MORE PLEASE - PICNICS

Cheese and Spring Onion Pies, A Meat Feast Sub and Puttanesca Pasta Salad

It’s about time we took The Dinner Party on a walk! Welcome to the Picnic episode; which includes 3 beautiful, portable recipes and a lush little selection of the cute picnic accessories too.

I think we all have trauma from the picnics of our childhood and the frankly insane decisions our parents would make about what to bring on them. Mine is sandwiches that would simultaneously be soggy AND stale, tubs of reeking coleslaw (no shade on coleslaw but it doesn’t travel well) and tuppa-wares of cut-up fruit that would taste both of garlic from the chopping board and bolognese from the plastic. Supermarket dips did change the game a bit, but now they are so familiar to our palates that a tub of hummus doesn’t even taste like anything anymore. It’s just mush. I do want to shout out recent efforts from M&S however, whose dip game remains the strongest in the market.

All this to say, there’s no excuse for picnic food to be bad. It does however need to be strategically planned depending on where your picnic is and how far you have to travel to get there. Today we are discussing a certain type of picnic - the local picnic, ie. less than half an hour travel of any kind to get to your spot. One where you are simply beavering over to the local park / a nearby field / enchanted wood / your own garden. Longer distances require cool boxes, risk soggy sandwiches and frankly, merit going to M&S and buying every single one of their layered dips and 10 packets of crisps.

A perfect picnic menu in my mind relies on 3 things - Pies, Pasta and a Pretty Big Sandwich. Carbs, really, are your friend on a picnic, as they do have the best staying power of all foods. Plus they are the best vehicles for other, more delicate ingredients that you still want to eat whilst out and about.

Our pie today is a riff on Spanakopita but made in a muffin tin and with no spinach. Softly cooked spring onions are mixed with a tonne of herbs, feta and pecorino and stuffed in buttery, crisp filo for a very delicious but also light single serve pie.

For the Pasta we are of course making a salad - bringing a hot pasta to a picnic would be bonkers. While the tomatoes are still so good then a heavenly preparation for them is the Ligurian “Marinata”. They are peeled, chopped and marinated with olives, capers, anchovies, vinegar and a decent glug of olive oil. Then I like to mix this with cooked, cooled and rinsed pasta for a non-claggy, extra briney and divine pasta salad that is basically a raw Puttanesca.

And finally a BLOODY BIG SANDWICH. This is a Meat Feast that Subway could literally never ever ever dream of making. Crumbled Italian sausage cooked down with peppers, onion and garlic, tonnes of olives, all the cured meats your heart desires, peppadews and a bit of cheese - it is utter heaven.

Before we start on the food though, here is a lush little selection of cute picnic bits that I love and some of which I actually own.