Category Archives: Recipe

How To Eat More Vegetables

This week is National Vegetarian Week, 20-26 May, a week devoted to all things veggie. Loads of people are now singing the praises of a meat-free (or mostly meat-free) diet. Even notorious carnivore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall now eats little meat or fish, declaring in the Guardian recently: “we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm.” (Which I basically agree with.)

It just goes to show that you don’t need to be a vegetarian to appreciate that vegetables are a good thing and most of us should be eating more of them. National Vegetarian Week, and its subsequent outpouring of recipes and resources from all those involved, can be a good starting point for those who need a little vegetable inspiration.

Here are my suggestions for how to eat more vegetables, including easy vegetables to start with, and a rock solid vegetarian recipe that will please all palettes (provided they can handle a bit of spice).

Get Some Vegetables

Start with easy vegetables. By “easy”, I mean easy to clean, prepare and cook (a muddy beetroot is not a good place to start). A beautiful vegetable, raw or cooked can form the basis for any number of dishes, be it pasta, lentils, omelettes, pizzas…even a humble green salad can be perked up with a few grilled bell peppers.

Here are my go-to staple vegetables, organised by cooking technique, for easy-to-make and tasty-to-eat vegetarian and vegan meals:

Easy to cook greens (stir-fry with onion and garlic, season with salt and pepper – add chilli flakes if you want a kick): Kale, cabbage, spring greens, spinach, swiss chard
Good stir-fry vegetables (a great basis for tossing with pasta, rice, beans or lentils for a complete meal; garnish with crumbled feta or some toasted nuts and seeds and you’ll be glad you did): Carrots, peppers, mushrooms, greens, broccoli, asparagus, green beans
Good raw vegetables (simply slice / chop and eat, with hummus or salad dressing if you’d like): Carrots, cucumber, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, radishes
Vegetables that are good on the BBQ (baste with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, throw it on the BBQ – this is a basic one-stop solution to making vegetables amazing): Asparagus, courgettes / zucchini, mushrooms, bell peppers

A Good Vegetarian Meal Doesn’t Try to Fake it

Of course, a few vegetables alone don’t make a meal. So what are your options? My advice is to cook something that is inherently vegetarian and not some kind of mock-meat sausage in disguise (this will only leave you banging for bangers). If there’s one cuisine that I have had consistent success with in pleasing all food lovers, vegetarians and omnivores alike, it is Indian food. And if there’s one dish that has rocked all of their worlds, it’s my lentil dal.

Dal is awesome because it’s vegetarian (vegan, in fact) by nature, easy and quick to make, and very adaptable to all manners of vegetables. You can make it as is, as simple lentils, or you can add in whatever vegetables you have on hand (cauliflower and spinach work especially well, but I’ve also had good success with carrots, chard and purple sprouting broccoli).

Served with some basmati rice (and if you’re feeling adventures, a cucumber and coconut salad), then you’ve got yourself a meal that’s nutritious, flavoursome and won’t make you think about the meat you’re not eating. Seriously, I have meat-eating friends who ask for this dal specifically when they come to visit. And a recent Airbnb guest, a real dal aficionado declared it “better than the dal I usually make at home”. It’s pretty special.

5.0 from 2 reviews

How To Eat More Vegetables

Serves: 6

Panch Phoran is a spice blend of fenugreek, mustard seeds, onion seed, fennel seeds and cumin seeds. You can buy the blend in Indian supermarkets, or make it yourself by combining equal parts of each of the above seeds. If you do make it yourself, make a lot of it, because you’ll be making this dal again and again. No joke.

Ingredients

250 grams red lentils (masoor dal)
4 cups water
1 teaspoon turmeric
olive oil
1 tablespoon panch shoran (a seed blend of equal parts fenugreek, mustard seed, onion seed, fennel seed and cumin seed)
10-20 curry leaves
1 large onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp minced ginger
400g tinned diced tomatoes
pinch of chili flakes (optional)
salt to taste
1 cup (or more) of spinach, cauliflower or any other vegetable you’d like to use in your dal

Instructions

Combine the red lentils, water and turmeric in a pot. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer until the dal is tender, about 20-30 minutes.
While the lentils cook, heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the panch phoran and curry leaves. As soon as the seeds start to pop, add the onion, garlic and ginger. Cook until the onion is soft (it should not brown).
Add the tomatoes, cooked lentils, chili and salt. Cook for at least 10 minutes to allow the flavours to bend. Add your desired vegetable and let them simmer in the dal until they are cooked. Note: if using spinach or any other quick-cooking green, add this at the very end just before serving.
Garnish with cilantro, if you’d like. Serve hot with basmati rice or warm naan bread.

This post originally appeared on Great British Chefs website.

6 Comments

Wild garlic pesto, two ways

I was recently given two very large bags of wild garlic foraged from London by recent-Airbnb-guest-turned-friend-and-colleague Kanna Ingleson. Wild garlic is a leafy herb that tastes and smells much like garlic and grows wild in woodland across the UK. It’s a forager’s favourite but is oddly hard to find in my local area in Wiltshire. Thankfully, there are hard-foraging people like Kanna in this world and I like the slice of irony that found the big bad City saving my wild garlic day here in the countryside (let’s take a moment now to give it up to London for rocking the green space).

There is lots to be done with wild garlic: soup, frittatas, risotto, ravioli… and being so akin to garlic, wild garlic can easily be used in any recipe where garlic is called for. Add a few chopped leaves to a salad, stir the greens in with pasta, add to soups, stews, you name it. Yes, options abound, but even so, to eat all of this wild garlic within the couple of weeks it would survive in the fridge would not have done my breath (or my social life) any favours. So the question turned to storage. I did freeze some of the leaves, but decided to turn a fair bunch of it into pesto, too.

The first pesto was a no-brainer: walnut and wild garlic pesto adapted from this parsley pesto recipe that I love. I’ve made it before and it’s perhaps my favourite pesto (be it with wild garlic, parsley or any combination of herbs) because it is most versatile – I love it as a topping for pizza, swirled into soup or blobbed on toasted sourdough with sautéed mushrooms and arugula.

The second pesto is a sun-dried tomato and wild garlic pesto adapted from this recipe for sun-dried tomato and basil pesto. I omitted the garlic and parmesan, substituted wild garlic for basil and added lemon and more pine nuts. Kanna also gave me the idea of adding lemon zest and chilli, so that went in there too. Props to my friend Sam from Shipton Mill who knows a thing or two about delivery devices for good bread and was on hand to help bring the pesto together. We ended up eating a fair bit of it as an appetizer with Turkish flatbread, hot off the grill.

(Hefty tip for UK fans of sun-dried tomatoes: you can buy them in bulk on Amazon: £11.55 for a kilo, and they’re organic!)

If I have one struggle with pesto, it’s this: getting the consistency right. I like mine chunky, but it’s easy to over-process the nuts, creating more of a pesto paste, which is fine, but I like some texture. The easiest way I found to achieve this is by putting the nuts in towards the end of the pulsing process, or leaving them out altogether and hand-processing the nuts with a mortar and pestle. It all depends on what your up for, and how much you can be bothered.

You’ll also notice that both of these wild garlic pestos are vegan – and you totally won’t miss the cheese.

The wild garlic pesto keeps well in the fridge for a few weeks, as long as you keep it covered with a good layer of olive oil. Or do as I do and store it in the freezer (I freeze the pesto in ice cube trays).

Here’s some more wild garlic stuff you might like:

Wild garlic and potato frittata, one of my earlier wild garlic discoveries [smarterfitter.com]
Last year’s wild garlic forage in the Forest of Dean with Gloria Nicol [flickr.com]
Gloria’s delicious wild garlic pesto, made with the traditional way with parmesan and pine nuts [laundryetc.co.uk]
Why wild garlic is good for you [guardian.co.uk]
Wild garlic recipes from Rachel Demuth, including her neat wild garlic malfatti, sort of like a gnocchi made with ricotta [vegetariancookeryschool.com]
How to have wild garlic all year round, Kavey’s super simple method of preserving wild garlic by blitzing it with oil and freezing it [kaveyeats.com]

5.0 from 1 reviews

Wild Garlic & Walnut Pesto

Ingredients

100g walnuts, toasted
50g wild garlic, washed and dried
About 150ml good olive oil (or extra-virgin rapeseed oil)
Zest and juice of ½ lemon
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

Put the walnuts into a food processor and process until finely chopped but still with some granular texture.
Add the wild garlic and blitz again to chop the leaves, then begin trickling in the oil while the processor runs. Stop when you have a sloppy purée.
Taste, season as necessary with lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Store in the fridge – if you completely cover the surface of the pesto with oil so all air is excluded, it should keep for a couple of weeks. Or freeze it!

5.0 from 1 reviews

Wild Garlic & Sundried Tomato Pesto

Ingredients

150 g sun-dried tomatoes, soaked in boiling water
100g wild garlic, washed and dried
½ cup pine nuts, toasted
zest and juice of one lemon
2 tsp red chilli flakes  (optional)
1 cup olive oil
salt and pepper

Instructions

Combine sun-dried tomatoes, and a bit of the oil in a food processor and pulse until the sun-dried tomatoes are roughly chopped (adding more olive oil as necessary).
Add the pine nuts and pulse until those are roughly chopped, too.
Add the wild garlic and pulse until it approaches the consistency you like for pesto (I like mine chunky).
Add the lemon and a few good grinds of black pepper, pulse a few times, then taste. Add more lemon, salt, or pepper as you see fit.

9 Comments

Asparagus: making healthy food less boring

We’re in the prime of British asparagus season, with May being Asparagus Month and a great time to explore this vegetable in all its many shapes and guises. Asparagus is, in general, a pretty awesome vegetable and happens to be extremely handy for people who do the intermittent fasting (aka 5:2 fast diet) thing. In fact, asparagus is good for anyone watching their calories – one medium spear of asparagus has just 3 calories but packs loads of flavour and can make traditional, boring “diet foods” into something quite interesting.

Case in point: salads. This is a favourite for many fasters and calorie counters because it allows one to have a big ol’ pile of food – quite nutritious food, at that – without necessarily having a big ol’ pile of calories along with it. But salads can be problematic: how many of us have eating a gargantuan salad only to find ourselves deeply unsatisfied at the end of it?

Let’s face it, there are many dimensions to food satisfaction: not only quantity, but flavour and texture, too. This is where asparagus can come to a salad’s rescue with its notable flavour and crisp bite (provided you don’t boil it to death). It also pairs extremely well with other fast-friendly foods like eggs and potatoes, plus fresh herbs like dill, tarragon and chives, which all together can make a salad so much more than a pile of leaves.

Dressing helps, too, but even a simple treatment of lemon juice and olive oil with salt and pepper can go along way (a little Parmesan helps, too, which is fairly low-calorie as far as cheeses go). But if you want to take it a little further, I can heartily recommend the tarragon vinaigrette recipe I’ve posted below, a little something I learned from The Vegetarian Cookery School that has proved infinitely versatile and especially stunning with potato, eggs and, yes, asparagus. All together it makes for an incredibly flavoursome fast day lunch or dinner dish – it clocks in at about 250 Calories, leaving you plenty of extra calories (250 if you’re a woman, 350 if you’re a man) for another asparagus session for later in the day.

Asparagus, Egg and Potato Salad with Tarragon Vinaigrette

You can adapt this recipe to use whatever salad vegetables you have on hand; the dressing is marvellously versatile, but is especially good with potatoes and light cheeses like ricotta and fresh goats curd. Calories: ~250.

5 asparagus spears, blanched and slice into 3cm pieces
2 boiled new potatoes (~1/2 cup or 80g)
1 carrot, julienned
1 tomato, sliced into wedges
Lettuce leaves
1 Tbsp tarragon vinaigrette (see below)
1 boiled egg
salt and pepper
lemon to serve

Tarragon vinaigrette:

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp chopped fresh tarragon
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp honey
pinch salt & pepper

Method:

Make the tarragon vinaigrette by whisking together all of the ingredients in a bowl (this makes more than you’ll need so store the rest for future salads).
Combine the asparagus, potatoes, carrots, tomato and lettuce leaves in a bowl. Toss with ~1 Tbsp of tarragon vinaigrette, plus a pinch of salt and a good grind of pepper.
Serve garnished with the boiled egg and a lemon wedge (in case it needs a little extra zing).

This post originally appeared on Great British Chefs.

4 Comments

Vegetable “Noodles”

A few people have been asking about the “noodle” dishes I’ve been Instagramming and which feature prominently in my food ideas for intermittent fasting. The basic idea is this: take any noodle or soup recipe for which you’d use pasta noodles and use julienned vegetables instead. You get the twirl-with-a-fork pleasure of pasta with fewer calories, more nutrients and, some might argue, better flavour, especially when you use really good vegetables. Soup in particular is very handy when fasting as liquid is very filling but low calorie.

My essential tool for the job is the julienne vegetable peeler pictured below. My mom gave this to me years ago and I have no idea of the brand, but an Amazon search for julienne peeler will turn up a few options (this Kuhn Rikon Julienne Peeler looks pretty flash).

The vegetables I julienne most frequently are carrots and zucchini, and occasional parsnips. Occasionally some swede (rutabaga) will come along for the ride.

Vegetable “Noodle” Soups

Here I tend to err on the Asian side. The two soups I make most regularly are Miso “Noodle” Soup and Vegetarian Pho; both are extremely quick and easy to make and basically work like this:

Make a delicious stock
Add some vegetables if you’d like: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, bell peppers, mushrooms, potato, pumpkin (be sure to be sensitive to cooking times and add those long-to-cook veggies ahead of the rest)
Add your vegetable noodles
Serve with your favourite garnishes

Miso soup can be as simple as mixing miso and water, then adding soy sauce and sesame oil to taste. I usually opt for white miso and follow this recipe as a guide: Basic Miso Soup.

Vegetarian Pho requires a bit more work, so I make the broth ahead and freeze it. This recipe on the New York Times is my go-to: Simple Vegetarian Pho Broth.

In both cases, I heat up the stock to a simmer, then add my vegetables, and try to be sensitive to their cooking times. (Broccoli cooks faster than cauliflower so I’d add the cauliflower ahead of the broccoli.) I like my vegetables crisp, so the vegetable “noodles” always go in last and only get a minute or two, otherwise they go floppy and their flavours disappear into the rest of the soup. If using leafy vegetables like spinach, I’d also add this with the “noodles”.

My favourite garnishes: spring onions, firm tofu (fried or raw), fresh herbs (mint, basil and cilantro are good), sliced fresh chilli, Sriracha sauce (who doesn’t love Sriracha?).

Vegetable “Noodle” Salad Bowls

As with noodle soups, noodle salads can also be adapted to use vegetable “noodles”. I absolutely adore this Noodle Salad with Lemongrass Dressing, pictured below, made with vegetable “noodles” instead of rice noodles.

Vegetable “Noodle” Pasta

I got the idea from this zucchini pasta recipe. You can make it with a vegetable peeler rather than a julienne peeler, making for “noodles” that are almost fettuccine like. The original recipe uses the zucchini raw, but I like to cook it for just a moment, with a few added carrots because I love them. And as with many foods in life, I like this one topped with a poached egg:

Other Vegetable “Noodle” Ideas

One of my favourite comfort foods: take thinly sliced onions and cabbage and sautee slowly until absolutely sweet and soft. Add carrots and cook for a little longer. Season with salt and pepper. Serve topped with a poached egg and garnished with smoked paprika. A little avocado on the side doesn’t go amiss.

Another great candidate is pad thai, and I’m somewhat addicted to Rachel Demuth’s Vegetarian Pad Thai recipe (alas, I’ve always devoured it greedily before getting around to taking a picture that doesn’t suck – if you don’t mind a sucky picture, then look at this one).

Some of you may be looking for Calorie counts on these recipes but I’m afraid that despite my mathematics degree, I haven’t done the math (my mode of fasting avoids calorie counting if possible). From time to time I clock the numbers and can say that the soups tend to be very low calorie (200-300) depending on how you garnish them. Other dishes can tend more towards the 400-500 calorie range. It all depends on what you add to it. But a really useful tool I find for quickly adding up calories is CalorieCount’s Recipe Analyzer.

Alright, hit me with some more vegetable “noodle” ideas. Why haven’t I made “spaghetti” and “meatballs” yet? Maybe that would be just a bit TOO much food pretending to be other food that it’s not. And perhaps that’s why most of these dishes aren’t very Italiany. Regardless, I’m open to suggestions, and the julienne peeler is open for business!

10 Comments

Making Moutabal with Genie Cooks

A few weeks ago I went to an Arabian Nights Supper Club hosted by Genie Cooks (aka my friend, Sharon Al-Momami) in South West London. I already knew Sharon could cook – she’s the one who took me on that amazing seaside foraging adventure in Essex last year. But the supper club was her chance to show off the Middle Eastern dishes that she’s perfected over the last couple of decades by immersing herself in the culture and family life of Jordan.

The supperclub menu included a few familiar Middle Eastern favourites such as hummus, tabbouleh and pita, but there were surprises, too. Case in point: mousakhan, chicken – or labna if you’re vegetarian – in a delicate, super-thin flatbread with caramelised onion and sumac.

What really got my attention was Sharon’s moutabal, an aubergine and tahini dip very similar to baba ganoush. I’ve always been a sucker for all things eggplant, and this was no exception. Sure, I’d had baba ganoush before – and loved it – but this seemed different. I can’t put my finger in it, and in fact, the difference between moutabal and baba ganoush is a little hazy. The answer seems to depend on where you’re from and who you talk to. Sharon says for her, moutabal is made with tahini and baba ganoush isn’t. But however you spin it, moutabal is creamy aubergine awesomeness, and the kind of thing I want to eat all the time.

Last weekend, Sharon came to Orchard Cottage for dinner with me and my Austin friend Marcella. We needed something to nosh on while we cooked (and drank Prosecco), so Sharon showed me the ways of moutabal, which involves roasting the aubergines whole over a direct flame for about 20 minutes, or until they’re charred on the outside and soft on the inside. I have an electric hob so we improvised with my gas grill outdoors.

Once the aubergine cools, it’s a simple matter of peeling it and mashing up the insides with tahini, Greek yoghurt, lemon, garlic and salt. The moutabal, along with Turkish flatbread and hummus, was the perfect way to start our evening of feasting, drinking and rafter swinging. And let’s face it, there’s nothing like bread and hearty dips garnished with lots of olive oil to help lube the system in preparation for a very merry evening. Consequentially, the moutabal is excellent hangover food, particularly along side Sharon’s fried flatbread sandwiches, stuffed with feta, zaatar and salsa macha.

5.0 from 1 reviews

Moutabal

Author: Sharon Al-Momani

Ingredients

2 aubergines
4 tbsp tahini
4 tbsp Greek yoghurt
Juice of 1 lemon
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
½ tsp table salt

Instructions

Prick your aubergines all over with a fork to prevent them from exploding during cooking.
Cook the aubergines over a direct flame for about 20 minutes (or until soft) charring them on all sides. This gives the moutabal a wonderful smoky flavour.
Once the aubergines are cooked, leave them to cool for about 20 minutes.
Now peel the aubergines carefully and put the flesh into a mixing bowl. Make sure you remove as much of the charred skin as possible.
Add the tahini, yoghurt, garlic, lemon juice and salt and stir gently to combine. Adjust the seasoning to taste.
Spoon the moutabal into a serving dish, garnish with pomegranate seeds (optional), chopped fresh parsley and a little virgin olive oil. Serve with pitta bread. Can be eaten warm or cold.

This recipe first appeared on Sharon’s blog.

4 Comments

Tamales with Butternut Squash & Goats Cheese

A couple weeks ago I wrote about making salsa macha with guajillo and chipotle chillies, a happy result of my having won a goodie bag from Cool Chile Company, which included masa harina among its dried chilli bonanza. Around the same time, I had an email from my friend, Patrick, suggesting he and our crew gather at Orchard Cottage for a Good Friday Easter feast.

The wheels began turning on a bit of Shaw family history: when I was younger, my Aunt Sue always hosted Easter with her husband Augie, whose family is from Mexico. The parties were some of the best of childhood memory because they brought together a weird combination of Lithuanian, Polish and Mexican tradition, including piñata-bashing to go with the requisite Easter egg hunt. Though we didn’t have tamales at our Easter parties, Sue often talked about her holiday tamale-making adventures with Augie’s side of the family, and on a few occasions she even gave me some leftover tamales to take home.

Sue probably didn’t realise how much I coveted these tamales, and they’ve always led to a weird longing for a tamale-making party of my own. So with life’s recent masa harina injection paired with Patrick’s Easter party suggestion, I decided to start my own tamale-inspired holiday tradition.

Tamales are usually made with lard and filled with meat like carnitas. I decided to take inspiration from last year’s Mexican Supperclub at The Vegetarian Cookery School, where I had some of the best Mexican food of my life – which is saying a lot given that I used to live in Austin, Texas! Among the dishes were Tamales Rellenos de Calabacin, aka tamales with butternut squash and feta, which she served with the most delicious mole sauce.

We ended up making two fillings: (1) butternut squash with goats cheese and (2) grilled red pepper, red onion, sweetcorn and feta. The tamales were surprisingly easy to make. The masa harina mixture is a simple dough of masa harina, butter (instead of lard), salt, baking powder, milk and vegetable stock.

The most fiddly part was rolling the individual tamales, but even this didn’t take very long, especially when you involve other people in the rolling. There are several schools of thought on rolling tamales – Jo and Rachel at The Vegetarian Cookery School seem to have a knack for making them extra pretty. I ended up using the technique shown in this allrecipes.com video, just because it made the most sense to me.

To serve with the tamales, I made mole poblano sauce – an epic adventure and worthy of a blog post in its own right (someday maybe?). I made it a few days ahead, with yet more of those Cool Chile Company chillies, using Thomasina Miers recipe from Mexican Food Made Simple (thanks to Charlotte Pike from Go Free for introducing me to that one).

Mole poblano is incredible stuff, containing about 20 ingredients, including dried mulatto, pasilla and ancho chillies, plantain, almonds, sesame seeds, prunes, raisins and not as much chocolate as you’d think. The result is an amazingly rich, deep, sorta sweet, sorta smoky sauce. I can’t imagine a better sauce for the butternut squash tamales. The richness of the chilli chocolate sauce seems ideal for the sweetness of the squash and corn masa, all rounded off by creamy goat cheese.

The tamales – in fact, the whole meal – totally rocked our respective worlds. We rounded out the meal with refried black beans, tortillas, salsa, guacamole, slow roast fennel with salsa macha, salad with lime dressing and for dessert: chocolate cake AND brownies with “a trio of ice creams” (including the much adored avocado ice cream). All that was missing was a piñata.

5.0 from 2 reviews

Vegetarian Tamales

Author: Rachel Demuth

Recipe type: Main

Cuisine: Mexican

Prep time: 1 hour

Cook time: 1 hour

Total time: 2 hours

Serves: 8

The number of tamales you get will depend on how big you make your tamales. I erred on the small side, which made about 16 tamales.

Ingredients

16 dried corn husks

For the masa

200g masa harina
50g butter, softened
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
50ml milk
100ml vegetable stock

For the filling

100g goat cheese
1 butternut squash, peeled and diced into small cubes
1 chopped fresh red chilli
4 cloves garlic, whole with the skin on
A few sprigs of thyme
Chopped coriander
Juice of half a lime
Olive oil

Instructions

Roast the squash in a hot oven (180C / 350F) with the garlic, chilli, thyme, and olive oil until it is soft. This should take about 30-40 minutes. When cooked, remove the garlic from its skin, mush it up with the spatula and stir it through the squash. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir through some chopped coriander and lime juice.
Soak the corn husks in hot water for 30 minutes. When they are soft rinse them under running water as you separate them. Lay them flat on a plate and keep them covered with a damp cloth.
To prepare the masa, beat the softened butter in a mixing bowl, until soft and fluffy.
Mix the masa harina with the salt and baking powder.
Beat some of the dry mixture into the butter and then add a little milk then some more dry mix, then some stock until everything is combined.
The masa should be the consistency of scone dough, soft and pliable, if too dry and a little more milk, if too wet a little more masa harina.
To assemble the tamales, lay a husk on the table with the fat end away from you. Place a sausage of masa (30g) in the middle of the husk, starting at 1cm from the fat end press the masa down leaving a border down each side, big enough so that the husk can wrap over the filling. Press the masa down to about ⅔rds down the husk and flatten the sausage.
Top the masa with a little bit of roasted squash and smear on some goat cheese. Roll the corn husk with one end open and the other end like a burrito so that the filling gets sealed by the masa (this video is helpful).
Tear a thin strip off a long husk and tie around the open end of the tamale to seal it all together.
Steam the tamales in a vegetables steamer for 45- 60 minutes. You can tell when they are done because the masa will be soft and sponge like.
Serve them as soon as possible with mole and salsa.

Avocado Ice Cream

This week is Holy Week, or as I’ve decided to call it, Holy Mole Week, because yesterday saw another one of my epic gatherings at Orchard Cottage, this time for a Mexican fiesta party featuring tamales, mole sauce, black beans, salsa and for dessert: chocolate cake and ice cream.

My original plan was to do chilli chocolate brownies with vanilla ice cream, but a chocolate tour in Camden with Jennifer Earle and Kavey Favelle introduced me to Artisan du Chocolate and their Lumi milk chocolate bar. Lumis are ripe limes boiled in salt water and sun-dried, giving the the chocolate a fresh tanginess. Given that my meal plan already involved lots of chilli and rich flavour from the mole sauce, I loved the idea of adding a fresh element to the cake, rather than more chilli. Plus, lime was totally fitting with the Mexican theme.

As for ice cream, I debated whether to make lime sorbet, coconut ice cream or avocado ice cream, and in the end decided to make all three, it what is now infamously known as “the trio” (a phrase I apparently kept repeating all night long, following many bottles of Prosecco – I still maintain that the phrase has a nice ring to it).

All of the ice creams in “the trio” were good, really good, but the avocado was absolutely outstanding and perfect with the cake.

I made the ice cream on Kavey’s suggestion, who did an avocado ice cream on her blog last year. I was ultimately drawn to David Lebovitz’s recipe in The Perfect Scoop for its inclusion of sour cream and lime, both of which sounded perfect for my cake. But the avocado ice cream didn’t need the cake at all (though it didn’t hurt): this ice cream totally stands on its own. It’s creamy but fresh-tasting at the same time, especially with that little hint of lime. It was so good that Patrick secretly stashed some extra avocado ice cream in the freezer so that we didn’t eat it all at once. Because we would have.

5.0 from 1 reviews

Avocado Ice Cream

Author: David Lebovitz

Ingredients

3 medium ripe avocados (about 675g)
¾ cup (150g) sugar
1 cup (240g) sour cream
½ cup (125ml) heavy cream
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
Big pinch of salt

Instructions

Cut open the avocados, remove the pits, and scoop out the flesh.
Combine all ingredients in a blender and puree until absolutely smooth.
Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

I’m including the avocado ice cream in Kavey’s Bloggers Scream For Ice Cream round-up under the fruit theme (yes, avocado is a fruit!).

7 Comments

Baking with Nimo: Assyrian “Eight Day” Bread

Last January my mother introduced me to her friend, Nimo, an Assyrian woman who’s managed that rare thing in America: to migrate to the states without losing her cultural food tradition. My mom’s been raving to me about Nimo for years, often sending me photos and scribbles from their cooking sessions, making such things as tabbouleh, lentil dumplings, Turkish bread, and stuffed aubergine. Given my propensity for Middle Eastern cuisine, it was no wonder why I “had to meet this woman”.

Assyria is an ancient territory that dissolved in the mid-seventh century and is now part of several nations including northern Iraq, part of southeast Turkey and northeast Syria. Though Nimo now lives in Chicago, her roots are firmly in her heritage, and this especially applies to her cooking. Nimo bakes from her tradition, using the recipes that her grandmother taught her how to make, rarely measuring anything and often not knowing the English words to describe them, which made follow-up research a tad challenging, but also hugely educational.

One such dish that Nimo taught us is what she called “eight day bread”, a sweet, egg-enriched braided bread that is eaten across the countries of the former Ottoman empire and in Greece and Armenia has specific associations with Easter. In Armenia it’s called “choereg” and in Greece it’s called ”tsoureki” or “lampropsomo”, derived from the Greek words for “Easter” and “bread” and refers to the light Christians believe is given by Christ’s resurrection.

There are many varieties of these festive breads, but what gives it its distinctive flavour and aroma is mahleb, an aromatic spice made from the seeds of a type of cherry. When ground to a powder, mahleb produces a flavour that’s much like a combination of bitter almond and cherry. The spice has several associations with Easter, not only in Greece, but also in Cyprus where it’s a used in a special Easter cheese-filled pastry called flaouna.

I’m still trying to navigate the landscape of Nimo’s food stories. Her food crosses several cultural landscapes and her methods are not recipes, but simple truths about cooking ingrained in her brain by tradition and repetition. The worktop must be clean. The ingredients must be good. The cooking must be done with care and respect. And the food must be enjoyed slowly and mindfully.

As to “eight day bread”, “Choereg”, “Tsoureki”, or whatever you wish to call it, I enjoy it best sliced and toasted with butter, during Easter time, or any time of the year.

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Baking with Nimo: Assyrian “Eight Day” Bread

Ingredients

6 cups flour
1 cup butter, melted
1 cup milk, warmed
½ cup sugar
3 eggs
1½ teaspoons salt
2¼ teaspoons yeast
½ teaspoon mahleb, ground seeds
1 egg yolk
sesame seeds or sliced almond, for topping (optional)

Instructions

Dissolve yeast in warm milk, then add the sugar and melted butter.
Beat the eggs eggs and add to the milk mixture, along with salt and ground mahleb.
Add flour gradually, one cup at a time until dough comes away from sides of bowl. Knead 10 minutes until soft, shiny and no longer sticky.
Place dough in oiled bowl. Turn the dough ball in the bowl to coat the outside with oil. Cover the bowl and put in a warm place to rise until doubled.
Divide the dough into two or three balls. Divide each ball into three and roll out with your hands to three long ropes.
Pinch all three ends together and braid loosely. Pinch ends and tuck under.
Cover and allow to rise again until doubled.
Preheat the oven to 400 F / 200 C. Brush the braids with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds or sliced almonds.
Bake for 20 minutes or until nicely golden brown all over.

This post first appeared on Great British Chefs blog.

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Salsa Macha: The life changer.

I almost didn’t make this recipe because it calls for two cups of olive oil. But when all was said and done, I ended up with a “salsa” that has completely blown my mind and changed my world. I’m not exaggerating!

It began with a recent good fortune: a few weeks ago I won a “goody bag” of dried chillies from the Cool Chile Company. I rarely enter competitions, and win them even less, so I was pretty psyched to receive a weighty parcel of dried pasilla, ancho, guajillo and chipotle chillies, and a bonus sack of masa harina.

Ever since, my mind’s been reeling over what to do with them. One of my objectives is to use this opportunity to get to know the unique flavours of these chillies. I’m very familiar with chipotles and their wonderful smokiness, but the others are a bit of a mystery to me.

I first made the ancho lentil tacos, where I discovered that anchos (dried poblano peppers) are milder than chipotles, though still a touch smokey, and sweeter. I’ve also made tortilla soup, which includes pastilla chilli, which seems similar to ancho to me, except is possibly milder.

Moving on from these recipes I wanted to take advantage of something that was really all about the chillies, so started hunting for salsa and sauce recipes. Rick Bayless’ salsa macha caught my attention because it was suited for any one or a mix of dried chillies, and also included some interesting ingredients like almonds and sesame. I only noticed the oil quantity after I’d mentally decided to make it. But I’m so glad I pushed on.

This isn’t a “salsa” like the kind you find in jars at the grocery star. It doesn’t contain tomatoes or lime or cilantro. This is more like chile pesto, a puree of dried chillies with nuts, seeds, garlic and a little salt, vinegar and Mexican oregano. And the flavour is out of this world.

I used six guajilla chillies and four chipotle chillies, plus some of my homemade apple cider vinegar. The resulting “salsa” has an awesomely sweet and smokey aroma with a flavour to match. There’s only a little bit of vinegar in the recipe, but it’s just enough to make the puree seem almost “fresh”, despite all the oil. The nuts and seeds, which have been fried in the oil, add further depth of flavour and balance out the chillies.

So it’s good, but life-changing? Well yes, for a vegetarian anyway, who isn’t accustomed to eating foods that are so deep, rich and satisfying. Although I don’t eat meat, I can understand why some meat-eaters would find it difficult to go vegetarian because it’s very difficult to duplicate meat’s, well, meatiness in vegetarian food (meat-eaters, maybe you can explain this phenomenon?).

Still, eating this salsa made me feel very much like one must feel after eating a good steak. I used the salsa macha in something very simple: a bowl of sautéed onions, potatoes and greens (a bit of egg would have been good here, too). I included some of the salsa in the saute pan, and then added a little more at the end. The flavours were so intense and wonderful that I finished the meal with a weird satisfaction that I’m not really used to. It had nothing to do with spiciness – in fact, the guajillo and chipotle combo resulted in a pretty mild heat – but pure flavour.

I think the phrase “awesome sauce” is appropriate here. I see myself using this all over the place – potato, eggs and tofu come to mind. I can also see adding it to other salsa and sauce recipes to add deeper flavour. Rick has a recipe for Slow-Cooked Fennel where salsa macha is used almost as a baste. He also does lamb chops with salsa macha for any meat eaters who are keen to give this a try. And you should, because it really is a life changer. And I can’t stop opening the jar just to have a whiff.

5.0 from 1 reviews

Guajillo and Chipotle Salsa Macha

Author: Rick Bayless

Adapted from Rick Bayless’s recipe for Salsa Macha.

Ingredients

2 ounces dried guajillo and chipotle chillies (about 6 guajillos and 4 chipotles
1½ ounces (1/3 cup) almonds
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
4 garlic cloves, peeled and halved
2 cups olive oil
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
A generous ½ teaspoon dried Mexican oregano

Instructions

Stem the chiles, then break or cut them open and scrape/brush/let fall out most of the seeds; cut into ¼-inch pieces – you will have about 1 cup.
In a large (4-quart) saucepan, combine the almonds, sesame seeds, garlic and oil. Set over medium-high heat and cook until garlic and sesame seeds are golden, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the chiles. Let cool 5 minutes.
In a small bowl, mix the vinegar with the salt until the salt dissolves, then add it to the pan along with the oregano. When the mixture has cooled to room temperature, pour it into a blender or food processor and pulse until everything is chopped into small pieces. You don’t want a super smooth puree – leave some texture in there.
Pour into a jar and store in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use.

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Marmalade Making with Vivien Lloyd

Here in the UK we’re in the midst of National Marmalade Week and to get in the spirit, I talked to Vivien Lloyd, author and winner of the World’s Original Marmalade Festival in 2008 and Fortnum and Mason’s Chutney Challenge in 2012. I wrote about this last week on Great British Chefs, and am writing about it again here, because Vivien is simply terrific person, a great writer and hugely generous with her knowledge about making marmalade and preserves. Sharing is how we learn and get better at what we do, and Vivien embraces this virtue in spades.

Source: teatimeinwonderland.co.uk via Vivien Lloyd Preserves on Pinterest

Vivien wrote the book (quite literally) on making marmalade, jam and chutney – her First Preserves book is a fountain of recipes, tips and beautiful photographs that make you want to but out your preserving pan – don’t we all have one of those? – and get your jam on (or marmalade as the case may be, I’ve personally got my eye on Three Fruit Marmalade with grapefruit, lemon and Seville Oranges).

So why Marmalade Week right now? Well, making “preserves” is all about preserving the season, and right now, Seville oranges are at their best, which means: it’s marmalade making time. But for preserving newbies like myself, the task is always rife with insecurity: How do I avoid burning the marmalade? How thick/thin should the skin be cut? Any tricks to testing the setting point?

In response to my questions, Vivien kindly shared a few of her choice tips for making great marmalade, plus her super recipe for Seville Orange Marmalade. Thank you, Vivien!

Marmalade Making Tips from Vivien Llloyd

Avoid burning marmalade by warming the sugar in a low oven 120C for 15 mins. Dissolve the sugar slowly, on a low heat and bring the pan to a rolling boil gradually.
I slice my peel very thinly as thinner peel releases more pectin into the marmalade than thicker peel. Pectin is a gum like substance found in the walls of the fruit. When pectin is combined with the sugar in the recipe it produces the “gel” in the consistency.
To test setting point I prefer to use the “flake test”: dip a large spoon into the pan and scoop out a spoonful of marmalade. Lift the spoon above the pan and turn it horizontally. If the marmalade has reached setting point ( 104.5C/220F) it will drip then hang on the side of the spoon like webbed feet.

Make small batches of marmalade- 2.25kg yield. Smaller batches give the best colour, consistency and flavour. Large batches take longer to boil to setting point. The longer the boil, the darker the colour, the weaker the flavour and often a syrupy consistency.
Invest in a large-lidded stainless steel pan with a capacity of 7 litres. Jam pans aren’t suitable. A lid is essential to manage the first stage of cooking. Without a lid, the water in the recipe may be driven off too quickly and the peel remains tough and under cooked.
To get an airtight seal on a marmalade I always use traditional jam jars. Re-cycle jars but buy new twist-top lids. I buy mine from Bottle Company South.
Use organic seville oranges if possible. I use oranges from Ave Maria.
Use a balanced recipe, that is, double the amount of sugar to fruit and sufficient water to soften the peel.

I love to see a foodie embrace the spirit of sharing when it comes to the food they’re interested in, and Vivien Lloyd has been spreading the marmalade joy all over the Internet. Visit her website, find her on Twitter or follow her on Pinterest. She also offers workshops for groups and cookery schools. And of course, there’s her books: Her First Preserves book on making jam, chutney and marmalade is as beautiful as it is useful. If it’s just marmalade you’re after, you can also pick up First Preserves: Marmalades as an ebook for iPad.

All images courtesy of Robert Walster of Big Blu Design unless otherwise noted.

Seville Orange Marmalade

Author: Vivien Lloyd

Makes around 2.25kg/5lb of marmalade.

Ingredients

675g (1lb 8oz) Seville oranges
1 Lemon
1.4kg (3lb) granulated, cane sugar
1.75 litres (3 pints) water

Instructions

Juice the oranges and pour the juice with the water into a large, lidded pan with a capacity of 7 litres. Remove the inner membranes and pips from the oranges. Do not remove the pith from the oranges.
Juice the lemon and add the juice to the pan. Put the orange membranes into a food processor or mini-chopper and chop finely.Put the chopped membranes, and any pips into a 30 cm x 30cm piece of thin cotton muslin. Tie this up with string and add to the pan.Slice the oranges and add the peel to the pan. If possible, leave the pan overnight to allow the fruit to soak.
Next day, bring the lidded pan to boil, turn down the heat and simmer very gently for two hours. The peel should be very tender and the contents of the pan reduced by a third. Remove the muslin bag and squeeze the liquid from the bag back into the pan through a sieve, using a large spoon.Warm the sugar in a low oven.
Add the sugar to the pan and dissolve. Bring the pan to a rolling boil and test for a set after 7 minutes. Leave to cool for 5-10 minutes- a skin should form on the surface. Remove any scum from the surface of the marmalade with a large metal spoon. Gently stir the marmalade to distribute the peel.
Pour the marmalade into clean, warm sterilised jars and cover with new twist top lids. Alternatively, seal the jars with waxed discs and when cold, apply cellophane covers secured with elastic bands. Leave the jars upright and undisturbed to set.

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