“I take out salad ingredients, vegetables, herbs and several knives: peeler, smooth-bladed and serrated. I cut half a cucumber into cubes, then move onto the mushrooms which I slice into little slithers, I go back to the cucumber, cutting wafer-thin slices, skip to topping and tailing green beans, pop whole beetroots into the oven, I scoop the flesh out of avocados and grapefruits, and put the chard into boiling water. The whole idea is not to get bored. The theory, because I have a theory about peeling things, is to leave room for random opportunities. With cooking, as with everything else, we tend to curb our instincts. Speed and chaos allow for a slight loss of control. Cutting vegetables into different shapes and sizes encourages combinations which might not have been thought of otherwise. In a salad of mushrooms, cucumber and lamb's lettuce, the chervil needs to stay whole, in sprigs, to make a contrast because the other ingredients are so fine, almost transparent, and slippery. If its thin stems and tiny branches didn't contradict the general sense of languor- accentuated by the single cream instead of olive oil in the dressing- the whole thing would descend into melancholy.” IngredientsVegetablesSalads Book:Chez Moi: A Novel Source: Chez Moi: A Novel
“The beetroots come out of the oven and I shower them with walnut vinegar. The chard gushes into the colander and I sprinkle it with lemon juice and pepper. My worktop is a battlefield: pips, tops, droplets, stains, leaves and peelings- everything piles up and oozes. I melt at the sight of pink beetroot blood on a cucumber heart.” VegetablesSeasoningsSalads Book:Chez Moi: A Novel Source: Chez Moi: A Novel
“Our tapas look exquisite: little squares of spiced honey-cake decorated with goat's cheese and roast pears, chicken livers on port on slices of potato with onion marmalade, rolled up radicchio with honey and haddock. Ben has been to buy some boxes from the patisserie to stow our treasures. The exotic menu is made up of taramasalata, roulade of tuna and capers, salad of peppers sautéed in garlic, and aubergine caviar. It isn't very exotic for an inhabitant of the Balkans but it probably would be for someone from Vietnam or Brittany. The giant salad really is a giant: there's a whole meal in it, from the first course to the dessert and all that with no rice and no tinned sweet corn. Slivers, slivers of all sorts of different things- vegetables, cheese, fruit- all blended without crushing each other, side by side without working against each other.” ExoticMenusSaladsTapas Book:Chez Moi: A Novel Source: Chez Moi: A Novel