crunchy salad

Tonight I came in late and wanted something fast and relatively healthy - I made myself a salad with spinach, tomato, mozzarella light (rubbish - no flavour - must remember not to buy it again), pinenuts and pumpkin seeds. I drizzed Belazu balsamic vinegar (the best in the business) and some posh extra-virgin olive oil over the top for some more flavour as the mozzarella tasted of nothing at all. It was nice though, and looks pretty colourful, don't you think?

Saturday white anchovy salad - a healthy lunch

This morning we had the hangover after the night before and, having slept it off for ages, we felt we needed some seriously healthy food for lunch. We decided on marinated anchovies (they were packaged in a little pot from Waitrose - expensive but well worth it) on a bed of spinach, watercress and rocket leaves, cherry tomatoes and a few pinenuts and pumpkin seeds as they were so good and crunchy on my salad yesterday. We didn't need any dressing as the anchovies are so powerful and delicious.

I can't eat those horrible little brown and hairy anchovies from tins - they just taste so wrong - but these silver little fillets from Waitrose (or I've seen them at olive stalls in posh markets) are simply amazing. They're pretty, they taste powerfully vinegary, they're smooth and fresh-looking AND they're so good for you, full of all the fish oils and all that. I wish we had them more often... happily I've got another tub of them in the fridge, so I know I won't have to wait long.

Friday Sunday Tea - a Tandoori Hut curry special

You'd think I'd be too full to eat a proper supper after my Friday Sunday lunch of roast beef and afters, but no! It was still the Christmas season - any excuse for overindulgence. My boyfriend and I went away to the seaside for a short New Year holiday on Friday afternoon and as there was no internet connection there, I'm having to update all my meals now. We arrived when it was dark and ordered a curry from the excellent curry house there. Here's my plate. I was stuffed and didn't manage to eat much of the garlic naan but manfully finished the rest. On my plate you can see, clockwise from the top, a scarily coloured chicken tikka masala, pilau rice (also scarily coloured in places), king prawn jalfrezi (nice and spicy with lots of green chillis), sag aloo (spinach and potatoes), garlic naan and in the centre brinjal bhaji (fried aubergine) and a bit of the end of the onion salad we'd had with poppadoms. Did you think we didn't have poppadoms with mint sauce and all the trimmings to start? Would a takeaway curry be acceptable without them? Of course not. Oohh, and the garlic naan was great dipped in a bit of cold curry in the morning - a fab breakfast.

Sweet chilli prawn salad

After consuming much more pâté than we had intended - it was just so moreish - we needed something fresh and zesty for our Sunday supper, and we had some big prawns in the fridge which we fancied eating. So I made this quick and easy salad with baby spinach leaves, halved cherry tomatoes, thinly sliced organic carrots, sliced yellow pepper and the prawns scattered artistically, I hoped, over the top. I made a tangy sweet chilli dressing (about 2 teaspoons of Blue Dragon sweet chilli dipping sauce, a couple of dessert spoons of sherry vinegar, about 4 dessert spoons of olive oil and some seasoning), poured it over and got stuck in. Lovely.

Insalata Tricolore - Zizzi, 73-5 Strand, WC2R 0DE

Well, we've just returned from a bloggers' lunch to welcome a new colleague at Zizzi's on the Strand. There were seven of us in all, and we had 4 pizzas, a calzone, a pasta dish and a salad between us. Mine was the salad - an insalata tricolore. It looked lovely - green and healthy, with cherry tomatoes, slices of avocado and tiny balls of mozzarella nestled in the spinach leaves and a pesto dressing. But I was slightly disappointed with the amount of mozzarella - I think I had six miniture balls - not really a main-course size. The avocado was all perfectly ripe - which was very welcome - but it was slightly flavourless; there were plenty of halved, sweet-tasting cherry tomatoes, but there wasn't anything like enough pesto dressing. All-in-all it was fine and looked pretty, but it wasn't anything to write home about. And by the end of the meal everyone else was stuffed, but I was still feeling a little peckish - that'll teach me not to choose a salad next time...

Oh, also, they got my order wrong and brought me a crayfish and snowpea salad instead of the tricolore, so I had to wait several minutes for my meal while my fellow diners were tucking in. This was unfortunate - we'd all had to wait an inexplicably long time for any drinks or food to arrive. I wasn't too bothered about it, as these things happen, but I thought they could have made a better salad as I'd had to wait so long for it.

Jumbo king prawn stirfry

Tonight we had a prawn stirfry, using Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Jumbo King Prawns (half price at £2.99). They were so nice we had to make a concerted effort to stop nibbling on them before I put them in the pan to heat through - it was one of those 'just one more each' moments, but we finally managed to resist after about six between the two of us.

Sharing the wealth between the supermarkets, I added one block of Sharwood's fine egg noodles (bought through Ocado, from Waitrose) to a pan of simmering water, put a Tesco mushroom stirfry pack into my wok with half a pack of Budgens' baby spinach and once it was cooked, a sachet of Blue Dragon chow mein sauce to warm through. (It's not like I'm proud of shopping at supermarkets so often - I wish other shops near us were open after normal working hours but sadly they're not, and if I want to do any independent/market shopping it has to be done at weekends, and that's not always possible.) So, anyway, back to the food... I drained the noodles, tossed it all together in a pan, tipped it into a couple of bowls and we ate it in front of the telly. Healthy, warming (see the steam rising from the bowl), filling, and taking just ten minutes from fridge to mouth, it's ideal fast food.