Aubergine & Eggplant

Crispy Vegetable & Noodle Soup

 

I've always appreciated the concept of soups: the way they fill you up with relatively few calories, their all encompassing meal-in-a-bowl nature and the ability to accommodate all the odds and sods from the fridge or the vegbox.

I dislike soups for equally persuasive reasons, however. The tendency to be slimey, the lack of chewing involved and, often, the lack of umami flavour.

So this Crispy Vegetable & Noodle Soup covers all my dislikes of the soup genre, and manages to include cabbage. Which is incredible because I really don't like cabbage. The solution to the sliminess is to fry the veg in a mixture of butter and garlic oil and not adding them until just before serving - they stay crispy, and get a bit of brown crunch adding a bit of the all-important umami. I've included noodles because I love noodles, but this soup would be more virtuous and would hardly suffer without them. It took me all of 30 minutes to make, including having to run and settle the Monkey back to sleep twice in the middle of it. 

Crispy Vegetable & Noodle Soup
(serves 2 moderately hungry people, one starving person)

2 leeks, sliced
1 small courgette, sliced into coins
1 small head of broccoli, chopped into small florets, stalked chopped into small chunks
1 corner of a small cabbage, chopped into thin strips (chiffonade)
1 stock cube (I used chicken, but veg is fine if you're looking to stay vegetarian) or a pint and a bit of proper homemade stock you have in the freezer because you're a better person than I am
60g fine egg noodles (I like Manischewitz)
1 tbsp butter
garlic-infused olive oil
Small handful of flat leaf parsley, torn

1. Put about a pint and a bit of water on to boil in a medium saucepan, and drop in the stock cube, or get your homemade stock boiling.

2. Heat the butter and olive oil in a frying pan over medium-low heat and add the leeks. 

3. Turn up the heat under the frying pan and add the courgettes and broccoli, ladling in some stock if the pan dries out - this is for lubrication only, you shouldn't have any liquid sloshing around in the pan. Toss the veg often, you should be getting some colour on them now. 

4. The stock should be boiling, add in your egg noodles. The Manischewitz package says they take 8 minutes or something to cook, I find it's more like 4 minutes. Regardless, boil until they are just about ready but not quite - remember they're going to sit in hot liquid for awhile.

5. Add the cabbage to the frying pan, and toss in another spoonful of stock. Everything should be getting a bit brown and wonderful now. Pull it off the heat once the cabbage is bright green with some brown bits.

6. Tip some of the veg in a soup bowl, pouring the stock on after. Sprinkle with the flat leaf parsely and serve!

Quick Roast Lamb Leftovers Solution

Just over a month ago I had my first child. Which is lovely and magical and all those things, but it also means the time available for cooking has shrunk to five to ten minute windows that can be interrupted at any time. Researching, prepping and fussing over finnicky recipes is out, for now. Anything I can bung in a roasting tin for long periods of time with some veg is featuring heavily on the family menu at the moment. Which is great, but it also means there are odd bits of meat leftover - not always enough to recreate the meal as a rerun for two people.

So, inspired by a Donna Hay recipe I couldn't quite remember, I threw together this quick dish. You could use any leftover roast - chicken, beef, pork. In this case, I had a chunk of roast leg of lamb. It's nothing earth-shattering, but the combination of textures makes it something a bit more than the average stuff-in-a-tortilla thing.

Quick Lamb Wraps
(serves 2)

Leftover roast meat of some sort, cut into bite-sized chunks
Hummous
1 each orange & yellow peppers, sliced
2 carrots, peeled and finely grated
4 flour tortillas
Olive oil

1. Heat a pan over medium heat, and add a small quantity of olive oil, whatever you need to keep things from sticking, but no more. Stir fry your meat so it colours a bit, but be careful not to overcook it. 

2. Add the peppers to the meat for a moment or two - we want to keep the crunch in the peppers, so don't go overboard. Turn off the heat.

3. Heat the tortillas in the microwave by putting them on a plate between two pieces of kitchen paper for 20 seconds. 

4. Spread each tortilla with a tablespoon of hummous, then the meat and peppers, and top with the grated carrot. Roll up and eat!

Parmesan-crusted courgette

Celia Brooks Brown kindly included my tweeted suggestion of what to do with courgettes, quickly, in her Urban Farmer column in The Times. Which, in 140 characters, is a bit of a challenge. My suggestion went like this: “coat medium courgette slices in balsamic & grated parm, then dry fry”.

Here's the verbose version.

Parmesan-crusted courgettes

2 or 3 small courgettes, sliced into coins about 5mm thick, or those fancy long oblong slices
Balsamic vinegar
A good pile of finely grated Parmesan cheese, or go for something similar but cheaper, like Gran Padano

1. Put your courgette slices into a bowl and just cover with the vinegar. Leave them to soak for a couple minutes.

2. Put the Parmesan on a small plate, and dredge each slice in it. I found it easier to put the slice on the Parmesan and then pile some cheese on top and press down with the tongs. 

3. Heat a non-stick frying pan on medium-high heat. The non-stick element is critical here, by the way. Fry your slices for a minute or so a side - keep an eye on these and don't wander off, they burn quickly. Some of them won't keep their cheesy coating so well, that's okay. Just scoop up the crusty, vinegary cheese bits and crumble over your courgette slices. This is why the non-stick pan is necessary, this could get very very messy if you have to scrape this off. Serve immediately. 

Growing your own vegetables

 

I've never been good at growing things, so when we moved into this new flat with a raised bed in the back garden, I didn't think I could do much with it.

But the lure of trying out this gardening thing in the privacy of my own back garden so no one could see how many mistakes I made was too much... and so I went a bit, well, crazy.

I did all the things you're supposed to do: watch too many episodes of Gardener's World and Beechgrove, order random inappropriate and outlandish seeds and have dreams about a bounty of vegetables instantaneously. Patience has never been one of my best qualities, so some would say gardening isn't really the best kind of thing for me.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and planted a bunch of things anyway, some of them by following the proper instructions and some things by just chucking a pile of seeds on the compost and hoping for the best. Thankfully, the seeds I've thrown out there - lettuces and salad crops - are sort of meant to be thrown.

We've got tomatoes I've grown from seed - Moneymaker and Gardener's Delight, lots of potatoes both in the garden and a couple patio bags - Charlottes and Foremosts, mint leftover from before, some struggling rocket, flat leaf parsley, two pak choi which we've already eaten, some thyme and a big patch of assorted lettuces - some Lolla Rosa, some random bowl lettuce, some random salad seeds I got free with a catalogue or something. There's also some mangetout and climbing french beans I've just put in, and some courgettes are sprouting on the window sill. 

Of course, at the moment there's not a whole lot to actually eat from the garden yet. Waiting, waiting, waiting. I'm not always good at this part.

Fresh

Historically speaking, I have always hated peas. In company I will swallow whatever ends up on my fork, but in private I have no trouble dedicating whatever time it takes to pry little green pellets out of a frozen dinner before I put it in the microwave.

So snow peas [mange-tout] were an abject lesson in "never say never"  for me, and the first sugar snap pea was an even more embarrassing crow-eating event.They are both divine. Who knew?

When snow peas were suddenly available only in little plastic envelopes shipped all the way from China, I stopped buying them. Sad. And incomprehensible. Snow peas are so easy to grow, why don't we have local ones?

In protest I planted my own this summer, both snow peas and sugar snaps. And on the why-stop-there principle, I also planted spinach (yum, green teeth), scarlet runner beans, carrots, tomatoes and zucchini. My luck ran out after the beans, but never mind.

With very little effort of my own, I had vegetables. Sweet, tender, spinach – enough to share with friends. Beans big enough to hold up a tent. And oh my gawd the peas. On my knees, religious experience, this is what we're supposed to be eating, peas. Humbling, move me to say thank you to the pea vines, peas.There is only one word I can think of to describe how they actually tasted– fresh.

I'd take a picture, but I've eaten them all.