Recipes Ideas, Tips & Guides

The focus on food waste tends to be on the fresh items we don’t manage to eat before they go past their sell-by date, but in our house there are plenty of pantry items that are hidden from view and remain unused, and my Inner Womble has been inventing ways to make use of them. Now that I’m at home for lunch, making fresh soup and bread is a good way of dealing with both of them – a blended soup can hide a multitude of less-than-perfect food items, and an inventive bread recipe can make use of some as well.

‘Potato Pete’ was a cartoon character from the WW2 era, whose job was to persuade people to fill up on homegrown potatoes rather than bread made from imported wheat. Potatoes made it into all kinds of recipes during the war, replacing some of the fat in pastry and even turning into dessert. The Ministry of Food published the Potato Pete Recipe Book, which you can read online.

I spent a lot of my childhood holidays on the Costa del Sol, soaking up the Andalucian atmosphere. When I went to secondary school I chose Spanish as my second language (French was compulsory!), and ever since then Spain has been in my blood. I love the culture, and the food, although not their obsession with all things pork. As an adult I even spent a week living with a Spanish family, a holiday filled with memorable meals. They were worried I would be fussy, but the only thing I turned down was squid cooked in its own ink.

Oca is a very tasty and useful vegetable tuber. It grows well for me in North Wales. It’s good ground cover and polycrops well with taller partners such as tomatoes. Fresh picked and raw, many varieties have a lemony (oxalic acid) taste which goes after exposure to the sun. The cooked taste is sweet. The texture ranges from that of a slightly less crunchy water chestnut to a soft puree which depends on the variety and how much you’ve cooked them.

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

Sometime towards the end of last year, my friend Chris gave us a homegrown, blue pumpkin. I’m amazed to find that I don’t have a photo of it, but it was large, a fairly traditional pumpkin shape, and rather spiffingly blue. It sat on the dining room table for months, waiting for me to pluck up the courage to do something with it, which eventually happened last week.

It’s a couple of days until the next stop on my virtual book tour, so it’s time to take off the pith helmet and put my feet up with a cup of tea and a biscuit. In a recent interview, I respond to a question I was asked about my favourite biscuit – which has to be Snickerdoodles. You can’t buy them, you have to make them, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with Snickers chocolate bars, or peanuts in general. They are a divine, spiced* biscuit (cookie) that’s very moreish and goes very nicely with a good cuppa.

It’s a little bit early to hope for fresh homegrown peas, but I made this last night and it went down a storm, so it’s worth using up the last of your frozen harvest (or shop-bought frozen peas) for this. And if you’ve been sprouting pea shoots this winter, they make a lovely garnish.

Today’s guest post is from Vanessa – she blogs at Esculent et cetera.

One of the first things I did in the garden last year, when we were still waiting for the hard landscaping to be finished, was to put some large, colourful planters into the front garden. To begin with they were planted with sweet peppers (actually cool chillies), but in the autumn I replanted them with their permanent contents, and they have become my container herb garden. Although they’re at the front of the house they are one of the easiest place to get to from the kitchen for a quick snip, and the paving means I can get there in my slippers…. This means I can, and do, just pop out to get a handful of fresh herbs, and we are starting to add more of them to our cooking.

I’m sure my parents didn’t know when they named me (and still don’t!), but Emma is the Tibetan word for a spice – the dried berries of Zanthoxylum species, more commonly known in the UK as Sichuan pepper. I really must replace the two species I had, which didn’t survive life on the allotment.

A quick and easy potato salad that makes a lovely side dish for a BBQ.

Today’s guest post is from Carl Legge.

Christmas guarantees a wide variety of leftovers that need eating up. If you can’t face another turkey curry, or bubble and squeak, then plan on putting together a pie this year.

I invented this soup for lunch. I should say now that the only reason I weighed everything was so that I could write the recipe down for you – left to my own devices I just bung things in.

The onion flatbreads I made earlier turned out to be absolutely divine. I said I have been honing my flatbread skills, but to be honest I use the Moro flatbread recipe and it’s a doddle. The hardest thing to remember is to start at least an hour before you want to eat them, as you have to give the dough time to rise.

The barbecue doesn’t need to be the preserve of meat – quality vegetable kebabs go down a treat with meat eaters and herbivores, they just require a bit of time and imagination. The halloumi adds some bite and additional texture, going beautifully crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

What did you do with your dahlias this year? Did you enjoy them flowering in your garden? Did you bring some inside as cut flowers? Did you carefully dig up the tubers and and settle them into trays of peat-free compost in the shed to overwinter? I did all of those things, but I also ate some with a nice chianti*

Basil is absolutely luscious, but this variation on the pesto theme is (surprisingly) even tastier – and parsley is a lot easier to crop in the British climate. The quantities in this recipe are a bit free and easy, so go easy with the garlic, cheese and lemon, adding gradually until you get the ideal combination.

We had a visitor over the weekend, and I had to plan a meal for Saturday evening that covered a mixture of dietary requirements – vegetarian, low salt*, cheese and moo-milk free. I came up with an Indian-inspired collection of dishes, so that there was some choice if something turned out to be unsuitable. The end result actually turned out very nice and everyone ate everything and leftovers were few and far between. These were the dishes I chose:

On the weekend that we had Jus-Rol Cinnamon Swirls as our mid-gardening snack, I also hatched a plan to use up the last of the oca harvest. Oca is Oxalis tuberosa, mainly grown for its edible tubers, which were (are?) a staple crop in its homeland of the Andes. There they have a large number of different varieties, bred for different culinary uses. This far out of its normal range we have a much more limited choice, although there are people working on that. Oca tubers are a bit like potatoes and generally used in the same way, although their flavour is a little different.

Customised potato wedges for a healthier alternative to chips or fries.

The sun has finally made an appearance, and it’s time to start hardening off all of those plants that will soon be living outside. I won’t be growing courgettes this summer, but I bought some the other day on a whim and then had to figure out something to do with them.

A few homegrown ingredients from the garden can completely transform bog standard burgers into meaty sandwich sensations.

Just about the entire northern hemisphere is in the grip of a prolonged heatwave, with wildfires raging and people dying. There’s disagreement on how much climate change is to blame, but a consensus that damaging heatwaves will become more frequent, and we really ought to do some planning for that now – changing the way that houses are built, and planting (and retaining) more trees and green spaces, for a start. Personally, I don’t do at all well in the heat. This week I have almost become a hermit, venturing outside only when entirely necessary. Ryan and I take it in turns to water the garden in the evening, and that’s pretty much all the attention it’s getting. I planted up a bed or basil and parsley on 11th July, and have just managed to keep some of the plants alive – one or two even look like they might be getting the hang of life now – but I have some climbing pea seedlings that really want to be planted out, but would scorch in about 5 seconds.

A summer pitcher of Pimms is a recipe for delight.

The ice cream experiments continue, with a spate of frozen yoghurt trials. I have never been a big fan of chocolate ice cream, but something I read online (and a half-empty jar of Nutella) prompted me to give Nutella frozen yoghurt a go!

Just over a year ago I took the Tree Aid Tree food challenge, and created a recipe using several ingredients harvested from trees – Superfood, superfruit, supertasty flapjacks.

I can’t decide how I feel about Matcha. On the one hand, it’s a fun plant product with a lot of history and ritual, and on top of that it’s supposed to be healthy. When you open the packet you’re confronted with a lovely jade green powder, packed with possibilities.

One of the great challenges, during our summer of waiting to move, has been feeding ourselves. We packed away a lot of the ‘unnecessary’ cooking equipment for a few weeks, only to find it was out of action for a few months. With numerous false starts, I kept running down the cupboards and the freezer, in anticipation of a move date that never came. Stress levels rose, cooking mojo vanished and we ate far more oven chips than you can imagine.

Desserts are a problem when you can’t digest (or don’t eat) cow’s milk. Restaurants and ready-made versions are all but impossible, and a certain amount of creativity is needed to make them at home. A lot of the time, I don’t bother – I don’t have that much of a sweet tooth.

Courgette + bbq = healthy and tasty side dish

I recently re-watched The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, and – as there is no legitimate way to acquire a permanent copy – I am slowly making transcripts of them. My episode 1 transcript is here.

Our veg box delivery last week brought us a bunch of asparagus, so we put it to one side to see how well we could cook it on the bbq.

As an ethnobotanist focusing on edible plants, I was powerless to resist when Tree Aid issued their tree food challenge to design a healthy, nutritious* winter dish using one or more of several tree foods. I chose: