Green Beans & Tomatoes
This week’s book was: River Cafe Cook Book Easy by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. This is the first of three weeks of River Cafe cookbooks. The River Cafe inspired many chefs that went through their apprenticeships there, such as Jamie Oliver, Theo Randall and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Rose and Ruth’s obsession with authentic ingredients beautifully prepared inspired a revolution in cuisine in the UK. The River Cafe Book Easy is possibly one of their purest expressions in a cookbook as all the recipes are straightforward and really let the ingredients shine through. Our daughter had mentioned that she fancied duck this week, so we had to try Duck with Tomatoes, a cracking little dish that roasts the duck with tomatoes, olives, and red wine. We served it with beautifully spiced Roast Squash. This was spiced with chilli and fennel seeds.
For dessert, we attempted the Easy Small Nemesis. The chocolate nemesis was a recipe from the first River Cafe (Blue) cookbook that became infamous for failed attempts! Now, this was Easy Small Nemesis – how hard could it be? It turns out, pretty hard! The outcome was more of a warm floppy mouse rather than a firm cake-like texture. It tasted good but was a bit of a disaster from a looks perspective. We faired better in the week with Sea Bass with Potatoes, a lovely combination of Sea Bass, olives, capers, thyme, and potatoes. We served it with Green Beans & Tomatoes, a great side of slightly caramelised tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and al dente green beans – definitely one to do again. The two combined were excellent. We rounded the week off with the fun to cook Spaghetti in a bag. This consists of spaghetti, garlic and chilli prawns, tomato sauce, basil and wine cooked in a foil bag. It was a great little dish and will be one we do again though I think it could feasibly be done in a pan pretty successfully without making the foil parcels.