Watercress again

Thanks to goodshoeday for her lovely comment on my previous watercress post - she talks of a chicken, mayo and watercress sandwich which sounds divine. Returning home, I browsed some cookbooks for watercress ideas, and mea culpa . I spoke slightly disparagingly about my mother's cress sandwiches - no less an authority than Jane Grigson says that the sandwich is the best way to experience the full peppery blast of these wonderful greens. I also looked in Sophie Grigson's Country Cookbook (which I picked up in a discount bookstore - I can't imagine why as it's a wonderful book) and she too speaks well of the sandwich route. She points out that cooking the cress gets rid of the essential hotness, and suggest several salad ideas. I'm thinking watercress, avocado, chirizo.

Saturday salad

A lovely sunny Saturday calls for a salad and one of my great stand-bys is a potato and coriander salad, based on a Sophie Grigson recipe from Sophie's Table. I must have read the recipe nearly 20 years ago, and I've been making it ever since. It's a lovely mix of soft buttery potatoes, lemon and coriander tang and mellow, grassy olive oil.

Boil your salad potatoes with a few stalks of coriander - when tender, drain, fish out the coriander and bin, cut the potatoes into chunks. Add some sliced spring or red onion, the juice of a lemon, a good slug of olive oil, and a handful of chopped coriander and mint. Stir well so that all the potato chunks are coated with the dressing. That's it. I normally leave it for a couple of hours so that the warm potato can drink in the lemony liquid. It keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days.

Also on the Tottenham salad table tonight: some smokey aubergine combined with pekmez, yoghurt and chopped mint, hard boiled egg with wild garlic mayonnaise, some Greek gigantic beans in dressing, serrano ham. And I must reread Sophie's Friends for more old favourites.