Turnip for the books

In my bathroom there is a tub of something called 'Pineapple Body Souffle'. The directions for use state that one should smother oneself in it from head to toe. (I hope I need hardly state that it wasn't me that bought it.) There is also a tube of something that claims to be a 'shower smoothie' which is said to contain strawberry, raspberry and pomegranate. 

These items got me intrigued. Extensive further research (two minutes on Google) has revealed the following perfectly edible items appearing in cosmetic products:

Coconut
Almond
Lime
Elderflower
Mango
Satsuma
Lemon
Fennel
Haddock
Avocado
Olive
Ginger
Banana

Alright, I was joking about the haddock, but still. In the midst of an imminent global food crisis, cosmetics companies insist on putting food into stuff that, instead of eating, we rub all over ourselves! And for non-recreational purposes! This is crazy! I'm frankly amazed that Coldplay haven't done something about it. 

Excuse my rant, but I think this list is interesting because turnip doesn't appear in it. Indeed, I reckon any cosmetic product that contained turnip would struggle in terms of worldwide sales. I blame the name. 'Turnip'. Unlike purple sprouting broccoli, it does not inspire sonnetry. Nor is it any more exciting in other languages. In French: navet. German: Rübe. Spanish: nabo. Portuguese: nabo. Danish: majroe. Gujarati: સલગમ (નો છોડ). Italian: rapa. Swedish: turnip. No wonder it struggles to get attention. 

In the classic 'Withnail & I', the late, great Richard Griffiths delivers the immortal line 'There is, you'll agree, a certain je ne ses quoi oh-so-very-special about a firm, young, carrot.' And I think the same might be said of a turnip. A firm, young, turnip is a very pretty thing, with its blush of pink. However, the thing that turned up in my bag this week was green, and enormous. It had 'curry' written all over it, in big letters. 

Happily, Google yields 965,000 results for a search on turnip (or 'shalgam') curry. Compared with 26,000,000 for chicken curry, it's still not bad. I looked at a few of them, then ignored all of them and went about it thusly:

Turnip Curry

1 turnip the size, shape and colour of a swede (just a coincidence I'm sure), cubed
Oil of your choice (not olive or toasted sesame!)
2 medium onions, sliced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
similar amount finely chopped ginger
a couple of mild chillies, seeds removed
three medium fresh tomatoes or half a tin of chopped
half a tin of coconut milk
Tablespoon coriander seeds
Tablespoon cumin seeds
Teaspoon fennel seeds
Teaspoon turmeric powder
Handful fresh coriander leaves, chopped

Get the onions frying very gently, with a lid on, for a good 45 minutes, stirring very occasionally. By the end they should be almost a puree, golden brown and very sweet but not burnt. Meanwhile, boil the swede turnip until just soft. 

Add the garlic, ginger and chilli to the onions and cook for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, dry-fry most of the coriander and cumin seeds until toasty, then grind with a pestle and mortar. Add them to the onion mix and cook for a couple more minutes, then add the tomatoes. Continue to cook until I tell you to stop. 

While that's happening, put some oil into another frying pan and heat it up with the rest of the coriander and cumin seeds and the fennel seeds. When nice and hot, add the turnip and fry at a reasonably high heat, turning occasionally until the turnip is a little bit brown in places. Throw in the turmeric and cook for another minute or two. 

By the time the turnip is cooked the tomato will have broken down nicely. Chuck the turnip in with the onions and tomatoes, then pour in the coconut milk and cook for about five minutes. Season well with salt (you'll need more than you think) and a very little pinch of sugar. Throw in the coriander leaves at the last minute. 

Serve with a spice-crusted lamb chop and a pile of rice that you had to reheat having been left over from last-night's dinner. Or with whatever you want. 

This is a mild curry, as I don't want to have to put a toilet roll in the fridge every time I eat something with chilli in it. But of course, if you like a hot curry, the tender, sweet swede turnip will definitely handle it. 

And if you don't like eating the curry you can always use it as a fragrant exfoliating body scrub!

On purple sprouting broccoli

A promise is a promise, and I'll come to that in due course. 

First though, I wanted to evangelise about this week's bag. This week's (ahem!) standard-no-potatoes bag. Yeah, you heard me. I've upgraded! No more standard bag envy for me! No more little bag blues. I've disdainfully waved farewell to the proletariat and am now rubbing ermine-draped shoulders with the elitist bourgeoisie. Feel free to throw rotten vegetables at me if you wish, but you won't find any of those in your bags this week because everything is fresh, fresh, fresh! 

To start with I've got more parsnips than I can shake a carrot at, and they're lovely-looking things, slender and pale like David Bowie in 1972. Or like David Bowie now, to be honest. They might become a zingy soup with apples or pears, or else they'll be grated and dressed  with rapeseed oil, chopped capers and grainy mustard as a sort of multi-purpose raw side dish. The carrots and onions are reliably there, as always, ready to lend their sweet notes to a stock or casserole. I might do a curry, for which the onions will of course be invaluable. Haven't done a curry for a while. And it is curry weather.  

There are lots of green leaves this week, which makes me very happy. The stir-fry bags from Calabaza have been a constant source of joy over the winter. Fried in oil of your choice with a bit of garlic and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end (and a good grind of black pepper), you can swizzle those mixed leaves around a bowl of pasta or gnocchi and you have a delicious, healthy midweek supper in no time at all. Add a few cubes of feta if you feel the need (but then your supper won't be that healthy anymore. Problem?). By replacing the pasta with noodles, the lemon juice with lime juice and adding a glug of fish sauce you could do the same with the pak choi. 

And there's chard! Get in! Strip the green stuff from the stems, chop the stems and fry them up in butter with some garlic until soft, then chuck in the green stuff and move it around for a minute. Add salt and pepper. Done. Or do as Slater does, and make a gratin out of cream mixed with grain mustard and parmesan. 

I don't know what I'm going to do with the leeks yet, but they're what I consider a 'utility vegetable' as they're so versatile. And I've got a turnip the size of Mansfield - I've never knowingly cooked or eaten a turnip before so that's going to be a voyage of discovery. 

But you haven't come here for all that. You're here because in my last post I promised a sonnet on purple sprouting broccoli if it should appear in our bags again. And of course it did, just last week. So here, too late to be of any actual use to anyone, because you've already cooked and eaten your purple sprouting, is my poem. I don't consider myself to be any sort of poet, by the way. Neither will you in a minute. 

The similarity to the Elizabeth Browning classic only lasts a couple of lines, but I've tried to retain the rhyme scheme. Obviously. So alright then: a sonnet. 14 lines, 10 syllables per line. Them's the rules. Go! 

(Clears throat. Nonchalantly adjusts cravat.)

How do I eat thee? Let me count the ways.

I eat thee to the stem and leaf and tip.

Raw dipped in hummus, to prepare is brief,

But on palate thy flavour lasts for days.

I eat thee as thy sesame oil plays

with garlic and fish sauce on my lip,

And chili and ginger dance on tongue's tip.

Alas, your season ends in saddest Mays.

But what keeps me glad throughout the year?

It's not the thought of baking under cream.

However, clearly that would be a dream.

It's dipping you in box-baked Camembert! 

Yes, I am sorry about rhyming 'year' with 'Camembert'. But Browning seems to have got away with rhyming 'faith' with 'breath'. Slapdash, if you ask me, but that's poets for you.

I leave you with a simple picture of some wonderfully leafy purple sprouting broccoli frying in my pan, just after the black pepper went in by the look of it. I can't tell you when my next post will arrive but I can guarantee one thing: There won't be another blummin' poem. 

Don't know what to call this one...

I've got to wondering recently why clafoutis is always sweet, and in a similar vein, why toad-in-the-hole always involves sausages. These parallel thoughts converged in my mind yesterday when I decided to treat those amazing-looking purple sprouts to the batter-baking treatment. What I ended up with, I now realise, was less a savoury clafoutis or a something-else-in-the-hole, than a quiche without the pastry. More on that later.

First, excuse-time. I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to do a new post. I've been away for a bit. I also had a few evening meetings meaning late returns home and no cooking. There has also been a new Mogwai album (which I'm now familiar enough with to be able to listen to as I write these words). So many distractions! But I'm here now and determined to be a better blogger from now on. (By the way, completely off-topic: Google's blogger system's spellchecker doesn't like the word 'blogger'. How silly is that? Similar to my mobile phone's spellchecker, which questions the word 'snooze' despite the fact that it appears in its own alarm function. Is it just me, or is that really funny?).

I had particularly intended to write about the purple sprouting broccoli a couple of weeks ago; had in fact, written much of the post in my head, it was just a question of typing it up, but I just didn't get around to it. I love that stuff. So much in fact that I was even going to have a go at writing a sonnet, based on Elizabeth Barrett's 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'. If purple sprouting appears in our bags again before the end of the season, I'll do it! 

But this post is about purple sprouts. Here they are:

There can be few more beautiful vegetables to look at. And the fact that I got such a whopping bagful (hope it wasn't just me, Blanche!) meant that I could be a bit experimental as there was enough for two or three dinners. So the idea for the batter-baking presented itself. It may well be that this sort of thing is a common dish in Lithuania or Staffordshire, and I've just not heard of it, but for the purpose of this blog I'll just have to call my savoury clafoutis or quiche without the pastry something dull and descriptive. If anyone can think of a better name for it, feel free to let me know!

Batter-baked purple sprouts

Serves an army

About 25 sprouts (I wasn't counting, as usual)

Knob of butter (plus a bit extra for greasing)

A clove or two of garlic

A fillet or two of anchovy (optional I suppose)

100g grated mature cheddar

3 heaped tablespoons of flour

Three free-range eggs

150ml single cream

250ml milk

Enough grated parmesan to give a thin cover

Cut the bottoms off the sprouts, remove the outer leaves, then slice thinly. Chop the garlic; Put the butter on to melt. Cook the garlic gently in the butter for a couple minutes - don't let it colour. 

Sift the flour into a bowl and add the eggs. Stir them in. It'll look lumpy and disastrous. Do not fear. Whisk in the cream and milk slowly, then speed up a bit until all the lumps are miraculously gone. Finely chop the anchovy and add it to the batter mix along with the melted butter and garlic. Mix in the cheddar. Season with salt and plenty of freshly-ground black pepper.

Scatter the sprouts liberally around a greased tart dish or other suitable container, then pour over the batter. Scatter the parmesan evenly over the top. Put the dish in a pre-heated gas mark 6 oven for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to about gas 4 until the top is lightly browned; a slight wobble in the centre would be ok, perhaps even desirable. 

It will hopefully look not too dissimilar to this:

Serve it in wedges like a quiche. You might even be able to convert stubborn sprout-haters with this! Hot, I think it would make a nifty starter, perhaps served with a rasher of crispy bacon or a poached egg. Cold it is perhaps even better, and would be great for a picnic if only sprout season coincided with picnic season. Happily, I think this treatment would work even better with asparagus, whose season makes it more conducive to being eaten off gingham table cloths stretched over the verdant and gently-rolling contours of Brockwell Park. 

There is swede in this week's bag, something which I'm sure has brought much joy to all of you. I'm quite happy about it, as it means I can do my swede pie again and actually get to eat more of it than 5/6 of a slice, which was all I got last time. I'm also looking forward to Thursday's Jerusalem artichokes. 

Pip pip!

Redeem the Swede!

Well, it isn't going to redeem itself, is it? 

Today was the day that a courageous band of visionaries descended on Herne Hill Market to show the world what can be achieved with a bit of imagination, a bit of gumption, and a lot of swede. 

To explain. The people at Local Greens decided it was time for the humble swede to shed its drab, thrift-shop clothes and learn to be beautiful. So they invited their customers to compete against each other in a bloody battle to the death in a battle to see who could create the most delicious swede dishes. They lined up top food journalist and beard cultivator Jay Rayner to judge our outpourings, on the basis that he would pick dishes that made a virtue of swede. They had warming trays. They were prepared. As it turned out, so were we. 

The breadth of dishes was astonishing, as was the quality. There was chutney. There was a souffle. There was a swede, orange and black pepper quiche. But none of them won. 

Third place went to a swede curry. It was a beautiful colour and very tasty. Second place, a thai swede salad, with swede taking the place of green papaya. That worked a treat, with a lovely warming kick of chilli on what was a very cold day. First place went to 'field and forest pie' - from what I could tell (it had been significantly 'got at' by the time I reached it) a sort of cottage pie with swede taking the place of spuds. Very nice indeed, and if you like the sound of it you can have some at Pullen's in Herne Hill as they will be putting it on their menu.  

Regular readers(!) of this blog will remember I threatened to make swede ice cream; this I did, and I'm pleased to say it earned me the coveted 'Invention prize' - to prove it, here is me being awarded the prize by Mr Rayner himself! He said the ice cream was 'edible'. I really couldn't have asked for more than that. 

Not wanting to be thought of as a one-trick pony, I made a swede pie as well for which the ice cream was intended as a mere accompaniment. Based on a pumpkin pie but with slightly different spicing and swede instead of pumpkin, it went remarkably well considering I've never even eaten pumpkin pie before let alone made one. It all disappeared as well, in the free-for-all that followed the judging, so it must have been alright. I am stuck with rather a lot of ice cream though.

Swede Pie with Swede Ice Cream

Serves loads

3 decent sized swedes

400ml double cream

600ml milk

a few drops of vanilla extract

2 or 3 cloves

2 egg yolks

Half a cup, or thereabouts, of caster sugar. Might've been more. Just keep tasting and adding.

200g plain flour

120g cold butter

3 tbsp caster sugar

Pinch of salt

1 egg yolk, mixed with 3 tbsp cold water

200ml evaporated milk

2 star anise

1 tsp fennel seeds

200g light brown sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

2 eggs

Begin by peeling and chopping the swedes and roasting in a foil parcel with a few knobs of butter for about 90 minutes at gas mark 5. Puree, and allow to cool.

For the ice cream, warm the milk and cream up with the vanilla extract and cloves; meanwhile, give the egg yolks and sugar a good old mix until pale and creamy. Add half the swede to the milk and cream and mix until smooth, then add to the egg and sugar mixture a bit at a time stirring as you go so that the eggs don't scramble. Pour it all into a pan and warm it up gently, stirring all the while, until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Allow to cool, pour into a plastic container and bung it in the freezer. Remove every hour or so and give it a good mix up - do this a few times, then let it freeze. 

For the pie: Get the flour into a bowl and grate the butter in. Rub together with cold fingertips until it's all combined evenly, like breadcrumbs. Add the salt and sugar, then the egg yolk and water a little at a time, cutting it into the mixture with a knife until you can bring it all together with your hands. Line a 26cm tin with it, cover it with cling film and let it sit in the fridge for an hour. Replace the cling film with grease-proof paper and baking beans, and bake for 25 minutes at gas mark 6, removing the beans and paper for the last ten. 

Warm the evaporated milk in a pan with the star anise and fennel seeds. Allow to bubble away gently and infuse until the colour of the milk deepens to ochre. 

To the swede add the sugar, cinnamon, ginger and eggs, then pour in the milk through a sieve. Stir until smooth, pour into the pastry case and bake at gas mark 5 for 40-45 minutes. Allow to cool. Serve at room temperature with a quenelle (or a blob if you prefer) of the ice cream. 

So I reckon the swede has been properly redeemed. The occasion was so good I think it ought to be repeated, but which unfairly sneered-at vegetable would make a suitable subject? 30 people in close proximity all eating Jerusalem artichokes is probably a recipe for disaster...

I'll open the debate with peas, just because it's my personal opinion that they're a complete waste of chlorophyll. Any advance on peas?

Meanwhile, here's a heart-warming photo of lots and lots of people, all getting together to dig the swede.

Sprouts and things

I'm afraid I've been suffering from a distinct lack of imagination with regards to my veggie cooking in recent days. I'm going to blame it on the superior quality of the veg we've been getting. 

Take the cauliflower. There are any number of ways to cook it, and any number of things to season it with, but all I wanted to do with it was make a lovely big puddle of cauliflower puree to dip a pan-fried duck breast into. Pureeing is a good way to use all of the stem as well as the florets, and if you simmer it in milk instead of water it makes a lusciously smooth puree with a fantastic cauliflower flavour. Salt and pepper are the only necessary additions.

Then there was the cavolo nero. Such an amazing vegetable. Open the bag, stick your nose in and smell the minerals! It's a little-known fact that Isambard Kingdon Brunel originally planned to construct the Clifton Suspension Bridge out of cavolo nero, and was only dissuaded when friends and well-wishers suggested it might be a bit floppy. Still, there must be so much iron in there, and it's so flavourful - I really don't feel the need to mess about with it much. It just gets roughly chopped and fried in butter with some finely sliced garlic. A delicious accompaniment to pretty much anything, I reckon. 

But what I really wanted to do with this was post to celebrate the unfairly-maligned Brussels sprout. 

I'll be honest: as a child I hated the things as much as the next fussy eater. I was glad I was only subjected to them on Christmas day. Oddly, the rest of my family seemed to dislike them too, including my grandma, though it was she that chose to put them on the menu. Perhaps it was designed to make us appreciate her lovingly constructed pigs in blankets even more. 

It wasn't until I was into my 20s that I discovered that sprouts needn't be a horribly bitter but otherwise flavourless ball of green mush. I'm now of the opinion that sprouts should never be served whole. They need to be finely sliced, and sautéed either on their own or with some bacon lardons. Or garlic. Or even sliced almonds. Just for a few minutes, until starting to brown in places. If you do that with them, they are absolutely delicious. 

If you really want to go for broke, you can bake your sliced sprouts under a little blanket of cream and cheese until the top is lightly golden and bubbling. Or, if you happened to have been within earshot of legendary food critic Jay Rayner today at the Redeem the Swede competition - as I was! (more of which later) - you might try mixing very finely sliced raw sprouts with anchovy mayonnaise. 

Unfortunately we seem to be at the end of the sprout season for this year. So hopefully you'll remember this photo when they come around again next winter, and remember to slice your sprouts!

Later this evening I will recount events at today's Redeem the Swede competition and publish my award-winning recipe for swede ice cream! 

Simple pleasures

It's been a while, but I thought it worth sharing a few things I've been amusing myself with over the last few days. An apology first though - the camera I was using before was borrowed. My own camera appears to have given up accurately reading light levels, which is a fairly important function, and as a result the machine is effectively useless, and I need a new one. So I don't have any photos of what I cooked. You'll just have to take my word for it. In case you would miss some sort of illustrative photography, here is a picture of a Swede:

Simple pleasure #1: Swede Dauphinoise

Technically I should be practising for the 'Redeem the Swede' competition, which regular readers will remember I have foolishly entered. But I also want to cook stuff that I actually want to eat, and given that you can use a swede for pretty much anything you'd use a spud for, I decided to have a crack at swede dauphinoise. It's easy to do and it turned out very nicely indeed. 

Serves 2

One average sized swede
One clove of garlic
300ml double cream

Quarter the swede then finely slice it. A mandoline would probably be useful for this (the bladed kitchen instrument, not a mandolin, the stringed musical instrument), but I just use a good sharp knife and a technique copied off the telly. Thinly slice the garlic and mix it up with the swede. Start layering the swede garlic mix in an oven tray, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go, but it really doesn't have to be neat. 'Chuck it all in there' would have been just as useful an instruction. Pour the cream over, getting it into all the nooks and crannies and making sure the top is all creamy. 

Pop it into a pre-heated oven at about gas 5 for maybe 45 minutes, I'm really sorry I didn't really pay too much attention to time. The important thing is that the point of a knife goes straight through with no effort and the top is lovely and brown and bubbling. If you wanted you could sprinkle some grated cheese over the top with ten minutes to go. I'm afraid I did. 



Simple pleasure #2: Pumpkin and Fennel Risotto

I once tried a make a pumpkin curry and the pumpkin ended up a bit mushy. It didn't work.  Not wanting to ruin my risotto by accidentally mashing the pumpkin, I decided to make the inevitable mashiness a feature rather than a mistake. Thus:

Serves 2

One quarter of an average sized crown prince squash (aka posh pumpkin)
One head of fennel
One onion
Butter
Olive oil
As many cloves of garlic as you fancy. Me? Oh, lots!
150g arborio rice
Half a cube of chicken or veg stock. If you've got the real thing, all the better
'Italian-style hard cheese' such as parmesan

Finely chop the onion and get it frying in a knob of butter with a drop of olive oil, gently so it doesn't go brown. Let it go for a good 15-20 minutes so it softens and the aroma transforms. Meanwhile, slice the squash fairly thin and put in a pan with just enough water to cover it. Bring it to the boil and then simmer until soft. Remove any fluffy fronds from the fennel and set aside. Halve and thinly slice the rest. Again, that mandoline could come in handy. 

Add the garlic and fennel to the onion and fry for a couple of minutes, then add another knob of butter, followed by the rice. Stir until the rice is coated in oniony buttery loveliness. Pour in the pumpkin along with the water it boiled in and simmer until the water is absorbed. Then add the stock a bit at a time and stir until the pumpkin has melted into everything and the rice and fennel are lovely and soft. Add another knob of butter if you dare, and a good grating of parmesan. Taste then season with salt and pepper. 

Slop it into bowls. Dive in. Nod contentedly. Sleep.  



Simple pleasure #3: Jerusalem Artichoke soup

(In the voice and delivery-style of Greg Wallace from Masterchef): Soup doesn't get easier or smoother or velvety-er than this!

Serves 1 (I was really hungry and it was really nice)

A double handful of Jerusalem artichokes
An onion
Knob of butter
Olive oil
A clove of garlic
Water

Slice the onion. Fry in a knob of butter and dribble of olive oil until your kitchen smells amazing. Add the garlic and the artichokes (which you have peeled and chopped in half). Pour in enough water to cover; bring to the boil and simmer until the artichokes are soft, maybe 20 minutes. Pour the lot into a blender, and blend until smooth. Season to taste. 

You can garnish this soup in the bowl with any number of things; a swirl of cream would be my choice. Or you could sprinkle some crispy bacon bits, croutons, or finely chopped parsley. If you have none of the above, it doesn't matter, it's just a heavenly soup.


This week's bag is bliss, with cavolo nero, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. I'll be sure to write about them, and I'll try and borrow a camera.  

Pip pip!

'The End of the Bag', or, 'I Did it My Way'

I know that many of you will have been doing little else for the last few days than wondering what I did with half a beetroot, a carrot and a few mushrooms, and I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to let you off your tenterhooks. I'm even more sorry to say that my imagination fell short of a satisfying way to put them all on the same plate, as what I really wanted the other evening was a good nourishing roasted root soup, and what I really wanted the evening after was a mushroom and goats' cheese tart. So here you go: The End of the Bag Bonanza Special is here! Two recipes in one post, but only one piccy I'm afraid. No excuses; just sheer laziness. 

Roasted Root Soup

Serves 2 with enough for seconds

Half a massive beetroot

A carrot

Half a swede

Olive oil

An onion

As much finely chopped garlic as you feel necessary or desirable (four cloves for me. Big 'uns, too.)

An inch square piece of ginger, finely chopped

Half a teaspoon of cumin seeds

Half a teaspoon of smoked paprika (quite possibly optional)

Half a chicken stock cube (definitely optional)

Chopped fresh coriander

It was a few days ago but I think that's everything

Chop the veggies into chunks (except the onion) and throw into a baking tray with a glug of olive oil. Roast at gas 6 for 45 minutes or so until pretty much tender. Meanwhile, slice the onion and fry in olive slowly while the other veg is roasting. The secret of a good soup, as with a good curry, is to cook the onions long and slow until they go nice and brown and soft and sweet. I never trust any recipe that says 'saute the onion for two or three minutes until soft'. No! For the onion to weave its magic it needs much longer. 

Add the garlic and ginger to the onions and fry a bit more, then the cumin seeds, cook for a minute, then add the smoked paprika, which I used as I thought it would prevent the beetroot from turning the soup pink. I've got nothing against pink, but I don't necessarily want to eat a pink soup unless it's a Hungarian-style cold cherry soup.

Tip the roasted veggies in and pour in enough water to cover everything. I would recommend adding half a chicken stock cube, unless you're vegetarian. Simmer it for 20-30 minutes to encourage the flavours to develop.

Blend everything together with a hand blender or any other piece of industrial kitchen equipment that is likely to get the job done. It's unlikely you'll need to pass it through a sieve afterwards but you could if it made you feel better. Taste and then adjust the seasoning with some good salt and black pepper. Serve with a blob of sour cream and a sprinkling of chopped fresh coriander. Don't miss out the coriander, it goes really well with it. 

Mushroom & Goats' Cheese Tart

Serves one

A double handful of mushrooms, sliced

A knob of butter

A couple of garlic cloves

A sprinkling of fresh thyme leaves

A couple of tablespoons of double cream. Maybe a bit more. 

A square of shop-bought ready-rolled puff pastry big enough to accommodate the mushrooms with some spare around the side

As much goats' cheese as you want depending on how healthy you want to be

Fry the mushrooms with the garlic in the butter until nice and soft and tasty-looking. Add the thyme and cream and cook for a minute until the mixture is amalgamated and you just want to dive in straight away and eat it from the pan. Don't do that though. Spread the mushrooms out onto the pastry and score a little line in the pastry around the edge of the mushrooms. I really don't know if this is necessary but in my head it tells the pastry under the mushrooms to sit still and the pastry on the outside to get lovely and puffy. Top with an unhealthy amount of goats' cheese and bake for 20 minutes or so until the cheese has melted and the pastry is golden and crispy. Ok; now you can eat it.

And that's how I used the veg that turned up in my Local Greens bag. It's all gone. Luckily I picked up another one on Thursday which is full of delightful things like celeriac and sprouts.  

The important thing is (and I hope you'll forgive the capitals but I think it is really important): NOTHING WAS WASTED. Veg bags reduce food waste because the producers know how much to harvest because the bag people know how much to order, and the customers know what they're getting and can plan in advance. And the bags are good value, I think, when compared to other retailers, and the veg is of outstanding quality. So if you don't already subscribe to a weekly veg scheme, please do; and if you do, please get all your friends to do the same. Baby steps can change the world if everyone takes them. 

This blog is now sort of redundant as it has done what it set out to do - to chart a (bit more than) a week in the life of a Local Greens bag. But it's been fun, and I hope it will be useful if only to me to write my recipes down if I think I've made something nice, so I can refer to them in future. So this isn't necessarily the end. Just the end of this post. Maybe. In fact yes, this is definitely the end of this post. Now. 

Not offal but not brilliant either

Just a fairly quick post today - should have done it yesterday but lacked enthusiasm as my dinner didn't live up to expectations!

Got some beef marrow bones for a bargain price from a lovely butcher. Thought I'd have a go at deep frying the marrow in breadcrumbs, like I've seen someone do on t'telly. Got the marrow out (and made lovely stock with the bones - see beef wellington entry), then soaked in in salty water for about 48 hours, rinsing and changing the water regularly. Boiled them up briefly then popped them in the freezer to firm up. 

When ready to go, I did the usual flour, egg and breadcrumb coating, and deep fried them for about five minutes. I definitely didn't season them enough, which was the main problem, and a sprinkling of salt at the end didn't help. Perhaps the original brine should have been stronger. All in all it was a bit odd. 

No matter, the mashed potato was good, you can always rely on mashed potato. There was a little pile of spinach, also good. And I chopped a Local Greens carrot into long thin strips, just covered with water and boiled it up for a couple minutes, fried up a chopped clove of garlic and a few cumin seeds in olive oil and used that to dress the carrots, plus some capers and a bit of caper vinegar which was intended to cut through the richness of the offally nuggets. It did, just about. I poured the leftover gravy from the previous night onto the spuds. On the whole I think the dish looked better than it tasted. Although that's possibly harsh as everything apart from the bone marrow was lovely. 

I'm unlikely to cook tonight as I've got a meeting at 7.30 (engaging communities again) and will probably be home quite late so tomorrow night I'll be working out how to use up the last bits of the bag: I've got one carrot, half a beetroot and a few mushrooms left. All on the same plate? Maybe!

Beef Wellington

No I haven't gone up in the world, I haven't bought a massive lump of beef fillet and I haven't had a very posh dinner party. A few months ago I was in M&S and came across a pack of two 'flat iron steaks' which they were offering for a measly £4. "What are these?", I asked my phone's browser, and read that this was a 'new' cut of beef that had been 'discovered' by researchers at universities in Nebraska and Florida. General consensus on the web was that they're tender like fillet and tasty like rump. Obviously I bought a pack and tried them out. They were amazing! As good a steak as any I've had from the more traditional prime steak cuts. And you can still get two for £4! Sainsbury's have also just cottoned on, selling packs that work out at £9.99 a kilo. The Sainsbury's ones don't look quite as good as the M&S ones, lacking the distinctive marbling and clearly not aged for as long, but it was to Sainsbury's that I had to turn for my flat irons this weekend as there were none in M&S. If lots of people are catching on and buying these steaks it leads me to suspect they might not stay this cheap for long. But only time will tell.

The fairly uniform thickness and rectangular shape of these steaks got me thinking that they'd be good for making little individual beef wellingtons. I'd never even eaten a wellington before, let alone cooked one, so when I gave it a whirl on New Year's Day it was quite an occasion. It went so well that I thought you might enjoy having a go yourself, so I made them again yesterday for t'blog. Two beef wellingtons for less than a tenner, anyone?

Sorry I forgot to take a photo until I was some considerable way into it! 

Beef Wellington

Serves 2 (extremely generously)

2 flat iron steaks
1 or 2 dried morels, or a couple of tablespoons of dried porcini mushrooms
A shallot
A clove of garlic
4 or five white mushrooms from your Local Greens bag
Butter
A teaspoon of whole grain mustard
A dash of red wine
2-3 tablespoons of double cream
A little oil or lard
150g baby spinach
1x375g pack of ready rolled puff pastry
An egg

For the gravy:

Beef bones
An onion
Half a carrot
1-2 teaspoons of plain flour
A dash of red wine

Begin by getting those beef bones into the oven. You're going to make a stock, but you want to roast the bones first to get maximum flavour out of them. Roast for about 45 minutes at gas mark 6, turning once or twice. Then put them into a pan with the onion and carrot, just cover with water and put on to boil. Simmer for an hour or two (or longer if you've got the time), then remove the bones and veg and boil the stock hard for as long as it takes to reduce it down to about half a pint. Oh, and don't wash the roasting tin yet. 

In a bowl pour boiling water over the dried mushrooms (just enough to cover them, plus a touch more) and leave to hydrate for half an hour. When you remove the mushrooms, squeeze as much stock as you can out of them back into the bowl. Finely chop the shallot and cook gently in a little butter until softening and becoming golden. Finely chop both sets of mushrooms (and I mean really finely) and add to the shallot with the garlic, also finely chopped. Cook gently for as long as you like - you can't overcook a mushroom. Add the mushroom stock to the pan and turn the heat up to reduce it down until it's almost disappeared. Add a dash of red wine and allow that to reduce also. Add the cream and stir to combine and thicken. Finish by adding the mustard and seasoning well with salt and black pepper. You have just made a duxelles. 

Get a frying pan really hot with some oil or lard (not butter as it will burn) and sear the steaks until good and brown - just a minute each side. The pan needs to be extremely hot so that you can sear the outsides quickly without actually starting to cook them inside. Season a little and leave to cool. Don't wash the pan. 

Rinse the spinach and put in a covered pan with no more water than is sticking to the leaves. Bring to the boil to wilt it; then squeeze out as much water as possible. Put it back in the pan, add just a very small knob of butter and a bit of s & p, and separate the leaves from each other a little.

Spread the pastry out, leaving it on the grease-proof paper it comes with, and cut in half width-ways. Spread spinach over one half of each sheet, leaving a good gap at the edges; make a rectangle of spinach the same size as your steaks. Put the steaks on top of the spinach, then spread the duxelles over the steaks. Pile it on, don't be shy. Then fold the other half of the pastry over the steaks to make what is essentially a pasty. Trim off any excess pastry and then crimp the edges with the tines of a fork to seal. Brush all over with egg. Prick each one three times with the fork. I don't know if this is necessary but it feels right. Put on a baking sheet, still with the paper under, and put in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 6 for 20 minutes. By this time the pastry should be golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to rest for five minutes. 

While that's going on you can make the gravy. Put the roasting tin on the hob and warm it up. There will probably not be much fat, so add a little knob of butter before adding the flour. Whisk to remove lumps. Meanwhile heat up the pan you fried the steaks in and deglaze with a splash of red wine. Pour this into the roasting and keep whisking. Then add the beef stock and whisk it in, then simmer for a few minutes. Taste and season.

I served it with a grated carrot and beetroot medley, dressed simply with olive oil and lightly seasoned, and a swede fondant which was completely unnecessary but very delicious. Really, all that's required by way of accompaniment is some green salad leaves and a belting red wine. 

If you were serving it as part of a three course menu you would only need to serve half a wellington per person. When you cut it in half, you'll see that the steak is still perfectly pink, and when you eat it you'll notice that it has a buttery texture and a deeply beefy flavour. The pastry on top will be crisp, underneath will be soft with spinach and beef juice, and the duxelles will add another layer of flavour. It tastes like the most ridiculous luxury, but at a fraction of the price you would expect to pay for such a dish. Can you tell I'm quite proud of it? You could call it my new signature dish! 

It's fairly complex I suppose, but you can break it up by making individual elements ahead of time. Then it's just a construction job at the end. 



Later today I'm going to tackle the marrow that came out those beef bones - a first attempt at cooking bone marrow. Wish me luck.

Sausage, Leek & Bean Stew

I'd spent a day standing outside in the cold trying to 'engage communities', an occupational hazard of working for an innovative and progressive local authority. A substantial dinner was required; summat to warm the cockles, but not summat that takes ages to cook. Sausage, leek and bean stew has never failed me yet, and there happened to be a couple of lovely leeks in this week's bag. It didn't take a massive leap of imagination. I'm a Lincolnshire lad, so it had to be Lincolnshire sausages, but it'd be just as good with Cumberland, or Toulouse if you're in an exotic mood. 

Sausage, Leek & Bean Stew

Serves 2, with enough left for lunch tomorrow

Six good sausages
1 onion (or three shallots)
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 lovely Local Greens leeks, sliced
1 tin of chopped tommies
2 tins of butter beans
A sprinkling of fennel seeds
A tablespoon of fresh thyme - oregano would also be good
The leftover water from boiling yesterday's romanesco for pureeing  (you did save it, didn't you?)

Might as well get the onion on first. No need to dice, just slice it and throw it into a pan of hot olive oil. Turn the heat down and cook it for a good 10 or 15 minutes at least, or until it's browning (but not burning) and becoming soft, sweet and interesting. Add the fennel seeds, garlic and leeks and cook for a further ten minutes, stirring occasionally. 

Meanwhile, get the skin off the sausages and cut each one into five or six pieces. Get a non-stick frying pan hot with some olive oil in, and fry the sausage pieces until browned all over. 

Add the tomatoes to the onions and leeks with the romanesco water (alright, plain water will also do), and then the beans. Then the sausages. Then the thyme. 

Everything is already pretty much cooked by this stage, because you've been 'canny' and used tinned tommies and beans. You just need to season it well - don't be scared of the salt and pepper, and then let it simmer slowly for a while to let all the flavours rub up against each other and mingle, like at a really good party. You know, the ones they had in the sixties.  

Serve it when you can resist it no longer. A pile of buttered spinach or steamed or stir-fried cabbage is optional but extremely desirable to serve with it. 

For lunch the next day I find it goes perfectly with a crispy potato rosti and a poached egg. So that's what I'll be having for lunch tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it already. 

Romanesco, Romanesco, Romanesco. And Gnocchi.

There's a thing I sometimes do with certain types of veg that really shows them off - I've done it in the past with cauliflower, broccoli and asparagus, and tonight I tried it with romanesco and it was a corker. 

 

It involves doing three different things with the veg in question: puree, stir fry, and raw. It's not as time consuming as it might sound - there's quite a lot going on but none of it takes long to do. You could do it with pasta instead of gnocchi. 

Romanesco with Gnocchi

Serves 2

1 head of romanesco

1 pack of gnocchi (or however much pasta you think you'll need)

2 cloves of garlic

Half a teaspoon of fresh red chilli

A sprinkling of pine nuts

A few capers

Half a chicken stock cube (optional)

A knob of butter

A few drops of toasted sesame oil (probably optional)

A quarter handful of grated Italian hard cheese such as parmesan

A glug of olive oil

Pull the leaves off the romanesco and chop off the stem just below where the florets start. Cut off each floret, trying to keep as many as possible looking pretty. When you get to the last few florets at the top, take some nice thin slices from the whole piece (see photograph for what I mean). You'll need three for each serving, and a good sharp knife is useful. Pick out the best florets until you've got about half of the really nice looking ones on one side, and the rougher ones on the other side. Cut the bigger of the pretty ones in half so that all the bits are of a roughly similar size. 

Chop the stem that you cut the florets from into bits and put them in a pan with the rougher half of the florets. Just cover with water and add the half chicken stock cube, if using. Bring to the boil and simmer until nice and tender. Pour off most of the liquid and puree with a hand blender, adding the liquid back a little at a time until it is of a pourable consistency but still holds its own. Season with salt and pepper, but taste first if you used the chicken stock so that you don't put in too much salt.

Meanwhile, put a big pan of water on to boil.

Chop your garlic and chilli, not too big and not too small. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the toasted sesame oil - just enough to add a little side note of smokiness.  Fry the romanesco with the garlic and chilli over a medium heat, and turn from time to time so that nothing burns. Throw in the capers towards the end.

When the big pan of water is boiling, put the gnocchi in.

Put a dry non-stick pan over a flame until it's good and hot and add the pine nuts to toast. Make sure they don't burn and take them off when they're going brown.  Add them to the stir-fry and take off the heat. 

Warm the puree through, ready to serve.

Drain the gnocchi once it's floated to the top, then put back in the pan and mix with the olive oil and parmesan. Add a good twist of black pepper. 

Plate up however you like, not necessarily as I did. It would also work with the puree folded through the gnocchi I reckon.

So I've already used up the salad leaves and the romanesco, and a bit of the beetroot. I need to keep some mushrooms for the wellingtons on Sunday, but apart from that the rest of the bag is my oyster. I have a feeling tomorrow will involve leeks, but I'm not yet sure how.