Alun's Tea Wine

I have to give credit for this recipe for a university friend of ours called Alun. It's quick, easy and cheap, even to make big 5-gallon batches. If you let it ferment out and bottle it properly it's very nice, but when we were students we just used to dip a jug into the bucket and filter it through a coffee filter as and when we needed it.


Alun's Tea Wine


For each 5 gallons -make 40 cups of strong tea, 12.5 lbs of sugar, 2.5lbs of raisins chopped, 2 lemons sliced. Make up to 5 gallons with boiled water. When cool, add wine yeast, following instructions on the packet.

On our recipe it says "ready in 4 weeks", but I think that's only for students. My dad used to say "Not a drop is sold 'til it's 7 days old". Nowadays I'd ferment it out, rack it twice and bottle it properly. But if you want to do it the "gut rot" way, be my guest.

Chutney

If I've persuaded you to try your hand at chutney, you'll need a recipe. So here's one (sort of):

Basic Chutney Method

Wash every empty jam jar you own (and go through to cupboard looking for jars that are almost empty and deciding you never liked that sort of jam anyway so you can "claim" the jar) really well, then place them upside down on a baking sheet and put in a low oven to dry out and sterilise.

Finely chop about 5lbs of vegetables (such as tomatoes, courgettes, runner beans, carrots - whatever you've got a lot of) 2 or 3 lbs of apples and one pound of onions. Put these in the largest pan you have with a pound of dried fruit of some sort (raisins, sultanas, chopped prunes, it's up to you), a pound of sugar and 1 1/2 pints of vinegar (don't use malt vinegar if you can help it or your chutney will taste of malt vinegar and not much else). Mix well and bring to a simmer.

Whilst you're going that, place a bunch of whole spices (such as a few whole cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, mace, fresh ginger, whatever you like) in a muslin cloth and tie up well, then dunk it in the chutney and let the flavours seep out.

Feeling nervous? Don't be. Chutney can't really go wrong unless you burn it. It's not like jam or a souffle - it can't fail. I promise. All you're doing is slowly cooking the ingredients down to a thick gloopy mush. You can taste it as you go along, and if you think it needs a chili kick, add some chili. If you think it's too vinegary, add a bit more sugar. Too sweet? Add more vinegar and salt.

It needs to simmer on a low heat for at least an hour or two. You don't need to stir constantly, thank God, but you can't totally desert it or it will burn. It's ready when it's thick and looks like chutney. I told you it was easy.

Now get it into the jars and screw the lids on. It needs to mature for at least a month or two. Before that it will still taste rather vinegary but after maturation it will be smooth and all the flavours will mingle together. Think of an appealing name for your chutney, and be creative - gooseberry and ginger sounds nice, but runner bean and swede isn't so alluring. So if your main ingredients are prosaic you'll have to call it something like "Taste of Autumn Relish", or "Poynton Farmhouse Chutney", or "Mel's Spicy Preserve".

It keeps forever in an unopened jar. Once you've opened it - honestly I've no idea. I've never seen a jar of homemade chutney go off, but I've never seen a jar of homemade chutney last more than a couple of weeks, so the point is moot.

Rabbit and Scrumpy Pot

Rabbit and Scrumpy Pot

First catch your rabbit. We bought two frozen dressed1 rabbits, two frozen dressed pheasants and a frozen dressed duck in the greengrocer in the village for £10. You can't complain about those prices.

Brown the rabbit in a frying pan with some butter. Place in a slow cooker or casserole dish with one chopped carrot, one chopped parsnip, one chopped onion and a few peeled shallots. That's just what we happened to have knocking around. You could use potatoes, turnip, swede, leeks, celery, the possibilities are endless.

Also add about an ounce of chopped pancetta and half a black pudding, sliced. Again - this was just what we had in the fridge. You could substitute bacon, chorizo, ham, sausage or anything like that.

Finally add a dried bay leaf and some fresh thyme (or rosemary, marjoram or whatever you have) and about a pint of scrumpy (or real ale or stock or wine - you get the picture).

Cover and cook in a moderate oven for roughly two hours, or until the rabbit is cooked through. If you are using a slow cooker, cook on high for an hour and then on low for five to seven hours.

1 Not dressed in blue waistcoats with buttons. It means they've been feathered, skinned, and had their guts, head and feet removed. It means something similar to "oven ready".

Tea Time

Mel's Muffins

Sift 10oz wholemeal plain flour with a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of baking powder. Beat 2 eggs, half a pint of milk and 4oz melted butter together in a large bowl then fold in the flour gently. Add 3oz sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla essence and something else, such as:

• chocolate chips


• chopped apple and mixed spice


• lemon rind and poppy seeds


• fresh berries, such as blueberries, raspberries, chopped strawberries etc.

You can really make it up as you go along.

Drop dollops of the mixture into cake cases or holes in a muffin tin. Bake in a moderate oven (about Gas 6/200degrees C) until they're done (it depends on the size of your muffins - 10-15 minutes for little ones, 20-25 minutes or so for huge ones).

Rich Scones

Sift 8oz organic self raising flour with a pinch of salt. Rub in 2oz butter and stir in 1oz sugar and 2oz sultanas. Beat an egg in a measuring jug and add enough milk to make 1/4 pint of liquid. Mix the liquid with the flour and butter mixture until it forms a stiff dough. Roll it out and cut it into dinky little circles. Brush the top with the leftover egg and milk mixture and bake on a greased baking sheet in a moderate oven until the tops are golden (about 10 minutes). Serve warm with Steph's homemade hedgerow jelly and extra thick double cream.

Serve on your beautiful home-made recycled cake stand.

Potato Latkes

Grate two pounds of peeled potatoes and soak in cold water for at least a couple of hours. Strain the potatoes and dry them well, for example by wrapping in a tea towel and swinging them round your head. Do this outdoors. And don't blame me if you accidentally let go of a corner and decorate your garden with grated spuds. If you're chicken you could just pat them dry between sheets of kitchen paper. Put the potatoes in a large bowl and add a grated onion and plenty of freshly ground black pepper and sea salt. In a separate bowl, beat two eggs with two tablespoons of wholemeal self raising flour. Mix the egg mixture into the potato mixture.

Cook spoonsful of the potato batter in a frying pan with hot butter or oil. Serve hot.

They taste fantastic, especially when made with home-grown potatoes and onions and home-produced eggs.

Recipe: Lemon Meringue Pie

Here it is, as promised - a recipe for the best ever lemon meringue pie. I know it looks long but trust me, it's really easy.

Step 1: The pastry shell. You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. Here is my favourite shortcrust pastry recipe for when I'm really pushing the boat out. It makes the best ever mince pies, for example. Sift 7oz plain flour into a bowl with ½ teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 4oz diced softened (really soft) unsalted butter, 2oz caster sugar, 4 egg yolks and ½ teaspoon vanilla essence into the well and then rub in. In fact I usually heave it all into my food processor with a dough hook attachment and let it run until it looks like pastry. Bring it together into a ball and knead it lightly, then wrap it in clingfilm and chill it for at least half an hour before using.

Roll it out, but it's a b****r to handle, so if it falls apart when you try to line your greased 9-10” pie tin with it, don't panic. Just smoosh it back together with your knuckles, and feel free to cover any holes with leftover bits of pastry and work them in until you can't hardly see the join no more. Stab the bottom with a fork a few times, put a sheet of tin foil inside and fill with blind baking beans, dried chickpeas, or whatever you can find to weigh it down evenly. Then bake at 200°C, 400°F, gas 6 until golden brown and set aside to cool. Turn the oven down to 150°C, 300°F, gas mark 2 whilst you sort out the filling.

Step 2: The lemon filling. You can use a jar of Hedgewizard's lemon curd, but if you're making the lemon filling just for the pie it's more economical to use a slight variation: separate 3 eggs. The whites will become the meringue, the yolks become the lemon curd. Put the yolks in a pan with the juice of 2 lemons, 3oz sugar, 2oz butter and a tablespoon of cornflour. Heat over a moderate heat whilst beating all the time until the mixture thickens. Then quickly pour it into the prepared pie shell.

Step 3: The meringue. Whisk 3 egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Gradually beat in 6 oz of caster sugar, then spread the mixture all over the lemon pie filling. It's important to spread it right to the edges and seal in the filling. Don't be too neat smoothing down the top - I like quite a spiky meringue topping. Bake at 150°C, 300°F, gas mark 2 (you did remember to turn the oven down, didn't you?) until the outside of the meringue has turned sort of beige in places. It takes quite a while - meringues dry out slowly in the oven rather than bake. We're talking at least half an hour, perhaps more.

The meringue will be squidgy in the middle. It's supposed to be. Those meringues you get at the shop that are crispy all through like styrofoam, they're made differently with boiling sugar syrup and all kinds of messing about. Don't pay them no mind.

Eat your pie hot or cold. I prefer it cold. It doesn't need cream or ice cream or anything else. It is perfection; complete just the way it is. My sister, Steph, used to make individual mini lemon meringue tarts and they were really nice. The recipe is exactly the same but you'd cut small circles from the pastry and bake them for a shorter time in a jam tart pan (don't worry about the blind baking beans, but do prick the bottoms or they might puff up), then fill with little dollops of lemon curd and meringue mix, and bake them for a shorter time, until they turn beige.

Lemon Curd

I made some lemon curd using Hedgewizard's recipe. Thanks, Hedgie, it's delicious and sooooo easy - you all must try it. Suitable for the preserve-challenged; forget massive cauldrons full of boiling hot jam, special thermometers and getting the whole kitchen covered in sticky goo. The whole process takes about 10 minutes from thinking "Hmm, maybe I'll make some lemon curd" to admiring your finished jar of golden yumminess. Plus it uses ingredients you probably have knocking around anyway - lemons, eggs, sugar, butter and cornflour. Finally, there's no problem with small batches. Just make a single jar if that's all you need.

Recipe for lemon meringue pie coming soon...

Tagliatelle Primavera

One of my favourite seasonal recipes is pasta primavera - fresh in-season veggies (from the allotment or vegetable garden if you can manage it) with pasta and a light creamy sauce. It's very quick and simple to make. Serve with a huge garden salad and a glass of white wine, and you will be full of the joys of spring.

Tagliatelle Primavera

In a huge pan of boiling water, add some tagliatelle (I use about 100g per person, judged by eyeball). Bring it back to the boil and wait a few minutes before adding broad beans, asparagus, garden peas, spring onions and whatever in-season fresh green veggies you can lay your hands on. In another pan, gently warm some crushed garlic with some cream (or home-made yogurt, creme fraiche, sour cream, fromage frais, smetana or any other creamy stuff you happen to like or have available. Don't over-heat cultured milk products or they could separate, but if this happens you may be able to rescue them by quickly stirring in a spoonful of cornflour). Drain the pasta and vegetables when cooked, and toss in the cream. Add freshly ground black pepper, and serve with salad and chilled white wine. Eat outdoors if you can manage it, with a red checked tablecloth.

Weed Tea

The weeds are growing on the allotment faster than I can deal with them. But every cloud has a silver lining, and I've used some of this fabulous green manure to make a huge drum of weed tea. No, it's not an accompaniment to cannabis cookies, it's home-made plant food. Much cheaper than buying tomato food from the shops, and another example of the law of return - never take anything away from the land unless you can put something of equal value back.

Weed tea is easy to make. Fill a container (we used a huge plastic drum that was left on the allotment when we took it over) with weeds - leaves, roots and all. I used a bunch of big dock roots and couch grass roots, as well as a trug full of leafy weeds such as cleavers, good king henry, bindweed and dandelions. Then I added as much comfrey as I could gather. Comfrey is fantastic stuff, and I always make sure I leave a clump somewhere on purpose (that's what I tell people anyway. The truth is it's a bugger to eradicate even if you wanted to). It has a deep root system and draws up nutrients from deep in the soil. As a result it is rich in the NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium) nutrients that plants need. It is a great addition to your compost heap, you can lay the leaves around seedlings as a mulch and feed combined, or you can use it to make cheap top-quality plant food like this. I'll also bring some chicken manure from home to add to the tea next time I go to the allotment. You could add nettles, manure (sheep, cow or horse - not cat, dog or human). You can put in grass clippings, seaweed, even perennial weeds like horsetails, bindweed, even japanese knotweed! Anything you've got a lot of, heave it all in, and cover it with water.

Now you need to cover it tightly because once it begins to ferment it will smell like the devil belched. Leave it a few weeks, then put on gloves and a gas mask (I pull my jersey over my nose and mouth) and ladle some into a watering can. Dilute it with clean water until it's about the colour of tea, and feed it to your plants. Tomatoes love it, so do courgettes and pumpkins, cucumbers, all those hungry crops that take a lot out of the soil. I'm told it's also good for flowers, and I'm prepared to believe it. The stuff is liquid gold and every gardener should have some on the go at all times. What's your excuse? Haven't you got enough weeds?

When you've used it all up, tip the foul black gunge that's left over on the compost heap and start another batch. See, even weeds have their uses!

Swedish Lemon Angels

Swedish Lemon Angels
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl or 2 cup measuring cup, beat an egg until foamy. Add 1/2 a cup of buttermilk (or 1/4 cup milk and 1/4 cup vinegar) and 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence and blend well. Add 5 tbsps baking soda, one teaspoonful at a time, sprinkling it in and beating until the mixture is smooth and the consistency of light cream. Add 1 cup of lemon juice all at once and blend into the mixture. Stir, but do not beat (you want it creamy, but without a lot of air). The mixture will congeal into a pasty lump. Scoop it out of the bowl with a spatula and spread it on a floured surface. Sift 7/8 cup plain flour and 3/4 cup of sugar together and use the fingertips to work it into the egg- lemon mixture. With a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out as thin as you can and with the tip of a sharp knife, cut out 'angel' shapes and twist the edges up to form a shell-like curve about 3/8" high. Sprinkle on more sugar. Brush each 'angel' with melted butter. Place the angels one inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12 minutes or until golden brown.

Nettle Soup

Following the success of my dandelion salad, I thought I'd continue my "backyard forage" experiments with nettle soup.

I've made nettle soap before, and it was a great success. So I already knew that it only takes a little bit of heat to disarm the stings. There's no danger at all that your lunch will sting your mouth, as long as it is well-cooked. I collected a dish of nettles from my back garden, wearing rubber gloves, and added them to some potato soup. It tasted lovely - not strong, but just delicately "green". Perhaps a little bit like spinach.

I'll definitely make it again. It's delicious hot, but its delicate flavour also tastes good chilled and thinned out with a little cold milk, like Vichyssoise. If nothing else, it's a welcome change from sodding cabbage.

Nettle Soup
Peel a couple of floury potatoes, dice, and simmer in half a pint of duck stock (if you don't have duck stock you'll have to use a chicken or vegetarian stock cube) and half a pint of milk. Whilst it's boiling, go outside and collect a breakfast bowl full of nettle tops - the top 4-6 young leaves of each plant. Give them a rinse and pick out any "extras", then add them whole to the potatoes. When the potatoes are tender, whizz it all up with a stick blender. Stir in plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, and serve with a swirl of home-made yogurt (or cream, or creme fraiche, or whatever you've got).

Dandelion Salad

I read somewhere that this is a good time of year to pick young dandelion leaves. You can steam them and eat them like spinach, or eat them raw in a salad. They have a slightly bitter taste, rather like watercress or radicchio. You can also apparently eat primrose flowers (they don't seem to taste of anything much but they look pretty). So last night I combined them in a spring salad.

Spring Salad
Fill a pint jug with young dandelion leaves, from plants that have not yet flowered. Give them a good wash and remove any leaves that are brown or spotted, and any bits of grass you may have gathered by accident. Add a couple of quartered hard-boiled eggs, and a few washed primrose flowers. Make a dressing by putting 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a jam jar with 1 teaspoon of cider vinegar, a crushed clove of garlic and plenty of ground sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Tightly seal the jam jar and shake vigorously, then toss the salad in the dressing.

Review: Living The Good Life

I really enjoyed "Living the Good Life" by Linda Cockburn. It's the story of an Australian family who spend six months without spending any money, but still living a fairly normal life. They had already converted their half-acre garden to a fruit and vegetable plot (with chickens and a goat called "Possum") to provide all their food, and installed solar hot water, photovoltaics and water catchment to provide electricity and water.

It's also peppered with facts and figures about the harm our modern lifestyles are doing to the planet and to ourselves, including the table I reproduced a couple of weeks ago in "Consumerism v Humanitarianism". These help explain why the family felt motivated to do such a thing, and perhaps should motivate readers to make some changes in their own lifestyles. But if you really don't like that sort of thing you can easily skip those parts because they appear in coloured boxes, so you can just go to the next bit of narrative about the family.

One factor that made it an easy read was that I really liked her. I'd like to meet her and just hang out, because she seemed funny and relaxed, whilst also passionate and serious about things that I agree are important. She kept that balance which (dare I say it) some eco-warriors tend to lose. So there is plenty of humour in the book. For example when their six-year-old son loses patience with the project and declares:

I don't care what's for dinner as long as it comes with a free toy!

Maybe I'm weird (well I know I'm weird) but when I read about how they went six months without buying new clothes (even though they all lost weight and their clothes were dropping off them), or new shoes (and had to mend their own flip-flops), or books (gasp!) or anything else, I really envied them and wished I could do it myself. So many aspects of their lifestyle seemed idyllic, that even their hardships didn't seem as bad as struggling to do the weekly shop in the rain, queueing up for hours at the checkout and then sitting stuck in the traffic on the way home, or the other "hardships" of normal modern life.

The end of the book describes their first couple of weeks "post-project". They had looked forward to having a huge blow-out, eating all the fast food they could get, and buying all the posessions money can provide. But they quickly found it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as they had anticipated. The dad had spent the whole six months cycling home from work past a KFC and trying to resist the alluring smell of hot chips. but when the project was over and he could have gone in and bought them if he wanted, he found he didn't really want to any more.

I recommend you read this book. For one reason, it might open your eyes and motivate you to make some changes in your lifestyle that would benefit you and the whole planet. It certianly did that for me. But that's not the main reason you should read it. The main reason is that it's a good read. I think you'll enjoy it.

Sprouts

I love sprouting beans and seeds, hence the name of this blog. Whenever I visit the health-food shop or ethnic grocer I look out for new types of seeds and beans to try sprouting them.

Recently at The Unicorn (a fantastic wholefood co-operative in South Manchester) I bought a bag of "sprouting mix" which contained sunflower seeds. I hadn't considered sprouting sunflower seeds before, but they sprout very well. This discovery led me to experiment with pumpkin seeds which also sprout well. And at Matta's (an international food shop in Liverpool) I got some raw buckwheat. That also sprouts well and very quickly, and you don't need to soak it overnight - an hour is plenty.

Through the winter, lettuce has not been available in my organic veg box, so fresh bean-sprouts have been the main ingredient in our salads.

Winter Bean Sprout Salad
Use your own sprouted beans or shop-bought ones. The familiar Chinese mung-bean sprouts will work fine, but if you have more interesting sprouts such as alfalfa, broccoli, chick-pea etc. that's even better. Now add whatever salad ingredients are in season. I've been adding grated carrot, chopped hothouse tomatoes (remove the seeds) and cucumber and finely chopped onion. The general rule I follow in making salads is to aim for a constant "particle size" - that is, try to chop everything about the same size as the main ingredient. So when I'm making rice salad everything gets chopped as small as I can and when I make sprout salad they can be a little bit bigger, but still fairly small (there are exceptions of course, I don't make potato salad with lumps of onion an inch across, it's just a rule of thumb). Now add a dressing. I have lots of dressing recipes. The simplest would be lots of ground black pepper, some sea salt and some freshly squeezed lemon juice. But feel free to use your own favourite salad dressing recipe (mayonnaise, especially home-made, adds a touch of luxury).

Chinese Egg Soup

There are so many different recipe books available in lots of different niches. Vegetarian recipe books. Healthy recipe books. Quick and easy recipe books. Wholefood recipe books. But I can't find a healthy vegetarian quick and easy wholefood family recipe book. When I get round to writing it, here's one of the recipes I'll include.

Chinese Egg Soup

Serves 1

Make half a pint of vegetarian stock - I use Marigold powdered bouillon, or Kallo stock cubes, or yesterday's vegetable cooking water, or sometimes I just use plain water. If you're not vegetarian use an Oxo cube or chicken Bovril. Add a slug of soy sauce and bring to the boil. Stir your boiling stock vigorously and slowly pour a beaten egg into it, stirring all the while. It will set into long fine strands when it hits the water. Add some bean sprouts (or sweetcorn, finely chopped spring onion, chives, parsley, whatever you've got) and serve.

It takes the same amount time as making a cup-a-soup, but it's a lot nicer and better for you.

Fair Trade Fortnight

We're already a couple of days into the Fair Trade Fortnight which runs from 26 February - 11 March. There's an online calendar of events including a talks by fair trade farmers, a banana race, and lots of coffee mornings, wine tastings, concerts and loads of other things. Find out what's going on near you.

Fair trade is a brilliant idea. A heck of a lot better than the alternative. I used to "hum" and "hah" about the extra cost which is usually a few tens of pence. But then I thought "If a Bolivian coffee farmer was standing here in the supermarket aisle asking for 30p to help feed his family, I'd give it to him without hesitation". So now I always choose the fair trade option.

Having said that, fair trade products come from developing countries by definition, which means they have travelled a lot of food miles. I generally try to avoid products which have come so far, preferring local alternatives. But I wouldn't want to give up coffee and tea, or chocolate, and I pick up the odd banana and citrus fruit, so these are where I look for fair trade options.

Here's my favourite fair trade recipe.

Banana-Choc Ice Lollies
A banana makes two lollies, so decide how many lollies you want and get half that number of fair trade bananas. Peel the bananas and cut them in half so that you have two short stubby halves (not two long skinny halves, if you see what I mean). Shove lolly sticks up the flat end of each banana-half to make a banana lolly, then dip the banana in melted fair trade chocolate. I use milk chocolate when I'm making these for the kids, but plain chocolate would make a more grown-up lolly. Then roll the lolly in roughly grated or chopped fair trade white chocolate. You could also use chopped nuts, multicoloured sugar strands, chocolate strands, cocoa powder- use your imagination. Now freeze for a few hours until they're solid and enjoy.

If you've never had frozen banana, you must try it. The banana flavour is intensified, and the flesh takes the consistency of ice-cream.

More Ways With Cabbage

I wasn't kidding when I said that smallholders, allotment gardeners and die-hard local food devotees can end up eating a lot of cabbage through a British winter. You may have thought I presented loads of cabbage recipes last time, but I'd still be eating each of them a couple of times a week for several months of the year unless I had some other cabbage ideas up my sleeve. Thanks to everyone for providing your own favourite cabbage recipes, too.

The trouble with cabbage is it's tricky to disguise. You can hide away some swede or parsnip or leek in a soup or casserole, a curry or chili or vegetable pasta sauce or all kinds of things. But as soon as you put cabbage into any of those dishes to my mind it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Bubble and Squeak (or Ca'ad Waarmed Up as it's known in the North East) is a good way of successfully mixing cabbage with other ingredients. It's traditionally made with leftover vegetables but you could cook some veggies specifically for the purpose. Mash up your leftover veggies (which ideally include potatoes and cabbage and other things - if there are any leftover bits of sausage or roast lamb or gravy etc. included, so much the better) and season generously. Heat some butter in a large heavy frying pan and add the veggies. Press them down with the back of a wooden spoon and fry until you sense they are beginning to brown. Stir it all up, mixing the brown bits back in with the cool bits on top, press down again and repeat. Keep doing this until it is hot all through and your mouth is beginning to water from the delicious smell. Let the bottom get good and brown, then carefully invert the pan over a warmed plate. With luck it will come out as one lovely golden cake, but more often it will break up and require scraping out of the pan. Either way it is uncommonly delicious.

Another use for cabbage is to make parcels with the whole leaves, as Steph suggested, a bit like dolmades but less exotic. The trick is to remove the inflexible central ribs, use only the largest green leaves, not the titchy ones from the heart, and place the parcel on the oven tray with the opening underneath to stop it unfolding again. I like to use fairly firm fillings bound with beaten egg. For example a tasty risotto could be mixed with beaten egg, stuffed into parboiled cabbage leaves and then baked in the oven with some cooking liquid in the bottom of the dish to stop it burning. Flavoured mince can also be used this way. My dad used to make a fabulous dish with mince and onions, mushrooms and largeish pieces of black pudding all mixed together in gravy. That would be good stuffed into cabbage leaves. It's even better just served with plenty of mashed potato and no cabbage at all, but we're trying to think of ways to make cabbage exciting here.

If you don't want to stuff your mince and onions into cabbage leaves, you could serve it with colcannon, as Linz suggested - mashed potatoes mixed with cooked cabbage, onions or leeks, shedloads of salt and pepper and something rich and tasty such as butter or dripping or cheese or whatever you've got. Olive oil definitely doesn't count. (I've still got a little duck fat in the fridge. Hmmm, that gives me an idea).

Coleslaw is nice, especially at this time of year when other salad ingredients are not in season locally. With home-grown cabbage and carrots and home-made mayonnaise from our own eggs, it's a real treat (I'd like to produce our own olive oil, but I'm afraid we're going to be dependent on Mr Bertolli for the foreseeable future). It really is essential to cut the cabbage into fine, short pieces otherwise your appealing winter salad becomes just a tedious exercise in chewing. The Vietnamese coleslaw recipe Tracy suggested sounds like a really different approach to coleslaw and I've bookmarked it to try sometime.

I couldn't find Lesley's cabbage curry called Hai Li Lim. Could you provide the recipe, Lesley? John's suggestion to flavour cabbage with crushed juniper berries sounds good. I often throw flavourings into the cooking water with my vegetables - with boiled or steamed cabbage I like star anise or fennel seeds, and with stir-fried cabbage black pepper or toasted cumin seeds are very good. Andy emailed me to say he tried my recipe for baked cabbage with nuts and cheese, but with his own additions of sliced onions and chopped palm hearts. That sounds delicious - I'm sure you could add all kinds of things, such as chicory or fennel perhaps, or really go to town with lots of different veg and turn it into a cheesey peanut and mixed vegetable bake. Stonehead's brose is very different to anything I've ever seen before, but I can't see how I can adapt it for my mostly vegetarian family. With the bacon it sounds very tasty, but leave the bacon out and all you're left with is cabbage porridge, which I can tell you now will never go over with my lot (or perhaps anybody at all). I'll keep that one on the back burner for now.

But to my mind the best thing to do with cabbage is cook it with so many rich and fattening ingredients it becomes a delicious treat rather than an obligation. Simmer shredded cabbage in water then strain into an ovenproof dish. Add double cream, salt and pepper, and something pigg-y - bacon, prosciutto, Parma ham or cubes of chorizo sausage, anything like that. Then bake in a low oven for however long you've got. Nobody will say "Oh, not cabbage again!"

Don't forget to keep the cabbage water. My granny used to swear if you washed your face with cabbage water it would make you more beautiful.

Red cabbage gives you a whole different set of possibilities. You still need to remove the tough central ribs and shred it finely just like white or green cabbage. But then you can put it in a sealable ovenproof dish with either:

• a shredded red onion, the juice and rind of an orange, some butter, salt and pepper. Cook in a low oven for a long time, then stir in a tablespoon of marmalade before serving, or
• a shredded red onion, a chopped red apple and some apple juice, butter, salt and pepper. Cook in a low oven for a long time, and stir in a tablespoon of redcurrant jelly before serving

If you've got any cloves, star anise or sticks of cinnamon, do bung them in as well. Don't wash your face in the cooking water from red cabbages, though.

You can make an unusual red coleslaw with red onions and purple carrots if you can get them. It's a bit gimmicky but it tastes good. And of course if you can't think of anything else to do with red cabbage you can always pickle the stuff.

I can't honestly say I look forward to the first winter cabbage with anything like the same eagerness as the asparagus season or the first new potatoes, but I've found lots of ways of cooking them that are really enjoyable.

Home-made soup

I have home-made soup for lunch almost every day. A different soup everyday.
"Ah," I hear you say, "That's because you're super woman. You are somehow endowed with more hours in the day, or more talents, or it's because you don't work full time like I do, or some other reason". No, it's because I cheat.

Home-Made Vegetable Soup

I hate recipes that start "Begin the day before you want to cook the soup", but in this case it's a blessing, not a pain. In the evening, save the leftover cooked vegetables your children won't eat. Instead of scraping them into the rubbish bin or compost bucket (or pig swill bucket if you live in a more enlightened country than Britain), scrape them into a container to be stored in the fridge. If you don't have children, or if you have strange mutant children who actually eat all their vegetables, you will have to make extra vegetables on purpose. Whilst you're at it, save the water you cooked the veg in.

The next day put the vegetables in a pan (or you could do this in the microwave) with milk and stock made with the veg cooking water, to just cover the vegetables. Heat up, then whizz it all to a puree with a hand blender. Add more milk or stock if it is too thick, add seasoning and a dollop of cream, yogurt or creme fraiche if you have it.

I've had some wonderful soup this way. I think my favourite was cauliflower cheese and mashed sweet potato soup. You wouldn't make cauliflower cheese and mashed sweet potatoes just to turn them into soup, but they were a delicious accompaniment to our evening meal, and then a delicious soup for lunch the next day. Roasted red peppers and sweetcorn also worked really well. But even pretty humble veg make wonderful soup. Yesterday I had cabbage, leek and runner bean soup and it beat the hell out of anything that comes in a tin.

Energy-efficient cooking

I wrote a while ago about our Braun food processor, and dad mentioned how it helped him and mum economise when they were students by making mince out of cheap cuts of meat. That got me thinking about the ways Ed and I economised when we were students. A big part of it was being energy efficient whilst cooking, so I made a list of things we did:

• Put lids on pans. Food cooks quicker and often you can turn the ring down
• Use the smallest ring possible, and turn the heat as low as possible. Gas flickering up around the sides of your pan is wasteful (and liable to set your handles on fire)
• Put steamers on top of pans so your veggies and rice are all cooking on just one ring
• Turn off the heat under the pan a few minutes before end of cooking time. For example we learned how to cook rice using 2/3 of the electricity by boiling it (in twice its own volume of water) with a lid on for 10 minutes, then turning off the ring and just leave it sitting for a further 10 minutes. It cooks perfectly
• You can also often turn the oven off before the end of the cooking time and leave the door closed. This can be disastrous with sponge cakes or souffles, though, which may collapse
• Mum bought us a pressure cooker, which meant we could cook dried beans (a staple for us then and now) in a fraction of the time
• One student flat we rented had a split oven. We found we hardly ever needed to use the larger oven, most things could be done in the small oven, saving energy. When we replaced our own cooker recently I made sure to get one with a split oven
• We also tried to cook more than one thing in the oven, for example whilst our roast stuffed butternut squash was cooking for dinner, a pie or sponge pudding was also baking for dessert
• Microwave ovens use less energy than conventional cooking but the end result isn't always exactly the same. We learned a few tricks such as pre-cooking things in the microwave then finishing them off in the oven. Baked potatoes for example are just as delicious if you microwave them until they are 3/4 done, then stick them in a maximum heat oven for the last 15-20 minutes to crisp up the skin
• One-pot meals obviously save energy. We liked casseroles with beans and vegetables and dumplings, and we also ate a lot of pasta dishes cooked this way
• I've read that slow cookers are very efficient, but they seem more suited to meat-based meals than the vegetarian food our family usually eats, so I don't have one

I still do some of those things, but now we're not so hard-up I have got out of the habit of doing them all the time. I'll try to use our steamer and pressure cookers more often, and also make sure the oven is full whenever possible.

Ways With Cabbage

This time of year can be pretty challenging for people who grow their own, or insist on local veg. Trying to subsist on swedes, cabbages and leeks and little else for months on end can be pretty trying. I'm OK with the swedes potatoes and leeks - you can make mash with plenty of butter or cream and lots of salt and pepper so at least it doesn't taste so damned healthy. Or you can make soup from them and keep it interesting by adding different beans, noodles, dumplings, croutons, or serve it with different kinds of home-made bread (I'm on a big soda bread kick at the moment - more on that in a future post).

But cabbage is a problem. I'm with Hedgie on this one. I'm just not a big fan of cabbage, and I admit I've flung a few of them to the chickens in desperation when my kitchen seems to be taken over by more cabbages than I care to eat. The chickens seem to like them as long as you can figure out how to suspend the cabbages so they don't just get trampled into the mud.

I have found the secret to making cabbage a pleasure is to cut out the tough central veins on each leaf and shred what's left into really fine ribbons - 1/8" or so. It's the mouthful of tough chewy cabbage that gets me down.

Once you've done that there are a few things you can do to make really delicious dishes with cabbage. I like stir frying it - I had a lovely vegetarian stir fry the other day with julienne swede, finely shredded cabbage and leeks cut into sticks rather than rings. I fried some garlic and ginger up with it too. Then I put on plenty of soy sauce and a little sesame oil and served it with noodles. It would have been even better with some soy sauce marinaded chicken but I didn't have any.

Staying with the Chinese theme, if you finely shred savoy cabbage and deep fry it with slivers of garlic, then drain it and serve with lots of sea salt, that's exactly how they make the stuff they call "seaweed" in Chinese restaurants. I don't make this any more because a) I haven't owned a deep fryer in years and b) when I tried it I found it tricky getting the cabbage properly crispy but not burned.

You can stir fry cabbage without going all oriental. I like to fry strips of onion in olive oil until they're soft, then add shredded cabbage and shedloads of black pepper. Don't think "seasoning" think "flavouring", like steak au poivre. It's supposed to smell strongly of aromatic black pepper. With some buttery nutmeg swede mash and some tasty sausages and onion gravy you won't be wishing for summer peas and lettuce, you'll be revelling in delicious winter food.

Or you can steam your shredded cabbage with some fennel seeds. Remove the rind from a lemon and squeeze the juice. Finely shred the rind and cream it into some butter along with the lemon juice, sea salt and a moderate amount of black pepper, them stir the lemon butter into the steamed cabbage. Our veggie family likes this with a vegetable quiche, and perhaps some mashed spuds. But I'm sure it would also accompany chicken or fish very well.

But our family's favourite use for cabbage is the legendary Baked Cabbage with Nuts and Cheese.

Baked Cabbage with Nuts and Cheese
Shred a cabbage (usually a white cabbage but it works with a Savoy as well) and boil. Make cheese sauce with a strong-flavoured cheese, and thin it out with some of the cabbage cooking water. Season well with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and lots of freshly grated nutmeg. Mix with the strained cabbage and a generous handful of salted peanuts. Bung it in an ovenproof dish with more cheese and nuts and nutmeg on top and bake in a moderate oven until the top is golden.

Believe me, this is one of the best things you will ever put in your mouth. This is the dish that has converted fundamentalist carnivores to vegetarianism. You know the people who always quip "This would be nice with a pork chop"? Serve this to them and it will shut them up. You won't believe cabbage could taste so good.

You don't believe me, do you? You're thinking "It's cheesy cabbage. So what? Sounds rubbish." Try it. I double-dare you. Then come back here and tell me if I lied to you about the best thing you ever put in your mouth, or not.