Poached Baby Vegetables with Caper Mayonnaise

JANUARY 13, 2015

Recipe number 1 - here goes!

Opening page 1 of Plenty couldn't have been any more daunting. Homemade mayonnaise?? This was going to be one hell of an experiment, the first step of which was assembling the new blender on top of the Kenwood Chef!

In went the garlic, egg yolk, vinegar, mustard, salt, lemon juice...and the olive oil and lemon zest prematurely because I apparently can't read recipes properly. Not to worry, it actually turned out pretty ok for the first time making mayonnaise. Perhaps a little bit runny to begin with but nothing a bit of cornflour can't sort out. The chopped olives (I used olives instead of capers because thats what I prefer) were mixed in and the mayonnaise was all done. 

Next step was to prepare the poaching liquor. This required a tremendous amount of white wine(!!) along with more olive oil, lemon juice, bay leaves, onion and celery. While this was heating up I washed and halved all the baby veg ready to go. I also popped a veggie treat into the oven to accompany my poached veg as this was to be my main meal of the day. The last step was easy peasy: poach. 

All in all - the veg was pretty ok. The mayonnaise was a bit runny and quite mustard-y for my personal tastes, but this is something to play around with in the future. There were plenty of leftovers for the rest of the week, although the flavours were quite strong for a meal I'd want to eat regularly.