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A-Z of Vegetables: Red cabbage

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Tuesday, 21 Nov 2023, 17:41

It’s very hard not to believe in magic when there’s such a thing as red cabbage in the world. As a child, it was always fun ruminating on why it was called ‘red cabbage’ – had they not invented purple at the time – but that’s before you get onto the astounding behaviour of the cabbage in regard to its own colour. The vegetable appears to have taken the semantic quibble of its name very personally: just watch when you cook it plainly, or even just bruise it: what is that colour? No foods are truly, naturally that colour, even blueberries are grey-violet. But no, red cabbage is, in fact… blue cabbage.

It’s something to do with its chemistry. Basically, red cabbage is what’s known as a ‘universal indicator’, meaning that it changes colour depending on the acidity (or alkalinity) of its environment – like litmus paper. Hence, if you’ve been busy braising red cabbage and you don’t want to put off your dinner guests with what looks like mutilated Smurfs, then simply add some vinegar or something else acidic and it will automatically become purple again. Add some more, and it turns pink. That’s because Acidity is Pink and Alkalinity is Blue (which was the title of my imaginary PhD).

The most common way of eating red cabbage is probably at Christmas, as part of the traffic-light vegetable medley of braised cabbage, roast carrots and growling sprouts. However, you can eat red cabbage like any other cabbage too: boiled like white cabbage, stir-fried like Savoy cabbage, raw like Sweetheart cabbage. In fact it is in its raw form that I most implore you to try it. You have to use red cabbage for coleslaw. You must, you must, you must. Who doesn’t want purple coleslaw? I do. Add beetroot too and your toilet visits will be as pink as the rose-tinted spectacles you’re wearing to cope with me mentioning toilets in a food article.

I have a big space in my heart for red cabbage. Actually, my heart probably is a red cabbage. In flavour terms, I think of cabbage as coming into your cottage from a long but refreshing country walk in the rain. I once read a recipe for game chips which said that it’s hard to say how many the recipe feeds because people generally eat as much as you put in front of them. I’m like that but with red cabbage.


Roast red cabbage burgers which you could pretend are actually burgers if you’re in the mood to insult somebody’s intelligence. To serve 3.

  1. Preheat the oven to 190ºC fan and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. This is because I do not believe in scraping burnt sticky bits off sheets of metal but if you are of a different persuasion, feel free to do what you want. I’m not washing up.
  2. Wash your 1 red cabbage and if any of the leaves are revolting, remove them. If they’re blue, that’s fine. Red cabbage is actually blue. Which only sounds insane if you think about it.
  3. Turn the cabbage upside down and cut the cabbage into slices using the core as a guide: you want to cut the core into 4 pieces, and the rest of the cabbage therefore into 4 slices.
  4. Put the slices of cabbage on the baking tray and sprinkle a pinch of salt onto each cabbage slice, paying particular attention to the core – this will help them soften. Using 4 tbsp quince jelly (optional but ambrosial), spread quince jelly across each cabbage. 
  5. Into a small jar with a lid, pour 1 tbsp oil, 1 tsp balsamic, cider or red wine vinegar and 2 tsp mustard, then put the lid on and shake it up, then pour the contents over the cabbage slices. Roast the cabbage slices for 30 minutes. Whilst you’re at it, maybe you should roast some tofu and other bits and pieces for dinner. Toss the chopped tofu in cornflour and ground pepper, drizzle with oil and roast it too.
  6. The best thing to do is get out a slice of bread so when the cabbage is cooked, it can get slipped onto the bread with all its divinely purple cooking juices.
  7. Look, the cores of the slices will still be tough. Edible, but tough. You don’t have to eat them! You can cut them out and chuck them in the soup or sauce you’re making tomorrow! You could blitz them into a smoothie! You could fry them into soffritto! But if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to eat mine anyway.

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A-Z of Vegetables: Violets

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Friday, 27 Oct 2023, 15:24

Roses are red, but violets are better. The classic in the world of British chocolate making is to have pink-dyed rose fondants sharing the box with purple-dyed violet fondants, but in my experience there are always too few violet ones... because they’re not all violet ones. 

Rose is far too common a flavour to genuinely feel exciting: they’re the wtf flavour of so many hand-creams and perfumes, and their gaudy can-can petals make them popular in gardens all over the place. No wonder violets shrink when confronted with so much ubiquity. If Forrest Gump was British, the box of chocolates metaphor would mean the path well-travelled (rose) versus the individualistic, hedonistically fulfilling and unexpected option (violet).

Another fascinating thing about violet flavour is that the particular scent of the flower – that is to say, what it smells like in the wild – has chemicals in it which numb the receptors in your nose. This gives violet its magical, fleeting quality, the sort of miracle you forget the majesty of, thus keeping it secret and special. Unfortunately, this forgettability seems to be driving violets out of existence, culinarily speaking. Crystallised violets, for instance, used to be a common and popular garnish for sweet things like chocolate cake or poires belle Hélène, and now you will be hard-pressed to locate it in a shop which isn’t either online or Fortnum & Mason. And since I don’t have the sort of budget which covers frequent forays into a wedding-cake-masquerading-as-a-Mayfair-department-store, I have to make do with alternatives. Namely: online shopping. Ugh (says the blogger).

In a high-stakes game of most important flavours, violet would easily be at the top. I associate it with happy holidays: the crystallised violets which my baking-fan sister got in a box of fancy cake decorations, which included crystallised roses, coloured sugars and dragées; the violet shortbread which I picked up on my very first visit to Fortnum & Mason, in its own embossed purple tube; the aforementioned violet fondants which was my introduction to expensive chocolate, when my father bought Prestat one Christmas as a special treat (and then taught us all a valuable lesson in sharing); lastly, and perhaps most importantly for me, glace à la violette, which I ate in Brittany and remains for me the very nicest ice cream flavour.

It seems, like so many other foodstuffs, that we have to rely on the French for the continued availability of violet flavour. In order to continue the use of violet in my sweets, I buy concentrated violet flavour or the more accessible violet Monin syrup, which I use in the recipe below. You can also use the Monin syrup to make no-churn glace à la violette: just whip 300ml double cream, 50g icing sugar, 2 tbsp lemon juice and 125ml violet syrup to firm-to-stiff peaks, then stick in a tub and freeze. It helps to whip the first three ingredients whilst pouring in the fourth in a steady stream.


Violet and chocolate shortbread

  1. This recipe is adaptable! Hallelujah! Preheat the oven to 160ºC fan and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.
  2. Cream together 100g vegan baking block and 50g white sugar. This means beating it until its light and fluffy – I must have read that phrase a million times when researching baking as a teen.
  3. Carefully incorporate EITHER 3 tbsp violet syrup OR 6 drops concentrated violet flavour. Obviously, concentrated violet flavour varies by brand, so you will have to taste-test this now, before you add other ingredients. Therefore, it needs to be stronger than you would want, but not so strong that you go ack before you add the flour. Don’t be tempted to add more syrup if you’re using syrup though, because otherwise your biscuits will have no structural integrity.
  4. Slowly and carefully incorporate 175g flour, until you have a shortbread dough. 
  5. Incidentally, if by some miracle you have actual violets you can cook with, add these now. Don’t use crystallised violets, they will go burned and horrible. 
  6. Chop up 50g chocolate and add this in, being unafraid to knead a bit. I won’t tell you not to use milk chocolate but I only ever use dark or white with violet: dark because it’s a classic combination, white because the violet might be shrinking and the diminished intensity of white chocolate coddles it back into excitement. In this scenario, white is my favourite.
  7. Just using your hands, make little balls of dough and press them down into the tray to make rounds. Aim to get them all the same size. Bake the biscuits for 15 minutes – they won’t colour much, but shortbread is meant to be pale. Leave to cool on the tray for at least 7 minutes, then move to a wire rack to cool down.

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A-Z of Vegetables: Tomatoes

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Saturday, 11 Nov 2023, 11:22

You may have noticed that tomatoes have cropped up in a few other recipes in this blog. You may have also noticed that almost the entirety of exported Italian cuisine has something to do with tomatoes. Well, in all fairness to tomatoes, they’re quite versatile, like the black pepper of the vegetable world. They can take on salty and bitter flavours in eye-wincing quantities whilst providing sweet, sour and umami tastes themselves. On top of that, you can get them all year round (tins are brilliant), grow them easily in Britain and they’re usually a jolly red colour which is always seasonally appropriate. You could equally hang them off your earlobes or a Christmas tree. Happy times!

What’s also incredible is the fact that nobody actually hates them. A person could be the most anxious eater on the planet and find tomatoes’ uncontrollable juiciness terrifying – all that uncontainedness! – but they probably like ketchup. Or baked beans. Or sun-dried tomatoes. Tomatoes have been so thoroughly deployed in recipes that we probably all eat them at some point or another, whether we like the fresh ones or not. 

The difficulty with the tomato is their tendency to a peculiar taste. Rather like melons, tomatoes can develop a watery metallic flavour not unlike lipstick – a bit like jasmine but less appealing. Others can taste like the sky in midsummer, or the promise of a flower meadow, or tomato. The sheer unpredictability of tomatoes mean that it is always worth knowing how to cook them in case they have contrived to be slightly inedible. Often a substandard or melon-like tomato can be improved by a dousing of balsamic vinegar with pinches of fine salt and dried basil, or wrapping the tomato in a fresh basil leaf like a birthday present, but otherwise you will have to roast them, fry them or make sorbet. (Weird idea, I know, but apparently tomatoes and strawberries are essentially interchangeable. Eat strawberries with mozzarella and you’ll see what I mean.)

Another brilliant thing about tomatoes is how tasty they are when they go a bit manky. Hear me out. It’s not that you simply eat a manky tomato – and heaven forfend you eat a gone-off tomato – but tomatoes which have begun to get a bit withered and old respond to cooking so well it’s almost worth buying a trugful and then waiting for them to sag like a parable for the futility of fighting time. (Almost. I still want some bouncing-ball fresh ones for my pesto panini.)


How to rescue manky tomatoes whilst still being the star of the show, serves 2

  1. Preheat the oven to 200ºC fan. Drain and chop 1 block of firm tofu, weighing approximately 250-300g, then put into a big mixing bowl along with 2-4 peeled garlic cloves. In a small jam jar with a lid, pour 2 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar, 1 heaped tsp wholegrain mustard, 1 tsp dried rosemary and a grind of black pepper, then put the lid on, shake it and pour this over the tofu.
  2. Peel and cut 2 onions into eighths and add to the tofu. Wash and halve or quarter 200g baby potatoes (up to you) and add those to the tofu. Wash what remains of your tomatoes and add these too. Toss everything in the big mixing bowl together so everything is coated in the salad dressing.
  3. Empty the contents of the mixing bowl onto as many roasting or baking trays as required for everything to fit in a single layer (it should be one, unless you are cooking vast quantities of tomatoes, in which case why not just boil them down to a concentrated pasta sauce with sautéed onions and celery?) Roast the lot for 30-35 minutes, by which point everything, even the tofu, will be crispy and delicious. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt.
  4. Serve with your usual suite of condiments – and a salad dressing to evoke the flavours of the tofu-soaking earlier. 

Notes: The reason I sprinkle with salt at the end and not the beginning is I find that salting potatoes before you roast them draws out their moisture and makes them damp and crispless. Which is a terrible shame, if still completely edible.


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A-Z of Vegetables: Onions

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I’m pulling out yet another tray of roast onions. The belch of steam from the oven temporarily fogs up my glasses and I question why Specsavers has not brought out their windscreen-wiper range. Anyway, the triangular prisms on the tray are bubbling away in the scant balsamic syrup beneath them; their outermost layers have become rumpled and chewy, like old bootstrap leather (vegan options are available). Their central layers have scorched and torched, like crisp ashen crowns upon their heads. The layers in between the chew and snap are succulent and yielding, slippery soft as silken bedsheets. How could one person tolerate such radically different textural experiences in one bite of vegetable? You can’t. You just press your knife at the base of the onion wedge and the layers flip apart for you to savour every last distinct mouthful.

I never used to have such a helpless dependency upon onions. Once upon a time I could go through dinner without an allium passing my lips. Now, as Nigella Lawson memorably said in How to Eat, I feel I cannot cook a thing without them. In fact, this is almost true, because pretty much every dinner recipe in my recipe jotter (which, humiliatingly, I bought when I was an unusually twee twelve-year-old yet continue to own) involves an onion. Is it their earthiness, their sulphurousness, their sweetness that I’m responding to? Is it their papery skins which feel so satisfyingly like scab-pulling when you peel them? Is it how useful they are for playing bowls? Or is it simply because at heart, I feel I ought to have been French and have internalised a British stereotype to compensate? Who could say? Zut alors (whatever that means).

Back to my roasted onions. What I’ve done is peeled and quartered or eighth-ed them depending on size (it’s absolutely vital to remove the papery skins on the outside, otherwise you will have paper cuts on the inside of your mouth), then tossed them in olive oil, chopped rosemary and balsamic vinegar and roasted at 180ºC fan for half an hour. You can also roast them for even longer and then mush them a bit and spread them onto crunchy bread – if you do this in privacy nobody will stare whilst your eyes roll like Catherine wheels in your head. I think onions get a bad rap as a vegetable, but I think that’s unfair when you consider how sweet and delicious they are. Think how many recipes begin with frying an onion. Gravy. Risotto. Soup. Stew. Pasta sauce. Omelette. Bhaji. Flammkuchen. I for one wouldn’t mind kissing somebody with onion breath – provided the person has had a shot of balsamic first, obvs.


Delightful side dish of onions – or something you can easily incorporate into other dishes

  1. See recipe above. What? I've a right to be cheeky sometimes!

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A-Z of Vegetables: Nuts

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Look, I know nuts aren’t technically vegetables! But name me a vegetable that begins with ‘N’ and I will show you a seaweed. There’s nothing wrong with eating seaweed – it’s a way to get some iodine into your diet if you’re vegan – but it’s not something I use much. I get my iodine from choice plant milks and tofu. So with that established, let’s talk nuts.

As is right, most people first encounter nuts in the rather enticing coating of chocolate – be that Nutella, the Brazil in Quality Street, Toblerone or, if you’re really fancy, gâteau d’opéra, that multilayered French confection of almond, coffee and chocolate. Yes, I have done my research. And no, I’m not counting Snickers because a ‘peanut be not a nut’ (try saying that after a glass of Frangelico).

But once you have grown up and moved on from an overwhelming obsession with chocolate (when is that supposed to happen, by the way?), you begin to mix nuts in more savoury contexts – which is just as well, because the relatively restricted range of proteins available to a vegan requires forays into the worlds of nuts and seeds – and we can’t eat chocolate morning, noon and night. Even if the little voice inside us tells us it would be a lovely idea. 

One of the most useful things to know is that nuts don’t all taste similar. Those big bags of mixed nuts are a trick to lead the hapless connoisseur astray, even if they are fantastic value for money. I do not consider it beyond the realms of decency to sift patiently through the bag to differentiate the nuts into ornamental bowls. If you’re including nuts in a meal, you have to check that their flavours complement what you’re cooking.

Almonds are easily the most versatile. They are almost the only nut which can pair with tomato harmoniously, and I can recommend flaked almonds sprinkled on top of risotto or pasta sauces if you want a slightly cheesy edge – although Tom Hunt also suggests grating walnuts. Almonds are also incredibly cheap and can be grown in Europe, so you don’t need to support ecologically devastating mono-crops of almonds in California if you want organic Portuguese ones instead.

Pecans are one of the least versatile. They’re slightly peculiar in flavour, rather like maple syrup, sawdust and shoes, and they’re almost inevitably stale when you buy them. I wonder if I'm going to list all the nuts there are?

Oh hang on! There is a nut which is a vegetable! Butternut! Awesome – here’s a recipe for a hot lunch if you’re home alone in autumn. It uses lentils; sorry. What do you mean a butternut is a squash?


Roasted butternut lunch with miso lentils, serves 1

  1. Preheat oven to 200ºC fan and get out a small roasting tray. An ovenproof dish for soufflés and crèmes brûlée will also do the trick.
  2. Wash and chop 150g butternut squash and 1 stick of celery (use cauli leaves if allergic or phobic) into 2cm cubes and tumble into the designated roasting tray. You don’t have to peel butternut because the skin is edible, which is an enormous relief because peeling those bastards is really difficult. 
  3. (Sidebar: those butternut seeds are edible – remove the frondy bits and simmer for 10 mins, then roast for 10 mins with a piece of greaseproof paper on top of the seeds so they don't pop over into the darkest recesses of your oven. Stick in a jar once cooled and sprinkle with abandon. They taste like popcorn.)
  4. Anyway, back to the squash and celery. Sprinkle over 1 tsp dried or chopped fresh rosemary and 1 tbsp olive oil, and toss to mix, then roast for 30 minutes.
  5. Drain and rinse one 400g tin green lentils. Stir together 1 tbsp brown miso, 2 tbsp water and 1 tsp your favourite vinegar or citrus juice into a runny paste. When the butternut is ready, pour the lentils in and around the veg in the tray and pour over the miso dressing and roast for another 5 minutes. It is a lot of lentils, but it’s supposed to be a meal in its own right.
  6. Time to eat! Sprinkle over some nutritional yeast flakes (optional) and tuck in! If you’ve chosen a decorative enough roasting dish, you could just eat straight from that and cut down on washing up. It’s not slobbishness, it’s economy. If it's good enough for brûlées, it's good enough for butternut.

Notes: If you can’t bear lentils, small tinned beans like haricot or black-eyed would be good too.


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A-Z of Vegetables: Fennel

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Tuesday, 21 Nov 2023, 17:43

There are two types of people in this world. No, I know people have said this a lot in a variety of humorous deviations (emphasis on the deviance) but I mean it this time. Because there are two types of people in this world. People who like liquorice and sad people.

Liquorice, as the most intense member of the anise flavour family, blows your socks off with a satanically sweet darkness you thought was reserved only for molasses, raw cacao and committing arson on a candy-floss factory. If you’ve never tasted liquorice before, you’re just going to have to taste it; it’s of that rare breed of flavours, along with quince and violet, which is so wholly unique that describing it in terms of other things is both futile and reductionist. Imagine crude oil but for eating and you’re not far off.

As intoxicating as liquorice is, like all sweets, it’s not something you can eat regularly. Also it has laxative properties and that’s not the most appealing thing at a dinner party. That’s why we liquorice-lovers eat it in secret, away from liquorice-haters’ sad, judgmental eyes. Fortunately, for people craving an aniseed hit without the sugar can resort to fennel which, sliced finely and eaten raw, tastes like liquorice in salad form. Being also a big fan of vegetables, this is as close to flavour nirvana as its possible for a liquorice-lover to get. Or it is until I invent chocolate-flavoured cauliflower. Watch this space.

Fennel can be stir-fried, sautéd, gratin-ed, braised, roasted, baked, souped, puréed, juiced, candied and thrown out of the window at passing seagulls but for me, my favourite way to eat fennel is simply raw, thereby preserving as much of its flavour and satisfying crunch as possible. I also realise that it’s not possible to give a recipe for eating fennel raw (wash it, slice it, chew ostentatiously because there’s no other way to chew it). So I decided to go down the extravagant route, play up the confectionery which inspired my love for fennel, and do something I’ve never done before: namely, turning fennel into a pudding. I’m candying it. This essentially amounts to boiling it in syrup. Don’t panic, it’s very easy. Not so easy that you would let a child do it, because they might lick the spoon OF BOILING SUGAR, but easy enough.


Candied fennel – it’s really simpler than the length of this recipe implies

  1. Quarter 1 fennel and give a quick wash behind the thick outermost leaves in case of dirt. Often fennels don’t have this problem, but better safe than muddy. Now cut each quarter in half, keeping the core on each slice intact.
  2. Put the fennel quarters into a small saucepan so they’re all snugly tucked in. Just cover with cold water, then measure how much this water is and make a note of it. Bring to the boil.
  3. Remember how you had to measure how much water you covered your fennel with? Measure out enough granulated or caster sugar to match the weight of water, i.e. 200ml water means use 200g sugar. Add in 1 tsp fennel seeds for extra liquoriceness, heat until the sugar dissolves and simmer the mixture for 18-20 minutes until the liquorice is glassily translucent and butter-soft.
  4. Remove the fennel quarters from the syrup and lay out on some greaseproof paper – this is by far the easiest way to ‘dry’ candied food, because the syrup drips off and is absorbed by the paper, which you then ostentatiously throw in the bin.
  5. Boil down the syrup until it’s the consistency of runny honey, then pour into a clean, airtight container (a jug and clingfilm will do) and put in the fridge to use in place of golden syrup when you make flapjacks tomorrow.
  6. Eat the candied fennel, once cool, with yoghurt and grated chocolate as an elegant pudding for two, or go one further by baking a large round of shortbread for the yogurt, fennel and chocolate to sit on. Do this by beating together 50g vegan butter and 25g sugar until light and fluffy, and then gently incorporating 75g flour (not rye) until a dough forms. Pat out on a lined baking tray to a round 1cm-thick, then bake for 15 minutes at 180ºC or 160ºC fan until pale golden. Leave to cool before transferring to a plate to load up and slice like a pavlova.

Notes: I’ve cheerily kept the syrup from step 5 for a week in the fridge, and you could equally use it in tea, coffee, hot chocolate, custard, salad dressings, acidic tomato sauces, gingerbread, cocktails – wherever there’s need for sweetening liquids or use of syrups.


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A-Z of Vegetables: Mint

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Tuesday, 21 Nov 2023, 17:55

In the classic cocktail party game of ‘What Would You Have Strapped to Your Face for the Rest of Your Life if You Had to?’, I would have to choose mint. Don’t get me wrong, mint faced stiff competition from wild garlic flowers, violets, my specs and Joan from Mad Men, but mint – specifically peppermint – won out. Of all herbs and salad leaves, I think it’s absolutely fair to say that mint is far and away the most fragrant; the sort of vegetable you can smell coming before you see it. 

It also has the rare distinction of being able to beat intense onion and garlic flavours into submission – who has ever eaten tzatziki and gone, ‘Oof, that’s garlicky but whatever happened to the mint?’ This is a form of culinary domination that you wouldn’t expect from such a wrinkled, floppy-leaved plant. Why wouldn’t I want it strapped to my face for the rest of my life if I had to?

Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that there is no one mint, in the same way that there is no one potato. There is a multiplicity of mints out there, including but not limited to peppermint, spearmint, garden mint, curly mint, apple mint, liquorice mint, toothpaste and the Royal Mint (which I prefer to imagine is some sort of extra-delicious, extra-sturdy golden herb with enough menthol aroma to stun a cow at twenty paces). And for me, too much mint is too little mint. When I have something mint flavoured, I want the mint to steamroll all other flavours like a maniacal attention-grabber. I want it to be the top note, mid note and back note of the flavour profile. I want it so minty that it makes my eyes hurt. I know somebody who made a vinaigrette to pour over especially good mackerel, and she wept with how sharply delicious it was. I want mint choc chip to make me cry. If mint were a film, it’s Brief Encounter.

Now. Obviously mint isn’t for everyone (just like Brief Encounter). For many, mint sauce justifiably terrifies. (Why is it both musky and fresh at the same time? Why does it taste like blackcurrants?) Mint in milk chocolate was described by Niki Segnit in The Flavour Thesaurus as less appetising than what she finds in her dishwasher filter (amen, sister). Bendicks bittermints are the most morbidly foreboding hockey pucks I’ve ever eaten. I get it. And if you’re not ready to make mint your mantra (with melon, oh please try it with melon) then why not try the potato recipe below?

(This is not entirely a coup de recipe. I was originally planning to write M for Maris Piper Potato, but got sidetracked when I walked into a farmers market display and ended up with a bunch of mint strapped to my face. Anyway, enjoy your spuds. I’ll have mine with mint sauce.)


Sunday spuds which are just like crisps. Serves 6 but scale down if you don’t have three baking trays! Disclaimer: these are not crisps. These are no titbit. Share not with undeserving palates who don’t know what’s good.

  1. Preheat oven to 200ºC fan for optimal crispiness. If you don’t have a fan oven, then move house. Line three baking trays with silicone baking mats, or foil then greaseproof paper.
  2. Get out a big mixing bowl. Thoroughly wash 750g floury potatoes – trust me, you want the skins on for this. Using the slicer on a box grater, or a mandolin, or a sharp knife and strong grip, finely slice the spuds into 3mm-thick pieces. As you go, dump all the spud slices into your big mixing bowl and dry your eyes periodically. You haven’t even started slicing the onions yet but you’ve never done so much chopping in your life, it’s natural to cry.
  3. Remember how I mentioned onions? Peel 3 onions and quarter them through the base, then cut each quarter in half so they’re in eighths. Add these to the mixing bowl along with 1 tbsp finely chopped rosemary and 2-3 tbsp olive oil. Give everything a good oil-slicking mix and then lay out the slices across the trays, in one layer, and bake for 30 minutes, by which point the potatoes will be cooked and excitingly semi-burned.
  4. Leave to cool on the trays for a bit before scraping off the trays so the maximum amount of steam can escape. Alternatively, and if you have the table space for it, serve the potatoes on the trays as they are and encourage everybody to go in with cake forks. The logic of cake forks is their diminutive size stops people’s forks crashing into each other. Obviously use ordinary forks as Plan B. Plan C is croupier sticks.

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A-Z of Vegetables: Kalettes

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Saturday, 11 Nov 2023, 11:29

I have a feeling that these are trademarked but OH MY GOD have you tried Kalettes? They’re so good! Steam them whole, roll them in a salty salad dressing and pull them into your mouth with a croupier stick. They’re Brussels sprouts in a ra-ra skirt, they’re kale in manageable sizes, they’re lettuces for the Borrowers, they are the most glamorous green you can put on a plate. Also, they’re expensive. Not break-the-bank-to-buy-beef expensive, a bag is only £2, but I mean – come on. They’re leaves. I could just harbour nettles from the park and eat those. But I won’t because Kalettes are THAT EXCITING!

I am not an impulse buyer. I can walk past countless displays of beautiful things that I could spend my hard-earned cash on – luxury chocolates, limited edition outfits, gadgets and gizmos galore – but I don’t, because I need that money for things like saving. But. Vegetables. Sometimes you feel the urge to buy them and you do not even know what they will taste like, so you have to cook them and offer them to your flatmate to eat them first, just in case you’re allergic to it so you want to check that they’re not allergic first, so if you are allergic, they can take you to hospital. Just me? Anyway.

The lovely thing about Kalettes is that I have never actually cooked them in my life. When I’ve been very good and not allowed any flatmate to starve (or poisoned them with questionable vegetables), I’m treated to somebody else’s cooking and it’s always a thrilling moment when the side dish is a steaming pile of Kalettes, shrieking out to be eaten and enjoyed like vegetal flapper girls.

If you’ve never had a Kalette, I imagine that you are absolutely dying to know what the flavour is. And if I have judged that completely incorrectly, it’s my column so I’m going to tell you anyway. You know how cavolo Nero or the dark bits of broccoli have this extraordinary saline, mineral flavour, like the outside of a multivitamin pill? Imagine this, but tempered into a husky floweriness which is entirely appropriate to the petticoat-like vegetable. I keep comparing this vegetable to sexy clothing in spite of the fact that I've never found clothes diverting in my life.

But. Vegetables.


What to do with Kalettes, if you happen to have bought a bag

  1. Wash the Kalettes, if the sack instructs you to do so. Simply waterboard them in a mixing bowl, then shake excess water at encroaching pets. They’re trying to get at your Kalettes.
  2. Put them in a steamer basket on top of a pan shallowly filled with boiling water. When steaming vegetables, you never want to use lots of water in the base – otherwise you might as well be boiling the vegetables. The point about steaming is it cooks vegetables ever so gently, preserving their flavour, structure and nutrient levels. And a vegetable this pretty is surely very healthy.
  3. Cook them until the bases yield to the point of a knife (I don’t know how long this takes, but they’re so diaphanous I’d be amazed if they took much more than 5 minutes). Tumble them onto a serving dish and give them the merest hint of a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a decisive spritz of lime juice. Sprinkle over some optional breadcrumbs if you’re somebody who needs to hear crunch when you’re chewing, then take yourself off to a secluded corner to eat them. Well, Nigella Lawson would approve.

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A-Z of Vegetables: Jersey Royals

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Edited by Gabriel Spreckelsen Brown, Saturday, 11 Nov 2023, 11:27

Every spring, food writers from up and down the country get into spasms of rapturous excitement for the new season of Jersey Royal potatoes. Considering that it is simply the season’s first crop of potatoes – a vegetable so basic they don’t even count as one of your five a day – it always seemed to me an excitement wildly out of proportion. No disrespect meant to Jersey, I thought, but that is just a small spud.

Nevertheless, since my dad was also excited for the coming of the Jersey Royals, I thought I’d give them a go and see what all the fuss was about. Apparently they’re supposed to be boiled and buttered because they’re good enough on their own – unlike, presumably, Maris Piper potatoes. I trusted my dad that they would taste nice, but he is also the man who hates carrots and can’t eat rice properly, so he can’t really be trusted when it comes to vegetables. So I tasted the Jersey Royals.

Look. I know potatoes often taste earthy. They’re a root vegetable, to some extent they’re all earthy. But Jersey Royals don’t just taste earthy. They taste of earth. Worse than that, they taste like mud. Worse than that, they taste like soil. Worse than that, they taste like Jersey Royals. They don’t even have the virtue of being described in terms of another foodstuff – ‘top notes of rosemary and lavender, with a background of musk and butter and a final aftertaste of good, hard starch’. The top, middle and aftertastes are all of Jersey Royal and it tastes like evil if evil was a potato!

There are better baby potatoes. Charlotte. Annabelle. Vivaldi. Maris Peer. The generic ones in that big sack from the health food shop. You don’t have to shell out the extra money to buy Jersey Royals when fundamentally, a potato is a potato is a potato. You could be throwing a May Day garden party for your spouse’s family and when your draconian mother-in-law, wearing a dead peacock on her head and a twinset spun from unicorn hair, jabs your bowl of spud salad and snootily asks, ‘I say, are these Jersey Royals?’, you can just lie when you know that they’re tinned ones from the corner shop and she’d be none the wiser. ‘I say, these Jersey Royals are unusually delicious, are they not?’ Yes they are, you silly bint, because they’re not Jersey Royals*.

I’m not claiming to be an authority on the Jersey Royal. Like all food preferences, mine is completely subjective. However, to prove to you that Jersey Royals are a waste of your time, here is a recipe for a different kind of potato salad to make for your friends which simply would not work with the rambunctious flavour of Jersey Royals.


Green potato salad, serves 2 for a healthy but indulgent late-night dinner

  1. Wash, halve and boil 300g baby potatoes in barely salted water for 15-20 minutes until they are the texture of firm butter (test by prodding with a knife). For the last 4 minutes of cooking, chuck in 100g broccoli florets and 100g frozen peas. Pour away the water but leave the vegetables in the steaming, empty pot.
  2. Separately and straight away, mash 1 ripe avocado with 100g vegan pesto (M&S Plant Kitchen is good) in a small bowl and add a spritz of water or lemon or lime juice if it’s too thick to dress the vegetables – because that is what you will be doing with it next!
  3. If not vegan, add 3 slices good prosciutto, shredded (prosciutto is always expensive so you might as well get something decent) to the hot vegetables and give it a stir before adding the avocado mixture. Otherwise, just add the thick avocado mixture to the vegetables, stir to combine, pile into tall bowls and eat on the sofa whilst wearing fluffy socks.

Notes: I’ve never tried this, but my recommended vegan substitute for the prosciutto would be stirring in some white miso and a generous pinch of smoked paprika to the avocado and pesto. Then again, it’s not vital.


*Use of the word 'bint' for the comedic sound of the word only.

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