Xmas cooks - Yotam Ottolenghi | ABC RN Breakfast | Food & Recipes | ABC Australia

London based chef Yotam Ottolenghi joins RN Breakfast to provide some tips for your Christmas cooking.

Recipe

Tomato and roasted lemon salad

Serves four

Ingredients:

2 medium lemons (270g),

halved lengthways, pips

removed and cut into 2mm

slices

3 tbsp olive oil

tsp caster sugar

8 sage leaves, finely

shredded

400g baby tomatoes, yellow

or red or a mixture of

both, halved

1/3 tsp ground allspice

10g parsley leaves

15g mint leaves

seeds of 1 small

pomegranate (120g)

1tbsp pomegranate

molasses

small red onion (50g),

finely sliced

salt and black pepper

Method:

I cooked a recipe similar to this in Sardinia when I shot my Mediterranean Island Feast series last year. I was performing in front of two cameras and our small crew when suddenly a bunch of chirpy Aussie ladies arrived to check in to my host, Roberto Flore's, tiny hotel in the remote Monteferru mountains.

As it happened, they had come straight from London, which they had visited especially in order to eat in the restaurants of their favourite chef; and that chef is your humble servant. The raucous exhilaration was hard tov contain but it did, I must admit, seriously boost my performance. There's nothing like a noisy home crowd!

Seek out the sweetest tomatoes you can for this salad in order to balance the bitterness of the lemon. You can bulk it up, as I did in Sardinia, by adding lots more leaves and fresh herbs and some cooked fregola. This will turn the salad into a whole meal. Otherwise, serve it with oven-roasted potatoes or pan-fried fish.

Preheat the oven to 170/150 Fan/Gas Mark 3.

Bring a small saucepan of water to the boil, add the lemon slices and blanch for 2 minutes. Place the lemon in a bowl and pour over 1 tablespoon of the oil, teaspoon of salt, the sugar and sage. Gently mix and then spread everything out on a parchment-lined baking tray. Place in the oven and cook for 20 minutes, until the lemons have dried out a little. Remove and set aside to cool. Place the rest of the ingredients in a bowl along with the remaining oil, teaspoon of salt and some freshly ground pepper. Add the lemon slices, stir gently and serve.