For three years in a row I have tried to grow my own brussels sprout ‘rubine’, the beautiful crimson flecked cousin of the common green brussel, and for three years I have failed. Brussels sprouts need care, love and attention right from sowing the seeds in March, through planting out the baby brassicas in early summer (protecting them from our cheeky chickens and the slugs until they are strong enough to stand alone), and then onwards to the first frost for that all important flavour boost. After three years of failure  I thought that it was just not meant to be.

My humble thanks and admiration then go to Marks and Spencer for putting in a lot of effort themselves into figuring out how to grow these little beauties so that I could buy them. Apparently it has taken them a few years of practicing too.  Happily I can finally chuck out my sprout seeds and stick to the simpler but still exciting stuff like funny coloured courgettes and oddly shaped carrots.

The red sprouts don’t taste particularly different to the usual green varieties but unlike many purple veggies they do keep their colour when you cook them.  All brussels sprouts are a great source of Vitamin C for people eating and shopping sustainably through the British Winter and the purple colour of these particular sprouts is because they have a high anthocyanin content, a group of antioxidant molecules with potential anti-cancer properties (that old nutrition advice to eat a rainbow has some pretty sound science behind it).

I was so excited to finally get my hands on these little chaps that I thought this was time to make good the final stage of my brussels sprout acceptance journey from being a long-time sprout hater; eating a raw sprout. Long time readers will know that I was planning to reach this last sprouty frontier way back in 2008, but somehow it never quite happened.

Anyway, if you’ve been holding off trying them raw (like I have), then don’t. There’s nothing scary about them – they just taste like raw cabbage. That raw brassica tang is lovely with the sweet, nutty gruyere cheese and creamy almonds I used in my little salad, and I bet they would make a brilliant winter coleslaw with dried cranberries and a mayo and yogurt dressing. What’s stopping you?

p.s I keep forgetting to tell you that I’ve made Facebook page for Mostly Eating.  It’s another way of following the blog (links to all new posts appear on there) but in addition I’ve been posting a small selection of links to other recipes and nutrition articles on there.

This salad recipe uses my new crush, gorgeous Tarocco oranges from Sicily, accompanied with peppery watercress and baked tofu.  When I first started trying to eat more sustainably choosing fruit in Winter was a big shopping headache. After all, there is pretty much no fruit that grows in the UK between November and the first forced rhubarb in February.  My attitude to this has relaxed rather over the last year, after all, part of sustainable eating needs to be about sustaining ourselves too don’t you think?  I buy fruit from Europe with two caveats; first, if it grows easily in the UK I’ll wait and buy it locally and seasonally instead and second, forgetting to use this fruit and letting it go to waste is not an option.  This feels like a good compromise given the massive environmental impact caused by food waste. There are so many stunning varieties of citrus are in season across Europe right now and none of them are ever available “homegrown” (whereas buying apples from New Zealand just doesn’t feel like such a good compromise).

Grab a bagful of these Tarocco Sicilian oranges if you see them for they are both beautiful and delicious. Sweet, refreshing and less acerbic than most varieties, they also have a delicate red speckle through the flesh for which they are known in Sicily as “half-blood” oranges.  The red colour is due to beta-cryptoxanthin, a compound similar to beta carotene and which our bodies can convert into Vitamin A as well as acting as an anti-oxidant in its own right.  The baked tofu is surprisingly savoury because of the garlic and shallots, a good contrast to the sweet orange segments.  Cooking yourself an extra block of tofu is a great idea so that you can put it into sandwiches, salads and wraps later in the week.

Being able to segment an orange is fantastic kitchen skill to have and a doddle once someone has shown you how. If you’ve never done this before check out Tea’s photographic instructions on How to supreme an orange or grapefruit. And while you’re there take a look at her Winter Survival Citrus ideas which I’m sure burrowed its way into my greedy subconscious and winded up where I am now (with a fridge full of oranges, lemons and clementines).

Nutrition highlights: superstar green leafy veg, vitamin C infused Citrus fruit and calcium rich tofu.

Everybody knows too much cheese is bad for you and full of calories and saturated fat. Except that really this isn’t true at all – yes cheese is fairly high calorie but it’s also a good source of protein, calcium and above all JOY!  Eating well sometimes involves taking a bit of a step back and seeing the wood for the trees.  It’s actually fine to have a moderate portion of cheese now and again, especially if it helps you to eat more of the good stuff along side it.  I’m a firm believer in the salad splurges philosophy of eating:

Not cool – a block of cheese gradually nibbled away until you realise that you’ve eaten half of it in one sitting, probably with slice of plastic bread on the side

Not cool – a huge bowl of just salad for lunch – unadorned and protein free except with nothing but a drizzle of fat-free salad dressing

Cool – a little bit of cheese as part of a well planned meal that also includes a huge portion of lovely veggies and some of those good fats too, like nuts and olive oil

This salad tastes best when made with some lovely smooth mature stilton, not the standard factory offering with its astringent, tongue-burning properties (great use for any Christmas leftovers).

If there’s one thing guaranteed to get me back in the kitchen it’s a brand spanking newly turned Autumn. All those lovely warm, cosy soups, stews and roasts.  And this seasons vegetables are just the best; pumpkins, squash, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks, beetroot, celeriac. All the real sweeties and perfect for roasting. 

People tell themselves funny stories when they’re faced with the everyday work of eating well. One of my favourites of that I hear often is this one: “it’s so easy to eat well in the summer – salads are so healthy”.  Roasted vegetables are the perfect ‘salad’ for Autumn and Winter.  Yes, there is ten minutes of chopping involved, but that’s pretty much it. Same as a salad. 

A tub of roasted vegetables have become of a staple in our fridge again this month.  These are my three favourite ways to prepare roasted autumn vegetables.

Three easy flavour additions for roasted vegetables
(take it as read that all three involve copious armfuls of veg, olive oil and a good grind of pepper)

• scatter with finely chopped red chillis and tuck very thin, deseeded slices of lemon among the veg (my current obsession, from Sarah Raven’s Food for Friends and Family book)

• chuck in a few sprigs of rosemary and a handful of garlic cloves (separated but unpeeled).  Once cooked, squeeze the garlic straight from their skins into the veg

• coat with maple syrup and generous amounts of grated ginger (as inspired by Eat Me, Delicious)

The trick to successful vegetable roasting is similar to that for drama-free stir-frying.  Cut your different veggetables to different sizes according to how long they will take to cook; smaller pieces for those that take longer to roast. It’s also helpful to give them a stir occasionally during cooking to avoid the tops of the vegetable pieces becoming overly charred.

It’s always worth making a big batch of roasted veggies.  Once you’ve got ‘em, there are endless ways to use them.

• add a protein source such as meat, fish or tofu for an easy meal
• cook up a wholegrain to serve along side and top with a small amount of feta, chopped nuts or a poached egg
• Add vegetable stock or hot water and blitz to a soup
• Stir through wholemeal pasta, add a handful of spinach and top with a little grated cheese

Even if you only dabble in growing your own vegetables, chances are that you grow a few radish here and there.  Few crops are as reliable or quick, speeding from sowing to serving in as little as three weeks. Our garden alternates between the mild, multi-coloured globe shaped radish that were my first ever crop and the hotter, torpedo shaped french breakfast radish.

This raita was inspired by a memorable keralan dinner cooked for us by friends, inspired in turn by their recent trip to India.  All of the food was vegetarian and included a dish that looked like a regular cucumber yogurt raita.  The first taste was cooling yogurt and cucumber, but swiftly followed by an unexpected and warming kick of ginger.  The same concept works equally well with the modest radish, which is also much easier to grow in the UK (though I am tempted to have a bash at propogating supermarket ginger indoors).

Like tzatziki and cucumber raita, this dish doesn’t keep terribly elegantly.  It’s not that it goes off overly quickly, just that the vegetables steadily seep water which separates from the yogurt.  You can easily drain off the excess liquid give it a good stir, but as the whole thing only takes five minutes to pull together I just tend to make a batch as I need it.  We use this as an accompaniment to veggie dishes (like the spicy chickpeas in the photo), simply cooked fish and barbecued or griddled meats.  If you fancy it you can add some finely chopped ginger for extra heat.

Other people’s radish

• Spicy Heirloom Radish Salad, with swoonworthy photos from Penny de los Santos
• Pickled radish from Lucy at Nourish Me
• Sarah Raven’s Radish top pasta, for the leafy part
• An Asian radish slaw, from Tea of Tea and Cookies

This week has seen something of a glut parsnips in our house, having bought a few in the shops and then been sent a few more by Abel and Cole who kindly sent me one of their fruit and veg boxes to try.  Parsnips have been popping up in the expected places such as soups and a few less expected like the tiny cubes dotted through a winter frittata along with leeks and smoked cheddar.  And then finally there was this lunchtime salad using raw parsnip, chickpeas and goats cheese coated in a honey mustard dressing.

Raw parsnip seems like a different vegetable from a soft, caramelised roasted parsnip.  A far feistier entity indeed; crunchy and unexpectedly peppery. I had some doubts about sharing this recipe; I’m not big on wacky ingredients, even when they are nutritious, and I’m definitely not a raw food diet advocate.  But then I saw Sally Schneider had used raw parsnip in her book The Improvisational Cook, in a Celery Root, Parnsip and Beet Slaw recipe.  Sally is a former chef, regular contributor to The Splendid Table foodie podcast and all round culinary genius, ergo it must be OK. 

A couple of recipe notes:

• This tastes better the day after the parsnip has mellowed a little and the flavours have had time to mix. Perfect for making in the evening and taking for lunch the next day.
• If you use a julienne peeler you will easily be able to “feel” if the parsnip has a woody heart to it. It’s fine to include this woody core when you are cooking parsnips but for a raw dish such as this I’d leave it out.
• This salad is my first foray into raw parsnips and I’m sure there are many as yet undiscovered combinations that would work just as well.  Raw parsnip has quite a kick to it which led me to pairing it with mellow ingredients like the pulses and goats cheese.

Other good things to do with a parsnip:

• Make Jamie Oliver’s spicy parsnip soup using half reduced fat coconut milk, half regular milk
• Chop into cubes and use in a frittata, following Kathryn’s excellent clear instructions on how to make a frittata (there’s no need to parboil first, just chop it into small cubes and cook for a few minutes before you add the other vegetables)
• Got a taste for raw parsnip? Try adding some to a winter coleslaw
• Use half parsnip, half potato to top a lighter cottage pie
• Dip Spiced Roast Parsnip Chunks into Coriander Chutney
• Use leftover roast parsnips to make Chestnut, parsnip and orange soup

Last week was all about those ingredients that sound like they are going to be wholegrains but turn out not to be.  This week is a little of the opposite – I have been cooking with cous cous.  Now those clever foodie types amongst you will know that cous cous isn’t really a grain at all, despite it’s teeny tiny appearance, but that it is actually little tiny pieces of pasta.  But surprisingly perhaps, you can get still get wholegrain cous cous; simply cous cous made from wholewheat flour.

The cous cous, sumac, pepper and date salad featured here is a very simple recipe.  Everybody makes a salad like this every now and then – perfect as a side dish or as a packed lunch to take to work.  Every time I make it this salad it is slightly different, however the ideas behind it are always the same.  I have five broad categories of ingredient in mind to make sure that my salad provides a good range of nutrients:

A wholegrain – choose from quinoa, brown rice, buckwheat, wholegrain spelt, wholewheat cous cous and millet or whatever else you fancy.  Wholegrains are higher in vitamins and minerals than their refined equivalents and full of fibre.  People often find that wholegrains are more filling than refined carbohydrates, so a wholegrain salad is perfect for keeping you energetic and wide awake well into the afternoon.

Fresh vegetables – any chopped fresh or lightly blanched vegetables such as peppers, green beans, radish, tomato, grated carrot, courgette, spring onion, red onion, cucumber or sweetcorn.  All of these will count towards your five a day as well as providing vitamins, potassium and fibre.  I like to include something that I know will give me a decent amount of vitamin C – usually red or yellow peppers.  You can of course use leftover roasted vegetables, in which case how about complementing them with some chopped fresh fruit so that you still get plenty of Vitamin C?

Dried fruit – dates, apricots, figs, sour cherries etc will all add an appealing sweet note to your salad.  Most dried fruits are very high in fibre and usually rich in minerals (particularly iron and sometimes also calcium).

Nuts or seeds – these provide healthy fats, more fibre and a little bit of protein. Most importantly they add bags of texture and flavour.

Flavour enhancers – a little something to boost the flavour.  I used sumac, which adds a lovely tart note against the sweet dried dates (not to mention an exotic pink hue!).  But pretty much anything goes; lemon juice, black pepper, fresh or dried herbs, chilli sauce, spices, seasoning mixes. The idea is to boost the flavour of your lunch without needing to add large amounts of calories or salt.

All of these ingredients are nutritious and tasty in their own right but I find that having this mental “tick list” of foods to include makes sure that my lunch is always well balanced and interesting – the wider the range of ingredients you add the more colour and different textures your salad will have, as well as plenty of nutritional variety. There are other advantages to following this plan; by eating your dried fruit and wholegrains alongside a vitamin C rich vegetable, your body will be much more able to absorb the iron from the dried fruit and grains.  This type of cooking is also immensely frugal and planet friendly; with only a basic outline of the recipe defined there is ample scope for seasonal adaptation, fridge clearance and using up those odds and ends of dried fruit and grains in the cupboard.

There is a moderate amount of protein in this kind of salad from the wholegrain and the nuts; probably enough for most people if you are having a good source of protein at your main meal.  If you know that the rest of your day might be a bit lacking in protein then go for the wholegrains that are higher in protein (particularly quinoa, spelt and rice) or consider adding a helping of fish, lean meat, cheese, tofu or beans.

A short aside
Kathryn Elliott over at Limes and Lycopene is running a fantastic series of posts daily through August called 31 Days to a better diet.  Do check it out if you haven’t done so already; two of my favourites so far include this post about keeping convenient fruit and vegetables handy and this one about trying out one of those new ingredients that we all have tucked away at the back of our cupboards but have never used.  

Related recipes on Mostly Eating
How to interpret wholegrain label jargon and a summer spelt recipe
Mackerel, Pepper and Bulgur Wheat Salad
Instant gratification – tuna, bean and watercress salad
Warm beetroot, sumac and sweet potato salad
An earthy fig, chicken and mushroom salad

There’s a recipe this week, for a delicious cooling summer salad with herbs, salmon cucumber and spelt.  But first a digression into the world of wholegrains and spelt, with a couple of labelling tricks for savvy shoppers to be on the look out for.

There is a surprising amount of nutrition hocus-pocus on the web and in magazines about spelt. Apparently it is “easier to digest” and “better for you than wheat”. The digestive claims could have some substance to them (for one group of the population) if spelt was gluten free.  In reality if you have coeliac disease with its accompanying immune response to gluten then spelt is not suitable for you; it is not gluten-free.

For those of us who don’t have coeliac disease, is spelt better for you?  So hard to say with any great conviction!  Every grain has its subtle distinguishing features (a little more protein here, a bit more of this mineral). While spelt bread “with bits in” has been shown to be low GI like most other similar breads, there still don’t seem to be any reliable results for spelt itself regarding glycaemic index.

The big selling point for spelt therefore (in addition to the lovely nutty taste) is all of that wholegrain goodness with its associated fibre and cardioprotective benefits.  Something to be found in all wholegrain products, even those made from spelt’s much maligned cousin, wheat.  But as is so often the case with food, you need to look carefully at the label to be sure that you are getting what you think you you are.

Is your wholegrain still whole?
Certain ingredients just have an aura of healthy goodness surrounding them don’t they?  Spelt is one of those; nobody says nasty things about spelt in the same way they do wheat.  Spelt is a whole grain, right?  Well kind of.  Spelt is a wholegrain if it is a left as a wholegrain, but can be milled and processed until it is no longer “whole” just like any other grain can.  I put my hand up to falling for this one; upon closer inspection at home my newly purchased spelt wholegrains were actually not whole at all but semi-pearled; somewhere between wholegrain and refined.

It pays to read the label closely on “wholegrain” products.  Look out for terminology such as pearled, polished, multi-grain; these products are generally not wholegrain.  Flaked, cracked and ground may or may not be made using the whole grain.

How much of a wholegrain serving will you get from your bread?
Shopping for wholegrain bread is incredibly complicated these days. There are many products that look brown and good for you and bursting with wholegrains but that in reality contain very little that is wholegrain or good for you.  Marion Nestle succinctly summarises all of her careful research into the state of modern breadmaking with these simple tips for label reading:

Look for “100 percent on the label, whole wheat flour as the first ingredient, 2 grams of fiber per ounce” (Marion Nestle, What to Eat).  An ounce is about 30 grams to metric types – about the weight of a slice of bread.

All grain processing isn’t necessarily bad; without any processing at all the majority of grains would be too irritating to the gut to be digestible and would contain such large quantities of a group of compounds called phytates that our bodies would be able to absorb little or no minerals from the grains.  As with everything, there’s a balance to be had. I was very happy with my semi-pearled spelt but will remember to check more carefully for a wholegrain product next time.

This herb, salmon and spelt salad recipe is just as at home as an offering for a summer party as for a cooling packed lunch during the summer.  There are easy modifications for vegans and those who do not eat fish (much of the chopping and cooking remains the same so I suspect it wouldn’t be too much work to make two different versions for barbecue or potluck):

• Vegans can substitute silken soy for the dairy in the dressing (between this and the spelt there would be a reasonable serving of protein in the dish).
• For a non-fish option use chopped hard boiled eggs in place of the salmon
• Consider boosting the vegetable content and reduce the grain content a
  little if you are making this for a packed lunch and won’t be having
  any other vegetables at your mealtime.  Try blanced asparagus or peas
  (frozen peas would be just fine).

Last week while I was busy not blogging I got predictably excited about an idea on Culinate for a breakfast salad.  The said salad can be prepared the evening before, kicking the day off to a great start with two portions of veg taken care of before even leaving the house

But the real world doesn’t always pan out like that and this weekend has been one of those weekends.  Suddenly it’s four o’clock on Sunday afternoon and my total fruit and veg consumption for the day has been a handful of dried fruit at breakfast (one portion down, at least four to go).

Big salads are the perfect cure to a day of vegetable dodging and have an endearing way of combining the best of all culinary worlds: raw and cooked, spicy and sweet, hot and cold.  This roast squash and chickpea salad is delicious and the perfect catch-up job; four portions of veg in one dish.  Definitely make the full quantities of the roast squash and marinated chickpeas even if you aren’t feeding four people and you will magically find yourself the owner of a ready made lunch to take to work the next day.

The recipe does have a few stages to it but there’s no rush; this is one of those good-natured recipes that will fit in happily around whatever else you might be up to.  I made the dressing and put the chickpeas in to marinade at about 3pm and then went off to sort out some paperwork.  I peeled and diced the squash and sliced the onion late afternoon before settling down to a bit of light blogging, finally roasting the squash and slow cooking the onions just before we wanted to eat.  With all of the prep done the actual cooking part seemed pretty trivial.

There are always raw food enthusiasts around telling you that a diet exclusive of food cooked using heat is the way to eternal life but in reality the answer (as is nearly always the case in nutrition) lies in variety. As much as some nutrients are diminished by the water and heat that they encounter during cooking, there are a whole host of others that only become user friendly with a touch of heat and a drizzle of oil. The Japanese are probably the best at this balancing act with their talent for mixing raw and cooked vegetables within a single dish, providing bags of texture and nutrients.

This winter I have been studiously avoiding imported salad vegetables as far as possible but I miss the crunchy stuff, and there are only so many kettle chips a girl can reasonably eat to fulfill this particular craving. Enter the winter coleslaw – fantastically crunchy and very nutritious.

Coleslaw is a really good example of why it is the variety of produce and cooking methods that you use across the week as a whole that counts. Cabbage is surprisingly packed with vitamin C (49mg per 100g of cabbage, compared with 54mg in the same quantity of orange, and 1mg in the same amount of cauliflower). Red cabbage is purportedly even higher in vitamin C than white or green cabbages, but the rub is that this vitamin C is a sensitive little nutrient and fair chunks of it tends to be obliterated during cooking. The same goes for the folic acid in the leek. Hurrah for raw food you might be thinking, but the story doesn’t end there – by eating them raw you will almost certainly absorb less of the beta carotene in the carrots. But the point is that’s OK, you can roast them or whatever you fancy later in the week.

Holding the mayo by the way is worth it, saving a whopping 21 grams of fat per tablespoon even if you use luscious thick and creamy greek-style yogurt.

We had our coleslaw alongside jacket potatoes and chicken baked with a crispy oatmeal coating, and then again with lunches later in the week (it will stay crunchy in the fridge for a few days, much more so than the stuff from the shops). I’d made this coleslaw a few times before I saw the winter vegetable coleslaw recipe in Jamie Oliver’s new book Jamie at Home – his recipe is very similar so check that out too if you have the book. Jamie uses red onion but I’m sold on using leek which is sweeter and adds those gorgeous vibrant strands of lime green through the slaw.

Cut up the veg in whatever way suits; the fennel, leek and red cabbage can all be sliced thinly with a sharp cook’s knife or shredded in the food processor. By slicing the leek in half lengthways you can open it out to get flat sheets that are much easier to cut into strands. As I’m nearly always too lazy to get my food processor down from on top of the fridge I tend to use a knife for almost all of the prep work, and my trusty julienne peeler for the carrots (a coarse grater is fine).
p.s if you are stuck for inspiration about what to make for your loved one on valentine’s day, this time last year I posted a healthy macaroni cheese recipe which we both really love!