Dara's Sandwich no. 4

 

Roasted Red Pepper & Courgette with houmous, rocket and tomato

in a home-made brown bap. 

I roasted some peppers and courgette with some olive oil and a bit of sugar till they were nice and tender. I put them in a lovely brown bap I'd made and I added some houmus, sliced tomato and a bit of rocket. On the side, I had some salad which I tossed in the left over juice from the roasted pepper and courgette dish. Delicious!

See my houmous recipe here.

- Dara

Hot Salad

This salad is hot.

Shit hot.

There are actually two:

- Cannellini beans, onion and tomato

- Avocado, red pepper, celery, cashew and sesame seed on lettuce.

The first does what it says on the tin, but there's a secret ingredient. (Whisper it) ... (Sugar).

So, finely slice some an onion, fry for a few mins, add a teaspoon of (preferably dark muscadavo) sugar, then fry it for a furhter five mins or as long as you can wait. This is caramelising the onion and is amazing if you have the patience to wait a long time. Add a can of cannellini beans and diced tomato, cook it up till the tomato's just getting soft. Yummy.

Next salad: roughly chop two stick of celery and a red pepper. Dry fry a handful of cashews and a handful of sesame seeds then add the veg and a bit of olive oil and tamari or soy sauce. Let it sizzle till it's at your preferred ratio of cookedness/crunchiness. Add avocado and mix it in till it's warm. PLEASE make sure it's nicely ripe - an immature avocado should be treated like a 15-year-old. There are no two ways about it, you just have to wait until it's ready.

Erm, meanwhile wash the lettuce and place it on the plates, then sprinkle with lemon juice. The avocado and cashew salad is nice on top of it but do as you like. It's your food.

Cous Cous Stuffed Peppers

Anything can go in a grilled pepper. Well, almost anything, I wouldn't recommend things like aeroplanes or arsenic. Although I once read about a man who ate a whole aeroplane, but by bit. It was the Guinness Book of Records. These peppers were stuffed with a mixture of vegetables and couscous and topped with mozzarella.

Grilled peppers

Wash the peppers.

Cut the end of the pepper with the stalk, about a centimetre in. It should come off with the seedy bit in the middle, which you can twist out and throw away. Someone told me once that the seeds are poisonous, but that was after I'd been a pepper-seed eater for a long time, and I'm fine, so they're probably not too bad.

Place them under a grill and keep an eye on them and turn them regularly, so that they go black all over. Sorry, that's chargrilled' to all you Jamie Oliver's out there...

Cous Cous

Is a wonderful grain.

At it's most basic you can just cover it in boiling water for about 3 minutes, stir it up, and it will obligingly fill a hole in your belly. If you care about your taste buds then you can throw in any manner of sauces, spices, herbs, pastes... whatever comes to hand in those hungry moments.

At it's best, it is full of interesting tastes, colours and textures, and will go well in a salad meal, as a light carb in one of your square meals, as a lunch, in a buffet... you get the picture.

Some people like to chop up vegetables SUPER fine and mix them in to the cous cous which has just had boiling water thrown on it. This makes it very tasty. Spring onion, cucumber, garlic, olive oil, black pepper and lemon is a good mix. Harissa paste makes it warm and moroccanney. (Yes, that is a word.)

The cous cous in the picture was made like this:

Onions and garlic fried in oil, then a load of chopped leeks and mushrooms thrown in. Two handfulls of cous cous and enough water to cover, stirred for about five minutes, then a load of spinach added, some salt and pepper sprinkled on, the lid put on the frying pan and the whole lot left to get to know itself.

In the meanwhile I sliced some mozzarella, and scraped the skin off a cucumber. At the time I knew that I'd heard that this is a good idea, but couldn't remember why, and nor can I now. Anyone? Anyway, I added the cucumber skin to the cous cous (pretending it was fresh herbs) then gave it another stir for luck and spooned it into the waiting peppers. A slice of mozzarella was added to each pepper, which were both delicately placed on the grill pan (their stuffing made this rather precarious), after it started to bubble I put them on a plate and cut them in half so that each plate got two colours of pepper. It would look prettier to leave the peppers whole but variety is the spice of life so I varied my pepper, baby. Mm-hmm.

Cherry tomatoes, cucumber and rocket went nicely with these peppers. It seems like they won't be that filling, but appearances can be deceptive so eat them slowly and listen to the signals from your stomach. Remember that they're nice cold too.