Baked Quinoa with Plantain Chips

A while back I was bemoaning the fact I couldn't find plantain in Normandy. Somebody must have been listening because I've found them in a couple of places since then.

Inspiration enough to step up to the cooker.

The Quinoa Bake is, because this is France and that's the way they sell it, actually Quinoa and Bulgar based. I would have preferred 100% quinoa but if you want to do exactly as I did then make a 50/50 blend or even just use bulgar in extremis.

Cook your quinoa in plenty of simmering lightly salted water for about 15 minutes, until the curly germ springs loose and the grain is soft and palatable. Drain and place into a well greased oven dish. Put a layer of fresh sliced tomato, not too thick on top - I used yellow tomatoes and sort of wished I had tomatilloes - then cover that with some thick tomato coulis or passata. Sprinkle with a little salt and some dried mixed herbs.

Make a handful of breadcrumbs, wholemeal for preference, grate in some vegan cheese and season well with black pepper. Use this to top off the bake, sprinkle with a little oil and pop into a hot oven.

To make the chips; peel and slice your plantain on the diagonal (or slice and peel if this is easier!). Fry quickly on both sides until just starting to turn golden, then remove from the pan and with spatula and some pressure squash each slice until it spreads a little.

Put onto a baking tray, add salt and hot pepper flakes to taste and put them into the oven with the bake for 20 minutes or so. The chips should be golden and the top of the bake browned and crispy.

Serve with a little hot sauce of your choice. This is really good.

What a pickle

I've not been doing much meal cooking. This last hot week of August has had me eating bread and tomatoes for most meals except for a few days when catering for a guest, when we ate traditional favourites that wouldn't stand to be blogged yet again.

But nature abhors a vacuum apparently. To take up the slack on my time in the kitchen I've been trying to preserve some of the harvest for later in the year. It's something I'm a bit ambivalent about - I love pickles and jams to eat as well as to make but we often find ourselves with a glut of produce turned into a glut of storage goods and still they don't get eaten up. It's just more effort and money in sugar, vinegar and fuel that is ultimately wasted. Still, there are some preserves that we do come back to year after year and if I'm careful with the quantities we'll have finished them up before we're bored of them.

This week I made some hot tomato jam, based on the Mark Bittman recipe here. This recipe is a good starting point for your own flights of flavouring fancy, and I think spicy hot is the way to go. Last year I made some and it was all finished within the month, it was that good. A word of warning though, take care when bottling it. I bottle into hot jars and still managed to crack the bottom off one with this very high temperature preparation. Most annoying.

The Piccalilli is the British standard recipe enshrined in Government handouts since at least the 2nd World War although mysteriously any number of celeb. chefs seem to have their own version. I adore the sweet mixture of ground ginger and turmeric which is the basis of the flavouring. For American readers I should point out that this is pretty much Bread and Butter pickles but Brits like to put cauliflower and onions in theirs. It's a cultural thing. It can be made hot, sweet or both.

The Sweet Cucumber relish is a little less well known so I'll give you the recipe below. We like it very much, sweet and sour with an intriguing flavour from the celery seed. Good on burger type things and in sandwiches.

Sweet Cucumber Pickle

All weights after preparation:

1kg cucumbers, you can use pickling cukes that have got away for this or shop bought ones, it makes little difference. Wash them well and slit lengthways to remove the seeds and wet pulp, then chop the flesh into neat cubes a little smaller than 1cm square. No need to peel unless the skin is really tough.
500g white or yellow onions, chopped finely
300g sweet peppers - use red or green or a mixture. Seed and remove the white pith and then cut into fine short slivers.

Mix all these chopped vegetables in a big bowl with 25g of cooking salt, cover and leave to sweat out their juices for at least 2 hours, and up to 8 if it suits your schedule.

The vegetables will produce a lot of juice. With your bare hands or some improvisation with tea towels and stick, squeeze out all of this juice and put the dry vegetables into a clean stainless steel pan. Most of the salt will be left behind but if it worries you, you can rinse the veg. well before the squeezing operation.

Add 500ml of good quality cider or white vinegar - this is mainly to keep the colour, as dark vinegar won't affect the taste, just the looks.

Simmer the vegetables in the vinegar for 10 minutes or so until just tender. There is barely enough liquid so keep the lid on but don't be tempted to add more because, well, because I say so.

Add 500g white sugar (the devil's food), and 1 tsp. mustard seed (yellow or black!). Then add half teaspoons of turmeric (don't overdo this, the colour again) and celery seed. Avoid ready ground celery seed if you can, I couldn't, the French are weird. Finally add just a pinch of ground cloves, they're really really strong.

Stir everything over a gentle heat until the sugar dissolves, then bring it all to a boil for a couple of minutes.

I pot hot, into sterile jars and seal immediately. This is the British way and the pickle will keep good in a cool dark cupboard for a year, only needing refrigeration after it's been opened. Lift the solids with a slotted spoon into the jar (a jam funnel is an excellent aid at this moment) and then top up with the juice, tapping to remove air bubbles. If you didn't squeeze hard enough or added too much vinegar you'll have a lot of juice left over, don't say you weren't warned. Be careful, it's hot!

If you prefer, allow the cucumber relish to cool, fill your canning jars and process in the way recommended for other pickles.

Gado Gado

The well known Indonesian dish made from cooked and raw vegetables served with a spicy peanut sauce. It's an excellent summer supper, made with vegetables from the garden, whatever you have and lots of rich creamy dressing.

Because every time I make this, I make it slightly differently I'm not going to give much of a recipe; assemble some fresh chopped green leaves, I used rocket here and top with sliced cucumber, slices of cooked potato, lightly steamed green beans, tomato if you like (wiki claims this is not traditional) and seared tofu. The strange little pods in the picture are green seed pods from the radishes, crisp and gently spicy. Coriander leaf is a nice but not essential addition.

Use a commercial sate sauce or whip up your own from peanut butter, dark sugar, lime juice, soy sauce, garlic, a little oil, chillies to taste and enough coconut milk and water to make a smooth pouring sauce, simmered a little to combine the flavours and served warm. I usually use the marinade from the tofu as a base adding peanut butter and coconut milk to make the sauce.

Enjoy on any summer's evening.

Courgette Bruschetta

I'm almost totally off my food and not that thrilled with anything else for that matter.

This evening, in a vain attempt to catch up with the courgettes I intended to make a zucchini bread or some cup cakes or something. I turned on the oven and slung a couple of potatoes in to start cooking so as not to waste any gas but my enthusiasm ran out at that point. So I made these tasty little snacks instead.

Slice up some day old french bread, baguette or other dry white loaf into neat slices. Brush with oil and lay out in a heavy baking tray. Grate your courgette or young marrow, no need to peel and season lightly with salt and pepper.

Pile the grated vegetable onto the bread slices and top with soy yoghurt mixed with a liberal amount of grainy mustard or flavour it as you will, I happen to particularly like this combination. Drizzle a little more oil over the top of everything and bake in a hot oven for 30 minutes or so until the bread is golden and crispy.

Eat as a snack, light hors d'oeuvre or with potatoes as a full supper. Best with wine.

Lunch for two

Toasted almonds, home grown tomatoes, baba ganoush, carrot sticks, dill pickles and bread. A wonderful hot day lunch in the garden.

Tarte de Fèves with Garlic Roasted Potatoes

This is a really simple meal we made a few weeks ago with some of the home grown broad beans and a sheet of ready made puff pastry.

Lay the pastry out in a suitable flan baking tray. Mix a couple of tubs (about 200g total) soya yoghurt with a big spoonful of grainy mustard and other seasonings to taste and spread across the base.

Top with tender broad beans or other fresh garden vegetables, slivers of courgette are delicious.

Bake in a hot oven until the pastry is crisp, maybe 25 minutes and serve with potatoes smothered in oil and crushed garlic and roasted until golden or other favourite accompaniments.

Chanterelles

It's not all food from the vegetable patch. Yesterday, whilst walking the cats, I found three chanterelles. This is thrilling, I didn't think they grew in our woods and it's terribly exciting. Chanterelles are some of the most delicious and sought after fungi in the forest. I shall be going back to look for more.



These are some of the easiest fungi to identify but it's still possible to make painful or lethal mistakes. I was lucky enough to be shown how to identify them by my Swedish relatives. All Swedes are demon mushroom gatherers and it's practically a national sport for them. If you're not so lucky with your family, try to join a mushroom hunting walk with an expert or study your books very carefully.

Things to note from the picture are the beautiful yellow colour, not shaded or patchy in any way, the ridges under the cap which extend down the stem and the solid and sturdy growth. You will read that they have a fruity smell a little like apricots. This may not be apparent while you're gathering them but if you keep them in a paper bag for an hour or two and then sniff the fragrance will probably be there to a lesser or greater degree.



I didn't really have enough for much of a production. Simply sliced, fried in a little oil with just a smidge of garlic (I used one thin slice from a clove with these) and a good sprinkle of pepper made a wonderful breakfast.

All from the Garden

Not really been cooking these last few days again. This is what I've been eating, variations on potato salad with all the main ingredients being home grown and very simply prepared.

To vary tonight's supper, I baked the potatoes and beetroot before chopping up, mixing with a little chopped shallot (not in the picture, I forgot but added it afterwards!) and some blanched skinned broad beans and dressing in a little soya yoghurt with grainy mustard.

Other garden produce based meals are huge pots of leafy greens, leaves from the beets, magentaspreen, thinnings and trimmings, quickly wilted down, chopped and seasoned with pepper and cider vinegar or stews of cubed vegetables simmered in vegetable stock and miso and served almost as a soup with nutritional yeast as a garnish. All rather basic stuff and would be horribly boring except for the joy of picking my dinner minutes before I eat it and knowing that the work is all mine.

I've been working out some new ways of using courgettes too, but I'll save those for another post or there'll be nothing to write about next week. Hope you're all enjoying your summer cooking.

Wheat and Peas

In this case, bulgar wheat and chickpeas. I've just read an interesting article on Agricultural Biodiversity about diet, referencing work that tentatively suggests eating bitter vegetables and marginal foods may increase your life span because the body recognises that the food isn't optimal for offspring and damps down the reproductive systems. That's rather a poor precis so I recommend you follow the link to Jeremy's piece and go on from there.

This light evening meal isn't particularly poor nutritionally but does include some food that might only be eaten in desperation, beetroot leaf stalks. They were just so pretty and succulent looking that I couldn't bear to waste them.

Cook some bulgar (pre-cooked whole wheat grains, cracked and dried) in twice its volume of water. Add a little salt and herbs if you desire. The bulgar takes about 10 mins to cook so after five minutes add your washed and neatly chopped beet leaf stems (just like chard really!) and allow the whole thing to cook. Take off the heat after another five minutes, cover and leave to cool while you prepare the rest of the salad.

I used a lot of cucumber in this, had to or it would have ended up in the compost, shallots, chickpeas (from a tin or otherwise precooked), parsley, lemon juice, a little olive oil for flavour, salt and pepper, effectively making a warm tabbouleh with beet stems in it. I needed to sharpen the flavour with a teaspoon of cider vinegar but it's by no means essential, adjust to your own taste by varying the amounts of lemon juice.

Subsistence food perhaps but pretty good.

A curry of Pumpkin Tips

Not many cooking exploits to record, the harvest is beginning and simply cooked veggies from the garden (think new potatoes and broad beans in no particular order) are making most of my meals.

This though, is a slightly more complex preparation utilising some pumpkin prunings, the luscious tender tips of the vines. It's a less well known way of using cucurbits, in the UK we tend to wait for the fruit but if you're hungry the greens make good eating. I had to cut the tips anyway, as the plants need training to stop them overwhelming everything around them.

Serves two.

Prepare some pumpkin tips. I had seven or eight. Use just the top 15cm or so with one or two leaves chopped into 3cm pieces and rinsed well.

Chop a boiled potato or two into small dice. I used some leftovers.

Take:

3 cloves
1.5 dry red chillies
1 teaspoon cumin seed
1 teaspoon coriander seed
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 teaspoons sesame seed

Toast these spices in a dry pan for a few moments until fragrant, then cool slightly and grind into a fine powder in a spice grinder or your pestle and mortar. Adjust the chilli heat to suit your self.

Add to the ground spices:

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (you can use some whole cinnamon and grind it with the other spices above if you like)
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

Grate:

about 3cm fresh ginger root
3 or 4 cloves of garlic

Chop finely:

1 medium onion

Gently fry the onion in some vegetable oil until starting to colour, then add the garlic, ginger and spices and mix together.

Add:

a small piece of tamarind paste soaked in a little warm water (or use 1 tsp. vinegar)

Add the potato and pumpkins tips along with some water, about 300ml should do it but you need to adjust this to your taste. The greens exude some liquid during cooking.

Stir well and cover the pan to cook gently while the greens wilt. Should take about 10-15 minutes. Add some chopped coriander leaves and mix in.

Sizzle a couple of teaspoons of mustard seed in some oil and pour over the curry at the end of cooking.

Serve with chapathis.