The Collective Cook

Patrice Newell's Recipe for Baked Garlic and Eggplant Salad

✮ Slice and quarter a large eggplant a spread on a baking dish.
✮ Break open a bulb of garlic, leave the skins on the cloves and add to the eggplant. Generously brush olive oil over all of it, lightly salt,  and bake in a moderate oven for 30 minutes or until all cooked and golden.
✮ Allow to cool a little, then skin the garlic.
✮ Chop up a tomato into pieces. Slice half a purple onion thinly. Finely chop parsley – about half a cup.
✮ Toss it all together, add more olive oil and a good balsamic vinegar.  Voila!

Tried this tonight, very nice. Another winner from Patrice Newell.

Italian beef salad (and chips)

Years ago we had a lovely lunch in Florence of thin slices of rare beef on a bed of rocket lettuce. It's a beautiful way to eat meat especially on a hot day.

I was reminded of it by a tweet from @Nigella_Lawson yesterday pointing to this recipe and decided to cook something similar tonight. 

I followed her recipe with the following modifications:

• cover the dish when you're marinating the meat
• use the marinade with the juices from the meat as the 'sauce' for the dish
• arrange the sliced beef on a bed of lettuce
• shave a little parmesan over the top

As an accompaniment, we had some chipped  potatoes, cut into cubes (a style popular in France, I believe):

• peel and cube the potatoes, dry with paper or tea towell, in a bowl mix with a little olive oil, salt, rosemary leaves and a crushed garlic clove or two. Drying potatoes is essential because they won't crisp properly otherwise
• add a nob of butter to the hot cooking oil (light olive, vegetarian or peanut) and when its just starting to smoke add the contents of the bowl, the butter gives the potatoes a richer, nuttier flavour (a bit like ghee in Indian cooking)
• cook until nearly done (light brown), remove the potatoes and drain on paper towells, when its cooled a little and just before you are ready to eat, bring the oil to the boil again and add the potatoes and cook until golden. Double frying like this makes potatoes crispier (I got this tip from Pie in the Sky, one of my favourite TV shows!). Remove and drain on more paper.

Sure, it's a version of steak and chips, but it's easy and it's a lot better.

This beef salad is similar in principle to the very popular Thai beef salad, but the flavourings are very different, of course. More of that another time.