Beetroot and foodie week

I've had a busy food related week. Sunday I was a judge for one of the Reading, Steady, Cook competition rounds. This was great fun but very hard to choose between duck and sweet potato curry and steamed halibut with caramelised goat cheese. (The curry won.) Look out for the semi-finals and final of the competition at the Eat Reading Live festival 4th and 5th June.

Watching the contestants do their stuff.

On Monday I went on a trip with the Reading Food Growing Group to Lower Shaw farm in Swindon.  They have a productive organic garden and keep chickens, pigs and sheep. They run residential and day courses and it is a real oasis on the edge of Swindon. I'm thinking of booking into their cookery weekend in November - a whole weekend cooking and talking about food, bliss!

On Tuesday Ben Zagorski, a finalist in last year's Reading, Steady, Cook competition and a judge in this year's was the guest on my Local Lunch show. I treated him to the first beetroot of the season from the veg bag. I boiled the beetroot for about 20 minutes, sliced them and made a dressing of olive oil, red wine vinegar and honey. I only used about 1/2 teaspoon of honey and added it a bit at a time and kept tasting to make sure it wasn't too sweet. I then added some  Pecorino di Fossa, an Italian sheep milk that is matured in sealed caves. I bought it from The Delistation, one of the stalls at Ms Marmitelove'rs underground market. They suggested you eat the cheese dipped in honey so I thought it should work with the honey dressing.    

Spinach and bacon salad

We had a surfeit of bacon this weekend. I'd brought my usual pack of Laverstoke Park smoked back home  from work but then Friday night went to MsMarmitelover's Underground Market. I came home with all sorts of goodies including smoked goat's cheese, strawberry and rose petal jam and Treflach Farm bacon. The guy on the stall was wafting a plate of bacon under people's noses as they squeezed past (it was very busy), a low down but very successful sales technique.

The Treflach Farm bacon went in bacon sandwiches on Saturday morning but the Laverstoke bacon had  been frozen and defrosted so really needed using. This week's veg bag had some lovely fresh spinach that we thought would be good raw so decided to combine it with the bacon for Sunday lunch.

All it needed in addition to the grilled bacon was croûtons. These are very easy to make - cube the bread toss in some olive oil, dried herbs and grated Parmesan put in a baking tray and grill for a couple of minutes, stirring occasionally. Don't get distracted though! We dressed the spinach with some truffle flavoured oil that we were given for Christmas but any oil or dressing would be fine. Finally we mixed the bacon and croûtons into the spinach (stalks and all) and enjoyed.

Beautiful chard and the perfect guest

Isn't this chard beautiful? It makes me smile when I open the bag and find some - those colours. This bunch was destined to be part of our Sunday roast along with shoulder of lamb from Waltham Place and roast potatoes.

My perfect guest is my brother-in-law Jon who usually comes round for Sunday dinner and often takes over some of the cooking. This week he offered to prepare the chard. He started by making a roux sauce with flour, butter and a cupful of vegetable stock instead of milk.

 He then chopped the chard - including the stalks - and cooked them gently in the sauce.

Summer Lunch in the garden

We've just got back from a week in the South of France to find it is hotter in Reading. My in-laws have a house in the Cevennes so we go there most summers but went a bit earlier this year to help celebrate my father-in-law's 70th birthday. We did the catering for 40 people ourselves so spent quite a lot of the holiday chopping and mixing but it was worth it.

Although you can still find good local fruit and veg in France particularly in the markets they do seem to have succumbed to the same supermarket culture as us. The nearest town has a Carrefour - France's rival to Tesco - with different brands but essentially the same array of cheap meat products and out of season produce we've grown used to in the UK.

Anyway to get to my lunch in an English garden - we had spaghetti frittata using spinach from the veg bag. I've written about this before but didn't have a photo so this is a good opportunity to show you what it looks like. Simon made it and said I should warn people that it shouldn't have as much spaghetti as this - he guessed how much he needed and then decided he might as well finish off the packet! We had most of it hot on Friday night this is what was left over for Saturday lunch time.

Award winning Berkshire Pasties

Since hearing about Cornish Pasties being awarded Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status I've wanted to have a go at making my own. I got the recipe for the pastry from the Cornish Pasty Association website although I used butter instead of 'cake margarine'. After leaving the pastry to rest for three hours as recommended  it was pliable and easy to work with, and robust -  the pasties survived being wrapped in tin foil and transported to the radio studio in my rucksack.

Instead of the Cornish version of beef, potato, swede and onion I used pork, leek and potato. I was aiming for a Berkshire Pasty but when I thought about it I realised that apart from being made in Berkshire they only Royal County ingredient was the flour (Dove's Farm). I don't think I'll be getting PGI status but they were good so here is the recipe for the filling.

450 gms diced pork From Dews Meadow Farm  (Reading Farmers Market) Oxfordshire

450 gms potato  Tolhurst Organic Produce veg bag - Oxfordshire

200 gms leek (2 med leeks) Tolhurst Organic Produce veg bag - Oxfordshire

Salt & pepper to taste

Teaspoon Dijon mustard mixed into the meat

butter 

Chop the pork, leek and potato finely, I used the food processor for the meat so was almost mince,  then add to rolled out circles of pastry. Layer the vegetables and meat adding plenty of seasoning. Put a knob of butter on top. Then bring the pastry around and crimp together. Cook at 210/Gas mark 6 approx 50 min-1 hour (Fan oven 165 for  45 minutes)

 

This amount made five BIG pasties and they were good hot and cold.

I should just explain about the award. See the Difference were running a competition last week to highlight their project to feed school children in Malawi. You had a chance to win some boxes of cereal if you sent them a photo of your lunch. I sent a photo of my pasty and won a prize!

Parrot Pie

Parrot as in parsnip and carrot - my carnivorous son was disappointed to discover it didn't contain any exotic birds. I got the recipe from the veg box recipes website. It is basically mashed carrots and parsnips in a cheese sauce in a pie. I'd normally make my own pastry but my in-laws have gone to France for a couple of months and we inherited the contents of their freezer including some frozen shortcrust pastry so I used that.

The pie was good, quite sweet as you'd expect. It went well with onion gravy made with the water the carrots and parsnip were boiled in and mashed potatoes.  I have to confess though it is not the most photogenic dish I've made!

Colcannon for St. Patricks day

I know I'm a bit late with posting this one! Celebrations for St. Patrick's day tend to revolve around drinking and many on-line recipes I found were just ways of colouring food green. I wanted to cook something Irish so turned to Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking. Allen runs the Ballymaloe cookery school in Ireland so covers all the classic Irish dishes in her book. I settled on Colcannon which is basically mashed potato and cabbage (bit like unfried bubble and squeak). There are a couple of interesting suggestions in Allen's recipe though. One is to cook the potatoes in their skins and then peel  them before mashing. I do find cooking in their skins retains more of the potatoes' flavour but combined with the suggestion to mash the potatoes while they are still hot led to some interesting manoeuvres involving forks and tea towels and still burning my fingers!

See here for Allen's Colcannon recipe. I used spring greens from my veg bag, stripped from the stalks and finely chopped they worked well. I served it with a vegetable stew so made good use of the veg bag.

Leek and potatoes

Part of my day job is to collect True Food's weekly order of veg from Tolhurst Organic Produce. When I was there last Thursday I commented that that leeks looked good "We've got too many leeks and potatoes" was the reply. So when thinking about what to have as a light Sunday lunch (you know something to keep you going between cooked breakfast and roast dinner) I thought I'd do my bit to use up the leek and potato mountain.

While the potato was in the microwave I finely chopped the leek and gently fried in butter and olive oil. Added black pepper and dried rosemary and once the leek was softened stirred in a tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese and a desert spoon of cream (just because I happened to have some in the fridge!).

Well used Squash

I had a red Kuri squash in last week's veg bag and it made me 2 solo dinners and 2 lunches. Tuesday was stuffed squash. I started off by roasting it, cut in half  and placed  cut side down on a baking tray. I have made the mistake before of trying to cook the squash from scratch with the stuffing in and it doesn't work - the filling is burnt before the squash is cooked - I had to scrape out the stuffing and carry on cooking the squash.

This time I was very organised I made the filling  - puy lentils, finely chopped carrots and leek and  some Za'atar (a Palestinian herb mix) - and roasted the squash the day before. Then when I got in from a meeting on Tuesday evening all I had to do was put them together and turn on the microwave, the perfect ready meal.
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I had some spare filling and left over mashed potato for lunch on Wednesday and then made a risotto with the other half of the roasted squash. Squash is fantastic in risotto, I put it in quite early on as you can see from the photo so that it melted right down into the rice. It had a rich creamy texture and although I had some Parmesan ready it really didn't need it. With spare risotto for lunch on Thursday pretty good value from one squash.

Dinner for one

I've never understood it when people say they can't be bothered to cook for themselves. It does give you a warm glow to cook for other people who enjoy your food but if it is just you then you can have exactly what you want. My family are away for half-term so I have the house and veg bag all to myself.

I went to a conference on food blogging at Msmarmitelovers underground restaurant on Saturday. It was fun and inspirational, tips on writing in general as well as increasing the readership of your blog. I'm not sure if I can be bothered with all the search engine optimisation stuff but interacting with other food bloggers was something they suggested that sounded like more fun. With that in mind I checked out the updates of my favourite blogs and found that Dinner Diary's latest post was breaded veal. I'd just got a rose veal escallop out of the freezer so I left a comment on their blog and started planning my dinner for one.

To go with the Veal Milanese I had beetroot boiled and then sliced up and fried in butter with a sliced apple until the apple was soft. The apple was one I found in the bottom of my fridge and I think it would have been better with one that wasn't past its best but they worked well together. I also had potato mashed with some chopped cooked leeks which would definitely not have gone down well with certain members of my family but was devoured appreciatively by my discerning audience of one.

Is organic food elitist?

Just got back from the Soil Association and one of the issues that came up repeatedly was that organic food is perceived to be expensive and only for the middle-classes. There are companies whose business model relies on getting a premium price for their organic produce - above and beyond any extra expenses in growing organically like extra labour. On the other hand there are lots of people working hard running community projects aiming to make organic food available to more people. 

It doesn't feel elitist when I get a bag full of muddy carrots and potatoes but picking up my veg bag on Friday morning it seemed like a good opportunity to compare the prices of what was in my bag. The first column is Sainsbury's on-line price for standard loose veg, where available, or where packaged adjusted to get the same weight. The second column is the price for organic from the supermarkets, I had to shop around different on-line supermarkets to get the whole bag. I pay £9.25 for my bag.

500g carrots                        37p        72p           

575g parsnips                      89p         1.69

1.5kg potatoes                    £1.19       £1.94

125g mushrooms                54p          50p

400g leeks                        £1.00         £1.65

small cabbage                      76p         79.5

punnet of raddish & alfalfa sprouts  - not available at any of the major on-line supermarkets £1.59 from Abel & Cole (organic)

500g Jerusalem artichokes - not available from any of the major on-line supermarkets £1.81 from Abel & Cole (organic) BUT £4.10 from www.finefoodspecialist.co.uk and it doesn't say they are organic, that is £8.20/kg - you can buy them at True Food Co-op for £2.95/kg a bargain!

The contents of my bag worked out at £4.75 for the things I could compare for standard supermarket produce or £7.30 for supermarket organic. If I add in the Abel & Cole prices for the two things not available at the supermarkets my veg bag is  £1.10 more than the non-organic produce and £1.45 less than organic supermarket produce. 

So supermarkets do put a large premium on organic food except for cabbages and when I looked the organic mushrooms were actually cheaper as they were on special offer. My veg bag is a cheaper way to buy organic vegetables as is True Food Co-op (and presumably other community enterprises.) It is also easier as I had to shop around to find organic versions of all my veg and as I said some wasn't available at all. So is organic food elitist? I don't think it needs to be although it is in some people's interests to maintain a high price. Perhaps the question should be 'are Jerusalem artichokes elitist?' The supermarkets certainly seem to think so.  

 

Spicy bean sprouts

I've mentioned the sprouted seeds before. They come in the veg  bag when there is not enough farm produce to make up the value of the veg bag. They come from Sky Sprouts in Devon and are a mixture of sprouted Adzuki beans, Mung beans and Chickpeas. 

I used a handful of last weeks tub in a sandwich (with smoked aubergine dip - yum!) and the rest in this spicy lunch on Sunday. 

This recipe includes grated fresh ginger. I keep pieces of whole ginger in the freezer and grate it straight from the freezer when I need it. I would have used fresh chilli but as I didn't have any I used some Very Lazy red chillies, flakes of dried chilli in white wine vinegar - very useful.  

ingredients

serves 2

half an onion, chopped

teaspoon of cumin seeds crushed in a pestle & mortar

1/2 teaspoon grated ginger

teaspoon of Very Lazy chilli

200g mixed sprouted beans

shredded savoy cabbage heart (or whatever green stuff you have)

Fry the onion for 5 mins , and then add the cumin, ginger and chilli and cook for a further minute. Add the beans and cabbage and cook until heated through.   

Jerusalem artichokes

I've been inspired to resurrect this blog with the arrival of Jerusalem Artichokes in my veg bag. They are not artichokes and not from Jerusalem but they are delicious and good for you. These ones were relatively smooth, sometimes Jerusalem Artichokes can be very knobbly.

Some people are put off using them because they think they are going to be a lot of bother to peel. Well don't peel them! We soaked these in water for half an hour to get the worst of the mud off and then boiled them in their skins. We served them (still in their skins) with a cheese sauce and chicken casserole. the BBC food website has a section on using Jerusalem Artichokes.  

Jerusalem Artichokes are supposed to give you wind but I have to say I didn't notice any ill effects!