I haven’t been blogging for some time because my job has had me on the road a lot and when I’m at home I’ve been too tired to do anything other than use recipes that are old and new friends from my extensive library of veggie cookbooks. I cull these every now and again but there are always have loads to fall back on – with wonderful ideas from fantastic cooks like Madhur Jaffrey, Ursula Ferrigno and Prue Leith and fabulous restaurants such as Cafe Paradiso and the River Cafe.

Anyway this dish isn’t out of a book. It’s not exciting and you would be disappointed to get it in a restaurant but it is warming comfort food for a cold and drizzly and wet and grey October day.

from the top...

...from the side...

You’ve pretty much got the ingredients from the top of this post. I soaked 2 ounces of chana dal in water for most of the day and boiled it until tender. While it was boiling I also boiled about 10 ounces of Brussels sprouts in salted water until they were tender but still a bit crunchy. Meanwhile I made a cheese sauce using half an ounce of butter, half an ounce of plain flour, half a pint milk, one and a half ounces of strong Cheddar, a sprinkling of mustard powder and some salt and pepper.

When the sprouts were done, I roughly chopped half of them and halved the rest. I mixed the chopped ones in with the cooked chana dal and the cheese sauce. This all went into the baking dish. I then topped the mixture with the halved sprouts followed by half an ounce of coarsely grated Cheddar mixed with one and a half ounces of roasted, salted cashew nuts (roughly chopped) – a topping I invented for this dish and will definitely use again.

...and on the plate

I had some parsnips roasting in the oven so the Cheesy Sprouts with Nuts went in the oven at Gas Mark 6 for about 25 minutes. By the end, my carefully arranged topping was half submerged by the cheese sauce that had bubbled up around the edge so, if/when I make it again, I will bring the temperature down a notch or two and cook it for 5 to 10 minutes longer.

Chilli without meat

You can tell it’s getting cooler again. Bring on the warm spicy food. This is a new invention, a hot-as-you-like-it, it-all-depends-on-the-chilli-you-put-in dish.

I don’t usually like Quorn because, um, it tastes of Quorn. This dish hides all its gruesome Quorniness and it doesn’t come over too much as a meat substitute. I often mutter madly to myself in a Grumpy Old Woman sort of way when I am walking round chilled and freezer cabinets of veggie foods that are all designed to feel, taste and look like meat. If I wanted meat, I’d bloomin’ well buy it. Calm down, woman! Back to the chilli.

The method is dead easy. Fry a large crushed clove of garlic and a finely chopped medium onion in a bit of vegetable oil until soft. Chuck everything else in and simmer for 30-40 minutes. The amounts here are enough for two if you just have a bowl of chilli or it serves three if you expand it with some creamy mash, which is what I did today.

The everything else that you chuck in is a loooong list of bits and bobs, starting with

a 300g packof Quorn mince, then…

half a 400g can of chopped tomatoes

a 400g can of borlotti beans (because they are more luscious than red kidney beans)

half a finely chopped sweet pepper (I used an orange one)

a finely chopped chilli pepper of choice (you pick the heat)

half a tablespoon of cocoa powder (for a dash of Mexican mole)

a teaspoon of Vecon (or similar dark veggie stock base)

a teaspoon of dark molasses sugar

2 whole cloves (boy, are they hard to find once this is cooked. Learn from my mistake and use ground cloves or pop whole ones in a muslin bag)

a dessertspoon of wine vinegar

a pinch of dried oregano

a pinch of cayenne pepper,

some salt and black pepper to taste 

and, finally, half a pint of water.

Plum and Almond Tart

The protein was in the plum tart since the pastry contained the normal flour and an egg, the filling had another egg but it also contained an ounce of ground almonds that made complete protein when combined with the flour. As for the plums – again no protein but they were deeeelicious. They  were a variety called Majestic, which I haven’t come across before: they were sweet and tangy. I certainly don’t regret choosing them over the more traditional Victorias that were on the same stall.

The tart is based on an Italian recipe for apricot tart. The pastry was pretty much the same but I definitely played around with the filling. Italy has the sun for luscious apricots but we have the cool summers that create fantastic plums so I modified the almond mixture to fit with their sharper juiciness.

I made the pastry by whizzing 4 ounces of flour, half an ounce of cornflour, a teaspoon of caster sugar and 2 ounces of butter in the food processor until it was breadcrumb-y and then added a beaten egg. I lined a 15 cm flan tin with this, pricked the base of the tart and then popped it in the fridge for about quarter of an hour. Then I baked it blind at Gas Mark 5 for 15 minutes and lastly dried out the base for another 5 minutes.

When the pastry shell had cooled down a bit, I poured in a mixture of one egg, 1 ounce of caster sugar, 1 ounce of ground almonds and the zest and juice of half a lime. Then I placed five halved and stoned plums cut side down in the mixture.

This went into the oven for about 35 minutes until the almond mixture had puffed up around the soft plums. We happily scoffed it down with a spoonful of double cream. Mmmmm!

To start with the end, their Gooseberry Galette recipe serves eight. My longsuffering husband would not appreciate the same dessert four days running so I made it for four but I messed up the arithmetic. If you use half the amount of ready rolled puff pastry and score an inch all round (the same as for the full-size recipe) then you need considerably less than half of the fruit to fill it. I have put my variant on the Good to Know website but just for you, here is my picture – surprisingly, it looks more appetising than theirs.

Gooseberry Galette

The main course of fennel, pea and goat’s cheese risotto was a variation on the leek and dolcelatte risotto that I made in March. Now fennel is in season and leeks are not at their best, so I used the same method but replaced the leeks with a finely sliced fennel (about 6 ounces prepared weight), the dolcelatte with 2 ounces of lovely fresh goat’s cheese (no rind and fantastically soft and creamy) and increased the quantity of peas  to about 4 ounces.

fennel risotto with sweet cabbage salad

The sweet cabbage salad at the front of the picture is a firm favourite. It may sound aggressively good for you but it tastes deeelishus. It’s any shredded green cabbage (I used Savoy today) marinated in a mixture of honey, mint, vinegar and oil. When we are having it, I make it before I do any other food preparation.

For four ounces of cabbage which does two people nicely as a side dish, you need a teaspoon each of chopped mint and runny honey mixed into a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and 3 tablespoons of olive oil with some salt and pepper. The cabbage has to sit for at least half an hour in the marinade with occasional stirrings to get the flavours everywhere. If you want to make this in winter when mint is asleep, you can use about half a teaspoon of concentrated mint sauce and reduce the vinegar a tad.

I am being very strict about eating seasonally but occasionally I fall off the locally grown wagon. Avocados are not farmed here – yet.

Two stalls had yellow fruits that are usually red – the tomato man who sells magnificent toms of all types and sizes - including the incomparable Black Russian tomato had some medium-sized yellow ones. They turned out to be way too insipid. The soft fruit lady had yellow raspberries which is apparently how they were before they were genetically engineered to be red. These were more interesting but their flavour wasn’t a patch on the red ones that we bought from her at the same time.

Continuing with the yellow theme, one stall was piled high with corn cobs still in their husks so we couldn’t tell if they were OK. These aren’t usually ready to eat until September. The farmer’s wife who was (wo)manning the stall said her husband had no idea why they were ripe now – a climate change by-product? Anyway, we ate them today and they were beautifully crunchy and sweet. So nothing wrong there, phew!

We also bought a two-pound patty pan squash – yes, one patty pan weighing TWO POUNDS!! This was so large that it was more like a marrow with a thick skin and loads of seeds but it still retained its own delicate flavour. The stallholder said that her husband had forgotten all about them and they had become giants while he wasn’t looking. We ate half of our one today, roughly chopped in a delicious melange of onion,  garlic, red and green peppers, cherry tomatoes and new potatoes (flavoured with parsley, dill, oregano and a pinch of cinnamon) that all steamed in a covered casserole in the oven for just over an hour in a good slosh of olive oil and a splash of water. All the vegetables kept their individual flavours which were enhanced by the herbs and the hint of spice. They produced a fantastic amount of scrummy juice that my husband willingly slurped up afterwards.

The sad news is that good food is not as appreciated in the area as it could be. We have had a regular stall selling first-class fresh pasta. But this was her last visit. People just aren’t prepared to pay her prices. Admittedly, they are slightly higher than the supermarkets but her pasta is far better than any in even the best supermarkets or our local deli and the fillings she makes are exceptional: butternut squash and amaretti ravioli enrapture us both and the white truffle ravioli have me yearning as I type. Oh well, I will just have to get out the pasta machine and try and recreate them.

I used a supermarket 225g block of paneer, sliced in two horizontally then cut into little cubes and fried over a medium heat in two tablespoons of vegetable oil until the cubes were golden.

fried paneer

I then lifted the paneer cubes out of the oil and put them to drain on some kitchen towel while I used the remaining oil to fry one large onion (finely chopped), a chopped clove of garlic, a piece of ginger root about the size of a pound coin (finely chopped too) and some chilli. I used a whole bird’s eye chilli (finely chopped, yet again) but my husband likes his food HOT. A more conservative palate would be better with a quarter of a teaspoon of chilli powder.

Once the onion was on the way to getting soft, I stirred in a quarter of a teaspoon of turmeric and half a teaspoon of ground coriander for a minute or so. Then I added 4 ounces of chopped tinned tomatoes and some salt. This was left to simmer for about five minutes until the tomato lumps had become more like a puree.

Lastly, I returned the paneer to the pan with 4 ounces of frozen peas and about a quarter of a pint of water. (The big garden peas are best for this dish or, even better, shelled fresh peas if they are available.) The mattar paneer then bubbled away gently until the peas were getting a bit mushy and the sauce had thickened just a bit. If you want to make the sauce really thick, you have to mash a few of the peas but I prefer a runnier sauce with nothing that could possibly remind me of that great British disaster (or speciality, depending on your point of view) – the lurid green mushy pea – oops, my bias is showing.

If you put some plain basmati rice on to boil when the paneer has been fried, it should be ready at the same time as the mattar paneer. Enjoy your meal!

mattar paneer and boiled rice

soft fruit tart for one

I made four of these little tarts yesterday – two for then and two for today. I could have made one big one but it feels less like eating up leftovers if your dessert doesn’t look like Pacman before you start.

There are four parts to the tart: the sweet pastry, the creamy base, the fruit and the jelly topping. It sounds like hard work but actually the thing that took me the longest was getting the redcurrants off their stems – if you used blueberries instead, that task would disappear. Yes, you can use any soft fruit in this. I just happen to have locally grown redcurrants and strawberries at the moment.

The smooth sweet pastry is made of 4 ounces of plain flour, 1.5 ounces of icing sugar, 2.5 ounces of butter, the yolk of a small egg, a teaspoonful of cold water and a pinch of salt. I just put the lot in my food processor and kept it running until it had mostly come together. I divided the pastry into four pieces. I then rolled each piece out and used it to line a 4-inch tart tin. I baked my four tarts blind at Gas mark 5 for 10 minutes with the baking beans and 5 minutes without.

Next the creamy base. I used light cream cheese from the Co-op. You could also use light Philadelphia or mascarpone. I mixed a tablespoon of icing sugar into about 2 ounces of the cream cheese. This mixture went into the bottom of the cooled tarts. This with the sweet pastry provides all the sweetener that the fruit need.

The next layer was 10 strawberries cut in half and about 4 ounces of redcurrants which I tried to lay out as prettily as possible.

Lastly, I melted 2 generous tablespoons of redcurrant jelly in a tablespoon of smooth OJ over a gentle heat, stirring until there were no jelly lumps. I let it cool just for a minute or two and then spooned it onto the top of the tarts. Done!

Admittedly it is a lot of bits but they all slotted in neatly into the preparation of my main dish. So my schedule was…

Make pastry first, prep aubergine for moussaka, roll out pastry and bake blind, prep remaining vegetables, make bechamel sauce and assemble moussaka, then while the moussaka was cooking, fill the tarts. They were plated ready to eat before the moussaka was on the table.

strawberry and redcurrant tart

summer cornucopia

The array of lovely vegetables that are available at this time of year is stunning. All of the above (apart from the cheese!) have grown locally during our damp, grey English summer but they spawn thoughts of the Mediterranean and sunshine. So I decided to go very French and have baked Camembert with buckwheat pancakes with ratatouille. OK so the buckwheat pancakes – or galettes au sarrasin – only go as far south as Brittany but that’s warm enough for me.

Galettes or crepes are so easy and so impressive that I really should make them more often. There is a lot of guff written about letting the pancake mixture sit for a couple of hours before use – or even overnight! I’ve found that if you make the mixture in a food processor or liquidiser you can use it as soon as you like. The key piece of equipment is  a frying pan with a really flat bottom. I bought a proper crepe pan a couple of years ago and now I know how much easier it is to use than an ordinary frying pan. I get circular, thin pancakes every time rather than the homely misshapes that I used to serve.

Buckwheat pancake mixture is pretty much like ordinary pancake mixture only you replace most of the plain flour with buckwheat flour. So it’s 4 ounces of buckwheat flour and 1 ounce of plain flour to a pint of semi-skimmed milk, a medium egg and a scant teaspoon of salt – all blasted together in your kitchen whizzer of choice. This makes six medium-sized galettes. We had two each today folded in quarters round spoonsful of ratatouille and I will use the remaining two for lunch tomorrow with some Gruyere melted inside.

Ratatouille is a very variable dish. I don’t worry about proportions too much. It’s the summer veg equivalent of a Friday look in the fridge to see what’s there and making the contents into a luscious stew. Today, I used one courgette, half a small green pepper, one small red pepper, about 4 ounces of aubergine and one onion all roughly chopped and sweated in two generous tablespoons of olive oil. After the vegetables were soft, I seasoned them and added about a quarter of a pint of passata. I left this to bubble away gently while I made the galettes. Just before putting the ratatouille into the galettes I added a generous amount of basil – largely because one of my basil plants is dying and I wanted to use its leaves before they were completely wilted.

Towards the end of making the galettes,  I put the Camembert in the oven at Gas mark 4 to cook for about 5 minutes. The Camembert was a small 145g one – a full-sized one would have been way too much for the two of us. Earlier I had taken the inner wrappings off, cut it in half horizontally and put one half in the box’s bottom and the other in the lid. These halves in their little wooden cases then go into the oven until the cheese is melted. A trivially easy but scrumptious dish.

Galettes au ratatouille with baked Camembert

I separated about 6 ounces of chard into the broad white stems and the glossy dark green leaves. I chopped the stems finely and the leaves roughly.  I had being going to use a largeish onion with the cabbage, but I now swopped to two shallots which I sliced thinly.

I fried the shallots gently in a tablespoon of olive oil. When they were fairly soft, I added the chard stems together with a tablespoon of chopped sage and a pinch of dill seeds. After they had cooked for a couple of minutes, in went the leaves, 2 fluid ounces of apple juice and some salt and pepper. I covered the saucepan and let them cook gently until the leaves were thoroughly wilted down and the apple juice had all but disappeared (about 10-12 minutes).

wilted chard mixture

I left the mixture to cool in the pan for a while, then prepared the filo layers. I used 6 sheets of filo pastry, laying them one at a time in a 1-pint souffle dish with their ends hanging over the edge and brushing each one with olive oil once it was in position.

Then I put in half the chard mixture followed by a couple of ounces of grated Cheddar and then the other half of the chard. Then I folded over the filo ends – again brushing with oil when they looked a bit dry – to cover the pie. I baked the pie in the oven at Gas Mark 6 until the top was lovely and golden – about 20 minutes.

As you can see I served it with runner beans. We also had a simple tomato and basil salad on the side.

The combination of sage and dill seeds was a last minute experiment and it was a real success, making the pie lovely and aromatic.

I only had nine of the little beauties but I wanted to make them into something special. So here it is. You can just see the stripes in the beet that is almost completely hidden at the bottom.

baby beets with Parmesan and sage polenta

The beet part was very quick. Most of the preparation time was taken up by the polenta. You can use instant polenta but I prefer to start with cornmeal. According to Wikipedia, this cooks (with constant stirring) for up to 3 hours!!! Who writes this stuff? Mine was much quicker.

I brought a pint of vegetable stock to the boil and slowly poured 4 ounces of cornmeal into the boiling stock in a steady stream with one hand while I whizzed it in with the electric mixer in the other hand. (As usual, I got some lumps but these had all disappeared by the end.) Then I turned the heat down low, cooked the polenta gently for about 20 minutes with some salt added, stirring every now and again with a wooden spoon. In the meantime, I  oiled an enamel plate to take the polenta when it was ready. It is difficult to describe the point at which polenta is cooked enough. The spoon should stand up in the cornmeal mixture which is fairly firm – but not as firm as it will be after cooling down.

Anyway, when I decided it was ready, I stirred in a couple of tablespoons of grated Parmesan, a tablespoon of chopped sage and some freshly ground black pepper. I spooned the mixture onto the oiled plate and smoothed and shaped it with wet hands. I left it for about half an hour until it was quite cool.

cooling polenta

I then cut it into six segments and slathered them in olive oil. They went onto a baking tray and were grilled until slightly crisped – about 5 minutes a side.

Meanwhile, after cleaning the beets, I removed most of their roots and cut them in half, leaving about a half-inch of  stems attached. I discarded most of the stems and roughly chopped the leaves.

After getting the polenta segments started under the grill, I heated a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan with a lid and added the beets.  After they had fried for a few minutes I added a little bit of water and a teaspoon of honey and put the lid on for them to steam for couple of minutes. Then I put the chopped leaves on top and replaced the lid. Once the leaves had wilted, I drizzled over some balsamic vinegar and mixed everything up together and served them on top of the slices of grilled polenta.

This was a good combination of tastes and textures – sweet and sour crunchy beets, tangy and juicy leaves on a smooth, mildly herbed and cheesy base.