brightly-coloured salad for a rainy day

Autumn is grey now. Gone are those lovely marigold-tinged and rust-tinted leaves hanging precariously from tree branches. They’re all on the ground now (at least in London), turned to mush by the deluge of rain we’ve had this week.

The only place I’m going to be conjuring up autumn thoughts is in a bowl. It’s not too hard: start with soft green baby spinach, and add some bulgur wheat (100 g, cooked weight, which nets about 110 cals), sliced cooked beetroot (in rounds, which looks great), and that year-round staple, lanky orange carrot, peeled and sliced into thick matchsticks. Top it off with a bit of reduced fat feta (about 25 g crumbled), some freshly-ground pepper, and a capful of white wine vinegar. Divine.

I’ve had this for lunch most days this week, complemented by half a pot of M&S country vegetable soup (in the chilled section, and only 105 cals per half pot!), and loved it each time.

spinach salad with roasted swede, pear and feta

Try as I might, sometimes this whole “cooking for two” thing doesn’t pan out. Last night I was determined to make a meal out of what was already in the freezer, refrigerator and cupboards. But there weren’t many protein sources around, and I was not keen for another pasta dish.

But in the freezer, for VERY rainy days, sat steak and kidney pies, chips and peas. (These are normally here for nights when I’m away). Now, I’m not about to have that for dinner, but the thought popped into my mind that perhaps it would be easiest for me to cook that for my husband, leaving me time to experiment with something for myself. Hmmm….

Swede, lonely and dejected, sat in my vegetable drawer, crying out for someone to spice it up. I decided to roast them in the oven with the pies and chips and use them in a salad. Warm salads can be lovely – if done right.

The fun part with the swede was deciding which spices to roast them with. I decided on something sweet, warm and earthy – a few fennel seeds, a pinch or two of cinnamon and a bit of pepper. But what about the other ingredients?

I decided upon concorde pears (hands down the best pears I have tasted this year), chopping one up and reserving a bit of flesh for a puree in a vinaigrette. The pears I knew would match perfectly with the rusty cinnamon.

What about protein? Obviously I needed some, but what? Options: mozzarella, cheddar and feta. In a perfect world, I’d go for blue vinney or perhaps parmesan. I felt something strong was needed, so mozzarella does not work. Cheddar, perhaps, but “it doesn’t sound good in a recipe title,” my sage husband surmised. (Perhaps he pays more attention than I thought.) I settled on feta.

Ding! Chips and pies onto one plate, swede into a bowl with spinach leaves, feta and pears. (For the vinaigrette, spray a bit of olive oil into a bowl with lemon juice, pear puree, salt and pepper and whizz with a hand blender. It’s less about having a full-blown dressing and more about ensuring the salad isn’t too dry.)

This salad is pretty low-calorie: about 300, actually. I was trying to make amends for a rather lovely smoked salmon and brie Panini I ate earlier in the day. But I believe it would work lovely as a first course for dinner – or as a soup/salad combo for a light Saturday lunch.

a healthy and filling cold-weather salad

I was flipping through Jamie Oliver’s new cookery book Jamie at Home this weekend, which I have to say I quite like, overall, if we excuse the atrocious recipe names (i.e. the motherload sauce or absolutely fantastic partridge stew) and the messy presentation. It’s not too often these days that I take away four or five ideas from a first read, keen to try them out.

The book is separated by seasons, and in the winter chapter, there’s a winter salad section. And I really like some of these: asian duck and squash salad and and another that reads like a list of crudités, but with a milky parsley dressing.

But it got me thinking (and hungry) on Sunday afternoon. Knowing I was going to concoct a roasted root vegetable stew with cheesy dumplings that evening, I wanted something light, but filling; tangy, yet sweet. I think what I came up with was just the thing.

The blue vinney (the best reduced-fat blue cheese out there) is a critical ingredient in the salad. It is just key to keep the portion size reasonable – i.e. 30-35g. Use 2/3 of it crumbled in the salad, and use the remainder in the salad dressing – that way, the light taste of blue vinney will distribute throughout the salad.

To bulk this up, serve with some wholemeal bread – or if there’s someone fearful of food without meat, a few grilled slices of Danish bacon is quite nice. (I’ll admit I did make this salad while I was on my own.) But the variety of crunches with the soft creamy bites of blue vinney made for quite a pleasant meal.

Spinach salad with apple, celery and blue vinney
(serves 1)

for the salad:
50g spinach leaves
2 stalks of celery, trimmed, sliced lengthways, then chopped
1 royal gala apple, cored and sliced, saving one slice for the dressing
2 spring onions, chopped
20-25 g blue vinney, crumbled

for the dressing:
2-3 tbsp of white wine vinegar
flesh of one slice of apple
a few sprigs of fresh parsley
10 g blue vinney
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Combine the salad ingredients into a large salad bowl. In another smaller bowl, combine the ingredients for the dressing, and whiz with a hand blender.

Pour the salad dressing over the ingredients in the large bowl and toss throughout.