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Tasty & Healthy Nuggets, Issue #004. Summer time - cooking in France. August 22, 2024 |
| Hello, www.light-food-full-of-flavour.com 
“When you mix good flavours, then the food turns into an orchestra.”Bonjour, Hello from southern France where I am working this month. It has been hot, very hot at times with temperatures reaching +38 degrees Celsius, 100 degrees Fahrenheit some days. I am cooking for a large group of people so both lunches and dinners are buffet style. I have been serving lots of salads, quiches, vegetable dishes, salsas and dips, barbecued meats et cetera for lunch.
orange-and-tomato-salad.html 
broccoli-and-spinach-quiche.html Apart from prawns, most of the people in this group don’t eat fish or seafood but all of them love vegetables and some of them are vegetarians. I often cook a lot of vegetarian dishes for dinner with chicken or some kind of meat on the side. My aubergine lasagne has been very popular.
aubergine-tomato-and-chilli-lasagne.html And they all love different curries, which is a huge bonus when you are cooking for vegetarians and meat eaters at the same time. I make the same curry base for everyone, then divide that base into 2 different pots and add different vegetables to the vegetarian version and prawns or chicken and also vegetables to the the other pot. My Thai-curry sauce recipe is an excellent example and it went down a storm when I did it here in France. I did a prawn-vegetable version and a vegetarian one.
thai-style-curry-sauce.html When the number of people went down for a while, I cooked my more time-consuming, vegetarian Sri Lanka dish one evening - Rice pancakes with coconut sambol and two different vegetable stir-fries. It’s one of my favourite Asian dishes and the guests were very, very happy.
rice-pancakes-with-coconut-sambol-and-stir-fried-vegetables.html Another curry they all loved, and which I will make again tomorrow night, is my Vegetarian curry with chickpeas, lentils and sweet potatoes. I made one change to the recipe, adding coconut milk in place of vegetable stock. I will oven-roast chicken thighs in the oven and serve them on the side.
vegetarian-curry.html Recipe Of The Month
My personal favourite salad this summer is a fennel, orange, pine nut and rocket salad. I honestly can’t get enough of it. Fennel is highly nutritious and contains minerals that are vital to bone health and also contains powerful antioxidants. Fresh fennel and fennel seeds are also low in calories.
This is the recipe for the salad. 1 fennel bulb 2 large oranges 100g, 3 1/2oz rocket/arugula 1 tablespoon pine nuts 1 tsp dijon mustard 2 tablespoons olive oil 1/2 teaspoon honey 1. Use either a sharp knife or a mandolin to shred the fennel bulb into thin slices. 2. Remove the skin of the orange with a knife over a bowl to catch all the juice which will be part of the dressing. Squeeze any bit of orange still on the skin into the bowl as well. Cut the peeled oranges in half and then into thin half-moons. 3. Dry-roast the pine nuts in a frying pan over a medium-hot heat for about 2 minutes. Place them on a plate to cool down. 4. Add the mustard, olive oil and honey to the bowl with juice from the oranges. Season with a pinch of salt and whisk until combined. 5. Place the rocket/arugula leaves on a large plate or in a salad bowls. Scatter over the shredded fennel, drizzle the dressing over the salad, add the sliced oranges and scatter over the pine nuts.
Well, that’s it for this time. Thank you for reading Tasty & Healthy Nuggets. See you again next month.
Happy cooking! Margareta Wiklund
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