It snowed here again last week (in April!) so we’re still cooking wintery food and dreaming of fresh tomatoes and summer berries. On the stove are hearty soups like this one made of tomato, fennel, beans, leeks and wholewheat noodles providing a complete meal in a bowl.

There are two types of soup in the world, the sort that needs a good chunk of bread and the sort that is a complete meal in itself.  This soup is the latter type with at least 3 servings of veg per portion, wholegrain carbohydrate and plant-based protein from the cannellini beans.  As well as covering everything I look for in a balanced meal the combination of fibre, fluid and protein mean that the soup is really filling.

The recipe is completely inspired by a much loved ‘Chickpea and spinach soup’ from the 1st edition of An honest kitchen, a genius recipe which is much brightened by shoyu sauce and a handful of fresh mint.

It’s a very well though out recipe:

• minimal pans are used, the noodles are just cooked by pouring hot water over and leaving them
• shoyu sauce provides a complex salty note but with less sodium overall than adding salt
• all of the ingredients are ones that we usually have in
• You can swap in different fresh veg (I always try to include one from the allium family)

My version here keeps all of the cleverness of the original recipe but with ingredients well suited to a UK winter pantry, including parsley, the only soft herb to grow in my garden right the way through the Winter. Recipe étiquette is a tricky thing, but having just read Kathryn’s post on the Honest Kitchen blog on how much she enjoys seeing her and Lucy’s recipes tweaked and adapted, I think she will be more than happy to see her ideas put to good use.

You know my feelings about oats. They are far too modest to say so themselves, but how many other foods are wholegrain, low GI and more than usually endowed with cholesterol mopping soluble fibre?  And so versatile in the kitchen too.  I’m always pleased to find another excuse to include them in my week and hence my delight at having these spinach, cottage cheese and oat pancakes as a new savoury oaty option.

I know some people pooh-pooh cottage cheese but if you buy the normal stuff it’s actually rather nice and creamy. I think it was all the extra low fat cottage cheese (very watery and lumpy) and those strange additions like prawns and pineapple that did for its reputation. That, and all those flavour free, soul-destroying diets of the 1970s and 1980s.  But if you’re still sceptical about the merits of cottage cheese then give this Baked cottage cheese french toast with a courgette and corn salsa a whirl as a stepping stone to moving on to these pancakes (honestly, I dare you not to like them).

Those savoury oat, spinach and cottage cheese pancakes combine both of these ingredients and are literally a case of blitz and cook.  Credit where it’s due to the awesome Shauna for spotting the sheer simplicity of this recipe. We like these as brunch and making a savoury twist on the original fruity recipe makes it really easy to fit in some extra portions of fruit and veg alongside the pancakes (today a heap of salad leaves and some roast cherry tomatoes).

People with problems absorbing lactose be aware that cottage cheese has much more lactose in it than hard cheeses.

Many more ideas for including more oats in your diet over here, plus a whole host of cheese and egg recipes.

Our house is the neighbourhood home for unwanted rhubarb. I love the stuff, while some of our friends who have rhubarb growing in their gardens just aren’t as keen (or possibly just have way too much).  It’s not uncommon for us to come home to find a bag of rhubarb hanging on our front door handle, sometimes with a cabbage for the chickens thrown in.

There’s just one difficulty with the free rhubarb  – it just doesn’t fit into the fridge easily. It’s too big for the salad drawer and ideally wants a shelf all to itself. I’ve tried leaving it out of the fridge and it just goes limp. Chop it into smaller pieces and it just dries out.  This spring though, I think I’ve finally got rhubarb sorted.  I can get a big bunch of fresh rhubarb from the doorstep and into a manageable, fridge-friendly, ready-to-eat tub of compote in under 10 minutes.

Here’s how to do it. Give the rhubarb a quick wash and cut off any leaves, plus an inch or so of stem from either end.  Chop the rhubarb into inch long segments and place in a ceramic bowl.  Add a splash of water or a squeeze of orange juice and a scant tablespoon of honey. Microwave on full power for two minutes. Stir and return to the microwave for a further two minutes or until the rhubarb is soft and disintegrating. Taste and add more honey if needed.

There’s nothing wrong with cooking rhubarb on the hob by the way, it’s just that cooking it on the hob requires a bit more time and attention. Which means that I’m more likely to want to cook it later when I can give it my full attention, rather than right away. Which means I’m going to try and wedge it into the fridge somehow, around the yogurt pots and over the relish jars…

The compote is great in a smoothie, with creamy natural yogurt, on oatmeal/porridge or with leftover quinoa for a quick breakfast.

Related posts

• Rhubarb and ginger thickie
• Is rhubarb good for you?
• Tofu with hot and sour rhubarb sauce

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

We’ve just returned from a few days in Provence where they have near constant sunshine in which to bask and also to grow sunflowers, lavender, olives by the field load. The Great British Summer in contrast is a fickle thing. Slightly disappointing, but not entirely surprising then, to come home to find the only species flourishing in the vegetable bed were a small posse of damp-loving funghi.

This one-pot bake is a perfectly suited to the trials and tribulations of a classic British summer.  The flavours are sunny and Mediterranean (lemon, oregano, tomato, olive oil) but the finished dish is also suitably warm and cozy for an evening inside watching the rain.  It is a “one-pot” supper in the nutritional sense too, combining summer vegetables (fennel, cherry tomatoes, onions), high protein, high fibre dried beans, monounsaturated olive oil and a wholegrain breadcrumb topping. One serving provides at least 3 of your five serves of fruit and vegetable per day with minimal effort.

Veggie sausages are typically lower in fat and more environmentally sustainable to produce than the meaty sort.  For a dish like this where the sausages are a bit player rather than the true star of the show, I tend to use veggie sausages (for the aforementioned reasons).  The recipe as it stands produces a dry style of dish with a crispy top; if you fancy something a little more cassoulet in style then just add a slosh of stock or white wine to the pan before topping with the breadcrumb.

Related musings and recipes on Mostly Eating
Heart Healthy Macaroni Cheese (with a very similar breadcrumb topping)
The perfect convenience food? Why a humble tin of beans is good for you and the planet
Fennel and Tomato Lasagne
Aubergine, courgette and tomato stew with quinoa and feta
What to eat now – a Mediterranean or Nordic style diet?

Skirlie is an old-fashioned savoury oat dish from Scotland made with oats and onions cooked in butter or dripping.  I’ve been experimenting with this again recently made with olive oil, fresh herbs and a few extra veggies.  It’s ridiculously easy to make, healthy and far easier to wash up than porridge.

Skirlie has a different texture to porridge; it’s a little moist but also chewy, more like the consistency of cooked brown rice. Ergo, if you aren’t keen on porridge in all its gloopiness you may find that you enjoy skirlie. Likewise die hard porridge fans may find it takes a few mouthfuls to get used to.

That gelatinous wobble of properly made porridge comes from the beta glucan in the oats, a type of soluble fibre that becomes jelly-like when moist.  Large amounts of this soluble fibre is root of many of those health benefits ascribed to oats.  It can keep you feeling full through an ability to swell up dramatically when moist and also because it causes the energy from the oats to be released very slowly into your bloodstream (oats are low GI) .  Soluble fibre also seems to assist your body in getting rid of excess cholesterol, helping to protect against cardiovascular disease (and in case you wanted to know but didn’t like to ask, yes soluble fibre helps to keep you regular too).  Skirlie contains just as much of this beta glucan as porridge, it’s just that it is less physically apparent than in porrdige because the dish contains so much less liquid.  Instead all of that that expansion of the oats will happen inside your stomach instead making skirlie a fairly filling prospect.

Oats love the temperate UK climate, growing over the winter months with about half of the crop going for human consumption and half for animal feed (there’s more info on UK arable crops from DEFRA if you’re interested).

Like so many vegetarian dishes, top it with a poached egg and you have a complete meal (brunch perhaps?). I also use skirlie as a side dish to oily fish or roast chicken (it’s even better with meals that have a little gravy or sauce alongside).  You could also try using it as a stuffing or stirring it into mash.  The flavourings and vegetables you use can be swopped and changed, for example on other days I’ve made skirlie with orange zest, lemon thyme and skinny ribbons of leek.

We’ve just spent a few days in the glorious highlands of Scotland.  Me with my camera and the triathlete with his bike, taking part in the Caledonian Etape.  Or trying to anyway; the whole weekend turned out to be rather more eventful than planned when somebody sabotaged the event by scattering carpet tacks across the route, possibly in protest at the road closures put in place for the event (scheduled to last an incredibly inconvenient three whole hours).

The Scots as it turns out have a whole vocabulary to describe rain.  After a dreich day, the rain upgraded its status to stotting down. The weather in England hasn’t been much better since we got back from our break (grey and distinctly chilly) so this seems an opportune time to share a crumble recipe.

I’ve dallied with ‘healthier fats’ in crumbles, but haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory recipe (oils seem to produce a dish more rubble than crumble).  A compromise is to accompany the butter with a high fruit to topping ratio, not too much sugar and plenty of good stuff in the topping.  Wholemeal spelt flour, whole oats plus roughly chopped hazelnuts for texture.  Spelt flour has a toasty, nutty flavour and is my current favourite standby flour for all but the most serious of baking recipes.  (Shopping note: as with the unmilled spelt grains, spelt flour comes in wholegrain and white varieties. Check the label to see which sort you are getting).

Our crumble accompaniment tends to start from luxurious, fresh vanilla custard on the first day to a more austere, sour note like natural yogurt or half-fat creme fraiche for the leftovers.

Other recipes featuring oats, plums and spelt
Baked plums with cinnamon and honey
Fig and plum porridge
Butternut squash, oat and ginger cake bites
Summery herb, salmon and spelt salad
Rhubarb and Ginger Thickie

The photo at the top of this post is from Queen’s View, reputably the most photographed view in Perthshire and a favourite of Queen Victoria.

There’s a recipe that keeps popping up and I’ve been trying to ignore it, because surely something that simple isn’t going to make a decent dinner?  It’s called pisto, a kind ratatouille that is a regular feature in Spanish home kitchens. Having given in and tried it, I’m now completely sold on the idea.  It’s not the pisto alone that has entranced me, but the traditional serving suggestion; the familiarity of rice with a homely, tangy tomato sauce and topped with a perfect runny egg. Pisto is a new stock item on our list of easy weeknight suppers but don’t let me limit your ideas.  For starters I’m sure this would make a perfect weekend brunch.

As a meal this is environmentally sustainable, nutritionally well balanced and stress free to make. What’s not to like?

It’s so darn easy
This is not an instant dinner (a misleading term if ever there was, as we discussed last week) but it is a forgiving sort of a meal to make, with very little active input required and little that can go wrong. Ximena Maier of Lobstersquad explains the attraction of making pisto “What I like about it is that it has a very relaxed rhythm. You only have to follow the order of ingredients, and throw them in the pan as soon as they´re chopped. There´s no anxiously waiting for something to be just right, no stressful wild chopping while something may burn. Things will happen while they must, and a minute up and down isn´t a big deal.”   In fact if you have a rice cooker then cooking dinner becomes a very leisurely affair indeed. 

The eggs are gently cooked in little dents made in the pisto with the back of a spoon.  This results in all of the gooey loveliness of a poached egg but with none of the scariness of egg poaching for the uninitiated (though there are many reasons why it is worth learning how to poach an egg if you haven’t already).

Nutritional balance
Pisto with brown rice and an egg is the very model of a well balanced meal.  Vegetables predominate the dish and are there in a range of colours which intimates that you are about to eat a good variety of vitamins and antioxidants. Eggs provide low fat protein and are cooked without the addition of any extra fat. The carbohydrate source is wholegrain. The total amount of fat used in the recipe is small and monounsaturated in nature.  And there is synergy between the ingredients too with the brown rice, egg and vegetables combing to give a reasonable hit of iron and the added benefit of vitamin C from the peppers which enables your body to better absorb these vegetarian iron sources.

Flexibility and Flexitarianism
I’m bound to offend some (Spanish) people with my messing about with the basic pisto recipe (then it’s not pisto, right?) but another very pleasing quality about using this as the inspiration for a meal is that you can adjust it a little according to what’s in the fridge.  If you want to make your pisto more seasonal and local you can; as it is mid Winter here I compromised with canned tomatoes in place of the traditional raw but used imported organic peppers.  An official common variation in Spain is to use eggplant (aubergine) instead of courgette but a carrot works just fine too.  And if you’ve got half a bag of spinach or another greeny leafy veg in the fridge then why not chuck some of that in too (I also keep frozen spinach which you can just chuck straight in from the freezer).

Brown rice is my accompaniment of choice but try experimenting with other wholegrains like buckwheat groats or quinoa. 

This is definitely a no meat required dish adding to its sustainable
credentials but the flexitarian among you might enjoy a bit of chorizo sausage for an occasional variation. 

Built in portion control
The sauce, rice and eggs are all introduced separately providing ample portion control opportunities. Looking for a light lunch? Reduce or skip the rice and just have one egg. My husband, who spends his evenings running and weekends cycling up huge hills needs more calories than me so he tends to have the pisto, rice and eggs with some crusty bread on the side.

Cook once, eat again later
Once you’ve made a big batch of the sauce the leftovers will sit happily in the fridge for about a week or freeze giving you a really easy dinner option on some busy weeknight when cooking is shaping up to feel more of a chore than a pleasure.

I’d really encourage you to make extra of pisto sauce ready for another day as it is really handy thing to have in the fridge.  You don’t need to eat it with rice and eggs; how about using it as a pasta sauce or adding a can of chickpeas for a vegetarian stew?  If you want to save some for another day stop just before the stage of adding the green leafy vegetables (which are best added at the last minute) and put aside any sauce that you don’t want to use today.

Other people making pisto
Pisto Manchego With Eggs from Marth Rose Schulman’s New York Times column as raved about last week
Winding down on a friday evening : Pisto from lobstersquad
Serious eat highlight a summery version of pisto to made with grilled vegetables
Not pisto, but I’ve also written about some healthy eating habits I picked up on holiday in Spain

This combination of juicy fresh fruit, sweet dried fruit and a hint of spice was my food flask breakfast for a very early train journey a few weeks back, inspired by a leftover bowl of quinoa.  Porridge (possibly more commonly known as oatmeal?) is my regular nutritious winter breakfast in many, many different guises, but quinoa makes a very pleasant change from oats.  Quinoa, it turns out, is also a much more forgiving grain to prepare in the morning rush.  Povided that you cook a little extra earlier in the week, this essentially just entails reheating; there’s no need to wait for that magic moment when those “oats floating in milk” magically elasticise into real, gooey porridge. Plus like porridge, this breakfast is really, really filling stuff, most likely because of the low glycaemic index of the grain which means that it keeps your blood glucose levels on an even keel well into the morning.

The mix of fresh and dried fruit covers water-soluble vitamins (particularly vitamin C), minerals and fibre all in one.  Porridge and quinoa are nutritionally similar in many ways; both are wholegrains and both low GI provided that you choose the right sort of oats.  Quinoa has a GI of 51 (classified as low), old-fashioned rolled oats 42 (also low) while instant porridge is 82 (high GI). Other nutritional aspects are more of a trade-off; porridge has its cholesterol-busting soluble fibre, while quinoa is higher in protein.

The quinoa can be soaked in the milk overnight but don’t worry about that too much – this dish still works fine made just before eating.  If you’re wondering why I’m suggesting adding honey to something that already contains naturally sweet dried fruit and clementines, the reality is that quinoa often has a very distinctive earthy note to it (the kind of flavour a wine buff would describe as a tad vegetal).  A little drizzle of honey among all of these other healthy ingredients is not going to cause any lasting damage but if you use a sweetened milk like certain soy milks then you might not need it.

Credit for this post goes to fabulous and thoughful dietitian Elaine of Greens and Berries for prompting me to blog about it after she caught me rambling from the train about my breakfast habits on Twitter.  She was right to get me to write the combination down.  This way I will remember it when the clementine season comes around next year.  There’s something about this one that is more than the sum of it’s parts (I suspect it’s the way that the milk soaks into the clementines making them super juicy).

Last Sunday was all about using up the ends of a roast chicken from a couple of weeks before, plus sundry other odds and ends from the fridge.  I was so pleased with the end result I thought I’d share it here:  a homely chicken casserole with seasonal veggies, spelt and light dumplings made with rosemary and lemon.

Like most people, we’re feeling the credit crunch a little bit around this way.  I’m loathe to cut our food buying in any dramatic way (not surprisingly, eating well is a fairly big priority in our house) so it is a softly, softly approach at the moment.  For me part of the deal of being an occasional omnivore means buying higher welfare standard meat and going back from this to cheaper alternatives just isn’t an option.  A small organic chicken is surprisingly economical, not to mention tastier than the ubiquitous pale chicken breast fillet.  This way the whole of the chicken gets used up, plus there’s something quietly satisfying in a domesticated way about stretching a chicken out to three or four meals.

Here’s what I had left in my fridge:

• Chicken stock – the really good stuff, the sort that sets to a quivering jelly in the fridge.  The stock was made from the carcass of a roast chicken that I didn’t have time to turn into stock straight away but slung into the freezer until the next weekend.
• Half a tub of crème fraiche – whenever I buy crème fraiche for a recipe there is always some leftover; every recipe uses half a pot or less!
• A chunk of sourdough – of course the breadcrumbs don’t have to be made from sourdough but the bottom line is that good bread makes good breadcrumbs.  Slightly dry, stale bread is even better than fresh, but fresh will work fine too.
• Seasonal vegetables – I’ve used carrot and leek, the seasonal vegetables that I had odds and ends of in the fridge.  Celery, squash, onion, fennel and turnip would also work well here.
• Rosemary and bay – not technically in the fridge, but unlike more delicate species, rosemary and bay are the only herbs to consistently survive both my horticultural efforts and the British climate

Casserole with dumplings is a universal comfort food and it turns out that most cultures have their own dumpling recipe, of which the traditional English dumpling is a particularly splendidly stodgy exemplar made from flour and suet (a hard, saturated animal fat).  My “leftover” dumplings are suet free, concocted of breadcrumbs and parmesan and held together with egg and leftover crème fraiche.  While the egg and crème fraiche are not fat free they at least provide valuable calcium, iron and protein, unlike suet which is essentially an unadulterated fat.  Making your own stock is really easy if you haven’t tried it and allows you to control how much salt ends up in there, not to mention the fact that it just tastes better.  Freshly homemade stock will settle with a layer of fat across its top which you can easily skim off after leaving it to settle in the fridge.

Posts I like in praise of using up a whole chicken
The House Guest Who Came to Visit and Stayed to Cook a guest post on Mark Bittman’s NY Times blog
3 meals from one bird, from the chicken out campaign – recipes by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall
Three of a kind: October: roast chicken, chicken frittata, chicken soup – slightly infuriating multi-page layout, but some nice suggestions from Arthur Potts Dawson
Jamie Oliver’s easy chicken stock – an easy introduction to making chicken stock from a carcass