Ottolenghi

My friend Kristi gave me the Ottolenghi Cookbook for my birthday and I promised to let her know how the recipes were. I decided the best way to do so would be to blog about it!
I wanted to make my darling fiance a fancy dinner and this seemed like the perfect excuse. After pouring through the cookbook several times, I decided to make two of the side dishes and serve them alongside roast chicken (b/c for some reason, side dishes and apps are always more appealing to me than entrees).
I decided to make roasted golden beets (the recipe called for mixed golden and red beets, but there were only golden ones at the store) and caramelized endives with Serrano Ham (I used prosciutto instead though though).
I made these dishes over the course of two nights. On the first night, I peeled and roasted the beets in foil and caramelized the endive halves in sugar and butter. The next evening, I assembled the roasted beet salad (using the herb mix from Whole Foods, along with sunflower seeds, and the recipe's maple dressing) then topped the endives with cream, cheese, thyme, breadcrumbs, and ham and baked them for 20 minutes.

Golden Beets Look Cool

Especially When You Peel Them

Halved EndivesCaramelizing Away- I Can't Even Describe How Great This Smelled

Ready to be Topped and BakedCompleted Salad with Beets, Sunflower Seeds, Baby Greens and Herbs

Endives Out of the Oven

Dinner is Served!

A few notes:
1) I washed the skillet after Pancaked stepped in it prior to cooking my endives. :)
2) The lighting in my kitchen is lousy, I cook at night, and my camera is old, so please excuse my picture quality.
3) The recipes I picked out were easy to follow and resulted in an excellent meal. My only issue with the cookbook is that all of the units are Britsh- so Celcius, ml, and grams. I did conversions for the stuff that seemed important but I was a little too lazy to figure out how many grams of salad I should have used and just winged it on things like that. Everything turned out fine, but if you are nit-picky converting everything could prove to be time consuming.

Overall I loved these recipes and I'm excited to cook more things out of this book. (I have my eye on mushrooms with barley and preserved lemons for this week.) Thanks for the awesome present, Kristi!