Fenel and blood orange salad

Slice your oranges (or ruby grapefruit, in this case) into bit-size chunks, and arrange on plate with thinly-sliced fennel.

Add rocket, black olives. Drizzle over with olive oil lightly. Tasty-zingy-yummy.

Gnocchi

Oh well, this is a staple but worth posting. They turned out rather well today, actually.

• 450g boiled, mashed old potatoes
• 175g plain flour
• 1 egg yolk
• 15g butter (melted)
• Salt and pepper

(serves about 3-4, depending on how hungry you are)
Combine ingredients into a nice dough, roll into a sausage and thence cut up into suitable bite-size gnocci. My grandmother used to roll them on a cheesegrater to make them bobbly on top, and I believe nowadays they are sold in packets with a sort of slash-marking on them. It doesn't actually make a difference - I usually just chuck them straight into the salted boiling water until they float nicely and then scoop them out. Done. Very easy and un-fiddly.

Serve with pasta sauce and a nice sprinkling of cheese. Or you can do the whole pesto-starter thing, or in fact use them for anything you want. One word of caution - I swear these things grow in size after being ingested so don't eat until you're full or you'll be in trouble later. Take it easy on the portions, although usually they're very tasty so it's a tough thing to do.

Mediterranean Oodge-whack Pasta

Well what is one to call it. This was one of those fortuitous discoveries - we had a lot of grilled peppers and aubergine salad left over so we chucked it in with some pasta and feta. My goodness, tasty or what. Anyway, to recreate the experience...
make your 'salad' (and yes, this is a great salad in itself...) - roast slices of aubergine in the oven , slice. Grill all sorts of peppers until their skins blacken, let them cool and taken their skins off, slice. Mix these two up with chopped good quality  fresh tomatoes, a squidge or two or fresh garlic (I do ours through the garlic press), dress, and hopefully let it stand for a little while. You can add some basil if you want, but it's got plenty of flavour already.
If you haven't already eaten your delicious salad, then boil up some pasta, and combine the two - if you've got some feta or halloumi all the better. A dob extra of olive oil never goes amis, eh? Enjoy!

Braised chicken with Lemon and Honey

Another lemon-chicken variation - different enough though to have a seperate entry. You cut up a chicken into pieces, and fry off and brown them on a high heat, extract. Fry up a sliced red onion on a lower heat, in the same pan. Add 12 cloves of garlic (peeled but not cut up) during the last minute of frying. Return the chicken to the pan with the garlic and red onion, add 1 lemon cut into cubes, 200 ml ish of chicken stock (we didn't have any fresh so we used powdered stock and wine instead), and 125 g honey, and simmer away for a good 15 minutes or until the chicken's done. Then extract the chicken once more and put under a grill to toast up again while you turn the heat up on the remaining sauce and bubble and reduce away. Serve the chicken with the reduced sauce poured over and some fresh organo leaves on top.

It's a right hum-dinger of a way to serve chicken, and we had it with 'Shepherd's' salad with feta and some slices of sourdough bread (homebaked today, mind you, homebaked...).... divine.

Greek 'Shepherd's' Salad with Feta

Don't know why this is particularly pastoral (except perhaps for the feta thing) but it's DAMN tasty, really recommend it with the Braised Chicken with Lemon and Honey (or indeed, just on its own - I could eat this till the sheep come home).

Combine: a tin of chickpeas, a good-size cucumber (non-seed variety), a decent chunk of feta, a bit of flat-leaf plasley (actually we fogot this, it was lovely without), 1 chopped green pepper, and a good handful of black olives. Dress them in a standard and pedestrian manner, and serve.

This is a truly excellent salad. It's so delicious and moreish you quite forget how healthy it is - which is, sickeningly healthy.

We had it with the Lemon and Honey chicken and it goes perfectly.

Lemon Steak with Tomato and Garlic Beans

Not much to this, but pretty damn tasty. Just the way we like it.

Beans: boil your beans briefly, and add them to a mix of lightly oil-fried crushed garlic plus tomtatoes chopped (or even tinned ones) and reduced down somewhat.

Steak – do as you will.

Serve with lemon.

Here we also had with two types of salad (though small), the main of which was baby spinach, peas, red onion finely diced, bit of feta, very light dressing. Yum.

Hope you all have as fine a repast of it as we did!

Barbecued Prawns with Melon, Spinach and mint Salad

Well we also served these with quite a few other things but actually the best ones were as follows:

Skewer your prawns, either shelled or not. We found shelled and marinated in a mix of garlic, sesame oil, ginger, soy and honey was pretty good. Barbie.

Cube your 'rock melon' (I think it's honeydew in the UK), mix with baby spinach leaves and a small amount of fresh mint. No dressing necessary at all.

We also did a dip of garlic, olive oil, and basil. The mild flavours seemed to set off the prawns admirably. Recommend.

Also served with a side of roasted whole sweet potatoes, simply sliced lengthways when very done and buttered and seasoned. Then sliced into …. well, slices. We're not technical here.

Deliriously engaging dish. Palate-ticklingly tasty. Enjoy.