Red cabbage, blue cheese and walnut salad

It seems I can’t open the Observer these days without Nigel Slater’s face mugging at me from the byline photo, as he earnestly tells me what to do with the fifty pounds worth of finest delicatessan produce I just happen to have in my fridge (’if you don’t have any Serrano ham, just use Parma’). He then tells me how to rustle up a quick and easy ’supper’ (who the hell eats supper? when is supper?) using nothing but … and then he proceeds to list a series of ingredients, which, were I to go out and buy them, would blow my entire week’s food budget. And he’ll top it off by making some offhand economy tip (’you don’t have to use your extra virgin single estate cold pressed olive oil here - a regular virgin blend will suffice’) that just underlines the poverty of my collection of cooking oils.

There are a number of lifestyle tutors around at the moment - like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Nigella Lawson, to name just two - who are pushing a similar agenda: slow food, low ‘food miles’, local, seasonal, organic, produce. I have a lot of sympathy with this agenda. But there is never any doubt that these are millionaires whose lifestyle is not for everyone. The irritating thing is that they routinely try to give the impression that there is nothing stopping anybody from eating as well as they do apart from their ignorance. To underline this, they periodically suggest a cheap recipe, and use it to sanctimoniously insinuate that poor people could feed themselves much better for less money if only they had a fraction of this foodie wisdom.

(If they decide to go into this at length, they will probably tell a story about the evils of industrialisation, and lament the passing of local food knowledge, which had been passed from mother to daughter until some of the daughters went to work in munitions factories and started eating from cans of spam. The result is a nation of helpless doughy peasants, who can’t tell the difference between chives and grass, and are sleepwalking into an early, and very wide, grave. But all is not lost! A band of valiant foodie rebels are resurrecting ancient soups made out of stinging nettles. If they succeed, we may once again feel the rhythm of the seasons in our pantrys and plates, and save the world from global warming.)

They then describe a recipe using an economical cut of meat, like scrag of lamb or shin of beef, a clutch of cheap British root vegetables and a can of stout, simply stewed for four hours in a two hundred pound Le Creuset cassarole dish. Once the lesson is over and the urban poor have been shown up as ignorant self-destructive stooges for the processed food industry, it’s back to truffle oil and organic corn fed, free roaming chickens.

However, the watchwords of this blog are ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’. If it involves pricey produce or more than two pots I’m going to either do serious surgery to the recipe (replacing the Kobe beef with button mushrooms, for instance), or leave it out altogether.

This salad, however, despite being a creation of the aforementioned Nigel Slater, it’s cheap, easy and really good. But Cashel Blue cheese costs a fortune! I hear you moan. Well, it may be a little pricey for you (especially if you live in, say, Casper, Wyoming), but it’s made just down the road from here and they practically give it away. It’s cheaper than cheddar.

Red cabbage, blue cheese and walnut salad
1/4 red cabbage
1 apple (any eating apple - I used Granny Smith)
Lemon juice to taste (1-2 tbsp)
1 carrot
Cashel blue (or any other blue cheese, to be frank)
A few walnuts (how many do you have?)
1 or 2 ribs of celery

Dressing
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tsp dijon mustard
4 tbsp oil

Finely slice the cabbage. Peel and finely slice the apple, and toss it in the lemon juice. Grate the carrot. Toast the walnuts (I did them under the grill, and burned them in about 30 seconds, so keep an eye on them). Thinly slice the celery. Break the cheese into small chunks. Put all the ingredients in a bowl.

Mix the vinegar, oil and mustard (with salt and pepper, and maybe a pinch of sugar), and shake it all up in a jam jar (make sure to remove the jam).

Pour the dressing over the salad, and mix it together. Serve.