Last Night's Dinner 28

A potato based warm salad with black pudding, broad beans, fennel and romano peppers

Hello everyone and welcome as well to all my most recent subscribers - thank you for being here! Much of my content is free to all - an upgrade with get you Last Night’s Dinner posts in their entirety as well as a few other posts which crop up from time to time.

If you are new to pressure cooking and need help with choosing a pressure cooker, are worried about getting started, or just need a refresher, there are a lot of posts right at the beginning which will help you. These are and always will be open access. The chat facility attached to this Substack is also available to everyone, regardless of whether you are a free or paid subscriber and is a good place to ask any questions you may have. I try to check it daily! I shall hopefully be back before the end of the week with a free post. Now onto today’s recipe….

I am not sure as I food writer I should be admitting to this, but sometimes figuring out what to cook can be a bit of a struggle. Not for my own, solo meals as cooking for myself is a joy and I relish everything about it. It is eating exactly what I want without consideration for others, of course, but it’s also the pottering to my own timetable and best of all the sheer PEACE of the cooking, the sitting, the eating. I love it.

Planning family meals is another matter as just like the next person I am frequently in a rush in the evenings, have run out of headspace after a busy work day (and especially frazzled if it is a baking development day) and can’t quite work out how to balance the conflicting preferences/needs of the teens. It used to be so easy!

Adam, like most growing teenage boys, wants meat, preferably white carbs, some kind of crunch in texture and cooked cheese, the stretchier the better. And/or eggs. Lilly, on the other hand, who I am being extra mindful of right now because she is still doing A level exams, used to love all these things and I’d throw in a love of pastry too - but these days does not want meat, or white carbs, or some kind of crunch in texture and definitely doesn’t want cooked cheese, the stretchiest is the worst as far as she is concerned. She would be happiest with an endless round of some kind of bean/pulse/vegetable combo, dal or soup (actually, so would I). But according to Adam we are having beans and pulses way too much. Almost every meal! Except it isn’t almost every meal. I went through all the main meals from the last 10 days and beans/lentils featured prominently only twice and just crept in, almost imperceptibly, to a couple of other things. So a perception thing then. Gah.

What often happens is that I end up cooking multiple dishes, with the knowledge that at least then I have leftovers - useful with a teen who is only at school for exams and a husband who hoovers everything up indiscriminately. But often it has to be a compromise.

Last night’s dinner was one such meal. Adam got his crisp potatoes, and a crunch from pepper, but didn’t particularly want the fennel and broad beans. Lilly was happy with all the salad elements and the fact the potatoes were skin on, but didn’t particularly want to eat black pudding (I wanted her to have the iron and she didn’t complain). They were both very happy with the shallot, mustard dressing. In fact, this is quite the sea change in our household. After years of having to keep any raw onion separate and mustard to a minimum - or shoulder the complaints - both teens have started to love both. So something positive after all. Phew.

For me (and Shariq), this meal was a perfect combination of flavours and textures. Every mouthful different, which I feel strongly about when it comes to salads. I assembled while the potatoes and black pudding were still hot, so it is a warm salad - I don’t particularly like the idea of cold black pudding. But you could eat it cold - or rather, room temperature - if you prefer. Just add the salad dressing while the ingredients are warm - it will work better. And none of these ingredients do well fridge cold.

If you don’t want to use black pudding - chorizo or bacon lardons will also work. If you want to make it vegetarian, I would go for halloumi - grills so well and the best thing protein wise. Vegan? Extra firm smoked tofu or seitan rather than the palm oil loaded vegan black puddings….

Oh - romano peppers, because the ones I have been getting recently are excellent - sweet and much nicer than the bell type.

Final thing on mustard. It has been affected by the general rise in food prices so on a whim last week I did a taste test between Maille mustard at £3 for 215g (not my favourite, that is Edmond Fallot but not easy to find) and Sainsbury’s own at 60p for 185g. And we all preferred the Sainsbury’s one. It had a slightly higher mustard seed content too.

New Potato and Black Pudding Salad with Romano Peppers, Fennel and Broad Beans

For the cooked elements:

500g baby new or salad potatoes

2 large sprigs mint

3 tbsp olive oil

400g black pudding

250g podded broad beans

For the raw ingredients:

4 handfuls of salad leaves

2 romano peppers, sliced into rounds and roughly chopped

1 small fennel bulb, halved lengthways and finely sliced

4 medium tomatoes, roughly chopped

2 tbsp capers, rinsed (optional)

Herbs to finish - I used parsley, but tarragon or dill would have been good too

For the dressing:

1 shallot, finely sliced

1 tbsp sherry vinegar

1 tsp mustard

1/2 tsp honey

4 tbsp olive oil