recipes

A collection of 23 posts

recipes

Cait's Festive Christmas Pie

The time for Christmas menu choices is suddenly here and, digging around in my memory, I discovered this old family favourite.  A friend of mine recommended it when it was my turn to host family Christmas and I needed to feed several vegetarians, myself included. It sounds fiddly to make,

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Patsy's Festive Tipple

Many of us like a warming draught of mulled wine during the Christmas festivities, and this year we have decided to ring the changes and try something slightly different. Rather than reaching for a couple of bottles of red plonk and a sachet of mulled wine spices, adding brown sugar

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Creamy Fresh Tomato Soup

September.  Season, we’re told, of mists and mellow fruitfulness.   The poet didn’t mention unending torrents of rain.  Perhaps an oversight on his part, or perhaps it didn’t scan. Fortunately, my tomato plants are tucked up snugly in our old (but still weatherproof) greenhouse.  Unfortunately it is not

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Summer Salads and Sauces

As a child, I thought “salad” was lettuce, cucumber and tomato. You could have different sorts of lettuce – cos, or butterhead, or Webbs wonder. I think the last was really a type of iceberg lettuce, but my dad grew it in the garden, so it was nothing like today’s

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Hummus - or Humous?

Forty or so years ago, when Findus Frozen Pancakes were a staple for the mythical average family, because they were quick if you were in a rush, who could have imagined that hummus would regularly find its way into the British shopping basket? A quick snack, great for dipping carrots

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Easter Biscuits

This year, with the warm winter behind us, we’re experiencing a cold Easter-tide.  As if the spring flowers hadn’t already had enough to put up with!  They’ve had fewer daylight hours, as the mild temperatures have encouraged them to flower early.  The ground they’re growing in

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Lentil and Mushroom Welsh Rarebit Pie

It is the approach of the Spring equinox – at last! Who knows, perhaps the ground will dry up when the March winds get going.   Slightly earlier each morning, before there is more than a glimmer of light in the sky, we can hear the mounting excitement of the birds trying

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Seville Orange Marmalade

One of the things I look forward to in January is replenishing our marmalade stock. Home-made marmalade is a true delicacy and bears no resemblance to even the very best shop-bought variety. Its flavour is distinctive and wakens up the taste buds in a way that nothing else can. Now

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Christmas Cabbages

About this time of year cabbages of every shape and size appear in the shops, and being mid-winter, we all need the vitamins and minerals they impart.  What is more, they are inexpensive, and can be very versatile.  If you really don’t know what to do with a cabbage,

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Green Lentil Casserole

The change from summer to late autumn has been sudden this year. The prolonged spell of warm sunny weather at the start of October encouraged the last tomatoes to ripen and lulled some of us into a false sense of security!  This didn’t last, and with winter setting in

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Quick oat milk

What you need 100g / 4oz porridge oats 750ml / 25fl oz cold water Optional sweetener of choice : maple syrup, date syrup, coconut sugar etc What you need to do Put the porridge oats in a bowl and completely submerge them with filtered water. Cover the bowl and leave somewhere cool for

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Cheat's Tomato Tart

This is a a super-easy dish to make, that looks impressive and is a great variation on quiche. At this time of year I usually have a glut of tomatoes, so it also provides a great way of using them up, especially bearing in mind that tomatoes that may not

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Foolproof Fruity Flapjacks

This is adapted from a recipe I found online several years ago, having repeatedly tried and failed to make really good flapjacks. Buying most of the ingredients from a refill shop makes them almost packaging-free and if you're trying to cut down on ultra-processed food they are good

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Penny’s Blackcurrant Surprise Pudding

What’s for afters? This childhood refrain frequently rang round the table as the family polished off our first course. It was either “afters” or “pud”, never “sweet” or “dessert”, so I make no apologies for calling the following dish a pudding, though in the strictest terms pudding should be

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Salad Days

In my long-ago youth, “salad” meant two or three lettuce leaves, a few slices of cucumber and a tomato. The addition of radishes and watercress rendered the dish positively festive. A few decades on, salads have become more interesting. Featured in today’s dish are potato salad, kohl rabi slaw,

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Purple Vegetable Casserole

This is, essentially, a vegetable casserole, but the ingredients were such that when cooked, it had a wonderful purple hue – fit for Royalty*, perhaps? I had a number of single vegetables in the fridge, which all needed to be used, including some amazing, really vividly purple carrots. These, together with

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Warm The Cockles Of Your Heart With Borsch!

We have a friend who says this tastes like authentic Ukrainian borsch – and she should know, she’s from Chernivtsi. Our Oddbox delivery has of late brought us veg we haven’t necessarily factored in to our current menu list, and the result has been a lot of beetroot that

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Bean and Vegetable Hotpot

This is one of my favourite recipes, not least because you can use up any vegetables that are waiting in the fridge for inspiration to strike! The version in the picture contains onions, garlic, a couple of sticks of celery, a tiny piece of root ginger, finely chopped, butternut squash,

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Vegetarian Roast Cheese, Cashew and Walnut Loaf

Patsy Hollingum writes: I’ve been making this for our Christmas dinner for around ten years now. It sounds more complex than it is, the end result is well worth the effort, and it takes far less time to roast than a turkey. It is just as tasty served cold,

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Beans Means … Texture and Flavour

Following on from the earlier post about lentils Patsy Hollingum turns her attention to beans. I am a fan of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme and earlier in 2022 the topic was beans, a subject to which the team devoted two episodes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/

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Patsy Hollingum is taking the pulse ...

In my store cupboard at the moment I have no fewer than 10 different types of pulse, plus one on my current shopping list. Some of you will be familiar with the word, without knowing exactly what it covers, so here’s a little rule of thumb: a pulse is

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Hard Times Bread Pudding

By Patsy Hollingum This is a recipe for old fashioned bread pudding using stale white bread. It’s a good way to use up really stale bread, including the crusts. As it is a recipe for using up “left-overs” I have not given exact quantities, however, don’t go over

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Vitality Soup & Family Frittata

VITALITY SOUP Cooking time: 20mins Vegan, dairy free, gluten free A combination of early vegetables and wild seasonal gems that can easily be foraged in Spring. Soften an onion, add 600g asparagus, handful of young nettle tops, 2 handfuls of wild garlic and chopped garlic clove, cover with 1-1.5