Monthly Archives: December 2014

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December 27, 2014

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Favourite Five, recipe

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Favourite Five Chestnut Recipes

Across Europe and the US, people have been out and about on the streets, frantically shopping for presents and visiting the sales. Many will be fuelled with piping hot chestnuts, roasted in barrels and sold by street vendors. The piping hot nuts are a Christmas tradition across the northern Europe and beyond. Chestnuts are a great ingredient for our home cooking too; whether in sweet or savoury dishes, they are a seasonal highlight.

Chestnut & Sage Soup – Sauté half an onion in a little oil and butter until soft and translucent. Add a few chopped sage leaves and a finely chopped clove of garlic, before 100g cooked chestnuts, a couple of chopped large potatoes and 1/2 litre of vegetable stock. After 30 minutes of simmering, whizz with the blender, then add 25ml of milk, reheat and serve topped with a few sliced chestnuts and crispy sage leaves.

Sweet Chestnut Purée – In a saucepan, combine 300g nuts, 220g sugar and 250ml water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 25-35 minutes until the majority of the liquid is evaporated. Remove from heat, add a little vanilla paste, then strain the nuts (reserving the liquid). Whizz the nuts in the food processor until smooth, before adding the syrup slowly to get the right consistency. Chill and use to fill your next sponge cake.

Chestnut, leek, apple and Stilton crumble – This is based on a great recipe from Leiths Vegetarian Bible. Sauté an onion and a couple of leeks, stir a little flour into the mix, cook for a minute, before adding 300ml of stock. Add a 225g pack of chestnuts, a little thyme, and bring to the boil, simmering for a 15 minutes until the chestnuts are tender. Peel, core and quarter a couple of apples and add them and the chestnut mix to an ovenproof dish. Make a crumble from 110g flour and 55g butter, adding some Stilton into the crumble once made. Top the chestnut mix with the crumble and bake for half an hour at 190°C.

Chestnut Stuffing – A simple traditional stuffing for the festive bird (or just to have on its own). Mix a good sausage-meat with chopped chestnuts, an egg, some breadcrumbs, a little fresh sage, salt and pepper. Cook in the roast, or in a dish separately for half an hour.

Quince & Chestnut Frangipane Tart – Although a version of this tart was included in the Favourite Five Pear recipes; this chestnut version is great. Swapping the usual ground almonds for ground chestnuts gives it a lovely nuttiness and the perfumed quince is perfect for a cold winter’s evening.

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December 23, 2014

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How to

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Quick and Easy Christmas Pudding Ice-Cream with Poached Pears

After Christmas there is always food leftover. If I’m honest, I prefer the days after Christmas with the cold turkey and leftover bits of this and that, to the main event on Christmas Day. In our house there is organisation of meals before and during the 25th, but once we’ve had the turkey and trimmings hot all meal planning goes a bit by the way side. We eat leftovers for the next few days, with different accompaniments perhaps, but essentially the same for the next few meals. And, as I mentioned, I love it.

Christmas pudding is one of those things that is traditionally on the list of leftovers. It is after all a really heavy pudding, served after a massive roast dinner. Subsequently, only a small portion is consumed by everyone and there is a decent amount left over. It’s all right the next day reheated, and I know some people fry a slice in butter to give it a quick twist, but in ice-cream it’s a revelation. A cold pudding, on its own, or accompanying a poached pear like below, is what is needed sometimes.

There is little spare time at Christmas, so this is a super easy recipe. So easy in fact that it doesn’t warrant a recipe section on this post. Very basically its, get some vanilla ice cream, whizz it in the food processor to make it a little smoother, mix in some leftover Christmas pudding, and refreeze. Remember to get the ice cream out of the freezer with enough time for it to soften, and enjoy with anything or on its own. To make the poached pear below, see my previous pear inspired Favourite Five.

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December 13, 2014

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Wellbeing

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5-A-Day For Your Mind

The government is always telling us we have to eat five fruit or veg a day to help improve the nations’ health, but what about the nations’ mental health? Fruit and veg have obvious physical benefits for our bodies, from reducing the risk of heart disease and diabetes to possibly protecting your body against some kind of cancers. However, a good amount of fruit and vegetables in your diet has also been found to have positive effects on your mental health.

Although food often feels like it is my life (an in many ways it is), there is more to food; and therefore other things which can help my wellbeing. I’ve discovered that certain activities are of real benefit to me. In a way, they are the equivalent of the 5-a-day fruit and veg. If I manage to do some or all of these things, my days go well. It is widely understood that taking part in activities is really beneficial to one’s mental health, and the organisation Mindapples has taken this concept, asking people to name their 5-a-day for your mind. They call these beneficial activities ‘mindapples’; the mental equivalent of an apple a day to keep the doctor away I suppose. Whatever their name, my mindapples are crucial to me. They help me to have time to think, to enjoy a moment, to be active, to connect with others…They just help me.

So, what are my 5-a-day for the mind? Well.

  • Time at the allotment
  • Baking bread
  • A coffee with someone in a busy café
  • A walk on the Downs
  • Helping people

Mindapples, or just 5-a-day for your mind; doing things, can be of just as much help to your health as fruit or veg. What are your 5-a-day?

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December 9, 2014

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Reviews

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Mushrooms

Our allotment has, as regular readers will have realised, been pretty wet recently. Not great for getting jobs done, but it has been a real bonus for the mushroom spores which have been blown onto the allotment or hidden in the soil. All over the plot there are mushrooms popping up from between bits of wood chip, or from underneath some discarded leaves. Every time I see a new crop appearing I have an urge to pick them and turn them into a delicious mushroom dish. The problem is, that I know there are a good number of mushrooms which may result in my gorgeous ravioli, risotto, or mushrooms on toast, causing me to have a serious stomach ache!

I’ve found myself a solution to this mushroom dilemma though – grow mushrooms myself. And the people at the Espresso Mushroom Company provide the way of doing it. Fresh mushrooms for you to pick, without the risk of causing yourself to be ill. The added brilliance to the Espresso Mushroom Company’s kit is that the mushrooms are grown on recycled coffee grounds. Apparently, each of their Kitchen Garden kits contains coffee from 100 espressos. Meaning, that as that is more coffee than you’ll drink in the time it takes to grow three cycles of mushrooms, you are ‘coffee-neutral’! As an avid drinker of coffee, but concerned about the impact anything I consume has on the environment, the sustainability of this product is a real winner.

The kits themselves are incredibly simple and easy to get cropping. Just open the box, soak the coffee grounds and mushroom spores contained within a plastic bag in water, pop back in the box and wait. A daily spray of water will, after a week or so, see the mushrooms beginning to fruit. Within another week you will have a super crop of edible mushrooms (the delicious oyster mushroom in the case of the kit I had). As you can see from the photos above, you get a decent crop, and the slightly older mushrooms can always be dried and used as porcini if you don’t get round to eating them all. Fresh, safe to eat, mushrooms which you can pick from the comfort of home, what’s not to like.

The Espresso Mushroom Company provided me with one of their Kitchen Garden kits to review.

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December 5, 2014

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allotment, glutenfree, How to, recipe

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Roasted Carrot and Cumin Soup with Labneh

With weather a little colder in the last few days, and certainly as a way of warming up after yet another drenching, soup is firmly back on the menu. Our carrots at the allotment have been pretty good this year, but due to the clay soil I only every grow small varieties like Chantenay  and Paris Market. Although this means I have a good amount of carrots, their small size also results in their being eaten up speedily. All this means we don’t have any carrots in storage. However, the other day I was given a load of carrots by a friend, with the mission of turning them into something yummy. My go-to use for a carrot glut is carrot and coriander soup, but we’d had that last week, so an alternative was needed. Roasting the carrots was needed to get the best of their (slightly past their best) flavour, so I added some cumin, onions and garlic when they went in the oven. The resulting spiced carrots made the perfect base for a sweet, spiced warming soup. Topped with cool slightly sharp Labneh it was just what was needed.

You will need

700g carrots, peeled and roughly chopped (larger chunks take longer to roast, so vary times accordingly)
3 cloves of garlic
1 onion (chopped into eighths)
Salt & Pepper
2 tsp of cumin seeds (slightly crushed)
drizzle of olive oil
1l good chicken stock
Labneh, freshcoriander and zaatar to serve – I made my own labneh, by straining 450g of yoghurt with a pinch of salt overnight.

Preheat the oven to 200˚C. Add the chopped carrots, garlic and onions to an oven tray, sprinkle with the cumin, salt and pepper and olive oil. Toss the vegetables to ensure they are all covered in the oil and seasoning. Roast for 30 mins or until partly browned. Once the carrots have started to caramelise, pour them into a saucepan and add 1l stock. Bring to the boil and simmer until the vegetables are soft and tender. Whizz in the food processor and adjust seasoning as necessary.

Serve the hot soup with a spoonful of the labneh (or Greek yoghurt if you want) and a sprinkling of zaatar and fresh chopped coriander.

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December 1, 2014

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allotment, plotupdate

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December at Plot 4

What a wet month! It’s been weeks of random downpours and wind fuelled rain. The allotment has a real windswept and weather beaten look to it, and our visits to the plot have often been cut short by inclement weather.

November , despite the weather, has given us some crops to harvest. In this period of the year a few plants come to the fore, with chard and beetroot being highlights. The chard has gone into a number of dishes including a warming chard pilaf. I love the way this beet brightens up the allotment with its rainbow coloured stems punctuating the slightly drab look of the plot in November. The last of the beetroot has been eaten too (I must plant more next year), going into a roasted vegetable salad with goats cheese. I’ve still got some squash stored in the greenhouse and they’ve gone into soups, pasta dishes and a great version of Leon’s Dalston Sweet Potato Curry (replacing the sweet tubers with roasted squash). Cabbage and Jerusalem Artichokes are also making their way onto our dinner plates, allowing us to enjoy their earthy flavours.

At this time of year there is not much to be sowing until the spring. The last few bulbs will go in (tulips) in the next day or so, but even then its possibly a bit too late and we’ll have to see what comes up in the new year. Instead of sowing, its time to sit down with a cup of tea and the seed catalogues; allowing myself time to dream about next year.

With the promise from the forecasters of more rain and wind this month, the chance to get on the soil has gone. Instead, the jobs are more about tidying up from the year past. Tools will need a clean and the shed could do with a tidy too. I’ll continue to put food out for the birds, and make sure that crops that need it are protected from the frost and wet. It’s also time to spruce up the shed, finishing the job of lining it with insulation and internal cladding and giving it lick of paint. All of which can be done with copious cups of tea made on the wood burner.

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This post is contributing to The Garden Share Collective; an international group of bloggers who share their vegetable patches, container gardens and the herbs they grow on their window sills.