Pretentious continued!!  So after Friday's simple duck dish I moved on to another "use what we've got" recipe.  My wife and kids have managed to cultivate the most amazing little 'market garden' as my Mum likes to call it.


One of our most successful and plentiful bounties has been beans.  Yellow, green and purple varieties, growing like there's no tomorrow!  So had to do something with beans before Zoe, the eldest, eats them all straight off the bush!  I still had some beets (also from the garden) left over from the night before so I replicated that again and made a little bean salad with asparagus.  Simple as could possibly be, just blanched the vegetables then sliced on a bias, tossed them with minced shallots and olive oil and hey presto, beautiful fresh dish.

To accompany it  I wanted do something hot (i.e. the fire) - so I went back to a classic sauce - dice some tomatoes, add two cloves of garlic, thyme, glug of olive oil, glug of red wine and throw all of it in an iron skillet and into a 400f oven to roast it for about 45 minutes.  Normally if I'm doing Italian I'll just put this sauce straight onto pasta, but for this I wanted something a little more refined.  So I pushed it through a chinois (or sieve) into a small pan and then add a touch of rooster sauce to add the heat and swirl around a touch of butter to add a smooth finish.  What was the sauce for I hear you cry!

First of all I sliced and panfried some chorizo, put that aside and in its fat then sauteed some scallops and shrimp.  Sliced them both in half, plated along with the chorizo and then add the now hot tomato based sauce.  Quite yummy when served with a nice cooling rose.