Tag: cookery books recipe testing

This was a really beautiful colourful dish and contains everything that I love, including a cheese element. If I have said it once I’ll say it over and over again – I don’t feel the need to buy any special ingredients for my vegetarian meals and this is what I love most about this cookery book. It just focusses on good fresh vegetables. Cooking a dish like this one with the squash and chard I do feel works particularly well later in the season when we are past the season of wanting to cook outdoors.

I served this with the Yuzu Mushrooms with coriander and cashews. I somehow failed to get a decent photo of this dish, so apologies for this. I was intrigued to try the yuzu juice, which was a lovely different citrus taste. I now have a handy bottle of this to use in other dressings.

This dish I failed to include in my first part of this ‘Cook the whole book’ challenge. I made a point of preparing this dish on holiday as we were in Wales so it seemed rather apt. We even went to a small deli/cheese shop in Camarthen to buy some interesting Welsh cheese, rather than using the cheddar suggested in the recipe. I cannot remember if I have ever made Glamorgan sausages before; I have certainly intended to and recommended them to others. I was very pleased with the way that these turned out, particularly as this was a recipe which required a little precision and I’d normally have weighed the cheese and the breadcrumbs. However there were no scales in our holiday cottage. I liked the way that these ‘sausages’ held well together, which is not always the case with vegetable sausages and burgers. I can imagine that they would indeed work well on the barbecue. I cannot now remember what I served them with, but a spicy tomato sauce and some potato salad would work well. I did make too many, so we had the remaining two as part of a cooked breakfast a couple of days later.

Sadly we did not have enough courgettes in the garden to make this dish, but for any good gardener it would be a lovely use of a glut. I like courgettes cooked almost any way, as long as they are kept away from water. These were very thinly sliced and the colours and textures worked well. I cooked mine on a cast iron griddle pan. In fact I cooked the potato dish on the griddle pan too, which made me think that cooking these dishes outdoors would have been a much better idea. My kitchen is small and gets smoky and smelly even with two fans on and the door open.

I served this with the dish you can see below:

Here I have to apologise for not having any tarragon at the right time of the week. It is not a herb that I grow in my garden (clearly I should!) so I bought a pack for this dish but it had wilted and gone brown by the time I came to cook this meal. I thus used some fresh leaves from the garden instead. Maybe this is one to do again next year when I shall hopefully have some tarragon growing! Anyway, it was all worth it even without the correct herbs.

I have spent far too long updating this blog, so I am going to leave this here and include my next recipes in part 3.

A reminder that Rukmini Iyer’s wonderful book can be bought at all good bookshops, including https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/cookery-books-i-love which supports independent bookshops

https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-green-barbecue-modern-vegan-vegetarian-recipes-to-cook-outdoors-in/9781529110272?aid=8665

I just loved watching the film Julie and Julia and my ambition in blogging would be to do what Julie Powell did and cook my way through a complete, loved cookery book and of course become rich and famous as a result!

Okay dream on Sarah, but the principle of the idea is a sound one. A few years ago I did attempt to cook the cover of all three of my cookery magazines every month. This was quite hard work, particularly if the recipe featured really needed a crowd of people to justify cooking it up. I did once make a rainbow cake and take it to an operatic society rehearsal. Anyway, in the end maybe I should have just stuck to one magazine. After the recent purchase of The Green Barbecue by Rukmini Iyer, I decided that it might be a good new project to cook the book. I am neither vegetarian nor vegan, and not that great at lighting barbecues, but I was just so inspired by the book that I really think I could happily cook every single recipe.

Okay, so a few things to get out of the way to start with:

I am not going to cook every recipe on a barbecue; in fact heading into autumn and winter now, I hope to complete the project before the end of next summer, so the majority of the recipes will be cooked indoors.

I may change a few ingredients depending on how the mood takes me. For instance, I am not a fan of tofu and indeed Rukmini says that in her ‘Dairy-Ish’ chapter it is fine to interchange tofu, paneer and feta. I might on occasions use halloumi too. Also, in our household we are not a fan of burger buns; I prefer to cook chips or potato salad or even just a light salad to go with burgers. We are also not fond of peanuts and I tend to use cashew nuts instead. Peanut butter as an ingredient I do love.

Each blog piece I write will be an update and include a few of the Green Barbecue recipes I have tried recently, hopefully with photos. I do like to photograph food just before eating it, and don’t usually set up a specific photo shoot, so there will be no clever tricks and I don’t normally let hot food cool down. Hence some of my pictures may be a bit steamy!

As I have said, we are not vegetarian, and although we have many vegetarian meals, on occasions I like to serve lovely vegetarian dishes with some meat or fish. Vegetables are the star in my meals usually.

So here goes! The recipe at the top of the page is Charred Tenderstem with oranges, blue cheese and walnuts.

My changes: I used purple sprouting broccoli, as that is my preference and what I buy most weeks. I also lightly boiled it before charring it on my griddle pan. I don’t have much success with charring or roasting broccoli from raw. It behaves quite differently from cauliflower.

Served with: for me a fillet of mackerel and for Paul a fillet of sea bass. We also had some left-over root vegetable gratin – celeriac, sweet potato, spices, feta and coconut.

Verdict: A really delicious salad with fresh flavours. I would be happy with this as a lunch dish on its own, but it does work so well as a salad served with other dishes to make it more substantial. On another occasion I might have served it with one of the potato dishes in the book (see below for the potato dish I tried earlier on) or just a jacket potato. I like warm salads, which are of course achieved by having some hot and some cold ingredients mixed together.

In the other picture above you can see my successful barbecue burning away. We have a lovely charcoal barbecue, but last year I had a few failures with it, fire not hot enough and a big disappointment, so I was a bit apprehensive trying another barbecue. I did not cook the broccoli dish on it but I did do the following three dishes as a simple lunch for my mother in early August. The idea was that if the barbecue failed, I could easily revert to cooking inside and it was less stressful with only two of us.

My changes: I used brie instead of goat’s cheese. I am actually a goat’s cheese addict, but I happened to have a large piece of brie in the fridge that needed eating! I also only did halves of peppers and did not top them with the other half of the pepper. We did not have burger buns either! With the potato recipe, I cheated by par-boiling the potatoes rather than cooking them from raw in the foil parcels. I was still not convinced that my barbecue was going to be hot enough, so thought that this would be safer.

This meal was just the three vegetarian dishes and worked really well. It would make a great meal for friends or family if entertaining. I would probably have just added some home-made houmus (as I am addicted to it!)

Verdict: A superb light meal. I admit that I did pick two cheese dishes and I know that this is not to everyone’s taste, but we are rather fond of cheese in our family. For the nervous barbecue lighter, these would be good dishes to pick as none of them take that long to cook (even speedier with my cheat with the potato dish!) The aubergine stuffed with cheese was a little difficult to handle on the barbecue and I was in danger of losing all my lovely cheese stuffing. I think that in the future I would consider just griddling the aubergine slices and then layering with the cheese afterwards; the heat would be enough to melt it I think.

I made these burgers recently and we really enjoyed them.

My changes: No burger buns as usual! I also incorporated the nuts (cashew nuts instead of peanuts) into the accompanying salad.

Verdict: Excellent flavours, but they did not hold together very well. I am pleased that I just cooked them in the oven and did not crisp them up on the barbecue or in a frying pan, as I fear they would have fallen apart. I need to work on this recipe and consider whether some egg for binding would be helpful. They were easy to prepare with a food processor and did not create loads of mess, as burgers and fishcakes sometimes do. I am actually not fond of beef burgers, even if good quality and home-made; something to do with always being greasy I think. I am therefore always trying out new veggie burger recipes.

I served these two dishes together whilst we were on holiday in West Wales recently. I wanted something fresh, vibrant and fruity and this selection fitted the bill.

Changes: I did not buy any preserved lemon, so left that out of the recipe. There is a limit to how many jars and store-cupboard ingredients you want to buy on holiday.

Verdict: A really fresh, beautiful meal. The mango dish is the kind of dish I crave when I want a complete break from meat and fish. I love the contrast of fruit and vegetables in a savoury course. Paneer is another of my addictions. You could really adapt this dish and have it as a pudding. I am thinking that in that case I would leave out the avocado and use goat’s cheese instead, maybe add a drizzle of honey. I do love my carbohydrate, so am always on the look out for variations on the humble potato salad.

Okay, so 7 dishes cooked from the book so far! Only 68 to go and I anticipate a very pleasurable journey along the way!