Salad Piemontaise

Sydney weather gave us but a brief glimpse of the weather we should be having over the weekend.  It was enough of a tempter to make you fire up the barbie and head outside.  What are you to add to the old grilled meat that is a little bit different?  There are all your usual suspects - coleslaw, green salad, potato salad.....

I was reading the new Good Food magazine and there was a section called Off Duty Chefs.  The article  gave recipes from Manu Feildel and Miguel Maestre.  Now if you can't personally invite these guys to dinner - and who wouldn't love to have that lovely sexy sounding frenchman Manu at the dinner table with you (I just love his accent!!)?  Do the next best thing - make his recipe!

The names of his dishes even sound sexy - Salad Piemontaise (Potato Salad!!) - but saying that is does have a few unusual ingredients that you may not have added to your potato salad before!!

Salad Piemontaise

1kg kipfler potatoes, scrubbed
3 large, firm tomatoes, seeded (oops!), cut into 1cm cubes
200g piece ham, chopped
50g cornichons (picked baby cucumbers) chopped
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, chopped
4 hard boiled eggs, quartered

Mayonnaise Dressing *


1 cup good quality whole egg mayonnaise (I used the one that I had made with the thermomix)
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp red wine vinegar
freshly ground black pepper

Cook the potatoes in salted simmering water on medium heat for 15-20 minutes, until just tender, but not soft.  Drain and rinse under cold water.  When cool enough to handle peel the potatoes and cut into large cubes (I did disks as all the potatoes were roughly the same size).

Meanwhile combine all the dressing ingredients.  Season to taste.

Combine the tomato, ham, cornichon, parsley and potato.  Pour over the dressing, and combine.  Add the eggs, then toss gently again.

This was a really yummy potato salad - believe me I am still munching on the leftovers!!!  It is great all by itself too as there are so many flavours in there!!

* The actual recipe in the magazine gave you the ingredients to make the mayo from scratch - but as I already had some I didn't do it this way!.

Here is a photo of the "recycled" Prawn Patty Noodle Salad - it was pretty good too!!

So Dear Reader do you just have to crank up the BBQ too as soon as the warm weather comes to town???

Asian Style Prawn Cakes with Noodle Salad

I just can't help myself - I see a magazine with recipes in it and I just have to pick it up.  At least this time it didn't cost me anything!!  The magazine in question here is the freebie that the supermarket Woolworths puts out - called Woolworths Fresh.  In this month's edition there is a recipe for Asian Prawn Cakes.

I decided that even though Mr. CCC was out for dinner I was not going to deprive my taste buds, and eat what "The Darlings" were having just to make my life easy!!  So I set out to make these prawn cakes for one (well not really because I made the full recipe - but I was the only one eating them).

If you look closely at the photos you will see that the patties are quite  green - that is because I blended everything up in the food processor, and possibly blended the coriander too far, and perhaps added a little too much!  So don't do what I did - and put everything in the food processor and blend the crap out of it!!!

This is how I will make them next time!!

Asian Prawn Cakes


Makes 12

500h green prawn meat
2 tsp fish sauce
1 lightly beaten egg
1 clove crushed garlic
1 tbs chopped coriander
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
1 tsp grated ginger
1 lemongrass (white part only) finely chopped

Place half of the prawn meat in a food processor and pulse, until finely chopped.  Chop the remaining half of the prawn meat roughly.  (This is where I went wrong - I processed it too fine- I think a few chunks of prawn meat would have been much better).

Mix all the other ingredients into the prawn meat.

Heat a large frypan over medium high heat.  Add a small amount of vegetable oil to the pan.  When heated, add approximately 1/4 cup amounts of the prawn mixture to the pan.  Cook patties in batches for 2-3 minutes each side, or until golden brown and cooked through.

Serve with lime wedges, sweet chilli sauce and noodle salad.

Noodle Salad

1 carrot, finely julienned
1 shallot (green) finely chopped
approximately 12 snow peas, finely julienned
1/4 red capsicum, finely julienned
1/4 punnet of cherry tomatoes, quartered
200g rice noodles

                                         I know this is quite tedious - but it is worth it!

Dressing


1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
2 tbs mirin
2 tsp sesame oil
1 tbs sweet chilli sauce
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
freshly ground black pepper

Soak the rice noodles in boiling water for 5 minutes to soften.  Drain well.

To make the dressing place all the ingredients in a screw top jar, shake to combine.

Combine all the salad ingredients in a large bowl, pour over the dressing and toss to combine.

This was of course much more than I could eat for dinner.  So I packaged the leftovers up, and recycled them the next day as a prawn cake noodle salad!!!  I cut the patties into small pieces and tossed them through the noodle salad.  Perhaps even better the second day!!

So Dear Readers if faced with making a meal for one - do you take the easy way out, or do you do like I did and still make yourself a "gourmet" treat even though it is more work??