Enchiladas! Finally!

I mentioned the other day that I'd been meaning to make these butternut squash enchiladas for about 10 days...and last night I finally managed to make them!

The original recipe called for quite a lot of cheese, and browned butter, but I wanted to make it healthier so I left out the cheese and butter, used unsweetened almond milk for the sauce, and instead of tortillas I used Mountain Bread corn wraps (which I get from my local organic supermarket). I also halved the recipe - although I ended up getting a bit overenthusiastic with my squash chopping, so I had some of the filling left over which I'm going to have with pasta for tomorrow's supper. And I got some lovely black kale in my veg box this week (no Veg Box Day post, though, I'm afraid - I got home late on Tuesday night after a book launch party and just chucked everything in the fridge!) so I put some of that into the filling as well.

It wasn't the most attractive of things to photograph...

...but it tasted really good!

On another note, the Christmas lights are up in Ealing. I checked back through last year's posts, and they've been switched on a whole 10 days earlier this year! I suppose it's definitely beginning to look a little bit like Christmas...

Veg Box Day: 30/10/12

No drama this week! My veg box arrived on time and with everything where it should be. Plus it was cheap as chips, thanks to the lovely people at Riverford putting a £5 credit on my account to make up for the mix-up with the last box!

So my box contained a butternut squash, some carrots, a few onions, a bag of potatoes, broccoli, a Savoy cabbage and some cherry tomatoes. All good stuff, although I am getting a little tired of small potatoes - I want to make mash and jacket potatoes, and small ones are no good for that!

Anyway, I had an evening in last night so I decided to do some cooking. I still had carrots, potatoes and a sorry-looking red pepper left over from my last veg box, so I made carrot and coriander soup and a roasted tomato and pepper pasta sauce. For the soup I fried an onion with garlic, ground coriander, cumin and turmeric before adding the carrots, some chopped potatoes and some veg stock and simmering it until the veg was all nice and soft. I then used my stick blender to whizz it into a smooth soup - although I did manage to splatter myself and the kitchen in the process! The sauce was even easier - I just whacked the tomatoes and chopped-up pepper into the oven with a couple of cloves of garlic, a spritz of olive oil and some black pepper, and then when it was roasted I whizzed that up as well. It smells delicious and I can't wait to eat it!

In other news, I spotted some festive lights last night! Usually I'd moan about it being too early, but since the clocks went back at the weekend I still haven't got used to these dark evenings, and with the weather being so chilly it's nice to have a bit of sparkle around!

Veg Box Day: 16/10/12

...or The Mystery of the Missing Box!

Yes, this post is a whole week late. That's because there was a bit of intrigue surrounding last week's veg box delivery! Mainly because it didn't arrive on Tuesday as it ought to have done. I emailed my delivery person but didn't hear anything, and I started to wonder whether I'd got the wrong week (apart from the fact that the money had come out of my account).

Then, on Thursday morning, I went downstairs to go to work and there was my veg box, sitting in the hallway! There was a note attached from a very apologetic neighbour of mine, who evidently also has Riverford boxes delivered - they'd delivered mine to her house instead, and it had taken her a day to realise it was the wrong week for her box! Very nice (and honest) of her to return it - and she was mortified by the fact that she'd eaten my swiss chard!

So eventually, I got my box - minus the chard but with a cute little butternut squash, a green cabbage, potatoes, red peppers, carrots and mushrooms. I then went away for the weekend, so I haven't used much of my veg yet, but this evening I made some yummy fajitas.

I just fried some onion, one of the peppers, a load of mushrooms and a big handful of cabbage with some smoked paprika, chilli flakes and a clove of gorgeous smoked garlic (which I picked up at a fab smokery near my parents' house) and wrapped all the veg up in a couple of tortillas. Well, actually they were Loyd Grossman chapattis, which I've been meaning to try for ages - they're far lower in calories than tortilla wraps (under 100 per chapatti) and they were really tasty!

Veg Box Day: 2/10/12

This is the first veg box I've had for ages, what with being away and everything. It's a good one, though! I got onions, carrots, salad potatoes, cherry tomatoes, courgettes, broccoli and what they called 'true spinach', which just means proper big spinach leaves instead of the little baby ones.

I used some of the spinach, broccoli and potatoes to make a big salady thing with mustard mayo to go with a poached salmon fillet, and I also made a batch of carrot and chickpea curry, with lentils and more of the spinach, which went in the freezer. Nigella made a pasta and courgette thing on her Nigellissima programme the other night, which may well feature in my culinary future! Or I could make my mum's amazing zucchini cake...

Veg Box Day: 21/08/12

I had an amazing weekend - a wedding on Saturday, a country show featuring cider, ice cream, big pigs and The Wurzels on Sunday, and as I'd also taken Monday off work we headed down to gloriously sunny Lyme Regis for lunch and more ice cream.

But more of that later! Yesterday was veg box day, and here's what I got...

...salad leaves, spring onions, portobello mushrooms, charlotte potatoes, cherry tomatoes, carrots and the biggest pointed cabbage I've ever seen!

I also finally got round to buying myself a salad spinner - all the things like salad leaves, spinach, rocket and watercress that come in the veg box need washing, and until now I've been washing them in the sink and then using industrial-sized volumes of kitchen roll to attempt to dry them. But now I have this!

Of course I had to get an expensive one (well, it was more than the flimsy £5.99 ones in the cheapo kitchen shop, anyway) because I only wanted a small one. This one fits in the fridge (if you store your salad in the spinner it keeps longer, apparently) and it's solid and the plunger on top locks flat onto the lid so it's really easy to store (very important in my tiny kitchen).

So supper last night was a salady affair - some of my freshly washed leaves with grated carrot, toasted pine nuts, new potatoes, a hard-boiled egg and a dressing made from tahini, lemon juice and a bit of water. I'll have to think of something to do with that cabbage now!

Veg Box Day: 7/8/12

Haven't blogged for ages, have I! I went on a week-long jaunt down to the Westcountry and did a LOT of cooking (and a bit of DIY...) so you can expect a few posts about that in the near future. In the meantime, here's this week's veg box - I haven't had one for a month, as I skipped my last delivery knowing I'd be away. This box is extremely summery, with a salad pack, spring onions, sugarsnap peas, carrots, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms and new potatoes, and it's all from the UK!

Unfortunately I was a bit hungry and I ate my supper before I remembered to take a photo of it...but it wasn't particularly interesting anyway, just some of the salad with chopped spring onions, a hard-boiled egg, new potatoes, cherry tomatoes (both of which I browned with a spray of oil in a frying pan for a warm element to the salad, yum yum) and a drizzle of balsamic.

Amazing yogurt and tahini dressing

The other night, I made this aubergine salad for supper and it was lovely - but what was really lovely was the yogurt and tahini dressing that went with it. The amounts in the recipe made a whole jam jar's worth of dressing, so last night I had it with roasted carrots, potatoes and chickpeas and I think it was even nicer having been in the fridge for a couple of days!

It's creamy and garlicky and lemony, and there's quite a kick from the cayenne pepper (I added a good pinch, but you could obviously use as much or as little as you liked) and it's ridiculously easy to make. You can also make it as low-fat as you like by using fat-free yogurt - I actually used some plain soya yogurt that I had in the fridge and it was fab and dairy-free to boot. I reckon it'd be amazing with grilled fish, or any kind of roasted vegetables, or a peppery rocket and watercress salad.

Veg Box Day: 10/7/12

Another slightly soggy one, thanks to this glorious July weather! This fortnight's box had vine tomatoes, an aubergine, two mini cucumbers, some spring onions, new potatoes, carrots and a TON of broad beans.

So far all I've done is mix some of the tomatoes and cucumber into a potato salad, but this evening I'm planning a variation on this aubergine salad recipe, with the cherry tomatoes and maybe some smoked tofu.

Veg Box Day: 26/06/12

I've got another really summery veg box this week, with wild rocket, vine tomatoes, a big red pepper, a pointed cabbage, a bunch of carrots and a bag of new potatoes. I've got a bit of a new potato mountain at the moment, as I haven't really used the ones from my last box, but I've made an effort over the last few days with a bright green spinach and potato frittata (which was totally excellent after Monday night's run)...

...and a lunchtime salad with new potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, black olives, tuna and a bit of mayo. I'm going to have some of the rocket with the rest of the salad for tomorrow's lunch, and I think the tomatoes might go into a pasta sauce tomorrow evening. For the first time in ages I actually have a reasonably quiet weekend coming up, so I'm hoping I'll be able to do lots of cooking!

Veg Box: 12/6/12

Another lovely summery veg box!

This week's box had spring onions, cucumber, a salad bag, courgettes, broad beans, new potatoes and some very exciting carrots with their green tops still on. It's a shame it still isn't salad weather! We've had horrible drizzle and murk for ages now.

Nevertheless, I decided to make something summery with some of my veg, and eventually settled on baked falafel, which I had with a yogurty cucumbery raita/tzatziki/dip/sauce thing (just some fat free Greek yogurt with grated cucumber, garlic and salt and pepper).

I based my falafel on this recipe from The Intolerant Gourmet, which I used over the Jubilee weekend with great success, but as usual I just had to change it a bit! I wanted to use some of my veg box produce, so along with the chickpeas I added some of the carrots and broad beans, and as I didn't have any herbs I threw some of the carrot tops in as well for some extra greenery. I got 16 good-sized falafel out of my batch of mixture and I can't wait to have the rest for Thursday's post-haircut (my God do I ever need a haircut...) supper!

Baked carrot and broad bean falafel

100g carrots, chopped
50g broad beans (that's the beans themselves, out of their pods)
5 or 6 spring onions, roughly chopped
Handful of parsley/mint/coriander/carrot tops/whatever leafy herbs you have
400g tin chickpeas, drained
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce or mango chutney
Whatever spices you fancy - cumin, coriander, paprika etc etc
4 tbsp chickpea flour (gram flour)
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 200C.
2. Put the carrots, beans and spring onions into a food processor (one of those little ones will do, that's what I have!) and pulse until finely chopped.
3. Add the chickpeas, herbs, garlic, oil, sauce and spices and blitz until smooth (like really chunky houmous).
4. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and add the chickpea flour and seasoning, and mix to form a dough (it will be slightly sticky but you should be able to handle it easily).
5. Line a baking tray with baking paper/greaseproof, then make little 2" patties with the falafel mix and place them on the lined tray.
6. Bake for 30 minutes, turning them over halfway through the cooking time so they brown on both sides.
7. Serve warm or cold - they'd be gorgeous in wraps with a spicy sauce!

Portobello mushroom and wet garlic risotto

'Wet garlic'...it doesn't exactly sound appealing, does it. But it is! Wet garlic is very young garlic, harvested before the bulbs form. I'd never tried it before it turned up in this week's veg box, but like wild garlic leaves it has a fresh, garlicky flavour and it behaves rather like a leek, with the slices breaking up into little rounds when you cook them.

As I had some lovely fat portobello mushrooms as well, I decided risotto was the only way to go. Mushroom risotto is never going to photograph well, but here we go...!

I don't really have a recipe for risotto - I just do the usual thing of frying up some onions (and in this case the mushrooms and garlic) and adding some wine, which I let bubble until reduced, and then I add the rice (80g per person) and stir it around for a minute or so before adding stock bit by bit and letting it all soak into the simmering rice. I don't add any cheese or cream if I'm cooking for myself, as the starch in the rice makes the whole thing lovely and creamy anyway, but as a special treat a handful of grated Cheddar, hard goat's cheese or Parmesan would be lovely scattered over the top! My risotto was topped off with some ribbons of basil and lots of black pepper.

Veg Box: 29/5/12

Definitely not soggy this week! And how lovely and summery does all of this look?

I've got butternut squash, beetroot, beans, mushrooms, vine tomatoes, onions, potatoes and some bonus free wet garlic (the leeky-looking things on the top there). One thing I do love about Riverford is that if you get one of the smaller boxes, they don't give you whacking great squash or tons of beetroot or whatever - it's all in nice manageable amounts.

Having said that, a weekend away and a few nights out meant that I still had squash, potatoes and beetroot left over from my last box! So I decided to have a bit of a clearout, and I roasted up a big tray of veg - the beetroot, potatoes and squash, plus some onion and some cherry tomatoes and carrots that were hanging around in the fridge. I like to give my veg a quick steam in the microwave before I roast them, because that way they take less time in the oven (definitely a bonus in today's warm and humid weather) and they all cook evenly with fluffy insides and crispy edges. Yum yum! So supper was a big bowl of veg, topped with some basil and a little bit of super-spicy Reggae Reggae barbecue sauce...

I also couldn't resist showing you this photo from earlier - I popped into central London for a meeting and Regent Street is all decked out in Union Flags ready for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee! I have to admit I'm getting sucked into the whole Jubilee celebration thing and am planning to go to a few events over the weekend - and of course, I can't wait for a whole four days off!

Unexpected fish!

That's not a phrase you hear often, is it!

An email landed in my inbox today from a colleague who only works a couple of days a week, saying that she'd bought some bream from the (excellent) fishmonger down the road from the office, but had forgotten to take them home with her, and would anyone like them? So three of us nabbed a fish each, and this is what I did with mine...

The easiest thing to do would have been to bake the fish in the oven, but as the great British weather has decided that this week it's summertime I thought it was too hot to turn the oven on (I know, last week I was moaning about the rain making my veg box soggy and this week it's too hot...!) so I cooked my bream in a pan with just a tiny bit of oil. I had some beetroot and some very elderly watercress in the fridge from the aforementioned veg box, so I shaved off slices of the beetroot with a peeler and left them for a few minutes to marinade in a little bit of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, and then I made a sort of watercress pesto with toasted sunflower seeds, garlic and a bit of olive oil. It all went very nicely together, I thought!

Soggy veg - Veg Box Day 15/5/12

Thanks to the marvellous spring weather we've been having, my veg box was a little bit wet by the time I got home! No harm done, though, and inside was a punnet of cherry tomatoes, four onions, a butternut squash, a bag of potatoes, watercress, summer greens and four massive beetroot!

I was heading to the pub on Tuesday night for a meeting about the Ealing Eagles 10K run, which (in case anyone fancies signing up) is happening on Sunday September 9th in Gunnersbury Park, so I didn't have time to make anything spectacular with my veg, but I did put together a quick and delicious pasta sauce using one of the onions, a small tin of chopped tomatoes, some of the cherry tomatoes, a few black olives, a small tin of tuna and a big handful of the purple sprouting broccoli that I nicked from my parents' garden at the weekend. It was gorgeous!

Veg Box Day: 24/4/12

This fortnight I've got spring onions, asparagus (yay!), carrots, potatoes, a red pepper, more purple sprouting broccoli (yay again!) and courgettes - I was meant to have portobello mushrooms but the quality wasn't up to scratch this week so they swapped them for the courgettes. Fine with me!

I seriously need to start finding things to do with potatoes, mind you. I don't really eat potatoes very often but I'm going to have to seeing as I now get a bag every fortnight! I've got a bag and a half to use now! To that end, I decided to make a warm Nicoise-inspired salad for tonight's supper, with tuna, spring onions, asparagus, potatoes, black olives and a hard-boiled egg. With a drizzle of balsamic vinegar it was absolutely delicious, and definitely a great way to use a couple of those spuds!

Storm clouds gather over London...

...and I make a frittata.

Seriously, the weather is getting beyond a joke. We might have had the driest two winters on record, and we might be in the middle of a drought with hosepipe bans and all the rest of it, but you wouldn't have thought it judging by this week's weather! I couldn't believe the sky on my way home this evening...

The photo doesn't even do it justice...the bit of sky below the clouds was green. Just after I got to the station, there was a massive hail-and-thunder storm!

There's only one thing to do on a day like this, and that's to get home as quickly as possible, pour yourself a glass of wine, and make something nice to eat. I've been rather busy this week so I've still got quite a lot of veg box veg in the fridge that needs using before Tuesday, so I decided to make a frittata, which I baked in the oven. I totally made the recipe up, but it went something like this...

Baked vegetable frittata

Serves 2

1 small onion, sliced
1 small potato, cut into dice
Six or so cherry tomatoes, halved
1 small chunk of frozen leaf spinach (you know, if you buy the bags it comes in those chunks...), thawed and patted dry
3 eggs
150ml almond milk (or regular milk)
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 200C and spray a small baking dish with oil.
2. Microwave the potato chunks with a little water for about a minute and a half, until softening. Add to the baking dish along with the onion, and roast in the oven for about 15 minutes until just starting to brown.
3. Add the cherry tomatoes to the dish and roast for another 10 minutes.
4. Beat the eggs and milk together in a bowl, then stir in the spinach and season.
5. Once the tomatoes have started to bubble, pour the egg mixture into the baking dish, return to the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes until just firm in the centre.
6. Allow to cool for 5 minutes before serving with salad (and I added a blob of mango chutney!)

Carrots, chickpeas and solving a kitchen problem...

My kitchen is tiny. Not quite as tiny as Rachel Khoo's teeny weeny Paris kitchen (if she didn't fold her bed away in the morning she'd practically be cooking in bed) but it's small. There's just about enough room for one person to cook and one person to stand by the fridge drinking a glass of wine and passing the odd ingredient over from the fridge. And, as I've been here three and a half years and have accumulated various bits and pieces in that time, every now and then I encounter a serious storage problem. I've recently acquired a couple of new mugs, and there was literally nowhere for them to go, and the top of the microwave was absolutely covered in stuff too - something had to be done!

Then I happened to see a post on Laura's blog, Keeping Healthy Getting Stylish, where she mentioned using a cheap wooden shoe rack as kitchen storage. I did some online research and some measuring, and discovered I'd be able to fit a shoe rack on top of the (excellent) custom-made set of shelves my dad designed for me when I moved in. Brilliant!

It looks fab and it frees up tons of space elsewhere. In an ideal world I'd do a DIY job on the shoe rack and the shelves and paint them a lovely sage green or a nice warm cream to match the kitchen tiles, but that's for another weekend!

This evening's supper was just as successful - yet more veg box produce used, and yet another recipe from River Cottage Veg Every Day tried and tested! This time it was Hugh's spicy carrot and chickpea pitta pockets - lovely buttery carrots with lots of cumin and orange, served in Hugh's case with pittas and in my case with homemade wholemeal flatbreads.

I used this recipe for the breads, halving it and using wholemeal plain flour, and I didn't really change much about the carrot recipe except for halving it, which made a good main course-sized portion (it'd easily serve two as part of a mezze spread or as lunch) and using less butter and oil than directed (probably a quarter of the original recipe). I was a bit worried about the carrots burning, so I put a lid on the pan and sort of braised the carrots, shaking the pan every now and then, until they were tender.

It was seriously lovely, and definitely one I'll make again - it was so easy. I'm not even a fan of oranges, but I went with it and the zest and juice went perfectly with the carrots and cumin. Yum yum!

Instagram, swiss chard and potato curry, and eating better...

The extremely trendy and popular Instagram app has just become available for Android, and of course, as someone who loves taking photos with their phone, I've downloaded it! I've been having lots of fun trying to work out how to use the thing, and it's already inspired me to do something new. My eating habits have been absolutely awful just recently - two weeks of eating whatever I wanted because I was building up to a half marathon/I'd just done a half marathon followed by an Easter weekend full of (lovely) cheese, wine, cake and puddings means I really feel like I need to get back on track before my jeans get any tighter!

So I've set up a tumblr blog called What Allie Ate Today, where I'll be using Instagram to share photos of everything I eat. The theory is that if I actually have to take a photo of my food and share it with the internet, I might be less likely to eat badly!

And then this evening I used the swiss chard from my veg box to make Hugh F-W's chard and potato curry, from my River Cottage Veg Every Day book. The original used new potatoes, but I've still got a couple of big baking potatoes from my last veg box (and a new bag of smaller Desiree ones from this week's) so I used one of those, and the whole head of chard, which turned out to be about 200g. Instead of mixing the tomato purée with yogurt and stirring it in, I mixed it with a tiny bit of almond milk, and I ended up with a gorgeously spicy and soupy curry.

I had it with some mango chutney and didn't bother with rice or naan as it already had enough carbohydrate for me - OK, so I ended up eating two big bowls of the stuff, but I only actually ate one potato, a load of greens and some spices!

The 2012 PSB Mountain...

That's purple sprouting broccoli, for those not in the know!

It's Veg Box Week again, but I didn't take a photo of Tuesday's box because it was rather soggy after a massive rain/hailstorm and I just wanted to get all the veg dried and into the fridge as quickly as possible! Anyway, this week my box contained onions, carrots, swiss chard, little gem lettuce, cherry vine tomatoes, potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli. I love PSB...and it's a good job, too, because my mum sent me home after Easter with a bag of the stuff from her garden!

Last night I went for a run, as usual on a Wednesday, and I'd originally planned to have beans on toast when I got home, but then I remembered about the ton of PSB in the fridge and thought I'd better use some of that instead. I wanted something quick, as I don't get home from running until after 8.30pm, and gradually a sort of eggs florentine idea started to form. Before my run, I made a batch of Angela's amazing sauce, and then when I got home I toasted some rye bread, steamed some PSB in the microwave, reheated the sauce and fried an egg. In an ideal world I'd have poached the egg, but I couldn't be bothered!

Toast, PSB, egg, sauce, black pepper. It was really nice! And I still have half the batch of sauce in the fridge - I think I'm going to have it stirred through some pasta with yet more PSB.

Unfortunately I then undid all my healthy running and vegetable-eating work by slaughtering a Lindt Easter bunny...

...but these things happen!

Pasta, pesto and potatoes...

...and other things beginning with P, I shouldn't wonder!

As you may remember, I got a bag of rocket in this week's veg box, and obviously it needs using up fairly quickly. I fancied the idea of making a sort of pesto with it, and then I remembered this recipe for pasta and pesto with green beans, from Hugh F-W's amazing River Cottage Veg Every Day. I've had the book for a while now and it's gorgeous, but this is the first thing I've actually made - well, the first thing I've made my own totally bastardised version of, anyway. My sister pointed out at the weekend that I never actually make a recipe as it's meant to be, I always mess around with it!

Anyway, I didn't have any green beans, so I didn't use those, and I made my 'pesto' by whizzing up a big handful of the aforementioned rocket, some toasted sunflower seeds, a big clove of garlic, a big squeeze of lemon juice, some salt and pepper and a little bit of olive oil (and I mean a little bit, not like when Jamie Oliver says '...and a little bit of olive oil' and then slugs in half a bottle). Then I cut a couple of small potatoes into cubes and boiled them for about five minutes before adding some spelt spaghetti and letting it all cook until the potatoes were soft and the pasta was done. And then I just stirred the pesto into the hot pasta. It was really nice, and perfect for my pre-half-marathon diet, as it involved two forms of carbohydrate!

Look! It's light enough in the evenings to take photos of my dinner without crappy lamplight!