Carrot and Garlic Soup

After our long weekend of cooked breakfasts, filling, tasty evening meals and a lot of chocolate cake we both fancied something simple when we got home on Tuesday evening. 

I had a few carrots in the fridge and we stopped and picked up some more and some butter. I already had a mountain of garlic at home.

I love this recipe, it's so simple and very flavoursome and creamy despite the lack of cream (OK there is quite a lot of butter instead).

So to make this soup you need:
1kg of carrots, chopped into thick chunks
120g butter
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp dried oregano
1litre of stock

1. Boil or steam the carrots until just tender.
2. Melt butter in a saucepan and cook for one minute with the minced garlic and oregano
3. Add the carrots to the melted butter mix and cook over a medium heat for five minutes
4. Add the stock and simmer for 10-15 minutes
5. Blend and serve

Bangers, Mash & Onion Gravy

Bit of a blurry picture I'm afraid courtesy of the darker evenings. The Linda McCartney bangers, lovely creamy mash and the best onion gravy in the world ( I think!) went down very well with my brother on Sunday night.

Beetroot and Caramelised Onion Tart

This was my second attempt at beetroot and caramelised onion tart and all was going well until I tipped the jug with the beaten eggs and milk in all over the hob, the worktop, the floor, the front of the cupboards....you get the idea!

I had used up all my eggs so then had to go out and get some more so that I could finish making the tart! It was worth it though. I made sure I caramelised the onions properly this time and added a tiny bit of chilli to the egg mix, although once I'd thrown it on the floor I forgot to add any to the new batch but I will try next time. Great tart this, especially the pastry, who'd have thought carrot in pastry would work? Not me!

Bangers, Sweet Potato Mash & Onion Gravy

On Wednesday I used up the rest of the boiled new potatoes and baked sweet potato as mashed potato and added our usual Linda McCartney sausages, carrots, peas and the wonderful Anna's Onion Gravy. 

Spring Onion and Potato Cakes, Onion Rings and Carrot-Ginger Dressing

I embraced my new cookery book a little too enthusiastically yesterday afternoon. I decided that I would make the spring onion and potato (pan)cakes and accompany them with some OMG Oven Baked Onion Rings and a salad with carrot-ginger dressing.

One of the benefits of the book is that you are supposed to be able to make these quickly after work. While that might be true for one item at a time but you can't generally eat the recipes alone. Accompaniments are suggested throughout the book. Obviously the more times you make something the quicker it will become but I spent about three hours in the kitchen yesterday making these three recipes (and some instant falafel mix).

So I started with the carrot and ginger dressing. It is really a carrot and ginger purée with a little onion, garlic, lime juice, red wine vinegar, toasted sesame oil and agave nectar. In itself I guess it doesn't take much effort or time. The only time consuming bit is the boiling of the carrots and waiting for them to cool down a bit. The recipe calls for 1/4 cup of lime juice and the same of water which I think is a bit too much. My dressing was quite watery. It is a simply but tasty addition to a plain salad and also went well with the potato cakes. The slight down side is that the raw ginger and garlic tend to stay with you afterwards!

The potato cakes again in themselves were not that difficult to make. Just mashed potato mixed with some spring onions and toasted sesame oil. You are supposed to use panko breadcrumbs both in with the potato mix and also on the outside, which I have discovered are Japanese style breadcrumbs. I tried the local supermarkets but couldn't find any. My favourite 'Continental Stores' didn't have them and the local Asian supermarket had run out so I had to make do with some Warburtons in the food processor instead, I think that this may have been my downfall.

I didn't seem to have enough breadcrumbs and the ones I did have didn't stick very well.  The end result was nice enough but didn't seem worth all the effort I'd been making all afternoon. I had some of the potato cakes for lunch today and they were nice. I think I'd make them again, just not at the same time as the onion rings and the dressing.

The OMG Oven-Baked Onion Rings promised the earth but didn't really deliver. Once again I think that it was the breadcrumbs that were my downfall. Mine were too big despite having been in the food processor. In the book it says that the method will take a bit of time to perfect, dunking each onion ring in the paste mix and then the sprinkling with breadcrumbs. I found that the first one was fine but the rest were awful with the breadcrumbs getting covered in the paste and sticking together.  I may try making breadcrumbs out of toast tomorrow, as this will make them smaller and drier, and see if that helps at all.

You can see the difference in the onion rings here. One breadcrumbed , many not!

As far as the taste is concerned the onion rings were nice but not fantastic, mainly due to the covering being quite sporadic. I certainly didn't get them to 'OMG' level but I will try them again.

Bangers, Mash, Onion Gravy and Veggies

On Monday night I had the family over for dinner. I went for an easy and delicious option - bangers (Linda McCartney's of course), mash, Anna's onion gravy, broccoli, braised red cabbage and carrots.

It went down well with everyone and then we tucked into a lemon meringue pie from Marks and Spencer for pudding. 

Winter Vegetable Stew and Dumplings

The VSTs had guests last night, a fairly rare occurrence! Veggie stew and dumplings was on the agenda anyway, having bought one of my super winter stew packs (3 onions, 6 carrots, a parsnip, a swede for £1.50) so I just suped it up with a couple of sweet potatoes and an additional couple of parsnips so that it would feed four and then two for lunch tomorrow which it did! I made one and a half times the dumplings too, I didn't think that any more would have room to grow in the pan and as you can see they were quite successful. Lovely evening.

Cheese Pie, Jacket Potato and Carrots

Friday night saw us travelling down to the in-laws. Mr VST had requested a speciality of his mother's, her cheese pie. This consists of pie crust, bottom and top, with cheese sauce inside it. It is nursery food at it's best. There are sometimes Quorn chicken-style pieces in the pie but then it changes it's name to Quorn pie! On Friday I detected some onion in there. It was good pie and I ate FAR too much of it. This was served with some boiled carrots and a jacket potato and then followed by a proper crumble. It was an apple and rhubarb crumble with a thick (2cms) crumble on top which was the perfect texture mmmmmm.

Parsnip and Carrot Soup with Cheese and Crackers

A lovely smooth creamy soup with crackers and cheese for dinner this evening. The recipe is here.

Veggie stew and dumplings

A lovely Sunday night supper using all the veg in the fridge. Quick, easy and tasty too with plenty left over for lunch.

Cottage pie with sweet potato mash

Thursday night saw the return of the cottage pie with sweet potato mash, very tasty and filling for only about 235 calories a portion. Served with carrots and broccoli.

Root vegetable stew and dumplings

Bought another bargain stew bag yesterday and made us a root vegetable stew which has carrots, swede and parsnip in it. On the calorie counting front this came out at less than 100calories a portion for the stew and the dumplings are 85 each so a very filling, tasty and low calorie meal.

Bangers and Mash

I cooked for us this evening for the first time in what feels like ages! I made good old bangers and mash with onion gravy and served it with carrots and the last of the braised cabbage from the freezer.

My first all-veggie Christmas

It's a question that we get asked quite a lot around Christmas - what do you have for Christmas dinner?

The answer to that is something different every year and all the trimmings. Usually there is a turkey cooking somewhere and either my Mum or Mr VST's Mum makes us something veggie as an alternative and then we have the same accompaniments as everyone else. This year there were five of us for Christmas dinner, three of which were vegetarians and so the meat eaters decided that they would have a veggie Christmas which made this my first all-veggie Christmas ever!

We started the day with buck's fizz, croissants and brioche.

We enjoyed our breakfast, prepared some vegetables and the main and then went for a walk in the snow before coming back and putting the veggies on.

My Mum made us mushroom Wellingtons for our main. It's another BBC Good Food recipe but to make it more Christmassy she used cranberry sauce instead of spinach. We nibbled on nuts before sitting down for dinner at about 4pm. It was a lovely relaxed day. I think it was something to do with not having a turkey to worry about!


We started with a lovely pear salad with the most delicious cheesy dressing.


The main meal consisted of mushroom wellingtons, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, a slightly unconventional Yorkshire pudding (which I made) carrots, mashed swede with parmesan and of course the token brussel sprout!

I tried to restrain my intake of Christmas dinner as I knew I had to keep some space free for the duo of desserts and then cheese and biscuits and Christmas cake but I couldn't resist another of the delicious roast potatoes. They were AH-MA-ZING!

We all had to have a (long) rest between dinner and puddings. After a rest on the sofa watching Dr Who we went back to the table for puddings.

I wasn't a big fan of Christmas pudding until this year. I always had some but never enjoyed it as much as I did as what has become the family's traditional alternative to Christmas Pudding, Delia's Return to the Black Forest. This year Mum used a Delia recipe for the Christmas Pudding too and it was absolutely delicious.

I can't describe how delicious both of these were and I can't remember if I managed to squeeze in any cheese or crackers but they were there so I probably tried but I know we didn't get around to cutting the Christmas cake.

Winter vegetable stew and awesome dumplings

When I went to the veggie stall today they didn't have any courgettes or aubergines to go with the peppers and mushrooms that I usually put in my stew but they did have a winter veg pack with 6 carrots, a swede, two onions, and two parsnips (all for £1.50!), so I decided to experiment and go with the flow!

I remember these vegetables being quite bitter when I was younger and I have avoided them on the whole since then. I was very surprised at how delicious my stew was. I also added a bit of mature cheddar to my dumpling mix. They fluffed up like crazy and made delicious light, fluffy dumplings.

Carrot, parsnip and cumin soup

My first semi-original recipe! This is a variation on my friend's Carrot and Garlic Soup recipe. It's soooooo creamy and smooth, a perfect Winter warmer.

500g carrots
500g parsnips
4 large cloves garlic, crushed
120g butter
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 litre swiss bouillon vegetable stock

1. Boil or steam the carrots and parsnips until just tender and drain well (remembering that the parsnips only need about half the boiling/steaming time of the carrots).

2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and cook for one minute with the garlic and cumin.

3. Add the carrots and parsnips and cook over a medium heat for five minutes.

4. Add stock and simmer for 10-15 minutes

5. Blend together and serve.