MORE PLEASE - REFRESHING

Yoghurt and Cucumber Rice, Coconut Chicken Salad and Borlotti Beans with Tuna in Tomato Dressing

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I am so excited to start our July recipe journey, and even though it’s not that hot at the moment, I wanted to share with you my favourite 3 light summer dinners that refresh, revitalise and invigorate. They are new on my roster, fresh from development and ready to shine and are particularly good on sticky, humid days.

I was getting a bit bored of my repertoire for this kind of cooking. I mean look, there’s nothing wrong with leaning into tomato salads and endless stuff on toast, but I wanted to get out of what felt like a rut, and do something new. Refresh my vibe. My brief to myself was to use ingredients or elements I always use, but in a different way ; to change their function in my cooking.

So, where I normally might use tomatoes in the main body of the salad, I’ve swapped them to be the dressing, having grated them and mixed them with garlic and vinegar. And so was born my Borlotti Beans with Tuna with Tomato Dressing - the work of 15 minutes and utterly divine.

Next up, cucumber. I usually use this as a garnish in some way, but I wanted to hero it, make it the main focus of a recipe. Yoghurt and Cucumber Rice was born and it may be my favourite of the lot. Hot buttered sushi rice served with a marinated cucumber salad and a chilled cucumber and yoghurt sauce with a fudgy egg for good measure. It hits all the right notes and I have eaten it again and again since.

Finally it was coconut milk. Typically I exclusively use this in hot recipes and not very often in summer at all. It’s a comforting, cosy creamy thing that I associate with bowl food in the depths of winter. I challenged myself to do the opposite and use it in a salad, both as a poaching liquid for chicken and as the dressing. Coconut Chicken Salad emerged and I adore it, especially with crispy fried wonton skins running through it.

SO, LET’S REFRESH.

YOGHURT AND CUCUMBER RICE

I think this is one of the yummiest dishes I have made all year, and that is saying something. Cucumber is not an ingredient I try very hard with, I tend to think of it as a filler not a killer. But I have been wrong! It is just so divinely delicious and with a few of its best friends like yoghurt, garlic, dill, eggs and butter it really is the main character of this dish. Baby cucumbers are so sweet and tasty for the salad here, but if you can’t get hold of them just use the rest of your big cucumber instead.