Bite Me!

I love it when summer finally arrives, and I can eat British salad to my heart’s content, without having to worry about carbon footprints or desertification or polytunnels or any of those other unpleasant factors involved in the eating of vegetables out of season.  My great lunch stand-by for work has to be the ready-made Caesar salad in a bag – yes, those overpriced ones with all the fiddly little sachets.  Add some Quorn roasted chicken fillets and you’ve got an instant meal that’s perfect in hot weather.  No, it’s not exactly gourmet eating but I don’t care. 

When I’m at home, however, my go-to salad is quite different.  The basic ingredients are lettuce (gem or round, not iceberg) and lots of capers, with a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil and salt.  I’m quite happy just eating this, but I often supplement with whatever I’ve got in the fridge at the time – normally cherry tomatoes, cucumber, onion or spring onion and spinach.  If I’m feeling particularly adventurous (or have just been shopping and have a well-stocked fridge) then I like to add olives, avocado, green pepper and sunblush tomatoes. Herbs from the garden also help to pep things up – basil, mint and chives are all good.  I can eat bucketloads of this stuff (and frequently do!)

I bought my lunch from the Scandinavian Kitchen the other day.  This turned out to be a good decision, for three reasons:

1) I had a money-off voucher from kgb deals - £5 worth of food for only £1.  Bargain.

2) The guy behind the counter was cute.

3) They sell my favourite little green cakes from Ikea.  This is a great thing, as my nearest Ikea is miles away and I usually just have to beg people to buy them for me when they visit.  You’d think it was a foreign country or something (well, it is Croydon.  That’s practically foreign, right?)  On second thoughts, this is probably not such a great thing, as now whenever I’m around Oxford Circus I’m going to be tempted to go and buy cakes and that will do my figure NO GOOD AT ALL. Hmm. 

So, that aside, I suppose you’ll want to know what the food is like.  Scandinavian, obviously – little Ikea cakes, open sandwiches, a selection of salads – £4.75 will get you two open sandwiches and some salad to take away, or variants thereof (see menu here).  I went for the Greek salad, Greve and radish open sandwich, and blue cheese mash open sandwich.  It was all fresh, and perfectly nice, if a little small for someone with my gargantuan appetite.  The blue cheese mash open sandwich was an exception, being piled so high with blue cheese that I rather wished for the missing slice of bread to even things up a little.

My conclusion?  I’ll probably be back.  If only to flirt with the counter man.  

Scandinavian Kitchen, 61 Great Tichfield Street, London W1W 7PP.  Tel: 020 7580 7161.  They don’t just do food to take away – there’s a café and grocery store too.

Back in the olden days, when we had nice weather (or Sunday, if you're feeling rather less melodramatic than I am right now) I did my food shopping.  For some people, summer starts with the first swallow; others, with the first barbecue.  For me, I know it's summer when I make the first tomato, basil and mozzarella salad of the year.  It's not worth making out of season because you need ripe tomatoes; in my opinion, it's a treat worth waiting for. 

Being in a massive hurry the other lunchtime, I nipped into a new sandwich shop called Leon which has just opened on Regent Street to get some lunch. Slightly alarmed by being the sole customer (well, it was about 3pm) and the way all six of the staff were all looking at me (albeit in a smiley, friendly way) I grabbed the nearest salad that came to hand and scarpered. What a stroke of luck – it turned out to be a Leon Superfoods Salad, containing broccoli, alfalfa, peas, feta, quinoa, cucumber and seeds, with a minty dressing. It was quite simply the best salad I have ever eaten – I was going to say, from a sandwich shop, but it occurs to me that it was probably one of the nicest salads I have ever eaten full stop. The avocado was perfectly ripe and not at all brown, the feta creamy, the broccoli of a perfect firmness. I’ll definitely be going back to try out some of their other lunches – the sweet potato falafel sound right up my street!

Leon Superfoods Salad, £3.95. For a list of all Leon restaurants (photo is of Leon Spitalfields), see www.leonrestaurants.co.uk