Mushrooms a la Grecque (vegan)
Cold mushrooms? Like those little pots you sometimes get in the deli? A bit suspect? Texture like flannel? Not at all, think again! This is how it goes…. mushrooms in a rich tomato sauce, scented with herbs and garlic; a back-note of spice and salt. Dip your bread into the sauce, oily and fragrant. Take a mushroom on your fork – tender but a subtle hint of resistance, almost meaty as you chew. Take another, easy to eat, heading eagerly down your throat. Oh, they’re all gone…better make a bigger batch for tomorrow. Simple to make ahead, to use as part of a salad spread with some cold meats, green salad, cheese, good bread. I’ve found that even mushroom-suspecting kids like these, given the chance. I think it’s the tomato sauce that does it, slightly sweet, slightly sour, slightly salty. And use small button mushrooms – the bigger open ones just aren’t right. You can also use this as a starter, with good bread and a rocket salad, but if it’s all you’re serving you’d need to be sure you don’t have any outright mushroom-refusers. Serves 6 as part of a mixed salad table, and leftovers can be brought out for another day. Timings – 30 minutes preparation, 30 minutes cooking, then keep cold until using.
Fry the onions gently in the olive oil, not letting them brown. It will take about 15 minutes to get them to the transparent oily stage. Add the chopped garlic and the dried herbs. Peel or clean the mushrooms, and cut up, depending on their size. Keep smaller ones whole, halve larger ones. Add to the onion mixture and stir around, frying gently for 2-3 minutes until coated with oil and turning soft. Add the tomatoes and their juice to the pan, then the red wine and the tomato puree. Stir well and adjust the seasoning. Add the fresh herbs. Cook over a low heat, but keep it bubbling, for about half an hour, until the liquid is markedly reduced. Taste seasoning again, adding more basil at this stage if you like it. Cool and keep in a closed container until needed. The taste is best if you let it warm up to room temperature before serving, so take it out of the fridge half an hour before eating if you can.
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Lentil Soup (vegan)
This is one of my personal standbys. It’s like a warm old woolly jersey. It doesn’t knock your socks off, but it’s delicious, smooth and full of veg. It’s also easy and quick to make from store cupboard staples and vegetables you are likely to have around. On that note, feel free to switch around the veg for whatever you have – add a leek, add the leftover cooked broccoli from yesterday, or a couple of Jerusalem artichokes. None of the quantities is exact, I just use a few vegetables and a handful of lentils per portion. Eaten for lunch with a piece of toast, it gently hits the spot, or rather strokes it. In our first lockdown, to give my Lunch Club seniors a change from cake, sometimes I took round a portion of soup (in sealed clean jam jars which they solemnly handed back to me the following week), and this was one of them. Several people asked for the recipe, which I took to mean it had gone down well. It also freezes perfectly, so you can make larger quantities and have it to hand when a bowl of soup is all that you want. You can, of course, zing it up a bit. Add some chillies – fresh or dried – or some garlic, add some fresh herbs, add lemon, or add tomatoes – not all at once, I’d say, but try what you like. You can even add some curry powder with the frying vegetables if you like your life spicy. Serves 6 Timings – 10 minutes preparation, 15 minutes cooking
Heat a little oil in a heavy saucepan and cook the onion, celery and carrots for a few minutes until they begin to soften and cook. Add the lentils and stir for one minute. Pour in the stock, bring to simmering, add the marmite and the Henderson’s Relish. Simmer for about 10 minutes, taste and adjust the seasoning, adding salt and pepper and any handfuls of fresh herbs you might have around. Cook for another 5 minutes – the lentils should be very soft and mushy by now and the vegetables are well cooked. Leave to cool, then puree. When you re-heat you might want to add a little bit more liquid as it does tend to thicken up, but you can freeze without doing this, to better use the freezer space. Serve with a salad and fresh bread, or with garlic croutons. Serbian Salad (vegetarian)
Long long ago when the world was young and I could still fit into my leather trousers (by far the best outfit for travelling ever invented – warm and cool like your own skin and never needed a wash…) I spent a lot of time driving about in what was then Yugoslavia. We ate at roadside restaurants where the cuisine was not at all remarkable – centring round grilled meat or some sort of tripe stew which our customer tried to trick us into eating on several occasions, to his own great amusement. One dish was found on most menus and I looked forward to it: a very simple “Serbian salad”. You can make it at any time of year but try to get the best possible tomatoes. The salty cheese sets off the sweet tomatoes, and the onions add that little bit of fire and crunch on your palate. The best Serbian salad I ever ate used home-marinated goat cheese, which I have re-created using feta, but if you don’t have time to marinate, you can just use feta from the packet. Serves 4 as part of a mixed salad table. Timings – 15 minutes to get the cheese marinating, and then 15 minutes to put the salad together when you want to eat. For the marinated cheese: 1 packet feta cheese (although I usually put two packs in to marinate at the same time, it’s only a tiny bit extra work and you can use it in all sorts of salads, or grilled on a slice of baguette, and it keeps a week or so in a closed container in the fridge, ready for you to use.) 100ml olive oil, 100ml light oil (sunflower or rapeseed work well, not nut oil for instance) – a clove of garlic, half a fresh chilli, teaspoon chilli flakes, a slice of lemon, teaspoon coriander seed, teaspoon crushed black peppercorns, teaspoon dried oregano, any strong fresh herbs you have to hand – thyme, rosemary are good. For the salad:
To marinate the cheese: Put the ingredients into a plastic container – I find one of the smaller takeaway boxes ideal. Mix up the oil with the spices and flavourings – you can adjust the flavours to your taste and the season. Take the feta out of the packet and slice it through its middle so you have half thickness slices – this is to increase the surface area and means the marinating flavours get further into the cheese. Slice the cheese so that it all fits into the container and spoon the oil around it, so it gets all over the surfaces. Put the lid on and leave in the fridge for 24 hours or up to 5 or 6 days. Turn the cheese in the oil if you remember. To assemble the salad: Slice the red onion and put it in a small bowl with the wine vinegar, some salt and a teaspoon of sugar, just enough to cover it. Wash and slice some good juicy ripe tomatoes. Take out the central pith if they need it, but don’t worry. Place in a rather flattish salad bowl if you have one. Chop the parsley leaves and the spring onions. De-seed the pepper and chop it into chunks, mix with the tomatoes. Crumble the cheese over the top of the tomatoes, then fish the red onion slices out of the vinegar and spoon them on top. Scatter on the spring onions. Mix 4 tablespoons of olive oil with one spoon of the vinegar you used on the onions, add a grind of pepper and check the seasoning, adding a smidgen more salt or sugar if needed. Dress the salad. Eat as part of a mixed salad table, with some salami or cold ham and some good bread. You can make this an hour or so ahead of time, the dressing will just sink into the vegetables, and it’s robust enough to be transported in a lunch box. Tapenade – dark as Christmas Night (vegan version)
Salty, deep, dark, garlicky, oily, wicked – tapenade tastes like it looks like it sounds. You can buy it ready made in jars, of course you can. But if you make it yourself, firstly it tastes fresh and spicy and wakeful, and secondly, it’s far more cost effective. I quite often get asked for the recipe, which shows that home-made really tastes different from bought. All you need is a stick blender – the bowl of a main mixer is just too big for this and the blades don’t get right into the sides of the paste. It depends how smooth you want it - it’s a personal thing. I like it smooth enough to spoon onto a small cracker or broken shard of toast, and have it stay there by its own willpower, so it needs to be oily and textured enough to stay in a blob. But I still like the slightly rough woolly-blanket-texture of the olives, not a soupy puree. Maybe I’m hard to please, but the point here is don’t over-liquidise. Stop once the mix has turned into a puree, taste, test and liquidise again if you want to. This is perfect party food – adult, sophisticated and tasting very much of the night. Serve it on little crackers slicked with cream cheese, on that French toast you get in packets (which gives you a surprise sweetish tang too, for another adult kick) or on pieces of broken sourdough for a careless, California vibe. Obviously in these post-Covid days, we don’t offer this as a dip, except in individual ramekins with each-to-his-own plates of dippy things. If you make larger quantities, this makes a superb gift, put into little jars to give to people at Christmas; maybe along with a little bag of sweet treats if you want to be really impressive. Serves 6 as a starter along with other nibbles and snacks. Timings – 10 minutes.
Put all the ingredients in a bowl and blend with a stick blender. Test the texture and either add a tiny bit more olive oil and blend a bit more or leave as it is. It keeps very well stored in a jar in the fridge, so you can make this at the start of Christmas and bring it out when the occasion demands. Tikka Mushrooms (vegetarian)
Halfway up the foothills of the Indian Himalayas on the way to Shimla, summer playground of the British Raj, we stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant. Having struggled through monsoon-destroyed roads, unfinished red-mud roadworks and past accidents caused by drivers unable to wait in queues, we were frazzled and frustrated. Our spirits were revived by a simple and excellent meal, as so often in India. We had butter-naan – now recalled with inappropriate desire, dripping with butter and dough meltingly soft; fragrant makhani dhal - yes, I know the cream content makes it a calorie bomb, who cares? I went on ordering the brown lentil concoction everywhere I could; - and this light and fresh plate of mushroom tikka. I remember the welcome we got in that little restaurant; the concerned waiter rushing to get us a cool drink, the calming view of precipitous green valleys from the back window, the comfortable seat after the sticky jeep. Oddly enough, the rest of the journey was much nicer after our stop – the effect of the food, or just nearer to the vision that is Shimla? I’m sure the genuine recipe is more complex, but here’s my re-creation of that lovely dish, and it is now an easy family lunch favourite. Serves 4. Timings: preparation 10 minutes, an hour marinade, 20 minutes cooking
Mix the yoghurt, tikka paste and lime juice thoroughly – you will get a nice red cool yoghurt slurry. Prepare the mushrooms – I prefer to peel them and take off the ends of the stalks, but if you’d rather just wipe them to remove any dirt from the culture medium, then fine. Add the mushrooms to the marinade, mix well to cover them with the yoghurt and leave for an hour. Take the dog for a walk. Pre heat the oven to 200°C. Take the mushrooms out of the yoghurt and thread them onto metal skewers. Put on a tray in the oven for 20 minutes – turn every now and then to make sure all sides are cooked. Serve either on the skewers or on a plate, with pillowy buttered naan if you don’t care about your waistline and want to remember India again, or maybe a simple green salad. Hallowe’eny (eggy) Toadstools (vegetarian option)
I think this was the very first dish I ever cooked all by myself – seduced by the tempting picture in my “Youngster’s Cookery Book” of these lovely fat toadstools with dotted caps. So that really tells you it’s child’s play – I was about eight when I made these for Sunday high tea. Really nice for half term lunch as well with a Hallowe’en theme. The bacon is optional, but I do love the salty crunch against the sweet tomato and the juicy cheesy egg, and the kids will like it too. Small hands can help with most of this recipe, so get stuck in and make it with them. A meal for messy togetherness. Serves 6, 30 minutes
Put the eggs into a pan of cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes to hard boil them. Have a cup of tea while the children lay the table and get on with the rest. Wash the lettuce, separating the leaves. Keep it in a bowl of cold water to crisp up. Make the salad dressing by shaking all the ingredients together in an empty jar. Fry the bacon until crispy and well cooked, put it onto kitchen towel to cool and crisp further. At this stage, the children are likely to steal all the cooked bacon so be prepared either to fight them off or cook some more. Halve the tomatoes round their equators. Weigh out the butter and cheese into a small bowl over a pan of hot water. Mix them up with a fork. The butter will start to melt quite quickly, that’s fine, take the bowl away from the hot water and just cover it with a plate until you get the egg yolks into it. When the eggs are done, take them out of the boiling water and run them under cold water to stop them cooking and cool them down. Crack the shells and remove the shells and membrane. This is the only tricky bit: cut a small slice off the fat end of the egg so that it can sit stably on that end. Now cut off the pointed end of the egg about 1/3 of the way down. You should expose the yolk. Carefully scoop out the yolk with a teaspoon into the bowl of cheese and butter. Keep on doing that until you have hollowed out all the eggs. If the yolk is too far to one side of an egg, the white can be very thin and can break, leaving an uneven hollow; never mind, the “mushroom” will be slightly wonky, but that’s nature. Mash the mixture in the bowl with a fork, and season with pepper and salt. Using another teaspoon and your fingers, and helped by small hands, stuff the mixture back into the middle of the eggs, saving some back for the dots on the “mushroom” caps. Spin the lettuce to dry and arrange on a platter. Stand the stuffed eggs around within the lettuce. Top each egg with a half tomato and dot some little pieces of egg mixture onto the tomatoes – I have tried both doing this dotting before topping the eggs and after, and it’s easier if you do it after. If you want perfection, you could pipe some mixture onto the tomatoes, and this might be quite fun for a child to do if you have the time and inclination. (You don't need a proper piping bag, a decent plastic bag with a small cut in the corner is fine.) Scatter the crumbled bacon over the lettuce and serve, with salad dressing if liked. Feels a bit sad really. Goodbye to summer, to the warm weather, to working in the allotment in a t-shirt. We ate the last courgette this week and that’s a true sign of approaching Autumn. Considering it’s the end of October, that’s not bad. I’ve been growing Defender (big green normal looking ones, great cropper) and Tondo Chiaro di Nizza (round slightly striped one.) We’ve had a glut, so I have a glut of recipes too, which I will share. You can use courgettes as courgetti/spaghetti or sliced like sheets of lasagne, for a less calorific version of pasta – they don’t taste quite the same, but they are great for a change.
Courgette antipasti with oil and lemon. (vegan) Serves 4, about 30 minutes and then time to chill.
In a flattish dish, combine the olive oil, lemon juice, salt and chopped mint leaves. Slice the courgette as thinly as you can. Put a little olive oil on a piece of kitchen paper and wipe the courgette slices with it – you need very little as you are grilling, not frying, you just want to stop them sticking. Lay each piece down on the grill surface and cook for 1-2 minutes each side – you want the courgette tender and browning but not burned. As each is cooked, take it out and lay it down in the olive oil mixture, it will hiss and then start to absorb the dressing. You can only do a few at a time, so it can take a while to do a whole courgette. When you’re all done, mix the dish of slices and oil up again and place in the fridge to chill for at least an hour. Taste, adjust the seasoning and eat as part of an antipasti or a salad buffet, along with lots of crusty bread to mop up the juices. They will keep in the fridge in a sealed container for a couple of days. |
Some Changes - April 2022
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