This week's French Fridays with Dorie recipe is a surprising salad - Lentil, Lemon and Tuna Salad. It is a mixture of green lentils, tuna, chopped preserved lemon and chopped scallions, dressed with an unlikely combination of olive tapenade, mustard, red wine vinegar and olive oil. But weirdly, it works - I really enjoyed it.I was lucky in that I had preserved lemons that I had made from lemons out of my friends', Veronica and Christian, garden. This is the first time I used them, so that made me happy. Preserved lemons are absurdly expensive to buy, given how simple they are to make.I ate this salad warm - it was already 3 in the afternoon, and I had not yet had lunch, so I wasn't going to wait a couple of hours for it to chill (after patiently waiting while the lentils cooked).To see what everyone else thought of this dish, visit the LYL section of the FFwD website.
Today is the last day of Shavuot, the Jewish holiday which celebrates God giving the Torah to the Jews. I am not Jewish, but I learned about this holiday from my Jewish physiotherapist, who is taking tomorrow off work to celebrate Shavuot.Naturally, the first question I asked her is whether there was food involved with Shavuot - and as it happens, there is. It is traditional for Jewish people to eat dairy foods on Shavuot, as when they first received the Torah, they could not cook meat in their non-kosher cooking pots, so they turned to dairy instead. This is good news, as it means cheese blintzes and cheesecake are made for the occasion.I adore cheesecake, so in honour of Shavuot, I made a lime and gingernut cheesecake: I used this recipe, but baked it in a 22cm pan even though the quantities given were for a half recipe. I added grated lime zest and lime juice instead of vanilla, and I added a base of crushed gingernut biscuits and butter (as I like my cheesecake to have a base). Some of the gingernut crumbs broke free from the base and floated to the top of the cheesecake - these are the speckles you can see in the cheesecake. However, this was not a bad thing - I didn't mind the cheesecake being flecked with biscuit crumbs.This cheesecake is of the light and fluffy variety, so if this sounds like your kind of cheesecake, do try this recipe. Me, I like cheesecake in all shapes and sizes, and I certainly enjoyed this one.
