Chicory, Green Apple and Mozzarella Salad | You've Got Meal!

Simple and healthy croutons salad idea. A recipe using endives, apple and Mozzarella. Perfect lunch/light dinner salad or as a starter.

Can’t believe that it took us so long to actually make a post about this dish. We’ve been making it for the past couple of years and we got the recipe from either Jamie Oliver or Good Food, can’t quite remember who we have to give credit.

Nonetheless, it’s a great salad, full of crunch, flavor, and it’s so light that you can use it as a starter to a longer meal. 

You’ll need:

• fresh mozzarella (for 2 generous portions we used 2 balls with roughly 150 grams each), 
• 1 rather tart green apple (Granny Smith), 
• 2 medium sized chicories (or endives, if you know them by that name), 
• a couple of slices of bread, 
• salt, pepper, 
• olive oil, lemon juice. 

1. Just roughly chop the endives – by the way, the salad looks better if you can find and use both red and yellow - tip types, and cube the bread. 
2. Heat up some olive oil on medium high heat and stir-fry the chicories for 2-3 minutes, remove from the pan and set aside. 
3. Next, in the same pan add the bread croutons, splash a small amount of olive oil on top and cook them until they are slightly crunchy and browned all sides.
4.  Meanwhile, cut or break the cheese in any way you like, dice about 1 quarter of the apple per portion and add it to the mozzarella. 
5. Make a vinaigrette of 1 part lemon juice/ 3 part olive oil, salt, pepper and pour it over the endives, apple and mozzarella. After that, pop in the croutons and mix well.

The next part of the recipe is optional, but we definitely recommended it: open your very well chilled bottle of Prosecco, pour yourself a tall glass of the bubbly and enjoy this great salad that will make you love it at first taste.

Cheers,

Fish Roe Salad | You've Got Meal!

This has to be one of the best and easiest to make appetizers out there, but it can have an acquired taste for some people – you are eating raw fish eggs in the end. There are a lot of possibilities from which to choose when deciding what type of fish’s roe to use, and for the recipe we went for pike. In my book, pike roe is in the top half, alongside trout roe. I like the fact that it has a medium granulation and the texture is a lot smoother than other types of roe that you could use for salad, like carp or hering. I’m pretty sure this is a well known fact, but the roe you use in salads are not the fresh ones, they are preserved with salt and plenty of it, so keep that in mind.  

Ingredients: 

• 50 grams of pike roe, 
• vegetable oil (make sure you use a bland oil, without a very strong flavor), 
• lemon juice, 
• a small onion, 
• soaked bread (optional). 

Making the salad is a very similar process to the way you make mayo, it’s about adding periodically small amounts of oil and incorporating it into the roe. You can either use a fork and work out in the kitchen using your hands to mix the salad, or plug in the hand mixer on a low speed, it’s up to you. 

For about 50 grams of the roe we used about 100 rams of sunflower oil. We like to start by just mixing the roe without any other ingredients, in order to break some of the eggs, but not all of them -  they give a nice, pearled look to the dish. The amount of lemon juice you add is up to you, same as the moment you add it to the salad (we do that at the end).

The idea behind the use of the soaked bread is to create volume and to cheat about the amount of salad you make. You need to soak the bread in water, drain really well and incorporate it in the salad so there aren’t any lumps (don’t use crust for this). Finely slice the onion and incorporate it in the salad. You can choose to grate it if you’re not going for the crunch factor, but make sure you drain the onion really well then.

So that’s it, easy fish roe salad. For me, this always reminds me of 2 things:  Mrs. G.'s mother, who makes some great hering roe salad, and the taverns in Greece, that served this as antipasti alongside some Retsina wine. So, what about you guys, any thoughts about the dish or recipe?

Enjoy,

Sun-dried Tomato and Artichoke Bruschetta | You've Got Meal!

One of the most important things that you’ll ever hear from any professional chef is to be organized in your kitchen. Manage your ingredients, keep things tidy, plan your cooking and so on and so forth. We are not professional chefs in the You’ve Got Meal kitchen, but this whole organizing your meals makes perfect sense it you’re a bruschetta fanatic like we are. 

We always have at hand in the pantry some sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, parmesan, capers, anchovies, cipolline borettane, olive oil, olives, etc. Of course most of the times we don’t have the whole list, but you can cook some darn right delicious treats with only a couple. And so it just happens that we only had some tomatoes and artichokes on hand the other day. 

Making the bruschetta is mega easy, start of by cutting some slices of bread (baguette), not too thick. When we use sun-dried tomatoes we tend not to use olive oil, just because the tomatoes are kept in a flavored oil, same thing for the artichoke hearts.

• Place a piece of tomato, topped with an artichoke heart – you can choose to cut that if you find it too big. 
• Next, place one or two fresh leaves of basil and sprinkle with some grated parmesan. No salt, there’s plenty of that in the vegetables and cheese, maybe a dash of pepper. 
• Cook the bruschetta in the oven for 7-10 minutes and serve warm. 

The conclusion here keep your pantry stocked with at least a couple from those ingredients, they will make a world of a difference when you have to whip something up when you get a last minute visit or when you get the munchies. 

One of the rules we do have about our bruschetta is to keep it simple, not too many ingredients of spices. Keep in mind that just a couple of flavors combined in the right way can do a lot better than trying to mix in a ton tastes.  So, go at it, try and mix them and see which combo suits you better in a bruschetta, there’s no way you’re not going to enjoy it.

 Enjoy,

Parsnip Soup

Winter is coming! And not only in Game of thrones, but also in real life. You know, real life, that kind of stuff you read posts about on Facebook. Anyway, with summer fading away so did our beautiful vacation in Thassos (if you haven’t read about it you should. It’s illegal not to. Where, you ask? In your country, go figure), and so I decided to bring a touch of autumn in the YOUVEGOTMEAL! kitchen with this parsnip soup. 

You can find many varieties of this dish in the great world of Google, but, in case you didn’t know this about me, I tend to get lazy sometimes… maybe a lot. So I just clicked the 1st search result which was a Jamie Oliver variation of this soup.

I liked what I read, and, with a few changes from the Naked Chef, things went like this, ingredients wise:

• 1 big onion                                            
• 4-5 cloves of garlic (use a sweeter variety if you can)
• 1 piece of ginger, thumb size
• About 750 grams of parsnip, cleaned
• A couple of bacon strips
• 1 red or orange chilli (optional)
• 750 grams of milk
• About 1 l of vegetable stock
• Nutmeg, turmeric, cumin, green pepper and salt
• Olive oil 

The beautiful thing about a cream soup is that you don’t really have to bother to chop your veggies finely and this is not an exception. Chop everything roughly, anyway you feel like it. Heat up the oil and pop in the onion, garlic, ginger and spices. Gently fry the onion on a medium low heat until it softens. Add the parsnip and coat it in the aromatic onion-garlic mix. Add the liquids and cook the vegetables on medium heat until the parsnip softens. To test it just try and put a toothpick through it, if it goes in easily you have a winner. Remove from the stove and blitz the soup. Taste for more salt and pepper.

You can serve it like this, but for a more elaborate approach finely slice your chili, fry a strip of bacon, break a couple of parsley leaves (or coriander) and sprinkle that on top. I have nothing but love for you veggie lovers out there, but I can’t just say no to bacon. It just makes things better, like wine, you just need to know when to stop.

Enjoy,

Lebanese- Inspired Salad

You’ll love this dish it has intense taste, a good level of sourness and some nice crunch, and it all mixes incredibly with the hummus. If you think about the crunch in the bread and the tangy dressing you can realise that it was inspired but the very famous Levant salad- fattoush.

So, grab yourself a romaine lettuce head coarsely cut, some tomatoes - diced, a skinless cucumber -diced, a couple of radishes – thinly sliced (I didn’t have those to use, but they work great). Mix the veggies together. 

Now for the crunch part: take some pita breads and carefully insert a knife in the middle in order to separate the two sides so you can cut the pita in half (basically, this bread is a like a giant, very thin, empty on the inside doughnut, that you want cut in half in order to obtain 2 slick sheets of bread). Use a brush or your fingers (whichever tastes better J) to very lightly coat the bread with some olive oil, then pop it in the pre-heated oven, high heat, for a minute, or until it reaches a dark brown color, similar to caramelized sugar. Remove the bread from the  oven and cut/brake it in to pieces for the salad. 

For the sour part, I mixed in some olive oil, about 2 tbs, the juice of half a lemon, 1 tbs of honey, a crushed garlic clove, some salt and pepper together (use a mortar and pestle to crush the garlic and mix the sauce in there), the result will be a tangy sauce that will counterbalance perfectly the rich hummus. For the traditional taste of fattoush, replace the lemon, or part of it with pomegranate molasses or juice. A different take would also be to add in even a couple of pomegranate seeds to the salad, that, besides giving great flavor to the sauce, also brings in for you some very nice, vibrant color.

And one last thing, the pita bread chips and some light aioli sauce= match made in heaven. 

Enjoy,