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.

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.

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.

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.

Pumpkin Cake

Do you remember the monster pumpkin we were so kindly given at the beginning of November? I'm sure it was left on our plot for Hallowe'en, but we didn't pick it up until a few days later, so it was too late to carve into a lantern. Did you ever wonder what happened to it?

We kept it - pumpkins store very well as long as they are not damaged and are kept cool and safe from rodents. Ours stored on top of the fridge for over 2 months, and then one day last week I cut it up and made it into lots of pumpkin puree and froze it in batches.

What will the puree be used for? Well pumpkin soup is an obvious possibility. There are lots of good recipes here - my favourite is the coconut chili and pumpkin soup. I also make a cracking pumpkin pie. But recently I've found some more surprising uses for pumpkin. For one thing, I found a recipe for a delicious moist cake made with pumpkin (pictured) which all the children will eat! It has vegetables in it, but they eat it anyway. God bless Harry Potter, that's what I say. And I've invented pumpkin griddle cakes. They're scrummy. So scrummy in fact that I'm quite relieved the kids won't countenance them - that leaves more for Ed and me.

Pumpkin Griddle Cakes
Simmer 1lb pumpkin pieces in a little water, strain and lightly mash with a fork. Make sure you strain them well, squeezing a bit if need be to remove excess water. Melt 2oz butter into the mashed pumpkin and mix well. Mix salt, pepper and grated nutmeg into the buttery pumpkin mash, then stir in 4oz wholemeal plain flour. This makes a sort of sticky dough. Heat a frying pan and grease it with a little butter. Using your fingers make a few walnut-sized pieces of pumpkin dough and drop them onto the frying pan. Fry until golden on one side (only about a minute if the pan is hot enough) then turn over, and squash them down a bit with the back of a spatula to make flattened cakes about 1/4" or so thick. Fry until golden on that side, then remove from the pan and keep them warm whilst you cook the remaining batches of pumpkin griddle cakes. Serve hot.

Vegetarian Christmas Dinner

Wow, the number of people arriving at this site by googling for "vegetarian Christmas dinner" is amazing. Most of them end up on the page where I put the recipe for stuffed roast butternut squash, which would make a great Christmas dinner. But that's not what we're having this year.

Vegetarian Cheesey Roast

Rip up half a loaf of wholemeal bread into a food processor and whizz it to breadcrumbs. Place this in a bowl with half a pound of really tasty cheddar cheese, such as from the Snowdonia Cheese Company, grated (I use the grater attachment on the food processor), cut an onion into quarters and whizz that into pieces in the food processor and put in the bowl with the other ingredients. Add half a cup of thick cream, a handful of chopped mixed fresh herbs, a very generous pinch of mustard powder, a normal-sized pinch of cayenne pepper, and plenty of salt and freshly milled black pepper. Mix it all together and it will come into a doughy lump.

This in fact is more-or-less Delia Smith's recipe for Glamorgan sausages, which she uses as the basis of vegetarian sausage rolls and very nice they are too. they're also nice fried up as vegetarian sausages, and the same mixture can be used in all kinds of other ways to make tasty vegetarian meals. We'll be using it to stuff a suet roll.

For the suet pastry, mix 8oz wholemeal self raising flour, a small handful of chopped fresh herbs, a pinch of salt and 4oz vegetarian suet in a mixing bowl and add a little cold water until it comes together into a pliable dough. Turn it onto a floured board and knead lightly, then rest it for a few minutes before rolling out out into an oblong.

Now put the cheesey mixture over the top of the pastry rectangle in an even-ish layer, then roll it up from the narrow end. Moisten the join with water to make it stick and place the roll on a tray with the join underneath and bake at 200C, 400F, Gas 6 for about 30-35 minutes.

Serve it with roast potatoes (roast them in vegetable oil, not dripping or lard, for vegetarians), mashed parsnips, sprouts, Yorkshire puddings (again make sure your roasting oil is veggie-friendly), bread sauce (don't leave this out - if you follow my recipe it's the best bit of the whole meal, I promise), and vegetarian stuffing. The vegetarian in your family will thank you.

Christmas Pudding

I made my Christmas pudding today, according to our family recipe. That is to say, it's Delia Smith's recipe tweaked to our family's preferences.

There are several traditions associated with the pudding. One is that it is made on "Stir Up Sunday", the Sunday five weeks before Christmas, at which the following prayer is read:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Another tradition is that everyone in the household (especially children) stirs the pudding mixture and makes a wish. It is also traditional to include a silver sixpence in the mixture, and whoever gets the sixpence in their portion on Christmas day gets to be "king" for the day, and all their requests must be fulfilled.

Vegetarian Cottage Pie

Here's what happened to all the veg from the allotment - it became a cottage pie. The pinky colour is due to the beetroot in the filling staining the potato topping. That'll be a nice dinner to welcome Ed home tonight - he's been in France since Monday, where the cuisine is tantalisingly wonderful but alas vegetarianism is unheard of.

Vegetarian Roast Dinner

My dad has invited us to Sunday lunch today. I'm looking forward to it, he does a great roast dinner. He's roasting a leg of lamb for himself and me, but my husband, Ed, is a vegetarian. It's OK, Ed loves all the trimmings and will be very happy indeed with a plate full of roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, mashed parsnips, carrots, stuffing, and plenty of bread sauce and vegetarian gravy.

When I do a roast dinner at home, though, I often make my own vegetarian version of a roast stuffed chicken: stuffed butternut squash. If I'm feeling lazy I might use a packet stuffing mix (one of the nice ones with rosemary and a sachet of apricot jam to mix up with the stuffing), but on special occasions I make my own stuffing.

Stuffed Butternut Squash

Easy version - cut a butternut squash in half, scoop out the seeds and feed to the chickens, mix up the stuffing according to the packet and use to stuff the squash halves. There'll be too much stuffing, so spread it all over the cut surface of one of the squash halves. Reassemble the halves to make a sort of squash/stuffing sandwich. Rub with butter or olive oil, wrap in foil and bake for a bit in a quite hot oven. (sorry I can't do temperatures in degrees and times and stuff, I don't usually cook like that). Serve with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, bread sauce and all the trimmings.

Complicated version - make stuffing as follows: fry an onion (chopped very fine) in 2 oz butter until transparent. Into this, mix 2 to 4 slices of wholemeal bread (ripped into smidgins), a good dollop of dried rosemary (perhaps a tablespoon), same amount of chopped fresh parsley, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Mix in a beaten egg and a big lump of apricot jam. Then follow the instructions above.

Whilst we're on the topic: Bread sauce

Into a heavy saucepan bung 1/2 onion chopped very fine, 1 or 2 slices wholemeal bread ripped into smidgins, 1 oz butter cut into bits, 3-4 whole cloves, 1/2 pint full fat milk, 1/4 pint double cream. Bring it to a simmer then let it sit on the lowest heat with a lid on for as long as it takes to make dinner. Stir sometimes. Before serving add a dollop more cream, salt and freshly ground black pepper and a generous grating of nutmeg. Yum.

Are you entertaining vegetarians this Christmas? Hit "save"!

Mock Pumpkin Soup

One year I threw an adult Hallowe'en party. It was fairly staid, no dressing up or anything, but we had a roaring fire, plenty of wine, everyone had to tell a scary story, and I promised there would be pumpkin soup and home-made bread. Except when I went out to buy a pumpkin there were none to be had. None at all. Not even for ready money.

So I bought some onions, carrots and swede and I made "mock pumpkin soup". It was orange-coloured, it tasted autumnal, and it was delicious with home-made crusty bread.

A few weeks later I got hold of a pumpkin and made real pumpkin soup for my friends, but they unanimously agreed that the mock pumpkin soup had been better. So here is the recipe for mock pumpkin soup.

Mock Pumpkin Soup

Chop a couple of onions and fry in a knob of butter with a crushed garlic clove. Peel a swede and a few carrots (sorry for the lack of pounds and kilos here, I just don't cook that way - relax, it'll taste great, trust me) and chop into smallish chunks, then fry them also until they start to change colour. Add a pint or so of vegetable stock and about half a pint of milk and simmer with a bayleaf until the veg is tender. Remove the bayleaf and liquidise. Add sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste and generous amounts of freshly grated nutmeg. Serve with a swirl of cream, and home-made crusty bread.

Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin Pie

Step 1 – Making the pumpkin puree
I usually make this pie on Hallowe'en using the scooped-out centre of the pumpkin I carve for the children, or you could buy a pumpkin for the purpose (or a couple of butternut squashes), in which case you'll have to peel it (the skin is quite thin), cut it in half and discard the seeds and the stringy material around them, then cut the flesh into chunks. Either way, boil what you've got with just a little water until the flesh is soft. Line a colander with a clean tea towel and let the cooked flesh stand until all the excess water is drained off. Then puree the pumpkin, either by rubbing through a sieve, with a food processor or hand blender, a ricer, or with a potato masher. I find that one Hallowe'en pumpkin usually yields about 2lbs of puree, so you could make two pies, or freeze some to make another pie later in the year. 2 butternut squashes makes 1lb of puree, just enough for a pie.

Step 2 – Making the pastry case
You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. But this 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 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.

Step 3 – Making the filling
Turn down the oven to something lower, because the pastry is now cooked, and all you want to do is gently set the pie filling. Beat 1/2 a pint of cream lightly with 3 eggs, the grated peel of a lemon, and 5oz caster sugar. Stir this mixture into the pumpkin puree and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of ground ginger, 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cloves. Combine thoroughly, then spoon the filling into the pie shell and bake until set and brown.


Serve the pie cold with something creamy. It looks nice with whipped cream piped on top, but it tastes even nicer with a generous dollop of extra thick double cream on the side. Or I like it with something a little bit tart, like crème fraiche or Greek yogurt. Enjoy.

Experimental Baking

My sister Steph is visiting, and we had an experimental baking day. The cherry oatmeal ginger cookies were good, as were the baked custards, but the best result was finding that butternut squash makes delicious pumpkin pie. Squash are also cheaper than pumpkins and available all year round (you can pretty much only find pumpkins at Hallowe'en in the UK).

Amber Mist by the Snowdonia Cheese Company

Steph's here again and we're enjoying a mid-morning snack of cheese and crackers.

The cheese is called "Amber Mist" from the Snowdonia Cheese Company. It's mature Welsh cheddar with whisky, and it's delicious. I don't normally go for flavoured cheese with funny stuff in. I think usually you just pay extra for basically inferior cheese with flavourings. But this is an exception. The cheese is very mature and fully flavoured. The whisky flavour tastes like whisky, not like "whisky flavour".

I Feel Like Quiche Tonight

Tonight's dinner, vegetable quiche. Photo by Eleanor Rimmer.

What, you want a recipe for vegetable quiche?

Oh, go on, then.

Vegetable Quiche

Sift 6oz wholemeal flour (chuck in the bits that won't go through the sieve) with a pinch of ground sea salt and rub in 3oz butter until it goes like breadcrumbs, add iced water and mix until it turns into a soft dough, roll out and use to line a quiche tin. Chill the pastry whilst you make the filling. Get a selection of vegetables (I used half a cauliflower, a couple of carrots and a leek), cut them quite small and boil for five minutes. Strain and put them in the quiche case. Beat 3 egg yolks with 4floz double cream and 4floz of full cream milk, season with ground sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and plenty of freshly grated nutmeg and pour over the vegetables. Top with a handful of grated cheddar cheese and bake in a moderate oven until set (perhaps 20-25 minutes).

Make a couple whilst you're at it. They freeze well, and anyway, it's Ed's favourite.

Chutney Tasting

The two batches of chutney I made earlier (one by myself and one with Steph) have had long enough to mature, so I cracked them open for a taste today. They're good. Not too vinegary or too sweet, nice thick texture and a complex flavour. Surprisingly they both taste pretty much the same, which is odd because they have totally different ingredients. I guess chutney just tastes like chutney, whatever you make it from.

High culture

The organic veg box gets delivered each Thursday, so on Thursday nights I use up all the week-old veggies that are still in the fridge. Stir fries, soups and casseroles are all good ways of using up assorted veg, but last night we had a veggie curry, with naan bread and popadums, couscous and salad.

I wanted to make a courgette raita as well, but discovered we'd almost run out of yogurt, so today I made some more. Like bean-sprouts, I've been making my own yogurt for years. It's easy and it's cheaper than buying the stuff. It's also satisfying and fun to make things.

You boil a pint or so of milk (skimmed will work just as well as full-fat or anything in between), then cool it to blood temperature, which is a bit hotter than you think. Then you stir in a tablespoon of live yogurt. I use the last bit of the old batch unless it fails or goes mouldy, in which case I buy a small pot at the health food shop. Then you need to keep it warm for a few hours. I have a yogurt maker that is a sort of wide-necked thermos flask, and another type that is more like an electric incubator. I have to say the incubator type is more reliable.

After a few hours (or overnight) you'll have thickened plain yogurt. You'll want to chill it because warm yogurt is kind of yukky. You can add syrup and fruit to make it more like shop-bought fruit yogurt. I like it with sliced banana and maple syrup. Or you can use it for cooking, for salad dressings, smoothies or frozen yogurt and even make a kind of soft cheese. I'll talk about that in a future post.

One of these days I will make yogurt with milk from my own cow or goat. I'm looking forward to that.

Courgette Raita

Grate a couple of courgettes, mix with a teaspoon of ground sea salt then put them in a colander and leave them to drain for an hour or so. Squeeze any remaining liquid out of the courgettes with clean hands, then mix them with about a half pint of home-made plain yogurt. Heat 1 tsp black onion seeds in a dry frying pan and keep them moving until they start to pop, then quickly tip them onto the yogurt/courgette mixture. Add freshly ground black pepper, and a crushed clove of garlic, and more salt if necessary. Stir well and refrigerate until needed. Serve with crudites and mini popadoms as a dip, or as a side dish with an Indian meal. It is excellent for cooling your mouth when eating very spicy dishes.

Vpud - the verdict

We had a huge vegetarian fry-up for dinner last night:

• Fried duck eggs
• Fried mushrooms
• Fried tomatoes
• Fried bread
• Whole-earth baked beans
• Homemade potato scones
• Realeat Vegebangers
• Realeat Vege Bacon
• Vpud vegetarian black pudding

It was delicious, and the Vpud was the star of the show. It's very similar to normal black pudding in taste and texture, which is important because some vegetarian meat-alike foods have the taste but not the texture. The Realeat Vege Bacon is an example, it tastes like bacon but has a rather nasty paste-like texture. It's great in pasta carbonara but not as good in a BLT. The Vpud however was a very convincing replica of meaty (or should I say bloody) black pudding, I reckon you could slip it into a meaty fry-up and the carnivores would never notice.

Potato Scones

Boil 1lb floury potatoes and mash them. Add a generous knob of butter, plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and enough wholewheat flour to make a dry, rollable dough. Split the dough in half and roll out into two half-inch thick circles. Cut each circle into six wedge-shaped slices with a knife and fry in butter for a few minutes each side.

Vegetarian black pudding - no kidding

The sun came out again today. Hooray! I hoed off all the weeds on the allotment, and the rain has done all the plants a power of good. I sowed some spinach and a few more radishes in some spare ground next to the spuds. Meanwhile the kids had fun squirting each other with the hose. Sam was the only one relatively dry by the end so I guess he was the prime squirter.

On the way home we went to the farm shop nearest us to get some fruit and other supplies. Whilst buying locally made cheese (though not Cheshire cheese, confusingly) I picked up a vegetarian black pudding. We'll have it for tea tonight and I'll report back, but if it's anything like the vegetarian haggis I had once it could be delicious.