Smashed Potato Salad with Pesto Dressing

I eat a lot more salads in the summer, even when the weather is bleugh. 

Sometimes we have a salad like this smashed potato salad or a pasta salad for dinner (like we did last night), for lunch it might be a couscous salad and at other meals you will often find salad on the side. 

In fact I think we eat more salad vegetables than any other type at this time of year. Salads are so quick and easy and a lot less cooking too.

This smashed potato salad came about after I got a new grill. My George Foreman grill died and instead of splashing out on another one, I got a much cheaper and smaller grill and it was pretty useless. When I was making toasties I had to stand a can on top of it for some extra weight so the toasties would brown and they were still disappointing. Luckily my next grill was much more substantial and had more weight to it.

You get what you pay for

Do you ever do that? Go for a cheaper option when one of your kitchen gadgets dies and instantly regret it? 

I should have known better than to buy cheap. You would think I had learned that lesson over the years. I'd hate to add up the money I have wasted buying a bargain.

Seriously, when you buy kitchen gadgets you need to spend a bit of money if you want something that will do the job well. I have wasted money on cheap blenders, bread makers, grills and even handheld hoovers and I now know the truth that buying cheap is not a saving but a waste of money. I recently made the same mistake with the aforementioned hand held hoover. 

Will I ever learn?

My recommendations

1. Blender - Optimum 9400  (a powerful beast with a hand dial for extra precision and a small jug for things like pesto, hummus and nut butters)
2. Bread Maker - Sage Custom Loaf Pro (easy to use, lots of settings, a dispenser for adding nuts, seeds and fruit during proving and no big whole in the bottom of the bread. Oh and the loaves are easy to remove.)
3. Grill - Tefal Optigrill + (It has a good weight to it, different temperatures, is easy to use and the plates pop off to wash in the dishwasher.)
4. Handheld Hoover - Dyson  (choose any of them, they are powerful, hold a good charge, are easy to clean with no bags. Just don't throw yours away if it dies, apparently the repair them. Wish I'd known that!)

Back to the recipe

Well I totally got distracted from my recipe with my little rant there, didn't I? This didn't start out as a sales post, but some things really irritate me!

So back to the salad. After grilling vegetables in my new grill, I had the idea for smashed potatoes. I lightly boiled potatoes, then popped them into my grill and pressed down with the lid, effectively smooshing them. The outside was crisp with those pleasing grilled stripes, but I used no oil so lower fat and calorie than roast potatoes. Now lets face it, you can't beat roast potatoes, but these make a quicker and healthier substitute and turned my salad into a more substantial meal.

I also grilled some sliced carrot and courgette, teamed it with fresh salad and  dressed it with some pesto that was thinned down with a little olive oil. 

Delicious!

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Smashed Potato Salad with Pesto Dressing

Written by Jacqueline Meldrum

August 11, 2017

A grilled potato salad with grilled vegetables and fresh salad, dressed with dairy-free pesto dressing.

Ingredients

• 6 baby potatoes (not the teeny ones), boiled or steamed until cooked but firm
• 1 small courgettes, sliced
• ½ medium carrot, thinly sliced
• 100g salad leaves
• ¼ cucumber, sliced
• 6 tbsp dairy-free pesto (or your favourite pesto)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• a good grinding of black pepper

Instructions

1. Heat your grill. 2. Grill the carrot and courgette slices until soft and set aside. 3. Next grill the potatoes, pressing down on the grill to smoosh the potatoes.4. While the potatoes are grilling, fill two plates with salad leaves, then top with cucumber and the grilled vegetables.5. Mix the pesto with the olive oil and season with pepper.6. Add the grilled potatoes to the salad and drizzle with the dressing.7.Enjoy!

Details

Total time: 15 mins
Yield: Makes 2 main course salads

Meat Free Mondays August 2017

Happy Monday!

How are you? How has your week been?

I've had a super busy week, yes I know, what's new?  Not much to share though.

I usually start the post with a photo of food, but I thought I'd share a photo of my kitchen instead to show you just how small it is. See the sink there. The draining board takes you right to the kitchen door, that leads into my conservatory which we use as a dining room, overlooking the garden.

Yes, it's that small. Now imagine it a bit more packed with gadgets.  I don't that microwave any more. My bread maker is now in place of the microwave and beside that is my toaster, kettle and blender, with a waffle maker squashed behind them. On the middle unit I now have a few big jars of spices and lentils. It's pretty packed. 

Oh yes and my cooker top is covered with my cast iron pots, that I leave on top instead of lugging them in and out of the cupboard. Yes this is a false representation of how my kitchen actually looks, but it gives you an idea of how small it is.

Is your kitchen teeny like mine or huge? Go on, make me jealous!

Anyway less of my kitchen and onto the recipes. There weren't as many recipes this week. I guess people are on holiday and enjoying the good weather instead of cooking and blogging, so I'm going to share a few recipes from my archives too. I hope you enjoy them.

Roast Vegetable and Hummus Pizza (vegan and dairy-free)

I had you at pizza didn't I?

If you're anything like us you love pizza. Our standard choice is a Margherita pizza with added veggies, but today we decided to try something different and went for a blond pizza with roast vegetables and hummus.

The truth is we've had pizza twice this week. Cooper wanted to make pizza from scratch so he and I both worked on a dough and we ended up with too much pizza for one night.

The first night we had it our favourite way. Our homemade thin pizza base, topped with my whizz bang pizza (blender) sauce, then mozzarella (vegan for Graham) and lots of veg. Cooper had sweetcorn on his, he likes to keep it simple.

The second night I spread the pizza base with a thick layer of hummus, topped it with lots of freshly roasted vegetables, a sprinkle of oregano, paprika and black pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. It was actually really good!

Best Tomato and Basil Pasta Sauce

Best ever?

Yep! I would say so. I started making fresh tomato and basil sauce for pasta when I was a student. It was an easy sauce I could make to feed myself and my friends, even when my boyfriend (husband now) would invite bands to stay in our student flat and I would end up feeding a dozen hungry lads.

Over the years the sauce has been tweaked to what I like to think is the best version of it. Back in my student days I would never have added red wine to a sauce as it was too much of an extravagance and I had to watch my pennies, but it does make a big difference to the favour. Originally I would have used dried basil, but of course adding fresh basil gives such of pop of flavour to the sauce and I seem to remember adding tomato ketchup to the sauce if I didn't have any tomato puree but I'd never do that now.

Meat Free Mondays - 7 Spectacular Veggie Recipes

Happy Monday! How are you?

I've had a good week. I was at work Monday and Tuesday then I had the rest of the week off with Cooper. It was great to spend some proper time with him. We spent time in our favourite book shop, went out for lunch, visited a museum, played board games, made pizza from scratch and did some eye bombing. It was great fun and over way too quickly. I'm back at work today and feeling quite sad about that. Why do holidays whizz by so quickly?

I'm back into the daily routine now and that means less time to think about cooking and lots of rushed meals in the evenings so planning is a must and that brings me nicely to this week's Meat Free Mondays and another fabulous collection of recipes for you to try. 

I hope you'll join me with some veggie meals this week.