Belleau Kitchen Random Recipe Challenge: My New Cookbook

When Dom at Belleau Kitchen posted his June Challenge, My New Cookbook, I had to bide my time...it was days before my birthday and I was hoping for some new cookbooks (no word of a lie I haven't had a new cookbook since July last year). 

Well...didn't I just luck out...two new cookbooks in my hot little hands!! Denis Cotter's "for the love of food" an incredible vegetarian cookbook with recipes that remind me of Ottolenghi's Plenty (think long ingredient lists with incredible results) and Stephane Reynaud's "365 good reasons to sit down and eat", which has a seasonal, french recipe for every day of the year.  

What to make first? Such a hard decision.

I plan my meals for a fortnight and when I made this week's plan I was thinking...end of June, sun, heat, time for salads!! Denis Cotter has a whole chapter dedicated to salads that eat like a meal and I greedily chose a handful to fill my meal plan.  

So, have you been enjoying the sun in Edinburgh? I hear you ask...um....no.  It has rained for about a week straight...and it's been chilly....hardly salad weather.  

Sticking to my meal plan last night, with a quick tweak (or two), I made this easy warm pea salad with cherry tomatoes, basil, red onions and garlic.  The first tweak was my choice of pea...the recipe calls for sugar snaps but I used a huge heap of freshly podded peas instead.  The second tweak? serving it with some baked fish, pita and hummus...much more weather friendly.