I however have brought trouble with my fussy ban on animal food stuffs.  There is, however a good simple solution, which so far has been universally approved of by all it has been served to - soup. Quick and easy to prepare, not too filling and almost impossible to mess up.  You can even make it the day before, so save yourself that little bit of stress on the big day if you’re the kind of person who gets their knickers in a twist at just the thought of preparing what is really just a fancy Sunday dinner.

Mind you, I suppose we do seem to expect an insane amount of side dishes. Any other day it’s meat  and two veg. But come 25th December nothing less than an enormous Turkey (must be big enough to feed at least 25 people)  and 17 different vegetables (to include at least 4 different types of potato and things you wouldn’t even consider eating any other day of the year) will do. Crazy really. At least it means a good few days supply of interesting sandwiches and bubble and squeak for breakfast, which is never a bad thing.

So here’s a couple of lovely soup recipes for you, both in my opinion good enough to be served up on Christmas Day. The first just a fairly simple broccoli soup. I’d only ever had broccoli and stilton soup before and was worried this would be a little bland without the blue cheese, but it was anything but. Really creamy, despite not having any cream in and a good rich flavour. I’m definitely going to be making it again. But perhaps on the big day I might treat myself and put that blue cheese in, just to make it that bit more special.

The second recipe is an old favorite from the Covent Garden “Soup and Beyond” book. I made this a few times last year and couldn’t wait for the first frost this year meaning that the sweetest, most Chistmas-wintery of all root vegetables - the parsnip - would be at it’s best. What a treat this soup is! Parsnip, leek and lemon, Yum! It’s such a simple recipe, meaning you really taste each of the individual elements, but at the same time they combine to make something unlike any other soup you’ll taste. Sweet and indulgent it’s just  one step on the savoury side away from being a desert. Now that’s an idea. You have carrot cake, why not parsnip and lemon cake? Hmm… We just made this soup today for Ann’s lesson and I’m sure she’d agree it really is a brilliant soup.

Simple Broccoli Soup

• 25g butter
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 head of broccoli, roughly chopped, including stalk
• 2 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into smallish cubes
• 1 1/2 pints of vegetable stock, or thereabouts
• A little plain flour
• (A bit of cream or blue cheese for more festive soup)

1. In a large pan melt the butter then add the onion and gently cook for around 15 minutes or so until the onions are soft and just beginning to brown.
2. Add the potatoes, stir round then cover and leave to sweat for 5 minutes.
3. Add just less than a tbsp of plain flour, stir round and leave to cook for 1 minute.
4. Add the broccoli and enough stock to just less than cover the veg, bring to the boil, then turn to simmer for about 15 minutes or until the veg are tender.
5. Puree the soup.
6. You could add some crumbled up blue cheese at this point and heat through until it melts, or just serve as it is, maybe with a fancy swirl of cream if you like.

Santa gets ready to leap into the yummy soup

Parsnip, Leek and Lemon Soup

• 25g butter
• 450g parsnips, peeling and sliced
• 3 leeks, washed, trimmed and sliced
• 1 3/4 pints of vegetable stock
• grated rind and juice of half a lemon
• 1 bay leaf
• 150ml single cream

1. Melt the butter in a large pan, then add the parsnips and leeks. Cover and cook gently for 5 minutes.
2. Add the stock, grated lemon rind and bayleaf.
3. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for around 15 minutes or until the veg are tender.
4. Cool a little, remove the bay leaf, add the lemon juice then puree.
5. Add the cream, then reheat gently if necessary.

If anyone has any other ideas for good Christmassy soups I’d love to hear about them!

More soup recipes

More Christmas recipes

Despite it’s fairly long list of ingredients, it’s really easy to make, and incredibly tasty. I saw the book in the shops yesterday and I have to say it looks pretty tasty too. I wanted to hug it (erm is that it bit strange?). It’s one of those big chunky books with unfinished paper, loads of beautiful retro illustrations and quirky pages with bits and pieces that you can take out. None of this really has anything to do with food and it being a cookbook I suppose you’d probably prefer to know whether or not the recipes are any good before you’d decide to go buy it. All I can say is that if this recipe is anything to go by then it definitely will be. I was too busy stroking the pages and drooling over the quirky design to actually read any of the other recipes it contained. Oops.

Leon Gobi (serves 6)

• 1 medium onion, halved and thickly sliced
• 1 carrot, thickly sliced
• 2 tbsp sunflower or peanut oil
• 1 red chilli
• 2 thumb-sized pieces of root ginger, washed but not peeled
• 5 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 large tsp Madras curry powder
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp black onion seeds
• 1 medium sweet potato, washed and cut into 2.5cm dice
• 4 heaped tbsp ground almonds
• A good handful of sultanas
• ½ a small cauliflower, broken into florets
• 1 x 400ml tin of coconut milk
• 150g frozen peas
• Juice of ½ a lemon
• A really big handful of coriander, roughly chopped
• Salt
• 2 heaped tbsp desiccated coconut, to serve

1. In a large saucepan, cook the onion and carrot over a medium to low heat in the oil for 15-20 minutes with the lid on, stirring occasionally. Season with salt.
2. Blitz the chilli, ginger and garlic to a paste in a food processor. Stir the paste into the onions once they have begun to soften, along with the spices (including the onion seeds). After another five minutes, season with salt, add the sweet potato chunks and the almonds and mix well so that everything is well coated.
3. Turn the heat up a bit and stir in 500ml of water and the sultanas. Bring to a simmer and leave it to bubble gently for 10-15 minutes with the lid off, stirring occasionally.
4. Add the cauliflower florets and the coconut milk and simmer for a further 10-15 minutes, covered. Check that the sweet potato and cauliflower are both cooked, turn the heat off and stir in the peas.
5. When you are ready to serve add a little salt, the lemon juice and the chopped coriander, stir and leave for a minute. Serve with rice, or naan (or both!) with a sprinkling of dried coconut on top.

Click here for more curry recipes

Click here for naan bread recipe

Good to see my old local veg shop Unicorn getting an award. They were joint winners of Best Local Retail Outlet. As mentioned in the programme they have just bought a 21 acres site to enable them to grow their own veg, adding to the already brilliant range of local organic veg they have on offer. I’ve said it before, but I really miss having them around. You guys in Manchester don’t realise how lucky you are, if you’re not already a commited Unicorn fan I advise you to get down there ASAP. It really is a great shop. You can read more about their ethics and current projects on their website.

Bury Market won the award for Best Food Market. I’d not heard of this market until listening to this programme, but now I’m desperate to go! Have any of you been? It sounds great, over 300 stalls, lots of speciality food, delicatessens, grocers, cheese, meat, fish (if you’re into that kind of thing), home made cakes and confectionery. Can’t wait to go! Any tips about which are the good stalls would be great.

Anyway that’s enough from me, listen to the programme here, you might find something you didn’t know about happening near you!

Apologies first for the terrible title. But as I am currently back at my parents living on Merseyside temporarily. I’ve had to get used to seeing references to the Beatles everywhere… but you may have realised that I cunningly concealed the subject of today’s bread making post in that title? Have you guessed what it is yet?

Yup, the humble naan bread. Like fish comes with chips (er, not if you’re a vegetarian…), ok then, like sosmix bangers and mash, for me the naan is as much of a part of a curry as the actual curry dish itself. When I was in India a few years ago, myself and my travelling companion John would have a naan bread with every meal. The only difference was that he ate “butter naans” with each meal whereas I would have a plain one. There was a bit of an increase in his weight during those 3 weeks in India. (For those who don’t know I was John’s best man at his wedding last week so I feel I am still in speech mode… and crucifying his personality… I’ll stop now!)..

Anyway naan bread. I’d never really thought too much about what they consisted of, or how they were made. But that all changed last week when I made some of these fabulous breads for the first time. It’s actually quite simple but you’ve got to plan ahead which isn’t easy for everyone.

The basic recipe is as follows:

• 500g plain flour
• 2tsp dried yeast
• 1tsp salt
• 1tsp sugar
• 3 tbsp natural yoghurt
• 30g melted butter (or ghee but I didn’t have any of that)
• 250ml of milk

You will see that it is a bread that rises but uses milk instead of water. You need to dissolve the yeast into the milk (which is at room temperature or thereabouts). With flour and salt mixed in a mixing bowl, add the yeast/milk mix, sugar, yoghurt, butter and the remainder of the milk.

You then need to knead this. If you’re not sure how to do this it’s worth having a look on youtube for videos. It will seem very sticky at first but resist adding more flour and keep kneading. After about 10 minutes you should have a soft dough.

You should then place the dough into a bowl and cover with the lid or clingfilm and allow to rise for 3-4 hours (so unless you are a student or idler it’s something to do at the weekend!)

After this knock it back (just knock the air out of it) and leave for a few minutes.

You should then divide into 4 pieces and shape it into a teardrop shape on a lightly greased baking tray. I used a rolling pin. I reckon keep it about 3/4cm-1cm thin as it will rise during the proving stage. Put the whole tray into a plastic bag and leave for another 45mins-1hour.

When you cook them you will need a griddle pan (as most people don’t have a tandoor). This pan needs to be really hot. Get the grill hot too. Griddle the bread for a few minutes (not sure about time you’ll be able to check and see if cooked). Then transfer to the grill (I put a bit of butter on it before this step and it worked quite well). Don’t put it right next to the heat or it will burn too quick. You want it to cook in a few minutes.

Serve it with your curry, rice and some yoghurt and chutney. Mmm I’m hungry now.

So that’s it! Having written this post a while after the event it seems a bit like hard work. But believe me the taste beats anything you will buy in the supermarkets even if it possibly won’t match proper indian restaurants! (well not until you’ve done it a few times)…

What I started with was an idea for quite a simple spread sheet. I wanted to create a table which would work out how much a certain recipe would cost by calculating how much a specific amount of each ingredient would cost according to the amount used and price per kg and then add them all up to give the price of the recipe.

So off I went to the shops with pen and paper in hand, happy that my life style now allows me to indulge in these odd ideas as and when then enter my head rather than just thinking “Hey wouldn’t this be great!” only to forget a few minutes later as I get distracted by some important task… such as picking the dirt off the bottom of my mouse… erm.

I tend to buy my shopping from a variety of different places but they are all quite spread out so I decided that the easiest thing to do might be to just head to the local supermarket and write down the prices from there. After all, all I was really looking for at that time was a vague idea of how much things were, so I could give a guide to recipe costs. But it was here that things began to get complicated. I was overwhelmed with a range of different options, each with wildly differing price tags.

I realised things wouldn’t be quite as simple as I imagined. The prices I chose could have a huge difference to the resulting cost of the meals that the table would work out. Should I go for the things I would buy or the things I thought other people would buy? Or maybe make an average price of the options available? I also noticed that the prices for somethings were miles away from what I would normally pay elsewhere. This would not be good. I wanted the spreadsheet I produced to be useful to people. It should be able to be used as a aid to meal planning, helping you plan meals according to a certain budget, and maybe also compare the cost of making things yourself as compared to those pesky little pots of slop labeled ready meals which can often seem like the cheap option. If it was to be used in this way it would need to reflect the users shopping habits and if I picked items at random I might as well just completely make them up for all the use they’d be.

What I’ve ended up producing, while obviously still limited, should hopefully be a much better guide. I decided to survey 4 different things which are independent shops and supermarket for both organic and non-organic produce. I’ve also included in the sheet a blank column for your own shop with all the formula in place behind the scenes so all you’d need to do is insert the price you would pay in your own shop. The results are fascinating. There are links below to the spread sheet, but first here’s a few observations I made as my mission developed.

The first thing I realised as I walked through the doors of the supermarket at the end of our road was the enormity of the task I had set myself. “What am I doing?!” I thought, ” This shop must sell over 10,000 different items! I’ll need more paper!  My pen will run out! Arrrgh!” But as I wandered around I calmed down as my first observation sunk in. Most of the contents of the shop were complete crap! Aisles and aisles full of rubbish, most of which I wouldn’t feed to my dog (including the dog food).

I couldn’t believe it. I have obviously been to a supermarket before, several times, but never really paying as much attention as I did on this trip. Even if I did do all my shopping at this supermarket I would say that out of the 30 or more aisles that are there I would only ever need to use about four.

So what is the rest of the shop full of? Processed food mostly. Ready meals, hundreds of them. Jars of sauce: pasta sauce, curry sauce, cheese sauce and ready made gravy(!) Prepared vegetables, chopped up pieces of cauliflower, broccoli and ready made mashed potato (!!!).  Crisps, biscuits and a thousand other snacks. Cans of everything: soup, chili, curry, macaroni. Frozen pizzas, frozen chips, frozen pies and hundreds of bags of mashed up reformed chicken. What would happen if Jamie got his way everyone started cooking their own food? They’d be out of business in a week. And he certainly wouldn’t be getting anymore celebrity endorsement work from them. As I looked around my first blinding truth was uncovered. The last thing this place wants you to do is cook. Is this, I wondered, where the health problems of our county’s diet stem from? The place most us buy our food from does not want us to eat healthily.

If this seems a little cynical take a closer look at what they sell. The herbs and spices for a start are ridiculously overpriced. I’ve written before about the way the leading brand of herb and spices package their wares in jars which are all but impossible to get the spices out of and crazily expensive. These jars and the supermarkets similarly badly designed jars are really the only options available. There are a limited range of bigger “re-fill” packs, which do offer better value, but still the prices are a strangely inflated for what is essentially a very cheap basic product. Check out the price of the chives as compared to buying elsewhere! It is NOT a tying error. If you wanted to buy 100g of dried chives from the supermarket it would cost you £139, from Unicorn, an independent organic shop, it would be £3. Apart from the price, just the fact that they are only really sold in these small containers points to the fact that they are not expecting (wanting?) people to want to use the contents very often.

The amount of aisle space devoted to wholefoods is another more obvious pointer. The list of ingredients on the spreadsheet I have produced, while obviously tailored to my own diet, only contains around 150 items. I can’t believe that even if you got ten people who prepare all their own food and have a massively varied diets that you would need to even triple this amount, yet the number of products on offer is enormous. I wouldn’t like to guess how many are in that particular store, but in the UK in general the amount of different products carried by a single supermarket has risen from 15,000 in 1980 to around 50,000 today.

But choice is a good thing right? In principle yes. However I’m beginning to think that if anyone ever brings up this “choice” argument it should be your first indication that that person is about to say something you need to be suspicious of. The breakfast aisle is one of my favorite/most scary places in the supermarket. It is full of choice. Huge rows of different coloured boxes containing corn, rice and wheat and the like smashed into various shapes and sold at a couple of quid a pop. If you search hard enough somewhere on the bottom shelf tucked away in the corner you might be able to find a bag of porridge oats, the price? 69p/kg. I have plans to go into the prices of cereals in more details in another post but, just to give you a taste of things to come, another much easier to find choice would be a multi-pack of “Oat So Simple”. You know the kind of “just add milk” packs with little pieces of shriveled up fruit, added sugar, salt, stabilisers and other bits and bobs. These come in at £1.99, or… £6.70/kg! No wonder they don’t want you to find the porridge. They can make so much more from this processed food it is not really in their interests to promote the healthier, cheaper option.Would you really chose this if you thought about it? Or might you buy your 69p bag a couple of bananas and few apples and have ten times the amount for the same price and not have to eat all the other rubbish they throw in there?

The supermarkets pricing of  organic goods is a disgrace, on most things it was around twice their non-organic equivalent. I haven’t got a problem with paying more for food if I know for example that that means the farmer is getting a better price, or that it is organic. It’s well known that supermarkets drive down the prices they pay to producers with threats of canceled orders if they can’t stretch to prices that barely cover the prices of production. Unfortunately I’m sure this same practice goes on with their organic suppliers, and even if it doesn’t and the resulting cost price is slightly more than for non-organic veg do they really need to add these crazy mark ups? I just can’t believe it cost them an extra £2 per kilo for broccoli for example. If this price difference really is because their organic veg cost them that much more to buy then how can it be that a small independent organic shop can be selling organic vegetables at a fraction of the price they are here? It just doesn’t seem to add up.

In the particular store I was looking at, which in size I would say was average to large in supermarket scale, the range of vegetables was pretty limited too. They had basic things, potatoes, carrots, onions, but if you wanted anything as fancy as a nice seasonal swede or celeriac and you wanted it to be organic, you were stuck. They don’t even sell beetroot! November, no beetroot. What is going on there? I began to realise how much more in touch with the seasons since I’ve been avoiding these awful places.

Also anything slightly out of “normal” range was expensive in supermarkets. Sure the carrots and potatoes are cheap, they even do special bags of value “Class II” value vegetables (not actually any worse quality, just maybe a bit of a perceived odd size) which really are cheap. But for anything as outrageous as an aubergine expect to pay well over the odds in your supermarket. Things like this often had their prices disguised. Aubergines in the supermarket were 99p each (no organic option available). In the non-organic independent they were £1.96/kg, organic independent £2.09/kg. So which is cheaper? An average sized aubergine weighs around 250g, so the supermarket was charging the equivalent of £3.96/kg! Nearly twice as much as anywhere else.

One of the main things that wound me up about the organic vegetables was that they were all heavily packaged. Everything was either in one of those horrid plastic trays, wrapped in cellophane or bagged. Apart from being a bit of a waste and an unnecessary use of polluting oil based plastics, this means that you can’t pick your own either. What if you just wanted one apple? What if you wanted your potatoes a certain size for a particular thing, or not that one with the big black bit on it that’s hiding at the bottom of your bag? Grrr. Is this really what people who are buying organic for environmental reasons want? It seems to ignore the core ecological ideals and instead plays to some fancy notion of buying organic which would wash only with someone who isn’t really thinking things through, allowing the supermarket to tick a few boxes and make posters with grass on them.

I can only think they must need this packaging for their till systems. They couldn’t possibly ask you whether the veg you’d chosen was organic or non-organic and trust you to tell the truth… as they do in Beanies in Sheffield where they similarly have a range of both organic and non-organic veg, none of which is in packages. Big systems can’t handle this kind of small scale human interaction. Or maybe they think we’ll all run in and mix all the organic and non-organic veg up just for fun.

I think that’s enough of a rant for now. There were definitely a few things I picked up on my research I want to write more about in the future, but I’m at risk of making you all switch off soon if I don’t give you a break, so I’ll stop and leave you with a quick round up of price comparison findings.

In general the trend seems to be like this. Independent shops are cheaper than their supermarket equivalent, so independent non-organic is cheaper than supermarket non-organic. This is most obvious in the organic ranges where supermarkets do very badly, I would even go so far as to say that only people who really didn’t care how much they spent could afford to buy organic at supermarkets. Their limited range of overpriced vegetables are enough to put people off the whole idea.

Supermarkets have somehow managed with their offers and advertising to make people believe that they are cheaper than other options, however it seems that if you really want to save yourself some money you would be better off if you stop shopping in supermarkets. Although they don’t have the resources to shout about it, independents are generally cheaper and you won’t be tempted into buying some self indulgent half famous celebrity’s auto-biography or buy one get one free jars of slop called sauce you could make much more cheaply and nicely yourself like you would at the supermarket.

Many thanks to the people from K+N vegetable shop and A&H (spices, dry products etc) in Birkenhead for helping me to compile the prices for independent non-organic things, and also thanks to Unicorn in Chorlton, Manchester who provided me with most of the prices for the independent organic options.

I hope you find this price comparison interesting, I’d really appreciate any feedback and ideas about how it might be developed in the future. Oh yeah, and you can also use the spreadsheet to work out the cost of meals if you like.

Notes on using the food price calculator (Please read first)

Download an non-editable example meal price calculator here, example shown, lentil soup.

Download the editable xls meal price calculator

Download an editable version to copy and use yourself (you will need a google account to use this)

Last week when I went to do my shopping at K+N in Birkenhead (top veg shop!) I saw they had a couple of crates of English tomatoes for sale at £2.99 each. £2.99!! The box was over 5kg! So that’s less than 60p per kg or about £1 less per kg than normal price. I knew it was good, but I’d never normally get through so many before they went squidgy.  And then a flash of inspiration, I remembered seeing Hugh making tomato sauce for the year from his home grown yearly glut and decided this was my chance to do the same (shame they weren’t home grown though).

This is really good. K+N probably buy from wholesale market in Liverpool, which I assume works a bit like a normal market, only bigger. Often at the end of the day you’ll get people practically giving things away, and they pass this on to their customers. Reminds me of I was walking through Kirkgate Market in Leeds a couple of weeks ago and a guy was shouting “Bag of bananas a pound! As many bananas as you can fit in a carrier bag a pound!” He had a hoard of ladies surrounding him grabbing at bananas and stuffing them into bags! So funny. I love the atmosphere in a market. Everyone shouting, people everywhere, so much going on. Imagine the staff of Tesco stood at the end of the aisle passionately trying to get you to buy their over priced ready meals and toilet fresheners. Nah, never going to happen really is it?

Obviously the bananas were unlikely to be fair trade nor would they or my tomatoes have been organic, but there is something about buying produce directly from a person with their own shop or stall that to some extent counterbalances these concerns. Although the ideal would be to shop by these principles all the time, it is not always practical, or as much fun! I remember being told as a kid “Don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”  more often than I imagine could have been necessary and it has obviously sunk in. I wonder why people kept saying this to me? What was I up to? Must have been up to no good anyway. Maybe I just remember it vividly as it’s really quite a gruesome thing to be saying to a small child. I was probably traumatised. Anyway what I’m trying to say is there is a lot to worry about when choosing what food to buy (or at least I find there is, more and more all the time) and you’d drive yourself (and other people) crazy and be likely to burn out and give up if you tried to stick rigidly to your principles all the time.

Well that went off on a bit of a tangent I wasn’t expecting! Back to what I was saying. So I’d seen Hugh making tomato sauce and decided I’d do the same. The result was fantastic! Such a sweet rich sauce! The 5kg of tomatoes converted into about 2.5 litres of tomato sauce which I now have handily stashed away in the freezer for any recipe calling for a tomato based sauce. Actually it didn’t all make it to the freezer, we had some just as it was on pasta (YUM!) and another portion was used in a sweet potato, marrow and lentil stew which we had with dumplings (more about these another time - so good they deserve their own post!).

The sauce was so simple to make, I hardly needed to add anything to the tomatoes as the roasting process really brought out the flavours. When I make tomato sauce for pasta with chopped tinned tomatoes I’d normally add a bit of sugar and lemon juice, but after the roasting these really didn’t need it, they were delicious as they were. I also decided not to add any herbs as that way I could decide when I used the sauce in later recipes what should go in then. But if you decide to go for herbs from the start you can sprinkle them over while roasting the tomatoes. You could also miss the onions out if you fancied thinking about them later too.

Rich Roast Tomato Sauce

• tomatoes
• garlic
• onions
• black olives, roughly chopped
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• S+P

1. Put out all the tomatoes you have on baking trays and splash over olive oil, balsamic and dot around big chunks or whole pieces of garlic, how many will vary to taste, I used 10 (!) or so with my 5kg of tomatoes. If in doubt put more than you think, the flavour of the garlic mellows with roasting and the whole cloves probably won’t end up in the final sauce anyway so don’t panic. Sprinkle with lots of S+P.
2. Pop the tomatoes in the oven at a medium heat and cook until they are breaking down and starting to brown in places, will be about 40 minutes or so.
3. Meanwhile finely chop some onions (I used 2 normal and 1 red) and sweat the gently with a little oil in a very large covered pan.
4. When the tomatoes are ready press through a seive (if you don’t want any seeds in the sauce) or colander with smallish holes (if you don’t mind a few seeds and want to do this bit quicker) You’ll need to stir round in the colander pressing it against the edges to get all the juice out and eventually will just be left with the skins, and maybe some chunks of garlic which you then discard.
5. Pour the tomato sauce into the pan with the onions, add the olives and leave to cook through for at least ten minutes. Season with S+P.
6. That’s it! Now just eat it as it is, or leave to cool and then bag up to go in the freezer in separate portion sized containers. Hurrah!

Here’s the garlic I put in. Andy thought I’d gone crazy and insisted on taking a photo.

An estimated 6.7 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away each year to rot in landfill. This creates a toxic sludge and gives off greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. As well as looking at how to avoid wasting food by your shopping behaviour and meal planning the harm caused by any unavoidable food waste (eg peelings, cores etc) could be reduced or even eliminated by composting.

If you have a compost bin, or wormery your food scraps are converted into a valuable resource. The food breaks down and the nutrients they contained are put back into the soil as part of a natural cycle renewing the earth. It is a potent natural fertiliser that in large scale non-organic farming is replaced by polluting oil based chemical fertilisers.

Some councils run waste food collection schemes, some with more success than others. The pilot in the area I’m living now was unfortunately abandoned and for the first few weeks we were here we ended up throwing our peelings away as I imagine most other people in the area do. It was driving me crazy! I hated the waste and felt guilty every time I opened the bin.

At some point I found out the man living next door had an allotment and it occurred to me that he would no doubt be a composter and after thinking about it for a few days ( I can be quite shy) I eventually went round, knocked on the door and asked if I could bring our scraps round there. He said yes. Hurrah! And he didn’t think I was mad or try and lock me in his attic or any of the things I was worried about. It was all good. What was I worried about?! I didn’t really think you would lock me in your attic if you read this Peter, you may think I’m a little mad though now. Hmm. Maybe I am.

So that was the wasted food issue sorted. Hurrah! Then a couple of days later I arrived home and found a bag of apples sitting on the doorstep. “Wow!” I thought, “What an amazingly quick conversion! Scraps to compost to apples in 3 days!” We’ve since had other things arrive including a huge marrow! Brilliant!

You may be thinking we seem to be getting the better end of this deal, which is exactly what I thought, so I made and took them round an apple pie to say thanks. It kind of grew enormous and exploded in the oven so it wasn’t the best looking apple pie ever, but I imagine it tasted the same. I think they must have liked it, they brought the plate back with a bag of potatoes! Now I’ll have to make them something else. The cycle continues. A bit like compost really.

This whole thing is brilliant, I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned somewhere. If you don’t currently compost you should. If you don’t have a compost bin you can get one really cheap from your council, more information here. If you don’t grow anything you should compost anyway, it’s a great way of reducing waste. It would take months or even years to fill the bin, unless you have a large family, and there are always lots of people who will happily come round and collect your compost if it does get full. If you don’t have a garden to put a composter in speak to people. There will probably be someone who lives near you that will take your food scraps. I promise they won’t think you’re weird for asking.

So, the moral of the story is talk to your neighbours, they’re probably nice and composting rules!

I’ve included a couple of recipes for the yummy things I’ve made with the vegetables from my super fast compost: Leek and Potato Soup and Stuffed Marrow. The stuffed marrow was incredibly tasty. The stuffing is quite rich, so the subtle fresh taste of the marrow is a great contrast and make it a great dish which stands up on it’s own as a main course. It would also be good as part of a spread if you had guests and were making a few things.

The Leek and Potato Soup was possibly the nicest I’ve ever made. The potatoes were really creamy, not sure what type they were but they were brilliant for this soup. Usually I’d mash the veg up a bit at the end of this soup recipe, but these didn’t need it. Enough had naturally worked their way into the soup to thicken it while still keeping some whole to make it a good chunky winter soup. Mmmm. Thanks again to Peter and Cathy for your generous gifts of veg!

Stuffed Marrow

• 1 Marrow
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 150g mushrooms finely chopped
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 100g black olives, chopped
• 100g cheddar, grated
• 150g brown rice (cooked)

1. Cut the marrow into slices about 1 inch thick and then scoop out the fluffy seedy middle bit so you have a marrow ring. Arrange the marrow rings on baking trays.
2. Heat the oil in a frying pan and gently cook the onions and garlic until soft, then add cumin and coriander powder and cook for a further 2 minutes.
3. Add the mushrooms and parsley and cook for a further 5 minutes then stir in the cooked rice and chopped olives.
4. Pack the mixture into the marrow rings, top with grated cheese and put in the oven at 180c for around half an hour, or until the marrow is tender and the cheese is golden brown.

Leek and Potato Soup

• 1 oz butter
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 250g potatoes peeled and cut into 1.5cm cubes
• 1 large leeks, or 2 smaller ones, sliced
• 1 1/2 pints of stock
• 1 tbsp plain flour
• 1 tbsp fresh parsley chopped

1. Melt the butter in a large pan and gently fry the onion until soft, approx 10-15 minutes.
2. Add the flour, stir round and leave to cook through for a minute.
3. Add the potates and leeks, cover and leave to sweat, stir occasionally to check it is not sticking. If it starts to stick just pour in a small amount of water and stir to unstick anything from the bottom.
4. After around 5 minutes add the stock. It should be just upto the top of the vegetables, you might need more or less depending on the size of leeks, potatoes etc.
5. Bring to the boil then simmer for around 20 minutes or until all the veg are tender. Add most of the parsley and stir.
6. If prefered you can mash the soup a bit at this stage, or even blend it up if you want a smooth soup. I prefer it a bit chunky.
7. Serve garnished with a bit of chopped parsley and maybe a little swirl of cream. Yum.

Blimey I’ve been eating a lot of pumpkin! Since the Hallowe’en party last week which left me with about 10kg of pumpkin to use I’ve made it a bit of a mission to try use the pumpkin in as many different ways as possible and have come up with this list of ten things to do with your Hallowe’en pumpkin.

I’ve tried to make them all quite different, so there should be something to suit everyone so you’ll have no excuse to throw your pumpkin away to rot. If you got a bit giddy like I did and bought the biggest pumpkin you could find you should have enough to make all these things. You’d also probably need to be a little bit insane to want to make them all, well at least all within the space of a week, so you might want to freeze some. You can just peel and chop the pumpkin as normal and then bag the bits and pop them in the freezer. I did this last year and they were fine to chuck into soups and things. No reason they shouldn’t be good for anything else too.

I can’t quite believe how much we managed to make! Especially considering that the pumpkin we’d bought only cost us £4. It must be the most economical vegetable purchase ever. 10 different dishes, portions for two people, plus we had some left overs to freeze from some dishes, what does that work out at? Less than 20p per person per dish (plus a few pence for rice, spices etc).

We did have another pumpkin too, of about a quarter of the size of the huge one. This second one however was not quite as nice, which was a bit of a surprise as I’d been reading the smaller ones are usually tastier, so I was expecting it to be the other way around. We’d bought the first from Church Farm, an organic farm shop and the smaller one from the co-op, it was specially stickered up as a hallowe’en pumpkin. The flesh was much paler and tasted more like water than pumpkin. So that’s my first tip. Even though it’s mainly for carving, buy a good one from a decent shop. Even if the organic one had have been twice the price (which it wasn’t, by weight it was actually cheaper), it’s gonna be so much tastier and you can make so much from one pumpkin it’s still incredibly cheap.

Here’s a quick run down of what we made in order of ‘most tastiest thing’ first to ‘hmm not sure about that one’ at the end. On the final day of my pumpkin frenzy I made about 4 things at once. The quality kind of suffered a bit, they’re still good ideas to be inspired by though. I’m sure the pumpkin gnocchi in particular has more yumminess potential. Will probably work on it some time in the next couple of months and will update you if it turns out better. All of these pumpkin recipes could be made using any other squashes too, I suspect some of them might even be a lot nicer made with perhaps a butternut squash or turban pumpkin. Full recipes at the end. If anyone tries any of these it would be great to hear how it goes. Also any other suggestions of what to do with pumpkins would be great. Enjoy.

1. Pumpkin Bhajis

So in at number one with a unanimous vote was Pumpkin Bhajis. This flash of inspiration came when we decided to do a pumpkin curry on day 3. “Mmm we could have onion bhajis too” I thought, then “Mmmmm! I could substitute some of the onion for pumpkin!” The result was pretty damn tasty. A lot lighter than a normal onion bhaji. The recipe below makes enough for about 20. They were good for at least 2 days after cooking, they’d all gone by then though (oops!), so not sure how much longer they would last, but it’s well worth making them in batches like this or even more. The temperature of the oil is pretty key and if you do them all at once you get into the super bhaji making rhythm.

2. Pumpkin and Coconut Soup

A close second was this soup. It was very kindly described as “One of the nicest soups I’ve ever had”. I have to agree it was pretty good. And, as with all soups, it gets extra points for easiness to make and potential to do in huge bulk quantities which you can then freeze in handy little portion sized tubs. Blimey imagine, if you did a whole pumpkin. You’d get enough for about 50 portions of soup! That would surely be enough pumpkin soup for a while year! Hurrah!

3. Salt and Pepper Pumpkin Seeds

This much overlooked part of the pumpkin easily gets a place at the top of the board. Great scavenging satisfaction… you thought you’d scooped them out to go in the bin… but NO! They’re going in the oven with a little seasoning to make a tasty snack easily on a par with dry roasted peanuts.

4. Pumpkin and Lemon Risotto

If it wasn’t for the three higher ranking competitors, this would surely be the winner! What’s that, am I auditioning to be a dodgy sports commentator?.. The addition of the lemon transformed this risotto into something quite spectacular. It’s a very naughty risotto, half a bottle of wine AND double cream. Tut tut. You could maybe substitute them out, but hey, they are what makes it taste nice, and you’re not going to eat it every night, so go I say for it.

5. Pumpkin Bread

Again only in the number 5 slot as the higher places have been filled up. Made by my Master Baker, Andrew, this was a very tasty loaf. Lovely fresh out of the oven with a good spread of butter, the taste of pumpkin is subtle, but pleasantly noticeable. A great seasonal loaf, what a way to use the yearly glut of pumpkin. Also once you’ve made this bread you might start to wonder what other vegetables you could add to things you’d think you wouldn’t. Like carrot cake and garlic bread, it’s a revelation.

6. Pumpkin Curry (Anything)

Curry Anything is our standard curry recipe. We tend to make this whenever we have a couple of veg that need using up. The recipe and method is always the same, you can just vary the vegetable or bean ingredients. It always works and is a good medium spicyness no nonsense curry.

7. Savory Pumpkin Pie

This started off as a gratin, but I found a spare bit of pastry lying around (doesn’t everyone have that?) so I popped it on the top and the gratin magically turned into a pie. It would be good either way, the top just turns it from a side dish to the main attraction.

8. Roast Pumpkin and Buckwheat Salad

This was fairly medium really. Just a bit of a thrown together at the end effort. The best bit about it really was that the pumpkin was roasted with nuts. This combination would be great just as it is with a roast dinner rather than mixing in with the buckwheat. I think the problem was I’d never cooked buckwheat before and I’m not sure I did it right. I had some as left overs and it was actually a lot tastier the next day than when freshly made, maybe he buckwheat had soaked up some juice which made it tastier?

9. Pumpkin, Tomato and Basil Soup

This was my least favourite of the things I made, just not my kind of soup. Other people might like it, I’m just not really into tomato soup, except bizarrely, the stuff you get in tins (if I can admit that). Also I thought the pumpkin in this had a wierd texture, almost gritty. I’m making this sound lovely aren’t I, bet you can’t wait to try it!

10. Pumpkin Gnocchi with Watercress Suace

Now this really doesn’t deserve to be at the bottom of the list. I’m convinced this has great potential and will be trying it again soon. Maybe it was the choice of sauce. I didn’t want to have it with a tomato sauce as we’d just had that last week, but I’m not sure the one I chose was right for it. The watercress sauce was lovely, but I think because the gnocchi is heavy in itself you need a lighter fresh tasting sauce to compliment it. The next day I had some of the left over gnocchi cold, this time with a bit of tomato sauce we’d made for some pasta and it was much nicer. So I’d probably do that. Also I think it would help to squeeze the water out from the pumpkin once it’s cooked. Mine was quite watery (must have been from the dodgy co-op batch) and so I had to add quite a bit of extra flour, which made it taste like, well flour surprisingly. I’m not giving up on you though Pumpkin Gnocchi. I know you’re a star waiting to shine.

1. Pumpkin Bhajis

• 1 large onion, thinly sliced
• 500g pumpkin, grated
• 200g gram flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tsp chilii powder
• 100ml of water
• sunflower oil (amount depends on size of pan, poss 500ml)

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
2. Gradually stir in enough of the water to bind it all together as a thick batter.
3. Leave to stand for 30 minutes before frying.
4. To cook, heat oil in a large deep pan, you’ll need a couple of inches, so the bhajis will be able to float around in it (you’ll be able to save the left over used oil in a jar for next time you deep fry something)
5. To test if the oil is hot enough drop a small amount of the mix in, it should start to bubble straight away.
6. When the oil is hot enough get a tablespoon of the mix on a metal spoon and scrape off into the oil using another spoon to form it into a rough ball shape.
7. After a couple of minutes turn the bhajis over, it should have turned golden and starting to brown. Then cook the other side until it looks the same.
8. Remove from the pan using a slotted spoon and transfer to a bowl lined with kitchen paper to drain off excess oil.
9. You might want to check at this point you have cooked the bahjis for long enough- just cut one in half and check it is spongy all the way though, with no soggy batter mixture still in the middle. If not cooked you can just return to the oil for a couple more minutes, then you will have a guide for how long you will need to cook the rest. The time will vary accordling to how big you are making them.
10. Can be served straight away, or will last a good few days covered.

2. Pumpkin and Coconut Soup

• 1 oz butter
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 red chili, finely chopped
• 1kg Pumpkin chopped
• 1 tin of coconut milk
• 1 1/4 pints of stock (approx)
• juice of 1 lime
• 1/2 bunch of coriander

1. Fry the onion gently in the butter for 15 minutes until beginning to brown.
2. Add the chili and garlic and fry for another minute before adding the chopped pumpkin.
3. Cover the pan and leave the pumpkin to sweat for around 10 minutes, then add enough stock to just less than cover the pumpkin.
4. Bring to boil, then leave to simmer for 15 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender.
5. Puree, then add the coconut milk, lime juice, chopped coriander. Return to the heat to warm through then serve garnished with a little more chopped coriander.

Toasted Salt and Pepper Pumpkin Seeds

1. Collect all the pumpkin seeds from your carved pumpkin, and seperate from any of the flesh and stringy bits.
2. Wash the seeds, then spread out on a baking tray.
3. Sprinkle lots of salt and pepper over the seeds, then put in a hot oven for around 45 minutes or until toasted and crunchy. YUM!

4. Creamy Pumpkin, Lemon and Sage Risotto

• 1 oz butter
• 1 onion, finely shopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 kg pumpkin, chopped
• 250g risotto rice
• 2 tbsp dried sage
• 1/2 bottle of white wine
• 1 pint stock
• 50ml cream
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• A handful of rocket, torn in half

1. Fry the onion and garlic gently in the butter for around 15 minutes or until beginning to brown.
2. Add the chopped pumpkin, cover and leave the cook for around 10 or 15 minutes, until beginning to soften.
3. Stir in the risotto rice until all coated from butter/pumpkin mix then pour in the wine. Add the sage and stir round.
4. As the wine starts to soak into the rice add the stock a little at a time and stir in to stop the rice sicking.
5. When the rice is cooked (will be approx 30 minutes), stir in the cream, rocket and lemon juice.
6. Leave to cook for 2 more minutes before serving. Also nice served sprinkled with parmesan.

5. Pumpkin Bread

• 300g pumpkin chopped into chunks
• 60ml cooking liquid from the pumpkin
• 2 tsp honey
• 500g white bread flour
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp instant yeast
• milk to glaze
• 2 tbsp pumpkin seeds, to decorate

1. Boil the pumpkin until tender and then drain, keeping back some of the cooking water and then puree the pumpkin and leave to cool.
2. Add honey to 60ml of the cooking liquid and stir to dissolve.
3. Mix flour and salt and yeast in a large mixing bowl. Make a well in the centre and add in the honey liquid, followed by the pumpkin puree.
4. Mix in the flour to form a firm, coarse, sticky dough. If the mixture is too dry, gradually add one or two tablespoons of the pumpkin liquid (or water).
5. Turn the dough out on a lightly floured work surface. Knead until very smooth, silky and elastic, about 15 mins.
6. Place dough in large clean bowl and cover with a tea towel. Leave to rise until double in size, about 1 to 1 1/2hrs. Knock back the dough to release the air, then leave it to rest for 10mins, covered.
7. Shape dough into a round loaf. Place on an oiled baking sheet and cover with a tea towel. Leave until double in size, about 1 hour.
8. Brush the dough with milk and sprinkle with pumpkin seeds.
9. Bake in pre-heated oven at 220C and bake for 40mins until golden-coloured and hollow-sounding when tapped underneath.

6.Pumpkin Curry (Anything)

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 inch of ginger, finely diced
• 1 dried red chilli
• “The Spices” :  1 tbsp ground cumin, 1 tbsp ground coriander, 1 tsp chilli powder, 1/2 tsp tumeric
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
• Anything Cooked (for this we used about 500g  pumpkin and a tin of butterbeans)
• Yoghurt
• Fresh coriander to garnish

1. Heat the oil in a large pan, add the cumin and mustard seeds, fry until they begin to pop
2. Add the onion and cook gently for about 10 minutes or until soft.
3. Add the garlic, ginger and dried chilli, cook for a further 5 minutes.
4. Add “The Spices” and cook for another minute or so.
5. Add the tomatoes, stir and leave to simmer until thickened, approx 10 minutes.
6. Add “Anything Cooked”, stir round and leave to simmer for a few minutes before serving. You can add a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt at this stage if you like.
7. Serve with rice and garnish with chopped fresh coriander.

7. Savoury Pumpkin Pie

• Pumkpin
• Garlic
• Butter
• Parsley
• Milk
• Shortcrust pastry
• S+P

Sorry for the lack of quantities, this was more of just an idea than a recipe.

1. Get however much pumpkin will take to fill your chosen oven proof dish and slice into thin slices as you would for a potato gratin.
2. Arrange around the dish, do a layer of sliced pumpkin, dot with butter, sprinkle on parsley, finely chopped garlic, salt and lots of pepper.
3. Repeat the layers to the top of the dish, then pour in some milk, enough to be about 1cm up the dish and then put into a medium heat oven for around 20 minutes.
4. After 20 minutes cover the pumpkin with shortcrust pastry and then return to the oven until brown, about 30 minutes.

8. Roast Pumpkin with Buckwheat Salad

• 500g pumpkin, peeled and chopped into smallish cubes
• 10 almonds, sliced
• Olive oil
• tabasco sauce
• 1 red pepper, deseeded and cubed
• cooked buckwheat
• crumbly white cheese, eg feta, wensleydale, goats cut into small cubes
• S+P

1. Put the pumpkin in a roasting dish with the sliced almonds, drizzle over some olive oil and a good splash of tabasco. Roast for around 20 minutes then add the peppers and roast for a further 10 minutes, or until the pumpkin and peppers begin to brown.
2. Put the cooked buckwheat into a dish and stir in the roast veg, cubes of cheese, and a little more oil if required.
3. Season with a bit of S+P.

9. Pumpkin, Tomato and Basil Soup

• 750g pumpkin, peeled and cubed
• 1 oz butter
• 150ml passata
• 1 large onion finely chopped
• 3/4 pint of stock
• lots of fresh basil
• cream or yoghurt to serve

1. Melt the butter in a large pan, then add the onions and fry gently until softened and beginning to brown.
2. Add the pumpkin, cover and leave to sweat for a few minutes.
3. Add the stock, put in just enough to go to just below the top of the pumpkin in the pan. Cover and lave to cook for around 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the pumpkin is tender.
4. Puree the pumpkin and stock mix then add the passata, a good couple of tablespoons of chopped basil.
5. Leave to heat through for around ten minutes before serving with a little cream or yoghurt and garnish with a freshly picked basil leaf.

10. Pumpkin and Watercress Gnocchi with Watercress Sauce

For the gnocchi:

• 750g pumpkin, cooked, drained and excess water squeezed out.
• 150g plain flour
• 50g grated parmesan
• 50g chopped watercress
• 2 tbsp chopped  fresh basil
• S+P

1. In a large bowl mix together all the gnocchi ingredients. Add more flour if necessary. The mixture should be dry enough to handle, but try not to add too much flour. Knead briefly to bring it all together.
2. Turn out the dough onto a well floured surface, divide into four and roll each piece with your hands into a long sausage shape about 2 cm thick, then chop this into 2-3 cm pieces, which you then roll into a ball shape in your hand to make dumplings. Press down lightly on each one with a fork to make a pattern.
3. Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil. Drop the dumplings into the water in batches. They will float to the surface when they are cooked.

For the watercress sauce:

• 50ml double cream
• 1 small onion, very finely chopped
• 1 oz butter
• 100g watercress, chopped
• 100ml milk
• S+P
• a squeeze of lemon

1. Saute the onions until soft, then add the watercress and cook for another 2 minutes before adding the cream.
2. Add the milk and leave to boil until it reaches your prefered thickness.
3. Season with S+P and add a squeeze of lemon juice.

My new student is flying! Last week we made this amazing roast vegetable lasagne. I’d never made a roast vegetable lasagne so I was a little nervous about how it would turn out, but all went to plan and it was very tasty indeed. I’m a little worried I could be out of a job soon though, apart from putting together the recipe and a bit of advice on making sure the cheese sauce was smooth, she did the whole thing. Gonna have to do something really tricky next time or I’ll be out!

It could probably do with a bit more cheese, there wasn’t quite enough saved for over the top, I like it  when you get a nice crispy cheesy topping. It still got 8 out of 10 Andy points, so a potential 9 I recon with this adjustment.

Roast Vegetable Lasagne

• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• Olive oil
• 1 red onion, cut into chunks and separated
• 1 aubergine, cut in half and sliced
• 3 courgettes, sliced
• 1 red and 1 yellow pepper, deseeded and sliced
• 15 mushrooms, sliced
• 2 x 400g tinned tomatoes, chopped
• 2tsp paprika
• 3 tbsp oregano
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8 lasagne sheets
• 8oz cheddar cheese, grated
• 2 oz butter
• 2 oz plain flour
• 1 pt milk
• nutmeg

1. Pre-heat oven to 190°C, Gas Mark 6. Put onions and vegetables in roasting dish, splash with olive oil, S+P bake for 20 minutes, until beginning to brown on edges. May need to do in two separate dishes as quite a lot of veg.
2. Put cooked veg in a big pan, add the tomatoes, paprika, oregano, garlic, S+P and bring to the boil. Turn to simmer and leave for 10 minutes or so while you are making the cheese sauce.
3. For the cheese sauce. Melt the butter, then stir in the flour and cook for 1 min.
4. Gradually stir in the milk, just a little at first to break the flour mix.
5. As thickens add ¾ of the cheese, and stir through until all the cheese melts. Do not allow to boil.
6. Place alternate layers of vegetables, cheese sauce and pasta sheets in an oven proof dish, finishing with a layer of pasta then cheese sauce. Grate over some nutmeg and a sprinkle of black pepper. Top with cheese and bake for 45 minutes, until golden brown.

Since leaving university Andy and his friends have met up once or twice a year in a gathering that has come to be known as “Harcourt” (named after the house/street they shared). Each year they take it in turns to organise the weekend, and this year it was Andy’s turn, which meant I had the task of feeding this gruesome looking crew.

Originally a strictly lads only affair the arrival of various small people has led to the invite being extended to wives, girlfriends and children. I’m pretty happy about this as although I’ve only known them for about 2 years rather than the 10 or more years they’ve known each other, it’s a brilliant get together, always loads of fun, really nice to see how much of an effort they’ve made to stay in touch for all this time. Harcourt has become a definite highlight of the year for me.

As we’ve not been working over the summer we’ve had a lot of time on our hands to organise things and after a brainstorming session at the pub we got a little over excited (drunk) and decided it should be a Hallowe’en themed fancy dress weekend, hired a clown and set about planning various surprises and treats for everyone. It was so much fun doing it all! Everyone seemed to have a great time and despite me doing my usual trick of everyone arriving on the Friday and drinking far too much wine and waking up with a horrific hangover I managed not to make too much of a mess of the food, hopefully everyone enjoyed it.

We found a great place for the weekend in Belper, Derbyshire, the “Old Baptist Chapel”. It was a converted chapel and though we didn’t realise it at the time of booking, in good theme for the weekend, it came complete with a garden full of graves! How spooky. The place was lovely though, absolutely huge, with lots of space for the kids to run around, a great lounge with about 8 sofas in it and a pretty nice kitchen on a kind of mezzanine level which had a window overlooking the lounge. There’s a sauna too! Didn’t get used by our guests over the already hectic weekend, possibly not the best thing for kids. However you get the place for 4 days for the same price, so with no jobs to rush back for on Monday, on Sunday Andy and I found ourselves alone in the house with a couple of left over bottles of wine, so we made up for the lack of sauna action over the weekend. It was very nice indeed. Already thinking about going back!

Here’s a quick run down of the weekend’s activities and menu:

Friday - Welcome Party
Champagne Reception and a Selection of Canapés
(ok, so it was Cava and snacks including homemade hummous and crudites, brocolli and stilton quiche, red pepper and goat cheese mini quiche and mozzarella, tomato and basil tarts)

Saturday - The BIG Hallowe’en Day

Boogely BIG Breakfast from 10am
A full breakfast of bacon, pork sausages, goat sausages, scrambled eggs, scrambled duck eggs, beans, mushrooms, black pudding, toast, tea and coffee.

Lunch - Help yourself buffet of sandwiches and homemade apple pie (recipe below) and ice cream

A spooky stroll around Belper Woooooo

3.30pmish back to the house of horrors for the

Hallowe’en Harcourt Fancy Dress Party

Giggles the clown!
Pumpkin carving competition!
Fancy dress! Prizes for the best dressed!
Fun and Games!

Dinner from 6.30pm
Fajitas, Wedges, Sour Cream, Grated Cheese, Salsa and Guacomale (recipes below)

It was a little tricky cooking for 17 people, but I had a team of choppers and washer-uppers and it all went ok apart from a small problem with the oven which seemed to have no heat distribution and either didn’t cook at all or burnt things to a crisp within seconds. Hmm, very handy.

Another strange thing was cooking meat for the first time in two years! Much as we would have liked to make entirely veggie menu there were a couple of committed carnivores there who no doubt would have withered away if we hadn’t have given them their meat injection for the weekend. We had a bit of a trauma about where to buy it from. Obviously not practiced in where to buy good meat, and how much to expect to pay it was a bit of a challenge.

We went on a little research mission. Wirral Farmer’s Market had an overwhelming amount of meat, but it was difficult to tell to much about it and although I’m sure they would be normally happy to chat the place was so busy at the time we were there I doubt the stall holders would really have appreciated a million questions about the origins of their meat and the animals living conditions.

We went round the various butchers in New Ferry and compared prices to what we could buy in supermarkets where we could have gone if we wanted to buy something that had been locked up all it’s life, fed an unnatural diet and pumped full of chemicals. Possibly not completely fair and they did sell some organic meat, but then you have the issue of how they’re probably ripping the farmers off blah blah blah… Stop it Leanne! This rant belongs in another post.

The butchers were in most cases a little cheaper, definitely on the standard prices, although supermarkets do these buy one get one free offers, making their meat cheaper, but again impacts on the already struggling farmers. The supermarkets organic meat, was however a complete rip off! £3.99 for 6 slices of bacon! No wonder people choose not to buy it. We ended up only paying a couple of quid more for about 3 times the amount of local organic bacon which we eventually decided to buy from Church Farm, a Soil Association certified organic farm shop in Thurstaston a couple of miles from where we’re living.

We also bought goat sausages from the farmer’s market. We chatted to the lady for a while who told us primarily they kept the goats for cheese. However obviously you can only get milk from the female goats, as such any male kids would usually be taken away from their mothers and slaughtered soon after birth which causes a lot of distress for the mother. They decided the best thing to do would be to allow them to stay together until the kid would naturally leave, at which point they were sold on for meat. So in effect the meat was like a byproduct of the cheese rather than the other way around. Although they didn’t have organic certification (this can be expensive and very difficult to maintain) it was a fairly small farm, definitely free range, no use of chemicals and an emphasis on the animals welfare. We bought a few sausages for people to try at the Saturday morning breakfast. Generally I think they went down quite well.

Now here is an admission/an interesting discussion to be had. I never tried goat while I was a meat eater and was a little intrigued as to what it would taste like. Hmm. I’d been thinking about it for a few days. When breakfast was served there were a couple of sausages left over which hadn’t been taken. I don’t like waste. I knew where they were from and had bought them happy for other people to eat them. I just wanted to know what they were like! I cut a bit off one and put it on the side of my plate. I kept looking at it while I was eating my beans and eggs, pushed it around the plate a few times, “Should I eat it, should I eat it?” I ate everything else first, and then chopped the piece of sausage in half, popped it in my mouth and ate it. It was indeed pretty tasty, very different to pork sausages, kind of more rich and creamy taste somehow. I didn’t want to eat more though, and am definitely happily not back on the meat eating side. But as I’ve said before I’ve seen meat eating in a different light since staying with people on various small holding who have a completely different  attitude towards meat and the animals it comes from than you get from the detached relationship you have when you buy your prepacked meat from the supermarket fridges.

I’ve included a few of the recipes from the weekend for you below, and some picture right at the end (is this the longest post ever!?). Making your own dips for fajitas is a great idea, especially when you’re making it for lots of people. So much fresher tasting, cheaper and you can adjust the chili to your own taste. The leftovers were great in sandwiches! Mmm. Oo, nearly forgot, I’d made welcome packs too, with skeleton straws, balloons, Hallowe’en shaped chocolates from the Chocolate Cellar and I’d made some Hallowe’en ginger biscuits to go in them too. They were great! Seemed to go down quite well with the kids who loved all the spooky shapes. Would be a brilliant thing to give out to any trick or treaters when real Hallowe’en comes around.

Expect several dozen pumpkin recipes in the next couple of days. The pumpkin carving competition left us with around 10kg of pumpkin to think of something to do with. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

From previous posts:

Brocolli and stilton quiche

Home made hummous
For the version for this weekend I’d just made plain hummous, so no red peppers and also I’ve stopped putting the onion, garlic and bayleaf in with the boiling chickpeas, it seems to be nicer without. Maybe the quest for the perfect hummous needs updating?

Guacamole

• 1chilli, finely chopped
• 1/2 bunch coriander, chopped
• 10 cherry tomatoes, finely chopped
• salt, to taste
• 1/2 red onion, very finely chopped
• juice of 1 lime
• 3 ripe avocados

1. Mash the avocados with a fork then mix in all the other ingredients.

Salsa

• 250g/9oz fresh tomatoes, finely chopped
• 1 small red onion, finely chopped
• 2 chillies, finely chopped
• bunch coriander, finely chopped
• salt, to taste
• lime juice, to taste

1. Combine all the ingredients together in a bowl.

Apple Pie

For the pastry:

• 10oz plain flour
• pinch of salt
• 5oz butter
• 6 tsp cold water

For the filling:

• 3 large Bramley cooking apples, chopped, stewed and cooled
• sugar, to taste (approx 2 tbsp)

1. Preheat the oven to 200C
2. Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
3. Add the cold water to the flour mixture. Using a knife, mix the water into the flour, using your hand to firm up the mixture.
4. Divide the pastry into two halves. Roll one half out so that it is big enough to cover an 20cm plate. Trim the edges with a knife using the edge of the plate as your guide.
5. Cover the pastry with the stewed apples and sprinkle with sugar to taste.
6. Roll out the other half of the pastry. Moisten the edge of the bottom layer of pastry and place the second piece on top.
7. Press down on the pastry edges, making sure that they are properly sealed. Trim off any excess pastry with a knife.
8. Press down round the edges with your thumb to seal and make a pattern round the edge.
9. Prick the surface of the pastry lightly before placing the pie in the oven and sprinkle with a little sugar. Cook for 20-30 minutes.

Hallowe’en Ginger Biscuits

• 75g soft brown sugar, sieved
• 2 tablespoons golden syrup
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 1 level teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 level teaspoon ginger
• 1 pinch ground cloves
• 100g butter
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 225g plain flour
• Hallowe’en shaped pastry cutters

1. Put the sugar, syrup, treacle, 1 tablespoon of water and spices in a large saucepan. Then bring them to boiling point, stir all the time.
2. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the butter, cut into lumps, and the bicarbonate of soda.
3. Stir in the flour gradually until you have a smooth manageable dough
4. Leave the dough covered in a cool place for 30 minutes.
5. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to 3mm thick and cut out the hallowe’en shapes.
6. Arrange them on the lightly greased baking sheets and bake for 10-15 minutes are lightly browned and becoming firm.
7. Leave the biscuits to cool a little and harden on the baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack.