A Perfect Lunch

June 29th, 2010

My lovely Colin made me the most perfect lunch recently and I enjoyed it so much that I’ve been making it on a regular basis. It’s a lovely salad made up with salad leaves we’ve grown ourselves and croutons made from our own sourdough bread. You can vary the ingredients to suit what you have – it’s very yummy.

To serve two, you will need:

Salad Leaves (enough for 2 people)
8 Tomatoes
1 chunk of Cucumber
Half a Red Pepper
Half a Red Onion
4 Free Range Eggs
Olive Oil
Juice of half a Lemon
Salt & Pepper
Parsley
Sourdough Bread cut into small crouton sized chunks
2 Cloves of Garlic

Special Ingredient – Flaky Smoked Salmon from the Salar Smokehouse in South Uist
If you can get your hands on some of this then your lunch will be heavenly! It’s the best flaky smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted! We’re lucky as Olwen came to stay last week from North Uist and she brought some with her – so we had to make the salad for her for lunch! If you can’t get hold of any [you can order online - http://www.salar.co.uk/] then substitute with tinned tuna or another smoked salmon product, or just go without as the salad is nice without fish too.

I guess you could use any bread – if it’s bit old and hard all the better – we just use sourdough as I bake a loaf every other day. So pour some olive oil into a frying pan and put on over a low heat. Add the bread chunks and gently fry these, tossing them occasionally to get an even browning on all sides. I don’t time this and generally just get on with making the rest of the salad and keep an eye on the croutons as I go and they’re generally ready by the time everything else is prepared.

Next put the 4 eggs into a pan of warm water and bring this to the boil, then boil for however long it takes to get a soft boiled egg – with the eggs we get it takes about 5 minutes, but this time might vary depending on the size of your own eggs, so use your own judgement. I always set a timer so that I don’t have to think about looking at my watch and know when they’re ready.

In the meantime keep tossing your croutons about and get on with preparing the rest of the salad. Wash the salad leaves and spin them in the salad spinner to get all the water off them. Lay these onto two plates. If you’re going to have salmon with your salad, as I think you should, then now is the time to add it – flake it into small pieces all over the salad leaves. Next chop up the onions, tomatoes, pepper and cucumber and arrange these on top.

Next make a dressing by mixing some olive oil with the lemon juice and season with the salk and pepper – I won’t give quantities as everyone likes something different – I love lots of lemon in my salad dressing and lots of pepper – just mix it all up gradually and taste it regularly until you like it. Drizzle this over the salad generously.

Take the croutons off the heat and then squash and peel the garlic and put it into a garlic press and squeeze this out over the croutons. Mix it in well and stir so as to avoid the garlic burning as when it burns it develops a bitter taste. Pour the croutons over the salad and then deal with the eggs.

Plunge them into cold water – this prevents a grey colouring forming around the yolk – and peel off the shells. Chop into quarters and place 8 pieces on to each salad. Then chop the parsley and sprinkle on top and viola you have a perfect lunch!