Happy Halloween

Lemon salty chicken

Following on with the theme of simplicity, I love this recipe. It hardly takes any time at all, its easy to make and it tastes delicious.

Half a lemon (use the other half to make an icy cold gin and tonic)

Two pinches of sea salt

2 chicken breasts

Olive Oil 

Green Salad

Chop the chicken into a smallish chunks, add to a hot pan with the olive oil. As it cooks, squeeze the lemon juice all over the chicken. Then add the salt.

In the meantime, make a quick plain salad, I like a combination of lettuce, rocket and basil personally. Once the chicken is cooked, add to the salad and enjoy with a nice cold drink.

Simplicity = Heaven

Tonight was lazy food night. The night where you use up whatever is lurking in the larder to make fast but tasty food. We had sweet tomatoes chopped with chunks of feta cheese with french bread. Simple but heavenly. The salty cheese provided the perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the tomatoes. 

Red Cabbage - Storecupboard

Whilst you SHOULD make your own, I admit to cheating these days. Given the amount of Polish goods being sold in the supermarkets, its far easier to buy it by the jar, especially if you eat as much of it as we do.

• Cheese and red cabbage toasties
  
• As a quick splash of colour and texture to a plate of roast meat
  
• As a topping for soups, particularly things like Borscht (the colours go perfectly together)
  
• Mixed into crunchy salads/salsas
  

I also admit to eating it out of the jar late at night when i need a snack.

Roasted Pork Belly with garlicky potatoes and red cabbage

Autumnal weather calls for autumnal food. Its been raining here for the last couple of days and the fog is hardly lifting. Seems as if the weather is practising for a haunting halloween.

Pork belly

2 heads of garlic

3 to 4 large potatoes

Red Cabbage

Salt

Olive Oil 

Preheat the oven to 160 °C (320 °F). Cover the pork in olive oil and rub with a good handful of salt. Place in a roasting dish with your potatoes and the garlic and pop into the oven.  Cook for an hour and a half, the pork skin down on the garlic.

Increase the heat to 180 °C (355 °F), turn the pork over and cook for a further 30 minutes or until the skin is golden and crunchy.

Peel the roasted garlic, chop into slivers and serve with the roasted potatoes. Serve with a large helping of red cabbage.

Beware beware there is beetroot everywhere (Drover's Inn)

Went out last night for dinner to a nice little spot near Kirriemuir that was recommended by friends (Drover's Inn) and guess what was on the menu... yep thats right beetroot cured smoked salmon with horseradish. It seems there is no escaping from the beet.

That said, dinner was delicious and we will definitely going back. Food aside, its a really pretty spot with a lovely walk through the orchard from the carpark to the Inn and a warm sunny day sitting in the garden to eat would be lovely (guess ill just have to wait for spring for that).

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

John Keats

October is here and its most definately misty, the haar is edging off the sea most nights leaving a chill in the air. My food thoughts are turning towards pumpkin pie and thick gravy covering huge slabs of beef with yorkshire pudding. Autumn and winter are my two most favourite seasons, perhaps because they house my two most favourite festivals, halloween and christmas. Nothing beats hurrying home in the cold, wrapped up warm and being greeted by delicious hot food. In fact the only depressing food related thought  on the horizon is the dreaded sprout. Still need to find a way of making them palatable before december the 25th.