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As promised, and as always, a simple recipe for a delicious meal. A salad of lettuce, peas and ham inspired by Nigel Slater.
If you’re a regular reader, you will have realised by now that original recipes always get changed in our house. Sometimes you don’t always have all the ingredients at home or it’s not sensible to go out buying them all. Sometimes you must make do and create new recipes from substitute ingredients. This is the joy of cooking that I love.
A yummy way to use up a lettuce glut as we have. You can’t beat the taste of homegrown lettuce and local peas. The homemade French dressing recipe to follow.
A salad of lettuce, peas and ham
Fresh peas straight from their pod
A couple of slices of free range ham (thicker is better here)
Baby gem lettuces
A hunk of good quality white bread
A piece of Jarsleburg cheese
Homemade French dressing
Pod your peas and place in a bowl.
Wash and slice your baby gem lettuces – add to the peas.
Shread the ham and cut the cheese into cubes. Add these to the peas and lettuce.
Heat a glug of olive oil in a fry pan. Tear up the soft inners of the bread (no crusts). Once the oil is hot, add the pieces of bread and fry until golden.
Add the crispy bread to the salad and drizzle over homemade French dressing – you can add a little cream to the standard dressing if you wish, something that Nigel’s recipe calls for.
Last weekend N and I did some baking. We baked two loaves of white bread and a focaccia, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt crystals and chopped rosemary from the garden.
The dog tried to take a bite from each at different moments throughout the afternoon and evening. We only lost of tiny bit of crust – thankfully!
We used a white bread recipe from Darina Allen’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking and a focaccia recipe from River Cottage Everyday by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
On Sunday, we enjoyed the sunshine, walked the dog, and pottered in the garden. I did a bit of weeding, and helped N make a run for Lovage and Daisy’s hutch – it’s so smart and they now have much more room. Happy bunnies.
Late afternoon we sat and watched the rugby and ate hunks of homebaked bread spread thickly with goat’s butter and raspberry jam.
It has been months since N baked homemade bread, but last night, prompted by a cube of fresh yeast, he got baking again. There was a near disaster at first, when the bread didn’t rise. We think it’s because the recipe we were following (find it here) called for dry yeast and we used fresh. On searching the internet I found out you need to use a lot more fresh yeast than dried…so while N started a fresh batch, I searched to find out if we could rescue the original batch. Turns out you can, thanks to those helpful people on the Jamie Oliver forums.
We ended up with two delicious loaves rather than one, neither of which were disastrous, and in fact were probably the best loaves we’ve made. We followed the recipe, misting the oven with water and the loaves before popping them in to bake. It produced the most fantastic crust, so we’ll definitely be using that technique again.
So, there you have it – my favourite meal…ever: still warm homemade bread smeared (generously, of course) with lightly salted farmhouse butter. Mmmmm mm.
*Note: we used white bread flour and didn’t follow the rye flour coating.
Eat the Earth 
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