Week 2: Slow-Roast Tomatoes, Goat's Cheese and Mint Salad

The book: Nigella Express

The recipe: p127, "Slow-Roast Tomatoes, Goat's Cheese and Mint Salad"

When this blog came up in conversation over a post-parkrun coffee on a snowy Sunday morning, we said it'd be nice if the fairies of fortune took the wintry weather into account and made this week's choice something hearty, like a pie or a stew. Inevitably, then, I shouted the randomly generated numbers through into the kitchen later that day so that Sam could look up the selected recipe, only to be greeted with the mournful response: "That's just a picture of some salad."

Flick back from p129 to the page containing the actual recipe, and it didn't sound too bad. It was lunchtime and we needed something light (insofar as anything involving goat's cheese can ever be described as "light"), and Nigella Express counts as one of the least-used cookbooks on the Random Kitchen shelf, so the choice was very much in keeping with the purpose of the exercise.

I'm not particularly fond of Nigella and her style of televisual delivery, though I concede I'm probably not the target audience for her assets. Still, underused though my copy may be, Nigella Express is responsible for introducing sesame oil, honey and soy sauce-glazed cocktail sausages to my life (and, subsequently, to party guests on numerous occasions), so it was really about time I gave it the honour of delving into its pages some more. 

The prep: Mostly fresh ingredients, of course, so a trip to the shops beckoned. The goat's cheese needed to be the ultra-soft variety - you know the type, with an almost mousse-like consistency for maximum dollopability. I opted for baby spinach leaves as the salad base, though in hindsight one of those supermarket watercress/rocket/spinach mixes would probably have made things more interesting.

That took care of the green and the white, but it's the red where the only complexity in the recipe comes in. Nigella calls for the reader to make their own sunblush tomatoes, a process that involves heating an oven, switching it off, then leaving a tray of herbed- and oil-up toms in there "overnight or for a day". Which, let's be honest:

Having said that, I'm sure the results would have been considerably better than the rather average supermarket deli counter tomatoes I ended up using - while certainly preferable to sundried tomatoes from the jar, which wouldn't have been juicy or sweet enough for the purpose, they were still a notable step down from my original plan, which was to get my semi-dried tomato fix from Lewisham's own slice of Italian heaven that is Gennaro's delicatessen.

Except Gennaro's is closed on Sundays, isn't it? #firstworldproblems, there. 

The making: Well, it's a salad. The Random Kitchen experiment is yet to pose any real problems where skill levels are concerned.

The spinach leaves are scattered across the dish as a base, then knifetip-sized dollops of goat's cheese are scattered here and there. The tomatoes are scattered on top, before a whisked-up blend of extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice is drizzled over and around the creation as it stands. Then to finish, as the recipe name suggests, a scattering of chopped mint. (It's a whole lot of scattering and a bit of drizzling, basically.) 

Et voilà:

See? It's a salad.

The eating: The tanginess of the goat's cheese and the acid pang of the tomatoes are the main flavours here, particularly since the quantity of mint involved doesn't seem to make much of an impression - I'd use a lot more next time. If you're like Sam and tomatoes aren't your favourite thing in the world, this salad won't be either (and doubly so if you're weirded out because it ends up leaving the inside of your mouth really dry for some reason). Whereas if you're me, you'll probably really like it, dry mouth and all.

Still, though: being essentially just a bunch of fresh ingredients slung together, the recipe lives and dies on the quality of those ingredients, and I'm the kind of person who finds it hard to justify spending delicatessen amounts of money on "just" a salad when I could be buying half a dozen bags of Tangfastics from Poundland for the same outlay.

So no complaints about random.org's choice this week - and Nigella Express certainly lives up to its billing when it comes to speed - but I'd need this to be a whole lot more special before I'd dare to serve it up to guests ahead of those sinful cocktail sausages.

One-word verdict: Tangy.