These make a delicate and elegant starter and are easy to make too.
Category: Starter
Filo tarts with goat’s cheese
Nice little nibbles to have with drinks or as a very light starter, and very quick to make. You can use either filo or feuilles de brick for this. A large tray of them looks delightful, like a mass of flowers.
The Prize-winning Chinese Yorkshire Pudding
This recipe comes from the “Great Yorkshire Pudding Contest” held in Leeds, as recounted by Jane Grigson in “English Food”. Five native chefs were humiliated by Mr Tin Sung Chan from the Chopsticks Restaurant, who took the top prize with this unorthodox recipe. His pudding, wrote the Guardian’s reporter, “rose to the height of a coronation crown and its taste, according to one of the judges, was superb.”
If you are in the habit of making Yorkshire pudding, you will find the proportions a bit bizarre. But if your puddings always sag, this recipe is definitely worth a try!
Peperonata
A versatile dish that’s a good way of using up a glut of tomatoes.
Pinchitos Morunos
A Spanish tapas recipe which can also be scaled up to a main course.
Courgettes stuffed with Ebly “risotto”
This recipe uses little round courgettes. If you can’t get them, the risotto will do equally well in peppers or onions — or indeed on its own, or as an accompaniment to something else.
Serves 4, or 8 as a starter.
Yorkshire Pudding
As recorded in a Yorkshire kitchen. Photos taken in haste, they are too good to leave hanging around!
Warm broad bean and potato salad with cheese and prosciutto
This is loosely based on a recipe in an old Sainsbury’s magazine. It’s an unusual idea — a kind of cross between salad and gratin, pretty and refreshing — a good light summer lunch or starter. You may vary the ingredients depending on what you have.
Tomates à la crème
From Edouard de Pomiane via Elizabeth David, who says it ‘makes tomatoes taste startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes’.
We had it as a starter but we reckoned it would be fab with some nice fillet steak – or with roast/grilled lamb.
Salade aux lentilles du Puy
This is an absolutely classic French bistro dish. I still remember eating it in a little café in Violès after an arduous morning’s grape-picking.