Lunch at Chez Dominique, Bath

By: Mrs Robot

Yesterday was my birthday (45 – might not be a 'big one' but it certainly feels big enough) so Mr Robot took me to Chez Dominique in Bath for lunch. Usually we go out in the evening for birthdays, but my workplace gives us our birthdays off so I'd booked a salon appointment in town that morning and we decided to make it a lunch date instead. Chez Dominique's a la carte menu is available all day, and we'd fancied going there for ages. It's just over Pultney Bridge, near our dentist, so we've both looked longingly at the menu on the way back from being savaged by the hygienist.

Mr Robot had booked the afternoon at work and said it felt very much like being on holiday, as we were eating nice food on a lovely day. It also felt a little like bunking off as he'd been in work that morning and then left it all behind.

But you're not here for tales of bunking off, you're here for food! I had smoked eel salad for a starter, and Mr Robot had a ham hock salad. Mine included chicory and apple, and both had a very nice dill dressing on that made us think yes, we really do need to grow some dill in the garden this year. The sweet crunch of the apple and bitter crunch of the chicory contrasted nicely with the soft, smoky eel and crispy smoky bacon.

For our main course we decided to share the chateaubriand from the Specials board. During our meal we heard the manager telling other customers the meat comes from Walter Rose – well, that explains why it was so good. We had it rare, because neither of us sees any point in having steak any other way. It came with fried mushrooms, salad leaves and frites. I'm fussy about mushrooms, only liking them when they're very fresh and very well fried, and these were perfect. (Honestly, stewed mushrooms are the worst.)

Mr Robot had the pear and almond tart for pudding, while I went for the cheese. This was good cheese. For one thing, there was an acceptable cheese-to-biscuit ratio. Too many places load up on (cheaper) fancy biscuits and stinge on the cheese, in my opinion. Chez Dominique makes sure that when you order the cheese, cheese is the star. And every cheese has a decent amount of punch.

I can't tell you how much it all cost as I didn't pay, but Mr Robot seemed to think the price was jolly reasonable, and we both agreed it's somewhere we'd go back to.

Our Thadingyut meal

By: Mrs Robot

We do a meal for Thadingyut each year. We started after visiting my grandfather McDonald's home town in Burma/Myanmar at Thadingyut some years back. We don't celebrate it in any traditional or religious way, we just cook Burmese food for it. (I guess in that way it's like our Christmas, which we also mark but not in any religious fashion.) 

In previous years we've made noodle dishes, but this year I made amethar hnat, a classic Burmese beef curry. I got the recipe from Easy Burmese Recipes, and tested it out in advance. We actually had Emily and Amy's version at their Rangoon Sisters supper club, and theirs was richer. As the writer of Easy Burmese Recipes states her version uses less oil and more onions, when I made our Thadingyut meal I left out an onion and added extra oil, and preferred the flavour, but it's good either way.

Alongside the curry I served boiled rice, two salads (tomato with crispy shallots and bean with toasted peanuts, though they were French beans not long bean, all dressed with fish sauce and lime), and chicken broth flavoured with garlic, coriander and a dab of yellow bean. 

The night I served it I was feeling pretty tired and not really in the mood to do the salads. The temptation to slap the curry on top of some rice and call it a day was strong! But I'm glad I didn't. If you're going to mark an occasion, it's best to make it special. Who knows what special dish I'll whip up next year?

Cat Bento!

 By: Mrs Robot

Working on games magazines for a living, I am surrounded by people who really love all things Japanese. And several of my favourite foodies are likewise obsessed with the place. Me? I'd love to go, though other places always seem to bump it from my travel list, and when it comes to cooking the food looks so elaborate. As much as I admire the precision and artistry involved, I'm too chaotic a person to make it.

Only now I have to control my chaos, because Mr Robot bought me a bento box designed like an adorable little cat, so it's bento lunches for me from now on.

He got me a Hello Kitty bento cutlery set and some sweet little animal-headed sauce bottles too. And, most helpfully of all, a recipe book. That was very reassuring, because the lunches in it didn't look half as elaborate as the ones I see online, which would probably take me half an hour or more to make – and I only have about ten minutes at most to cobble together a lunch. It's nice to know no-one actually expects me to recreate the hanging gardens of Babylon or the works of Studio Ghibli using rice and cherry tomatoes.

Monday's lunch was basmati rice plus beef, green beans and carrots in oyster sauce (leftovers from Sunday night), plus cherry tomatoes and cucumber as a snack, and today it's what I hope is a more correct rice* with duck in a sweet and slightly spicy soy-heavy sauce, plus cherry tomatoes, and melon and nectarine as a snack. The duck was left over from last night. Already a pattern is developing...

As I mentioned, I've never really cooked anything Japanese, and I suspect Cat Bento will end up full of confusion cuisine. I got some deep-fried tofu from the Chinese supermarket as until now I've been sticking to pure fruit and veg at lunchtimes, and while I'm prepared to introduce rice and possibly egg, I'm not sure I want meat in my lunch too often. The cookbook has a recipe for Japanese omelette, which I should give a go. I do appreciate the portion control dictated by the size of the compartments.

Anyway, watch this space for the continuing adventures of Cat Bento...

*The Chinese supermarket in Bath stocks Chinese and Korean foods, and this rice had Korean script on the bag but also a little English script calling it 'sushi rice'. As far as I know there's no Japanese shop in town. I also tried the Thai shop, but they just had jasmine rice or readycooked sushi rice. 

Still eating salads

By: Mrs Rabbit Robot

I said I was going to make a conscious effort to eat more salads, and so far I've managed it. I think the major revelation for me on my veggie-munching mission so far is that I don't have to eat lettuce. Lettuce was pretty much the base ingredient for every salad I had growing up, and I'm not massively fond of it, so allowing myself to ditch the stuff has made Project Salad a lot more interesting (and easier to stick to). The other revelations I've had are that herbs can be an ingredient, not just things you sprinkle on top in tiny amounts or add to dressing, and that if you make a salad of little chopped bits it's best not to throw too many ingredients in, otherwise it all ends up a bit jumbled, and all your salads end up tasting the same in the long term. These are probaby things hardcore veggie lovers knew already, but they've been amazing to me!

My lunchtime salads are pretty much just chopped stuff in a box – chunks I can easily eat with a fork at my desk. There are usually around five things in the box, and my current favourites include: tomato, melon, mango, cucumber, peach, pepper, sweetcorn, and grated carrot with kohlrabi. I did try grated carrot, green pawpaw and Thai basil, but the basil overwhelmed the other flavours, so I need to use less of that if I use it in future.

Evening salads, which I've been having with my main meal of the day, are where I've got more room to be more complex. For one thing, I have more time to prepare them, and for another I've avoided things like dressing, oil or mayonnaise in my lunches, whereas I am allowing myself those things in the evening. In the case of oil and mayonnaise, it's because of their calorie count, whereas in the case of dressings, I adore east Asian dressings with fish sauce in, but the salt in the fish sauce makes the veggies all watery by lunchtime.

On Sunday I made som tam, a Thai salad based on green pawpaw. Monday's meal is in the photo: koftes from our butcher, Walter Rose, plus a tomato, cucumber and onion salad with a bit of coriander on. (Raw onions never go in the lunch salad, I like my workmates too much to inflict that on them.) The other thing on the plate is just roasted sweet potato, onion and chickpea with a little cumin on, topped with tahini and garlic sauce; I don't class it as a salad as it's been cooked and is served hot, though some people might think of it as one.

I have noticed I no longer get the mid-afternoon sleepy feeling, but I also no longer get the sense of satisfaction I used to get from my lunch. It's hard to put into words; I just get an immediate feeling of wellbeing from carbs, a sense of comfort and pleasure. My biggest wellbeing-feeling foodstuff is tea anyhow, so I'm making sure I keep drinking plenty of that. There really is nothing to beat a good cuppa. It's only been a week or so since I started making an effort to eat more veggies, so there's been no real change on the weight front. It's great to be using more of the vegbox, though, and being more creative with previously neglected ingredients.

Retro recipe: Russian salad

By: Mrs Robot

Growing up, I didn't know a single kid who liked salad, because if you were British, working class and growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, salad meant lettuce, cucumber and tomato, maybe radishes if you were lucky, all sitting sliced and separate on a plate. As for dressing, salad cream was your lot. This is, of course, a generalisation. Mr Robot's mum was working class but adventurous. He still remembers the cold baked beans she once served up as part of a salad. However, my point remains: nobody liked salad. They were, like the boiled veg served up in winter, the things that padded out your actual food, which was potatoes and meat.

Now I am in my forties, and somewhat fat, and get a weekly organic vegbox, all of which is making me realise one thing: I need to eat more salad. I've learned to enjoy it more over the years anyhow, but over the next few months I'm going to make a conscious effort to be more adventurous with my salads and get more pleasure out of that weekly vegbox. I've decided to kick off with a classic, Russian Salad.


I first encountered Russian salad as ensaladilla Rusa in Spain, served as a tapa. It seemed pretty much to be potato salad with some tuna in. After a bit of googling, I've learned that Russian salad started out as salat Olivier, a very posh salad made in 19th-century Russia by one Monsieur Olivier, which has undergone all sorts of changes over the years, becoming a staple celebration dish in Russia. Nowadays it's pretty much a 'shepherd's pie recipe', by which I mean everyone has their own version and they're all definitely different while being recognisably the same thing.

I based my salad on the recipe in 1080 Recipes, a classic Spanish cookbook. (Phaedon publishes a translated version.) That recipe contains simply peas, carrots and potatoes in mayonnaise. I included a few pods of broad beans in mine, because we've been getting loads in the vegbox lately, and some tuna, because I've only ever had ensaladilla Rusa with tuna in and it would feel wrong without it. I left the veg fairly chunky, and didn't over-flake the tuna, and the result was absolutely delicious. 1080 Recipes suggests putting prawns in, which would also be delicious. This looks like a perfect salad to make in winter too. Is there anything not to like about it? No wonder it's become a classic, in its many forms.

Recipe: Simple salmon salad

By: Mrs Robot

It's probably a little late in the year to blog this recipe now, but I thought I'd put it up anyway. It's a dish I came up with on my own, but I've seen similar things all over the place. I'm pretty sure Mi Mi Aye has one in Noodle!, for example.

You will need
The salmon (recipe will do one or two servings)
A salmon fillet per person
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon each chopped garlic and ginger.
(I cheat and use the Nishaan ready-pulped ginger as it's brilliant stuff, but there's no substitute for fresh garlic, the ready-chopped stuff in jars has lost its punch.)

The salad
Noodles – egg or soba are best; I used soba in the version in the photos.
Carrot
Spring onion
Light soy sauce
Sesame oil

Mix together the dark soy sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger in the bottom of a flat dish, then lay your salmon fillets fleshy-side-down on top to marinate. The longer you leave this, the more the marinade penetrates; half an hour is a good time to leave it.

I haven't given quantities for the salad because how much I make depends on how greedy I'm feeling and how much of each ingredient I have in the house. You want the salad to be half noodles, and a quarter each spring onion and carrot.

Cook your noodles. As soon as they're done, rinse them with cold water and pop in a bowl. Cut the carrot and spring onion into matchsticks about two inches long. Toss it all in with the noodles, dress with a slug each of light soy sauce and sesame oil, and toss it again. The dressing helps to stop your noodles sticking together.

To cook your salmon, put it fleshy-side down in a hot pan and cook it halfway through, then turn it over and finish cooking it on the skin side.

Bung salad on plate – you can sprinkle on some sesame seeds if you have any in the house, just to look pretty – then put the salmon on top.