I honestly wish I’d thought of saag halloumi myself. One of the main issues with paneer is it’s blandness. Halloumi on the other hand is almost too flavoursome, bearing its brazen salinity. It seems a perfect candidate to temper all that salt with a bag of spinach and some sweet cherry tomatoes.
Mid-week Dinners
7 posts
Yotam has included a lot of pasta recipes in Ottolenghi Simple and they are all very tasty and very simple. They’re also not quite pasta in the traditional Italian sense, they’ve definitely been Ottolenghi-fied. This pappardelle with rose harissa, black olives and capers seems to take inspiration from the robust classic pasta alla puttanesca (or slut’s spaghetti if you’re Nigella). This Ottolenghi take on the classic adds rose harissa and removes the anchovies, making it an incidentally vegan recipe.
Another year, another Diana Henry cookbook. This year’s release, From the Oven to the Table is subtitled simple dishes that look after themselves. I LOVE a traybake recipe.
So chraimeh a river…
So to quote Yotam, ‘Chraimeh is a piquant sauce from Libya. It keeps well in the fridge for at least a week so make double or triple the quantities, It also works as a sauce for chicken or fish or just as a dip with bread before supper’. In practice, it’s a chilli sauce with a bit of musty cumin and caraway and the sourness of lime.
Halloumi has definitely become the new mushroom risotto as the go-to vegetarian option. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Halloumi is bloody delicious and a bad mushroom risotto can be a miserable experience. Salty and savoury – halloumi seems like a natural alternative to bacon and I’ve had it with many a vegetarian breakfast. I’ve also seen halloumi battered and fried as it’s a piece of cod. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
A pasta alla norma can be wonderful thing. A simple tomato sauce with some well cooked aubergine. What’s not to like? Traditional recipes can be a faff, calling for rinsing, salting and/or frying the aubergine. Felicity Cloake’s recipe actually calls for baking half and frying half the aubergine. No, just no.
Pasta really does make such a simple mid-week dinner. It’s hearty and carby and the leftovers travel well – what more do you need? True to it’s name, Ottolenghi Simple is filled with interesting and achievable mid-week pasta recipes. One such recipe, is the gigli with chickpeas and za’atar. People […]