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Best tomato salad

This tomato salad recipe is the perfect, sunny, flavourful accompaniment to long summer’s evenings in the garden, basking by the barbecue and drinking silly amounts of Pimms. There’s no cooking involved; just some slicing which is easily done with a glass by your side and the sun pouring in through the kitchen window.

If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself with a glut of tomatoes late in the summer. This salad is remarkable in that you can make it again and again, and it doesn’t become boring. It brings out the gorgeous flavour of the sun all those tomatoes have soaked up; the basil, oregano and sweet balsamic vinegar all work together to make your tomatoes platonically tomato-ish.

Use whatever tomatoes come to hand. This salad is really pretty with a couple of yellow tomatoes scattered among the reds, or with large and small-fruiting varieties mixed together. Here, I’ve used small vine tomatoes and some baby plum tomatoes. To serve four as a side dish (or two as a lunch on its own with some crusty bread) you’ll need:

20 small tomatoes (see note above)
1 shallot
1 handful basil leaves
½ handful oregano leaves
1 small clove garlic
1 ½ teaspoons balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons good olive oil
Salt and pepper

Slice the tomatoes and lay them out on a large serving plate. Slice the shallot into thin rings, chop the garlic as finely as you’re physically capable of, and scatter over. Roll the basil leaves into little tubes and slice them thinly to cut it into thin strips (chiffonade), and throw them over the salad with the whole oregano leaves.

Immediately before serving, drizzle the olive oil and balsamic vinegar over, and season with salt and plenty of pepper. Crusty bread will come in handy to mop up the juices.

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Provençale roast lamb with flageolet beans

Spring is finally here in Cambridgeshire. In celebration of the fact that some of my bulbs are finally flowering, I thought I’d eat a dear little fluffy baa-lamb.

This recipe is wonderful for this time of year, when the sun is bright and there’s a jug of tulips on the windowsill. The herbs and sweet tomatoes are a real foretaste of summer. Enjoy this with a cold glass of white wine, or a pint of real ale.

To serve two, you’ll need:

½ a shoulder of lamb
100g tin flageolet beans, drained
10 small tomatoes
6 cloves garlic
1 glass white wine
1 tablespoon tomato puree
1 teaspoon Marigold vegetable bouillon
A few stems of rosemary
A few stems of thyme
4 teaspoons quince jelly (use redcurrant if you can’t get hold of quince)
1 handful parsley
1 handful oregano

Begin by making little slits in the skin of the lamb – six to a half-shoulder will be plenty. Stuff each resulting pocket with a quarter of a clove of garlic and a sprig of rosemary. (You may want to leave the knife in the slit and twist it to fit the garlic and rosemary into the hole.) Slice the rest of the garlic finely. Sprinkle the skin of the lamb with salt.

Quarter the tomatoes, and mix them with the the remaining rosemary and garlic and the rest of the ingredients in a heavy baking tray. Place the lamb on top, skin side up, and roast for an hour and twenty minutes at 180°C.

While the lamb is roasting, finely chop the parsley and oregano, and combine it half of it with two teaspoons of the quince jelly and a large pinch of salt. Remove the lamb from the oven and smear the herb paste all over the skin. Stir the other two teaspoons of quince jelly and the rest of the herbs into the beans around the lamb, and return to the oven for ten minutes, until glossy and beautiful.

The beans will have soaked up the juices from the tomatoes and meat, becoming sticky, rich and packed with flavour. You should be left with some meat for tomorrow’s sandwiches – the beans are also delicious cold.
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Clinical canapes

Being related to a doctor is a wonderful thing, but those of you who aren’t can buy your own drugs paraphernalia at the chemist’s. Nothing is guaranteed to concern your guests more than arriving to find you injecting home-flavoured vodka into a couple of giant punnets of cherry tomatoes.

These little guys are, by design, very sharp. Be sure not to have any vodka yourself before you start this; you’ll need all your faculties clear and lucid in order to avoid spicy vodka-finger.

I made a Bloody-ish Mary base by mixing nearly half a small glass of unflavoured vodka with half a glass of lemon vodka, the juice of two limes and two teaspoons of wasabi. You need lots of spicing; only a little of the mixture goes to flavour each tiny tomato.

Carefully insert the needle at the place in the tomato where the stalk was attached. Squeeze down on the plunger gently until you can feel the little tomato swell and become stiff. Serve in a great big bowl, warning guests that these are not precisely tomatoes.

Here is an equally tasty option for needle-phobics. Unfortunately, I put this canape together after a few too many tomatoes, so it’s not as pretty as the first batch was. The first seeded, skinned tomatoes were diced attractively. The layers were neat and not smeary. The baby basil leaves were not all oily. Still – it still tasted great, and they’re very easy to make. You’ll need:

1 loaf white multigrain bread, sliced
1 bulb garlic
1 pat butter
1 pot fresh pesto
2 tubs soft goat cheese
1 punnet tomatoes, skinned and deseeded
Basil

Simmer the chopped garlic in the butter for fifteen minutes until it is soft, and the butter is infused with the scent. Use a rolling pin to roll flat the slices of bread, and cut out fifty circles of the squashed bread with a cookie cutter. Brush each side with the garlic butter and bake in a hot oven for around 15-20 minutes until the little rounds are crisp and brown. Once they have cooled, you can keep the garlicky bases in an airtight box for a few days, and they won’t lose their crispness.

Score the skin of the tomatoes in a little cross at the base, and pour boiling water over them straight from the kettle. This should loosen the skins so that you can peel them off easily. Chop them into four and throw the seeds away. Dice the tomato flesh.

Spread each crisp round with a layer of fresh pesto, a layer of goat cheese and a sprinkling of diced tomatoes. Garnish with basil and eat quickly to keep the crunch.