Jottage from Lancaster - Leek and Broccoli Speltotto

Just when I wasn't sure what to make for dinner, a River Cottage link to the Guardian HFW recipes at the weekend turned up on Facebook with barley and spelt recipes. One of them was for Leek and Broccoli Speltotto. As it happened, I had both leek and broccoli which I was thinking of eating tonight, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with them except cook them and sprinkle them with cheese. So I printed out the recipe and went straight into the kitchen to start making it. Amazingly enough I had all the ingredients, even fresh thyme and a little cardboard carton of wine (though actually opening a bottle and using some of it might have been a nice option as we could have drunk the rest of it tonight). 


Both Heather and I have noticed the amount of washing up generated by cooking from scratch, and I used a non-stick frying pan and a couple of saucepans as well as various knives and a cheese grater but overall it didn't seem to hard to make - in fact it was relatively simple. But the results were really gorgeous. The spelt was nutty and the veg succulent. I added parmesan cheese but it probably would have been good without.

The more I make these veg recipes, the more I love vegetarian food. This one really stands out as one of my top favourites.

Jottage from Lancaster - Brussels sprouts, Apple and Cheddar

We have been geocaching this morning and having made the trip out, it seemed a good opportunity to buy some veggies on the way home. I tend to buy whatever veggies I fancy these days - and lots of them. I use raw fruit and veggies for a big salad that I make for lunch every day, and for anything else I buy, I find some nice recipe from River Cottage Everyday or Veg. 


On the basis that they just looked nice and crunchy and fresh I bought some Brussels sprouts and was pleased to find a lovely salad in River Cottage Veg which would both use them up and be a variation on my usual crispy lunch. 


It wasn't just the sight of the Brussels sprouts that made me think of buying them. We have just got back from a trip to Chicago with my sister and her husband and we went to a restaurant called The Purple Pig (cheese, swine and wine). They had a couple of items with sprouts - one with raw shredded sprouts and one with fried. I had some of the raw sprouts (very finely sliced with parmesan) and loved them. I'm not a great sprout lover - I understand it's genetic - but I adored these. So when I saw them in Booths I was reminded of a happy lunchtime all together on North Mich.

The Purple Pig

Book shopping, Chicago 

So this was my lunch - brussels sprouts, apple and cheddar (actually Red Leicester) with a few walnuts and a slice of my home made wholemeal bread, finished off with a jar of homemade yoghurt. What could be better for me than that???

Jottage from Lancaster - Smoky Cheaty Brandade

On Saturday - on an impulse - I bought River Cottage Year which was prominently for sale, hugely discounted, in The Works. I didn't quite mean to buy it, but there was a recipe in it to make your own ricotta. OK, I don't use ricotta that much, but the thought of making it myself was a bit tempting. And another River Cottage book would just about fit on my cookery shelves - but only if I was ruthless and threw away some of the old cookery books that are cluttering it up. 


So I set about and cleared both shelves and chucked away some old books that really I would never use again. It's surprising how much cookery has its fashions. And surprising that some of those books took me back to times when the children were younger. Very much in evidence was my 'Italian' phase when I made something with pasta every week (more often than not hand-made). I seem to remember these as very happy times cooking for 4 with all of us together. Then the American cookbooks began to creep in. There weren't many of these, but enough for an idle onlooker to guess that we had started our long love affair with the USA (a love affair in more ways than one as both Heather and Deborah married US citizens). Sadly, most of these cookbooks have lain unused for too long and will pass to charity shops in the next day or so. I have copied out the odd recipe that I can see myself turning to again - but probably I won't make them.


River Cottage Year has a nice fish recipe in it. Now I am a little sensitive about fishy issues at the moment - but there's no way I'm going to relive my nasty episode with cold callers on the doorstep yesterday. Luckily I had bought some lovely oak-smoked fish from Booths to make Smoky Cheaty Brandade for when Heather and Tristan come tonight. It looked like a simple recipe and one which Tristan might enjoy. The smoked fish might be a little salty for him so I left out adding any other salt in the hope that all the added mashed potato would bring it down to a low level. It seemed to need something else adding - maybe an egg, or some nutmeg. But I kept to the recipe faithfully and it's all made up, ready to cook tonight. I wanted some nice veggies to go with and spent a pleasant 10 minutes leafing  through River Cottage Everyday before I homed in on green beans and tomatoes.


The brandade turned out to be good - but a bit uninteresting. Tristan seemed to like it anyway, and I enjoyed it too. But it really needed the green beans/tomatoes to give it some interest. It's not something I would make again I don't think.

Jottage from Cambridge: Mushroom Risoniotto

Strangely enough we have also just tried the Mushroom Risonitto. Well actually I just did the eating as my husband decided that he would do the cooking while I took a break from the kitchen. Tristan watched Theo cut up the mushrooms and measure out all the various ingredients from his high chair – I think Theo thought he had eaten a raw mushroom but I found it later stuck under the washing machine. I had bought button mushrooms and chestnut mushrooms, and we happened to have a selection of dry mushrooms too. I had just been to Tesco and bought a few of those handy cartons of white wine so we didn’t need to open a bottle.

I adore mushrooms, but goodness this dish was almost too mushroomy even for me! The orzo didn’t stick together thankfully, and the dish was deliciously creamy. However I’m not sure I would make it again or, if I did, I would use fewer chestnut mushrooms. I hadn’t realised that button mushrooms have pretty much no taste at all – a bit like cheap tomatoes which aren’t cut from the vine. You seem to pay extra for flavour these days which is a bit depressing. Sainsbury's use the label 'Taste the Difference' on their premium products which perhaps does hint at the fact that, unless you're willing to dig that bit deeper into your pockets, what you're buying really won't taste of much at all.