Romesco sauce is vibrant red Spanish sauce made from the best of its ingredients – sweet red peppers, chilli, garlic and tomatoes, almonds and Spanish sherry vinegar. It’s appeal is the sweet, sour piquancy which is a perfect match for roasted vegetables chips, chicken and fish. There are many versions of this sauce but this is a simple one made mainly from store cupboard ingredients.
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'Canned' red peppers
If you have two or three long red peppers languishing in your vegetable rack at the end of the week you might think of making these wonderful 'canned' peppers. Simple as you like and very tasty especially with the Gozleme (Turkish flat bread stuffed with spinach and feta) I posted last week.
The recipe for the canned peppers comes from the kitchen of Honey & Co the delightful, pixie like Middle Eastern restaurant a little way down on the left from Warren Street tube station in London. Honey & Co is the creation of Itamar Strulovich and his wife Sarit Packer and they make jolly nice mezze and cakes.
Itamar was a panelist on Jay Raynor's Kitchen Cabinet on Radio 4 last week. It was great to hear him speak (....I like to hear chefs speak rather than see them skulking with a fag outside the back door of a restaurant kitchen). He sounded intelligent, knowledgeable and thoughtful. I liked him.
So if you fancy cooking some great Middle Eastern dishes you could start with these peppers and a few pitta and then move on to some other recipes in their pretty book. What about madfunia and finish with the cherry, pistachio and coconut cake?
The ingredient lists are shorter than those devised by Yotam Ottolenghi, who I love, but despair of sometimes. He gets us in a bit of a whorl trying to find all the bits and bobs needed for his little salads. Nice as they are.
I haven't abandoned Yotam but it is nice to have other options in the Middle Eastern department. So the Honey & Co recipe book is open in our kitchen and when we are near Warren Street, that is where we head.
Canned red peppers
Ingredients
2 long peppers
3 sprigs of fresh thyme or oregano
2 cloves fresh garlic (do not use any that is sprouting)
sea salt
2 tbsp fruity olive oil
2 tbsp red wine vinegar (I used sherry vinegar and it was perfect)
Method
Char the peppers over a gas flame or under a grill until black all over. Leave to cool and then peel the charred skin and remove the seeds. Do not wash the peppers. You need to preserve the smoky flavour of the charred skin. Cut the peppers into long strips and place in a bowl. Peel and slice the garlic and muddle up with the pepper strips. Add the olive oil, garlic and vinegar. Strip the thyme or oregano, chop up finely and scatter over the peppers.
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Canned peppers are simply delicious with the Turkish stuffed bread - gozleme
Vegan avocado and chocolate mousse
This is just a very quick post but it might help you. If you ever have a vegan friend round for a meal this is a simple, beautiful recipe you can pull out of the bag. There is the flavour of raw chocolate, the texture of velvet and the mystery of guessing what it is made from. So book mark it now.
Read MoreBuckwheat and spinach pancakes with roasted pepper, chickpea and tahini yogurt cream
There is something rather thrilling about making pancakes. There is the risk of them going wrong, the challenge of tossing them and decision of what to fill them with. And then the simple pleasure of eating them. These pancakes behaved themselves very nicely. They stayed whole, were easy to flip over and tasted and looked wonderful. Buckwheat is a great flour to use in pancakes either neat or half and half with wheat flour.
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