Veggie breakfast recipe

Potato rosti topped with sloppy tomato, mushroom and garlic mix,
served with a poached egg

Here is my entry for the Demuth's restaurant veggie breakfast recipe competition.

I make a potato rosti - the very best potatoes to do it with, in my opinion, are pink fir apple - but hard to get hold of in supermarkets. I clean the skins and then grate them (the best pink colouration is just under the skin in pink fir apple hence not peeling them). I then melt some butter and put the grated potato into that. The potato is then put into stainless steel rings in a frying pan which has olive oil in it (with a touch of my chilli oil for a bit more of a kick!), the potato is packed down and then fried, flipped over and fried on the other side. 

While that is going on I chop up some mushrooms and cherry tomatoes and start to fry them down in some olive oil. I add slices of garlic (fresh 'wet' garlic from the garden is best, but wild garlic also makes a showing in this when its in season) and then some basil leaves towards the end - with a good grind of black pepper too. I tend to do this with chestnut mushrooms - but for a real treat this would be with shiitake and oyster mushroom.

The sloppy mushroom and tomato mix is then put on top of the crisp rostis, and all topped off with a poached egg.

The tomato mushroom mix is also really nice on top of a good piece of toast - that's how I first had it in Barcelona - but I am potty about potato rosti so prefer it that way at home.(any waxy potato is good in my opinion for a potato rosti - possibly because I don't make them the traditional way.)


Competition details in Rachel Demuth's blog

Stuffed deep fried patty pans in batter

I love to pick baby patty pans with the flowers still attached - these are then stuffed with a herby mozzarella mix, dipped into batter and deep fried.

Here they have been served with fresh sweetcorn from the garden (Supersweet is my favourite variety for our climate and can't be beaten in terms of sweetness) and chopped beans.

All this is cooked and eaten within 15 minutes of harvesting it from the garden - you can hear it growing still its that fresh!

Goats cheese ravioli

This is probably my favourite ravioli recipe - a good goat cheese ravioli cannot be beaten!

I mix lots of different cheeses - but always a good goat cheeses (and usually with a nice cheddar, some mozzarella and veggie parmesan) and use this to make ravioli.

Here I have served the ravioli with a creamy cherry tomato sauce with slivers of baby leeks and wilted mixed leaves from the garden.

Lemon meringue pie

Lemon meringue pie; made using the recipe from the hummingbird cookery book.

Here I have doubled the meringue mixture so there is a veritable mountain on top of the lemony goo.

Harvests from the garden

Bean harvest

Patty pans, potatoes, cherry tomatoes, purple podded peas, garlic,
mixed leaves (clockwise from top right)

Onion harvest

Squashes, beans, sweetcorn and asparagus peas

Cheese wedding cake

Our cheese wedding cake (from the top layer down):
Cerney Vine
Truffled Pecorino
Godstone Cheddar
Colston Basset Stilton (half) and
Cornish Yarg

Hop Frittata

The golden hop growing up the side of the greenhouse (LHS of picture)

April and March see the re-introduction of hops into our diet as the hop inside and outside the greenhouse gets going again.  I leave all the tendrils growing on the outside of the greenhouse as they provide some temperature control over the summer to the tomato plants inside, but woe betide any tendrils that come up inside the greenhouse. They are far too aggressive and invasive and as they send runners up to ten feet in all directions, have to be kept under control.
Eating them is by far the best way. They have to be cooked as they tend to have lots of silica spikes along the stems (that help them climb and cover) but these can be incredibly sharps - plunging into boiling water deals with this problem.

Probably our favourite way to eat them is in a Frittata. I chuck fresh garlic, hop shoots, cubes of re-cooked potato (or some raw grated pink fir apple potato into a frying pan with some olive oil and cook for a few minutes. In the meantime I mix eggs with a dollop of natural yogurt (Yeo Valley is the best), and some chunks of goats cheese and then pour this all over the potato, garlic and hop mix. This is then cooked until all the egg has set, and often finished for a minute under the grill to brown the top a little.

I vary this recipe throughout the year - its a great way to use up our permanent glut of eggs and the occasional glut of courgettes, patty pans and cherry tomatoes.

Odd-sized eggs

The very different sized eggs laid by our ex-batts on December 7th 2011.
The smallest had no yolk - but sadly the largest did not compensate for this by being a double yolker...

[Update: May 2012 - we no longer have chickens, the six we had when these eggs were laid, Tilly, CJ, Chicken, Madeline, Eggbutt and Pebbles, are no longer with us. Eggbutt and Pebbles vanished without trace one weekend in February this year, Madeline was plucked from the jaws of a fox by Rod on Feb 16th and died later that morning, CJ died a week later, and Chicken and Tilly have joined a new ex-batt flock in rural North Wales where there appear to be no foxes!]

Cheese wedding invitations

We made our own wedding invitations: a Camembert box with homemade personalised labels and then the invite and instructions for the wedding inside.

Needless to say this resulted in a lot of Camembert cheeses needing to be eaten. The best way was to take a whole Camembert, put some slits in the top and insert slivers of garlic and springs of rosemary and then cook until oozing in the over. This worked wonderfully with potato wedges and fried polenta fingers - but would also make a wonderful fondue if you get the inside runny enough and then remove the top to dip bread in and scoop out the cheese.

A very simple pea ravioli recipe

Make  pasta; mix egg yolks, strong white flour and a bit of water into a firm dough and roll out into thin sheets.

For the filling mix peas (thawed petit pois or fresh from the garden and lightly cooked) with cottage cheese, goats cheese and some veggie parmesan - season and then liquidise briefly. Put dollops of the filling on the pasta, cover with another piece of pasta and form into raviolis squeezing all the air out.

Cook for about 2-3 minutes in boiling water and drain. Melt butter and add freshly ground pepper, a touch of chilli oil to give it a bit of a kick, some zested lemon rind and some sage leaves - toss the ravioli in this.

It also works well to melt the butter and just add some peas to that and then toss the ravioli into that.

The spikey cardoon

Cardoons harvested from the garden

Cardoon heart

Cardoons in flower

Dedicated to my cardoon plants.
The cardoon plant - the wild uncultivated predecessor of the globe artichoke plays a strong role in my cooking due to being so prolific each year in my garden.
I cut a third of the heads for me - to eat and to study the perfect geometrical patterns of the choke.
The rest are left to go to flower for the bees - and also for me. For the bees who appear to be blind drunk and unable to fly away from them they are so satiated. And for me because the smell when you walk past them on a summer evening is so strong it feels like breathing in pure honey.

Edible wedding bouquets

Getting married between Christmas and the New Year raises many problems in terms of sourcing things that are short-lived or out of season.   When I was told that I would have to pay over £80 for a small bouquet of red roses that would be long past their best, and £4 for each buttonhole, I decided to think about it later. Then promptly forgot  until three days before the wedding - Christmas Day when everything was shut.

I was fortunate to be saved by an artichoke plant in my garden that had been confused by the unseasonably mild Autumn and was busy producing heads.  Inspired by the tradition in parts of Italy of having chillis in a bridal bouquet (with interesting meanings I'm sure) I decided to use some of the chillis I had grown earlier in the year to surround the artichoke head. A quick whizz around the garden on the morning of the wedding to pick Bay, Rosemary and Fennel (magical in its ethereal featheriness) meant I had all I needed to create my bouquet.  I just added a few red roses bought from the local Co-op on Boxing day to ensure the bouquet matched the buttonholes I made for  the male guests - and that was it, a bouquet and ten buttonholes for about a tenner!

On returning from a two-day honeymoon, I used the bay leaves and Rosemary to make stock for an artichoke heart, borlotti bean and chestnut stew served with spiced polenta fingers - and a deep feeling of gratitude to a seasonally challenged artichoke plant.

Last of last year's beans from the garden

I've just used the last of last years beans from the garden.  The beans were ridiculously prolific last year and I had to freeze huge quantities so I didn't bean-off the entire family by making them eat them daily from mid July to the end of November.

They froze really well and we ate the last ones nearly ten months after they were first picked.

The best varieties for freezing from last years garden were the dwarf Yin Yang (grown for many years now from beans originally acquired from my Mum), the Norweigan Dry variety, but best of all the french purple climbing beans - now grown from home saved seed over so many generations I no longer know what they are officially known as - but always referred to as 'prolific purple climbing french bean'

Here they are served up last summer with Nasturtiums from the garden, grilled halloumi cheese and a pile of potato gnocchi served with artichoke hearts (sadly these particular ones were canned) and my favourite cherry tomato variety - Sungold.