Everyday stir fried vegetables in wraps

This is simple and can be made with a variety of vegetables. Here is a version I made yesterday:

Serves 2.5

Ingredients

3 carrots, sliced thinly
1 red onion, chopped
2cm piece of ginger, peeled and chopped finely
Chunk of broccoli stem and a few of the florets (about half the head is fine)
Half a head of cabbage shredded - you can include most of the stem as long as its not too woody
About 8 mushrooms chopped roughly
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Rapeseed oil and sesame oil
4 flour tortillas
Natural yogurt and sweet chilli sauce.

Heat the about a tablespoon of the oil in a wok. Next add the chopped vegetables one type at a time allowing them to heat up before you add the next batch. This prevents the whole lot getting steamed as the temperature of the wok gets reduced too much when you overload it. Toss the vegetables to prevent them sticking. Tossing them is also less likely to break them up than using a wooden spoon to stir.
Keep the heat high and toss the vegetables every few seconds for about 10 minutes or until all of the vegetables are cooked.
Turn the heat off. Add some soy sauce and mix the whole lot up.
Serve with flour tortillas - 2 per person is plenty.
Place a tortilla on your plate, spread a line of natural yogurt across the diameter. Do the same with the sweet chilli sauce. Wrap the whole lot up and enjoy.

Bread salad and Hake

I got a big loaf of nice white bread a couple of days ago and we ended up with too much. It's still nice for toasting, but this salad is a far better use. I served it with some steamed hake. Nice summery food for the first good weather we have had in ages.

Hake cooked in foil

Ingredients:

Enough hake fillet to feed yourselves - make sure its properly defrosted
Juice of a lemon
Salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Wash and pin bone the hake. Give it a good drying with kitchen paper. Put a large sheet of foil on a baking tray. Place the hake on top of this. Juice the lemon on top and remove any pips. Discard the lemon skin. Close over the foil to seal the package up. Bake in the oven for about 12 minutes. Check the fish is cooked correctly before you serve. While the fish is cooking you can make the salad.

Bread salad

Ingredients:

White bread (stale)
About 10 good olives - stoned and cut up
A handful of chopped basil with stalks removed
6 ripe tomatoes - chopped with the calyxes removed
olive oil and red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper
About a tablespoon of capers, drained

Cut the crusts off a big chunk of stale white bread. I used a block about 10cm on a side, but use what you think you need to feed yourselves and up or down the rest of the ingredients in proportion. That said, this is not an exact recipe. Just through in rough amounts and you will be fine.
Put all of the ingredients in a large salad bowl. Make up a dressing of 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 8 tablespoons of olive oil. Pour this over the mixture and squish it all up with your hands.
Bring to the table.

Pea and parsnip soup with aniseed

This recipe is inspired by the excellent book by Niki Segnit The Flavour Thesaurus. I have added some aniseed to her pea and parsnip soup. The flavours all worked well together and it was dead easy to prepare.
To get the aniseed give one clove of star anise a good whack in a mortar and pestle. Then peel out the individual aniseeds, throw the husk out and crush the aniseeds.

Take 2 large parsnips and peel and chop them into large dice. Fry a chopped onion in a good glug of olive oil. (Don't use extra virgin for this as its likely to burn a bit). Add the parsnip to the fried onions and give it a good stir. Cover with about a litre of vegetable stock. I used Marigold Swiss Bouillon in boiling water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 10 minutes or until the parsnip is soft. Then add 300g of frozen peas and the crushed aniseeds from one star anise. I am going to use a bit more of this next time, but the flavour of aniseed can be a bit overpowering, so go easy on it first time. Season with some pepper. You probably won't need any salt if the stock is salty enough, so try a spoonful first. Bring it back to the boil and simmer for about 5 minutes. Liquidise and serve.

Ideal mid week and I still have plenty of parsnips from the garden. I never do well with peas unfortunately, so frozen it has to be. Vegetarian, filling and very tasty. We had this for a light dinner for 2 people, but it would be a great lunch in smaller portions.

A vegetable bake with cheese sauce and brown rice

I got this recipe from Complete Cookery Course: Classic Edition. My copy is fraying at the edges at this stage, but I can still rely on it for recipes that work. The full recipe is available here.

I know it looks a bit of a mess, but the photo does not do it justice. There is even rice scattered over the worktop :-) The recipe is supposed to be enough for 4 people, but my wife and I ate the lot. We did not have  a starter or dessert, so this was a perfect fit. The recipe sounds like there is quite a bit of effort involved, but there isn't really. I used normal cabbage instead of Chinese leaves and threw a chopped courgette in with the cabbage and broccoli for sauteing. Courgettes are nearing the end of their season, so I am putting them into everything I can.

Biscuit topped apple crumble

We got a bag of apples off an uncle last week so I decided to make a crumble. I had a packet of hazelnuts in the fridge, with some rough instructions on how to make a rhubarb crumble, so I adapted them.

150g of oat biscuits (I used a mix of hobnobs and digestives)
50g of whole hazel nuts
700g of cooking apples
2 tbsp of sugar
A couple of tbsp of water

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees c.

First toast the hazel nuts under a hot grill. This only takes a few minutes. Keep an eye on them as they burn easily. When they are done, allow them to cool and chop them roughly.
Next chop up the biscuits and give them a good bashing. No point in getting too fussy about this, nice and rough is just fine.
Peel and slice the apples and put them in a pan with the water and sugar. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 5 minutes. Pour the lot into a casserole or deep pie dish. Mix the biscuits and nuts together and spread them over the apple mixture. Put it in the oven for about 15 minutes. Serve with some vanilla ice cream.

Vegetarian curry with tamarind

I went through a phase of making Laksa a while ago and had some tamarind paste left in the press.  Tamarind is used to sour curries and I thought it would make a good addition to a curry just made with mild curry powder. The tamarind is soaked in a small quantity of boiling water first and then pushed through a metal sieve. You don't eat the seeds. I also added some garam masala which I have had lying around for ages. I really just want to get rid of this. It is rarely called for in the recipes that I use and I don't like throwing anything out. I picked a good handful of small chard leaves from the garden too. I wanted to get a nice tart tomatoey flavour, so I added a few chopped sun dried tomatoes to the mix too. The rest of the ingredients are largely what I had to hand.

2 Onions
2 Carrots
2 Celery sticks
3 cloves of garlic (from my father in laws garden)
The stalk of a broccoli head that we used up during the week
1 Chili with the seeds removed
A handful of sultanas
1 tablespoon of sunflower oil
2 tablespoons of mild curry powder
1 teaspoon of garam masala
A chunk of tamarind (about 20g)
1 tin of whole tomatoes + the tin filled with cold water
3 sun dried tomatoes chopped very small
1 teaspoon of vegetable stock powder
A handful of small chard leaves

Chop all of the vegetables into bite sized pieces - except the onions and garlic, chop these finely.
Fry the onion and garlic in the oil for a few minutes. Add the curry paste and garam masala and fry for another minute or 2 to release the flavours. Then add all of the other ingredients except the chard and give it a good stir. Cook for about 30 to 40 minutes until the vegetables are all tender. Throw the chard in for the last few minutes.

I served this with some boiled white basmati rice. It had a lovely rich flavour.

Borlotti bean minestrone

The finished product

We have had a tin of borlotti beans in the press for the last while. They were inherited when some friends moved house and cleared out their kitchen. We weren't really sure what to do with them, so I took a look on the web to see if I could get any ideas. A lot of the recipes that I found used them with tomatoes, garlic and olive oil, so I decided to make a minestrone.

First put a good glug of olive oil in a cast iron pot on a medium heat. I used some nice Greek stuff that I got in Aldi. Next you need to soften some finely chopped vegetables over a medium heat to make the soup base. I used a couple of carrots, onions and celery sticks, but I reckon you could vary that easily enough. About 20 minutes should be plenty to soften these.  

Then throw in the tin of rinsed borlotti beans, a tin of whole plum tomatoes and a litre of vegetable stock. Season with salt, pepper and plenty of fresh rosemary. I blanched and froze some chard from the garden earlier this week and so I added this to the pot. Cabbage is more common, but any boilable green leafy vegetable would be fine. Let this all simmer for about 20 minutes.

That's it done except for the pasta. This is best left until you are ready to eat. If you add the pasta too early and leave it to sit it will keep sucking up liquid and you will end up with a soggy mess. I used wholewheat spaghetti which I broke into chunks 3 or 4 inches long and threw them but pretty much any pasta will work. About one normal main meal portion of pasta is fine for these quantities. Just keep the pot bubbling until the pasta is cooked and you are ready to go. 

This fed both of us well for our main meal. It would be a very nice lunch or starter in a smaller portion. This is very healthy stuff. The only things to watch are that you don't over do it with the oil and that your stock is not too salty. 

Garden peas from Wexford

I was mad into growing peas when I was a kid. Something about the perfect little peas inside the pods that you would watch growing day by day. The number of peas I used to get would fit into 2 cupped hands (child's ones), so not a great yielder. I reckon they take too much work and produce too little yield in the garden to bother with them now. My father in law on the other hand has heaps of space and can turn his hand to any crop that he fancies. Good Wexford soil helps a bit, but he is just good at gardening full stop. He grew these beauties this year and gave us a big bag.

From Drop Box

The Flavour Thesaurus was a great help again and pointed in the direction of Pea and Mint soup. I know pea and mint are supposed to go together, but I had never tried it. The mint in the garden needed picking. I can never figure out what to do with it, but this was fantastic. Will be making it again. We have another batch of the Wexford peas left, but then I reckon I will try this one with frozen peas.

Pea and mint soup

Finely chop a carrot, stick of celery, a few cloves of garlic and an onion. Heat a glug of good olive oil up in a heavy based pot. Sweat the veg for about 10 or 15 minutes. Now add the peas. I used about 3 mug fulls of the garden peas. Add 3 teaspoons of Marigold vegetable stock powder. Cover the veg with boiling water and simmer the whole lot for about 30 minutes. Finally add a good bit of mint which you have finely chopped and puree the lot with a stick blender. 

I served this for lunch with some buttered home made brown bread. The photo is not great (no matter how many pixels your phone has it will still take naff photos), but the soup was gorgeous.

Brown lentil casserole and the first seeds in trays

Brown lentil casserole

Made with loads of vegetables and lentils for protein, this is an excellent main course. It's very tasty and healthy too. The list of ingredients is not hard and fast, this post is more about the general idea of vegetable and lentil based casseroles and how to make them. The list given here is based on what I had in the fridge today. I used the small brown lentils, but the flatter green ones are fine too. This recipe is not ideal for the small orange ones as they tend to dissolve. If you want to use those try this recipe instead. This serves 2 people for dinner.

Ingredients:
3 handfuls of brown lentils
Half a butternut squash(I find that even after halving these keep for ages in the fridge. Same goes for the sweet potato)
A small turnip
3 carrots
Half a sweet potato
3 tsp of marigold vegetable stock powder (you can use regular stock cubes, but you will need to use enough of them for the amount of water that will cover the vegetables. Better to use a measuring jug in this case. Marigold is good stuff with no much in it. Tricky to get though.)
A couple of teaspoons of soy sauce
2 celery sticks
1 Onion
Boiling water to cover
A cup of frozen peas


Sourcing:
The brown lentils are from the health food shop in Liffey Valley shopping centre. You can usually get these in Tesco, when they have them in stock. More often than not our Tesco just has a convenient space on the shelf where they would be if they had any. At least I know to stop looking at that point.
Most of the vegetables were bought in Aldi.
The Marigold stock powder was bought in Sainsbury's in Newry. I normally get it in the health food shop on Liffey Street, but was up north, so picked up a few there instead. Soy sauce is Kikkoman from the Asian Emporium on Abbey street.  They sell it in large bottles there which I then decant into the nicer little serving one. Much cheaper that way.

Method:
Peel and chop all the vegetables into bite sized pieces. Place all of the ingredients except the peas into a large pot. Add the stock powder or cubes and cover with the boiling water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 25 minutes. The add the frozen peas and continue to simmer for another 5 minutes. Check that the lentils are done to your liking.

The first seeds in trays
Raked over the vegetable patches to get them ready for planting. They are looking pretty good if a bit lumpy. I never get them looking like they do on gardeners world. Might try some 'no dig' next year.

Planted courgettes and leeks in mini pots. The seeds are a good bit out of date, so will keep an eye on them to see if they germinate in the next 2 weeks. If not, it's off to the garden centre. Seeds are cheap, so it's not that, but who likes to throw stuff out?

Next things to do are get the rest of the veg into trays (trying to avoid direct seeding into the patch, it does not work out very well for me) and plant the herb trays for the kitchen. I will try to grow rosemary this year, like every year and will probably fail :-( Great crop of tomatoes last year - we still have chutney - so must get some of them sown indoors ready for planting out.

Garden kickoff, last of the leeks and cheddar scones

First vegetable patch work
I finally got out into the garden today. Dug the vegetable patches and spread the years worth of kitchen compost. It was composted very nicely. I tipped the whole lot out and removed the good stuff. Threw the uncomposted recent stuff back into the now almost empty bin. Next up I have to rake the ground to a fine tilth and get the first of the seeds planted indoors.

The last of the leeks needed to be lifted before I could get working on the patch. There were quite a lot of them. Topped and tailed them all and made this soup with 700 grammes of them. The rest are in the fridge at the moment.

Leek and Potato soup
Ingredients:

700g of leeks - cut up finely and washed
2 onions - chopped finely
900g of potatoes - peeled and shopped small
100g of butter - I got some nice country butter in Tesco
Salt and pepper
1.5 litres of chicken stock - I just used decent cubes, real is of course better

Method:

Melt the butter in a large thick bottomed pot. Add all the vegetables and stir to coat them with the butter. Season with plenty of salt and pepper. Leave the mixture on a medium heat for about 15 minutes until the vegetables have all softened. Check it does not burn every few minutes and give it a good stir. I found that the potatoes stuck a bit, but did not burn.
Then add the hot stock and give the whole lot a stir. Cook this for about 40 minutes on a very low heat. Liquidize and stir the milk in. This recipe makes a lot, but it freezes well.

Cheese and herb scones
These have a lovely chewy texture and are yellow in colour from the buttermilk. Like all scones they are very quick and easy to make, so not worth making in bulk for freezing. Just make them up fresh when you need them. Having nice herbs in the garden makes this possible. You won't spend a fortune buying fresh herbs that go off in the bottom of your fridge.


Ingredients:

220g of plain flour
Half a teaspoon of baking soda, sieved
Handful of sage chopped finely - I had this in the garden, but dried is ok
200ml of buttermilk
25g of cheddar cheese grated

Method:

Mix the flour, baking soda and sage in a bowl. Add the buttermilk a little at a time until you have a dough that you can handle. Should be a bit sticky, but not total gunge. Turn it out onto a floured work surface and shape it into a flat disc about a centimeter thick. Cut it up into triangles, or use a cutter. Use a brush to coat the top surface of each scone in some more butter milk. Dip the scone tops into the grated cheese. Place them on a sheet of grease proof paper on a baking sheet.
Bake at gas mark 8 for about 20 minutes. Hollow when tapped.

These went great with the leek soup and some more of the country butter on them.

Healthy red lentil soup

This is filling enough for a main course. As vary the ingredients according to what is in the fridge. A parsnip, sweet potato or ordinary potato goes well in it too.

Ingredients:
4 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
A teaspoon of ginger - I used paste from a jar, but fresh is better if a bit fiddly
2 sticks of celery, washed and roughly chopped
A tablespoon of sweet chili jam - bought stuff is fine
2 onions
3 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of Marigold Swiss Bouillon Vegetable powder - or any other type of stock concentrate
3 handfuls of red lentils - not exactly scientific, but it works
Boiling water to cover

Method:
Add all the ingredients to a pot. Cover with the boiling water. Bring back to the boil and simmer for about 40 minutes.  Couldn't be simpler.

Green lentil casserole

Very tasty and filling mid week dinner. This serves 2. No need to soak the lentils.


IngredientsOnions - 1 chopped finely
Carrots - 2 chopped chunky
Green lentils - 100g
Celery - couple of sticks
Sweet Potato - about half of one
Stock to cover
Splash of soy

Add the ingredients to the pot bring to the boil and simmer for about 30 minutes or until the carrots are cooked.