Tag: gardening

Categories
Mains Recipes

Autumn Veg Roast

The signs of autumn are now all around us. I’ve been enjoying some beautiful wooded walks amidst glorious shades of red and orange leaves. The days are getting cooler, and this coming weekend, in the UK, our clocks will be going back one hour, bringing in earlier, darker evenings.

This dish was inspired by the arrival in the ADK Kitchen of a wonderful harvest of autumn vegetables from our local community farm. You can see these spread out in the photo below: butternut squash, another (as yet unidentified!) variety of squash, parsnip, carrots, onions, celeriac and mooli (white radish). Also included in the crop was some broccoli, green beans and fresh butter beans.

There was too much to use in one dish, so I focused on the squashes and root veg, which I think are lovely roasted. I added a tomato and onion sauce, with a maverick ingredient – black olives. It is topped with a crisp crust of wholemeal breadcrumbs, grated cheese and chopped nuts.

The next photo shows the finished article, warm from the oven. Served with a nice glass of red wine, it makes a great comforting meal on an autumn evening, now that the nights are drawing in.

Timings

10 mins to prepare and chop the veg, which then roasts for 30 mins. The rest of the prep you can do while the veg are roasting. Allow a further 20 mins for the assembled dish to roast further.

Servings

This will serve 6 people.

You Will Need

  • A pyrex dish-ful of chopped seasonal veg: I used butternut squash, celeriac, parsnip and mooli, and added some chestnut mushrooms and red pepper
  • A sprinkling of herbes de provence
  • Some olive oil
  • A 500g carton of tomato passata
  • 1 onion
  • 1 clove of garlic
  • 75 g pitted black olives, whole or chopped
  • 5 or 6 slices of wholemeal bread chopped into crumbs
  • 75g grated cheddar cheese
  • 75g chopped mixed nuts

Method

  1. Chop enough veg to half fill the pyrex dish that you will use. The veg should be in chunks roughly about 2-3cm square. Tip them into a separate metal baking dish and sprinkle with the herbes de provence. Drizzle with olive oil and roast in the oven for 30 mins at 180C. Spread them so that they are in a single layer, and use a second metal dish if necessary.
  2. While the veg is roasting, chop the onion and add it to some hot olive oil in a saucepan, with the garlic clove, crushed. After a few minutes, tip in the passata and black olives, and mix. Let it bubble for around 10 mins so that it is slightly thickened in consistency.
  3. Separately, combine the breadcrumbs, grated cheese and chopped nuts in a bowl. Get your hands in there and give it all a good mix. You want the cheese to be intertwined with the other ingredients so that, when it melts, it will bind it all together into a crisp coating.
  4. When the veg has roasted, combine it with the tomato sauce, and pour into the pyrex dish. Pat it all down with the back of a spatula so there are no gaps.
  5. Sprinkle over the bread, cheese and nut crust, evening it out and patting it down with the backs of your fingers. Give it a final drizzle of olive oil.
  6. Cook in the oven for around 20 mins, or until the top is crisp and golden. With some ovens, it may help to give it a final 5 mins under the grill to crisp it up. Serve.

Customise it!

Lots of scope for customising here, starting with choice of veg. Really, you can use whatever is in season and whatever particular veg you prefer. There are many varieties of squash and root veg around this time of year, most of which benefits from roasting, helping it sweeten and caramelise on the outside and succulent to bite into.

With the crust topping, you can use other bread for the crumbs, and other cheese. Grated blue cheese would give it a lovely taste twist, as would some parmesan. The next time I make this I will include some pumpkin and sunflower seeds in the crusty mix.

You can omit the olives if they’re not your thing. I love them, and had the idea to include them in the sauce and serve the dish with a warmed, sliced black olive ciabatta (see my photo), which all worked really well.

The dish is suitable for vegetarians. To make it vegan, simply omit the grated cheese, though the topping will be a little looser. However, you could always use a vegan cheese. As ever, feel free to experiment!

This time of year also means that Halloween is approaching. I’ll be saying more about this in this coming weekend’s post, and hopefully having a little fun. For now, I’ll choose a track from a Halloween Playlist I have on Spotify, to share as musical accompaniment.

Cue Superstition by Stevie Wonder. Nothing more to say!

Categories
Blog Sides

Green Tomato Chutney

This week on A Different Kitchen we welcome our latest guest post. Our contributor is my wife Lesley, a keen gardener and cyclist, who has been making the most of this summer’s tomato harvest from our garden!

Hi. I grow Gardener’s Delight tomatoes, a really tasty cherry tomato. At the end of the season I usually compost the green ones when tidying up the garden for winter, having had a magnificent crop of warm juicy tomatoes when picked fresh. 

This year I decided it was more in keeping with my desire to reduce food miles and increase self-sufficiency  to convert the green tomatoes into chutney.  I inherited some vintage Kilner jars from my parents who used to make jam from gluts of fruit. The skill and desire to preserve a home-grown harvest has been handed down to me, even though I thought it was boring at the time.  This recipe was super easy to make and, as the following photo shows, we now have this rich sticky chutney to pair with cheese, ham and bread for much of the winter to come.  

This made just under a litre of chutney.  Here’s a ‘How to’:

Slice the green tomatoes and an onion. Sprinkle with the best salt you have and leave. The salt will draw liquid out of the tomato onion mixture, then discard by straining it. Don’t rinse the salt away, its all part of the salt/sweet/sour balance of the chutney. 

I used 200g muscovado sugar and half a litre of cider vinegar to my 1kg tomatoes to make it rich and tasty but any sugar and vinegar will do. I have windfall apples from my tree so I added about 4 medium-sized ones peeled and cored with a handful or 2 of sultanas or any similar dried fruit. Add in whatever spices you like. 

All this gets boiled up till it is pulpy and sticky  (about 1 hr) and then carefully spoon into the sterile jars that have been warming in the oven. I don’t have lids for these so have put greaseproof paper squares over the jar with an elastic band and popped it in the fridge once cool. 

I always say to my children when eating anything we have grown in our garden, “this was made from Hampshire sunshine”. Eating it will remind me of a ridiculously record breaking sunny summer, sheltering inside from the heat, watching cycling teams on TV dousing copious amounts of water over their heads in le Tour de France on punishingly hot roads. Being a keen cyclist, I have chosen this excellent Kraftwerk tune to go with my chutney. 

Categories
Blog Drinks

Save it for Later

Next stop on my foodie tour of the West Midlands, while here for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, is Hill Close Gardens in Warwick. It’s a set of Victorian gardens that was nearly lost to housing development in the 90’s, only to be rescued through the campaigning work of some dedicated locals. The gardens are now restored and open to visitors, giving an insight into how our forefathers managed a plot of land to feed families with a healthy crop of home grown fruit and vegetables. Additionally, it shows the role gardening played in supporting their wellbeing, through respite from busy lives as merchants and shopkeepers in a growing 19th Century English town. It’s a lesson many of us would do well to remember today.

At this time of year the trees are full of traditional varieties of English apple that you will not find on the shelves of our supermarkets. Golden Delicious? Pink Lady? Jazz? No, nowhere in sight. However, if you’re interested in seeing the likes of Cox’s Orange Pippin, Ross Nonpareil, Laxton’s Epicure or the wonderfully middle-England named Reverend W. Wilkes (shown in the photo above), then this is the place to come. They are here in abundance, weighing down the heavily-laden branches of some very old trees.

The Gardens are managed on a not for profit basis and run largely by volunteers. Other fruit and veg spotted on our trip included beans, plums, courgettes and beetroot, to name a few. It is possible to buy some of the produce, including bags of windfall apples, but I opted for a bottle of juice made from the apples in the gardens. It’s already been chilled and opened, and tastes delicious!

Back at #B2022, since my last post we have attended a couple more events. The Lawn Bowls at Leamington Spa was all about precision, skill and strategy, while the Basketball 3×3 at Smithfield a frenetic and action-packed race for points against a fast beating clock. Both were excellent spectator sports in their own way.

On the musical side, it’s good to see that the soundtrack at events and Fan Festival sites is featuring Birmingham musicians, like Duran Duran, ELO, Slade and Joan Armatrading. My personal favourites are UB40 and The Beat, who have many great tracks. I will get some of these added to the ADK Playlist. By the way, did I mention that we have saved some of that lovely apple juice in the fridge for later?