Radishes
Our favourite way to eat radishes is 20 seconds after we’ve pulled them. Run them under the garden tap, whip off the little root and tear off the leaves (keep them). Pour yourself a glass of something cold and cut a slice of fresh sourdough with cold fresh butter. Then sit in the garden eating the radishes dipped in salt, and the sourdough! Nothing better!
Kissir
Kissir is a Turkish salad dish and a regular visitor to our table in the summer.
Chop lots of tomato, cucumber, spring onions, parsley and dill and mint. Put a mug of bulgar wheat into a wide shallow dish and pour over sufficient boiling water to just cover it. Then cover the bowl with a clean teacloth. Leave for an hour. Then add all the chopped salad vegetables (plus chopped fresh beetroot if you wish) and a big handful of chopped walnuts. Then make a dressing in the blender: Use the radish tops (and parsley and basil), two cloves of garlic, the juice of one large lemon, 75-100ml olive oil or rapeseed oil, a good glug of pomegranate molasses and salt. Whizz it all up and pour over the bulgar and salads and mix it all in together.
Fennel
Fennel – so long as it is young and fresh – is a beautiful plant in a garden border and culinary fennel sometimes flummoxes people! What to do with it, how to use it, what bits to use? If you have a very young fennel bulb then every part of it is edible. And the older they are the more you have to peel away to find the young sweet inner parts. To make a fennel and orange salad, peel away the tough outer parts until you come to the soft inner. Take thin slices top to bottom and drop into water with a squeeze of lemon juice to step them discolouring. Use as many fennel slices as you need, and match the number with very thin slices of fresh orange. Scatter with chopped parsley, lemon juice and olice oil.
Potato salad
Boil about 500g small potatoes in their skins with 4 eggs in the pan for 15 minutes, then drain and place in cold water. Remove the shells from the eggs and chop the potatoes into chunks. Chop loads of parsley and mint and scatter over the egg and potato. Add chopped spring onion if you like. In your blender, whizz up one clove of garlic, one teaspoon Dijon mustard, small amount of salt, juice of a lemon or about 25ml white wine vinegar, fresh basil and about 100ml olive oil and 100ml plain yogurt. Pour over the eggs and potato and mix.
Anything pesto
You can use almost any green vegetable tops (maybe not potato!) for pesto. I’ve used carrot tops, small chard leaves, all sorts of herbs, cavalo nero – so I encourage you to experiment. Place 100g cashews (pine nuts are too expensive!) – a good handful of green veg tops and herbs, a good squeeze of lemon juice, olive oil or vegetable/nut oil and a cup of grated parmesan (or substitute). Whizz it all up and it will keep in the fridge for about 5 days if you keep the lid on. Not only do I use this for pasta, but also to drop into a bowl of soup or as a salad dressing.
Enjoy those summer salads!
