Spring pickings

Finally (whisper it) it looks like spring has arrived. Time then, for a round-up of some of the better vegetarian recipes that have featured in recent weekend supplements and more.

Quinoa Salad with Mint and Mango

As soon as light nights come around I’m all for leaving aside the root vegetables and spicy stews of winter and marching into the warmer weather with a light supper. This ‘salad’ from Paul Rankin over at the BBC could work, I suppose, as an accompaniment to a heartier dish – Rankin suggests grilled halloumi – but on a warm evening, or at lunchtime, the mix of zingy flavours and protein from the quinoa would do just fine on its own. The recipe is here.

Chard open omelette

Feta and greens is a favourite combination over at ETP Towers, so this ‘open’ omelette from chef Bill Granger over at the Independent is a winner for us. It shouts ‘lunch’ of course, but some hushed sweet nothings could tempt me to turn this into a brunch dish, especially with a little drizzle of chilli sauce. The recipe is here.

Japanese asparagus and duck’s egg omelette

Also over at the Indy is this rolled up omelette that gives us all something different to do with asparagus this season – the sweet and nutty spears chopped finely with spring onion. Not everyone will find the Nanami Togarashi chilli flakes that chef Mark Hix suggests, but I’m sure your common or garden chilli flak will suffice. The recipe is here.

Asparagus with pastry wafers and butter sauce recipe

Sticking with asparagus, this recipe from Rose Prince at the Telegraph keeps it simple, highlighting that ‘Best of British’ asparagus, while adding a more substantial, even luxurious, touch to a light lunch. It’s rare I’ll eat puff pastry. It’s equally rare that I’d complain about having to. And here it is, a precious airy pillow on which those asparagus spears can rest. The recipe is here.

Vegetarian mezze

Have you noticed how cauliflower seems to be making a comeback? Regular readers of Earth to Plate will know we love it here, but it’s good to see this often overlooked vegetable getting tome respect. It features here as one of three ‘small-plate’ mezze dishes by Yotam Ottolenghi: Fried Cauliflower with Pine Nuts, Capers and Chilli is followed by Honey Roasted Carrots with Tahini Yoghurt and Aubergine and Parsley Pesto. Just pass me some warmed pitta. The recipes are here.

Recipe: Stevie Parle’s Moroccan Chickpea Stew with Fried Egg Brik and Cucumber Salad

Well, this recipe from the Observer Food Monthly magazine has ETP drooling somewhat. It’s a north African spiced chickpea dish that should be quite dry as there’s only one tomato used to add ‘sauce’ rather than a tin of them. But the novelty value, for us at least, is the filo and egg ‘brik’, which will add extra protein to the dish… as well as steering it well away from sounding healthy! Maybe that’s where the cucumber accompaniment comes in. Too late, cucumber, too late.

In any case, as chef Parle says, it’s a concoction of some favourite things thrown together and yep, we’ll be making it. The recipe is here.

Last night’s dinner: Egg curry

I suppose it doesn’t sound particularly wonderful. A simple egg; that generic, catch-all term ‘curry’. Hmm.

My desire to make an egg curry, however, goes back to the mid ’90s when I received a ‘curry’ recipe book that featured one. I have no idea why I never got round to making it. And the book? I’ve no idea where it is.

Which means I had to make up a recipe for this protein rich, filling dish. The ‘curry’ is in fact a basic dhal that we then perked up with some extra ingredients on top. For our basic dhal recipe, see here.

I think dhal plus a boiled egg could be a little cloying on its own, so to balance the flavours we added some tangy sweetness in the shape of some cherry tomatoes, and some savouriness in the form of crispy fried onions. The eggs were boiled, straightforwardly, and have of them added to the dhal, half reserved for the top. The dish is finished with a little chopped coriander.

It’s the balance of those added extras that makes this work. And, after 17 years of waiting, I really rather enjoyed it.

Recipe: The perfect egg fried rice

A few days ago the Guardian newspaper offered up its advice on how to make the perfect egg fried rice. Glad to see it didn’t differ to much from our own here at ETP Towers – other than the non-addition of garlic. I think at the moment I’d also revise our version and go with the paper’s, although it’s a matter of personal taste. The newspaper’s recipe is here. X-ref with our own here.

Recipe: Cannellini bean salad with boiled egg

Yes it has been a little quiet around ETP Towers, hasn’t it. Well, that’s because we’ve been away to Barcelona where, surprisingly I thought, it was actually rather easy to eat vegetarian. More on that later. First, however, here‘s a nice bean salad from Yotam Ottolenghi from the Guardian newspaper a few weeks ago. I’d suggest swapping the anchovies for a spoonful of chopped capers. It should work nicely. Scroll down for the recipe.

Last Night’s Dinner: Cheese and onion flan with tomato salad

Monday 22 August

I don’t know anyone who remembers school dinners with much fondness. I certainly don’t. I stopped having them as soon as I could and took packed lunches instead, then dinner money to spend down ‘the street’ where there was a bakers that did a nice old-fashioned cheese sandwich.

One thing I did like at school though was the sizzling hot trays of cheese flan, or cheese and onion flan, or cheese and tomato flan (it was a long time ago). Even in sixth form some of us used to nick into the refectory for a slice. It was so savoury and delicious.

I say flan – and I think I mean it. It wasn’t at all elegant, so ‘tarte’ is definitely wrong. And it wasn’t a quiche. In my mind, a quiche is light, the egg ‘custard’ fluffy and pale. You might eat quiche cold.

But a flan… a flan is unpretentious. There’s no milk added to the egg mixture, it’s not overly whisked, it’s just a plain old simple open pie. That’s what I set out to make, stuffing the pastry case with (in this instance) onion, tomato, eggs and cheese to approximate that old school dinner.

I bought the pastry for this one, rolled it out and flopped it into a 10-inch flan tin. Blind bake the pastry for around 15-20 minutes at 190/200 degrees (ie, cover it and weigh it down so it doesn’t rise, and cook until the pastry is just golden and not raw/soggy anymore). Finely chop and fry an onion. Spread that across the cooked base of the pastry case. Halve four medium tomatoes, take out the pips and finely chop the remaining flesh. Scatter that into the flan base too. Then, beat five eggs in a bowl, add some pepper and grate a fair amount of strong cheddar cheese into the bowl. It should be a cheesy-looking egg mixture, rather than simply beaten eggs with a spoonful of cheese.

Pour the mixture into the pastry case and spread evenly. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes on no more than 140 degrees – the lower temperature means the eggs will set without the pastry starting to burn (hopefully). When the egg/cheese mixture looks set, take the flan from the oven, grate some more cheese over the top and place a few thin slices of tomato across the top too. Put it back in the oven for 10-15 minutes. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before serving.

It’s nice to serve this with new potatoes and a green salad, but on this occasion we had a beautiful punnet of mixed tomatoes that came in reds, oranges, yellows and purples, as well as regular tomato and ‘pear’ shapes. Gorgeous. Halve the tomatoes, place in a bowl, season with a little salt and pepper, add a dash of sherry vinegar and a splash of olive oil, mix well and leave to stand for 15 minutes.

Job done.

Last Night’s Dinner: Vegetarian sausage and egg with chilli sauce

Sunday 26 June

Okay, so this isn’t quite a ‘last night’s dinner’, it’s a breakfast based on a recipe in Denis Cotter’s For the Love of Food. Once you get the basic idea, it’s easily adaptable to your own taste.

We’ve often wondered about how to make a decent veggie sausage – one that doesn’t try too hard to be meaty, one that doesn’t taste of artificial flavourings and enhancers, one that celebrates its own fresh ingredients and yet one that is defiantly sausagey. Well, this is as near as we’ve got.

The principle is straight forward. It’s a mix of cooked chestnuts (a vacuum-packed bag from the supermarket is good for this), mashed tofu, breadcrumbs and herbs, all blitzed in a food processor with an egg to bind the mixture. You then take small palm-full of the mix, mould into a sausage shape and lightly fry.

For Cotter’s exact ingredients see the book, but we’d happily encourage you to have a go yourselves. It’s just like making a fritter or savoury ‘cake’, but sausage-shaped and with ingredients you might not expect. Think about it, however, and it all makes sense.

One tip: do be careful with them in the frying pan, unlike a Quorn sausage, or a real sausage, they do break apart fairly easily. Cotter suggests making a large batch and freezing them, uncooked. Apparently they cook better from frozen. We tried it. They did.

We served them for breakfast with a fried egg and a hastily made chilli sauce (take a couple of tomatoes, some chillis, a little oil, seasoning, whizz in the food processor and cook through for five minutes).

Last Night’s Dinner: Asparagus, Egg and Chilli Tomato

Tuesday 17 May

English asparagus at this time of the year is the best proof possible that eating vegetables in season makes sublime sense. Steam it and serve with some Jersey Royal new potatoes and a little butter – perfect. Then there’s the Jamie Oliver inspired chargrilled asparagus and parmesan salads that became popular a few years ago. We also like asparagus with a poached egg on top. But what else to do with this handsome stem?

This easy supper brought two dishes together – the complementary pairings of asparagus and egg, and egg in a setting of a spicy, tangy, chilli-infused tomato sauce or jam.

The chilli tomato here was literally a large handful of halved cherry tomatoes, softened ever so slightly in a little olive oil with the addition of some chilli flakes. The tomato ‘sauce’ is poured over a halved soft-boiled egg, which sits atop some spears of griddled asparagus, which sits atop some roughly chopped watercress (spinach or gem lettuce would be fine). And yep, we sprinkled some parmesan shavings on top at the end. Easy.

Last Night’s Dinner: Kedgeree

Tuesday 10 May

Kedgeree? I hear you gasp? Fish?

Not a chance, mate. Kedgeree (khitchri, kitchari etc, to many people throughout culinary history, was never about smoked haddock or salmon – or even tuna. It was a rice and lentil (moong) dish, eaten throughout the Asian subcontinent, often for breakfast. Rice and peas, basically. This is where our take on kedgeree takes off. It’s so easy to do but does involve a few different pans.

The first pan is used to cook basmati rice until it’s tender but nutty. Once cooked it’s flavoured with dried spices – a little cumin, a little paprika, a little smoked paprika and a little cumin. The second pan is to boil some puy lentils until, again, tender but nutty. The third pan is to fry some halloumi – which for us replaces the smoky fish in most modern kedgeree recipes. The last pan is to hard boil a couple of eggs. If you don’t want to cook all these at the same time, start with the lentils, then the rice, then the eggs, then the halloumi.

Once everything is cooked, combine it all together in a large pan, chopping the egg and halloumi into small pieces. Mix it all through with a fork and then add some chopped flat-leaf parsely.

Finito!

Last Night’s Dinner: Ful with hummous

Monday 2 May

Ful is the Egyptian dish of crushed broad (fava) beans with cumin and garlic. It’s often eaten at breakfast but actually enjoyed at any time of the day. The version Ella made was again inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Plenty (see previous post). He warns that it might not look like much but is actually rather filling. And so it should be – a big pile of herby broad beans on a bed of warm, homemade hummous and and an egg on top. That’s one big plate of protein and a rich mix too. There’s something about beans, olive oil and herbs that is heartening – ETP’s butter beans and feta recipe does a similar trick to this. Good old Ottolenghi.

Recipe? There’s a wealth of them for Ful out there, but try this one here and adapt to your liking.