Del-icious!

Bits & Pieces

1. Smoked salmon

Whilst enjoying a recent party at a friend's house (the Scotch egg friend), I was able to smoke some of the salmon my husband and I gutted last week. The host has a large smoker which he uses seldom but when he does decide to indulge, the result is incredible. He smoked two chickens, one large pork shoulder and 20 sausages. He began the pork the night before in the oven at a very low temperature where it happily sat for 8 hours. He then transferred it, along with the chicken and sausages, to the smoker in the morning for a further 8 hours. My two pieces of salmon were given only 2 hours, but it was enough to blanket them with a subtle and sweet hickory taste. The pork and chickens had been coated with an amazingly complex rub taken from the cookbook of a local barbecue restaurant. I was roped in (very reluctantly), to 'shred' the meat with two forks and subsequently had the pleasure of picking off the choice crispy bits and skin where the marinade rub had intensified. Sweet, smoky, spicy and savoury, a little like marmite in places, the taste was incredibly addictive and I was full before I even began to fill my plate. The meat literally fell from the bones and was served with a homemade barbecue sauce. The whole meal, rounded off with contributions from other guests such as Thai noodle salad, potato salad and cornbread was fantastic rustic fare and my Scotch eggs seemed a little out of place!

We brought one piece of salmon home for lunch the next day.

Smoked salmon with fruit salsa and roasted beet relish.

Salsa

1 peach, chopped small

1 two inch piece cucumber, peeled and diced

1 small piece mango, peeled and diced

1/2 a red chili, de-seeded and sliced

1 tsp extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste.

Mix together

Roasted beet relish recipe was taken from The River Cottage Handbook No.2 'Preserves'

2. Cauliflower mash

Despite being the obsessed foodie that I am and ardent collector of various types of cookbooks, I have been living a low-carbohydrate lifestyle for the past 8 months. This has been an unbelievable challenge and at times I have felt like I am laughing in the face of adversity. I have cheated on several occasions, including the entire vacation in Tokyo and Thailand where there was no way I was going to deny myself any pleasure to be gained from eating the incredible food. Again, recently, when I lost a job and found solace in a plate of pork and shrimp fried rice with crispy ginger beef from the local Chinese restaurant and various other times too numerous to remember or mention. However, I do try hard to abstain from the carbohydrate heavyweights. Rice, pasta, bread, sugar and potatoes. Yes, even potatoes. So, yesterday being a miserable, wet dog of a day, I craved for something that would be warm, comforting and stick to my ribs. In truth, I craved mashed potatoes. Come forward cauliflower mash! I have made cauliflower cheese many times and have had success with cauliflower 'rice', but this was the first time I actually pureed the cauliflower down to the consistency of mash. It was a great success, although my processor is so small I had to blend in 5 portions and had to add a little too much milk to render the mash a little wet. The copious amounts of Caerphilly and Cheddar cheese I added helped to thicken the mixture and butter added that extra creamy edge. I spread the mixture to cover a bowl and added another few handfuls of grated cheese before grilling to golden brown under the grill, (broiler). It was a very credible substitute for my mum's cheese and potato pie which is high calibre comfort food. Today, for lunch, I added more cheese and some bought candied, chili salmon in flakes, mixed well and then grilled again. It was sublime, probably better than the real thing.

3. Sainsbury's recipe cards.

Yesterday, while undergoing the monthly ritual of desperately trying to gain some apartment space by moving things from one place to another, I came across an intriguing book long lost at the back of a cupboard. It turned out to be a very exciting foodie find, a folder containing hand written recipes, recipes printed from the Internet and 36 recipe cards from supermarkets in the UK, mostly from Sainsburys supermarket of which Jamie Oliver is the advertising face. Therefore, I have a large stack of Jamie Oliver recipes created exclusively for Sainsburys and not available in his books! To name a few: Thai style mango salad with griddled prawns, lamb balti, spicy prawn curry and spiced lamb stew with walnuts and pomegranate. These gems are available free in UK supermarkets and people collect as many as they can ,accumulating their own mini recipe collection. Sadly, I have not seen anything of this high a quality available in any Canadian supermarkets, of course I may be wrong, but neither can I name a celebrity endorsing the supermarket. I look forward to visiting home where I can stock up on more of these little cards and have another stack of something to have to find space for, (no doubt finding another 10 such books in the process)!