In the second half of June you guys in the UK have guaranteed gorgeous weather – I’m away on hols. It’s always the nicest time at home when I go away. Enough said that last year, in the British summer of the century, I managed to spend two weeks in France wet and shivering.
I’m not going to suggest what to cook on holiday because on hols you don’t cook – you eat out or barbecue. These ideas are perhaps too elaborate for holiday cooking but you never know, some of you are definitely ambitious, hols or not.
Best things first: ice cream special. The raspberry ripple and the salted caramel ice cream are both no churn, three ingredient recipes and the only pain is the wait for the ice to freeze. If you want proper, creamy gelato, try the matcha, chocolate and vanilla recipes. There’s also frozen yoghurt which is my favourite and a couple of fruity ones. You’ve got to have ice cream in the freezer – it’s going to be hot, see above.
Dinners should be light – so you have space for the ice cream afters, of course. Crispy pork with noodles or lemon chilli chicken are quick and easy dishes you might want to try, or Thai noodles with cinnamon for veggies. Fish ideas this week are monkfish with mushrooms and chorizo or skate fillet with capers. Broccoli salad goes very well with fish as does crunchy cabbage.
Flavoursome tomatoes are starting to appear so you could cook pasta with fresh tomatoes one night this week. And if you’d rather make a cupboard staple pasta dish, go for pappardelle with crispy capers and breadcrumbs. Make sure you ‘accidentally’ cook too much pasta – you can turn it into pasta fritta the following day and that will be a feast.
I started with dessert so I clearly need to finish with breakfast. See my last blog post on the subject, quite controversial for such a benign meal. I can’t get enough of overnight oats for my breakfasts, making slightly bigger and bigger portion every evening with chopped up strawberries or blueberries. Oats are fantastic for breakfast anyway, be it granola or oatmeal bake, plus they are the solution to an embarrassing problem a lot of us apparently don’t recognise…
On that enchanting note I’ll bid goodbye for two weeks, but there will be new recipes popping up. Keep in touch via the newsletter – subscribe here.