Grilled portobello mushroom, watercress and sprouted seed salad and garlicky croutons

This week I have been rubbish at updating, and cooking. For saturday lunch this was lovely. I'm a big fan of mushrooms, especially portobello, and I think they go really well with goats cheese. I would have liked to add some toasted walnuts to this too, but the cupboard was bare!

A large mushroom, one per person
French goats cheese, the kind you can slice in a circle
Watercress
Sprouted seeds
Stale bread (I used seeded wholemeal)
a clove of garlic
Some thyme
Olive oil and balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper

It's really easy to make this - just grill the bottom of the mushroom first, then add some thyme, salt and pepper to the top and the circle of goats cheese. Grill under a relatively high heat until the cheese is bubbling and golden brown.

The croutons I made by just frying up a little bit of garlic in olive oil, then adding the bread which i'd torn into quite chunky pieces. Cook on a lower heat until crisp.

Then just toss the watercress in a little oil and vinegar, add the seeds and sprinkle with the croutons, and serve the mushroom in the middle.

It's farmhouse breakfast week!

Which I'm really excited about, because breakfast is probably my favourite meal of the day. This morning I made what my good friend, former housemate and brilliant cook Laura (who taught me to make it) calls pottage (but I've also heard called bircher muesli).

You can make it the night before or leave the oats to soak for about half an hour before you eat it. It's really nice and silky, and you can use whatever dried fruits, nuts and seeds you like.

You just need to combine a portion of oats with some dried fruits (I used a mixture of raisins, sultanas and other vine fruits) and soak in enough milk (or apple juice, or a combination) to cover. You can also add a grated apple, or some dried apricots, dates or dried apple. Once that's done, break up some nuts (pecans and walnuts are nice) and sprinkle over some seeds. Then add any extra milk if needed and serve, with a drizzle of honey.

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.

Jerusalem artichoke and roasted garlic houmous

I love houmous. There's something so comforting and wholesome about it. But I hardly ever make it myself. Tonight I was thinking about what I could do with the rest of the jerusalem artichokes - I'd read that they're great pureed, so I thought - why not in houmous? The result was a very wintery, garlicky, nutty houmous. I'm going to have it for my lunch tomorrow with some left over roasted veggies and bread.

If you're not too sure about the flavour of the artichokes and would prefer a more subtle flavour, I'd recommend using one or two. It's really nice though - just experiment with the proportions of garlic, oil and lemon juice until you find the combination you like.

1 400g tin of chickpeas
between 1 and 4 jerusalem artichokes
between 1 and 3 cloves of garlic, skins left on
juice of about half a lemon
olive oil
salt and pepper

Peel and roast the artichokes and garlic cloves in a bit of olive oil. I prefer to do them slowly at about 150-160 degrees for about 40-50 mins to really let the flavour develop. You might want to take the garlic cloves out before this time though, as you don't want them to be too brown; just nicely soft.

Once they've cooled you just need to pop them in a food processor and blitz - add the drained chickpeas and garlic (according to taste) and keep blending. Add a bit of oil (I don't like to use too much because I think it can overpower the flavour, but again it's all down to taste), the lemon juice and maybe a bit of water to ensure the consistency isn't too dry. Season and taste - add a bit more of whatever you need and blitz again until it's the consistency you like. Very easy!

Onion, fennel and thyme pasty (with a bit of Jerusalem artichoke for good measure)

This was our Sunday tea this evening. It’s not actually a pasty at all but a tart really, however the cynics in my house couldn’t get past the poshness of a tart (my cooking is anything but posh) so we adopted pasty as a not-too-threatening name.

It’d be nice without the fennel too if you can’t get it, but when roasted it adds a real depth of flavour to the tart and is a little bit more interesting. I really liked the Jerusalem artichoke added – it’s got a lovely nuttiness to it. I roasted it then chopped it into smaller bits when it was really soft and caramelised.

You could also make individual tarts, use shortcrust pastry instead of puff (I’d like to try it with a wholemeal shortcrust), perhaps add some tapenade or sundried tomato paste, use a different kind of cheese (maybe try blue cheese – this would really work with the nuts and fennel, or perhaps feta if you want something a bit lighter and zingier) or even no cheese at all. This made 3 big portions (enough for two hungry people for dinner and some for lunch the next day).

Half a pack of puff pastry
2 onions (I used red, could use a combination of different kinds)
a bulb of fennel
about 3-4 knobs of jerusalem artichoke
olive oil
thyme (fresh or dried – I only had dried)
a handful of walnuts, broken into pieces
soft creamy goats cheese (or alternative as above) – as much as you like

Once you’ve roasted the veggies this is just an assembly job. I roasted the onions, fennel (both sliced fairly thickly) and artichoke (whole knobs, peeled) with some thyme, seasoning and olive oil for just under an hour at about 160 degrees.

Once that’s done, just roll out the pastry and draw a box around the outside with a knife (this is so the sides puff up nicely) and arrange the veggies (chop the artichoke into smaller pieces first, making sure you eat plenty of it while you’re doing so), nuts and cheese within the border. Then it just needs a little drizzle of olive oil and a twist of pepper and a hot oven for about 25-30 mins (my fan oven was about 185 degrees).

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.

Welcome to the veggie box veggie!

So, here we go!

This blog is part of a personal desire to eat more organic food, understand more about seasonality and become more sustainable in my eating habits. I’ve always been obsessed with food, cooking, experimenting and devising new recipes and more recently I’ve become concerned with the ways that our buying and consuming habits are having an affect on a wide array of things: from the dearth of independent shops in our town centres as the supermarkets take over; the monopoly the supermarkets have over many farmers’ livelihoods; the loss of understanding of what is actually in season; the change in what we actually look for when buying fruit and vegetables (nice colour and shape instead of actual taste, smell etc).

I think this country is heading towards (if not already reached) a food crisis. On the surface of it, we’ve got greater choice than ever before, more convenience and I would argue more people are on the road to understanding about food and cooking thanks to chefs like Jamie Oliver trying to appeal to a wider demographic. But underneath it all, we’ve lost our connection to the delicious food that we grow in our own country, we’re eating more and more processed food because we’re strapped for time, we’re spending less and less of our income on food, and what fresh food we are actually eating is tasting less and less like it’s meant to (i.e. of something, not just water!).

But anyway, enough of that. After reading various books on food waste and what actually happens behind the scenes to get the food into our supermarkets (Not on the label by Felicity Lawrence is a great read and highlighted many things to me), I decided that I wanted to do something about it. As well as learning more about these issues as I go, I’ve decided to start buying all my fruit and veg from a local box scheme, and to try and use the things I get as creatively as possible to get the very best from the flavours and textures of the foods. However, I don’t make things that are complicated or that require any huge level of cooking skill. This blog is going to document that veggie box journey, and even if I manage to persuade one person to try the same thing, I think it’ll be worthwhile.


About me

I’m a twenty something from Bedfordshire and I work for a charity in London. I’m a vegetarian (don’t be scared meat eaters! There will be ways to add meat to the things I make on here). I eat a lot of fruit and veg, but I try to avoid too much processed veggie alternatives like Quorn because I find it a bit disturbing that you’d give up meat only to eat something that’s meant to look like it.

I’m no chef but I’m obsessed with cooking, and I like to think that I’m ok at it. My style is very much experimentation – I don’t really stick to recipes and when I cook I throw things in to see what works. I like to use herbs and spices and I like to season things well. Tasty food to me is something that’s had a lot of love put into making it. my ideas won’t be recipes as such, but I’ll give some kind of guidelines to say what I did and what might work instead if you can’t get the things I had. I’m not very good at being exact or measuring but I’ll try to present them in a relatively user friendly way!

Why organic?

I want to eat more organic produce because:
• It’s grown in ways that are better for the environment and respects biodiversity, protecting the soil in ways that intensive farming doesn’t
• Doesn’t pollute – no fertilisers, pesticides or other nasties
• It’s meant to taste better
• It’s better for animals too. Organic rules on producing milk and eggs are much kinder to the animals (in terms of being able to roam free, outside where animals should be)
• The veggies and fruits aren’t subject to such strict and silly rules on what can and can’t be sold. There’s an incredible amount of waste generated by this every year, with some farmers losing up to 60% of their crop because of ‘grading out’. I’d rather eat nobbly vegetables – I don’t care what they look like – it’s taste that’s important to me
• The fruit and veg smells of something – have you ever tried to smell produce in a supermarket? Because it’s underripe when it’s picked so it can be transported thousands of miles to be with us, it quite often smells of nothing. Which I find weird.

I’m using a weekly veggie box to do this because:
• It’s better value than buying the same products organically at the supermarket (I am spending about £35 on average for a large vegetable box, a fruit box and sometimes a salad bag or some organic milk. This feeds four of us for a week.)
• It’s better for the environment because there’s less (sometimes no) plastic packaging
• Getting things as locally as possible ensures that they haven't travelled half way across the world by plane to get to you. Makes things fresher too.
• A lovely friendly man brings it to my house every week on his rounds, for free
• I don't want the supermarkets to take over and make our country lose its individuality, difference and charm
• And another nice outcome (as my mum said the other day), is because you scrub the mud off the carrots and potatoes, it almost feels like you could have grown them yourself – wonderfully cathartic.