Results tagged “spring” from Mostly Eating

Even if you only dabble in growing your own vegetables, chances are that you grow a few radish here and there.  Few crops are as reliable or quick, speeding from sowing to serving in as little as three weeks. Our garden alternates between the mild, multi-coloured globe shaped radish that were my first ever crop and the hotter, torpedo shaped french breakfast radish.

This raita was inspired by a memorable keralan dinner cooked for us by friends, inspired in turn by their recent trip to India.  All of the food was vegetarian and included a dish that looked like a regular cucumber yogurt raita.  The first taste was cooling yogurt and cucumber, but swiftly followed by an unexpected and warming kick of ginger.  The same concept works equally well with the modest radish, which is also much easier to grow in the UK (though I am tempted to have a bash at propogating supermarket ginger indoors).

Like tzatziki and cucumber raita, this dish doesn’t keep terribly elegantly.  It’s not that it goes off overly quickly, just that the vegetables steadily seep water which separates from the yogurt.  You can easily drain off the excess liquid give it a good stir, but as the whole thing only takes five minutes to pull together I just tend to make a batch as I need it.  We use this as an accompaniment to veggie dishes (like the spicy chickpeas in the photo), simply cooked fish and barbecued or griddled meats.  If you fancy it you can add some finely chopped ginger for extra heat.

We’ve just spent a few days in the glorious highlands of Scotland.  Me with my camera and the triathlete with his bike, taking part in the Caledonian Etape.  Or trying to anyway; the whole weekend turned out to be rather more eventful than planned when somebody sabotaged the event by scattering carpet tacks across the route, possibly in protest at the road closures put in place for the event (scheduled to last an incredibly inconvenient three whole hours).

The Scots as it turns out have a whole vocabulary to describe rain.  After a dreich day, the rain upgraded its status to stotting down. The weather in England hasn’t been much better since we got back from our break (grey and distinctly chilly) so this seems an opportune time to share a crumble recipe.

I’ve dallied with ‘healthier fats’ in crumbles, but haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory recipe (oils seem to produce a dish more rubble than crumble).  A compromise is to accompany the butter with a high fruit to topping ratio, not too much sugar and plenty of good stuff in the topping.  Wholemeal spelt flour, whole oats plus roughly chopped hazelnuts for texture.  Spelt flour has a toasty, nutty flavour and is my current favourite standby flour for all but the most serious of baking recipes.  (Shopping note: as with the unmilled spelt grains, spelt flour comes in wholegrain and white varieties. Check the label to see which sort you are getting).

One of the side effects of eulogising about seasonal food is that you can’t help feeling a little bit of a fraud writing about vegetables you’ve never eaten. Enter chicory, the one you might know as belgian endive or witloof.  As soon as I had typed the word onto my spring seasonal fruit and veg guide I realised I'd better get my culinary finger out and actually try some.

For some reason we’ve just never gotten round to trying it, probably because of its reputation for bitterness. But the bitter taste isn’t overpowering and makes the perfect foil to a sweet dressing.  Chicory is pretty readily available, though it seems to cause the shops a bit of confusion by not fitting neatly into any of the established groupings of vegetables. In our supermarket the chicory was nestled underneath exotic ginger and chillies from much farther afield.  Despite chicory being in season in the UK at this time of year much of the stuff we buy in the shops is actually grown in France (around Calais). But as Rose Prince points out in her excellent New English Table book "...strictly speaking this is just 20 miles from Kent, so more local to people in the South of England than a Scottish raspberry."

Orange juice and butter is a classic chicory accompaniment. This braised chicory dish uses olive oil in place of the butter and has a plenty of flavour courtesy of the orange zest and a hint of honey.  We had ours with roast chicken but it would go well with anything that isn’t too overpowering in flavour (pork, fish, a multitude of vegetarian dishes or maybe a grain to soak up the juices).

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.

I’m delegating responsibility to Jamie Oliver for the nutritional component of today’s post. As he comments, it’s nearly all water. 

It does have a bit of vitamin C, some calcium and fibre, but that’s not the point of rhubarb…Instead it has an amazing flavour spectrum

Jamie Oliver

He’s right too, I double-checked in my always to hand “incredibly detailed guide to the nutritional composition of everything” book. But not every fruit and vegetable has to be an antioxidant superhero; sometimes it’s just enough for them to be there, saving us from some riotously unhealthy alternative choice. And it does a fine job of tasting amazing, even when people turn it into whacky sounding dishes like hot and sour rhubarb sauce and rhubarb and ginger oat thickie.

...people are rediscovering the health benefits of eating rhubarb and it fits into modern tastes

Janet Oldroyd

The distinguished history of rhubarb was one of the topics discussed on clever quiz show Q.I last week. As well as discussing Yorkshire's rhubarb triangle, it turns out that rhubarb was very popular for its health-giving properties in Queen Victoria’s time. So popular in fact that during the First Opium War China threatened to withdraw the supply of rhubarb to the UK, thus wiping out the entire population through mass constipation. Phew, it’s a good job we won...

Cottage Pie is a perennial British favourite, one of that breed of dishes you find in all cultures whose sole purpose in life it is to use up yummy leftovers.  A proper cottage pie is a hearty dish of savoury beef cooked with carrots and onions and topped with a rib-sticking layer of mashed potato.  Its sibling recipe, shepherd’s pie, is much the same but made with lamb, each dish being bourne out of the happy necessity to use up leftover meat from the Sunday roast.

A good cottage pie is a splendid thing, and no great nutritional disaster if you choose lean mince and don’t smother the top with cheddar cheese or bathe the mash in heaps of butter.  But it is also the epitome of winter cooking – time to move on.  March is time for a welcome spring take on cottage pie using chicken alongside lighthearted flavourings of lemon zest, tarragon and crème fraiche.

The original inspiration for this recipe is buried deep within a gargantuan pile of food magazines in our living room so this is one of those top of the head efforts.  It turned out pleasingly well I thought, a delicately flavoured Sunday lunch kind of a pie rather than a big, hearty supper dish.


Of course to name this recipe properly I really need the correct term for the person or persons whose job it is to look after chickens.  If any of you can help out I’d be much obliged (fingers crossed that it will be something suitably whimsical – poultry farmer pie just isn’t cutting it!) 

Back in the olden days, the only fresh veggies available to eat in the long dark Scottish winter were potatoes and when the potato crop failed there was scurvy.  Scurvy (overt vitamin C deficiency) is thankfully [virtually] unheard of in the modern age, but the urban legend of the student who ate nothing but porridge got me wondering.  Are those of us trying to eat locally through the winter eating a wide enough range of fruit and vegetables to get all of the nutrients that we need? Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that we are all about to get scurvy, but I don’t think there is any harm in putting a bit of attention into making sure that you fit a couple of good sources of vitamin C into every day, especially if you have slipped comfortably into a routine of roasted root veggies for dinner.

There’s still no evidence that lots of vitamin C will stop you getting a cold, unless you are living life on the edge in extremes of cold or physical stress (soldiers, marathon runners - it might help you guys out), but you do need a top-up of it every day for a whole host of important bodily functions. Vitamin C makes collagen for you, the connective network of tissues in your skin and bones, as well as carnitine, without which you feel would be feeling very tired and weak.  It is also one of those antioxidant nutrients, working hard in combination with other antioxidants to stop the kind of damage to individual cells and arteries that can lead to cancer and heart disease over time. Last but not least, vitamin C gets to work every time you eat a vegetarian iron-rich food making sure that you absorb as much of the iron as possible.



There are a whole host of good and relatively sustainable sources of vitamin C for the winter months:

Juicy fruit
There are lots of fine fruity sources of vitamin C (raspberries, kiwi fruit, citrus, pomegranate) and sadly none of them are growing anywhere near here in the middle of winter. In Britain importing fruit in Winter is a centuries old practice and meeting your five-a-day is difficult without it come February/March/April (the hungry gap) when even the British apples have run out. Delicate fresh strawberries and raspberries are lovely and full of vitamin C but to my mind they are going to taste all the better for the wait next Summer. A workable compromise position is to buy fruit that is sturdy enough to ship and which comes from the same continent (so this week Spanish clementines are in). 

Finding out how your fruit has arrived in the shops can be tricky – hassle your regular supplier for more information if their labelling isn’t very helpful.  Certain suppliers and certification schemes will do this for you - the Soil Association is looking at excluding air freighted produce from its certification programme and many organic box schemes only provide shipped imported produce, no airfreight.

Breakfast is a meal that I expect to work hard for its money (nutritionally speaking that is!). I'm very attached to the idea that if I start off with a good healthy breakfast then the rest of the day (food and everything else) will magically fall into place. A fruit smoothie for breakfast is a very tempting idea but it doesn’t really do it for me in practice - my stomach starts looking round for its next snack far too soon (I’ve no idea how those people who live on black coffee until lunchtime cope). I’m confident now that it isn’t just me being greedy because one of the top purveyors of smoothies in the UK, Innocent, have come up with a clever solution to exactly this problem: the Breakfast Thickie. Fruit, honey and yogurt blended with a handful of oats to make something substantial enough to call itself a Breakfast. I’d happily buy an Innocent Thickie every day (I can’t even whinge about creating unnecessary packaging as they are in a fully compostable “eco-bottle”) but Innocent only make one flavour at the moment (Raspberry and Blueberry) which although lovely is starting to get a bit dull, not to mention expensive.

Rhubarb is the “in” fruit in the UK at moment (by virtue of being the only fruit actually growing in the country). I don’t think anybody eats rhubarb raw (I could be wrong?) and so my technique for rhubarb is to roast it in a big batch with a sprinkling of sugar and to munch through that gradually during the week. I’m into rhubarb for breakfast at the moment; tart rhubarb plus creamy porridge is fantastic (I'm even considering freezing a few batches ready for the Autumn). But then the weather got a bit warm for porridge hence my first attempt at making a thickie, with roasted rhubarb and little stem ginger for added wake-you-up feistiness.

If you’ve read the post just before this one about sustainable lamb farming, you’ll know that I sometimes buy the lamb farmed by the Northmoor Trust at our local farmers market in Oxford (see their picturesque location above). The first time I bought their lamb I bought a pack with 2 rolled breasts of lamb in it; it was both a bargain and an item of complete foodie curiosity. It looked a bit like an over-sized, fat-streaked, rolled pinwheel of bacon, cut to a 2 cm thickness rather than the usual few millimetres. I left the market very happy that I would be able to put it to good use with a bit of help from Google and a few cookbooks, and while I’m not really into pigs ears and those sorts of things, it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling to be using a cut that might otherwise have been overlooked.

So, on to the day of the cooking of the lamb. What did Google have to say for itself? Not much really is the answer. I thought Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be the man to search for, him being a champion of cheap and lesser known cuts of meat. I did find his recipe for breast of lamb Ste Ménéhould, apparently a recipe from The River Cottage Meat Book, but it sounded very complicated (cooking on one day, resting overnight under jam jars and then coating in breadcrumbs and cooking again the next day). The other sites were a real mixed bag and bought up more questions than they answered. Did it matter that I have breast of lamb rather than breast of mutton? Could I use a recipe for bone-in lamb when mine has been deboned? Most importantly, what do you do when you want to cook and eat on the same day? The only recurring theme seemed to be that stuffing was the way to go if you had a piece of boned breast meat.

A few years ago we had a short trip to San Francisco where a rather dry conference was brightened up massively by my bright-spark of a colleague suggesting that we all stay at the Hotel Phoenix. The Phoenix is a day-glo, 1950’s motel-style hotel famous for being the residence of choice for passing bands and other arty types. Such a hip venue was a little daunting at first (boy did I feel like I’d bought the wrong clothes) but the hotel had such a party atmosphere and the staff were so friendly that we had a fantastic time. Even more cool than the hotel was its then newly opened cocktail bar/restaurant, the Bambuddha Lounge. Numerous items from the asian-fusion menu were sampled but the thing that has stayed in my memory was the Eight Element Salad. A big bowl of finely chopped delicacies were mixed at the table, (I remember lime, ginger, garlic, chilli, peanuts, coconut and sesame seeds) and we were left with a pile of verdant greenery with which to parcel them up. The greenery was apparently la lop leaves and the end result was a very invigorating (and slightly surprising) mixture of crunchy, sweet, sour, fiery and citrus.

When Ilva and Joanna had the splendid idea to host an event on heart friendly finger food I was immediately filled with enthusiasm; heart health is such a vital part of nutrition and choosing what to eat that I’ve hardly got a post that doesn’t mention it in some way! After my initial giddiness I realised that for all my healthy-eating talk I actually had very little in the way of finger food in my repertoire. Surely such a worthy event deserved better than my usual standby nibble of chopped veg and houmous? After a bit of pondering I decided to create a heart-friendly homage to that eight-element salad; soft spinach leaves filled with a vibrant asian pesto and topped with fresh spring onion, pepper and cucumber. I still have no idea what a la lop leaf is (I’m pretty sure you can’t get them round my way) but a humble spinach leaf is more than up to the job and creates a pleasing boat shape, curling safely round its cargo when you pick it up.

How do you sum up a Laksa for somebody who hasn’t tried it before? On the one hand it ticks lots of boxes that somehow bring to mind healthy thoughts: spicy; fresh-flavours; crunchy veg and soup. On the other hand it has that essential comfort-food ingredient carbohydrate (in the form of noodles), and is bathed in luscious, creamy coconut milk.

There is an interesting wikipedia page on laksa for those who like to know more about culinary traditions and history; apparently there are actually two types of laksa, curry laksa and assam laksa. I must admit that my recipe is a complete culinary hybrid with the coconut milk base of curry laksa and the sour notes of an assam laksa. The main inspiration for my recipe is in Jo Pratt’s lovely new (and surprisingly pink and girly) book, In the Mood for Food, with a few twists of my own inspired by health and storecupboard. It comes out just creamy enough to feel like a treat and has a great mix of textures. Sometimes I think it is just the small things that really make a difference, for example I’ve followed Jo’s tip to slice the prawns in half lengthways which means that you get a bit of prawn in nearly every mouthful.

Noodle soup dishes like Laksa and Miso soups are fantastic places to use up bits of leftover veg from the fridge (within reason, I suspect parsnip wouldn’t go well here). The original recipe had a couple of spring onions in it per person but given that all you have to do is chop them up and throw them in it's a good opportunity to eat a bit more veg. You can put in as much or as little as you want but for this dish to count as one of your ‘five a day’ you want to include at least 80g of veg per person.

Something that this post made me think about that I've never really considered before is whether or not coconut counts towards your fruit and veg quota. The whole ‘what counts’ thing is essentially based on scientific consensus so there isn’t a definitive answer, but my hunch is that counting coconut flesh or coconut milk as a portion would be considered counter-productive because of its very high saturated fat content. There isn't an official fruit and veg portions expert group to give a verdict on the matter but I did see that Sam, the Food Standards Agency’s nutritionist agrees with me on this (coconut apparently is considered more akin to a nut than a fruit). In this laksa the effects of the saturated fat in the coconut milk are tempered by diluting it with stock and adding some richness back in the form of peanut butter. The final result is not low-fat but the balance of fats in the dish are improved by these two adjustments. Nuts are full of monounsatured fats and replacing saturated fat with these monounsaturates can help lower LDL (bad) cholesterol levels.