Summer nights: In a jiffy roasted vegetable wraps

I love what weeknights become in the summer: corners of the weekend that fall into Mondays and Wednesdays that are way too cold to do anything with in winter. Summer is tinnies in the park, night buses home way too late, and good food before grabbing every bit of sunlight you can. 2013 has finally turned me into a serious serotonin chaser. I didn't think it could happen either.

This dinner is perfect for pre-going out, making a bit of a fuss of a friend before heading off, and it would also make a very easy Sunday lunch. Just call me Lionel. You could also easily adapt this for a vegan barbeque by skewering the vegetables into kebabs and grilling instead of roasting.

Refried chipotle beans form the glue for these wraps, the recipe for which can be found here. I added tomatoes and salad to mine, with a squeeze of lemon. They also last really well in lunchboxes- (If you want to be extra kind to your hangover the next day, wrap up yours while you serve your dinner so the hard work is done for the next morning!)

Makes enough to serve 2 generously, multiply up for more
Ingredients
2 peppers
4 small onions
1 courgette
Handful of mushrooms
Olive oil
Seasoning

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Chop the vegetables into chunks- I like to leave the onions whole as they retain their juices and then break them up once roasted.

Place all the vegetables in a large oven-proof dish and drizzle with a good amount of olive oil and seasoning. I don't think you need to add too many herbs or other flavours here because of the refried beans and lemon juice, but maybe some thyme, rosemary, or oregano could work well.

Cook for 30 minutes, in this time you can prepare the refried chipotle beans and salad.

Springtime roast with braised celery and paprika butternut squash mash

Sunday, Sunday here again! A few notes from a spring-time roast last week.

Celery is one of my all-time favourite flavours, and yet it sometimes feels a little side-lined, just one stick needed for each recipe, a few sticks garnishing a jug of bloody mary, left in the sieve from gravy, reduced down beyond any recognition in rich sauces. And all of those components are better with celery, but on it's own, it's strikingly salty flavour and texture can also be delicious. I lightly roasted a few sticks along with some carrots and onions last Sunday, so it came out juicy and almost the same taste as celeriac, (the bulb of the plant of which celery makes up the stalk), but without the aniseed flavour, which I can sometimes find overwhelming. One thing to bear in mind when seasoning the celery is that it does seem to absorb any salt it goes anywhere near.

With the braised celery I made a paprika butternut squash mash, adding some chili flakes and chili oil. The squash seemed to release a lot of liquid so I let it reduce on a low heat for about 20 minutes. You could also add a potato to the mash to absorb some of the excess liquid. This paired up well with some flash-cooked greens and leeks, barely boiled and left with a clean, light flavour to counter everything else going on. 

Roast potatoes, vegan haggis uncovered from the depths of the freezer and rosemary onion gravy completed a pretty huge Sunday roast line-up.

Soups to mend a broken heart: Hoskers' lentil soup

I'm not saying anyone's got a broken heart. What I'm saying is this soup is the culinary equivalent of Petula Clark's 1965 hit Downtown. This soup mends everything, fixes everything, warms everything and quells everything. This soup pretty much brought me up.

My best friend Rachael's Mum used to cook vats of this soup in a huge pressure cooker at their house over the weekend, when we'd wait in the kitchen to eat bowl after bowl. It would simmer away for hours before being blended into a smooth, rich liquid we'd dip pitta bread and bagels in to. When I moved away from home, the first thing I asked for to put in my new kitchen was a pressure cooker and a blender, so I could make this soup. It's not glamorous or show-stopping, it's delicious, cheap and sustaining.

We eat it before gigs, coming home from nights out, for Sunday lunch, for Monday lunch, for catch ups and for late-night suppers. It freezes well and will keep on the stove for around a day, deepening in flavour after a few hours. I've kept the Hoskers' recipe the same, just switching chicken stock for vegetable stock instead.

Makes enough for six bowls

Ingredients
1 mugful of red lentils, rinsed with a sieve
3 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
400 ml (or more) of vegetable stock
Few glugs of oil
Salt, pepper, and extra seasoning if you fancy it (chili, paprika, coriander all work well added at the end)

Take the largest pan you can find. Sweat an onion in oil for around five minutes. Add the chopped potato and carrot and stir in. Boil the kettle or prepare your stock so it is ready to pour in. Add the red lentils to the pan, mix in with all the vegetables, then add in the stock to ensure the lentils don't burn to the bottom of the pan. I would leave off seasoning for now until everything is cooked to gauage how the stock is absorbed by the lentils and vegetables.

Allow to simmer for around 30-40 minutes. Check back every 10 or 15 minutes or so to ensure the lentils haven't absorbed all the water. Top up with any leftover stock or water if this happens. Once the potatoes and lentils are cooked through, take off the heat and blend with a hand blender or mixer. Now season to taste, it may need quite a bit of salt to take the bitterness away from the lentils. I like to toast croutons to have along side this, or a huge loaf of bread to tear apart- so bowl up and enjoy.

Nut roast alternatives: Vegan haggis

Mark: Mmmm. Why toast when you can roast?

Jeremy: Another roast? That's the third today.
Mark: What's nicer than a roast?
Jeremy: Yeah, but, chain-eating roasts?

I'm not quite at chain-eating status yet, but with sooooo much amazing autumnal produce from Growing Communities, there seems to be enough food for at least three ginormous roast dinners every week. I'm not complaining, after all what's nicer than a roast? 

At the start of Autumn my friend Jenny suggested I tracked down some vegan haggis to try with a roast dinner. I haven't come across any in a shop yet, so instead, I've been working on my own recipe. Despite not having any of the traditional meat products in it, this haggis recipe is perfect when a nut roast just won't quite cut it, and I can confirm it also tastes amazing alongside tatties and neeps.

It's essential to watch The Life Aquatic while cooking Sunday lunch.

n.b. the ingredients list does look almost Ottolenghi in length, but most of these things will be hiding in your kitchen supplies- feel free to change the nuts or beans to ones you have in- the Vegetarian Society recipe I based this on asked for hazel nuts instead.

Makes enough for four

Ingredients

1 onion, chopped 

Few glugs of sunflower or vegetable oil 

4 carrots, very finely chopped

Handful of mushrooms, finely chopped 

50g red lentils

600ml vegetable stock 

25g mashed, tinned red or white kidney beans 

35g ground peanuts 

35g ground cashew nuts

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp lemon juice 

2 tsp dried thyme

2 tsp dried rosemary 

1 tsp dried curry mix

200g fine oatmeal 

Salt and pepper

Decide how you are going to cook and serve the haggis- I greased with oil four pie tins, a bread tin, and also some muffin tins, I'd say the pie tins were the perfect size portion. 

Preheat the oven to 190C. In a large pan sweat the onion in the oil for 5 minutes, then add the carrot and mushrooms and cook for a further 5 minutes. Add the lentils and about three quarters of the stock.

With the remaining stock, blend in the kidney beans and add this to the pan, along with the nuts, soy sauce, lemon juice and seasoning. Mix well and cook for another 10 to 15 minutes.

Now add the oatmeal and reduce the heat to a simmer, cooking for 15 to 20 minutes. Keep an eye on the mixture as the oats tend to stick to the bottom of the pan, so add more stock or water if needed. 

Garlic roasted beetroot to go along with the haggis

Spoon the mixture into your chosen tins and bake in the centre of the oven for around 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops go crispy.

The haggis freezes really well and just takes half a day to defrost in the fridge, so if you make extra you can store away for another roast- a perfect excuse!

EDIT

Congratulations Growing Communities!

I was so happy to find out on Sunday that Growing Communities won the Observer Food Monthly Awards 2012 for Best Independent Local Retailer. I cannot think of any company more deserving, or one that has changed my entire attitude to food any more. I feel like I talk about their vegetable box scheme all the time, but if that's true, it's because it's so damn good!!

As if to add to such good news, my walk down to collect the vegetable box was scattered with autumn leaves and the prize of a pumpkin at the end of it- the first one this season, to be found in our vegetable bag...

Safe to say it's now very much at home on my desk!

If you live in Hackney or near any of Growing Communities' schemes in the UK, there really is no reason not to give it a trial month. It costs me and my boyfriend each a pound per day to have all the fruit and vegetables we could want every week, they're seasonal, you know exactly where they've come from and the farmers that grew them, and they taste SO much better than anything you can find in a supermarket.

Well done Growing Communities! Such a deserved award!

Growing Communities Veg Boxes

One week's fruit and veg bag from Growing Communities in Hackney

Within two days of becoming vegan, I realised that I was going to have to make some major changes to how I shopped for food. It wasn't just that I was suddenly spending much more money on fresh food in the supermarket, but without the added flavour of things like grated cheese, roux sauces or mayonnaise, I realised the produce I was buying tasted bland, watered down and sort of a lost in translation version of how I expected them to taste. 


I'm ashamed to admit it was only after switching to a vegetable box scheme that I realised potatoes have distinct different flavours depending on variety, or that salad leaves actually HAVE a flavour, that changes from leaf to leaf, taking command over a sandwich when before I just used them as filler.

If I am totally honest, my vegetable box order has completly changed how I eat in every way. There's the obvious things: it's all seasonal, it's as local as possible, and it means a lot fewer trips to the supermarket. But the changes I didn't expect have been the best. 


Washing the mud off all your carrots until you can see the first signs of orange, or red for beetroot, or pink for potatoes, and you're reminded that everything you're dealing with came from the ground, not stackable plastic supermarket palettes. I know I sound mad here but when you take away the distractions, vegetables are bloody brilliant. 


Using supermarkets less means you waste a whole lot less food. There's no BOGOFs or weird impulse buys when most of what you're getting through arrives once a week. This also means we've had to become much more careful with how much food we cook each night. I used to stick in a whole bag of potatoes for mash and think nothing of it. Now I know the six potatoes we get have to last three meals- and any leftovers go for lunch. And there's always leftovers. 

Most of the fruit and vegetables featured on Guac and Roll will be from the Growing Communities vegetable and fruit bags. The variety and warts-and-all produce is down to them, and I can't thank them enough for completely changing how I think about the food I eat each day. 

Summer Suppers: Courgette and pea pasta with vegan basil and parsley pesto

Courgette and pea pasta with vegan basil and parsley pesto


Inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi's Fried courgette pasta in Plenty, this is a super easy dish to put together before the sun goes down, and of course, if you make enough it just gets better for lunch the next day.


Because the sauce here is a vegan pesto, the pasta is best if it's light and not shaped to absorb much sauce - the main thing is that you use plenty of the best olive oil you can get your hands on, as that's what will bring out the flavour in the courgettes and peas.

Yields four portions, i.e. dinner for two and lunch for two.


Ingredients:
400g pasta
1 courgette, chopped into 5mm width slices on the side
1 onion, chopped and diced
Two good handfuls of peas
1 handful of basil 
1/2 handful of parsley
Olive oil
Salt and pepper


Heat a frying pan with a little oil and start to fry the courgette pieces. It's vital you don't over-crowd the pan as they will go soggy and steam each other instead of crisp up. So take your time and do in three or four batches. Leave to drain away any excess oil in a colander over a plate.


Now you're only a few minutes away from serving, so put the kettle on to boil and pour into a saucepan with the pasta to start cooking, adding salt if you want.


Without washing the frying pan, add the onions and allow to go slightly translucent, then add the peas. They'll take on the oil and juices from the onion and taste even better.


If you have a herb chopper knife, chop the basil and parsley as small as it will go, and mix with around three or four tablespoons of olive oil, and plenty of salt and pepper. If you have a hand blender you could also use this to chop the herbs, or just use the sharpest knife you have to really chop it all up tiny. You've now got your vegan pesto.


Drain the pasta and allow to cool in the pan for a few seconds. In this time you can transfer the onions, peas and courgettes into a big serving dish. Pour in the pasta and the pesto to the mix, and then give everything a good stir. Add a little extra olive oil or pepper to taste, and you're good to go.