Meal ONE

Due to a heavy brunch yesterday, courtesy of Village Inn, I decided that my first meal from my cook book should be a salad. So I turned to the salad section and made the first salad: Provencal Salad.

Nice and easy I thought to myself, what a great way to start. Little did I realise that this 'salad' would require 3 pots of boiling water and the oven!!!! For a salad?? My aim for the next salad is to sweat just a little less during the intense preparation.

The salad itself consists of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, bell pepper, green beans, boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, tuna, anchovies, olives, homemade croutons and homemade anchovy vinaigrette. It was a rather filling meal, I didn't finish my portion. The homemade dressing was delicious, I usually skip dressings altogether and opt for a naked salad as I feel that dressing can oftentimes be too pungent and/or oily. Yet this dressing (Dijon mustard, anchovy fillets, garlic, white wine vinegar, canola oil, olive oil and fresh ground pepper) was just the right consistency and left a lovely taste on the pallet for the rest of the evening.

I have already run into ingredients problems.... The vinaigrette recipe called for sunflower oil. But nowhere on the 14ft by 7 ft shelf of oils at walmart was there any sunflower oil! After a quick consultation with my HTC hero smart phone I opted for canola oil as a substitute.

Matthew has suggested that I have a system for getting through the cookbook. If I were to just pick things that look the most appealing to me I would inevitably end up with recipes that I don't particularly want to try! So when I decide that we are going to have a meat dish I shall go to the first recipe in the meat section and so on. A great suggestion from Matt, although he began to question himself when I told him there is a recipe of calf's liver with honey..... all of a sudden just choosing what we wanted seemed more appealing to him afterall!! But I do think his idea is the best way to go about it and so I'm going to stick to that.

However, when we have guests coming over (as we do tonight) I am going to pick and choose what I serve, so watch this space :)