Goats' Cheese, Confit Tomatoes & Basil Oil (Spain)

Everything in this recipe sounds amazing to me.  I never used to like goat's cheese but a year or so ago I tried it again and discovered that it was one of the things that I decided I didn't like (or didn't like the idea of) at a young age and that I actually really liked it.  This particular recipe looked like a very simple salad to make so we did it as an accompaniment to our fondue one evening.

It includes instructions on making your own basil oil which was something we'd never tried. We usually use a vinagrette-style dressing for our salads so we were looking forward to trying something different.  

As part of making the oil, you also shallow fry the tomatoes - seemingly with the purpose of making them easier to peel.  Personally, this was not necessary in my opinion.  I'm perfectly happy eating un-peeled tomatoes and having fried them in oil only made them slippy, slimey and just as irritating to peel as they would have been had they been cooked any other way. But it's done now so there you go. 

Once the basil had infused the oil and it had cooled, we whizzed it all up in Soph's adorable mini-processor - not quite as good but useful enough and a lot easier to clean than her expert processor.    

The rest of the salad was very easy to assemble and tasted great - the ingredients were a great combination of flavours and the oil was very simple to make and it made for a lovely addition to the salad. 

One thing we did say about it was that we tend to use warm goats cheese in salads, which we all actually prefer to the cold goats cheese which is used in this recipe. 

Soph and my brother-in-law also have a recipe for marmalade breaded and fried goats cheese which tastes great and doesn't take all that much extra effort.  So if we were to make the salad again, we'd likely at leat heat the goats cheese.