More beetroot...this time a salad

An easy weeknight dinner this one, which I knocked up using some of the same dressing from the pink fritters that I made the other night. It's substantial and comforting - sweet and a little spicy.

To serve three or four, peel and chop up some beetroot into half moons, and peel some baby shallots (or use onions but cut smaller). Toss with cumin seeds, olive oil, salt and pepper and roast until done in a fairly hot oven - about 25-30 mins.

While that's going on, making the dressing. See the pink fritters recipe for how. Open a couple of cans of chickpeas, drain and tip into a bowl with a handful of sultanas, a handful of toasted pumpkin seeds, some chopped parsley and the dressing.

Plate up with some nice salad leaves, adding the onions and beetroot. Top with some natural yogurt that's been slighty salted and had some more chopped parsley stirred through.

Purple fritters with spicy salad

With my beetroot this week, I was going to make some roasted root salad, with spices, fruit and nuts. But instead I got happy with my grater and made up these pinky purple fritters, which were super yum and great with just a simple salad with a citrussy-spicy dressing. Recommended for meat eaters! As an extra treat, we griddled the extra halloumi from the pack and alternated grilled halloumi and fritters in a tasty pile of loveliness. This makes enough for two.

Fritters:
4-5 beets (little ones), peeled and grated
1 small onion, chopped little
1/4 of a pack of halloumi, grated
a teaspoon or so of cumin seeds, toasted in a dry pan
a handful of finely chopped parsley (or coriander would be great)
One egg, beaten
A tablespoon of chickpea (gram) flour
Salt and pepper to season

Salad:
Some nice seasonal leaves
A handful of whatever seeds or nut you have (pumpkin, sunflower, walnuts, cashews, sesame), toasted in a dry pan
A handful of dried fruits - I used cranberries

Dressing:
Juice from a couple of clementines (or one larger orange)
Juice of one lemon
Sugar and honey, to taste
Teaspoon or so of white wine vinegar
Harissa paste, to taste (I used about a teaspoon)
Oil - whatever you fancy. I used walnut oil for extra rich nuttiness

First, make the dressing. Put the citrus juices in a pan and add the sugar and honey, then heat for a while until it starts to bubble and reduce a little to form more of a syruppy consistency. Then remove from the heat and stir in the other ingredients and season, tasting and adding extra if necessary. Set aside.

Then mix together the dry fritter ingredients in a bowl, and gradually add the egg, just enough so it binds together. Heat a large frying pan so it's really hot then add oil. Dollop in spoonfuls of the mixture to sizzle away, gently pressing them down so they form flat fritters. They'll need maybe 2-3 minutes on each side, that's all.

While they're cooking, dress and arrange the leaves on your plates, sprinkling over the nuts, seeds and fruit is using. Then stack up the fritters on top (with the sliced and griddled remaining halloumi, if using), and tuck in!

Butternut and butterbean dip

Ok, so I've been doing a lot of recipes with butternut squash lately (see here) but this should be the last one for quite a while, as I've just about finished off the massive glut we had for a few weeks.

Just a simple spiced dip for lunch, a kind of squash and bean houmous (more houmous here if you don't fancy squash), it was really great with some celery and toast. It's not a recipe but more of a houmous variation. It tasted great so I figured I'd post it.

Spicy squash bean burgers

It’s barbecue time here in the UK! We’ve had gorgeous weather for the past week or two which has coincided really nicely with the easter bank holidays.

For a squashy twist on the run of the mill beanburger veggies are so often served up, try these. They’re really easy, tasty, and freeze well, so you can whip one and whack it on the grill if needed in an emergency (!). Load them up in freshly baked baps with homemade guacamole (or perhaps some coleslaw made with red cabbage and fennel) and enjoy alfresco eating.

Makes 4 large burgers

Butternut squash gnocchi with spinach and herb pesto

Until I made this, I’d never attempted gnocchi before, but I’d done quite a bit of reading up on how to make them super tender and light to avoid the out of the packet rubberiness. This article from Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks is fantastic. She talks about her best gnocchi recipe having no egg in at all, which I wasn’t quite ready for! However, I took her advice and I did use the bare minimum of egg to bind the dough. When you’ve made it up, it’ll be quite tacky (I think this is to do with the water content of the squash). At this point I was very scared – should I add more flour and risk them becoming chewy? But I pressed on, ignoring my instincts and worries, and the result was light and delicious.

I had quite a bit of spinach to use up so made some herb pesto warmed up with a hint of chilli, which paired perfectly with the squash. I used thyme and sage as I think they go really well with the nutty squash flavour, but you could use whatever herbs you’ve got.

Squash falafel (like Leon's)

I was so excited when I found this recipe on 101 cookbooks for the lovely squishy squashy baked sweet potato falafel made famous by Leon. Since discovering it, I've made it in the sweet potato version, but also experimented a bit with peas and feta in the summer, and today, with roasted squash.

They're fantastically light falafel (not as you know them), healthy because they're baked, and have a wonderful flavour. They also freeze really well - pop them in when you've shaped them, and cook as you need from frozen. As with an awful lots of the things I'm cooking lately, you begin by slowly roasting the squash to develop its flavour.

My various-root borek

I LOVE Turkish, Greek and middle eastern food. I have a friend who's half Greek and one who's Turkish so I get to learn brilliant things about this wonderful cuisine, as well as being fed olives for breakfast and things like that.

I first made these borek stlye parcels a few Christmas Eves ago for a drinks gathering and they went down a storm, especially with my mum's Thai friend who is a fantastic cook. The great thing about them is that you can make them with pretty much anything you've got - they'd work with pretty much any root veg I think, roasted with cumin, cinammon or a bit of chilli, you can add honey, cheese, herbs, any nuts or seeds you like, perhaps some green veg (spinach would be good). They also freeze really well - I usually make a big batch then freeze and just cook up what I need.

They're really nice served as part of a mezze style spread. I made some tzatziki (grated cucumber, add 1/2-1 clove of garlic, greek yogurt - the 0% stuff is fine - then herbs - dried at this time of year is fine, I used dill and mint), a strange sprouted seed salad which turned our suprisingly well (sprouted seeds, chopped artichokes and sundried tomatoes from jars, cucumber and feta), some houmous and pita. The only thing missing was the Turkish bread, which I absolutely adore. I used to buy this all the time when I was living in London, but sadly haven't managed to find it anywhere up here yet!

A week of coloured soups...

Soup making isn't rocket science - just bung some stuff in a pan and simmer it for a bit then either eat with lumps and all or blitz - but still, there's probably nothing more comforting than a warm bowl of soup.

This week, I've had almost a rainbow of soups - bright pink beetroot and celeriac, deep grey mushroom, and a 'using up' golden orange rooty soup. I think beetroot and celeriac work really well together, and the soup really has the most wonderful colour that the photo doesn't do justice. I went travelling to Russia in the latter part of last year, and I found this soup really took me back to the beetroot and sour cream cuisine (!) that we encountered there. Here's the recipe.

Roots n beans

Keeping it really simple with this one - roasted roots with honey, orange zest and rosemary, tossed with a few cherry tomatoes and butter beans. It was delicious and filling, sweet and creamy, and very orange!

Simply roast the root veggies for about half an hour to 40 minutes, drizzled with olive oil, a bit of honey, some orange zest and some rosemary. For the last 5 minutes of cooking, add the drained beans and some halved cherry tomatoes. Serve with extra olive oil, a dusting of chilli flakes and a blob of creme fraiche for extra creaminess.

Squash stuffed with pearl barley, mushrooms and feta

As I'm sure many other veggies have come across, there's an awful lot of rubbish veggie options consisting of some sort of stuffed vegetable, usually involving peppers and cous cous. However, I really love stuffed squash (and peppers actually - just not if they taste of nothing at all), and you can pretty much add anything you like.

I hadn't tried stuffing squash with pearl barley before, but I think it works really well, especially with the mushrooms. I like to toast the seeds because I think it helps to release their flavour into the mixture, and also prevents them from becoming soggy and retains their nice crunchiness.

How many it will feed depends on the size of your squash - mine already had the top missing as it was used for something earlier in the week, but usually half a squash is fine for one person. This feeds one.

Half a butternut squash, seeds scooped out
40g pearl barley, simmered for about 40 mins and drained
1 small onion, chopped
4-5 chestnut mushrooms, chopped into small pieces
Thyme
A few chilli flakes (if you like - I added a few just for a bit of warmth)
Maybe a tablespoon each of sunflower and pumpkin seeds
Feta cheese, to taste

Pop the squash on a baking tray (you could cut off a tiny bit of the bottom to level out so it stands up ok) with a little olive oil and put it in the oven at about 170-180 while you make the filling.

Sweat the onion for about 5 mins then add the mushrooms. Keep cooking until they're slightly brown, maybe 5-10 mins. Move them to the side of the pan and add the seeds and let them pop for a couple of mins. Then turn off the heat and add some thyme (I used dried which works fine - about a teaspoon?), chilli flakes if using and season well. Then let it cool for a couple of mins and add the drained pearl barley and crumble in some feta. Mix well.

All you need to do now is get your squash out of the oven and stuff it with the mixture, then put it back in the oven for about 20 mins - depending on the fierceness of your oven you might need a bit of foil to cover - just keep an eye on it. The squash should take about 50 mins-an hour to cook in total, but this depends on the size so best thing to do is just test it with a sharp knife to see if it's nice and soft.

Silky celeriac soup

Courtesy of my mum. A wonderfully silky textured, nutty and deep flavoured soup, with a nice freshness from the lemon – a delight to return home to after a hard day at work! I would really urge you to try celeriac – although it looks ugly it’s delicious, and in a soup the flavour is really mellow and warming. This served four with extra for two more for lunch.

The remaining ¾ of the large celeriac
2 potatoes
1 small onion
veg stock (cook the veg in about a litre-ish or enough to cover and add more if needed)
splash of milk (maybe a couple of tablespoons – all to taste)
squeeze of lemon juice (same as above – start with about a tablespoon and add more if you like)

Finely chop the onion and sweat this in olive oil for about 10 mins in a pan. Add the cubed potatoes and celeriac and stir for a couple of mins. Then add the stock, and simmer for about 20 mins or until the veg is soft. Puree in a liquidiser or with a hand blender until really smooth. Add a splash of milk for extra creaminess, and a little squeeze of lemon juice to taste. You can also add more stock if you prefer the soup thinner. Serve with crusty bread and plenty of pepper sprinkled on top.

Crushed roasted carrots with pine nuts, raisins and goats cheese

This was really nice for lunch served with warm, crusty wholemeal bread. Serves 1 but you could scale up for more, or serve with other salads and bread. Might also be nice sprinkled with some flat leaf parsely (I didn't have any.)



2 carrots
handful pine nuts (toasted in a dry frying pan)
a few raisins
tsp or so cumin seeds
juice of a small orange (I squashed a Clementine and ate the rest)
about a tsp clear honey
a few blobs of nice soft, mild goats cheese

to start I scrubbed and chopped the carrots – I cut them down the middle lengthways and in half. Then seasoned and roasted them in a bit of olive oil for about 50 mins or so at 170 degrees C.

the dressing is pretty easy. I toasted the cumin seeds then crushed them. I mixed the honey and the orange juice, and added the raisins to soak in there to plump them up a bit while the carrots were roasting. I added the olive oil that the carrots had been roasting in to this at the end, and plenty of black pepper.

When the carrots were done I squashed them lightly with a fork, and poured the dressing over. Then sprinkled with the pine nuts and added a bit of goats cheese. Yum!

Bashed roots with sausages and an onion, apple and cider sauce

My first veggie box meal!

Now this was super tasty. The sauce is kind of syrupy in texture and really brings the whole meal together – it’s almost like a warm liquidy chutney. This is lovely comfort food.

Mash/bash
Some celeriac (I used a quarter of quite a big one for 4 people)
A swede
Potato (enough to feed as many as you’ve got – I used about 3 for 4 people)
(could also be nice with other roots – parsnips, carrots, squash)
knob of butter
lots of salt and pepper
might also be good with a bit of mustard stirred in according to taste – I didn’t try this tho

Scrub, peel and chop the roots, then pop them into a saucepan of water, bring to the boil and simmer until done (I think 15-20 mins but a knife is the best indicator!) Drain, season and mash to the texture you like it. I like it quite lumpy, so you still get little pieces of different veg – you might get a nice celeriac mouthful, yum! Add a bit of butter for smoothness – you could also add a bit of milk if you wanted, or leave both out.

Sauce
1 onion finely sliced
a couple of big cloves of garlic, finely sliced
a couple of sprigs of rosemary, finely chopped
half to one apple, peeled and sliced into little bits (it will cook down a little bit so don’t worry too much about it)
a bottle of cider
sprinkling of sugar

To make this I sweated the onions on a low-ish heat for about 15 minutes in a pan with a bit of sugar, then added the garlic and apple for about 5-10 mins. After that I added the rosemary and the bottle of cider, and simmered and reduced it until it was syrupy.

I served these up with some veggie sausages (good for adapting for meat eaters too!) and some steamed cabbage sprinkled with a little salt after cooking.