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.