Anticipated Bliss

Reading recipe books is one of my favourite pastimes - meandering through others' ideas about food; learning by inference the many properties of an ingredient. As with fiction, I have authors I admire, and those I don't, and books that I come back to again and again. One such is Arabesque, modern Middle Eastern Food by Greg and Lucy Malouf. There are many recipes that I have cooked from it - a sure sign of a good cookbook, and many more that I have read over and over and thought "One day, I must try this."

Well, one of the recipes that has excited my imagination over and over is this one. Finally I tried it out today when we had a vegetarian friend amongst our guests for lunch. You can try a recipe that looks really good and be sorely disappointed, but this one (like all the others I have tried from this book), will not. We had it on its own for lunch for five, and it wasn't till several hours later that anyone went looking for the coffee and cake. You could easily spread it between eight if you had other courses, but I suggest that you go old-fashioned and serve it as a course, because it would be too overwhelming to the palate to combine it with anything else.

Honey roasted pear and walnut salad

• 3 ripe pears
• 2 1/2 tbl mild honey
• 3 cardamom pods, seeds only
• 1 tbl orange-blossom water
• 3 tsp sherry
• 25g butter
• 120ml olive oil
• 100g walnuts
• 2 packages Cypriot Hloumy cheese (250g packets), sliced in 3mm slices
• 100g plain flour for dusting
• juice of 2 lemons
• 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• 1 purple onion, sliced finely
• 3 handfuls of salad greens
• salt and black pepper

Peel the pears and cut them into halves or quarters (if they are large), and cut out the core. In a small pot, warm the honey, cardamom seeds, orange-blossom water and sherry.

In a heavy frying pan melt together the butter and half the olive oil until bubbling, then sear the pears for a minute or so on each side so that they begin to brown. Add the honey mixture and saute together for a further couple of minutes until it is a warm caramel colour then remove to a large bowl.

To roast the walnuts, place them on a baking tray in a very hot oven for 5 minutes, then tip them on to a clean tea towel, rub off some of the papery skin, and cut or break into large pieces.

To grill the haloumy cheese, dust the slices in flour. Heat the remaining olive oil in a frying pan over high heat and cook the cheese slices until they are golden brown. Turn them and colour the other side. Remove the slices to a bowl and pour over the lemon juice and sprinkle over the thyme.

Stand the onion slices in a bowl of hot water for 10 minutes then rinse in several changes of cold water. This softens the harshness of the onion.

Add the cheese, salad leave, 2/3 of the walnuts and onions to the bowl with the pears, season, and use your hands to gently mix it together.

To serve, mound the salad on a large serving plate, or on individual plates, and scatter with the remaining walnuts.