Spring on your plate..

After last week’s experiments with the lovely vegetables in my veg box delivery, I have followed one of my own recipes a few more times since as it was so good!!! My shawarma vegetables were so tasty, that I’ve replicated it with various different mixes of vegetables, and have found that it has worked every time.  

 The mix of spices with the olive oil and lemon juice is so fresh and flavoursome that I’ve eaten it salted but also eaten it raw, it makes a great salad 🙂

This week I had kale in the veg box so the dish contained red onion, leek, slivers of carrot and kale, along with the cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon, salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice.   

Just gorgeous!

On seeing the photos of my first vegetable box, Suzanne had told me about recipes using the green carrot tops, so this week I threw them in too and sautéed them along with everything else.   

    It came out nicely and great to use even more of the produce. 

   And of course, even better topped with tahini sauce!  

Last week I had slightly different items in the box, which lead to this creation…yum…

Really I just wanted to treat you to a page full of fresh, beautiful, colourful vegetables!! What a great welcome to spring hey?!

I hope your week is starting well, check back on Wednesday to read a very special edition of ‘What would you feed me?’ this week xx

 

My veg box..part 3: roasted kohlrabi & root vegetables with two new dips



Kohlrabi is a new vegetable to me, I know I’ve read recipes from some of you who have used it, but I’d never tasted it. I looked up what it tastes like and decided to do my favourite thing with new vegetables: roast it and check it out! 

So I peeled and chopped it and threw it in a bowl with peeled and chopped butternut squash plus the carrots and shallots from the veg box, then tossed it all in Mrs Middletons rapeseed oil with some of my own moroccan spice mix..

Having tried a bit of the raw kohlrabi it seemed to me to taste a bit like a mild radish, with an element of parsnip to it. It was nice 🙂 

I roasted the vegetables at 200C I until I deemed them nicely done then mixed them with yesterday’s leftover quinoa and topped it all with flaked roasted almonds. It was wonderful tasty already but I decided to add some moisture with some dips..

I made a version of ‘toum’, the Lebanese garlic sauce I mentioned in yesterday’s post; this version includes greek yoghurt and a lot less garlic that is typical – so it doesn’t burn your mouth out!! 

I blended together:

400g 0% greek yoghurt

40g olive oil

30g lemon juice

1/2 – 1tsp salt (to taste) 

2/3 cloves raw garlic

Lovely!!!! Drizzle it over everything!! 

The other dip was an experiment: I had some leftover shawarma vegetables and quinoa from yesterday, so I whizzed them up with a good couple of tablespoons of greek yogurt plus some olive oil and it was so tasty!! Definitely worth having leftovers!! 

What a lovely lunch! And what fun I’ve had with my first veg box..:) I hope you’ve been inspired x 





My veg box fun…part 1

You may recall that I mentioned that I received my first vegetable box delivery last Friday evening? It was from a local business ‘Luke’s Local Produce‘ and delivered by Luke himself, a nice young man with an interest in food – so he must be nice!!! 

I had no idea what to expect and I’ve been very happily impressed by the produce, it definitely brought new items into my vegetable world and challenged me to make new dishes, of which you will be seeing a few more posts this week..for now, let me tell you, the box included potatoes, carrots, parsnips (the photos of these three were taken AFTER washing off the mud!), shallots, mushrooms, a red onion, a HUGE leek, a kohlrabi….

….stunning purple kale, broccoli tops….

…and, wait for it….sprout flowers…a really new one to me…



…aren’t they beautiful?? And all this for £10! Very nice 🙂 Some items needed to be used sooner than others, which is no problem for me, and now, nearly a week on all I’ve got left is a couple of potatoes. 

So, to start with I made kale chips with the purple kale and threw in some of the sprout flowers too and they crisped up nicely too.



I washed both sets of the vegetables and dried them as much as possible, then chopped the flowers from the main thick purple stalk, and cut the kale leaves from the or stalks and cut them into pieces.

I heated the oven to 140C fan assisted. 

I sprayed the leaves and the flowers with olive oil spray, making sure it covered everything by moving through the leaves with my hands as I sprayed the oil, and seasoned them with salt and pepper, then laid them in a single layer on a sheet of baking paper on an oven tray.



I cooked them for 5-6 minutes then turned the tray and cooked for another 5-6 minutes then took them out and forced myself not to eat them all immediately whilst they crisped up a bit more. 

The sprout flowers needed to be cooked for a bit longer – you need to judge it yourself really, getting the leaves crispy but not overdone. 



This was just the beginning…and a very nice beginning it was too 🙂 

Check back tomorrow for the next dish veg box dish – something completely new x



My veg box..part 2: shawarma vegetables and quinoa

In the Middle East “shawarmas” are typical street food that you can buy on every corner as the sun goes down; shawarmas are Lebanese rolled, wrapped sandwiches, made in round ‘khobez’ arabic bread, with marinated, spit cooked chicken or lamb, wrapped up with pickled vegetables and ‘toum’, a garlic sauce; the smells are glorious and even though I don’t eat meat anymore, I can still fully appreciate the aroma and flavours that go into that sandwich – I remember them very well. They make shawarmas at the open air Lebanese restaurant at the bottom of my Mum’s building in Abu Dhabi and the smell of the spit cooking in the warm Middle Eastern air mingling with the many and varied perfumes worn by everyone, is one of my most favourite aromas.

I now know the spice mix that is used to create those flavours and use it regularly on chicken for my boys, but at the weekend, I applied it to some of veg box produce, and it was a winner 🙂

This is a dish of flavour, freshness and colour…a vegetarian taste of the Middle East, which I teamed with quinoa to create a healthy tasty lunch..

I chopped up the mushrooms, sliced the leek and red onion, and chopped up the broccoli tops, the leaves and the few little pieces of broccoli. I sprinkled these with:

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp green cardamon powder

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp salt (I use about 1/2 for my tastes)

…stirred it all through, drizzled freelly with olive oil and lemon juice, and stirred through again to spread it throughout the vegetables. I then left them to marinate for a good couple of hours. 

Whilst they marinated I cooked the quinoa in my own unique way.



When I was ready to cook the vegetables, I sautéed them on the hob/stove over a medium heat until they were cooked, but maintained a slight crunch, as is my choice. I then threw in half the cooked quinoa and stirred it through to warm it up. At the same time, I sautéed the rest of the sprouts flowers in another pan. 



When it was all warmed through, I added roasted flaked almonds and pomegranate seeds to finish the dish and threw on the sprout flowers. Yum yum yum!! 

Love it!!!! This was soooooo good!!! 

Part 3 of my veg box fun is coming tomorrow with even more new ideas…for now, I’m bringing my shawarma vegetables and quinoa to this week’s Fiesta Friday blog party, co hosted this week by Mila nd Jhuls ……. Come along and join the fun! 

Have a great Friday everyone xx