A sea of Sunflowers

 The weather was beautiful so a walk in the allotment was a joy. We were welcomed by a mass of sunflowers. Most of them self set  from seeds dropped in previous years.

Carmen, Keiko, Emi and Hiroe started with picking raspberries as a treat to take home. We picked both red and yellow ones. The we picked masses of spinach beet for our Vegan Spinach and Ginger soup.

   

Before we went to the allotment, we made the dough for wraps, as it needed to rest for 15 mins.

After picking sunflowers we walked home, prepared the  freshly harvested filling for the wraps (our first orange sweet peppers, carrots, cucumber tomatoes) and made our wraps 

      

Together with soup a gorgeous lunch and the ladies went home with a big bunch of sunflowers each.

First session back after lockdown

Today was a special day in our calendar as for the first time, we saw each other again in person.

Miho (who was pregnant when we last saw her) came with her baby son, who slept all the way through the  session, Simone our first ever member was back again for a few weeks before she starts work again and then we welcomed Maiko a new member.

Armed with hand sanitisers, masks and face shields, we made picked raspberries from the garden for our dessert,

 

The chickpeas we used later in a chickpea salad,  we made some Lazy dough which was then turned into some flatbread to go with the salad.

We had a little walk to the allotment, where we cut some runners of the strawberries, to plant into the bottles of our vertical bottle garden. We tasted the apples, tomatoes, yellow raspberries, nasturtium flowers all fresh from the garden.

What a lovely start we had.

Courgettes and pasta

After making ravioli today, I had some pasta dough left over so I turned it into tagliatelle.
Dried it and bagged it up for another day when I would need a quick meal.

Coming back from the allotment with a handful of courgettes, I wondered what to do with them.
Then the doorbell rang and my youngest son, paid us a surprise visit.

So out came the tagliatelle and found Nigella's recipe which was quick and extremely tasty.
Definitively one to do again, especially in courgette season.

Gnocchi, Sage, carrot top pesto

A few years ago Simone showed us how to make gnocchi. Ever since, I made it many times, if I had left over baked potatoes, as I had today. I once saw Gordon Ramsey, fry these beauties  which turned them into delicious crispy on the outside but airy on the inside bite sized gems. So today I find his recipe and made it for lunch. As I had thyme in the garden and still my garden peas in the freezer, a perfect lunch in the making.

From Spade to Plate 25/9/2018

As the last few weeks we have asked our international guests to give an idea to use our garden grown vegetables and herbs into some international dishes like Sushi and Samosas, this week we will use our potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, flowers, sage, and carrots to make Gnocchi with a batch of various sauces.

Simone came armed with some notes and showed us how her family used to make  Gnocchi.

With the 1 kg of desirée potatoes, 300 gr of flour and 1 egg  and a little salt, we managed to make a lovely light batch of Gnocchi.

Wash and boil the potatoes whole in salted water. 

Peel them when they're still warm, mash them and then mix them with flour and salt.

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Shape the mixture like a mound on a floured surface, make a hole in the middle and add the egg inside. Knead well and divide the potato dough into tennis-ball size portions. 

Sprinkle some flour onto the worktop and on your hands and roll the portions into long sausages. Cut segments of 3-4cm. Lightly press each segment onto a fork and roll it off the fork onto a plate to obtain the characteristic ridged shape. 

Tip: Double the ingredients and freeze what you don't need. You can freeze a ball of dough and then defrost it at room temperature on in the fridge overnight (microwave it at your peril!). If you want to freeze gnocchi, first place them onto a tray inside the freezer. When they are hard, bag them, this way they won’t stick together. Frozen gnocchi don't need to be defrosted. Just tip them into a saucepan full of hot, salted water.

*The best potatoes for gnocchi are floury ones with minimum water content - the red-skinned variety is also great.

Cook gnocchi into a saucepan full of salted, boiling water. Gnocchi need to be cooked only for a few minutes, when they rise to the surface they are ready! Drain carefully not to mash them and serve.

We made two sauces to go with the gnocchi.

One of which is a carrot and walnut pesto

The other was creamy tomato sauce

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Gnocchi with sage and parmesan butter

For the sauce: 

This post was first made on 25/9/2018

Apple cider and blackberry balsamic vinegar

This post was first posted on 11/9/2017

Today I found a bucket full of windfall apples so decided to turn them into  apple cider vinegar.
Gillie's blackberries were already ripe and felt like turning them into blackberry balsamic vinegar

       

In September 2017 our From Spade to Plate group harvested apples for eating, storing, pressing and turning into vinegar.

Autumn is here, fresh mornings but when the sun breaks through it is glorious.

We started off  by sorting the apples. The best ones were used for storing and eating, the slightly blemished ones were turned into vinegar and used for  pressing the pears and apples to make some lovely juice. Then the rain came and we went inside to make the main meal.

The summer vegetables are starting to show signs of wanting to be harvested. I have decided to harvest the french beans Faraday  ( that we sowed on 19th June)  they were lovely and tender.

 and harvest the new potatoes (put the sprouting charlotte potatoes from Aldi in the ground in June after I had eaten the lettuces) to make space for the winter onions and garlic (later next month).

Served with a tomato, mozarella and basil salad.


This went down very well.
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3 toppers for the new book

This post was first made on 27/11/2019

As today I had some left over mushrooms and newly harvested onions, I looked back with great joy and remembered the time we made stuffed mushrooms with Alice, Carmen, Li, Erika, Irine, and Sima. I have not seen them for such a long time. I hope they are well.

As I am hoping to get the 3rd cookery book published in the next couple of weeks, I wanted to put in 3 recipes that we had done before, tasted delicious and fancied eating them again.

A bit of a strange combination but a hit nonetheless.
We first made the chickpea chocolate brownies, a gluten free recipe which went down very well. Sema our newest member who claims that she cannot cook, treated us to some gorgeous brownies. We added a cherry from the cherry jam we made last year, and a dollop of greek yoghurt. 

We also made a cheese roll wreath, 

a wonderful recipe, easy to do and great for parties when people can just help themselves to a roll (or two) We use the Lazy dough recipe and then added a block of cheese and the parmesan and italian herbs in oil to spread on top     

Our main meal was the stuffed mushrooms, if only we could have had more of them.
   

  

Carmen suggested that instead of an empty ramekin in the middle of the bread wreath, we could have put in the stuffing we used for the mushroom; colourful and extremely tasty.

Will no doubt make these recipes more often, but for now they will end up in the recipe book.