A Summer Dinner Party: Caramelised Walnut, Goat's Cheese and Orange Salad, with Sourdough Croutons

What to have at a dinner party when it's really hot - and you don't really feel like standing in a sweltering kitchen? Salad. It's the obvious answer, perhaps, but it can be tricky finding a salad that's enough to constitute a full main course! This one, however, I have tried out on three hungry men and they all seemed to approve...although this time I cooked it for my two sisters-in-law and a female cousin-in-law. One of the sisters-in-law is a professional chef so I was a little intimidated, but she left saying she was inspired by it, so I'm taking that as a compliment! I found the recipe on a snippet from a magazine I'd cut out ages ago, and have amended it slightly.

It might not be the prettiest...but it is totally delicious!

What makes it so lovely is the combination of crunchy sourdough and the tangy goat's cheese along with sweetness of the walnuts and summery-ness of the orange. This recipe does involve a little cooking, but it's so easy and low maintenance that it's totally bearable in the summer heat...

Ingredients - enough to feed 6

• 100g walnut halves
• 4 tablespoons clear honey
• 4 thick slices of sourdough bread, cut into crouton sized cubes
• 2 tablespoons wholegrain mustard
• 4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 10 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 medium sized oranges
• 400g salad leaves
• 250g goat's cheese, cubed

Heat oven to 200C.

1. Peel the oranges using a small sharp knife and cut them in to small segments. Transfer any juice that collects on the chopping board during this process into a small pan - this will form the basis of the salad dressing later!

2. Mix the walnuts with two tablespoons of the honey, and then spread them out on a baking tray covered with greaseproof paper - or alternatively, put them on a silicone baking sheet. In the pictures below I experimented with using foil, but it didn't work brilliantly!

3. Also place the sourdough bread cubes on a baking tray / in a roasting tin and drizzle a little olive oil over.

4. Place both trays into the oven for 15 minutes, checking them half way and turning the trays to make sure that the walnuts and bread are evenly browned.

Click to enlarge.

5. While the walnuts and sourdough bread are in the oven, prepare the dressing. Add the remaining honey, mustard, vinegar and oil to the pan with the orange juice. Stir, heat slowly and season.

6. Assemble the salad. Put the salad leaves in a large bowl and add the orange slices, sourdough croutons, goat's cheese and walnuts. Toss gently with the salad dressing.

Tip: if the walnut halves are too tricky to remove from the tray, place them back in the oven for a minute to soften the honey slightly.

We followed the salad with the raspberry baked cheesecake I've posted about before. I don't often repeat recipes so quickly, but the husband requested it! This time, I made it in a slightly bigger tin (although using the same quantities as in the posted recipes), left it in a little longer (I forgot...!) and dressed it up a bit...

I'm cooking for another dinner party tonight (got to make the most of the dying days of the summer holidays!), but something totally different: chocolate chilli chicken followed by lime souffles: check back later to see those recipes!

Therapeutic Baked Raspberry Cheescake

Apologies for horrendously not keeping my word and not posting about the lentils mentioned in the previous post. Bear with me as the reason will become apparent...

There was a need for therapeutic cheesecake baking and eating. And yes, cheesecake must, must, must be baked. In my youth all I had ever eaten was the far less superior put-in-the-fridge-to-set type. I never particularly liked it, but would eat it on offer as I had a feeling cheesecake should be good. Well, it turns out that what my little self was yearning unknowingly for was baked cheesecake. If you have never tried a baked cheesecake before, please vamoose from this blog, go to the supermarket, buy the ingredients and make this pronto. It will change your view of cheesecake forever - and I'm afraid probably make you a cheesecake snob like me.

So, the reason for the therapeutic nature of this cheesecake: the glass on our car back windscreen was randomly smashed in a couple of nights ago. Nothing was stolen, but dealing with the whole thing wound me up. To the kitchen I went, and baked this. In fact, I am now eating it as I write this post:

Yes, there is a random hat in the back corner of the photo. It's my husband's recent purchase for winter...anyway, back to the cheesecake. I found the recipe years ago in a Waitrose Food magazine; I baked it for one of my first ever dinner parties and now, having admittedly tweaked the recipe a bit, it is up there as one of my favourite recipes. As I have little self control, I usually make this just before going to bed. When the 40 minute cooking time is up, I turn off the oven and go to bed so I can't keep peeking at it...

Ingredients - enough to make a cheesecake to fill a 16cm diameter round cake tin.

• 50g butter
• 200g bourbon biscuits, crushed (not sure if you can get these outside of England; if not, just use chocolate cookies!)
• 400g cream cheese
• 142ml double cream
• 75g icing sugar
• 25g cornflour
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 200g raspberries (I didn't have that many left and it's fine with fewer!)

Heat oven to 170C and put a baking sheet on the middle shelf of the oven.

1. Grease and line your cake tin with baking paper.
2. Set about making your base; melt the butter in a small saucepan while you whizz the biscuits in the food processor to crush them. Add the crushed biscuits to the melted butter, stir to coat them and put this mixture into the bottom of your tin. Push it down with a wooden spoon until you have an even base for your cheesecake. Transfer this to the fridge while you make the rest of the recipe.
3. Put the cream cheese, cream, icing sugar and cornflour into a bowl and, using an electric whisk, beat to combine.
4. Add vanilla extract and eggs, then beat again until smooth.
5. Stir in the raspberries. Then transfer the mixture into the tin, on top of the biscuit base.
6. Put the cheesecake into the oven, on top of the preheated baking sheet. Cook for 40 minutes or a little longer, until the cheesecake is just set in the centre.
7. Now is the tricky bit: turn off the oven but leave the cheesecake in there for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Don't keep opening the oven door, or the cheesecake will crack!
8. After the cheesecake has cooled, transfer it to the fridge to get it really cold.

If you want to be fancy and serve this at a dinner party, decorate the top with extra raspberries and dust with icing sugar.