Summery update
The best recipe I made on holiday and plentiful eating notes
Merguez Sausage, Potato Tomato
We saw a family grilling merguez sausages at the picnic area of a service station in France and the scent of richly spiced lamb fat on the BBQ ignited an urgent desire for them – so when it was my turn to cook dinner for our friends, I knew what to do. I found a butcher selling merguez and bought two each and then used them to make a full-meal rendition of one of my favourite vegetable dishes – potato tomato – with the juices from the sausages seasoning everything and producing a delicious scant sauce. We ate it and drank rosé wine as dusk fell and bats whizzed past our faces.
Serves 6
Ingredients
c.1.2kg potatoes, peeled and thickly sliced
5-6 medium sized, ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced
1 large or two smaller white onions, peeled and thickly sliced
12 merguez sausages
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
How to make
Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Put the sliced potatoes, tomatoes and onions in a large roasting tray, add the olive oil, some salt and pepper and coat using a spoon to mix up. Shake the pan so that they level out, then put in the oven for 20 minutes. Prick the sausages with a skewer or the end of a knife and arrange on top of the potato mixture. Put back into the oven and cook for around another 20 minutes or until the sausages are cooked.
Serve with a green salad, and make sure each person gets a spoonful of cooking juices.
Eating notes
In other potato-tomato developments, I made a version where I poured in approximately 100ml of double cream ten minutes before the end of cooking, to great effect. This was with neatly arranged sliced tomatoes and potatoes interleaved with slices of garlic, salt and olive oil. The cream became scented with garlic and the fruity tomatoes cut through beautifully. We had it with roasted chicken thighs and green salad.
I co-organised an event to raise money for Palestine in the town where I live and made fattoush as one of the dishes at the picnic that was part of it. Deep frying the dried-out pitta in olive oil made all the difference to the taste. We raised over £1000 and it was good to see Palestinian flags flying in an Essex seaside town.
An immensely satisfying dish: sausages that you have browned and then cooked through in passata, served with small gnocchi tossed in the tomato sauce that has been enriched by the sausages. Finely grated parmesan to serve.
A perfect slice of greens and ricotta pie and salad with my agent at Cafe Deco to discuss my next book (a good place to go when you are not paying!).
Braised lettuce to this superb recipe by Woks of Life (buy their sensational book, too).
Together with my daughter Ursula I made Rachel Roddy’s recipe for a similar pie to that I’d had at Cafe Deco (subbing in some spelt flour as I ran out of plain) and I didn’t have the precise quantities of greens or cheese as Rachel but it is such a solid gold recipe it survived my measured meddling. At home we had it with a tomato salad with roasted peppers, diced white onion, capers, parsley, vinegar and olive oil (itself a modification of my friend Ed’s salad, documented here a year or so ago). Then I took a slice in to the library for my lunch, and it stood up well to being hurled around in my bag.
I made a Manchester tart after my partner said something about wanting a tart with custard and jam. I made it from a recipe I found online and now can’t remember, but it was not too hard to make and lasted superbly over a week.
I was reminded that Claudia Roden’s boiled carrot salad is one of the best recipes there is when I made it to accompany some couscous, olives and hard-boiled eggs for a weekday lunch at home.
We stayed with friends in the Loire region of France and at the market producers were selling locally made ‘crottins’ – small rounds of goats cheeses that I have previously seen on sale at Mons for about four times the price. I bought some (5 for 10 euro) and for lunch one day baked them as I remember seeing in the St John cookbook with cherry tomatoes, fresh thyme, garlic and olive oil (not sure if St John adds the aromatics). I had the oven a little too hot – next time I would have it more like 160C to go a bit easier on the young cheese – but it was delicious.
Fried Korean chicken and fresh cabbage slaw at a tiny and very popular restaurant in Paris called ‘Olive Chicken’ where we were stuck for a few days after losing a passport.
7am breakfast at Le Select in Paris – I love it. Everything is fresh, the juice, the bread and pastries, the silver jug of milk to mix your own hot chocolate – and if you get their full breakfast, it comes with 3(!!!) of the tenderest fried eggs you ever beheld (and fruit, and fromage blanc). I first visited after a famous writer told my friend Katherine and I that we should go, and that James Baldwin had been a regular. As well as having all the major French newspapers, they have a lot of children’s books in specially designed wall racks, which Ursula delighted in perusing.
After seeing the TV dinner of sausages and chips in Not Now Bernard and reading about going to eat sausages and chips in a caff in The Tiger Who Came To Tea – whereby Ursula learned the word ‘sausage’ – I gave her a cold sausage at breakfast the next day, which she ate most of, before adding the final pieces to her bowl of rice crispies, and force feeding them to my partner.
Loved reading this so much
3 eggs! <3