Category: Food

On Monday Ruth was clearing one of the longer vegetable beds (they are all actually mixed flower/veg beds). We’ve got into a habit of treating brassicas like Purple Sprouting and taking heads of, leaving the plant to do its own thing, unless we need the space. During the clearing it became clear that the cabbages had developed multiple little loose heads, the Autumn broccoli had developed nice little sprouts, some spinach had developed a few vaguely acceptable leaves and a little patch of beetroot that was too small to harvest hadn’t entirely given up the ghost. Ruth saved them and passed them over to me.

Ruth and I are both on the same side of one of life’s great divides – Beetroot. I have a policy of keeping on trying things until I find out what it is people like about it and after many years of failure I discovered that Beetroot with goats cheese, really worked, especially if the beetroot is roasted. We eat it regularly now.

With that is mind and what I had in the house I came up with the following vegan recipe, which went down very well.

Flavouring – 1 tsp Allspice, 2 tsp sumac, 2 tsp ginger 1 tsp cardamom powder added to 1.5 tbsp olive oil in a roasting tin at 180 degrees fan oven.
Vegetables – 1 medium red onion, 1 clove garlic, 1 carrot, 10 small beetroot, 2 punnets of brassica tops, tin of sweetcorn,
To add at the end – 1.5 tbsp nutritional yeast, 1 dsp vegan bouillon powder, 100 ml water.

Process – Clean and if necessary peel/scrape vegetables and cut into long pieces not to thick. Remove any hard stalks from the Brassica tops and clean up.

Starting with the beetroot and carrot, pre-cook the vegetables (other than onion, garlic and sweetcorn) in the microwave and add in turn to the hot roasting tin, putting the onion and garlic in after the beetroot has cooked crisped up a bit. When the leafy bits are starting almost to turn into crisps, add the sauce ingredients and the sweetcorn and return to the oven for around 5 minutes. You can turn the oven off at this point.

We ate it with toasted home made bread and there was a little bit left for lunch today.

This is one of those experiments that crept into my brain and worked first time. I make quite a lot of variations of a cauliflower, broccoli, potato mix from dry to moist, from roasted to plain cooked vegetables, from full vegan to a combination. I used cheese this time but you could add more nutritional yeast or a touch of marmite into the mix instead and perhaps add crushed , mildly salted, salted cashews to the top when browning off.

Ingredients for the roasting tine – 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon turmeric, desert spoon mint, tablespoon thyme, teaspoon paprika.

To add later – tablespoon nutritional yeast,  half teaspoon of  arrowroot, teaspoon whole mustard, 100g barber’s crunchy, desert spoon bouillon.

Vegetables – chopped large cauliflower, about 20 small salad potatoes, 1 small onion chopped fine.

Heat the oil, herbs and spices in the oven in a roasting tin (210c).

At the same time pre-cook the potatoes for 5 minutes in the microwave, add to the hot oil and turn. 

Keep pre-cooking the cauliflower a batch at a time (4 minutes each), adding to the roast and turning to catch the turmeric colour.

Add the onions to the roast before the last batch.

Add the remaining ingredients, except the cheese and mix round. Add 100 cc of water and half the cheese, then mix up. Top with remaining cheese and return to the oven, until the cheese is browning.