A Summer Salad

You'll excuse me for my brevity - it's summer. It's hot. The days are long and we're all reveling in it. Especially baby A&N, who wakes with the sunrise. At 4.30am. Full of the joys of life, which is nicer than being a misery guts, but by 9am we're all flagging and in need of a long perfumed bath (or perhaps that's just my tonic).

Dinners have needed to be cooling (no ovens, please), quick and easy (god we're tired), but without sacrificing taste. Cookbooks could be written and sold by the hundreds based on those criteria. But we're too tired to find the right cookbook, so after a bit of head scratching and repeated staring into the fridge for ingredients on hand, this is the result.

A flexible summer salad, adapted to whim/what's available. The key ingredients are an anchovy dressing, a grilled vegetable of some description (aubergine in this case, but just as easily courgette or pepper), and a bit of something from the bacon family (we used some lovely pancetta, from a specialist Italian organic farmer, having a pedigree better than I do. Probably wasted in this salad, but did I mention we're too tired to think creatively?). It was salty and wet, filling and fresh, meaty and crisp. It will make an appearance again, probably in a slightly different guise, probably later this week when we're too tired to think. Again.


A Summer Salad
Serves 2 as a main course with left over for 1 lunch

• 1 aubergine, cut into thin slices
• (touch of olive oil for the aubergines and pan frying)
  
• 70g of pancetta or bacon
• 1 small gem lettuce or 2 handfuls of baby spinach
• 100g green peas
• 100g broad beans
• handful of sundried tomatoes, rehydrated and roughly chopped (or just chopped if using ones in oil)
• 250g pasta
• 3 anchovies, very finely chopped
• 2 Tbsp sherry vinegar
• 5 Tbsp olive oil (or 4 Tbsp if using tomatoes in oil)
• 1 clove of garlic, very finely chopped

1. Lightly sprinkle the aubergine slices with olive oil, then grill at 180C for about 15 minutes or until tender. Set aside to cool slightly, then cut into bite-sized pieces.
2. Pan fry the pieces of pancetta or bacon until nicely crispy, then set aside to cool slightly.
3. Briefly boil the peas and broad beans until just tender, then quickly put in a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking a preserve the flavor. Drain.
4. Boil water for the pasta, and cook until desired consistency. Drain and cool down under some cold running water.
5. Chop the lettuce and place in a bowl, and add in the peas and beans as well as the chopped tomatoes. Add the aubergine and pancetta once cooled, as well as the pasta.
6. Make the dressing by stirring together the anchovy, vinegar, olive oil and garlic.
7. Pour the dressing over the salad bits and adjust for flavoring.

Pumpkin Pancakes

I am finally, officially on maternity leave and boy, does it feel good. The last few weeks of work were beyond hectic and tiring but I had more than enough work to see me through to the end, and some I'm still finishing up at home. I can take up to a year of leave (even if I don't get paid for much of it), and being an American-abroad who knows plenty of friends who only get 6 weeks/a couple of months off, I haven't lost sight of how lucky I am to have a few weeks to rest and relax before the baby arrives (I hope). T-minus a-bit-less-than-3-weeks, and the hospital bag is packed since baby really can come any time now.

To celebrate my first morning of not having to go to work (even if I still woke up at 6.45, as I normally do), I made myself a breakfast of something more than shredded wheat biscuits mashed up with banana. If we owned a waffle maker, I would have indulged in some waffle action; instead, I pancaked myself up. Not your average pancakes for me, though. This being a dreary autumnal day on which I was celebrating the ability to take afternoon naps (for a couple of weeks) and not to do my hair and make-up (which I'm told stops being a luxury after having a baby and becomes a source of shame), these pancakes were going to be tarted up a bit.

In what could have been a section of a self-help book called How to Pick Yourself Up When the Weather is Grim and You'll be Laying Around in Your Pajamas All Day, I found a recipe for Pumpkin Pancakes in a breakfast book a friend had given me ages ago. Pumpkin pie is part of the holy trinity of Thanksgiving to me, along with turkey and the Macy's parade, but I'm also keen on using pumpkin in other things when it's in season. Working pumpkin into a breakfast seemed like a glorious gift from the breakfast fairies as well as a way to warm up my pumpkin tastebuds for Thanksgiving next week.

The pancakes stayed a bit soft even after they were fully cooked, pushing the pancake slightly in the direction of actual pumpkin pie. I would have preferred them to be more cake-like, since it's the texture of pancakes that is a much a feature of their glory as the taste is. I had been eager with my pumpkin, though, which did throw off the texture so I can't blame the recipe (yet) for the squishiness. Also for the next time around, I will play with the sugar and spice content a bit more since I'm happy to stand my pumpkin up against stronger allspice and nutmeg flavors to have the pancakes be firmly on the sweet rather than the savory end of the spectrum. I served the pancakes with a bit of crumbly sugar topping and maple syrup, which to me was the only way to properly embrace these creatures.

I'll certainly be trying the recipe again with the tweaks I mentioned, though the recipe below is reproduced from the original for those purists out there.


Pumpkin Pancakes, from The Big Book of Breakfasts
makes around 16 decent-sized pancakes

• 1 C flour
• 1/4 C cornmeal
• 2 Tbs sugar
• 1 tsp allspice
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/3 C milk
• 3/4 c canned pumpkin
• 3 large eggs, separated
• 3 Tbs melted butter
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, allspice and salt in a large bowl.
2. In another bowl, whisk together milk, pumpkin, egg yolks, melted butter and vanilla.
3. Add the wet mixture to the dry and whisk until smooth.
4. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form, and then fold them into the batter.
5. Pre-heat your normal pancake-making pan over a medium high heat and melt some butter or vegetable oil in it.
6. Pour desired pancake-sized batter amount into the pan, and turn once small bubbles appear along the surface of the pancake. Cook for half the amount of time again.

British vs American Quick Recipes

Toward the end of July, I blogged about how The New York Times featured a list of 101 recipes, designed for the summer heat and getting in and out of the kitchen in 10 minutes or fewer. Perhaps because the weather has been so notoriously poor this summer it was delayed, but the Observer Food monthly has finally featured these recipes in this month's edition of the magazine. Ah, I thought at first, I've already copied them down. But then I began to wonder how much cross over there was between recipes, and how many had been tweaked for the two different cultures.

The answer is, there are some differences but it's mostly the same (I was enough of a special-sort to go through the two lists, side by side, checking and crossing off dishes as they appeared. Sigh). There are a couple fewer vegetarian recipes in the UK version (which surprises me, since vegetarianism is more easy to negotiate in the UK), although mackerel makes a slightly greater appearance as do other fishes (salmon, prawns). And, no surprise, rhubarb is a guest star in the UK but gets no mention in the US.

All boring and factual, but to me the underlying curiosity had to do with food prejudices and presumptions. British cuisine still has a poor reputation in places, particular the US; bad British teeth and bad British cooking are two stock jokes about life in the UK. Now that I've relocated, I find it really rankles me when someone trots out these lazy stereotypes, particularly given the quality of cooking that you can get served at restaurants as well as the food-literacy and appreciation of so much of the public. My cross-checking of the lists heartened me from the point of view that the 101 suggested dishes weren't dumbed down with their transplant across the Atlantic, and that to create relevance a few of the native British food stuffs were given their place of honor. Although, interestingly, the Observer attributes the dishes to the NY Times writer Mark Bittman and to the UK chefs Tom Norrington-Davies and Allegra McEvedy, while the NY Times only credits Mark Bittman. Hooray British food.