Cucumber & Avocado Salad

I'm not a fan of those standard green salads with lettuce, spinach, watercress, rocket and other raw leaves.  My friend Aiden sometimes buys a bag of washed salad and just eats it like that. Unseasoned, cold, bland leaves.  What kind of a snack is that? That's no way of getting your five-a-day.  I prefer cooked vegetables.  I love steamed green beans, sauteed spinach, baked broccoli, braised kale and that is how I get my greens in.   I don't like raw leafy salads.

I remember when I went on my raw challenge and I just ate stupid leaves for three days.  It was a bad experience, I ended up hating everyone and everything.

Vegetables in Desserts

Before you grimace in disgust, think - you've got carrot cake, you've got courgette cake, you've got beet cake (at least these are all quite common to me).  Now open up more doors, there are no boundaries.  Why should some ingredients remain in savory dishes?  Why must we be so close-minded?  After a thorough brainstorm and online research, I present to you a couple of ingredients that feature themselves in a perhaps rather odd context.  These recipes are not tested, I merely chose them for you as inspiration and if you would like to try them out, be my guest, but if they turn out to be disastrous, I am not responsible for your waste of time and ingredients. 

Tomatoes
There is no controversy, we all know that it is actually a fruit and it's time to just treat it as what it is.  My Chinese mother used to make this sweet snack for me --- she chopped up those big beef tomatoes and tossed them with sugar and it was the most refreshing dessert for a hot summer day.  See, you can kind of see how it'd work right?  It's naturally sweet and so obviously there's a place for it in desserts.

Tomato Tarte Tatin from In Sweet Treatment
Tomato, Olive oil and Cinnamon cake from Love Food Eat

Favorite Basil Recipes

I always associate basil with summer.  I grew up in China but every summer my family would go back to Italy, and so I link all Italian produce like basil and cheese and san marzano tomatoes to those summers.  Back then you couldn't get anything remotely "Western" in China.  Forget basil, forget cheese, any kind of cheese.  Maybe you could get a hold of Philidelphia cream cheese if you managed to find some "gourmet" imported goods deli in the embassy area.  Even now, it's funny, it's still bad, so bad that you get these cheese delis where they have Philidelphia cream cheese there next to the parmesan.  Bless the Chinese. 

But I digress and should focus on the basil.  Shredded on a plate of bright red spaghetti, scattered on top of pizzas or pounded with parmesan, pine nuts and olive oil to make a luscious sauce -- basil has a strong role in Italian classics.  But I want you to open your mind and think about basil in another context.   Here are some more.. adventurous recipes.

Instead of chopped chives in your bold potato salad, why not try basil, like in this recipe from The Kitchin. 

Cauliflower and Caraway Soup

Today I had a sandwich with rye and caraway seed bread and my god, unexpectedly, I rekindled my relationship with caraway seeds.

Surprisingly, caraway seeds were perfect with the egg salad filling.  Let's be honest, egg salad can be a bit boring without some herbs or spices. I had always just paired it with chopped chives, but caraway seeds are waay better than chives as a match for the humble and plain egg salad.

So I spent most of the day thinking about what I should make with caraway seeds.  And as I'm currently in Scotland, a place that never quite understands what "summer" entails, a warming soup was what I was craving for. 

Sea Bass en Papillote with Fennel

Fish en papillote is simply done by enclosing the fish in a parchment paper packet and baking it in the oven so essentially the fish steams in its own wonderfulness.  I was looking for its recipes and I noted that most say to cut the parchment paper into a heart shape and putting the fish on one half of the heart and the other half goes over it.  I just thought that was brilliant -- best date dish ever.  Next time you want to show your significant other that you care -- forget about chocolates, champagne and other cliched aphrodisiacs -- it's time for fish en papillote. Set the scene: soft instrumental music, dim lighting, table set up, your stunning woman/man sitting opposite you sipping wine and nibbling on the delicious antipasti you put out.  Then she/he opens up this parcel to reveal the heart with a beautiful piece of fish in the middle.  Oh my god, you can even enclose a ring in it!  That's the best way to propose.  Putting it in cakes/drinks risks choking to death.  Have it right there on top of the fish in the middle of the parchment paper heart.  Although it'd probably smell quite fish and you risk scalding their finger.