Results tagged “autumn” from Mostly Eating

A short post today about a couple of different things.

Seasonal eating for Autumn
Rather than re-posting it, I thought I'd just mention last year's Seasonal Fruit and Vegetable Guide for Autumn.  If you're after meal and snack ideas for seasonal eating, or fancy a pretty print-out of seasonal fruits and vegetables to stick on your fridge door then look no further.

Potential chicken-keepers - ask your questions here!
A couple of people have asked me what our day-to-day routine is with our backyard chickens so I've started to write a post about our daily and weekly routine. I've also included answers to the sorts of questions we had before we decided to get our girls, such as "can you leave them alone if you need to go away for the weekend".

It occurred to me that some of you guys might be more actively thinking about getting your own chickens and might have questions that you'd like to ask somebody who already has chooks. We're very much novices ourselves so don't worry about asking anything too daft - just post them in the comments and I'll answer if I can (you can even ask the one about whether you need a cockerel to get eggs).

Alongside the lush new greens growing in  my garden are some productive older residents including  damson, apple, fig and plum trees. Most of the fruit bounty from the trees is taken care of between eating, passing on to friends and freezing (with just enough sugar). It’s the damsons that need a bit more thought; they are delicious in their own way, but not really all that good eaten au naturel.  

The first batch of purple blue damsons were made into a tub of decadent full fat, cream and sugar ice-cream, courtesy of Nigel Slater. The second batch were destined for Madalene’s Bullace and Conference Pear Breakfast Muffins. And so it turned out were the third batch.  Now before I get on to talking about the muffins, if you haven’t seen it already you should take a look at Madalene’s blog, The British Larder. Her photography is mouth-watering and her recipes are always inspiring me to try out more traditional British produce such as cobnuts, bullace and greengages.

This recipe produces wholesome, unpretentious muffins - the sort you’d have for breakfast or to tide you over until a late dinner.  And there are hidden treasures within the muffins; the damson pieces form little crimson, caramelised nuggets and the cereal flakes become chewy and malty.

Spring is in the air, which might seem an odd time to be writing about Winter, but what better time is there to reflect over what we have been eating over the last months? More and more evidence is gathering to support the Mediterranean diet for health and longevity, but there’s something in the mere mention of Mediterranean food that evokes images of sun-loving plants and al fresco eating. Is this a diet we can keep up through the Winter, or should those of us in colder parts be switching to a Nordic style diet? 

Last Sunday was all about using up the ends of a roast chicken from a couple of weeks before, plus sundry other odds and ends from the fridge.  I was so pleased with the end result I thought I’d share it here:  a homely chicken casserole with seasonal veggies, spelt and light dumplings made with rosemary and lemon.

Like most people, we’re feeling the credit crunch a little bit around this way.  I’m loathe to cut our food buying in any dramatic way (not surprisingly, eating well is a fairly big priority in our house) so it is a softly, softly approach at the moment.  For me part of the deal of being an occasional omnivore means buying higher welfare standard meat and going back from this to cheaper alternatives just isn’t an option.  A small organic chicken is surprisingly economical, not to mention tastier than the ubiquitous pale chicken breast fillet.  This way the whole of the chicken gets used up, plus there’s something quietly satisfying in a domesticated way about stretching a chicken out to three or four meals. 

Here’s what I had left in my fridge:

• Chicken stock – the really good stuff, the sort that sets to a quivering jelly in the fridge.  The stock was made from the carcass of a roast chicken that I didn’t have time to turn into stock straight away but slung into the freezer until the next weekend. 
  
• Half a tub of crème fraiche – whenever I buy crème fraiche for a recipe there is always some leftover; every recipe uses half a pot or less!
• A chunk of sourdough – of course the breadcrumbs don’t have to be made from sourdough but the bottom line is that good bread makes good breadcrumbs.  Slightly dry, stale bread is even better than fresh, but fresh will work fine too.
• Seasonal vegetables – I’ve used carrot and leek, the seasonal vegetables that I had odds and ends of in the fridge.  Celery, squash, onion, fennel and turnip would also work well here.
• Rosemary and bay – not technically in the fridge, but unlike more delicate species, rosemary and bay are the only herbs to consistently survive both my horticultural efforts and the British climate
  

This post is first of a new set of seasonal guides on Mostly Eating.  Quarterly seems like a good timescale for a produce guide; long enough to hide those little uncertainties induced by geography and climate which can easily throw things out by a few weeks.

Here’s what you will find in here:

• a list of fruits and vegetables in season between late September to mid December (yep, I know, a little bit later than scheduled!).  I’ve developed my list from a consensus opinion across a variety of sources including Eat the seasons, River Cottage and the Scottish What’s on your plate guide.  It’s good for the UK and also for much of Northern Europe and the less sunny parts of the USA (for a State by State guide check out the Sustainable Table). For you antipodeans, Kathryn usually has a list for New South Wales (tell me if you know any sites with a wider coverage of Australia).
• I've put together a longish list of recipe and snack suggestions that center around using seasonal ingredients to make sure that your diet is full of fruits and vegetables.
• there's a pretty PDF version of the list to stick on your fridge, or tuck into the front of your favourite vegetable cookbook as a quick reminder of what to look out for when you go shopping. The Autumn cooking suggestions are on the back.

Autumn produce guide
Autumn is a feast riches for the seasonal eater, with the luxury of an extended overlap between the last of the summer favourites such as courgettes and aubergine and exciting newcomers like pumpkin, chestnuts and kale.

Seasonal fruits and vegetables for Autumn

apples, damsons, medlars, pears, quince, plums, chestnuts, elderberries, artichoke, aubergine, beetroot, broccoli, butternut squash, carrots, celery, courgette, fennel, garlic, kale, leeks, onions, potatoes, turnips, watercress, celeriac, kohlrabi, pumpkin, jerusalem artichoke, parsnips, chicory, beetroot, cauliflower

Last week was all about those ingredients that sound like they are going to be wholegrains but turn out not to be.  This week is a little of the opposite - I have been cooking with cous cous.  Now those clever foodie types amongst you will know that cous cous isn’t really a grain at all, despite it’s teeny tiny appearance, but that it is actually little tiny pieces of pasta.  But surprisingly perhaps, you can get still get wholegrain cous cous; simply cous cous made from wholewheat flour.

The cous cous, sumac, pepper and date salad featured here is a very simple recipe.  Everybody makes a salad like this every now and then - perfect as a side dish or as a packed lunch to take to work.  Every time I make it this salad it is slightly different, however the ideas behind it are always the same.  I have five broad categories of ingredient in mind to make sure that my salad provides a good range of nutrients:

A wholegrain – choose from quinoa, brown rice, buckwheat, wholegrain spelt, wholewheat cous cous and millet or whatever else you fancy.  Wholegrains are higher in vitamins and minerals than their refined equivalents and full of fibre.  People often find that wholegrains are more filling than refined carbohydrates, so a wholegrain salad is perfect for keeping you energetic and wide awake well into the afternoon.

Fresh vegetables – any chopped fresh or lightly blanched vegetables such as peppers, green beans, radish, tomato, grated carrot, courgette, spring onion, red onion, cucumber or sweetcorn.  All of these will count towards your five a day as well as providing vitamins, potassium and fibre.  I like to include something that I know will give me a decent amount of vitamin C – usually red or yellow peppers.  You can of course use leftover roasted vegetables, in which case how about complementing them with some chopped fresh fruit so that you still get plenty of Vitamin C?

Dried fruit – dates, apricots, figs, sour cherries etc will all add an appealing sweet note to your salad.  Most dried fruits are very high in fibre and usually rich in minerals (particularly iron and sometimes also calcium).

Nuts or seeds – these provide healthy fats, more fibre and a little bit of protein. Most importantly they add bags of texture and flavour.

Flavour enhancers – a little something to boost the flavour.  I used sumac, which adds a lovely tart note against the sweet dried dates (not to mention an exotic pink hue!).  But pretty much anything goes; lemon juice, black pepper, fresh or dried herbs, chilli sauce, spices, seasoning mixes. The idea is to boost the flavour of your lunch without needing to add large amounts of calories or salt.

Last week while I was busy not blogging I got predictably excited about an idea on Culinate for a breakfast salad.  The said salad can be prepared the evening before, kicking the day off to a great start with two portions of veg taken care of before even leaving the house

But the real world doesn't always pan out like that and this weekend has been one of those weekends.  Suddenly it's four o'clock on Sunday afternoon and my total fruit and veg consumption for the day has been a handful of dried fruit at breakfast (one portion down, at least four to go).

Big salads are the perfect cure to a day of vegetable dodging and have an endearing way of combining the best of all culinary worlds: raw and cooked, spicy and sweet, hot and cold.  This roast squash and chickpea salad is delicious and the perfect catch-up job; four portions of veg in one dish.  Definitely make the full quantities of the roast squash and marinated chickpeas even if you aren't feeding four people and you will magically find yourself the owner of a ready made lunch to take to work the next day.

The recipe does have a few stages to it but there's no rush; this is one of those good-natured recipes that will fit in happily around whatever else you might be up to.  I made the dressing and put the chickpeas in to marinade at about 3pm and then went off to sort out some paperwork.  I peeled and diced the squash and sliced the onion late afternoon before settling down to a bit of light blogging, finally roasting the squash and slow cooking the onions just before we wanted to eat.  With all of the prep done the actual cooking part seemed pretty trivial.

Nobody is more surprised than me by my current emotion (well OK, maybe my Mum will be a bit more surprised than I am if she’s reading this).  I’m upset because …. march is the end of the brussels sprout season!

Sprouts are a fabulous winter source of vitamin C and being so readily available locally meant that this winter just seemed like the time to put previous prejudice aside and give them another try.  I’ve always hated brussels sprouts, but a couple of factors have won me round.  First and foremost, sprouts are just tastier than they used to be – growers have been working hard to come up with sweeter tasting varieties (if you don’t believe me, well then that's all the more reason to give them another try).  Secondly, the blogosphere has sprouted some amazing recipes over the last couple of winters. If you look closely at the recipes they all have one quality in common; the sprouts are at no time be cooked using water. Therein lies the top tip - if you want to learn to love sprouts in all their glory then you need to start by steering well clear of anything boiled or microwaved.  

Heidi’s golden crusted spouts recipe dusted with cheese was the deal clincher for me, after which I have progressed swiftly through cheesy pasta sauces and on to virtually undisguised sprouts in healthy stir fries.  Still to come is the ultimate pinnacle of sprout acceptance, the raw sprout (roll on the first frost of winter 2008).

Five recipes to make you love brussels sprouts
Start with Heidi's golden crusted sprouts and work your way through.  Not a recipe but useful for those who have been willfully avoiding sprouts is Vegan Yum Yum's article on How to Buy and Prep Brussels Sprouts

• Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts Recipe Heidi at 101 cookbook
  
• Pasta with Hashed Brussels Sprouts and Pine Nuts Molly at orangette
  
• Brussels sprouts with spiced breadcrumbs recipe by Tom Norrington-Davies (channel 4)
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts Recipe with Balsamic, Parmesan, and Pine Nuts by Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen
  
• Caramelized strips of tofu served over sauteed shredded brussels sprouts Heidi at 101 cookbooks
• Brussels sprouts and tofu by Yotam Ottolenghin and ably tested by Wendy

There are always raw food enthusiasts around telling you that a diet exclusive of food cooked using heat is the way to eternal life but in reality the answer (as is nearly always the case in nutrition) lies in variety. As much as some nutrients are diminished by the water and heat that they encounter during cooking, there are a whole host of others that only become user friendly with a touch of heat and a drizzle of oil. The Japanese are probably the best at this balancing act with their talent for mixing raw and cooked vegetables within a single dish, providing bags of texture and nutrients.

This winter I have been studiously avoiding imported salad vegetables as far as possible but I miss the crunchy stuff, and there are only so many kettle chips a girl can reasonably eat to fulfill this particular craving. Enter the winter coleslaw – fantastically crunchy and very nutritious.

I adore Meeta’s definition of comfort food - “food that hugs you from the inside”. Sums up this kind of food just right doesn’t it?

Dal is very special class of comfort food; it feels like a comfort food (all soft and squishy), it tastes like a comfort food (soothing but moreish) and you can dip your choice of bread into it or shovel with a spoon, bowl to chin. All good stuff. But unlike other comfort foods, dal need not have a touch of cheese, butter, chocolate or cream to their name. In fact they are positively brimming with nutritional benefits, especially when you combine them with a vegetable as in this butternut squash and red lentil variation.

The cinnamon, turmeric and cumin lend a very gentle touch here, imparting aroma to the lentils and squash rather than spice. A tarka is simply a garnish, in this case slow cooked red onion, fiery chilli and garlic. Tarka are generally made using ghee, a saturated fat heavy clarified butter, replaced here by olive oil.

All of those enthusiastic things I said about beans being “agriculturally sustainable and nutritionally multi-tasking” hold true for lentils and I plan to get to know them even better this year. Red lentils are a forgiving place to start if cooking with lentils is new to you, disintegrating into the requisite creamy puree whatever you do to them.

Soup is the perfect food for this time of year; suitably healthy if you ate a few too many mince pies but comforting enough to pacify those of you stuck with snow blizzards or malingering colds. This recipe is for my new favourite, a soup made with roast parsnips, chestnuts and finished off with fresh orange juice and a dollop of zesty, spiced yogurt.

Full bodied is the most fitting description I can conjure for this soup. My other half (the triathlete) raved about it for its deep, near meaty flavour and for myself, well I can’t resist a roast parsnip and the nutmeg, orange zest and yogurt topping adds that bit of freshness that I can’t help looking around for now that autumnal roasts and stews are starting to seem “so last year”.

Chestnuts are a funny old thing aren’t they? Delicious, but very different from your average nut and I couldn’t help but be intrigued about their composition. Chestnuts don’t have the typical nut benefits of high protein and heart healthy monounsaturated fat, but they do have plenty of fibre, and with hardly any fat (good or bad) they have massively less calories than your conventional nut. Pretty good for you, but strangely much closer in make-up to a parsnip than an almond.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I hope you all have a lovely time over the Christmas break. We will be off up North in a couple of days to see both of our families and before that I'm planning a leisurely couple of days wrapping presents and drinking mulled wine. For alongside this I have already made a batch of my favourite Christmas baking treat; sticky golden syrup flapjacks warmed up with a seasonal dollop of mincemeat and a snifter of rum. This recipe is as easy as baking gets and but will still fill your house with a satisfying dose of spicy, fruity Christmas scent.

I tried nutritionify-ing this recipe by leaving out a bit of the butter and golden syrup, but it told me in no uncertain terms that this was not what Christmas cookery was all about by promptly falling apart. I present here the full fat, full sugar, full syrup version to enjoy (normal service will be resumed in January!).

Everybody has their favourite way of making porridge. Purists will tell you that porridge has to be cooked long and slow to develop the correct consistency, stirred with the attention usually only reserved for a good risotto. There's no way I'm standing around doing that first thing in the morning, so to the microwave it is. Mind you, there is a way get some of that traditional creaminess into a microwave porridge and that trick is to soak the oats in the milk before you cook it.

Here's how it works in our house: fall out of bed, stumble down stairs, pour oats and milk into a bowl while making obligatory cup of tea, put bowl into microwave out of way of the cats, go back upstairs and get washed and dressed, come back down, cook porridge, eat. If you are feeling crazily organised you can do the soaking stage the night before and leave the porridge mixture soaking in the fridge where it will become even creamier (I have even been known to eat this mixture cold without cooking it, on the train. Funny looks? Yes!).

Porridge is just made for experimentation and this fig and plum porridge is a joy (think christmas morning, every day). Dried figs are an excellent partner to porridge, keeping their texture better than most dried fruits because of all of those little tiny seeds (did you know that they also contain a surprisingly large amount of calcium and iron?). Allspice is this year's winter spice of choice for me, having the requisite warm, mulled wine fragrance but with a bit more punch than cinnamon. And nutritionally there are pretty much only good things to say about oats; if you would like to read more about these good things I highly recommend Canadian Dietitian Leslie Beck's Featured Food article on oats. Scratching around, the only thought close to a criticism I have ever managed to come up with is that oats are a little lower in insoluble fibre (the roughage sort) than some other cereals. The addition of fresh and dried fruit boosts this and I also throw in a teaspoon of flaxseeds at the soaking stage (these are also called golden flaxseed, flax and linseed). The finishing touch to the porridge is a decadent sprinkling of dark muscovado sugar crystals that melt into the top in an irrestibly fudgy way.

There’s one question that I need to get out of the way quickly before my lovely husband gets any ideas. Yes, these little cakes do have vegetable in them, but no, they don’t count as a portion of veg. I hope I haven’t upset anyone else with that revelation? A portion of veggies you see needs to be at least within shouting distance of 80g, and a slice of carrot cake or any of its culinary siblings come in nowhere near that, not even nutritionist Kathryn’s Chocolate and Beetroot cake or Heidi’s Special Zucchini Bread. These little squash bites are in the same boat – a meagre 12.5g of squash per cake. But don’t worry, it is not so much what you are putting in that is important here, it is what the squash lets you leave out. Here's the low down on why these are worth firing up the oven:

• Crystallised ginger and butternut squash are the perfect autumn flavour combo


• Roasted butternut squash provides plenty of moisture leaving the recipe to be naturally low fat


• Flour is OK (unless you have coeliac disease), especially wholemeal, but just doesn't do as much good stuff for you as oats. This recipe is loosely based on the kind of proportions you would use to make muffins but skips half of the flour in favour of low GI, cholesterol busting oats.


• There's no butter or marg in here, just two tablespoons of rapeseed oil to make twenty cakes. Rapeseed oil is the one also known as vegetable oil or canola and is predominantly monounsaturated like olive oil (indeed you could use a mild olive oil instead if you prefer).


• You won't miss the butter, I promise, because there are also a handful of buttery macadamia nuts in there.

These are an every day sorta cake. They aren’t particularly pretty or delicate (meaning that you can dunk them in your tea), but they are as nutritionally well balanced as you can expect a cake to be. Like most low fat cakes they don’t keep for too long but this works in their favour – I keep a batch in the freezer and when I fancy something sweet with my tea I take one of these out at breakfast and it is ready to eat by coffee break.

This is an entirely self-invented recipe and I'm not a baking expert by any means; feel free to tweak the recipe and report back on any improvements you come up with! I’m sure you can think of plenty of things to do with the rest of the butternut squash but if not pop it into the freezer for now (I have an easy savoury recipe to use the rest on its way).

My foray into vegetable-based baking coincides with a beta carotene theme for regular blogging event Sugar High Friday so I thought I would take the opportunity to join those guys for a change (the event is hosted this time around by Leslie at Definitely Not Martha). It sounds good so I will put a link to the round-up here when it appears.

I’m planning ahead a little here I know, but I reckon this warm sweet potato salad will really come into its own in dreary January and February. There is no way it can fail to bring a bit of cheer to the table with its sweet flavours and vibrant shades of purple, pinks and orange. Happily my plan should work; sweet potatoes, beetroot and red onion are all seasonally available now in the northern hemisphere and should be around for a quite a while yet.

This recipe has its roots in the moreish potato salad recipe in Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer book, made from baked potato, spring onion, olive oil and sumac. This autumnal version brings in sweet potatoes and beetroot and most importantly keeps the potato skins. Potato skins I love in all their chewy leathery-ness, and as your mother no doubt told you when you were growing up they are very good for you too (there you go, not every bit of advice in nutrition changes with the month!). Last but not least, for what is essentially an oven roasted vegetable dish this one requires surprisingly little oil.

Sweet potato has a lighter texture than a regular potato and has the advantage of being low GI to keep you fuller for longer. Orange and purple beetroots add an earthy note, more sweetness and a good helping of folate. The smattering of crushed sumac berries add a delicious tartness as well as more flecks of luminous pink, as if the beetroot and potato were not colourful enough already! Don’t worry too much if you don’t have sumac – the raw onion does a pretty good job on its own in providing a bit of contrast. If you are using a fresh orange for the juice (rather than a carton) you could chuck in a bit of finely grated orange zest in place of the sumac.

The point about eating fruit and vegetables to keep healthy is that it doesn’t really matter all that much which ones you eat, so long as you eat plenty of them. In fact, the more variety the better most experts say. Weekend Herb Blogging, the biggest, most bustling weekly round-up of plant-based edibles must, therefore, be one of the best tips going for anybody trying to include more fruit and veg in their diet.

Once a week the blogosphere sends in a whole raft of new fruit, vegetable and herb based creations and each week sees a range of recipes to suit every palate. There is an instant project in there for anybody who thinks fruit and vegetables are boring: every Monday get along to the Weekend Herb Blogging round-up (you can always find out who is hosting WHB this week on Kalyn’s site) and choose one recipe to try out that week. Whatever you fancy will be there: instant salads or leisurely roasts; sweet or savoury; homely, comfort food versus fresh flavours; not to mention a constant parade of exotic new ingredients and new treatments for old favourites. Even better, the global nature of WHB guarantees that there will always be somebody cooking what’s in season near you right now!

This week marks the second anniversary of the very first Weekend Herb Blogging. Normally my contributions to Weekend Herb Blogging are on the simple side but this recipe is a meal fit for a celebration; aromatic poached quince with delicious pork chops and a soft, savoury pilaf.

The quince is the epitome of seasonal food in the UK, a rather old fashioned, gentle fruit that hasn’t reached the heights of popularity that demand it be forcibly cultivated all year. But don’t worry if you can’t get hold of a quince – pears and pork are a classic combination, just remember to reduce the poaching time accordingly. The pilaf recipe is very loosely based on those featured in the first Moro cookbook of recipes inspired by the cuisine of Spain, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean (I have a sneaking suspicion that the idea of a making a pilaf snuck into my head when I was reading Joanna's recipe for stuffed quince with a chickpea pilav).

Spiced chilli hot chocolate is an idea as old as well, hot chocolate! The earliest traces of hot chocolate, found in Mayan tombs in Guatamala dating back to 460 A.D, had been made from a paste ground from cocoa seeds mixed with cornmeal and chillis. I like this spicy hot chocolate as an occasional mid afternoon pick me up when I am struggling to concentrate on something complicated – there’s definitely something in the research from Nottingham University showing that a cocoa rich drink can improve blood flow to the brain. Chilli is also well known for improving blood flow all over your body so this would be equally welcome to warm you up after a bracing winter walk outside.

Sadly chocolate is not the health food that some clever marketing people would like us to believe (or that we would like to believe perhaps?), but for an occasional sweet treat a mug of hot spicy drinking chocolate is not such a bad thing. Two tips to keep it on the healthy side; first, use good quality plain chocolate rather than a sweetened milk chocolate or chocolate powder and second, use semi-skimmed or skimmed milk to keep this on the low fat side. All chocolate is high in sugar and fat (dark chocolate just has a little bit less fat and a little bit more sugar) and so the health gain in choosing dark (plain chocolate) is not really about fat but is because dark chocolate contains more cocoa solids, usually around the 70%. It is the cocoa solids in chocolate that have been associated with having heart health benefits and that contain valuable anti-oxidants.

If you've ever heard nutritionists talking about sugary and sweet foods being empty calories they mean that these foods provide calories but bugger all else of nutritional usefulness. Happily this hot chocolate is well away from being empty calories with those 70% cocoa solids and a good helping of bone healthy calcium in the milk. If you don’t drink cows milk just go for whatever alternative you normally use but try to choose one that has been fortified with calcium.

And now to the all important third tip - for a super enjoyable, guilt-free beverage experience make your drink from tasty fairly traded dark chocolate! Rachel who makes and bakes many lovely things over at Rkhooks is gathering together all of our best chocolate recipes to promote the chocolate campaign from Stop the Traffik. The chocolate campaign is there to draw attention to the shocking practice of using trafficked child slave labour to harvest cocoa beans on the Cote D'Ivoire. The chocolate campaign web site has some information about where to buy your traffik-free chocolate from but essentially for a chocolate to be awarded Fairtrade status it must be guaranteed not to have involved any trafficked labour in its production so you can just look out for fairtrade chocolate.

As mentioned in my earlier post about the french beans with almonds, I'm going through a phase of 'messing about with my vegetables', finding new ways to cook and prepare that don't bring anything disagreeably unhealthy into the equation. Roughly translated, this means no lashings of saturated fat heavy butter (well not every day anyway!) and not too much salt. Most of the time it also entails cooking methods that maintain the vitamin content of the vegetables as much as possible, so the methods that don't use too much water to and which do involve quick cooking (stir fry, steam, microwave). This week's experiment has been baby carrots, sort of steamed and coated in a sweet, sticky plum and honey glaze (secretly sneaking in extra fresh fruit without adding any salt or fat).

My shock discovery of the week has been about the baby carrots of America. You guys can’t get enough of these carrots apparently, so much so there is a roaring trade in taking full size grown-up carrots and whittling them down into faux baby carrots! My first reaction to this was outrage (surely this has be an incredible waste of natural resources?) but in fact these carrots are a clever solution to consumer fickleness. Piles of misshapen, knobbly carrots that nobody wants to buy are magically twirled into standard 2-inch babies in a process that was the brain-child of Californian Mike Yurosek. Mike developed his process because he was fed up with watching all the wastage from the carrot business, seemingly a great example of a sustainable business idea. In a strange twist, demand for the baby carrots has been so massive that business is no longer a niche charged with using up an industrial by-product; carrots are now being grown in long, thin shapes better suited for turning in to several ‘babies’ apiece. I really don’t know where the baby carrot industry stands now in sustainable terms (possibly not so good any more?) but from a nutritional point of view you have to be pragamatic and conclude that anything that persuades people to use vegetables as a snack is probably positive.

There is one thing I am sure about – those fake baby carrots can't taste anything like a real, fresh from the ground, naturally cute 'n stumpy baby carrot! You can see from the picture that my carrots arrived reassuringly caked with mud and mishapen and so I'm fairly sure they are the real deal. The plum and chilli sauce gives this an almost oriental sweet and sour feel but the carrots themselves remain uncontrovertibly earthy and english. We had ours with pan fried Irish trout and noodles tossed with raw pak choi and sesame oil but I think these carrots would be equally at home at the side of a roast dinner. Trout is an oily fish (containing a good measure of omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids) and is ideal for a quick supper, cooking almost instantly in its filleted form. This particular trout was a mini adventure in itself as my other half did the shopping and bought home one whole trout for us to share (I've only ever bought trout ready filleted before – I know, such a sheltered life!). Funnily enough he hadn't really thought ahead to how he was going to get the trout into shareable form. Anyway, a bit of googling of 'trout filleting' and I was soon getting my knife dirty and fingers slimy rather cackhandedly cutting off the two fillets. The end result was a bit untidy around the edges but tasty and I think somewhat underrated at only £2.50 for an organic trout to feed two.

For the last few weekends I have been a triathlon widow, which has been OK with me because I have had plenty of time to potter about in the kitchen and ponder on what to do with the bounty from our fruit trees.

The usual suspects when it comes to preserving fruit to use through the winter are jams and chutneys. Most years I make plum chutney and I have nothing against a bit of jam but somehow it always seems such a shame to take a super healthy food and to mix it with its weight in sugar. If you want to make your fruit last without adding large quantities of sugar then one answer is to turn it into softly stewed compote and freeze.

Unlike in jam making where the sugar has a central role in preservation, when you freeze fruit the amount of sugar is dictated only by palate, so unless you have a very sweet tooth you can go a lot lower with the sugar than most recipes suggest. I've been mulling this over since Heidi's Plum and Rosewater compote in July (20% sugar to fruit) and more recently Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's article on British plums (25% sugar to fruit) and decided to try my luck at 10% sugar to fruit. This worked out perfectly for my taste buds and is a respectable level of sugar for healthy people to eat as an occasional food (nutrition guidelines suggest that any foods with over 15g of added sugar per 100g be regarded as high in sugar, with 5g or less per 100g considered low).

Despite losing a little bit of certain vitamins compared with eating raw, cooked fruit is a very nutritious food to eat, 'counting' towards that five a day while being up there with a ready meal in the convenience stakes. For those of us who like to know these things, a portion of cooked or stewed fruit is three tablespoons. I have a bunch of reusable containers from Lakeland and have frozen my compote in roughly three portion batches so that I can take out one tub a week through the Winter. Our freezer isn't big enough to store a batch for every week of the Winter but I have stuffed quite a lot in there, largely aided by accidentally leaving the freezer door open a couple of weeks before (I wouldn't advise this as a strategy, it was quite messy and expensive). There is something very satisfying about having a freezerful of healthy food squirreled away, though as always I’m sure there are pros and cons in the sustainability argument. Freezing fruit will use more energy than traditional preserving methods but for me compote fulfils a completely different space in the diet from jam and I love it that I won't need to rely so much on imported fruit during the Winter.

I have made two compotes, one from plum and one from apple, but you will probably have your own ideas depending on what fruit you have a glut of or can buy cheaply. I'm pleased with the contrast between these two - one week I will have a gentle, aromatic plum compote perfumed with vanilla and the next week a fresher, chunkier apple compote spiked with a clean rosewater flavour.

In Oxford you know that autumn is approaching when it is time for St Giles Fair. The two main roads that merge on the North side of the city centre are closed and an old-fashioned funfair springs up overnight, causing traffic chaos for three whole days. Colleges, offices, shops, pubs and museums all suddenly find their main entrance opening out onto the back of a fun house or zero gravity ride and on good years a big wheel offers sneaky peeks into college quadrangles and secret gardens. St Giles Fair also brings with it three unmistakable smells: diesel, candyfloss, and the irresistible waft of frying onions from the fair’s numerous burger vans.

Fresh from the fair and armed with my local, seasonal but mainly just very cute aubergine (see picture), I knew I wanted to pair it with some of those sweet, slow-cooked onions and a really rich (and dare I say) autumnal tomato sauce. The final recipe is a little more time consuming than most of my cooking but griddling the courgette and aubergine and slow cooking the onions is what makes this dish. Lightly brushing the aubergine (eggplant) and courgette (zucchini) with olive oil and griddling until they have golden criss-cross markings on them brings out their flavour in much the same way as slow cooking does for the onions, without letting the aubergine act as too much of a giant olive oil sponge. Speaking of the aubergine, these italian heirloom types have a sweet and creamy flesh with no hint of bitterness to need salting away.

I totted it up quickly on my notepad and a serving of this recipe easily provides three fruit and veg portions. I’ve teamed the vegetables up with quinoa because it has a pleasant nutty flavour and is a healthy choice in carbohydrate terms but I don’t really believe in any of that individual ‘superfood’ business; if you don’t fancy quinoa just substitute it for another wholegrain like brown rice, bulgur or barley. For the curious there is some detailed information on the GI News site from Sydney University about the interaction between wholegrain goodness and glycaemic index.

You know it only just occurred to me that all this quinoa we’ve suddenly started eating has to be coming from somewhere and sure enough when I checked the brand I bought last is imported from Bolivia. Do we grow quinoa in the UK? Yes we do apparently, as a tall dense cover crop for game birds to hide in! I wonder if that is starting to change.

Sam has challenged all of us English to stick up for our much-maligned national cuisine, which is a fine idea but leaves us all with a bit of quandary; do we showcase one of our traditional dishes or do we attempt to show “how much we have come on”?

One of the things I think we Brits/English do really well is this local eating and reducing food miles business. One of the advantages of living on such a small island is that when we try to eat local it really can mean local. Not for us a 100-mile radius like those Bay Area people I keep hearing about - no disrespect intended if any of you are reading :-) Nope, over here local is often very local indeed (100 miles is after all, a quarter of the length of England). From where I live at the edge of a reasonably large city (Oxford) I can get artisan cheeses, an impressive choice of organic veg, melt-in-the-mouth sustainably farmed lamb all within the 18 miles from my house.

An area of British produce that has seen a big surge in popularity in recent years with both health-conscious and ethically-concerned shoppers is venison. The main species of deer farmed for venison in England is the red deer, indigenous to Britain, which I think fits nicely with the theme of the event. I far prefer the idea of eating an animal that has been reared out and about in something close to its natural habitat (hence my thing about lamb recipes) and the increase in sales suggest that there are a lot of other peope who feel the same way. Deer for the most part are still reared on expansive parkland in England, though I understand that the same is not true of all countries.

Red meat has a bad reputation nutritionally-speaking. Some, but not all of these concerns are related to the saturated fat content of the meat, so if you do eat red meat occasionally then naturally low-in-fat venison is an excellent choice. It is much lower in fat (including saturated fat) than other red meats, while retaining the typical beneficial attributes such as high quality protein and easily-absorbed iron. The venison in my casserole contains 165 kcal in it per 100g, and 2.5g of fat, whereas my next choice, lean (trimmed) braising steak that would have contained 225 kcal and 9.7g of fat.

This risotto is a rustic, weeknight supper kind of a dish, not for an elegant dinner or to impress somebody with your culinary skills. But it isn’t quite as unsophisticated as it looks; alongside the butternut squash and sprigs of rosemary it has a few hidden secrets, more of which later.

As a baked risotto this is definitely not an authentic recipe, but it is the only sort that you can bung in the oven and ignore while you sit on the sofa finishing off those last bits of Easter egg. Personally I think I have reached the stage of being pretty much done with chocolate for the six weeks or so. First there were those chocolate kiwiberries, then a bit of neat chocolate (a sample of all three colour varieties) and last night we rounded it all off by making Bill Granger’s Molten Chocolate Puddings. If you too are so over all that chocolate then this is the perfect antidote; simple, wholesome and very savoury.

Anyway, back to those hidden secrets. Nearly invisible from the photo but very strong on flavour are a few dried porcini mushrooms and hint of truffle oil. And if you look really closely, you might just be able to see that this is a risotto made with brown rice. What on earth was I thinking I hear you ask? Well two things really. First, brown rice has that great nutty flavour which is fabulous with those strong flavours like the rosemary and the porcini mushrooms. Second, brown rice is a wholegrain, and white rice isn’t.

A few people I know turn their noses up at Quorn because it “doesn’t taste of anything”. To my mind they are missing the point; it is precisely this quality of Quorn that makes it useful. Yes, the plain imitation chicken fillets are decidedly uninspiring (and a little odd) but ignore those and go for the mince or the pieces; Quorn is at its best in something like a stew or a chili where it can absorb all of the other flavours like a sponge.

This vegetarian chili is not the most elegant dish around but the huge batch I have just made will be most welcome over the next few weeks when I am going to be very busy with limited time to cook and shop. It freezes beautifully and is very highly rated by the more carnivorous half of the household.

The important thing with this one is that you have to make this recipe the day before you want to eat it if you want it to taste good. I think there are two reasons why this is even more important for a quorn chili than a meat version. Firstly, because parts of the dish are relatively bland tasting, you need to allow longer for that magical merging of flavours that happens to make any stew type dish taste more than just the sum of the individual parts. Secondly, some of the lovely aromatic compounds in the spices will dissolve in the water component of the dish and others in the fat. Because this version is so low in fat compared with a meat dish again you need to give it a bit longer for all of the flavours to spread throughout. So, make it while you watch a movie on a rainy Saturday afternoon, wandering into the kitchen to give it a stir occasionally, and then it will be ready and waiting as a quick dinner on Sunday or Monday night. Bag or box the remaining portions and put them in the freezer from which they will emerge even tastier.

Friday was a big day for me, my last day after working in the same place for nearly nine and a half years! As is tradition when somebody arrives or leaves we had a big communal coffee morning, known locally as a Beano.

This isn't the place to describe the perfectly chosen flowers, photos and other gifts I was given, the lovely speech (though Stuart did you really need to bring up the rugby tackling incident?), or the sniffing on my part. But I would like to say a big Thank You again to everybody involved in giving me such a fantastic send off - you know who you are! Anyway, enough of the sentimental stuff now, if you are reading this blog you probably want me to shut up and get to the food part.

My offerings for the occasion were some Chocolate and Chili bites. These went very quickly and a few people asked for the recipe so I’m guessing they were a hit; you can find the original recipe for them on the Chocolate and Zucchini web site. These are very rich (more akin to a brownie rather than a muffin) and very tasty. I'd love to tell you all about how good for you they are with their antioxidant-rich dark chocolate but given their other major ingredients (lots and lots of butter and sugar) it would be terribly unethical of me to encourage their regular consumption on health grounds. What I will say is that these are suitably small so as not to make you feel too guilty, and that a little of what you fancy does you good.

Today was not a day to go out to buy something for lunch – the weather forecast said “damaging winds gusting 60 to 70mph” and it was not exaggerating. It was so bad that every so often the wind gusts through the roof and makes the hatch from the landing to the loft lift up and drop with a bang (boy did that scare the cat!).

Lunch was therefore something concocted from the remainders in the fridge. The last of the virtuous seasonal, organic and local parsnips fried in a little olive oil and thyme, with a dollop of cottage cheese on the side and finished off with a sprinkling of seeds. The whole thing was surprisingly good; the sourness of the cottage cheese complemented the sweet, caramelised parsnips and the seeds added a welcome crunch to the whole thing.