The May edition of Good Food India magazine almost invited me towards itself on the magazine rack! The cover page was adorned with colourful ice cream cones and who wouldn’t want some chill in this sweltering heat! This month’s issue had a lot of recipes that interested me and so I made a list of all that I can try given my limited reach to special ingredients (I live in a small town called Vadodara, where most of the gourmet ingredients are not available). I was surprised that my list has 27 items! And in the last two days I have already crossed out three! 20 more days to finish the remaining! 🙂
Here is my take on their Beetroot, pea and feta salad. I of course had to substitute certain ingredients to suit local availability. For ex: feta cheese with paneer or cottage cheese; arugula, lollo rosso lettuce and iceberg which are again not available here, with spinach leaves. I also added French beans to the salad.
It had an interesting flavour, the sourness of mustard, the sweetness of beetroot and peas all went together very well!
Beetroot, peas and cheese salad
Preparation time: 20 mins | Cooking time: 2 mins| Serves 2
Ingredients
2 beetroots, peeled and cut into bite sized cubes
250gms green peas
50gms French beans
100gms cottage cheese, cubed
A handful of spinach leaves, stalk removed
1 tbsp English mustard
1 tbsp white vinegar
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp oregano
A pinch of salt
Method
- Shallow fry the beetroot cubes in olive oil (The recipe said beetroot, quartered and cooked. I don’t know what cooked meant though. Whether I should boil it, steam it or fry it. I choose frying)Wash the spinach leaves and keep in cold water
- Cook peas in boiling water for a few minutes, drain and keep in cold water
- Steam the French beans for 2 minutes and keep in cold water
- Shell half the peas (I followed this from the recipe, but the skin of peas wasn’t too tasty to eat.. so next time I might just shell all the peas)
- Arrange spinach leaves, peas, French beans, beetroot and feta on two plates
- For the dressing, mix mustard, vinegar, olive oil, oregano and salt. Pour over the salad. (I mixed all ingredients in the same pan used to fry the beetroot so I didn’t need to add any more oil)
- Pour the dressing over the salad and Enjoy the lovely combination! 🙂
ashima the pic looks inviting :)…
Thanks Sujata!
All credit goes to my dear husband! 🙂 I’m simply amazed at his patience of trying to get the best shot and not straight away dig into the food! 😛
Cheers!
Ashima
Sikki badal gaya hai! 🙂
Hey RG!
How are you? Bides kaisa hai? 🙂
Pehle kya Sikki khane pe toot padta tha kya? 🙂 Though kal woh kaafi pareshan hua… I had made mango chicken with pulao and the whole chicken got cold and he still wasn’t happy with any of the pictures even after some 20 clicks :p
I’m good and I swear I don’t know what Bides is although you probably mean England? And England is getting better – lots of sunshine last few days. But these 9:00pm sunsets are driving me crazy.
This behaviour might be vats’ doing, so be careful. (it could be yours as well for that matter :))
Btw, I’m going to try making this beetroot salad with real feta cheese. 🙂
yes bides is England 🙂 9pm sunsets are driving you crazy?? Imagine I lived at 11:00pm sunsets! I used to draw all the curtains before having dinner so that it at least is dark and feels like dinner time!
Try with real salad leaves also.. we don’t get any here so I used spinach.. and do tell me how it turns out 🙂
RG was googling ‘bides’ and wondering whether it was a secret name for england!I had to get him to think in his mother tongue again. lol.
And Ashima, the salad was very tasty, although we couldn’t get it to look like the one in your pictures. 🙁
Hey!!
Seriously! He had to google bides! I was earlier going to write videsh.. I think that would have been more clearer.. but I thought the dehati way would be more closer to bides! 🙂
How are you? 🙂 enjoying UK summers?
Hey. Your bides gave us something to laugh about for quite a long time – so its great that you wrote that. I am doing well – enjoying whatever little sunshine we get here in the otherwise long 14 hour day. But enjoying otherwise – school is fun 🙂
:)) My pleasure to humour you :). Can totally relate to the 14 hours long days! Was talking to Siva yesterday and he told that London is back to the rains and grey weather after a brief span of 2 week sunlight.. I miss London, I miss college.. it was so much fun! 🙂
For future, if you use foreign language words in English (especially those which are not commonly used), italicising them is a good practice. 🙂 If that is not an option, then double-quotes can be utilised as well.
bilkul ji.. aage se dhyan rakhenge 🙂
haha. its funny that after all the contemplation rg is blaming it on the lack of font. anyway, i am super impressed by your blog ashima. please keep it coming!
😀 I feel like saying ‘angoor khatte hain’ 😀
Thanks Priyanka.. my beetroot salad must be thinking that we completely ignored it in its own comments section! 😛
I have started following your blog and very nice easy to do recepies. Keep up the good work
Thanks a lot! Hope some of these dishes find their way to your kitchen! 🙂