… Catalan Market Salad
So now basically it’s Christmas. Work is done. I’m with my family. Christmas food shopping is done (it took three days and five differnt supermarkets and a few return trips to some of those five). The present shopping is done. And warped. My fore rib of beef is bought. Suddenly I feel almost organised. Almost. I feel organised enough to do a 15 Minute Meal. My niece is also with us. She forms the advance party for her mum, dad, sister and new brother. I went through every recipe in the book with her and this was the only one she said she would eat and so I cooked it. There were two other meals that she said she would eat but they both involved spaghetti and, I was informed by her that the spaghetti was the only bit she would eat.
Tonight I’m cooking for my sister Anna, her boyfriend James, my niece Lydia, my sister Selina, my brother Gordon and my mum.
The ingredients for this were bought when I did what I really do hope will be the very, very end of the Christmas food shopping. I know for some the amount of shopping involved in my christmas cooking will seem both intolerable and outrageous but for me this really has been very restrained. It started at a little after seven am on Thursday morning when I bought My fore rib of beef and it ended at about four pm this afternoon. I have never, ever cooked a proper fore rib of beef before. I’m so excited. I think this may be the biggest and certainly the most expensive pice of meat I have ever bought. But after the conclusion of a long and annoying row with my bank basically the Christmas beef is now courtesy of Natwest (well 3/4 of it is).
This meal requires you to have a red chicory and a green one. I have never ever seen a red chicory for sale in the supermarket. I tried again today to buy one and I failed … again. Lots of jamie’s recipes call for a red chicory. I first came across this when cooking some of his christmas recipes from a magazine’s a few years ago. The problem hasn’t gone away … So it’s two green ones.
Despite being out of my own kitchen I was confident with this one. It’s the kind of food I cook a lot. It’s the kind of food I love.
There really isn’t a lot to report here. It worked well. The only vaguely difficult bit was remembering to not burn the pine nuts that are toasting in the frying pan. I have a very bad habit of burning pine nuts! I didn’t Or nearly didn’t. A few were a but charred. But that just adds to the flavour. Right?
It was done in time. It would have been done sooner, but I really did need to wait for the pasta to cook.
This was a very tasty meal. The carbonara sauce was made with low fat yogurt rather than cream, so it felt much less naughty to eat.
The salad is really, really good. It is one that I really want to remember because with or without the carbonara it is great.
Everyone seemed to like this. I was cooking for much more that the prescribed four people and we didn’t eat mean portions.
Well worth a go.
Who with: James, Anna, Lydia, Selina, Gorday and Mum
How long: Fourteen Minutes and five seconds
