Beetroot hummus with charred dippers

It's way too hot to stick anything in the oven right now, so instead I'm not ashamed to say I fantasized about beetroot hummus for most of Tuesday.

Beet hummus is a great way of brightening up some aperitifs or grab-and-go dinners, and is much lighter than regular hummus so you don't need to worry about filling up before a show-stopping main course. The deep pink shade of hummus coupled with the oily wrap dippers make a perfect understated entrance for guests and is refreshing enough to serve mid-heatwave.

I would team this with some giant green olives on ice and some herb toasted almonds, or just a few cold wheat beers and plenty of the dipper wraps pictured above and below.

Makes enough for four as a dip

Ingredients

4 beetroots, peeled and cut into quarters

1 tin of chickpeas, drained

2 garlic cloves, chopped small

1 tsp ground cumin

2 tbsp tahini

Juice of one lemon

Seasoning

Olive oil to taste

Plus flour wraps to serve

Boil the beetroot in salted water until they are soft and can be pierced with a fork. Once cooked, chop into smaller pieces to make it easier to blend.

In a large mixing bowl, add the chickpeas, garlic cloves, cumin, tahini and lemon juice, along with the chopped beetroot. Using a hand blender or mixer if you have one, blend until smooth. The consistency will be lighter than normal hummus, so don't be worried if it isn't as thick. Add olive oil and seasoning to taste once you've blended, and set aside.

For the charred dippers, use a griddle pan to fry flour wraps on a high heat with olive oil for a few seconds (about 10) on each side. Then chop into quarters or eighths and get scooping!

BBQ sessions: Sweet potato and lime falafel with plantain and lime and coriander hummus

The only thing funnier than British people moaning about the heat is British people moaning about moaning the heat. Rest assured, this blog is a no-moan zone. Why moan when you can eat falafel?

These sweet potato and lime falafels are uber easy and perfect for making in advance for a BBQ. They also use a lot less flour and oil than other versions that are fried. They're very soft when straight out the oven, but leave them for half an hour or so to cool and they firm up, and proved the perfect summer accompaniment to my packed lunch! Heck, they survived a 7 mile cycle into work- these things are a falafel miracle.

Makes enough for four servings

Ingredients
For the falafel:
1 large or 2 medium sweet potatoes
1 tsp ground cumin
2 garlic cloves, chopped small
1 handful fresh coriander
Juice of 1 lime
100g plain flour
Seasoning
1 tbsp oil

Heat the oven to 200C. Wrap the sweet potatoes in kitchen roll and microwave for 8-10 minutes, until they are cooked the whole way through (you can check with a fork). Allow to cool for a minute or two before taking off their skins, which you should be able to do with your fingers.

Add to a large mixing bowl with the cumin, garlic, coriander, lime juice, flour and a little seasoning, and mash until smooth. Using a teaspoon, shape the potato mix into falafel-sized balls, I usually get around 16-20 out of a batch. Depending on the consistency, you can add a little oil to make the mixture wetter, or chose to leave it out.

Place on a greased oven tray and bake for around 30 minutes. They are very soft whilst baking so I would resist the temptation to try and turn them and just let them cook through.

While they are cooking, slice the ends of the plantain and vertically score one side of each from tip to top. Wrap up the plantain tight with foil and stick it towards the bottom of the oven, to cook alongside the falafel, or prepare now and save to cook on the BBQ.

For the lime and coriander hummus, follow this Guac & Roll hummus recipe, but  instead of lemon juice, pomegranate seeds and paprika, add lime juice and stick with the coriander.

The falafel and plantain should be ready at the same time, so either allow to cool and pack up for a BBQ or begin stacking into pitta breads for a quick, light lunch in the sunshine, sans moan!

Superhero food: Roasted hazelnut, pomegranate and radish salad

Radishes make me really happy. There, I said it. I love the colour pop, I love the spicy crunch and I love their tree-trunk pattern. They're also a great source of that infamous vitamin B6 everyone keeps asking me about. I teamed up them with hazelnuts, which are also rich in protein and a load of other B vitamins, but mainly because I love the taste of hazelnuts that lingers between sweet and savoury, which is made even more apparent when toasting. Pile 'em on fellas and get crunching!

I made this salad for brunch with soft polenta, roasted mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. I also added some pomegranate molasses for a dressing but I think it works just as well left plain and extra refreshing.

Makes enough for four as a side dish

200g hazelnuts
1 handful of radishes
2 inches cucumber
Pomegrante seeds from half a pomegranate
Different types of salad leaves

In a dry pan, toast the hazelnuts on a low heat for about 3-5 minutes. You'll know when they are ready as they will start to brown and you will be able to smell the oil from the nuts toasting.

Keeping an eye on the nuts, slice the radishes and cucumber and arrange with the salad leaves. Sprinkle the pomegranate seeds on top.

Roughly chop the nuts- leaving some whole, and place over the salad, mixing a little to make sure all the good stuff doesn't roll to the bottom if you're using a salad bowl.

Serve with warm polenta, juicy mushrooms or just the pomegranate molasses for a tasty wake-up call.

Breakfast like a king, notes on the best meal of every day

In the pub last night with some friends we got talking about how different diets can boost your mood- that classic "yeah live a healthy lifestyle okay" attitude we all take for granted. The main recurring issue seemed to be that everyone said they didn't have time to organise every part of their day to be healthy, and that's something I can defo agree with. Chips in the kebab shop are a way too-frequent occurrence on my weekly meals rota!

It was this sense of not having enough time that used to mean I never, ever ate breakfast. When I moved away from home and was studying I didn't eat until 5pm at the earliest. Crazeh times. In any case, I've realised through a few good pals that always seem to be switched on from dawn til dusk that breakfast is, in fact, the bomb.

In the winter I'm pretty much a porridge or bust kinda lady. I don't even care about soy milk any more. Hand me the goddamn water and oats perlease. But by summer I guess there's reason to be a bit more adventurous- here are a few ideas for vegan breakfasts:

In reality, no one has time for freshly baked breakfast muffins or tracking down that bit of the smoothie blender that got used as an ashtray last time you had people round. Ta. Working on a five minute preparation-limit, the easiest thing for a vegan breakfast is to have some uber nice museli hidden away somewhere at your desk, some soy milk in the work fridge and some pieces of fruit in your bag. I usually add a vegan hot chocolate for extra decadence/motivation to see the day through to lunchtime. Be sure to pick a museli with plenty of nuts and seeds like almonds and brazil nuts and you'll be getting a good helping of protein and essential nutrients. Whack three pieces of fruit in and you're basically on the 5-a-day home run.

At the weekend I say no holds barred, go all out. Fried mushrooms with shallots and dried herbs on ciabatta are almost easy enough to make before your first coffee (almost, I said, almost) or there's homemade baked beans OR American-style pancakes with banana and cinnamon. Go on, go on, go on, go on.

Gazpacho sweats and sangria withdrawal

A staple Catalan diet (maybe) of sangria and gazpacho

Hey, I'll admit it, I wasn't holding out much hope for an easy vegan ride in Barcelona. Considering Spain ranks as one of the highest meat consuming countries per capita in the world, I figured it would be paprika crisps, watermelon and black coffee most meals, if my (admittedly brief) stays in Poland and Italy were anything to go by.

So you can only imagine the relief that began to seep in after a few days in Barcelona and at Primavera Sound. There's stuff vegans can eat here! People know what that word is! There's VEGANAISE!! By the time I left Spain I'd tried more vegan food than I had ever imagined I would and have basically never eaten better on holiday. Scotland was more difficult. Who am I kidding, central London is more difficult.

We stayed in the centre of Barcelona where things like soy milk, plain pasta sauces and a lot of gorgeous fruit are easy to come by. The Turkish shops sell falafel wraps until the small hours and a lot of the bars will bring you a selection of vegan tapas dishes if you ask extra nice.

Espinacas a la Catalana, or, the best spinach you've ever tasted

But even when we ventured into the mountains- an hour's train ride out of Barcelona, we were able to make up a huge vegan, gluten free picnic with some of the most delicious food I've ever tasted- a tray of Catalan spinach cooked with olive oil and pine nuts was so rich we had to pretty much roll back to the cable car and down into the valley.

But it was the vegan food stall at Primavera Sound that changed EVERYTHING. I ate vegan brownies whilst watching Deerhunter, a vegan thali at 3am before Hot Chip and veganaise with (not so hot) chips at pretty much every opportunity. I would probably have eaten my way through the entire stall if we'd stayed any longer.

¡Muchas Gracias Spain! 

We're caught in a trap: The perils of potato dauphinoise

Few people are able to understand the heartache that comes with adoring potato dauphinoise. Amelie is one of these people. Not only did she cook me, Ruth and Keelan the most perfect vegan potato dauphinoise ever, but in the same week managed to get into some kind of virtual tussle with Felicity Cloake over what exactly makes up such a flawless yet infamously tricky dish.

See, the problem with potato dauphinoise is that when it's done right, it's a wall of creamy potato, infused in garlic with an impossible-to-place yet omnipresent nutmeg seasoning. It's the kind of side dish that people row over at Sunday lunch. It's the kind of dinner I've been known to simply take out of the oven and walk off to my room with, oven mits still in hand.

So, conversely, when it's done wrong, when there's cheese, clumps of garlic, onion, ham, bacon, egg, (THESE HAVE ALL HAPPENED TO ME) it's heartbreaking, and why, until now, I had never even attempted to go near it with soy cream.

My Nanny was also one of the few people who fully comprehended the gravity of the gratin. Her potato dauphinoise was secretly also Marks and Spencer's, carefully re-assembled in her own crockery, heated to perfection and shared out among my aunts and uncles. Everyone always wanted more dauphinoise, but once it had all been served up, my portion never seemed big enough. I soon worked out that if I went to see my Nanny in the kitchen twenty minutes after dessert, she'd let me help her 'tidy up' the plastic microwave-able dish the dauphinoise came in, our stealth second helpings disguised by the rumble of the dishwasher.

Just as I tried to savour my helping of creamy potatoes as a child, I now only ever make dauphinoise when nothing else will do. Sick days, birthdays and bad days, when life gives me lemons, I can still be found in the kitchen tidying up bits of leftover potato. This one is for you Nanny!

This is based on Amelie's recipe for potato dauphinoise. I would use fresh nutmeg over ground anytime, but ground is better than nothing, so just use what you have in. Unlike some other recipes I've seen, the potatoes are not parboiled, as this means any moisture they soak up is also from the cream, making it far richer and less likely to go gloopy or too sloppy. A slice of this should stand up on its own.

Makes enough for 4, or 2 if you are not in a sharing mood. Let's be realistic.

Ingredients
500ml cartons soy cream
Fresh nutmeg
Salt, pepper
4 garlic cloves, sliced in half
400g potatoes, peeled and sliced as thinly as possible, around 1mm- 4mm thick.

Gently heat the soy cream in a pan, with a good amount of seasoning and about 1 tsp of nutmeg. Add in three of the garlic cloves and allow to simmer. It's much better to add the salt here, so taste the cream to test if it needs any more. Once heated through, remove and discard the garlic from the cream and set aside while you prepare the dauphinoise dish.

Preheat the oven to around 180 degrees Celsius.

Using the remaining garlic clove, rub a wide, shallow dish all over with the cut-open side of the clove. You may need to use both halves to get a thorough coating.

Then begin to layer up the potatoes, slightly overlapping the edges as you work across the dish. Once you've completed a layer, pour over a quarter of the cream and grate some more fresh nutmeg over. You should be able to do around 3-4 of these layers, before pouring the rest of the cream over the last of the potatoes.

Place in the middle of the oven and cook for at least 40 minutes. The top potatoes should be crispy, the middle and bottom piping hot. Allow to stand for a few minutes before serving, or bribing everyone else to leave.

Notes from a vegan picnic

At the start of the month Amelie had a picnic to celebrate her birthday and it was a BONANZA. I was running preeeety late by the time I got to the park, having decided to make homemade pizza and guacamole with pomegranate seeds half an hour before the picnic started. But it didn't matter- there was a feast to get through...

Amelie and Ruth had made falafel, potato salad with purple potatoes and vegan soy cream, homemade hummus with homemade tahini (mind blown), hard lemonade (it involved gin) and a whole lot of other stuff I can't remember, probably because of the hard lemonade. Joe and Becca made some amazing cous cous salads and an aubergine and tomato sort of stew with so much olive oil it was the richest, tastiest thing I think I've ever eaten at a picnic.

We finished with a gluten free, vegan birthday cake made by Ruth. Happy belated Birthday Amelie!!