Happy 1st Birthday Random Recipes!

This month, the Random Recipes challenge, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen turns 1! Happy Birthday! I can only hope there is as much cake for its first birthday celebration as there was for Mini-M's :o)

The challenge this month was to return to the book you used for that first challenge and pick another random recipe. Or for those of us that were't there 'in the beginning' to return to the book used in the first challenge we participated in, and make another randomly selected recipe from that.

My first challenge was magazine clippings. I selected randomly and came up with a Prune and Whisky tart. Which shockingly I vetoed, on account of it looking incredibly difficult to successfully de-dairify, since it was rather cream heavy, and I could foresee a good amount of stress and ingredients being thrown at something that was destined from the outset to be a bit of a disaster. When a recipe calls for whipped double cream, it generally wants you to use whipped double cream, and nothing else will taste or work in quite the same way.

Random recipe selection... take 2!

So I selected again, and ended up with "Topinambours a la Barigoule" or Provencal style jerusalem artichokes. Based on the formatting and typesetting, I had a suspicion that it was from a Waitrose Food Illustrated Magazine, which after a bit of googling turned out to be correct. So you can find the recipe here on the Waitrose website. I followed it pretty much exactly (Shock horror, I know!).

The jerusalem artichokes are slowly simmered with black olives, white wine, thyme, and garlic with fresh parsley and breadcrumbs added for the last 5 minutes to thicken it up. Apparently it is named after the 'barigoule' which is a summer truffle, as the ingredients combination gives it a truffle-y flavour. Having not ever eaten truffle, I couldn't comment, but it does taste lovely - I generally don't like olives and was worried they would be over powering, but I like them in this dish. A new discovery, that may well be resurrected whenever jerusalem artichokes appear in the veg box.