Orecchiette, Butter bean and Cauliflower salad

This Summer has been pretty delightful in the UK. There's been lots of warm temperatures and sunny days. Weather that puts you in mind for barbeques, of course! 

Barbeque food is fun, informal and easy. Marinaded cuts of meat, burgers, sausages, the main element of the food is simple to prepare. Barbeque cooking on the grill does require a certain element of skill, but the prep is a doddle. But what do you have with your bangers and burgers? One answer is a salad.

But barbeque salads have to be more than just leaf. Or it seems like an afterthought. A gesture of "I'm expected to do this, I'm not that fussed, so here you go". 

Being the middle of Summer, how about making something fitting for the season? Something with sunshine and perhaps Meditteranean flavours... To me, nothing says that more than the flavours of Italy. But I don't want to do something textbook, I want to take those typical Italian flavours and ingredients and give them a twist.

So here is a pasta salad with some very able co-stars, butter beans, rich in fibre and protein and cauliflower, a much neglected vitamin source. I decided to dress it with a very thick dressing, a paste to be precise. The paste used as a dressing here is my spin on pesto. 

I would recommend you use the hand-made Orecchiette pasta, because of its thickness. It has a slightly more chewy texture as a result, which contrasts well with the cooked cauliflower and butter beans. However, if you can't find any, then machine made Orecchiette or Conchigle pasta will do. 

Serves 4 as a main course or 6-8 as a side salad for a Barbeque

Ingredients:

Juice of half a lemon (you might want to juice the other half and keep it to one side)

3 tbsp finely grated parmesan cheese

3 tbsp pine nuts

2-3 tbsp olive oil

1 can (400g size) butter beans, drained and rinsed

Half a cauliflower, washed and cut into small florets

125g Orecchiette pasta (or conchigle)

8 halves of sundried tomato (one third to one half of a 340g jar)

1 small handful (about 3 tbsp) chopped flat leaf parsley

15-20 large basil leaves, roughly chopped

Pinch of salt

Twist of ground black pepper

Olive oil to drizzle (optional)

Method:

Put a large saucepan full of water onto the heat and leave to come to the boil.

In a small pan, lightly toast the pine nuts until they are golden. Beware; they burn very quickly and become bitter and unpleasant. Leave to cool down.

Put the butter beans into a large mixing bowl.

Once boiling, put the Orecchiette pasta into the saucepan, and set a timer for 5 minutes.

When the timer goes, add the cauliflower florets. 

Reset the timer for 6-7 minutes, depending on whether you like the cauliflower al dente or just cooked.

Take all the remaining ingredients and blitz in a food processor to make a paste. 

When cooked, drain the Orecchiette pasta and cauliflower, reserving a few tablespoons of the cooking water. Rinse with cold water to arrest the cooking process. 

Put the cooled Orecchiette and cauliflower in the mixing bowl with the butter beans. Scrape out the paste, and fold into the beans, pasta and cauliflower thoroughly.

Taste the salad and check the consistency, and add either more lemon juice for more acidity, or the cooking water to loosen up the salad or seasoning as required.

Serve and enjoy!

Butter bean and chick pea salad with marinaded pork

Weekday nights are some of the hardest things to cook for, I have come to realise. You put in a full day's work. You contend with the evening commute (mine is courtesy of Southeastern rail, and just a cursory check of #southeastern on twitter will tell you EVERYTHING you might want to know about their customer service). Then, tired and careworn, you make it home. Frankly, all you want to do is crack open a bottle of wine and ring out for takeaway. 

But home cooking is a noble and worthwhile art. Even on a "schoolnight" (and to all those people who disapprove of grown ups using that phrase to describe Monday to Thursday evenings, I say this: I work for a university, so I'm ALLOWED to call it a schoolnight!). You will feel more pride from doing it yourself... and if recent revelations from Which and the Food Standards Agency are anything to go by, you are far more likely to know exactly what you are eating too!

I'm always looking for new and fresh ideas for weekday night suppers. Dinners which can be rustled up quickly, but don't suffer from blandness. 

Another prerequisite is full and happy flavours. An area where the gutsy, sunshine flavours of Spain come up trumps. Who doesn't love the fragrance of fresh parsley, the punch of chorizo coupled with lemon and onions? 

My idea was to make a salad influenced by the flavours and typical produce of Spain. Obviously influenced by the Moors and southern or eastern Mediterranean, I wanted to include healthy and protein rich pulses and legumes, herbs and olive oil. Chorizo would add paprika along with its meaty texture and pepper and artichoke some crunch. 

Recently, I followed Nizami Foods on twitter. They are a company producing food products with an Indian twist. Think Chinese Chilli oil with roasted garlic or Thai tamarind chutney with an Indian flourish of cumin and dates. Well, everyone told me that twitter was "a total waste of time". Turns out I was their 100th follower (genuinely) and as a thank you, they wanted to send me some products as a thank you. One of them was a Romesco sauce, which was an Spanish red pepper sauce with an Indian twist. 

The Romesco sauce suggested that it be used as the base for either a pasta sauce or a marinade. Marinading is one of the midweek cook's top tricks. You either start the marinading before you go to work (for those typically long marinaded dishes) and leave the ingredients to work their magic whilst you toil away or you start as soon as you get home and get all your preparation and other tasks done before cooking. It was a no-brainer; marinade was going to be the use.

This dish uses a number of storecupboard ingredients I have recently discovered. One was garlic paste by Garden Gourmet which is very useful for squeezing into salad dressings (as I have done here) but also marinades. The other was artichoke bottoms in brine by Morphakis found in the local Turkish shop. The Romesco sauce I have already mentioned. 

So here is a supper we enjoyed recently. The salad can be enjoyed as a meal on its own or a side dish with grilled meat, possibly a full flavoured fish. I think the salad, if made in excess, would make a wonderful packed lunch for work the next day (cook's prerogative, of course!).

Spanish style chick pea and butter bean salad

Serves 2-4 people, depending how much salad to meat you like. 

You can substitute the red onion with a banana shallot. You don't want to use a white onion, as it won't be sweet flavoured enough.

Ingredients:

For the salad:

1 can chick peas drained and rinsed

1 can butter beans drained and rinsed

1 handful of fresh flat leaf parsley chopped roughly

70-80g chorizo chopped into fine rounds

1 small red onion, halved and sliced finely

2 artichoke bottoms, finely diced

2 peppadew peppers, finely diced

For the salad dressing:

1/2 teaspoon garlic paste

juice of 1 lemon

3-4 tablespoons of olive oil

For the marinaded pork:

2 pork loin steaks

1/2 bottle Romesco sauce by Nizami

Method:

1. Marinade the pork loin steaks in the Romesco sauce for at least 30 minutes. An hour would be better.

2. In the meantime, prepare the salad ingredients as set out above. Get all your ingredients except for the herbs, chorizo and dressing in a bowl.

3. Another task to deal with in the meantime is to heat either your grill or your griddle pan so that it is hot.

4. Put the pork loin on to grill, about 7 minutes each side.

 

5. Fry your chorizo rounds in a little olive oil. Wait until they start to go brown. 

6. Once the chorizo is brown, lift out of the pan with a slotted spoon or spatula onto a plate covered in kitchen paper (to soak up the excess fat and oil).

 

7. Mix up your salad dressing in either a mug (mixed with a spoon) or in a jam jar by closing the jar and shaking vigourously.

 

8. Just before you are ready to serve up, mix all of the salad ingredients with the chorizo and dressing. You want the dressing to coat everything thinly.

9. Serve the salad with the cooked pork loin steaks. 

 

Snigdha was sent a bottle of Romesco sauce by Nizami who did not expect any coverage to result. It was sent on account of my being their 100th follower on twitter.