m. 34 potato and rutabaga (swede) puree

every once and awhile we create a meal around a "side," in this case it was potato and swede puree, but not just any potato and swede puree, both the potato and the rutabaga were from our garden and the recipe for the puree came from our very own copy of the larousse gastronomique (p. 949, for your reference), the larousse's recipe was actually for potato and turnip, but in the end it looked like this:

those are homemade spelt bread croutons inelegantly perched on top of the puree (and some kale from our garden in the back!), it fell into the "ridiculously good" category and given the fact that we have a whole field of swede grounding in our winter garden right now, i'm sure we will be eating this again very soon!

intermezzo 3 the value of protein

remember my little rant about processed protein? well one of the things that i argued was that little, tiny bits of protein that come in cardboard boxes (and if your lucky plastic to prevent freezer burn, somehow the presumption is that if its not real meat it is not affected by real freezer burn) are ridiculously expensive ... well in defense of that argument i present exhibit "A:"

now, i appreciate the exceptional quality of food at ASDA (or walmart for those of you admiring this sale from afar) but i must object that i just don't think that quorn fingers are worth £1247.25 per kilo, in fact, it would be a stretch to suggest that they are worth 3 for 5, particularly when you can get them sometimes at iceland foods for just a £1 a box, and of course even at that price, the veggie "fingers" that come out of my kitchen, made from wheat gluten power, or beans, or tofu are still cheaper, fresher, and tastier than anything the fungal engineers in quorn's labs can muster, good try ASDA!

m.33 mee goreng

long ago i was convinced that no fried noodle dish would ever come out of our kitchen, i held firm to this doxa for two reasons: 1) we cook on an electric stove, and hence we would never really get the heat needed to fry noodles properly and 2) the memories of failed phat thai from a box were seared into my culinary memory, and my hands got clammy anytime i would even pick up a spatula with the intent of stirring noodles in a pan ... luckily all of that is behind us, and we have been making perfectly simple and tasty fried noodles now for about a year, our latest attempt looked like this:

 although normally we wing it, this time we tried a recipe from ottolenghi's plenty to see how he did it, we substituted harissa for sambal olek, thus putting in jeopardy any future trip to the malay world ...

m. 32 saag tofu and chickpeas in a tangy tomato sauce

we had an extravagant night of homemade "curry" as part of the "midwife's orders," m actually made both dishes, very yummy indeed, the saag tofu, which was actually chard from the garden rather than spinach, came from deborah madison's suppers book, while we went back to our standard for the chickpea recipe, the art of indian vegetarian cooking, always yummy:

m. 31 little baby lasagne

what do you do when there is a little one on the way and you want to freeze some food so that you don't have to cook after its arrival?  you make little baby portions of lasagne:

it is a red sauce lasagne, with ricotta and spinach (which we discovered is, after reading the guardian and following their hilarious typology, an "american" style lasagne), we made the pasta the day before and cut up tiny little layer pieces, now they are sitting in our freezer just waiting to be eaten, gulp!

m. 30 traditional british "tangy" lemon cake

or at least that what our "traditional british cooking" cookbook called it:

the top came out with a huge seam showing because the cake rose too quickly, nonetheless, very yummy and tangy, we will definitely try to be more "traditional" in our kitchen in the future!

m. 29 veggie italian sausage on apple sage "heros" with apple chutney

here is our first trifecta and it is a doozy:

we begin with veggie italian sausages from everydaydish tv, this is a very yummy recipe (much better than the tofurkey recipe, which itself is not at all bad), then we move to the bread, which is again a dan lepard creation, apple sage heros, we finally got to use our baguette tray to bake the hero rolls, but we also did two "loaves" conventionally:

they were very very good, and not as dense as his bread usually is! the condiment of choice (unfortunately not pictured above) was m's very own apple chutney, a 2010 vintage, just opened for the occasion ... in all a great lunch!

m. 28 a broccoli cheese tart

one of the advantages of maternity leave has been cooking lunch together, today m adapted a broccoli cheese tart recipe from one of our cheesier cookbooks and the result was amazing:

she did the short crust pastry (which we are a little bit obsessed by this week, that and polenta it seems, a random combination of interests) and i did the veggies, we even had enough pastry dough to make some smaller tarts for the days after the little one arrives and we feel less adventurous (on that note i will be making some lasagna this weekend, yum!):

intermezzo 2 another suma order

i give you ... another glorious suma order:

in all its pragmatism and hilarity! we have two trays of tomatoes this time, a "pillow of penne" as m referred to it, that is a massive 5 kg of polenta off to the left, a whole cow of uht milk, both pasta flour and all purpose flour in the middle and some other things too embarassing to admit to (note the recycled sponges on the right) ... nothing but goodness!

m. 27 no-knead bread

perhaps one of our first foodie credentials came with participating in the cult-like obsession with mark bittman's no-knead bread (i've linked the youtube video so that those of you preserving your precious new york times page views won't have to cringe before you click), we still make it in between making other things (like our recent dan lepard experiments), here is the last round that we made in all its simplistic glory:

m. 26 "slider buns"

and what came out of the oven just 30 minutes after we finished making the post below, why the buns to go with our tofu burgers of course ... these are a dan lepard creation, we have been doing a lot of his recipes recently and will certainly be getting his book soon ...

they were yummy, i think we're going to have to make tofu burgers again to have an excuse to eat them right!

m. 25 tofu burgers and sweet potato french fries

we don't really accumulate gimmicky cookbooks, but we do have one, the mammoth 1000 vegetarian recipes from around the world, so unlikely is it that one cook could amass 1000 recipes on their own that the cookbook has no author, just a producer, it's published by parragon ... we have actually noticed that a lot of their recipes cut  corners so we rarely look at it, but that changed after i was searching for borlotti bean recipes and i came across the appetizer section of the 1024 page book, it included a number of things that we've made this week: bean burgers and lentil croquettes, but only this deserved a blog entry:

it's a tofu burger (pictured under carrots, tomatoes and a cucumber-yogurt "relish"), flanked by sweet potato fries and a slice of mark bittman's no knead bread, everything was very tasty, although the bean burgers we made earlier in the week tasted a little bit more savory, and it's certainly something we will be experimenting with in the near future!

m. 24 "humble home-cooked" borlotti beans and homemade veggie sausages

dinner this evening involved something old and a lot of something new, we made this amazing jamie oliver recipe called "humble home-cooked" beans that used some of our fresh borlotti beans, we first made this last year and it was just as amazing this time as last time (we don't really cook much from jamie oliver, the patronizing attitude on some of his travel/cooking shows annoys us a little, although we're down with the whole school kids need to eat better thing) ...

and then there was the little matter of our experiment with making veggie sausage (pictured unflatteringly below):

sometimes it's hard to find well-crafted vegetarian food in the uk, the ubiquity of those "veggie burgers" in all kinds of takeaways that are effectively just potato patties with peas and carrot are a good example, so when you do find some good vegetarian food it is impossible not to become a little obsessed ... in oxford (a city that perhaps because of its resident tourist population has very little good everyday food) there is a small butchers in the old market called david john butchers that make maybe the best veggie sausages i have ever tasted, the website for the now closed big bang restaurant provides a little more hyperbole by suggesting that they are the "best vegetarian sausages the world over," way to go david john ...

like about two months ago, after we started making seitan and fake chicken, i started to think about how to "clone" the david john sausages, i spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would take to replicate their mozzarella sausage (which i was a little disappointed to hear is not their most popular even though i think it is by far the most interesting of their 10 or so kinds of veggie sausage), and so tonight we experimented.

we had a pretty good sense of some of the ingredients: onion, carrot, mozzarella, some kind of tomato, and then maybe some flour and possibly bread crumbs and egg to bind it (m had the brilliant idea of adding some leftover brown rice as well) with maybe oregano and thyme, salt and pepper, the two primary questions were what kind of tomato is used and what do you do with the onions: cook them or leave them raw, we tried four different configurations:

1. raw onions, carrots, and tomatoes
2. sauteed onions, carrots, and tomatoes
3. raw onions and carrots with tomato puree
4. sauteed onions and carrots with tomato puree

every one of these worked, with the raw ingredients providing a little more flavor, something i didn't really expect, and the puree worked as well, although i think next time we are going to experiment with a basil tomato sauce, i can't wait ...

... but do david john's methods, whatever magic they contain, still produce the better sausage?  i think so.

m. 23 borlotti beans in tomato sauce with polenta

we have a lot of fresh borlotti beans from the allotment, last year we were wowed by jamie oliver's crazy borlotti beans on toast recipe, but this year we wanted to start off with something a little more substantial, in the neighborhood of this:

borlotti beans in tomato sauce with polenta, of course an absolutely gorgeous picture of this meal's true culinary potential can be found by following the recipe link ... it was totally wholesome and very yummy, and i definitely think that we will be seeing more polenta in our future!

m. 22 hazelnut and stilton loaf, balsamic brussel sprouts, and pilaf

tonight we had a kind of friday night roast, after a couple of days of eating out (nothing special unfortunately)/not cooking much, we splurged:

 

hazelnut and stilton loaf, which is an adaptation from a green kitchen stories recipe (basically just adding 200g of stilton to the mix), it is super easy to make although it takes some time in the oven, then we had balsamic roasted brussel sprouts, and a dill mushroom pilaf (that I make basically once a week for one reason or another, and i can't remember the first time i made it) ... the nutloaf was served piping hot (hence the first blurry picture that is not the fault of my camera), it was a yummy dinner!

m. 21 paneer and zucchini herbed rice and butter soft zucchini and tomatoes (louki tamatar tarkari)

with a surplus of courgettes sitting in the fridge, m and i have been scouring cookbooks to come up with ways to use them, today i had the idea to turn once again to yamuna devi, and the result was amazing:

(the quality of my photos seems to be inversely related to the actual beauty of the food itself--both in image and in taste, so the more amazing the food the more ridiculous the photo) 

the rice was basically a pilaf with zucchini and paneer, it was delicious, and in the wintery future (if we ever have one) this rice could be made just with the paneer, the buttery courgettes and tomatoes was incredible, yamuna (aka joan) you have really outdone yourself this time, and here is an adapted version of the recipe (spinach is added at the very end, something we did not do).

the best thing was that the two dishes took just an hour from start to finish, m said "if you can make food this good there is no reason to out for curry,"  but she also said "is there any left, i can't wait to eat it for lunch" ... there go the leftovers!

m. 20 mung bean, carrot and feta salad

if as a kid you ever dreamed of eating candy for dinner you would have never imagined that it would look like this:

it is the last of the ottolenghi recipes that we have been waiting to try, and my first thought when i tasted it was candy: the caramelized carrots, spice infused oil, and lemon together make this salad the perfect mixture of sweet and savory ... we will definitely make this again! m said that it was perfect for a spring-like october, which is kind of what we're having now.

m. 19 black eyed peas, brown rice and chard (aka. hoppin' john)

m, our star chef, has been making rare appearances in our kitchen recently (for obvious reasons), but tonight dinner was all hers, and the result was this:

amazing black eyed peas (or beans as their called here) over brown rice with chard, the recipe came again from deborah madison, we have been meaning to make black eyed peas for a while now (with our pressure cooker we can really make any bean dish we want on short notice) and m thought about this southern classic, it was delicious!

also, we have decided to eat more brown rice (especially since the 5 kilos of brown rice that came with our suma order will need to be eaten!), so this was a great first effort, in this case we used the last of some brown basmati that we had lying around, but next time we will use long-grain (which is i must say less popular among some of the mouths in our kitchen) ...

m. 18 puy lentil, chard and tomato soup

wow, even more soup, this time from a hugh fearnley-whittingstall recipe, which uses spinach, but we swapped it out for the chard (certainly a crime somewhere in the culinary world), this was an amazing soup, and it was so easy to make:

two wonderful bowls of soup, soon there will be three!!!

m. 17 red lentil soup with fried paneer

now back to the food, over the last week we have made a frenzy of recipes from the guardian, including this red lentil soup that tasted amazing from yotam ottolenghi (his carrot and mung bean salad is on our culinary to do list too):

unfortunately we had no tofu, so we used paneer instead, and in the center of the bowl is a bit of cumin and chili infused oil, m stole the leftovers of this for lunch the next day, a common crime in our kitchen.

intermezzo 1 our suma order

so when we first imagined this page we viewed it strictly as a food diary, and the idea was that there would be no scattering of all thoughts food related, but it would be about precisely what we are eating (because ... one evening we had a chat about all the things we were forgetting that we liked to eat and make, so the answer was to keep a diary), but now comes an event so "monstramental" in our kitchen that we cannot resist to write about it ... the suma order:

basically suma is a wholesaler of bulk, organic foods and if you get enough people together to buy enough food they will deliver it to one of you for free, we wanted to do it for one thing and one thing only: their canned tomatoes! 

but in the meantime we got other things too, such as these hazelnuts, enough to make 5 hazelnut and blue cheese loafs!

or these ground almonds, to make all kinds of other goodness (especially smoothies and almond cakes!)














the really fascinating thing about receiving these 1 kilo bags is that it tells you precisely where your food is coming from: the us, turkey, china, brazil, posing a tough dilemma for foodies, cut out the big box grocery retailer in order to get very cheap good food and you are still faced with a food miles nightmare (this conversation will make little sense to those in the us where a discussion of food miles is non-existent).

m. 16 homemade ramen noodles

ramen noodles is another one of those foods that are seared into the food portion of my brain both because of, again, college, where i ate an entire container ship of 25 cent ramen and also because simple noodle soups are so common in thailand that it is very easy crave something so simple and good ... and of course, it is very simple to make it yourself, in fact too simple to not feel guilty that i once thought that those strange crystalized flavor packets were all there was in the world, here was lunch a couple of days ago:

yummy!

m. 15 cardamom cookies and apple sauce

what is a traditional dessert that you would always think of having after a great saturday night dinner, why cardamom cookies and apple sauce, of course!

the cookies are the invention of deborah madison, while the apple sauce was all m's creation (with the help of a local apple tree!), the taste of the two together are amazing ...

m. 14 zucchini and potato soup

i have long been suspicious of zucchini soup, there is so much pressure to use up as many courgettes as possible at the end of the season that to turn to a zucchini soup could be seen as a sign of desperation rather than culinary mastery, but now i am convinced, it didn't take a lot of effort, but that effort did come a long way: all the way from new zealand ... at least by way of our neighbor, who kindly appeared at our door the other day with a recipe for this beautiful (though blurry) soup:

it is a simple courgette and potato soup with cream, lemon juice, and parmesan, we'll be making it again soon!

m. 13 spelt bread

two ugly loaves of absolutely gorgeous tasting spelt bread: 

those seams on top should not be there, and i saw this train wreck coming when i put them in the tins after the second rise ...

we used deborah madison's classic sandwich bread recipe adapted for spelt flour, nice!

m. 12 beet risotto

there is a little bit of a risotto renaissance taking place in our kitchen, partially because we have mastered the very simple process for making risotto and now the fun part is just coming up with the flavors ... luckily that task was not difficult this time, we found hiding in some unexplored corner of our very tiny fridge a little cache of beets! left over from the summer, still fine to roast and put in risotto (pictured below in our perpetually dimly lit kitchen):

beet risotto has always been one of my favorites, and today i even had the luck of being somewhat organized, roasting the beets while i made the rice, good work!

with our risotto we had a salad of rocket/arugula, lettuce, spinach, and carrots all from the allotment, and in the middle of october too!

m. 11 tamarind-ginger cookies

recently we have been making a lot of dan lepard's recipes from the pages of the guardian, our new love affair started with his amazing mustard seed and onion rolls and ever since then we have stuck with his off-beat baking, so when we saw the recipe for these:

we wasted no time to start creaming the sugar, but in this case we were creaming sugar, butter and TAMARIND! of phat thai fame, the tamarind remained together in bits during the creaming and this gave each cookie a little burst of citrus, they were just simple gingery goodness!

m. 10 stuffed peppers

when i was a kid my grandmother terrorized me with her stuffed peppers, they were green and had a quality (like all of her cooking) that seemed completely incongruous with a sterile culinary childhood in the suburbs, to me her cooking seemed alien and inedible ...

it has taken 20 years and a lot of cooking to help me understand what i was missing and why her food seemed so different, and tonight we crossed the ultimate barrier and made stuffed peppers:

we went for something simple, zucchini and mushrooms mixed with rice with cheddar on top, i'm sure that my grandmother would have been nonplussed by the fact that we skipped the meat, but hopeful this would have made her proud!

m. 9 minestrone

we cook a lot of meals from mark bittman's how to cook everything vegetarian, it's pretty much a staple, but some things have become classic for us, and perhaps one of the best and most flexible recipes in the entire book is for minestrone:

every single time i make it i think back to the 1000s of cans of minestrone that i ate in college, never again ...

m. 8 courgette pakoras and palak panir sag

much of the south asian food that we eat in our house comes from one source: yamuna devi's the art of indian vegetarian cooking, and the reason can be summed up in just two words: zucchini pakoras!

so, while the rest of britain consumed stale onion pakoras from the deli counters at sainsbury or asda, or had a drunken snack on frozen pakoras from a kebab van, we for once were spared that tragedy with fresh, homemade courgette pakoras, together with creamy spinach with panir and some leftover curried potatoes and green beans ... it all tasted wonderful:

the creamy sag was amazing, and the seared panir was a nice touch:

ps. my camera takes ridiculously uneven pictures

m. 7 lemon-almond cake

we have finally made something sweet for the first time in a week, this lemon-almond cake:

the recipe was from this interesting food blog called rachel eats, which has beautiful pictures on it, this is the first thing we made from it and it came out rich and tasty, its a great basic almond cake recipe ...

m. 6 lentil, mint, and yoghurt salad with breaded halloumi

recently, we have been experimenting with bits and pieces of yotam ottolenghi's plenty, the recipes are pretty involved, so we usually trawl the book looking for anything small that we can accomplish in just under 5 hours ... in this case we had some puy lentils that we had cooked in our amazing pressure cooker a couple of nights ago, we wanted to use them up and luckily we came across his puy lentil galettes recipe that has as the "topping" for the galettes this lentil, mint and yoghurt salad, without the galettes (which we will save for another day) it wasn't too difficult to make at all and we had it with our favorite breaded halloumi (more on this below):

we also had some string beans from our garden that we absolutely had to eat so that meant we ended up with some strange pairings: the cool mintiness of the salad went perfectly with the halloumi, and the beans strangely went well with the halloumi, but the salad and the beans DID NOT go together, still a great meal nonetheless ...

we have been making breaded halloumi for a while now, just a couple of weeks ago we started doing it using jerk chicken flour that we have had for ages, but in london recently our friends took us to this normal looking pub for a usual lunch and it had VEGETARIAN FISH AND CHIPs, with battered halloumi, it was amazing (both in a tasty way and also in a whoa-how-much-fat-was-in-that-meal-way that you don't normally get to experience as a vegetarian), i enjoyed it (in both ways).

m. 5 zucchini/courgette bake

today, m for lunch stole the leftovers of our courgette bake, baby likes zucchini! and this bake is a great way to use up a lot of it:

1. saute onions (a clove or two of garlic is optional here)
2. add as many courgettes as you like, maybe two or three medium sized, chopped into thin quarters and sweat until tender (this could take some time with a lot of zucchini), this can be seasoned with a pinch or two of dried or fresh thyme
3. at the same time cook a cup of dried white rice (this could also work with brown but we haven't tried it yet)
4. once the courgettes are done, mix them with the rice and two large eggs
5. at this point you can add whatever you like, typically we add a cup of gruyere cheese, and last week we also added a half cup of sundried tomatoes, that tasted great!
6. add salt and pepper and place the mixture in a buttered or oiled 9 x 9 baking dish, bake at 175c/375f until brown on top (or 15-ish minutes)

mushrooms can also be added to the mix, in addition to the courgettes, we didn't have any so we decided to add the sundried tomatoes, a very tasty decision!

once we made the zucchini-potato charlotte two weeks ago we realized that this courgette bake was in effect a rice version of the charlotte (but sans cream), each is infinitely edible in its own way ...

m. 4 sweet potatoes

a couple of posts back on 16b i posted about a beautiful meal we made with our friends in london: sweet potato fritters with sweet potato humous, it was really amazing and we just made them again, here are the fritters:

they were just as good as the first time we made them! we tracked down the recipe for them here and simply swapped out the carrots for the sweet potatoes, yummy! we had a little picnic out in the incredible early october sun ...

m. 3 fennel red sauce

i am totally recycling this post from our other blog, but today we revisited our fennel red sauce, i am always amazed at how such a simple recipe can result in such great sauce, the best part about tonight's dinner was that the fennel came from our garden and the pasta was dried pasta from a batch that we made a week ago ...

m. 2 potato salad

m made this yummy potato salad to go with our sandwiches today (she used apple cider vinegar in its mustard vinaigrette):

it was such a nice day today that we actually ate outside, look at this lovely spread!

m. 1 butternut squash risotto

this was a classic risotto with roasted butternut squash risotto (half puree-half cubed) added at the end, or the mantecatura, the added flavor of the roasted squash was really gorgeous, i can't wait to make it again ... we've been searching for a way to get the risotto "cleaner" than in the past, and a trick may be to toast the rice for 5 minutes prior to cooking.