In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you may spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

It has been over three years since I have shared with you what has been going on in my kitchen, in that time there has been some fairly radical changes to what we eat.  In the mid 90s I was diagnosed with Crohns disease whilst this can be a very debilitating disease for some, I am so thankful that I have not been seriously ill with this chronic condition.   In the early days, the medication that I was taking to keep this check gave me further problems due to side effects I made the decision to stop taking them and started my long slow journey into alternatives, that was in the days before the internet was there at a click of a button.  Around that time I had a food intolerance test which transformed my life, within a week of excluding my list of foods my symptoms had all disappeared.  Life ticked on and I continued to exclude my list of 'no' foods until a few years ago, when it occurred to me that it was great that my symptoms had not come back but after so long excluding these foods I was still unable to reintroduce them without side effects, was I really 'better' then or just managing a different status quo?  I hadn't stopped reading and researching in that period but I knew that I needed to try something different.  I eventually decided that I would try giving up wheat and sugar for a whole year and see what happened, if that didn't work I would try something else.  Both of these ingredients formed a integral part of our diet, although sugar less so, I gave up all sugars including refined sugar, sweeteners such as honey and maple syrup and all fruit.  Yes you did read that right all fruit too.  I spent at least a month before I started planning and finding new recipes.  It made a huge difference to me, I felt much less sluggish, less bloated and I slept so much better, but even more amazing was that during that year I started to reintroduce some of those foods that I had not eaten for nearly twenty years and I suffered no side effects.

That was back in 2017, now we eat a wheat in maybe one meal a week or less, sweeteners are used sparingly and fruit is very much back on the menu.   When I look back through my old In My Kitchen posts there was a lot of baking going on then, that has all been much reduced.  It has been a big change.  I didn't think, before I gave it up, that I was eating a lot of wheat until I started to look at a week of meals rather than each meal individually, I am a huge believer in every thing in moderation but that was not an ingredient we were eating in moderation.  It has been surprisingly easy to bring about this change, rather than look for alternatives, using gluten free flour to make pastry or bread for example, we ate differently.  We now eat a lot more vegetables than we used to and with a teenage boy in the house our veg bill is large!  Now I can eat out, share food with friends and family and not worry about the ingredients for the first time in so, so long.  It has made a huge difference to my life and I am so glad I gave it a try even though at the time it felt like a really extreme thing to do!

When you make a fairly radical change to your diet it can mean that many of your cookbooks are full of recipes which are no longer used.  I have given away many of the books on my shelves, particularly the bread baking ones of which I had quite a large collection.  This has been a good excuse to buy some new ones and last year I was given two amazing cookbooks for my birthday, one (fourth book on this link) of which I use a lot and has become a firm favourite for us.  We have yet to try anything from this book that has not been loved and made again, it is a book that really suits what we love to eat, a particular favourite is a Mediterrean Tray bake a dish based on roast veggies.

I am going to leave you now with a recipe for a meal that you could make for dinner* or tea, we usually eat this for dinner.  It is my favourite kind of recipe as it is a collection of possibilities all thrown together to make a really tasty meal which means that it tastes different each week and each season depending on what you have in the house.  If the flavourings don't appeal to you then add your own.  These quantities serve two so increase/decrease accordingly.

Shakshouka (Serves 2)

1 tablespoon butter
1/2 onion or a leek or 3 spring onions
3 cups of whatever green vegetables you have
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon chilli flakes or a few drops of Tabasco
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 handfuls of leafy greens and herbs
salt and pepper
eggs
4 tablespoons of any cheese you have and like crumbled or grated

Melt the butter in a frying pan over a medium high heat, add the onion/leek/spring onion, green vegetables and cumin.  Cook for 5-7 minutes.

Add the chilli/tabasco, lemon juice, leafy greens and herbs and cook until wilted.

Season with salt and pepper if desired.

Create divots in your mixture and break in the eggs one by one (as many as you want), sprinkle with cheese, turn heat to low and cover.  Cook for about 5 - 7 minutes until the eggs are set.

Printable Recipe

*****

*Where I live dinner is the meal that you eat in the middle of the day

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

June has been a full month, days full of mostly being outside enjoying the sunshine.  We have eaten so many meals outside either at home or whilst out and about.  It has been mostly about salads with the odd warmer meal thrown in the mix for those, rare, cooler days.  This post is a little later this month, we were away for our annual summer solstice camp and I completely failed to factor in writing a blog post before we went away.  Better late than never!

I rekindled my love for an old recipe book on my shelves this month.  It is one of those books which rarely fails to let me down.  I discovered a section on breads that I hadn't previously noticed.  The recipes are a mix of yeasted and batter breads, the latter being more like a savoury cake.  I tried two.  A savoury nut and a cottage cheese and dill.  The picture is the nut bread which was definitely the better of the two, I have made it twice this month and we have eaten it with salads, hummus and bean spreads.  I am going to try freezing it next time I make some as it makes a big loaf which hasn't been keeping in the heat we have had, the birds enjoyed it too!

Sometimes digging through old recipe books for new ideas can remind me of favourites that I have forgotten.  So carrot pie made it back on to our menus this month, a pie that looks dramatic, tastes wonderful and is really easy to make.  It has a pastry base and a filling of cooked onion and carrot mixed with cream and cheddar cheese, egg and herbs which you cook for 45 minutes.  It is delicious hot or cold and I just love the way it looks when you cut into it.

We celebrated a birthday in our house this month.  Alice turned seven.  She told me exactly what she wanted to do on the day, including the guests she wanted to invite and the food she wanted to eat.  Her chosen guests meant that the menu had to be gluten, egg and dairy free so my usual birthday cake was out as were all the recipes in my recipe books.  The result was a vegan cake which was incredibly rich, fed all the party guests and kept us going in cake for nearly a week afterwards!  I used this recipe which looks nothing like mine (I don't think my blueberries were the right variety to give such a purple shade to the top layer) it didn't suggest what size of tin to assemble all the ingredients in but clearly I used something much bigger.  However given the richness I think this size was perfect.  We ate lots of salads before the cake, beetroot and feta, chickpea, red rice and a green one accompanied by lots of potato wedgies.  It all got eaten a sure sign that I got it right.

One thing about being busy is that you forget to take photos so I don't have any more to share.  Courgettes are back in our veg bag now and we have been enjoying a courgette and cheese bake and lots of delicious salads.  The asparagus season lasted a long time this year and we have been eating the salad I shared last month every week, I could never tire of it.  We have tried a butter bean and brie salad, a new to us mixed bean salad and lots of salads made with whatever is in the fridge and the garden.  I have started to cook a curry each week which has introduced us to some more new recipes all of which have been delicious.

I have had quite a few conversations about meal planning recently, it is something that I have done for a number of years now.  I am not evangelical about it as I know that it doesn't work for everyone however it does save money and time and I am sure it could help to reduce food waste if more people did it.   Planning means that when I have the time and feel inclined I peruse my recipe books looking for new ideas for meals.  When time is precious and I am tired then I throw together a menu of old favourites the list of which is always increasing!  Are you a meal planner?

I am not going to share a recipe with you this month, I hope you are ok with that.  I will be back in July with hopefully a few more pictures and a recipe for share.  In the meantime I need to go off and do the weekly shop.  What have you been cooking lately?

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

I always start off the Spring with good intentions to forage for wild food throughout the growing season, getting excited when the wild garlic puts in an appearance and never really going much further until the rosehips and blackberries appear in the Autumn.  I do hope that I manage better than that this year!  But I have been out picking wild garlic leaves this month and whizzing up batches of pesto, I used almonds this time.  I always pick a good quantity of leaves, from several different places to ensure that I am not compromising the plants in one particular place, and freeze some of the batches for use during the year.  We don't eat huge amounts of pesto but it is much nicer to eat your own.  There were a few leaves left over so I just had to make some scones with them as I had been seeing recipes for them all over the web in April.  I made a small batch as scones taste so much better the day they are cooked and I don't think they freeze terribly well.  We ate ours with a bean spread.  Delicious!

I think we may well have eaten salads every day this month, certainly my children would have you believe so, not salad again I hear them cry whilst they tuck in and eat every last mouthful!  They have been a mix of made up recipes with anything I had to hand, they are often the best and the most impossible to recreate as I never have the same bits to use up from one week to the next, and recipes that were both new to us or tried and tested.  The one on the far right above has tofu in it which I thought was delicious but the rest of the family decided they preferred the smoked tofu salad I make, this one was marinated and baked.  The rest are all grain based with rice at the top and pearl barley and couscous at the bottom.  I have been adding nuts and seeds to the made up salads, particularly toasted ones.  I soaked a big batch of pumpkin seeds overnight and toasted them on a low oven, sprinkling a bit of chilli powder over them first, until they were crisp, they don't last long round here.  They have been enjoyed in salads and as a tasty snack.  The first picture in the post is a beetroot and feta salad that we all adore and would eat every week of the year, I do make this every week we get beetroot in our veg bag.

I mentioned in my March in my kitchen post that I was on the hunt for tasty recipes for breakfast.  I tried two this month.  A Banana Bread with Millet in it, which got eaten so quickly that I failed to take any pictures!  It was delicious with yogurt and/or apple puree.  It was one of those recipes with a very long list of ingredients which usually that means they take forever to make, but not in this case. It required some forward planning as the millet needed to be cooked first before adding to the mix, but it was a two bowl method, one dry, one wet, mix together, spoon into tin and into the oven.  The other recipe was a Breakfast Bar.  It was from a book I was given earlier in the year, one that I thought was going to be great but has actually turned out to be a disappointment and is rather hard on the wallet.  Again these were banana based this time with oats and a few other ingredients, they were ok but I don't think I would make them again however I may use the recipe as a basis to have a go at coming up with my own take.  I can see that these would be really useful when camping or out walking as they were good and solid and didn't fall apart like so many of this type of bar do, so watch this space I might be sharing my results at some point!

We have entered the, very short but rather lovely, Asparagus season here in the UK.  We get a handful of spears in our veg bag each week for about a three to four week period.  Each year I try to add a new recipe into my repertoire and this year I found a salad that I thought sounded good and it was, so I thought I would share it with you.  It is based on a recipe I found in a book from the library, I have tweaked it slightly but if you would like to see the original it can be found here

Lentil and Couscous Salad with Almonds and Asparagus  

100g Green Lentils (I always soak mine overnight)
360ml Water
200g Wholewheat Couscous
8 Asparagus Spears cut into approx 3cm sections
1 Small Red Onion, chopped fine
45g Capers
2 Large handfuls of salad leaves/watercress
40g Almonds thinly sliced

Vinaigrette
5 tbs olive oil
3 tbs apple cider vinegar

Put the lentils and water in a saucepan and simmer until cooked, if you have soaked them overnight they will cook quicker.  If needed, drain, then run under cold water and transfer to a large bowl.

Cook the couscous by your preferred method, I always melt some butter and gently fry a crushed clove of garlic in the butter for a minute before adding the couscous and coating with the garlicky butter then add the water and simmer until cooked.  Add the couscous to the lentils.

 Steam the asparagus until just tender, rinse under cold water, drain and add to the lentils and couscous.

Add the red onion, capers, salad leaves and almonds.  Whisk the vinaigrette ingredients together and drizzle over the salad mix together and serve.

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

I mentioned in my last in my kitchen post that I had been making toothpaste and deodorant and many of you asked me to share my recipes, which I did in my last post along with many other cleaning products I make. Thank you to all who commented and shared your own cleaning 'recipes'. I didn't mention why I make my own, aside from the fact that it fits neatly into my efforts to live sustainably, I do so out of necessity. About four years ago I started experiencing hives like symptoms on my hands over the course of the year it got worse and worse as I couldn't work out what was causing it. It was when I started to wake up with a swollen face and eyes swollen shut that I realised it might have something to do with the cleaning products I was using. So a new journey started into making my own, I haven't dared buy them again I really don't want to repeat that awful experience.

It has been all about baking in my kitchen this month.  There has been lots of salad making too, old familiar recipes and a few new ones too, but it is the baking that will be the content of this post.

I have made Hot Cross Buns for Good Friday for a few years now using the recipe from Nigella Lawson's Feast cookbook.  I have been wanting to make other types of bread with my sourdough starters and thought that Hot Cross Buns would be a good place to start.  They turned out really well and didn't last that long.  They were definitely from the slow cooking avenue of baking, the recipe started twenty four hours before baking day.  They only needed a little attention each time, I do like that kind of baking fitting it in around other jobs be done.  You can find the recipe here.  I haven't tried making anything else but writing this has reminded me that I want to, if you have any suggestions or good recipes I would love to hear about them.

As part of our Spring and Easter project/traditions we observed Purim and we made these Haman's Purses for tea, a traditional dish to eat for this Jewish Festival.  You can fill them with any filling you like, ours were made from dried apricots soak over night and then pureed in a blender they were delicious!  I also made a stew using Carlin Peas which are a North of England speciality at this time of year, I had never heard of these peas before but they were selling them in my local health food shop just before Easter so I just had to give them a try.  They are also eaten around Bonfire Night in November.

I stopped eating anything with refined sugar in about six months ago it wasn't particularly difficult as I don't really have a sweet tooth.  I realised quite by chance that it was giving me stomach ache.  I stopped eating it for a few weeks, then started again, and repeated a couple of times as I wanted to be sure it was that, and not something else, before I stopped eating it completely.  As I have Crohn's Disease, which I manage through my diet, I kept a food diary too I didn't want to exclude yet another ingredient without being sure.  I have been experimenting with other sweeteners in baking to see if they cause a problem too, but so far so good.  I have made two cakes sweetened with honey (the recipes call for maple syrup which is incredibly expensive in the UK so I have been using honey instead) and apple puree.  It makes a tasty moist cake and is really easy to make, definitely my kind of recipe.  If you want to give them a go you can find the recipe here, and thank you to this lovely blogger for putting me onto the recipe.

I made my sourdough starters some months ago now. We don't eat a lot of bread, but I make it most weeks and have got a good rhythm going. Every Friday morning I get the starters out of the fridge (I have one rye and one spelt) where I store them in glass jars. I leave them to stand for day to warm up to room temperature. If you need to make bread more often you could probably just leave your starter on the side all the time it I haven't tried that so don't know if it will work. What I have found with making sourdough bread is that you need to find what works for the flour you are using and your climate, recipes are a good starting point but bear in mind where the author lives! There is a huge amounts of advice out there some of which will work for you and some won't, but even when it doesn't work it is never, usually, a complete disaster. So having warmed up my starters, in the evening I make the sponges combining the starters with flour and water which I leave to stand, covered, overnight. The more you make bread, the more wild yeasts you will have floating around, the more you sponge will bubble, mine looks good now but it hardly bubbled in the beginning. On the week I took these pictures the rye sponge (on the left) was more lively than the spelt, some weeks it is the other way round. In the morning I remove some of the sponge into back into my jars to become the next starter, the rest is mixed with more flour to make the actual loaves. The rye does not need any kneading as it makes a wet dough that you slop into an oiled tin to rise. The spelt I knead for a short while, if you knead it for too long it makes for a very dense chewy loaf, so until it is smooth will do. I leave it to rest for around fifteen minutes before dividing into two loaves and placing on a floured baking tray to rise. The flour stops the loaves sticking to the tray. How long I leave it depends on the temperature. The warmer the place the less time you need, a maximum of three hours if it is cool, again this is something that is best worked out for your own house. If the loaf is starting to flatten slightly it is ready for the oven! I freeze these loaves and always have a good supply in the freezer ready for those occasional weekends when I am too busy to fit in making any bread.

We have been enjoying a new to us salad recipe this month.  It has many ingredients and takes time to put it all together, but I know that the more I make it the quicker I will get.  It is really tasty so it is worth it!

Apricot and Chick Pea Salad

200g bulgar wheat
150g cooked chickpeas*
50g sprouted mixed pulses
50g dried apricots soak overnight and chopped
25g toasted flaked almonds
2 tbsp chopped parsley
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp crushed dried chillies
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
pinch cinnamon
pinch ground cloves
to taste salt & pepper

Pour boiling water over the bulgar wheat and leave to stand for 30 minutes then drain. Fluff the grains up with a fork.
Mix together the bulgar, chickpeas, sprouted pulses, apricots, almonds and parsley in a bowl.
To make the dressing, heat the oil in a pan, fry onion until soft. Add spices, cook for 2 minutes, season and stir into the salad immediately.

*if you are using dried chickpeas this equates to approximately 75g.

Based on a recipe from the Vegetarian Society Website.

In my kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

It has been a really exiting month in my kitchen  so many things that I have been pondering over for a while have happened.  I am, by nature, a ponderer.  I don't rush into much, I think things through, do mountains of research which sometimes becomes displacement activity.  I have read many posts about water kefir grains, they sounded interesting and something that I thought might do me some good.  I had considered buying them but hadn't got any further than that.  I casually mentioned, in a conversation with a friend who had just been given some, that I had been thinking about giving them a go.  A few days later I had my own small jar of grains.  I knew that, like a small child they could not be ignored but I hadn't considered that I might end up with some quite so quickly.  I dived right in encouraged by my initial research which suggested that you can't really go wrong.  My grains are on their second batch of food and multiplying rather quickly, it will soon be my turn to pass some on, we are enjoying the first batch which is on it's second ferment and fizzing up well.

It wasn't just my kefir grains fermenting in my pantry this month.  These past few weeks I have felt like an alchemist in my kitchen mixing up weird and wonderful concoctions, never quite sure how they will turn out.  I have been wanting to make sauerkraut for years.  When I was fifteen I went on an exchange to Germany the family I stayed with made their own sauerkraut which they seemed to eat with every meal, I loved it so much they sent me home with a jar.  It is so simple to make that I cannot believe I haven't tried it before.  I love it and know that this small batch won't last long.

Breakfast is an important meal, probably the most important of the day, and yet it is the one I pay the least attention to.  I have been eating my own take on Bircher muesli for a few months now, long enough for me to no longer find it appetising.  I started making oatmeal pancakes again, soaking the first two ingredients over night.  They take a bit more organising as I make my own yogurt which always seems to unexpectedly run out.  I am sure I have yogurt eating fairies in my fridge.  I don't want to get fed up with these as well so I am on the hunt for a few more tasty recipes and switch between them.  What do you have for breakfast?

It's not just food I have been making in my kitchen this month.  I ran out of toothpaste and deodorant both of which I make myself. I have am using a different deodorant recipe to the one I previously posted and I don't seem to have shared my toothpaste one, I shall have to rectify that soon.  I have also made a few more beeswax food covers.  The first batch I made were mainly a gift for a friend, I only had a couple which wasn't enough.  When I posted about them several of you asked if they kept their shape when you cover food with them, I hope the photos above demonstrated how beautifully they do that!  They are covering my soaking pancake ingredients and the leftovers of a meal that I didn't have room in the fridge for!

I dont know whether it is the lighter evenings, the warmer days, or the increase in sunshine but I have cooked so many new, to me, recipes this month.  Each Thursday when I sit down to plan the meals for the week rather than the same old again, I have been reaching for the recipe books.  I also had a go at making one up when I couldn't find what I wanted in my books or online.  I fancied a burger/pattie with cashews and lentils, this is what I came up with

Cashew and Speckled Lentil Patties

1/2 cup cashew nuts (soaked overnight)
1 cup speckled lentils (soaked overnight)
1 onion '
2 garlic cloves
1 tbs hemp seeds - optional
1tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp coriander powder

Preheat the over to 180°C/350°F
Fry the onion in your preferred choice of fat, when they are transparent add the garlic and fry for a further minute.
Add the lentils and stir to mix, add just enough water to cover and cook gently with the pan lid on.
Put your soaked cashews into a food processor and whizz, add the cooked lentils and the remaining ingredients and whizz.
The mixture will be very sloppy at this point and look rather unappetising!
Using both hands place handfuls of the mix on a baking tray and flatten slightly.  When all the mix has been shaped, wet your fingers slightly and smooth and shape the patties.  (the photo above shows the patties smoothed on the left and not on the right).
I made nine with mine, but you can make more or less depending on the size of each one.
Cook for about twenty minutes in the oven.

We enjoyed ours with a dressed green salad.

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome.

I have fallen in love with a new ingredient this month, I bought it in error.  I use paprika quite a lot at this time of year in stews and sauces but the smoked version is just wonderful and so much better.  It brings a very different flavour with it, as you would expect, one with such depth but not over powering.  If you haven't tried it before I can really recommend it.

I get most of my veg delivered to my door from a local farm share I buy into.  Once year I get a kohlrabi bulb, an unusual looking vegetable that looks like a wrinkled turnip or a rather solid cabbage, which is what it is.  It tastes like a cabbage but has the texture of most root vegetables.  I love trying out new ingredients but it does take me a while to find the best combination of flavours, it is hard to form that kind of relationship with a vegetable that we only eat once year.  I have been unable to buy it anywhere else so I guess it will remain as a once a year pot luck meal!

I was really lucky to get a lovely new kitchen appliance for Christmas.  I have wanted a new blender for a while my last one, a wedding present, packed up a few years ago a stick blender sufficed for soup making but nothing else.  I was given the money from several family members so I had a good pot, I didn't have the time for any research prior to Christmas so in a quiet moment in January I found what I wanted.  I have been getting to grips with it this month, having not had one for a while I have forgotten what I can use it for, this one has many different settings the most used one so far has been smoothies.  Every night I throw a handful of oats and a glass of water to soak, in the morning they are whizzed to make oat 'milk' for Alice's breakfast.  I have attempted a few smoothies with mixed success, the best combination so far has been banana and blackcurrant with oat milk and a dash of yogurt.  If you make smoothies I would love to hear what you put in yours, especially vegetable based recipes.

I have had some nurturing to do this month, one of my sourdough starters was looking and smelling a little neglected.  I buy my flour direct from a local mill, my last order didn't include any rye flour so when I went to make a loaf back in December I was a bit surprised to find I had nearly run out.  I decided to use the little bit I had left to keep my starter going, feeding it every week until I needed to order some more flour.  The mill is not somewhere I go past very often and I didn't want to make a special trip for one bag even though I buy 6kg at a time!  Despite my occasional feeding, the starter wasn't looking too healthy when I finally had the flour to make some more bread with it.  I threw half of it in the compost bin and fed it with one tbsp of flour and one of water for a few days and then made a loaf with it.  As with all new starters the first few loaves were a bit strange but it is now back to normal and making delicious rye sourdough loaves again.  I have not been baking with sourdough starters for very long but I have loved how in a short space of time I have gained the confidence to know what to do by the look, smell and feel what I am doing.   That doesn't mean that I make completely successful loaves every time, but you can always make breadcrumbs from the failures so nothing goes to waste.

We have been cooking for our feathered friends this month.  The end of January and February are always the coldest months of the Winter here, it often snows and food is hard for the birds to find.  We feed them all year round with scraps from the kitchen but at this time of year we make them food.  Using lard as a basis we make two different types, one for the seed eaters which is full of seeds and breadcrumbs, the other for the insect eaters with meat scraps (if we have any), oats, cheese and sultanas.  I melt the lard, mix in the ingredients, leave them to cool in bowls, before scooping them out and leaving them for the birds to enjoy.  If you have the book All Year Round there are recipes on page 207-8.

Whilst the birds might enjoy that recipe it doesn't sound the least bit appealing to me but we have been enjoying stews this month especially if they include dumplings.  I always throw whatever vegetables I have to hand in my stews, leeks, carrots, swede, potatoes, sweet potatoes are favourites here.  The flavourings are always the same, my favourite combination is a pinch of cayenne and a tbsp of smoked paprika added with 2tbsp of flour and stirred into the vegetables thoroughly before adding the liquid, stock with a dash of soy sauce.  The dumplings are added after cooking the vegetables on their own for about ten minutes.

Cheese and Herb Dumplings

This makes eight dumplings you can increase or reduce the quantities to make more or less, they don't reheat well.

100g Wholemeal Self Raising Flour*
25g Butter
50g Grated Cheddar Cheese
3tbsp Chopped Parsley
50 - 75ml Milk

Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles fine crumbs
Stir in the cheese and parsley.
Add just enough milk to make a firm dough.
Divide into eight and shape into balls.
Add to the dish, cover tightly and cook for 20-25 minutes on a low heat ensuring the dumplings don't catch on the bottom.

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* If like me you don't buy self raising flour, just use the same weight of ordinary flour with 1 level tsp of baking powder.

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat.  I have posted the occasional recipe here in the past, so I though it would be fun to do a post of what has been going on in my kitchen each month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome.

It would make sense, in the first post of this series, to show you round my kitchen.  It faces North East, has dark counters and dark walls none of which is conducive to good pictures in the Winter.  You would be forgiven for thinking it is a dark cave but there is a big window and the walls are few as it is open plan into the hall and the dining room.  It will have to wait until a lighter month.

The Festive season in our house means eating special food but not overindulging.  I am not a huge fan of many of the traditional foods eaten at Christmas in the UK.  But the good thing about tradition is that you make your own at any time.  I have never made a Christmas cake, my Mum did every year it often didn't get eaten until well into January, I wanted a cake that we could make,eat and enjoy at Christmas so this year I tried Stollen.  I remember my Dad bringing one back from Germany some time in the 80s when they were unheard of in the UK, I thought it was delicious and light, and much preferred it to the heaviness of the traditional rich fruit cake.  The recipe made enough for two very large loaves, Stollen is more of a bread than a cake, that didn't last long, it was delicious.

I got some lovely presents for Christmas all of them exactly what I would have bought for my self.  We exchange presents with some friends who bought me the perfect recipe book.  My shelves are already growning under the weight of recipe books but there is always room for more.  This book is all about salads, 75 recipes.  I love making and eating salad.  I miss them in the Winter months but no more, this book has salads for whole year.  Hearty salads that would be too heavy for the summer are perfect for the winter.  We have eaten a different recipe each week this month and they have all been wonderful.

At the beginning of the 90s I went travelling around Morocco, during my eight weeks there I was sold for camels (but you already knew that) and found interesting presents to bring home.  Two of which were these:

If you have not seen one before it is a tajine we saw them everywhere we travelled, in restaurants, cafes and outside in the streets.  I used it a lot when I first bought it home, but being on the big side* it is stored at the back of a cupboard where it is easily forgotten about.  I was reminded of it recently on a visit to my brothers' who was the recipient of the second one and who cooked us a wonderful meal in his.  You cook with it on a low gentle heat and the unusual shape creates a complete seal, the gentle cooking means that the ingredients soak up all the flavours you add, creating a delicious meal in one pot.  You pile the food up in layers in a cone, the base should be the ingredients that take the longest to cook with the quickest cooking ones at the top, pour over your flavourings and liquids place the cone on top and cook.  You can use this one on the hob or in the oven on a low heat, I have also used in in an Aga putting it in in the morning before I went to work and coming home to tea ready to be served!  In Morocco we saw these outside houses set on a fire bowl of smouldering embers.  We have been enjoying a recipe from this book which a blogger has helpfully created a PDF version of should you want to make it yourself.    In the manner of all good recipes we have adapted it to suit us!

I am going to leave you this month with a recipe that we are enjoying at the moment.  We eat seasonally so this has two vegetables which are regulars in our veg bag at this time of year.  I made this up so I have never measured quantities, I just go by how many I am feeding.  It is essentially two vegetables in a rich creamy sauce, it freezes well so if you do make too much.........we never have any left over here.

Squash, Leek and Feta
Squash
Leek
Butter
Flour -  any
Thyme
Stock
Double Cream
Feta

• Peel and chop the squash into bite sized pieces.
• Trim and slice the leeks into slices about 1cm thick.
• Melt the butter on a low heat into a large pan/pot (it is important your pan/pot has a lid with a good seal) and cook the vegetables until they start to soften, stir occasionally to stop them catching you can put the lid on to do this it works well either way
• Add flour enough to just coat your vegetables, you can use any flour you want for this it helps to thicken the sauce slightly
• Add the thyme, stir through
• Add enough stock to just cover your vegetables, I always use vegetable stock as I am vegetarian I don't know how it would taste with any other type of stock, bring to a simmer, turn the heat down very low, cover and simmer gently until the vegetables are cooked
• Chop feta into very small chunks
• Add the cream and the feta stir in and cook gently until the cheese is melted

I serve this with mashed or jacket potato.  It also works well as a pie filling with a pastry top.

In the spirit of all good recipes this also works well with Sweet Potato instead of the Squash and a soft goats cheese instead of the feta.

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*This one is 30cm/12" wide and 24cm/9.5" tall.

The top photo is the Galette de Rois I made for Twelfth Night.