Beetroot and Carrot Salad

I used to think beetroots had to be cooked. Now I am wiser, I know they can be  raw. And may be more nutritious as a result.

Grating beetroots makes crunching effortless while an oil and vinegar dressing adds luxury. Carrots, also grated, are a perfect companion.

You know what they say: eat for colour: orange, reds (and more), each colour containing different immune-boosting nutrients.

I first came across the beetroot/carrot combo at the Better Food Cafe about seven years ago, and copied the idea, working out a version at home. 

Then turned it into a recipe for Grown in Britain Cookbook. I wish I had name-checked my inspiration so glad to be doing so now. My beetroots came from  the Better Food Company, too.

I peeled the carrots and beetroots, above. Grown organically, slowly, biologically, they are chemical-free and needed only scrubbing, plus the skin has nutrients. (But I am not perfect and peeling is faster).

I was taken with the yellow, white and purple carrots, as they used to be before 17th century Dutch growers went monoculture orange to praise William of Orange. Poetically, these 21st century rainbow carrots were grown in Holland.

I had bought my Dutch rainbow organic carrots at the Bear Fruit stall (above) in the Bear Pit, Bristol.

The Bear Pit is, by the way, an example of urban regeneration from the grass-roots-up. A dingy subway on a busy city roundabout now transformed by locals into a lively market and meeting place.

Beetroot and Carrot Salad – ingredients for four

• 600g raw beetroot
• 600g raw carrots
• 50g sunflower seeds
• Dressing: 4 tablespoon olive oil + 50ml balsamic vinegar
• oil for frying/toasting + soy sauce for seeds
• Salt and black pepper, to taste
• Fresh herbs (parsley, coriander) or snipped salad cress.
• 1.1. Scrub/peel carrots and beetroot, and trim tops and tails. Keep carrots whole for grating. Peel the beetroot and cut in half. Grate the raw vegetables, using hand grater or food processor. Combine in large bowl and add olive oil and vinegar dressing.2. If not serving immediately, don’t add dressing yet. Instead, store covered in fridge. Remove 1 hour before serving to bring to room temperature. Then add dressing (below).

  3. For the vinaigrette, put the oil and vinegar in a screw-top jar, put the lid on tightly and shake vigorously.

  4. Gently heat olive oil in a small frying pan and toast the seeds for 3–4 minutes over a moderate heat, stirring to prevent sticking. Add the soy sauce at the end of the cooking, if using. Most of the sauce will evaporate, leaving a salty taste and extra browning for the seeds. Store the toasted seeds in a jar with a lid if preparing the day before.

  5. When ready to serve, add the chopped herbs to the grated beetroot and carrot. Shake the screw-top jar with vinaigrette, then pour over the vegetables, and season to taste. Toss the salad gently until everything glistens. Scatter the toasted seeds.

Katie Stewart: Pots de Crème au Chocolat (chocolate pots)

Yesterday I received an email from the Guild of Food Writers with sad news: the cookery writer, Katie Stewart, had died.

“…a long-time Guild member and the recipient of our 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award. Katie was taken ill on Friday and died on Saturday” said the email.

My mum gave me The Times Calendar Cookbook (my edition published 1976) and I have used it since the 1980s. I also had the privilege of meeting Katie Stewart when she received her Guild of Food Writers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

I tweeted the sad news, and soon there was an outpouring of tweet messages from fellow food writers who, like me, had learnt to cook thanks to Katie Stewart.

I believe generosity of spirit, and the heartfelt desire to communicate and share, really does transmit, to create classic cookbooks.

Yesterday Fiona Beckett, Guardian food writer, suggested on Twitter we have a day/weekend when we cook one of Katie’s recipes. What a great idea. More and more food writers thought so too. (Wow. Social media in action. Love it!).

I suggested we have a #katiestewart hashtag, and explained why at my other blog.

Alex Renton, The Times food writer got in touch. He is doing an obituary piece in Thursday’s edition for Katie, who was The Times cookery columnist.

He did not have a Katie recipe, so I offered to write one down.

I know the page number for pot au chocolate – page 77 - by heart.

My additions in brackets.

Pots de Crème au Chocolat

6oz/175g chocolate chips or plain chocolate broken in pieces

1/2 pint/3 dl. (300 ml single cream)

1 egg

pinch salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence (optional)

Katie says: ‘Put the chocolate in the globlet of a blender. Heat the cream until just under boiling point, then pour on to the chocolate. Cover, switch on and blend until smooth. The heat of the cream will melt the chocolate. Add the egg, salt and vanilla essence and blend again quickly. The mixture at this stage will be quite thin. Pour into six small individual pots, or failing this, small glasses. Chill for several hours or overnight until the mixture is quite firm. Serves 6 ‘

As you will see from my pic, I have played with this recipe over the years, and in 2012, made a raw chocolate version with chilli and orange zest.

Her book, The Times Calendar Cookbook, follows, without fanfare, seasonality: “Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and game mature according to the seasons and over the year offer us a wide variety of fresh foods to use in recipes,” writes Katie Stewart in her introduction.

The pic of spring vegetables (heading up this blog) is a photograph from the book illustrating May. The vegetables come from Petersham Nurseries, still going strong.

I fear I am jumping the gun a bit because our #katiestewart, or Katie Cook Day as Alex coined it, is really at the weekend.

So please, please all fellow Katie Stewart fans near and far – get cooking at the weekend, share your recipe and…pass it on!

God bless Katie Stewart. What a life-enhancing legacy.

May her soul rest at peace.

Celeriac salad

Celeriac’s brutish appearance belies its tender nature.

This winter root vegetable makes a fabulous nutritious raw salad in minutes.

Here is the celeriac peeled, its dirty shavings discarded and its whiteness revealed, ready for grating.

After grating it, I dressed the organically-grown celeriac with yogurt, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice. All organic because I want less of the bad stuff, more of the good stuff.

Nigel Slater’s classic celeriac remoulade is made with cream and mayonnaise. He points out dressed celeriac goes soggy overnight so eat it freshly-made.

Celeriac salad goes well with many dishes such as fish

- and is also just great on its own.

Keepers: Creamed coconut rice and raw vegetable marinade

Recently two recipes have entered my cooking repertoire. Both vegan (as it happens) they complement each other (as it happens). I want to record them with credits.

Creamed coconut rice

Step up, Claire Milne, the leading light behind the No Tesco in Stokes Croft campaign (and compadre), and the genius who came up with the easiest way to make the best coconut rice ever.

To cooked brown rice, add creamed coconut, cut small so it melts easily, and hey presto: soothing, luxurious coconut rice.

For 8 people: 3 mugs of rice for 6 mugs of water (how to cook brown rice here), 1 creamed coconut block (200g) cut in small pieces. (correction on rice proportions thanks for comment below).

(Experiment with adding cooked lentils, squash fried in small cubes, fresh herbs etc.).

Raw vegetable marinade

Step up,  Julia Guest. A filmmaker who made Letter To The Prime Minister in Bagdad during the bombing, in Fallujah during the occupation.

Julia’s current film, In Her Own Image, is an exploration of female divinity – in response to the war in Iraq as she explains at Indiegogo (where you can crowd-source/support the film). 

Anyway, food – where was I?

Raw vegetable marinade

A marinade is a sauce in which you soak your raw food (usually before cooking but in this case, no cooking required).

Which vegetables can you eat raw? Certainly not potatoes.  More info on raw food here.

I ate sliced mushroom, grated courgette, matchsticks of beetroot.

Choose veg you usually eat raw such as tomatoes, cucumber, radish, but think of others such as carrot or cabbage.

Sliver or slice or grate or anyway cut nice and slim.

Superfood dressing: tamari and cider vinegar and olive oil in equal proportions.

The marinade helps digestion of the vegetables.

Let the sliced veg soak in the dressing for a couple of hours before serving.

Would go well with the creamed coconut rice.

Sheepdrove organic goose

There is no getting away from it. Eating meat means taking a life.

I understand the horror vegetarians feel. I love vegan cuisine.

But I am a meat eater. Maybe once a week. I can feel the nutritional value it brings to my body.

If I were a hunter – I imagine – I would kill the animal, and lie down and cry because I had killed it. (I saw this on TV once). Then eat it. Hopefully with reverence.

But I could be romanticising.

The fact is I cannot square killing for food.

At least I can make sure the animal was well looked-after while alive.

Which is why I choose organic meat.

On Christmas day, we cooked and ate a goose from Sheepdrove Organic Farm.

Declaration of interest: I work with Sheepdrove Organic Farm. But – you know me – I can only work with a cause or company I believe in.

Check out Sheepdrove Organic Farm. Lots of great info on its website: including the importance of grass-fed creatures and Eating less meat? Eat better meat!

Sheepdrove Organic Farm’s head butcher, Nick Rapps, is passionate about showing people how to eat organic meat in a budget.

For instance, buy cheaper organic cuts (not pre-cut packages) from an actual butcher who can provide the unusual cheaper cuts. Cheaper cuts need slower cooking.

Nick Rapps’s The Organic Butcher’s Blog at Food Magazine is a treasure trove of tips. Here’s Nick on the organic Christmas turkey on a budget.

My sister, Geraldine, cooked our Christmas goose.

Listen-up. True to our ancestors, she is a real food lover.

My sister said: “How did I cook the goose? It was good, wasn’t it? And simple to cook. I rubbed salt and pepper and fresh grated ginger on the skin. Then scrunched wet greaseproof paper, smoothed it out and covered the goose. The formula is 20 minutes per pound on a low heat roughly 150/Gas Mark 2/300  and 20 minutes over. Our goose took about 5 hours. Regularly,  pour fat off the roasting pan (and keep it later for roasting veg) otherwise the goose fat will overfill the pan. Most importantly, let it “rest” a good half-an-hour after taking it out the oven.”

We served the Sheepdrove goose with an array of colourful vegetables, cooked by other members of the family so not one person did all the work.

Red cabbage and apples, squash and coconut, cranberry sauce, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, gravy.

PS I lost my ‘phone over Christmas. However – curiously – on the day I lost my ‘phone, I sent a picture of our Christmas meal (above) to myself. Which was lucky as I had not backed up my images since November so the Christmas meal pic would have been lost. Funny, eh?

Pecan banana bread made with ground nuts not flour

Banana bread + organic creme fraiche + Better Food Spicy Apple and Citrus Preserve

Experiment: Spoke a first draft instead of writing it. Took me five minutes. Could this be the way forward?

Here is what I said (with few amends).

Due to a delicate digestion, I think a lot about how I feel after what I have eaten.

The food is delicious. But how does it sit in my gut?

So I was interested to read in Natural Lifestyle an article by nutritionist Christine Bailey about healing the inflamed gut. A new idea. Is it possible?

The article recommended homemade yogurt (I am a believer), and well-cooked vegetables with meat broth, avoiding all grains.

The article gave a recipe for banana bread using ground pecan nuts instead of flour. No sugar. Honey instead.

Finding-out how to grind the nuts was a mission.

I even bought a new hand blender. I drove myself and the assistant at Kitchens mad questioning the nut-grinding function of every machine and found all nuts when ground eventually go to a paste because of the heat.

So it seemed nut-grinding might be a Shangri-La illusion.

So I bought my £30 Philips hand blender with a grinding attachment and further research found freezing the nuts might stop them getting too oily too fast.

I froze the nuts. I used the nut blender attachment, I found with short burts and not expecting too much fineness, I ground the nuts. It worked.

Pecan nuts are more expensive than flour. Nuts are more expensive than flour.

Here is Christine Bailey‘s recipe. I changed it: got rid of the baking agents, using eggs to make it rise, and two bananas instead of one. It filled one small and one big loaf tin. You could substitute the pecans for other ground nuts.

Grind/blend 10 1/2 oz (300g) frozen pecan nuts. A cinnamon stick adds grit to oily nuts. Add 2 tsp ground cinnamon to ground nuts. Whizz four eggs until airy then whizz with two tablespoons of olive oil (I used melted ghee butter) and one large or two small ripe banana until airy and smooth. Combine gently with nuts and cinnamon. Pour into two oiled loaf tins. Bake 180C Gas Mark 4 for 40 minutes until firm to touch. 

The banana bread tasted a bit worthy and I did go non-vegan spreading it with organic butter.

It must be noted, it was easy to eat, not sickly-eating sweetness

and afterwards my gut felt good.

It would not have been so happy with the grain.

The banana bread is a keeper but it does need a spread and I wonder what you might add to luxuriate the baked bread.

And have you grappled with nut-grinding?

Sprouts and raw hummus

I was told yesterday that today is the last day of the Mayan calendar.

That means the end of 28,000 years of hierarchy and oppression.

Yippee!

And I have finally found a spouting system that works.

I bought this jar with its plastic perforated lid from Harvest, part of Essential Trading Worker Co-op.

DIY types can make their own. Or use old tights or muslin as the lovely Alys Fowler suggests.

Or buy one like mine (after years of experimentation, I can vouch that This One Works), and get loads of sprouting info from Living Food of St Ives.

First you put the dry (organic) seeds in the jar.

Add water and leave them overnight to bring them to life.

After that first long soak, you wash the seeds daily (or twice, thrice).

The seeds like being clean and wet (not soaked or drowned).

So after filling the jar with water, swill the seeds around then drain away the water (hence the natty perforated lid which makes life so much easier).

And how is this for a virtuous circle? I drain the water on the indoor plants so they get a regular watering.

After a few days, I have produced living things.

Here are some sprouting chickpeas, looking positively Lawrentian.

(DH Lawrence being one of my fave authors because he describes life on its different levels: soul, mundane etc and because: “Lawrence believed that industrialised Western culture was dehumanising…”).

So now I am going sprout-mad. Sprouts in stews. On toast with cream cheese.

Whizzed with Organico Artichoke Spread for instant hummus.

Hold on a minute. Did I say hummus?

I ask myself: WHY make hummus with cooked chickpeas when you can use extra-bursting-with-vitality FRESH sprouting raw chickpeas?

So, I substitute the cooked chickpeas for my Lawrentian darlings, add some turmeric and crushed coriander seeds (must sprout THEM one day) and of course lemon juice, olive oil, tahini, raw garlic, as in my usual recipe for hummus .

And it was delicious.

Fish4Ever challenges big brands

As a journalist and food campaigner, I help Fish4Ever with its communications. I cannot work for a cause or company I don’t believe in.

So, I have the privilege of asking nosy questions and learning about the politics of fish.

Lunch: a fried-medley of Fish4Ever sardine fillets (Steenberg’s Organic online £1.60) on a bed of organic rice vermicelli.

Medly: I fry sliced shallots/onions, garlic and chilli in the organic oil in which the fish are canned – Fish4Ever uses 100% organic land ingredients.

I add the sardine fillets, mashing them (was that respectful?). I snip-in fresh parsley .

Fish4Ever canned fish is in a class of its own, fished traditionally (70% MSC-certified, the rest artisan) and quickly-conserved for freshness.

I am a real food lover and here’s why: you do good – it tastes good.

Why is it important to look after the fish?

Fishing technology is too effective. Desired species are being hunted to extinction.

Its hunting methods are indiscriminate, killing turtles, sea birds, dolphins.

There are too many factory boats and not enough fish. Regulations to control catches are insufficient and often ignored. Out at sea, where no one is looking, rules can be flouted. Poor countries suffer from foreign piracy on an industrial scale.

Hugh’s Fish Fight on Channel 4 earlier this month focused on changing the fishing methods of the big tuna brands and own-label supermarkets.

The food corporations’ proposed changes are far better than nothing.

However, although the big brands may well promise a “pole and line” range, their primary business remains likely unchanged.

Each Fish4Ever can has a story - including the smallest tuna fishing boats in the world.

This is not an eco-add-on. Fish4Ever’s raison d’être is care of land, sea and people.

That’s what I call an ethical company.

Meditation pot-luck lunch with Claude AnShin

“Bring cushion, blanket and vegetarian food to share,” were the instructions for yesterday’s meditation workshop at the Pierian Centre.

I have never known a pot luck not to work: my plate was filled with favourite foods such as raw beetroot and seaweed, butter bean salad, rice and lentil salad, raw carrot and hummus…

We practiced eating meditation. We ate in silence, aiming to chew each mouthful consciously, with 50 chews.

Eating silently and slowly in company was strangely relaxing.

I had helped promote this event with Saint Stephen’s and the Pierian Centre so it made sense to go.

But I had dreaded it. What? A whole day of meditation? I felt trapped.

Instead the day was rich and intense.

The workshop was led by Claude AnShin Thomas supported by KenShin.

(“How do I address you?” I had asked KenShin. “Ken – like Ken and Barbie – and shin as in leg,” she answered.)

Claude AnShin Thomas was a Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress – like many in the military or caught in war.

His spiritual practice helped him cope with flashbacks and emotional pain.

Meditation does not make horrifying experiences go away.

But being conscious, or awake, paradoxically makes trauma easier to cope with.

You learn to sit with discomforting feelings rather than self-medicate or distract yourself to push them away.

Claude AnShin Thomas is funny, straightforward, down-to-earth, profound and deeply touching.

A mendicant monk, he is homeless, goes wherever he can make a difference, and lives on donations.

He works for peace with the Zaltho Foundation by being as conscious as possible. “Everyone has their Vietnam,” he says.

I have marched for peace but peace activists can work for peace by healing the war inside, too.

I am reading his book, At Hell’s Gate. Beautifully written, so worth reading.

He’s not a new-age guru making money from spirituality, but a man with a troubled past who found his spiritual practice bought him peace, and who has dedicated his life to sharing this to help others.

And this real-ness transmits, I swear.

Tibetan soup at Buddhafield 2011

Buddhafield has all the wildness of a festival – live music, dance tent, cafes, workshops, healing area, fires, plunge pool, sauna; but without intoxicants.

There was so much on offer: every hour 10 simultaneous workshops and/or live gigs  to choose from.

Abundance was the festival’s theme. At first I moaned, stressed by having to choose, and being catapulted outside my comfort zone, cut off from home and the internet.

I plodded around the three field-festival site. I got effortlessly fitter from plodding.

This Tibetan soup – from the Outer Regions cafe - sustained me. So nourishing. light and warming. Perfect for rainy days and before dance workshops.

          

(Soup – something you can make quickly with what’s in the fridge. Fry onions or leeks, chilli and garlic. Slice or chop veg: carrots, courgettes, green beans, potatoes – the smaller you cut ‘em the quicker they cook. Add a handful of cooked dried beans such as butter beans or open a tin of plain beans. The trick with soup is how much water: it is easier to add than than remove. So start with two mugfuls and see how it goes. Add noodles towards the end of cooking.  Season with black pepper.)

I am grateful to Mike for making healthy refreshing breakfast every morning.

A camping-must. Muesli and fruit (bring knife to chop). Add water, so no cooking needed.

Festivals are up-and-down (like life) – all I know is I felt great when I got back.