Doodle Dip

I am completely obsessed with crudites and dips at the moment; if I’m going to be mindlessly munching it might as well be on the good stuff.   So obsessed, in fact, I’ve more or less given up the virtuous path of soaking – cooking chickpeas or other pulses and gone straight for the quick and easy rewards of red lentils.  And no, I don’t remember the seventies (that much).

Mixed with lemon juice, garlic, cumin and tahini, lentils make a lovely creamy puree.  Add cooked beetroot and fennel seeds and it’s a pretty in pink party.  Add canned pumpkin and smoked paprika and a touch of maple syrup (in my case), try not to eat the lot out of the processor off the spatula.

Versatile as a dip, dumped on top of a salad, served alongside a pile of steamed greens, slathered on rye toast, snatched by the spoonful from the container – lentils and me, besties in the kitchen at the moment.  Cheap date.

Sultana, oat and cashew cinnamon and ginger freezer cookies

Today I saw an ad for McVities Double Chocolate Digestives and my God, I don’t know what’s happening to me in my advancing years but I briefly thought, yum.  Clearly my sweet tooth is demanding some TLC, so I came home and made these.  They would have been double chocolate too, but I’ve run out of cacao powder and nibs.  Woe!  So this is just a standard semi-raw recipe which I have certainly picked up elsewhere online but have no idea where.

1 cup (or measure) of cashew nuts

1/2 cup (or measure) of oat flour (ie, oats processed to powder)

I cup of sultanas (preferably organic, obv.  Mine weren’t.  *sigh*)

1 generous tsp of dried ginger

1 generous tsp cinnamon.

Blitz the nuts to powder in a food processor.  Add the oat flour and spices and blitz again.  Add the sultanas and process until the mixture clumps together when you press it between finger and thumb.  Roll into small balls and press flat on a paper lined tray.  Place tray in freezer for about an hour and then cookies are go.  Great fresh but after a week frozen, delish.

Next time double cacao is so going to happen.

Roasted Fennel Tomatoes, Millet, Kale

Sometimes I wonder if the USP of this blog would just lie in the title of my posts and an artful photo.  But I don’t have a camera, so… and also you can’t taste pictures, no matter how beautiful they are.  So I guess the USP will have to continue to be quiet and simple (not that anyone is reading this at all, of course).

I bought a bag of tomatoes at the market at the weekend for a pound and of course, in February, they were dull.  Love apples, not.  Or is that potatoes?  I forget.  Anyway, my tomatoes were not enticing me to eat them raw, so into the oven they went, with lots of EVOO, salt, pepper, balsamic and fennel seeds.  Fennel seeds make more or less everything taste amazing.  I roasted them until the juices were just starting to caramelize on the pan, and the tomatoes themselves had collapsed into amber piles of unctuousness.

I’m mixed them with some precooked millet (cook 1 cup of millet in 3 cups of water for 15 minutes and that is plenty for 3 if not 4 people).  And then topped them with some steamed curly kale and some broccoli stalks (waste not want not).

So what I ended up with was a glistening bowl of grainy golden red joy, sweet and sour, with hits of fennel and sea salt, and lots of lovely tender leaves, full of brassica-y goodness.  Yum.

Salt and Pepper Cumin Roasted Cauliflower with Curly Kale and Crunchy Quinoa

This dish is all about the seasoning.  Be very, very generous.

As ever, the title says it all.

Cook your required quantity of quinoa (you don’t want too much), drain and cool quickly under running water.  Spread out in a single layer on a baking sheet.

Divide your cauli into medium size florets and place in a roasting tray.  Don’t waste the cauli-crumbs; mix them in too.  Drizzle with olive oil and season well with freshly ground black pepper and good sea salt.   Add a generous sprinkle of whole cumin seeds and mix everything together until the cauli is well coated with the oil, spice and seasoning.   Roast in a hot oven for about twenty minutes until the cauli is tender and beginning to char at the edges.  After the cauli has been cooking for about ten minutes, put the tray of quinoa in the oven until it has dried out a little and become crispy and taken on a tiny bit of colour.

Steam your curly kale until tender.

To assemble, place the kale on warmed plates or bowls, top with the cauli and all its crunchy seasonings and sprinkle over the toasted quinoa.

 

 

Winter Ribbon Salad with Walnut-Citrus Vinagrette

For the salad, quantities dependent on appetite or mouths to feed:

Red cabbage, finely sliced

Fennel, ditto

A small amount of red onion, ditto

Carrot, shaved with a vegetable peeler into ribbons

Parsnip (yes, raw), ditto

Clementine or tangerine or satsuma or orange, peeled, halved and segmented

Dried cranberries

Fresh pomegranate seeds

For the dressing:

Blend – a handful of walnuts, dash of red wine vinegar, one clementine (peeled), teaspoon of grain mustard, maple syrup to taste and water to bring everything to the desired consistency.

Combine veggies and dressing and let sit until ready to serve; overnight is just fine, if not better.  Finish with chopped parsley, or finely shredded kale or spinach, for a flash of green colour.

Textures of roots, leaves and flowers

Or, beetroot and carrot “risotto”, with cavalo nero, broccoli and cauliflower.  With the usual tahini-based dressing, as earthy, sharp or sweet as you like.  Really, try this.  It’s not as mad as it sounds.

For the beetroot and carrot “risotto”, peel two (raw) medium beetroot and four or five carrots, cut into chunks and pulse in the food processor until they resemble arborio rice or bulgar wheat.  Do NOT puree.  Set aside.

Cut the cavalo nero into strips and steam until tender.  Do the same with the broccoli and cauliflower florets (flowers, see?), OR coat these with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and roast in the oven until tender and slightly charred in places.  In a good way.

Put two teaspoons of tahini in a jar or small bowl.  Add the juice of one lemon, fishing out the seeds if you can be bothered (I rarely can).   Sweeten with two teaspoons of maple syrup or honey, and heat things up with a generous teaspoon of grain mustard.  Season and stir well.  This will thicken as it stands.

Slightly warm the “risotto” if you want.  Top with steamed kale, the cruciferous florets, and drizzle over the dressing.  If you want to be really fancy, some toasted pecans and pumpkin seeds would be delicious additions.  I only wish I had thought of that before I polished off my second plate while typing this.

Dhaling

Never under-estimate the sheer comforting frugal deliciousness of the humble red lentil.

Utterly inauthentic as a dhal, this.  I was actually aiming for a dip, but it looks so soupy and warming and yummy and wholesome in the pan that I am not going to fuss with it any more.  And this is not even a recipe, but a non-recipe worth remembering (because I always forget about it).

1 cup of red lentils

1 cup (plus more, as necessary) of water

1 tbsp curry powder plus extra tumeric, if desired

Add the water to the lentils and bring to a boil, mix in the spices, and then immediately turn to a low simmer and reduce until the lentils are soft and the liquid is thick and luscious.  You might need to add a bit more water.  When the consistency is how you like it, stir in salt to taste and there you have it – possibly the cheapest meal this side of value-sliced-white and infinitely, incomparably more nutritious.

Later on this evening I will reheat mine, stir through some leaf spinach, squeeze in some lemon and top with cashew cream and nigella seeds, and a sprinkling of dried chilli.

Bung in the oven

Usually, the words “roasted vegetables” on a menu fill me with ennui, and if those words are preceded by “mediterranean”, my heart plummets faster than Felix.  BORING.

But, when the end of the week looms and the fridge turns up a random assortment of veggies that have been seen more youthful, pert days – vegetables that could, frankly, do with quite a bit of help before being fit for public viewing let alone consumption – the roasting tray and the oven become your friends.  Olive oil, balsamic, herbs, spices and seasoning work with heat to alchemical effect; softening, rounding, mellowing, melting the most uncompromising of woody carrot or parsnip, wrinkled pepper or bendy courgette into a sweet and burnished delight.  The oven does all the work for you, collecting all the delicious roasting juices for dunking  / drinking up your carb of choice and leaving you all that precious end-of-week time to open that all important end-of-week bottle those few precious minutes earlier.  That could, however, just be me.

Last night I found myself with a full fridge and an empty oven and set about redressing the balance. So this is how I made dinner, for 3-4 with lots of leftovers.  Into a huge roasting tray went:

• Chunks of courgette, sliced thickly on the diagonal
• Red and yellow peppers, halved, destemmed, deseeded and sliced into thick strips
• Shallots, peeled and halved lengthways
• A pack of baby fennel bulbs, halved, but two full size bulbs, chopped into quarters or eighths would do the same job
• Two bulbs of garlic, separated into cloves but the cloves unpeeled.

I added several snipped twigs of fresh rosemary, a generous slug of olive oil and another of balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and fennel seeds, mixed it all together well and put the whole lot into a hot oven to bake at about 220c for an hour, or until softened and slightly caramelized on the exposed edges of the veg.

Into another dish went:

•  About 500g of mushrooms, halved
• Dried thyme
• Olive oil
• Tamari
• Salt and pepper

And this was baked alongside the other veg for about 20 minutes, until the mushrooms began to release their juices.  I then added a lot of cherry tomatoes (again, probably about 500g) and returned to the oven until both mushrooms and tomatoes had released a lot of sizzling juice and started to create their own sauce on the bottom of the pan.   All that lovely fragrant liquid needed something to soak it up, so I added some cooked giant couscous, some chopped capers just to lift the flavours a little and some steamed chard leaves, stirred it all through and left it to marinate while the rest of the veggies finished cooking.

A crisp side salad of romaine, sliced mangetout and radish, dressed with copious quantities of lemon juice added crunch and a thick, luscious, spicy avocado cream sauce (avocado, lime juice, pimenton blended until very smooth) tied everything together.

Delicious, comforting, not boring at all.  And I really didn’t open the bottle until everything was in the oven, honestly.

Sweet butternut squash and onions

An autumnal supper of sweet and mellow flavours; soft and tender butternut squash and melting roasted onions, gentle herbs, sticky balsamic-maple toasted nuts and seeds, a tangle of savoy cabbage, and crunchy pear and shallots… delish.

 

1 butternut squash

3 onions

I bulb of garlic

Dried rosemary

Fennel seeds

 

1 handful of almonds

1 handful of pumpkin seeds

Balsamic vinegar

Maple syrup

½ a lemon

Dijon mustard

 

Dark green outer leaves of 1 savoy cabbage

 

1 pear

½ banana shallot

Mixed mild salad leaves – although watercress would work well here too.

 

Peel the butternut squash, remove the seeds and fibres, and cut into small pieces.  Lay in a single layer in a large oven proof dish.

Peel and slice the onion fairly thinly and mix with the squash

Remove the papery skin form the garlic bulb and separate it into cloves; no need to peel those.  Add to the squash and onion.

Season with salt and pepper, scatter over fennel seeds and dried rosemary, and add a generous glug of extra virgin olive oil.  Mix everything together with your hands until the vegetables are well covered, and bake in a fairly hot oven until they are tender and just beginning to catch on the edges.  The onion will add moisture so the butternut squash will not be crispy.  Be sure that the garlic cloves are well softened.

 

In a heavy based frying pan, toast the almonds and pumpkin seeds until fragrant and “popping”.  Splash in some balsamic vinegar and stir around as it bubbles away to coat the nuts; repeat.  Remove the pan from the heat and add maple syrup to taste, stir to keep the syrup from burning.  Add one tsp of Dijon mustard.  Taste and adjust to your palate; you may need more balsamic, more syrup or a squeeze of fresh lemon to balance the flavours.  You should end up with a pile of glossy sticky nuts and seeds and a small pool of thick and luscious dressing.  Pour this over the squash and onions and mix gently to combine.

 

Shred the cabbage and steam until tender but bright green.  Add to the squash and nut mixture and again, mix gently.

 

Slice the pear and the shallot thinly.  Lay on a bed of salad leaves and dress with balsamic vinegar and oil if required.

 

Eat, with good bread or pasta if desired.  Small pieces of creamy chevre go well here, mixed in through the sweet squash.

Spicy Creamy Carroty Hummusy Dippy Dressing

A cross between carrot puree, hummus and a creamy salad dressing, made from carrots and tahini spiced up with garlic, chilli, fennel and balsamic.

Peel and chop 5 large carrots into chunks and steam / boil in a little water until tender.  Drain, and place in the bowl of a food processor.  Add 2 tsp tahini, 1 clove garlic, 1 tsp fennel seeds, 1/2 tsp chilli flakes, salt, pepper and a splash of balsamic and process with as much water as necessary to make the whole thing creamy smooth.  Use as a spread in a wrap, a dip with crudites or mix with leaves and other veggies and pulses as a thick and yummy dressing.