Easter: Orange and Asparagus Salad
Happy Easter! It’s that time of year again where we’ve rapidly jumped from one holiday to the next, all desperately waiting for more sunshine and warmer days. Whether the sun has yet to make an appearance in your life, or it’s out in all its glory, I hope this recipe can help brighten up your day from your inside out.
Song suggestions:
Les Etoiles - Melody Gardot
Let Your Love Flow - Bellamy Brothers
Song Suggestion:
It’s Alright - Seal
Song Suggestion:
Rien que l’extase - Carla Bruni
Orange Asparagus and Black Bean Cous Cous Salad
I know what you’re thinking… “odd combination of things to put together”. I get you, I’d have never thought to mix them either but a combination that I stumbled upon by accident ended up being something I now enjoy almost weekly. Here’s how to make it:
Ingredients:
2 oranges, the juicier the better
A chunky handful of asparagus stalks (about 150-200g)
1/2 tin black beans
50g uncooked giant couscous
Pinch of salt
Recipe:
Wash and slice the asparagus into little pieces.
Rinse the black beans from the can.
Weight out the cous cous and set it to boil.
Juice and zest one of the oranges. Add the juice and zest to a pan with the asparagus pieces. Sprinkle a little salt on top.
On a medium heat, sauté until the asparagus is just about soft.
Note: personally, I quite like it a little on the crunchy side so I wait until the orange juice has evaporated and I serve it, however if you like it a little softer, once the orange juice has disappeared you can add a little water to help soften the asparagus up and cook it a little longer to reach your desired texture.
Mix everything together. Add a little extra orange zest for an even stronger flavour!
Serving suggestion: on top of a mixed leaf salad with your favourite meat replacement pieces, or as a side dish to a main meal.
Table decorations
A neighbour of ours was cutting some of his garden trees to get them ready for spring and was about to throw out these beautiful branches covered in these yellow balls, a tree my grandparents call ‘the carnival tree’, as that’s when they recognise it starts to bloom. The tree is an Acacia pycnantha tree, more commonly known as a golden wattle tree. As soon as I saw them being thrown out, I took as many as I could carry and got to work at home! I’ve used some for napkin decorations and the leftovers have been stuffed into a jar that now sits nicely on our dining room table. This simple yet effective napkin decoration adds the perfect final touch to a plate and is easy to improvise. It can be tied with raffia, ribbons, string or twine and still look beautiful. The flowers are also really easy to improvise! A top tip: if your flower, like this one, is prone to potentially leaving a little pollen behind, place something between the flower and the napkin in order to catch any funky plant dust. Here, I cut up an old brown paper bag we had lying around into rectangles and used that. Another alternative could be greaseproof/baking paper.
A Bite Out of Life
A picnic is such a simple pleasure, but one everyone enjoys slightly differently. Who’d have thought packing up a couple nibbles and pitching up in some random field could be so exciting? Our house last year was a big fan of picnics; we had them at 4am for breakfast on cliffs watching the sunrise, on cloudy beach days making friends with every dog that came over to investigate our selection of goods, on sunny park days playing frisbee and Ninja, we loved them. Here’s a picture of me and the two other amazing girls I lived with last year, Maria and Ana. This picnic that we put together had all the classics: veg (carrot, celery and cucumber) sticks with homemade hummus, tofu BLT bagels, melon, grapes, orange juice and crisps. We walked 3.5km to a park we wanted to explore, ended up taking the wrong entrance in, took a huge detour around all the local farmer’s fields trying to find the middle of the park, walked up some pretty steep hills, combined map orientation stops with water breaks and finally made it… all with a bunch of flowers in a backpack. A day extremely well spent, saw a lot more of the park than we had intended and got my lovely white jeans dirty from climbing trees. Thank God for washing machines!
What does your ideal picnic look like?
Do you prefer a bench, or like sitting on the floor?
Pre-made picnic essentials or homemade everything?
What’s your extra entertainment of choice? Cards, a frisbee, music?
Can you think of the best picnic you’ve ever had, and why it was so special?
enjoy food, enjoy life.
