Wahaca: Three Tomato Salad

I have hated fresh tomatoes with a passion for my entire life.  They loiter on the side of your plate in pubs, oozing their juice over the best chips or lurk surreptitiously in the middle of shop-bought sandwiches, making the bread soggy.  This makes me grumpy.  If I'm dining in company, whoever my companion is (historically my grandfather or mother, now the husband) will immediately be furnished with said tomatoes in exchange for cucumber and/or coleslaw.  They offend me so much I can't even have them on my plate.  It's the slimy insides I don't like.  And cherry tomatoes are the work of the devil as they have the greatest slime-to-flesh ratio of all tomatoes.

I've got nothing against cooked tomatoes.  Not cooked whole tomatoes, you understand.  But if they're in a sauce then I'm okay with that.  And, one of my favourite recipes from this blog so far has been Thomasina Miers' chilli jam - which contains mountains of tomatoes.  I keep a huge jar in the fridge to dollop into sandwiches or eat alongside salads.

Not quite as nicely styled as the book version but just as tasty

The only time in my thirty-something years on this planet that I've ever enjoyed tomatoes was the first time I met the parents of my very first boyfriend.  Despite him being off to the top end of the weird scale, I really liked his parents and when they offered to make us dinner, I politely accepted.  His dad was a keen gardener and grew all his own fruit and veg.  You can imagine my horror when the aforementioned meal turned out to be chicken with a fresh tomato salad.  But because I was bought up to have good manners (things have changed since then!) I accepted the plate with good grace and steeled myself to do battle with the mound of tomatoes, taunting me.

What a surprise.  These were firm and tasty and had that gorgoeous fresh-grown tomato smell.  I've always loved that smell and it reminds me of when my mum used to grow tomatoes when I was a child.  Dressed in a simple vinaigrette and sprinkled liberally with salt, they were an absolute revelation.  Nothing like those squidgy, slimy, dreary salad tomatoes peddled by the supermarkets.

Sadly for my tomato-eating career, we split up soon afterwards on the advice of his mother.  She had the sense to see I could do better for myself (I couldn't have done worse!).  Don't get me wrong - she liked me. She even told me I was dating the wrong son and that I'd be a fantastic daughter-in-law (I was a late starter on the dating scene).  But the weird, psychotic tendencies of son number two quickly sent me running for the hills.

The past fifteen years have been plagued by further encounters with both people firmly at the wrong end of the weirdo scale and nasty tomatoes too.  I'm sure I've eaten in places that could've changed my tomato fearing mind, but it's just something I would never consider ordering.  When you go out, you go out to eat for pleasure, not to torture yourself.  Lycopersicoaphobia has remained firmly rooted in my psyche.

Until I got my copy of Wahaca: Mexican Food at Home by Thomasina Miers.  If you're a regular reader, you'll know I adore Thomasina's books.  And I'm now eager to holiday in Mexico one day (although I'll be going by myself as Mr Fussy wouldn't eat the food and would worry that he'd get kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel).  Flicking through the book, the one recipe that really captured my imagination was the aforementioned Three Tomato Salad.  Yes.  Seriously.  I've been obsessing about this for a couple of weeks now to the point where I'm wondering exactly why I'm craving something I can't stand.

For the record, I would like to categorically state that I am not pregnant.  My mother will obviously be very disappointed by that.  My boss will most likely be relieved.  As will the husband because he's starting to make noises about me working late too often.  I am actually working to keep a roof over our heads!

Pretty colours

So today, I headed to Morrisons to pick up some real tomatoes.  They've recently revamped the fruit and veg section and you can buy all manner of weird and wonderful things.  And lots of it doesn't come stuffed into a huge plastic box so you can just buy what you need.  Okay, it's probably more expensive, but I don't mind paying a bit more to buy only what I need if it's far tastier than a giant economy pack of flavourless tomatoes.

I was spoilt for choice with stripy Heirloom tomatoes and tiny orange plum tomatoes, regular cherry tomatoes on the vine and pretty orange and yellow tomatoes.  I really wanted someone to share this joyous occasion with but the husband is crashed out on the bed after another session of the Insanity workout and I'm too impatient to save it until the next time I'm at my mothers so it seemed the perfect antidote to yet another wet and dreary day.

The flavours are amazing.  Fresh tomatoes with feta and pineapple, mixed with a red-wine vinegar dressing.  The salt of the feta cuts beautifully through the sweet tomatoes and is balanced well with the acid from the pineapple and the dressing.  In fact this now ranks up there with my all time favourite recipes from this year.  And I have enough tomatoes left to make it again for tomorrow's lunch.  I was planning on using them to make Gazpacho, but it seems a criminal waste of beautiful tomatoes.

I'm now firmly converted!

BBC Good Food Pineapple and Pink Grapefruit with Mint Sugar

The final recipe in this week's mint quadrilogy.  I was feeling really virtuous when I came home from work and tucked into a plate of soft, sweet pineapple and cheek tingling red grapefruit (I didn't pay attention to which colour grapefruit I picked up at the shops so don't shoot me) and summery mint sugar.  And then the husband persuaded me to have a chippy tea so now I'm feeling fat and bloated and a bit greasy.  For every yin, there is a yang and all that.

Not much to say tonight, mostly because I have to do a whole load of washing, ironing, packing, recipe printing and more cooking related packing.  And work.  Hence the really quick and easy recipe and lack of soul searching post.

Never would've thought about doing anything with these fruit other than eating them by themselves.  I added a squeeze of lime to the mix for a really tropical taste.  Will definitely be eating this a lot post holiday!

Recipe is here.

Miss A's Sunny Carrot Cake

Today's recipe was a little bit unplanned.  I'd intended to do fajitas for tea for the hubby and try Thomasina Miers' Spring Tacos myself.  But when I finished work just after midday, I discovered that Miss A had been waiting to cook since 9am (hands washed, sleeves rolled up, apron on) and Daddy had promised that Mummy would help cook as soon as she finished work.

Sunny carrot cake

So we made up our own carrot cake - inspired by a similar recipe from CBeebies 'I Can Cook' - and adapted with the help of Dan Lepard.

I wanted to make it healthy-ish so alongside the carrots and pineapple, I used both regular and wholemeal flour and I included some finely ground oats - an addition I picked up from Lepard's Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake earlier this week.  From the mixture, we made eight average sized muffins plus a 1lb loaf cake.  The muffins were baked for 25 minutes, the loaf cake for 40.  Or you could turn it into a 2lb loaf cake - I guess that would take about an hour to cook.

After portioning out the muffins, I suddenly realised I should've included some stem ginger as I had a jar in the fridge.  So the loaf has ginger in.  The muffins don't.  Both are equally tasty so the ginger is an optional ingredient.

The muffins will be frozen so Miss A can have them in her lunch box once in a while.  The loaf cake was topped with ginger cream cheese frosting and will no doubt be devoured by the husband later tonight.

Ingredients

Multi-tasking :)

• 125g plain flour
• 100g wholemeal flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 75g fine oatmeal (or rolled oats, blitzed in a blender)
• 3 balls of stem ginger - optional
• 1 tbsp syrup from stem ginger jar - optional
• 1 heaped teaspoon mixed spice
• 100g unsalted butter, softened
• 100ml sunflower oil
• 90g light muscovado sugar
• 2 eggs
• pinch of salt
• 100g carrots, finely grated
• 250g tinned crushed pineapple (or use regular tinned pineapple and break up with your fingers or in a blender)

For the cream cheese icing (optional)

• 125g icing sugar, sifted
• 20g butter, softened
• 20g cream cheese
• 2 tbsp stem ginger syrup (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan.  Either line a 12 hole muffin tray with paper cases or grease and line a loaf tin.
2. Beat the butter, sugar and oil until light and fluffy.  Mix in the eggs until thoroughly combined.
3. Add the carrots and pineapple to the mix and stir well.  Add the ginger and ginger syrup if using.
4. Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and mixed spice into a separate bowl.  Add the oatmeal and mix well.
5. Pour the dry ingredients into the egg and butter mixture and mix until well combined.  Portion into the cake cases or pour into the loaf tin.
6. Bake until risen and golden.  Approx times - 25 minutes for muffins, 40 mins for 1lb loaf, 60 mins for 2lb loaf.
7. Remove from the oven and cool in the tin for fifteen minutes before placing on a cooling rack until cold.
8. For the icing - sift the icing sugar into a bowl.  Add the cream cheese and butter and beat until well combined.  Add the ginger syrup if using and mix thoroughly.  Refrigerate for at least fifteen minutes as this makes it easier to spread.

Pineapple salsa

Busy day, busy evening.
Gordon Ramsay's pineapple salsa with ham salad for lunch.
Sounds odd but strangely tasty.
Will post recipe later - it's from Gordon's Greatest Hits.

Mango, Pineapple and Lime Sorbet

This sounds like a variation on a theme of Thursday's blog, but after finding myself stuck with copious amounts of mango and pineapple which the child can no longer eat (you should've seen her face as I was chopping it up and had to say no, she couldn't have any) I had to make use of the fruit somehow.

Bonfire night is traditionally fireworks and curry night in the Crowdey household.  Well it was BC.  But now we are AC with Miss AC, the closest we get to fireworks is arguing over why we never remember to phone for the takeaway an hour before we're actually hungry rather than waiting to pick up the phone when we're hungry and are considering cannibalism by the time it arrives.

So no chance of a dinner recipe trial tonight.  Instead, I dug out the recipe for the aforementioned sorbet which has been kicking around in my BBC Good Food binder for more years than I care to remember.  It was one of those recipes that seemed like a good idea for a palate cleanser after a dinner party, but sadly, I've never held a dinner party in my life - hence no sorbet got made.

Whilst I was contemplating this recipe, I did some research based on the comments that it was too hard to scoop.  I discovered that there are no two ways about the ridiculously high sugar content if you want a relatively soft scoop.  Fibrous fruit like mangoes, strawberries and pineapple work best.  An ice cream maker is not essential although a mixing it during freezing every couple of hours will reduce the number of huge ice crystals.  And you should temper it for fifteen minutes or so before serving.

When the curry arrived, the sorbet was near perfect with just a tiny soft spot in the middle.  By the time we'd eaten and then watched an episode of Frozen Planet - a-MAZING TV! - my sorbet was indeed reminiscent of an ice block.  It was just about scoopable and I should probably have let it temper for fifteen mins before serving as advised, but being impatient to get the blog written, I forged straight ahead.

It was a little icier than I would've liked.  During the research I discovered that egg white may or may not help (beat in towards the end - it doesn't need to be whisked first though) but mostly commerical sorbet and ice cream is kept soft by the use of food grade anti-freeze.  Nice!  So I'll take my pure fruit slightly icy sorbet over commercial soft scoop sorbet every time.

Need to work on the composition of my pictures!

Simplicity in itself and cheek tinglingly tasty.  Based on the comments after the recipe though, I halved the fruit content but kept the amount of lime juice the same as I was wary that some commented it was too sweet.  This was definitely a good move in my humble opinion.

One other top tip is to use a reamer to juice the limes.  I have tried classic glass juicers, various electric ones (although not the citrus press that came with my Kenwood), heating the fruit in the oven or microwave and juicing it with a fork.  But none of these techniques work as well as the wooden lemon reamer I got from Ocado.  It's also a very satisfying activity.  And I just like the word.  Reamer.

• 3 limes - zest one, juice all three
• 100ml water
• 125g caster sugar
• 1 large mango, peeled, stoned and diced
• 1 large pineapple, peeled, cored and diced

1. Put the lime juice, lime zest, water and caster sugar in a small saucepan.  Bring to a boil and then simmer for five minutes, removing any scum.  Cool.
2. Blitz the mango, pineapple and lime syrup in a liquidiser.
3. Pour into a freezer proof container and freeze for 4 hours.  Giving it a quick stir every hour or so helps it to freeze better.
4. Temper* for 15 minutes before serving

*Tempering ice cream and sorbet means taking it out of the fridge and leaving it at room temperature (unless the weather is scorchio - in this case, reduce the time)

Mango, Pineapple and Strawberry Smoothie

Okay, okay this is a dead easy recipe and you could accuse me of being very lazy today.  Yep.  You got me.  It's not that I couldn't be bothered.  Just got beaten by plain, old-fashioned exhaustion.

I've been off on an overnight 'jolly' with work on a 'non-course' which was actually used to highlight all my worst points and then tell me that if I pull my socks up, I might get to do something different one day. I don't think baking cakes all day long really figured in their plans for me.

If I'm honest, it was far more than just looking at the negatives that need work, it also celebrated the positives and had a dash of the 'ministry of the bleedin' obvious' about it too.  Sometimes you just need a little nudge to remind you of long surpressed ambitions or to be elbowed in a direction that you'd not really considered before but is acutally quite appealing.

Anyhoo, after a day in the kind of hotel that leaves huge-mongous jars of sweets (sour apples, double lollies, cola bottles...) and custard creams near the water coolers and serves not-too-bad meals and awesome pastries at breakfast, all I wanted was something simple and healthy for my tea.

Please Santa, can I have a camera?

When I arrived home, the fridge was overflowing with the BOGOF fruit I got from Ocado last week that I've not gotten round to eating.  So I grabbed my well used copy of 365 Smoothies and Juices and off I went.

I got given the book several years ago (or maybe I bought it??) when my family gave me a juicer to celebrate moving into our new house.  As I was working from home full time then, I diligently juiced every morning - my favourite being apple, ginger, orange and beetroot.  Cleaning it was a pain in the backside, but the earthy-purple juice with a spicy kick made me feel like I was being the healthiest person in the world despite it being one of my 'fat' periods.

One day, it just turned up its toes and went to the big appliance heap in the sky and I've not touched the book since.  When I got my new Kenwood over a year ago, I never really thought to get making smoothies again with the piles of fruit we get through every week thanks to the child but will definitely be experimenting as part of the challenge.

I don't think you can go far wrong with smoothies.  They always taste pretty good and this one was refreshing and filling.  Only change I'd make would be to add a twist of lime but I didn't have one anyway.

Ingredients - Serves 2

• Half a fresh pineapple, cubed
• 1 mango, cubed and frozen
• 8 frozen strawberries, plus two fresh to decorate
• 400ml orange juice - fresh or frozen
• juice of half a lime.

Throw all the ingredients into a blender.  Blend until smooth.  Serve in glasses decorated with strawberries - and if you have it, a sprig of mint or some candied lime zest.