Something For the Weekend #6
A late summer celebration
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Hello friends, and welcome to this sunlight-dappled Something For the Weekend recipe special, in which I’m sharing three simple, but really special recipes that celebrate the abundance of the deeply flavourful late summer ingredients at our fingertips right now. As I’ve mentioned here before (and more frequently offline, like every other British person I know - what is our obsession with the weather!??), our summer here hasn’t been all that great, and so now we are on the cusp of the seasons, with September just about to unfurl, I think it’s important to make the most of these still-long days while the sunshine is golden and warm, and snatch as many moments as we can outside. Preferable eating something delectable.
Which is why these recipes are designed with al fresco eating, picnicking, and portable feasting in mind, but I should also say that they are superlative dishes in their own right, perfectly well suited to sharing indoors with friends around the kitchen or dining table for a long and lazy lunch, if the weather fails. Indoor picnics are fun too, and each of these can be conveniently made ahead, making for the most flusterless of hosting experiences.
The produce right now is some of my favourite of the year, and I can’t help but get excited as I walk down my high street and see the green grocers’ displays towering with the new season corn, still-muddy onions, properly ripe tomatoes and shimmering punnets of plump blackberries. It’s harvest time, and I love it. And so I give you a tart of the crumbliest, butteriest pastry, filled with sweet caramelised onions, a tangle of earthy spinach and an intensely cheesy custard. It’s the perfect foil for fresh, crunchy, sharply dressed salads, and I made it for a dear friend and her family recently when they visited (I always like to try my recipes for you out on friends, as I gauge whether they are worthy for you here), and they were delighted - I served it with a fresh green salad with vinaigrette and juicy tomato salad - both things so simple I know you don’t need instructions for, though do correct me if I’m wrong there.
The salad I’m sharing with you today though, sings with plump, juicy sweetcorn with charred courgettes, squishy roast tomatoes and crumbled feta, and is dressed with a beautifully zingy, smoky hot chipotle-lime dressing. It’s leaning in on the flavours of Mexican elotes, with its chilli, cheese and lime, and stands up brilliantly to being made ahead and boxed up for later.
Pudding was inspired by our wild and wonderful garden, which is still lush and brimming with life thanks to all the rain, the fig tree outside the kitchen door heavy with green fruit and fragrant with milky leaves; the mess of brambles in our border a friendly provider of perfectly purple pops of juice and flesh. Together, they combine in this elegant, blackberry-studded fig leaf infused clafoutis, which I love to slice up and take with me to the beach or on walks to snaffle more blackberries. The gently figgy, slightly coconutty flavour of the fig leaves is the perfect backdrop to the sharp, intensely flavoured blackberries (forage some wild if you can), and I’ve taken a leaf out of Mark Diacono’s book in this recipe and toasted the fig leaves first for extra flavour before infusion.
In the spirit of summer picnics, I’ve teamed up with artisan food purveyors Dukeshill to giveaway a ‘picnic delights hamper’, as photographed here during our beach picnic, to one lucky subscriber. All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning it is to comment below telling me about the one thing you can’t picnic without. I’ll choose a winner over the next week, and be in touch about the prize directly. Due to the nature of this giveaway, I’m afraid it’s only open to readers in the UK. As a little bonus, if you happen to fancy ordering some goodies from Dukeshill (which I can highly recommend, btw), they are kindly offering 20% off first orders for new customers, using the code ROSIE20.
As always, these Something For the Weekend recipes and the giveaway are the preserve of my paid community, whose subscriptions allow me to continue to produce this newsletter, buy ingredients, test recipes and carve out the many hours it takes to photograph, style and write up these recipes and my other articles. If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter in its free form, please consider upgrading to become a full member, which will mean you get access to my entire recipe archive, travel guides, voice notes and giveaways with brands I love. But more importantly, and perhaps more meaningfully, it will bring you into the fold of our growing global community, allow you to share comments and connection, take part in discussions, threads (more of these soon), and get to know me even better while supporting my work. All for less than a pound a week if you sign up for the year (though monthly subs are available).
And so to the recipes. Please do drop me a line below to let me know how you get on with them, and thanks so much for reading and supporting my newsletter. You are the best.
Spinach, Cheddar and Caramelised Onion Tart
Serves 4-6
The beauty of this tart lies in the simplicity of its filling, but also the buttery extra short biscuity crumb which is just so perfect with the sharp cheddar custard and those crunchy salads you’ll be serving it with. I use an unconventional, but foolproof method for lining the tart tin too which I hope you’ll like… it’s such a good one to have up your sleeve.
