Before you panic-buy olives, dips and an uninspired assortment of supermarket cheeses, consider these fresh alternatives. Better yet, send this list to your friends and assign everyone a dish or two for the ultimate spring picnic or backyard barbecue – even if you’ll be dining together over video chat.
Asparagus and ricotta tart with miso and black garlic
Quiche and frittata are staples of the picnic round but if you are looking to mix things up, try this asparagus and ricotta tart with miso and black garlic.
Asparagus is cheap and plentiful throughout September and October in Australia and is combined here with the mysterious, sweet-savoury ink of black garlic.
For the uninitiated, black garlic is heated for a number of weeks under regulated temperature and humidity until it becomes dark, sticky and caramelised. It sheds the raw heat of fresh garlic and instead takes on a mellowed balsamic/umami notes and is utterly addictive.
Nepalese potato salad
There’s always one friend who brings an industrial-sized punnet of supermarket potato salad to a barbecue picnic but those potatoes – suspended in a pallid, gluey emulsification – truly are the stuff of nightmares.
This sprightly take could not be further from that, combining Nepalese spices with tamarind and pickled chillies to provide some mouth-puckering tang. Perfect paired with any barbecue meats or as a standalone dish.
Giant couscous with golden raisins, lemon and almonds
Salads are often a casualty of improper storage and transit, arriving to picnics limp and languishing in the bottom of sweaty plastic containers, but this robust grain salad is perfectly engineered to show up as fresh as when it was made, and can even be dressed beforehand.
Golden raisins and lemon segments create sweet and sour pops in the mouth, and dry toasting the couscous beforehand further enhances the nutty flavours.
Burrata with chargrilled grapes and basil
There are few things more pleasurable than slitting a fully engorged burrata and admiring the creamy curds spilling out. This recipe takes it even further with charred grapes macerated in an agrodolce blend of vinegar, spice and brown sugar.
All that is needed to accompany it is a downy, salt-crusted focaccia and your aperitif of choice.
Chicken wings with banana ketchup
If, like me, you were overconfident in your rate of consumption of bananas during lockdown and have pangs of guilt every time you pass their decaying corpses in the fruit bowl, here’s a recipe to use them up which isn’t banana bread (or eternal banishment to the freezer).
Overripe bananas transform into ketchup and form the base of this recipe, first to marinate the chicken wings and then to serve alongside as a dipping sauce. Make sure you keep some napkins on hand for all the licky, sticky fingers.
Zingy tofu rice paper rolls
Fresh, zingy and portable, these rice paper rolls tick all the boxes for a spring picnic. Simply pack your dipping sauce in an airtight jar to avoid any spills in transit.
If you’ve struggled in the past with folding these and your rolls look more like a flaccid, overstuffed sock, Yotam Ottolenghi has some choice tips on how to make these tiny bundles look just like the photo, using little more than a damp tea towel.
Butterbean hummus with red pepper and walnut paste
Two tins of beans and a jumble of blistered red peppers (bullhorn chillies are available and affordable at the moment, and have a similar mild taste to capsicum) and you have a very chic layered dip to complement any picnic cheese platter.
Serve with bales of freshly cut crudités and generously torn rags of pita bread, perfect for greedy scoops.
Lemon and sage roasted almonds
A humble bag of almonds gets a zesty makeover with sage, rosemary, maple syrup, sumac and lemon.
Make extras to keep on hand for future afternoon beers.
Amalfi lemon, bay leaf and olive oil cake
An homage to those heady days of international travel, golden sunsets and salty sea air. This dish manages to distill the flavours of the Mediterranean into one glorious beam of sunshine.
Fresh bay leaves are blitzed to a fine powder and folded into the cake batter (and glaze) along with fruity olive oil and lemon zest, creating a cake with a herbaceous, floral perfume.
Tahini and halva brownies
Fudgey or cakey, edge piece or centrepiece, debate rages over what makes the perfect brownie. As Yotam Ottolenghi forewarns, “the difference between a cooking time of 18 and 22 minutes can be significant”, so if you’re team fudge, err on the side of slightly underbaked, as they will still firm up once out of the oven.
These brownies have the added bonus of swirly, chewy pockets of tahini and halva to temper the sweetness of the chocolate.
