Plenty more

A couple of weeks back, I published the 200th post on this blog!!  To mark this milestone, I treated myself to a very special dinner at Nopi, whilst stopping over in London on a recent trip.  Nopi is a restaurant which was created by Yotam Ottolenghi, amongst others.  I’ve long been a fan of Mr Ottolenghi’s recipes, so this was very exciting!!  Plenty more is the title of Yotam Ottolenghi’s fourth book.  There’ll also be ‘plenty more’ posts on this blog!

The restaurant was very stylish and there were beautiful touches everywhere!  The food was sublime, and the menu was very much geared towards people sharing a multitude of smaller dishes – perfect for me and my companion!  That way we got to taste far more than just two starters and two main courses.  I felt too self-conscious to take many photographs, and the pictures I did take did not come out well enough to share with you, because of the low light levels.  Phone cameras can only do so much, unfortunately. 😦

But fear not, I have been doing some more cooking with my friends, and together we tried out more of Mr Ottolenghi’s recipes!! 🙂

Here’s what we cooked:

• Grilled red mullet with lemon and celery salad
• Multi-vegetable paella
• Caramelised pears (without fennel seed crackers)

Since it was not long after Christmas and New Years, we all agreed that we wanted to keep it as simple and light as possible. The dishes we had chosen were perfect for that!

You’ll be able to download and print off the recipes from the above links (to find the pear recipe please keep scrolling down the page), so I won’t go into any details as regards preparation or ingredients.  Without further ado, here are the pictures for the grilled red mullet with lemon and celery salad:

The multi-vegetable paella was a glorious combination of rice and all kinds of vegetables:

Et voila, the finished dish!

The stock is next

Adding the remainder of the vegetables

Gently frying the peppers

The rice is added

The ingredients for the paella

With the caramelised pears we substituted strained yoghurt for the mascarpone, and left out the fennel seed crackers – it was still a very delicious dessert!!

It was such fun trying out these new dishes, and the results were so very good.  Have you tried out any of the recipes from my blog?  I’d love to hear how you got on!