Photo by Jonathan Buckley
One of my dreams is of having a kitchen garden, so that I can cook and eat vegetables as they should taste, and this maybe explains why I am particularly drawn to Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook. It provides enough romantic escapism — since I don't have the luxury of any outdoor space — and yet is of practical purpose, too, in the form of vibrant, inspiring recipes that, with the help of a good greengrocer, I can cook in my urban kitchen, too. This really is a rich compendium of a book. These winter months make bitter leaves flourish, and since the blood oranges are in season, this Chicory and Blood Orange Salad was the obvious, gratifying choice. The — optional — Treviso mentioned below is a particularly wonderful form of radicchio, with the zeppelin shape of chicory but more richly packed with — ruby — leaves.
Chicory and Blood Orange Salad From Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook by Sarah Raven, published by Bloomsbury (2007), available from www.sarahraven.com.
Photo (c) Jonathan Buckley.
