I have backslid from my menu planning. Scandal. It's partly that I just get a bit bored with vegan food in the summer when I can't be doing with cooking; much easier to do a Protein plus Salad set of meals with Added Toast or Pasta if you need it. It's also that it's good weather for white meat and (especially) fish at the moment, and I quite want to cook that. So my rigid four week cycle has *temporarily* become five weeks: veganish, veggie, fish'n'chicken fortnight, then meat/anything goes. What the hell, I'm on "holiday" most of this week, sitting in a slightly different pattern of chairs in my flat, so why not disrupt the week planning too...
It's Fish Week 1 at the moment. Nothing complicated, lots of goodness.
There's prawn and avocado salad with a dressing of lime, fish sauce and a smidge of sugar. Techcnially a recipe from the Little Library Year (very good for seasonal ideas), but also without the mango, with precooked shrimps instead of big prawns, and without any faffing.
There's also crab linguine, from the Sunday Night Book (thank you, Kate, I really wasn't kidding that I wanted to cook everything in it). I love a crab linguine, but crab flavour can so easily vanish.
Turns out if you make a quick blitzed dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, chilli and garlic, and then mix the crabmeat in, it pops very nicely indeed.
A messy plateful involving chopped cherry tomatoes, fried minicourgettes with their flowers, and some sorrel.
I've been to the market again. Can you tell?
I bought a couple of punnets of green cooking gooseberries and decided to chuck in some leftover purple dessert goosegogs from last week, thinking they'd hardly notice.
Reader, they *really* notice.
A SEETHING CAULDRON, positively. I should say this is when it's just boiling up, and before I'd skimmed off the scum or indeed fished out the staggering number of leaves I dropped in with the berries without spotting them. It looks less staggering now it's just stewed down. Still quite green-and-red variegated though.
(Last week ended with tomato pasta with mozzarella and basil. I'm going to be eating like this for a while.)
I want to eat everything on this page!
ReplyDeleteIt's the time of year when (assuming you can get seasonal stuff) cooking is such a breeze. Hard to mess up. Though boiling that many gooseberry leaves is not my finest hour.
DeleteThe prawn and avocado salad is a winner - dress it all with half a lime, and then use the other half for a dressing with 1tsp sugar and 1tbsp fish sauce. Smells like nothing on earth as there's no oil to tone down the fishy sauce reek, but it tastes so good. If I hadn't had so much seasonal fruit in for other reasons I'd definitely add a mango to the mix, might do that in winter.