Cherry's English Kitchen

In The Bag : June

My entry is this fella....

I was having a bake/cook fest in my kitchen with my future mother - in - law on Sunday and as well as stock, desserts and many pots of jam I made this........

I used a pound and a half of cubed Scottish lamb, a large handful of chopped coriander, a large handful of chopped mint, a small punnet of English cherry tomatoes, a few knobs of butter and lots of seasoning. I put it all in to a shallow roasting dish, drizzled it with olive oil and added my broad beans and Anya potatoes. Now I par boiled a large bag of broad beans first and squeezed off the outer pod to reveal the bright green fleshy inside before adding them to the roasting pan and I also par boiled my new potatoes too. I the drizzled 125ml of water into the pan and baked the whole lot in the oven at 180c for one hour and thirty mins. Keep an eye on the dish making sure that it stays moist and that it doesn't dry out. If you find that your lamb is not tender after 90 minutes then simply leave it in a little longer.

And there you have it, what a super round up. We are still discussing what will be in the bag for July but perhaps it should be something veggie or fruity?!?!?!? I'll let you know what we all decide!

Cherry Menlove

Perfection?

There seems to be a great deal of talk at the moment about obtaining perfection in your cooking. That's a tad difficult for me to swallow (pun intended) as food and how it tastes to us as individuals is completely subjective.

So all I can do is to tell you a way of preparing things and cooking/baking them that works for me. That pleases MY taste buds, if you also like the dish then I am glad. But you may have a way of doing things that works much better for you and I would encourage you to stick to it. We need adventure and courage in the kitchen to get us out of the ready meal rut that unfortunately we still languish in as a society. Although it looks like, even in this, that the worm is starting to turn.

So in this post I'll take you through how I roast tomatoes in a way that works the best FOR ME and I can sum it up in one word......slowly!

I put these Vittoria vine toms in to my oven drizzled in EV Olive Oil and a few good grinds of the black pepper mill and left them for about 90 mins on 150c.

I then served them with some baked cod and puy lentils. Now that is perfection!

KIDDING!!!!!!

Today and tomorrow are the last days to get your In The Bag recipes in to me. See the post below this one for all the details!!

After The Fat.....Fennel!

Now don't get me wrong here! I made those Vanilla Squishy Kisses in order to eat them, and eat them I did. In fact, I ate so many that LBH came in from work one night and said "but you've been baking all week. Where are the cakes??"

However after all that fat and sugar I needed a little injection of freshness and a few vitamins to top up my supplies. I know that Fennel is not supposed to be available right now so I can only assume that I was able to get hold of two organic, British bulbs of the stuff due to the very mild Winter we have recently lived through.

It has also been a week of fish. Lots of fish in fact. Salmon, among other fish, is in season at the moment, and this is a new recipe of mine that I tried out earlier this week.

Topped Salmon with Baked Fennel

Serves Two

Take a generous handful of pine nuts, 12 black olives, half a red chili (de-seeded) and a large handful of flat leaf parsley and throw them in a blender. Drizzle a small amount of olive oil into the blender and whiz until it looks like the picture above and share two thirds of the mixture with the tops of two Salmon fillets. If you whiz the mixture for too short a time then the mixture will be too chunky to stay on top of the Salmon and if you whiz it too much it will be too much like liquid to stay on the Salmon. So, you can see the importance of getting this just right.

Slice one bulb of fennel into slices and place in a baking tray with the topped Salmon for approximately 20-25 mins at 160 degrees. As you can see in the picture I have placed some of the salmon topping onto the fennel also. This is important and will give the fennel a wonderful, additional taste as well as cutting down on the amount of olive oil you have to use due to the oil in the pine nuts seeping out during baking. If however it looks like the fennel is turning a little dry in the oven then drizzle with a small amount of olive oil.

Serve with brown rice or lentils.