Egg and chips anyone?

Here's a new take on egg and chips using the delightful Jersey Royals that are around at the moment. Crispy and nutty, with lovely runny poached eggs - great for brunch.

This could also be good with a few sundried tomatoes (not too many though as they're quite strong), some rosemary on the spuds or perhaps a bit of garlic.

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.

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.