Potato Salad Contest: RECIPE 7 - Ben Blaine (Charlie Productions)

'POMME ON POMME DE TERRE'

For reasons of health and safety I had to eat sausages last night so I made up this recipe to go with them. On the grounds that sausages like apples I threw caution to the wind and this is roughly what happened.

Boil a bag of Jersey Royal potatoes exactly as it says on the back, bringing them to the boil and then simmering for 15 minutes. 15 minutes feels like 5 weeks but it's surprisingly perfect.

Meanwhile peel and core an apple and cut it into chunks. I used a Braeburn but anything with a bit of bite will do. But if you bring any Pink Lady to the table I'll know and there'll be trouble. I once went to an food related event where the people responsible for the Pink Lady apple were selling the damn things out of a bright pink mini. They were all dressed in pink. And they were ladies. It was a glimpse into a nightmarish vision of my own private five-a-day hell. So anyway, you've peeled an apple.

Add some salad leaves. I'd like to pretend that I went out into the garden and plucked them fresh. I got them from a bag. I don't even know what they all were though there was definitely some Rosso action on the lettuce front. To be honest I don't think they're that essential to this salad but there was only a few left and if I didn't eat them now I'd have to throw them away or give them to the rabbits and the have an entire garden to eat as it is.

Right, now comes the one bit I was proud of. I took a quantity of dried rosemary, an amount of maldon rock salt (yes Jenny, you're dead right, it does matter), an amount of black pepper corns and a clove of raw garlic and I put them all in a pestle and ground them into a paste. My only recollection of quantities was - much more than I intended (rosemary), a fair amount for a man who likes a lot of black pepper (black pepper), as much as my heart and my conscience will allow (salt) and a very small one (garlic).

To this divinely scented paste I added a teaspoon of Taylors Original English Mustard and a tablespoon of Mayonnaise. 

I then put all of those things together with the drained potatoes and discovered that I'd burnt the sausages. This though actually worked in my favour because it made the whole thing smell and taste like the most perfect first barbecue of the year. Smokey, sweet, tangy and hearty it was the perfect thing to eat on a spring evening that had turned surprisingly cold.

Then Polly the dog caught a rabbit in the garden and would not be deterred from eating it inside. Oh yeah, said her dark little eyes as she glared at me from over the corpse of her velveteen victim, two can play at this cooking shit. I call this Lapin Al Fresco...

(For decency's sake I've photographed only my dinner, not the dog's)