Prawns with ouzo, orzo and courgette and Greek rosé

I didn’t have plans to go to Greece this year but staying in the UK for the summer has given me itchy feet so I’m cooking my way round the Med instead.

This was a dish from Marianna Leivaditaki (of Morito)’s lovely new book Aegean (which I’ve posted here). I made it with friends last Friday and would definitely make it again. Orzo is a small, rice-shaped pasta and the dish is a bit like a prawn risotto.

We drank two wines with it - a delicious Greek rosé called Nautilus which Aldi rather cheekily has on sale for £6.99 (it’s over twice that elsewhere) and the Azores Wine Company’s wonderfully sharp, salty Verdelho which at £31.50 (from winebuyers.com) is considerably pricier but rare and thrilling. Both wines were samples.

Other pale dry rosés, particularly from Provence, would also be good as would other crisp whites such as Picpoul de Pinet and albarino.

You might wonder if you could pair ouzo with it as the recipe includes it and you would presumably have a bottle to hand. I think it’s a bit of an ask to drink it right through a meal - it’s better with meze - but you obviously could. If you didn't have ouzo you could use - and drink - dry white vermouth.

Octopus and albarino

Octopus is a bit of a cult ingredient on restaurant menus at the moment. I’ve already noted two good wine pairings for it - with Baga and orange wine but this weekend I found another at the Sabor pop-up Polperia at the Dartmouth Food Festival.

Chef Nieves Barragan was serving it very simply - boiled in a huge vat of boiling salted water and dressed with good olive oil and a sprinkling of pimenton - and offering a glass of Mar de Frades albarino from Rias Baixas on the side. The clean slightly saline wine was just perfect with the octopus, offsetting the richness of the oil and accentuating the spicy pimenton.

Given I’ve now shown it goes with white wine, red wine and orange or amber wine it actually turns out to be a really easy ingredient to match! I suspect it would work well with a dry rosé too.

Anchovies and alvarinho

If you don’t like fish don’t go to Olhao! Restaurants in this bustling fishing port on the Algarve serve almost nothing else which is fine with me but less good for people, like my friend J, who has a real phobia about fishbones.

That sadly meant he had to miss out on these excellent fresh anchovies - even though they were already filleted he still found their fishiness offputting.

They were scattered with pink peppercorns - an underrated spice that gave them a fragrant, spicy lift that went particularly well with the crisp young (2017) Torre de Menagem alvarinho/trejadura we’d ordered (from the Monçao e Melgaço sub-region of Vinho Verde up in the north of the country. Alvarinho is Portugal's equivalent of Spain's albarino.)

It really underlines the fact that anchovies pair well with almost any crisp white (or rosé) wine - I also enjoyed them last year in San Sebastian with Txacoli.

Pumpkin ravioli and sparkling albarino

Having ended up unexpectedly in hospital last week I struggled a bit to find a match of the week. Water doesn’t make the most inspiring pairing for food although it (the food in hospital) isn't by any means as bad as it used to be. So I’ll tell you about the the dish I had before I was taken ill.

It was a guest lunch at The Seahorse in Dartmouth cooked by Angela Hartnett and featured one of her wonderful silky pastas - ravioli stuffed (I vaguely recall) with pumpkin and hazelnuts and scattered with lavish amounts of parmesan.

I wouldn’t say it was the perfect match with the glass of sparkling albarino I was drinking, an ultra-dry Albarino Brut Nature, from Mar de Frades which was probably designed to go with the antipasti but it was certainly good enough. I also loved the intelligent wine list which is divided up by price.

If you want to try Angela’s food - and you should - visit one of her Cafe Muranos in London in St James’s Street and Covent Garden. Or Murano itself though that's quite a bit more expensive.