only a matter of time: mantecatura

well it was only a matter of time that food would come to be a big part of our garden blog, but in order to avoid blogging more about food than about gardening, i present to you:

mantecatura

it's our new food diary, so that we can recall all of the yummy things we come across and just happen to be made in our kitchen, the mantecatura is the final part of making risotto after all of the hard work has been done, adding butter and cheese to it all ... enjoy!

more goodies

this past weekend we had a wonderful time in london with jo, ed, and georgia, where we had a great dinner ...

 

that included sweet potato fritters and sweet potato humous!!!!  originally they were supposed to be made out of carrots, but it seems like global giant tesco had difficulty stocking the lowly carrot, so the sweet potato had to do (the cruel irony is that we may never be able to grow sweet potato in our allotment), but after we got back we felt in the mood to try fritters again, this time we opted for one half of an ottolenghi recipe, and dinner's main elements (minus the accompanying rice) looked like this:

counter-clockwise starting from the chard, pine nut and goat's cheese fritters (no, i am not joking - and they don't look so great in this photo but are really delicious), below there is corn from our garden, and then there are these:

breaded courgette/zucchini flowers!!! m referred to these as "vegetable donuts" and "naughty food," they were great, and at the end of the season when our plants get a little bit stressed they produce even more flowers, so we may be having this a little bit more regularly (baby likes this kind of donut!), but nearly the first thing we did when we got home on sunday was make these:

lavender shortbread cookies! we have slowly been working through a whole raft of lavender cookie recipes to find the greatest of them all and this shortbread recipe is surely in the running ... we are obsessed by lavender cookies!

diy protein!

one of the strange side affects of vegetarianism is a possible obsession with processed proteins ... basically my own veggie trajectory went like this:

• became a vegetarian with no idea how to eat
• realized that i was eating like a meat-eater but just without the meat
• learned how to cook
• learned how to cook pretty well
• began to understand that anything you see you can make yourself

no matter what stage you're at, though, processed proteins are everywhere: veggie burgers, fake meats, quorn (whatever it actually is), veggie sausage, tofurkey, flavored tofu (and tempeh, but I have never seen this in the UK), nut roasts,  even premade falafel ... this makes sense only if you consider that the processed protein is the hallmark of modern meat-eating (of the truly cultivated meat-eater): the tv dinner, the chicken nugget, the fast-food burger, the bacon flavored cheese slice, or worse  ... so corporate vegetarianism simply took a page from the agri-business handbook on how to mass-market their protein, and i have enjoyed it for the 18 years of my vegetarianism, but no longer!

the problem with these "meats" is not that they are meaty trompe l'oeil (this is a different question altogether), but that they are processed, they come with a lot of packaging, they take a huge amount of energy to freeze and store in massive grocery freezers, and given the ingredients they are amazingly expensive (and in the case of quorn, there is no real proof that the matter we are eating is physically of this planet)!

so, i present to you our "chicken:"

it's seitan, made from wheat gluten flour and seasoned with one of mark bittman's seasonings, actually it's a hybrid of the vital wheat gluten seitan recipe, mark bittman's golden stock and a clever video from everyday dish tv that showed the trick to the holy grail of corporate vegetarianism: how to make tofurkey! most importantly, it was a snap to make!

here it is after an hour boiling:

and here is the end product, not bad for our first time ...

• 100g of store bought fake chicken "slices:" £1.50
• 1.25 kg of homemade fake chicken: £.90

• knowing that you are just a few steps away from liberating yourself from the freezer section at your local healthfood store/tesco/walmart forever: priceless

the next frontier is veggie sausage and then BACON AKA THE RASHER!!!

two great recipes

basically, with the exception of mushrooms, we have been completely veggie self-sufficient since the beginning of july and things look set to continue like that for a while now, the last couple of years has established this pattern that by the middle of summer we are eating solely from the allotment ... the good news is that it is ridiculously healthy, the somewhat burdensome news is that you don't want to eat the same thing over and over again, so a constant stream of new recipes is called for, and just recently we have had two killers:

first, there is our great fennel red sauce recipe, i have no idea where we first got the idea for this, but we have been making it for the last two years now, and we picked our first fennel bulbs just the other days so i thought i would try it out with fresh fennel for the first time:

1-2 cups cubed fennel bulb (the more the better)

1 large yellow onion

2 400g/12 oz cans of chopped tomatoes

1/3 cup cream

this recipe is crazy simple and good, just:

1) cube the fennel bulb and dice the onion, sweat them together in a skillet over medium heat for 20 minutes, the fennel must be tender and it is ok if they get somewhat caramelized 

2) once the fennel is tender add the tomatoes and let the mixture simmer for about another 20 minutes, at which point you

3) take the skillet off the heat and mix in the cream,  salt and pepper to taste, and then serve straight away, it's an amazing sauce

the second recipe is a zucchini and potato charlotte, its just a little more complicated and comes from the Silver Spoon, but you can also look here to see a version of it ... this was insane, and it came out nearly perfect the first time we made it, the original Silver Spoon version has these changes:

1) use parmesan rather than fontina

2) 1/2 cup of cream rather than milk

3) one leek rather than a bunch of scallions (of all of the substitutions this is the one that i don't get, perhaps this is some kind of primordial culinary fault line that i am not aware of but leeks beat scallions any day in my mind)

please, all of our faithful readers (that is all 1 or maybe 2 of you), please make these two dishes right away!