Day 20 Julie & Julia experiment
In this post I’ll include the three salads I made at the weekend. I’m then on a break from the experiment for mid-term. Spending it in Budapest. Even my readers will get a salad-free week! Next post from Budapest.
First up
Minted petit pois and Swiss chard with lardons
I’m not going into huge detail on these three salads as it would make this post very long. This is the salad I had done to death for the family before I ever started this experiment. I will leave this to the two family emigrants to cast their votes, by way of comment. They have had it many times!
Please note the background. My two home guinea pigs up in arms!
Next up
Moroccan couscous
Denis and I both voted this salad 4.5/5. (I left out the photograph as I didn’t have a proper photograph).
Couscous was cooked and allowed to cool and then diced red and green pepper, and thinly sliced celery added.
Ground coriander, cumin, chilli powder, raisins were gently warmed in olive oil on a frying pan and white wine vinegar added in and the whole mixture added to the couscous. Chopped coriander and parsley were then sprinkled on top.
I would definitely consider the recipe for this salad to be wrong where it calls for 125ml of olive oil to be added to 1 cup of couscous. I really think this amount of olive oil is miles too much.
On reflection, I wonder could it be that for the purposes of this book, the recipes used in the cafes, were adjusted to feed four people, but not with enough care? (It says in the Introduction that ‘All recipes feed four unless otherwise stated’).
I used a fraction of that amount of olive oil, about 1.5 tablespoons and it was perfect.
Final salad was Roast fennel and pepper with mangetout
We voted this 4.5/5. For this salad fennel and peppers were roasted in olive oil. The vegetables and juices were mixed with sherry vinegar, garlic and parsley and supposedly a small amount of cooked mangetout, .
There was no mangetout left when I went shopping. I decided to go ahead however as planned and make the salad without mangetout. Denis and I rated it bearing that in mind. We loved the mixture of fennel and peppers with garlic and oil.
Only eight more salads to go!
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Lily you deserve a break. Enjoy Budapest, I look forward to your travel tales!
Please, Miss
Where/how do you buy lardons? I know it’s pork fat but I’ve never seen it sold. I seem to remember Tom Doorley saying (in your link) that he substituted Lidl bacon instead?
Here’s to a Hungary half-term!
Grannymar, thanks, I intend to.
Steph, your comment made me do some research! I always understood lardons to be cut thick bits of bacon. In France I remember they were sold pre-cut.
If you look up wikipedia it says’ A lardon is a small strip or cube of pork fat (usually subcutaneous fat) used in cooking to flavor foods.’ However I never knew them as just the pork fat, so I went further. I looked up Waitrose’s website glossary and it explains lardons, ‘These are small pieces of thick cut bacon, sold ready-chopped. As an alternative to lardons, thick rashers of bacon can be cut lengthwise into strips and then into small dice.’
Avoca’s recipe today (for Minted petit pois and Swiss chard with lardons) called for ‘6 slices streaky bacon or pancetta, cut into lardons.’
Pancetta is ‘the Italian equivalent of streaky bacon’. It’s sold in Superquinn and I’m sure most supermarkets.
So to get lardons for this recipe, I just chopped up pancetta.
I hadn’t cooked pancetta before this experiment. It’s an ingredient in a few recipes in the book. Going forward I will use it far more as it is more flavorsome than ordinary bacon.
I tell you I’m learning lots from this experiment!
I am too!
Thanks for explanation.
[...] asked a question at Lily’s blog the other day and it gave me an idea for my recipe today. Thanks [...]