174: Inspiration for a lamb chop, p83, and 175: A carrot salad, p308

Oooh, I wasn't expecting this for the lamb chop recipe - only really properly realised it was a salad when I was reading through the rest of the recipe whilst the lamb was marinating. Just using soy and garlic for the marinade worked brilliantly, the lamb was lovely and tender and soaked it all up, and mixed with the spicy, hot, sour, sweet leaves, was delicious.

The carrot salad sounded like it would also be rather dull, but turned out to be really rather nice! Again, don't much like eating nuts raw but slightly toasted in a dry frying pan something happens to them which suddenly makes a big improvement... The dry peanuts, plus the lemon and walnut oil, stop the grated carrot making the salad end up a sodden orange lump. Not really enough for a main meal but a good side dish or maybe even a starter?

170: An English cheese salad, p74

This sounded a bit dull and dreary but actually was really rather nice and worked well with the pork steaks, last weekend. Didn't have any Wensleydale and after the trauma of getting some Lincolnshire cheese a few weeks ago, I was a bit lazy and didn't try to hunt any down. We're also ending up with a fridge full of half used lumps of different types of cheese - some people's idea of heaven, but it's taking up a lot of space!! I'm not that keen on nuts normally but I do rather like what happens to them when toasted and incorporated into these yummy salads of Nigel's...