Meat Free Mondays - Oeufs à la Grecque

Paul McCartney thinks that having a meat-free day at least once a week will slow climate change and reduce world hunger. I don't know enough about carbon emissions to know if the first part of that is true. I am fairly sure that there is more than enough food to feed the world (sustainably? don't know) and that hunger in the world is caused by politics and economics, not steak.

However, I feel terribly virtuous if I eat plant-based meals a couple of days a week. Even more so if it is something low-carb instead of pasta with a vegetable sauce... So I have decided to put scepticism aside and buy into Meat Free Mondays.

Something that I have always loved is Oeufs à la Florentine - eggs on a bed of spinach topped with a cheesy, nutmeggy bechamel sauce. So I thought I would head in that sort of direction, but I had a big bunch of chard instead of spinach, and the only cheese I had on hand was a nice Greek feta. So I decided to take my Florentine by way of Athens and Greek up the flavours.

Oeufs à la Grecque
Serves 2 (served by itself or 5 if you stretch it with some rice and a dessert)

1 onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 courgette, chopped
1 big bunch of chard, washed and shredded
2 or 3 marinated artichoke hearts, chopped
olive oil
dried dill
5 eggs
1 block of feta

In a fairly deep saute pan, heat a slurp of olive oil and soften the onions and garlic in it. Add the other vegetables and cook, stirring frequently, until the chard has wilted down. This takes much longer than spinach. Season with a sprinkling of dried dill tops (I don't often bother with fresh dill - the flavour is better but it invariably goes manky before I finish the bunch).

Scrape the vegetables into an ovenproof dish. My flat Le Creuset dutch oven is my weapon of choice for these things because it looks so pretty, but a pyrex lasagne dish would do the job and be easier on the wrists.

Make 5 indentations in the vegetables and crack an egg into each one. Crumble the feta over the top. Bake at 190C until the eggs are cooked. Maybe 20 minutes? Delicious.

Summer vegetables and chicken kebabs

The thing about a vegetable box is you end up with a bunch of stuff you don't often cook and no real idea how to use them...

Kat and Matt do amazing things with their seasonal CSA boxes but when my veg box turned out to contain small turnips, I didn't have any mayo for the baby turnip slaw they made recently.

So I asked a few people and eventually made a sort of vegetables printanier. But it is summer, so I shall call it...

Légumes d'été
Serves 2 as a substantial side dish

2 bunched onions
2 courgettes
1 cup double-podded broadbeans
2 little turnips
4 tiny baby carrots
knob of butter
1/4 cup cava (or any dry white wine)
Black pepper
rosemary

Chop the onions and soften in the butter in a saute pan. Add the chunky courgettes, broad beans and cleaned and chopped carrots. Peel and chop the turnips and microwave for about 2 minutes to soften and speed up the cooking. Add to the saute pan and add the cava. Reduce heat to the smallest bubble and add a bit of rosemary. I meant to add dill but grabbed the wrong jar from the spicerack and the rosemary was just the most perfect flavour. When the liquid has almost all been absorbed/evaporated and the vegetables are just tender, season with black pepper.

We had it with some chicken thighs, marinated in garlic and lemon juice, skewered on soaked bamboo skewers and cooked on the Weber. The smoky flavour was wonderful, and worked perfectly with the sweet baby little crisply tender vegetables.

Cucumber Salad

Aren't these cucumbers the most amazing colour? We recently ordered an organic seasonal vegetable box (which will be a one-off, it wasn't particularly good value) and it contained this wonderful cucumber. I made a salad with some onion, freshly ground black pepper and white wine vinegar and it was just lovely. Very sweet and firm and refreshing.

Potted Shrimps

Potted shrimp is one of those terribly English things that peppered my childhood reading and fired my interest without me really knowing what it was.

In one of the Blandings books Lord Emsworth is horrified and outraged when his pig girl goes to get her tea and shrimps without sufficient concern for her charge the prize pig Empress of Blandings.

Then I got a bit older and (if humanly possible) more interested in food. And I discovered that mixing tiny brown shrimps with melted butter is not just a delicacy but a preservative. Using melted, clarified butter efficiently excludes air preventing the growth of aerobic bacteria. The traditional seasonings of nutmeg and mace add a bit of spice to mask the flavour of slightly past-it seafood and may also help to kill bacteria.

Most importantly, of course, they taste good. When I first arrived in England we went to a celebrity chef-run restaurant (which I shall tactfully not name) and were served two of the most abysmal steaks that anyone ever charged £30 for. But I can't be entirely down on the place because it was there that I first tried potted shrimps. And fell hopelessly in love.

Now when I go to 32 Great Queen St, I have to hope that the potted shrimps AREN'T on the menu, so I can order something else. If they are on the menu I haven't the strength to resist.

I've been wanting to make them myself for ages. The thing that has put me off is the thought of peeling all those little shrimp. I really don't have the patience for that sort of fiddle. So you can imagine my delight when I discovered that The Fish Society sells peeled brown shrimp online. Nothing was holding me back but the need for a recipe.

I searched long and hard, comparing recipes from all over. But I decided that Marco Pierre White was the way forward. His recipe appealled because firstly it sounded right. All the flavourings that I wanted to see in it (white pepper, cayenne, mace and nutmeg) were there. And secondly he did away with the tedious clarifying process. I suppose in this day and age no one is actually planning to store seafood on a larder shelf for weeks at a time...

So I made it. Scaled down because I only had 200g of shrimp.

It made 2 tidy little ramekins worth, with enough left over to pile, still warm, on a couple of thick slabs of toasted rye sourdough bread for some quality control.

The next night we had some more of them piled onto a barbecued rump steak for an elegant take on "surf & turf". With an Oregon Pinot Noir it made an extremely fine dinner.

Pistachio meringue

I decided to make this dessert to take to friends. For simplicity of transportation I decided to make one large one instead of several small ones.

And then the wheels started to fall off. Blanching pistachios is not nearly as easy or as satisfying as blanching almonds or broad beans. I remembered that I am not very good at making meringue. And then I realised that I don't have a wide enough serving plate for this sort of thing.

So I ended up squashing the bottom layer of meringue into a tart plate, covering it with the filling (I just did mascarpone and some mixed berries, combined into a sort of fool, rather than mixing cream into the mascarpone and decorating with strawberries) and then topped it with the second meringue disc, tucked in around the edges.

It really didn't look bad. And it tasted nice. But it just wasn't right and wasn't what I wanted it to be. Very irritating.

Fritto misto

OK, so I lied. THIS is the last British asparagus for the season!

A Friday night fritto misto of calamari, asparagus and onion rings, in an egg yolk & cornflour batter, seasoned with Old Bay, shallow fried in sunflower oil.

I microwaved the onion rings for a couple of minutes to soften them, and then cooled them before adding them to the batter. I didn't want raw onion!

Served with a big squeeze of lemon juice and a bowl of fresh, garlicky mayonnaise and a bottle of chilled prosecco.

Pinchos Morunos and the Last British Asparagus

It was a couple of days before pay day, and I decided to be virtuous and use the contents of the fridge and freezer rather than buying any new groceries. So I had a dig around and unearthed a UFO (Unidentified Frozen Object), which I soon realised was cubes of pork in a Pinchos Morunos rub. Although I have absolutely no memory of when I put it there. Surely the last time I made pinchos Morunos we were living in the other house? Surely it hasn't been 18 months in the freezer?

Anyway, I was pretty confident that the spice mixture they were sitting in would have protected them from freezer burn.

I spiked the chunks of meat onto soaked bamboo skewers with some pieces of onion, made up some tomatoes Andaluz with our last two, slightly sad-looking tomatoes, steamed our last bunch of British asparagus (the supermarkets are all stocking Peruvian again) and poured a couple of shot glasses of gazpacho (bought - a very nice one). We couldn't be bothered lighting the Weber, so we cooked the kebabs and pita breads under the grill in the kitchen.

It was a very tasty dinner, and a fitting way to farewell British asparagus for another year.