Sunshine salad

I’d been meaning to have a go at the Weekend Cookbook Challenge event ever since I first heard about it. Well I have a lot of cookbooks, in fact probably an obscene amount of cookbooks; the challenge for me would be to select ‘a’ single cookbook. The point of the event is to shine a light onto a hitherto unappreciated cookbook in your collection by reproducing a recipe from it. Food stylist Tami from Running with Tweezers opted for the theme of salads for the 14^th challenge. My first thought was to make my favourite salad which is an adaptation of one of Jamie Oliver’s from The Naked Chef. But this seemed to be cheating; I have been inspired by many of the recipes by Jamie’s first book so this is not the spirit of the event. So I resorted to my index cards. Before my cookbook collection got rather out of hand, I would catalogue each new addition to my collection by categorising all the recipes contained within that I was interested in. This was enormously handy, as when I desperately wanted to do something fabulous with say a cauliflower, I could consult my cards and get inspiration. If I ever get a spare month or so I will complete my indexing (or, in the modern parlance – tagging) and then I could always immediately lay my hand on any required recipe. Of course if I did reinstate this mammoth task, I should really go electronic as with the aid of a good search engine the sorting possibilities are endless. Oh, for a few spare few months…

Anyway back to Tami’s challenge, I checked out the salad cards, ignoring references to much-used cookbooks and concentrating on recipes that I could produce from the contents of my fridge. And then I espied the following from Simple Suppers by Hugo Arnold, a little paperback from 1996.

Sprouting broccoli salad with quail’s eggs and Pecorino

Serve 4
1 dozen quail’s eggs
3 thin slices of garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
4 handfuls of various salad leaves
110g mature Pecorino
450 g purple sprouting broccoli, trimmed of any tough stalk ends

Boil the quail’s eggs for 2 minutes, drain and refresh under cold water, peel and set aside.

Mash the garlic with a seasoning of salt and pepper until it becomes a pulp. There must be no whole bits of garlic, so sea salt and coarsely ground pepper is best for this. Stir in 5 tablespoons of olive oil and a dessert spoon of balsamic vinegar. Toss the leaves in this dressing. Peel the Pecorino into slivers with a vegetable peeler.

Cook the broccoli in a large pan of boiling salted water for 5 minutes, or until just tender. Drain and refresh briefly under cold water – it still should be warm. Toss the broccoli in with the salad leaves coat in the dressing. Distribute on 4 plates, scatter over the quail’s eggs and Pecorino and serve.

What clinched this recipe for me was with a little tweaking, and when do I not tweak, I could rustle this one up without a trip to the shops and it would highlight beautifully my remaining purple sprouting broccoli. I wasn’t sure if my last few quail eggs are still at their best so substituted them for a couple of D's favourite and now mine, Old Cotswold Legbar eggs as I thought their stunning golden yolks would add an extra dimension to the salad. And I’m really glad I did, I am sure Hugo’s original recipe is lovely but hard boiled quail eggs wouldn’t have given that lovely unctuous just soft-boiled mollet egg treat that I had. I only boiled the eggs for just over 4 minutes as I wanted them to be soft when I peeled them and then broke them up gently on top of the balsamic dressed sprouting broccoli and leaves. I replaced the Pecorino with Parmesan as that is what I had to hand but everything else I followed faithfully.

This was a lovely salad, I never tire of purple sprouting broccoli and it seemed rather virtuous with all that lovely greenery and sunshine-y yolks. And I just managed to get it done before the challenge deadline – just!