Root vegetable tagine

My niece came to stay this weekend, and we cooked this delicious vegetable tagine together. Aside from onion and carrot the selection of vegetables was far from authentic, as I used winter vegetables – sweet potato, parsnip and swede – but the result was just as tasty as tagines featuring mediterranean vegetables. My niece had seconds, so I think it has the seal of approval!

I used red onion, but regular yellow onion would be just fine. These quantities serve 4 generously and I didn’t use all of the swede pictured. You can easily up the quanties, remembering to increase the amount of spices, to serve more people or make sure you have leftovers for tomorrow’s lunchbox. Having browsed a number of different recipes online and in my cookbooks, I decided that the important things were to soften the onions and cook the spices slowly at the beginning, then turn the chopped vegetables in the spicy onions, and finally add the liquid and chickpeas. You could add crushed chillies or a fresh chopped chilli with the rest of the spices at the beginning instead of using paprika.

Rather than serving the vegetable tagine with couscous, we had brown rice, which made it a really satisfying meal. To thicken the sauce – and up the protein content, particularly useful if you are vegan – you could add 100g red lentils just before adding the stock.

• 1 large red onion
• 1 tbsp rapeseed oil (or similar neutral oil)
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 thumb of root ginger
• ½ tsp ground cumin
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ¼ tsp paprika
• 2 carrots
• 1 large sweet potato
• 2 parsnips
• 1 small swede
• ½ tin chopped tomatoes
• 600 ml vegetable stock
• Large pinch saffron
• 8 soft dried apricots
• zest and juice of ½ orange
• 400g can of chickpeas
• 1 red chilli or 1 tsp harissa
• a handful of coriander leaves
• To serve: brown rice or couscous with 50g pine nuts to garnish

Start by peeling and chopping the onion, crushing the garlic and peeling and finely chopping the ginger. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed casserole or pan with a lid, large enough to take all the vegetables comfortably. Peel and chop the carrot, sweet potato, swede and parsnip into even, fork-sized chunks.

When the oil is hot, cook the chopped onion, stirring from time to time, for about 5 minutes until it is starting to soften. Add the garlic and ginger, and cook for another couple of minutes before tipping in the cumin, cinnamon, coriander and paprika. Stir for a few minutes until the scent of the spices rises.

Add the rest of the vegetables and stir them about in the spicy onions – this is where you’ll be glad that you chose a nice large pan! Then stir in the tomatoes. Heat the stock, or make up from 1 rounded tsp of Marigold vegan bouillon powder and boiling water. Add the saffron to the stock and pour into the pan. Finally, chop the dried apricots into quarters, and add them to the pan together with the orange zest and juice and drained chickpeas.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 20-30 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Put on the rice or couscous and we toasted some pine nuts to sprinkle over the rice. Once the tagine is cooked, stir in the harissa, if using. Serve with the rice or couscous, and garnish with chopped coriander and sliced red chilli, if wished.

Beetroot and red onion tarte tatin

This glistening, deep-red tart would make a showy centrepiece for Sunday lunch, and is useful if you or those you cook for are vegan or trying it out for Veganuary. I made it the other evening for an omnivorous friend with high culinary standards, who gave it the thumbs up, so meat-eaters won’t be disappointed either.

There seem to be various approaches to caramelising the vegetables before finally baking them under their crust. I decided that baking the beetroot with olive oil and basalmic vinegar and cooking the onions on top of the stove gave the best combination of ease and deep flavour. If the beetroot you have are small you may need more than four and in this case, they will just need to be quartered or halved. Remember to choose a puff pastry that is vegan.

You will need a solid baking tin – don’t use a spring-form tin or you may end up with the juices firmly caramelised onto your oven. I used a 20cm round one, but a square pan would be absolutely fine if you have a dish or board the right shape to turn it out onto. And you use a rectangular tin a bit smaller than your piece of pastry then you won’t need to faff around cutting it to size (though you may need more beetroot and onions)! Note that you need to rest the tart for 10 minutes before serving, so build that if you timing is critical. This quantity feeds 3-4 people, depending on what side dishes (or other courses) you serve it with – you could, of course, easily scale it up to make a big tart for a crowd.

• 3-4 medium beetroot
• 4 tbsps rapeseed or olive oil
• 1 tbsp basalmic vinegar
• 3 red onions
• 1 tsp soft brown sugar
• half a pre-rolled sheet of puff pastry
• handful of parsley (optional)

Unroll the sheet of puff pastry, upend the baking tin on it, and cut a piece 1 cm larger than the tin. I needed to roll the pastry a bit to get it to the right shape, and I should have allowed a bigger rim to tuck in (as you can see, it was not 1 cm larger than the tin). Re-wrap the pastry and put it back in the fridge in its bag. Line the baking tin with greaseproof paper. Heat the oven to 180°F fan/200°F/Gas 6.

Wash, trim and peel the beetroot (use rubber gloves if you want to avoid Lady Macbeth hands). Cut them into 6 or 8 wedges from top to tip and put them in a bowl (yes, it is worth the extra washing up!). Toss with about 2 tbsps oil, 1 tbsp basalmic vinegar, salt and pepper.

Now arrange the beetroot wedges on their sides in a circle around the edge of the tin, fitting them snugly together (mine could have been closer together) and fill the centre with a few of the smaller pieces. Put into the pre-warmed oven and cook for 30-40 minutes until a knife goes through them, remembering that they are going to get cooked a bit more later. If you have any beetroot left over (I did) just tip them into a separate baking pan, cover with foil and pop them in the oven at the same time. They will make a lovely beetroot salad with watercress, chicory and sliced orange.

Peel the onions and slice fairly finely. Heat the remaining 2 tbsps oil over a medium heat in a large frying pan with a lid.

Stir the onions regularly and when they start to soften add the 1 tsp brown sugar, season with salt and black pepper and put the lid on. Cook the onions slowly for a further 15 minutes, stirring once or twice, until they are meltingly soft and caramelising. Leave to cool – this makes it easier when you come to add the pastry. You can prepare everything a few hours ahead up to this point.

When the beetroot is ready spoon the onions over them, filling any gaps between the wedges to give a relatively smooth surface. Carefully unroll the pastry over the top and tuck the edges down over the filling.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until the pastry is nicely browned, turning the tin half way if your oven is like mine and browns the back half of the pastry more quickly. Take out of the oven and rest for 10 minutes – this allows the tart to settle and avoids you emptying scalding beetroot juice over your hands when you turn it out!

Gently slide a spatula round the edge of the tart to loosen any sticky bits. Now firmly clamp your serving plate over the top of the tart, using a cloth as the tin will still be hot, and swiftly turn it over. The greaseproof paper will probably stay in the tin but if not just peel it off – it will have done its work of stopping the filling sticking to the tin. Sprinkle over some chopped parsley, if you wish. It really needs to be served with something green – broccoli is good or a watercress or rocket salad – and you could add new potatoes if you want to make it more substantial.

 

Escalivada or Catalan roasted vegetables

Eating Escalivada reminds me of long holiday lunches while staying with my friend who has a flat by the beach in Llançà in Catalonia. It is so simple to make, yet the combination of roasted vegetables is just right, making a delicious starter, light lunch or a side dish that seems to go with everything.

Yesterday we had it with a dish of warm lentils, rocket salad and an oozingly ripe goat’s cheese. The only thing it demands is a bit of advance planning, as the vegetables need to cook quite slowly in the oven. This quantity serves 4 as a starter or part of a main course. It keeps well in the fridge, so it’s worth doing more than you need,  providing an instant hit of sunshine for supper later in the week.

1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
1 medium onion
1 aubergine
olive oil
2 tsp sherry vinegar

Heat the oven to 190ºC/Gas mark 5 – though if you were cooking something else at 180ºC/Gas mark 4 that would be fine too; they would just take a bit longer to cook. Wash the peppers and aubergine. Cut out the stems of the peppers and pull out the fibrous inside and seeds. Slice off the top of the aubergine, and pierce it a few times with a knife (to avoid explosions in the oven). Cut the onion into two (or four if it is fat) – no need to peel it.

Put all the vegetables into an oven dish and rub them with olive oil (except for the onion skin). Sprinkle with a little salt and cover tightly with foil. If you prefer you can wrap the vegetables individually in foil, but this strikes me as more trouble than is necessary. Roast for an hour, then check how they are doing – you need to roast them until they are really soft and starting to collapse. They will probably need another 30 minutes, and I took the foil off for the last 15 minutes to speed things up.

When the vegetables are all really soft take them out of the oven and leave until they are cool enough to handle. Then peel the skin off the peppers and aubergine – it should just pull away really easily. Extract any remaining seeds or fibres from the peppers – the only remotely fiddly part of the recipe. Slice the vegetables into long pieces about 2-3 cm wide and arrange on a platter. Pull the pieces of onion out of their skin, cutting them away from the root, and slicing them in half lengthways if they are too large to fit on a fork. Add them to the platter. Drizzle with olive oil and sherry vinegar, and season to taste. Serve at room temperature.

Escalivada is a great accompaniment to fish or lamb or chicken, or you can simply eat it with some good bread and a glass of wine. And pretend you are by the sea in Catalonia…

Onion tart

This is a classic Elizabeth David recipe. I can clearly remember learning to cook it with a friend while I was a student cooking in a shared hall of residence kitchen, in a block rather glamorously located opposite Selfridges (it was bulldozed a few years ago). For many years I cooked it so regularly that it became a sort of signature dish. It is ideal either as a starter for a formal meal or as a vegetarian lunch with salad (and perhaps some new potatoes).

I haven’t cooked it for a while, but this weekend it provided the perfect start to a rather traditional dinner party menu. As some of our guests had warned that they might be a little late – and given that it has been so cold – a casserole seemed the obvious answer for the main course, especially when Irene discovered this amazing Rowley Leigh recipe for Daube de Boeuf. Cooked for 12 hours at a very low temperature the meat was incredibly tender, all the work was done the night before and it could be reheated once everyone had arrived. An onion tart seemed suitably special and French and would provide a golden, creamy contrast before the dark Daube. I served it in modest portions with a small serving of baby leaves with a mustard dressing, or ‘avec sa salade’, as they say on French menus.

As I hadn’t made it recently, I went back to the original recipe and was glad I did – I adapted my normal pastry recipe following her instructions for pâte brisé, and refrained from my normal thrifty habit of including some whole eggs in the filling, rather than just the egg yolks as specified by Elizabeth David, both to good effect. I found a very good use for the egg whites, which I shall post shortly – and here’s another one in the meantime.

These quantities fill my 26cm tart tin and serve 6 as a main course or 8-10 as a starter. You do need to start the pastry at least 3 hours before you want to eat. If you’re entertaining, you can do most of the preparation early in the day and assemble the tart 45 minutes before dinner, as I did.

Pastry:
150g plain flour
80g butter
1 egg
pinch of salt

I started with my normal quantities for buttery shortcrust, added a whole egg and mixed everything in the food processor until the dough was just coming together (you may need to add a little cold water – I didn’t). I then briefly kneaded the dough into a ball before following Elizabeth David’s instructions for pâte brisé:  gradually stretch out the dough with the heel of your hand, bit by bit, to form a ragged sheet. Gather the dough up – my plastic dough scraper made this very easy – and repeat the process. Form the pastry into a ball, wrap it in cling film and leave it in the fridge for at least 2 hours. This produced the best behaved and neatest pastry I have made for some time, so I will definitely be using this method again. Elizabeth David says that chilling the pastry for at least 2 hours stops it shrinking in the oven, and it works!

Filling:
3 large, mild onions (about 650g)
50g butter
a little oil
salt, pepper and nutmeg
3 egg yolks
150g crème fraîche

Peel the onions, cut them in half and slice them thinly. Heat the butter with a dribble of oil in a wide frying pan with a lid. Do not be tempted to skimp on the butter – this is not a recipe to eat everyday, and butter is essential to the taste and silky texture of the dish. Add the onions and cook them gently with a lid on for 30 minutes, stirring from time to time to make sure they are not catching. By the end they should be beautifully soft and golden yellow. Take off the heat and season well with salt, pepper and freshly grated nutmeg. In a bowl, beat the three egg yolks well and mix in the crème fraîche. Stir into the onions and leave aside until you are ready to bake the tart.

Roll out the pastry to line the tin quite thinly. As I wanted to enjoy pre-dinner drinks with our guests, I rolled out the pastry at tea-time and put the lined tin back in the fridge ready to be filled and put in the oven as the door-bell rang.

Put a baking tray big enough to take the tart tin in the oven and heat it to 200ºC/Gas 6. Add the filling to the pastry case, put in the oven on the hot baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes until risen and golden. Elizabeth David says to serve it very hot, but I actually prefer it warm. Either way, a green salad is the perfect accompaniment.

Top six soups to banish the winter cold

That headline probably ought to be ‘Top six soups to banish a winter cold’ because the arrival of a cold a few days ago, apparently out of the blue, is what sent me scurrying for my favourite comforting soup recipes. Hot, liquid comfort food – ideally with lots of garlic and onions – is what I crave at the moment.

Whether you, too, are suffering a cold, or just want a soup to warm you when you get back from work or a winter walk, here are six soups which should cheer you up. They are all vegetable soups and all but one are vegetarian – from French country onion soup to roasted squash and tomato soup (below).

1) My fail-safe anti-cold soup is Elizabeth David’s Tourin Bordelais, a country recipe for a pale onion soup, served with slices of sourdough rubbed with garlic. I much prefer it to traditional French Onion Soup, and have found it cuts through the most miserable of colds. It is from French Provincial Cooking – still my desert island cookbook, as it is such a pleasure to read, as well as to cook from.

3 large mild onions
1 tbsp each butter and oil
2 egg yolks to thicken, if desired
A few drops wine vinegar

Slice the onions as finely as you can. Heat the butter and oil (Elizabeth David uses pork dripping, but I rarely have any) in a heavy saucepan, and cook the onions slowly, stirring until they start to soften. Season with salt, cover the pan and cook very gently for 30 minutes. The onions should be very soft but still a creamy yellow colour – you don’t want to brown them.

Pour over a litre of cold water, bring slowly to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes. If you wish to thicken (I don’t always), beat the 2 egg yolks in a bowl with a few drops of vinegar and a ladleful of hot soup. Return this mixture to the pan and stir until very hot, but NOT boiling (or the eggs will curdle).

The original recipe says to serve by putting slices of French bread baked in the oven into each soup plate and pouring the soup over. I think using toasted sourdough, which has been rubbed on both sides with a raw clove of garlic, is even better, especially if you have a cold. Serves 4-6.

2) A close second is this Lentil and Squash soup, based on Nigel Slater’s Dal and Pumpkin soup and probably the recipe I have cooked most often from his first Kitchen Diaries (my favourite of all his cookbooks – though that is a hard-fought title).

3) Today I opted for Celeriac Soup: creamy, wholesome and easy to make.

1 leek
1 onion
300g celeriac
1 or 2 cloves garlic
20g butter
500ml vegetable stock
3 tbsps single cream to garnish (optional)

Serves 3, although you could thin with extra stock to make enough for 4 more elegant portions. Slice the leek, and dice the onion. Peel the celeriac, and cut into 1 cm dice. Heat the butter in a large saucepan and add the leek, onion and celeriac. Crush or finely chop the garlic and add to the pan and season with salt and pepper. Cook gently, stirring from time to time, for about 10 minutes until the veg are beginning to soften.

Heat the stock and add to the pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes until the celeriac is really tender. Blend using a stick blender or liquidiser, check seasoning and drizzle a spoonful of single cream on each serving. You could also add chopped parsley or all manner of tasty, crispy toppings, but such sophistication can seem a step too far when you’ve got a cold – unless you’re lucky enough to have someone to cook soup for you, of course!

4) Parsnip is one of my favourite vegetables, and over the years I have made a number of different parsnip soups (you can, for example, pretty much substitute parsnip for celeriac in the recipe above). The absolute best, though, is Pastenak and cress cream from Elizabeth David’s Christmas. As I have said before, this book really is a treasure trove of unusual and delicious Christmas recipes. Pastenak and cress cream has become a fixture on our Christmas menus, but deserves to be cooked far more than once a year. Pastenak is the Medieval English word for parsnip, a corruption of the Latin name pastinaca. I particularly love the cress garnish – people seem to have forgotten about mustard and cress in their enthusiasm for putting coriander and flat-leaf parsley on everything, but mustard and cress adds a welcome note of freshness and heat here.

5) This is a recent entrant into my list of favourite soups: Roast squash and tomato soup (pictured, before blending, at the top of this post), originally a Sophie Grigson recipe, which I discovered through the excellent thesinglegourmetandtraveller blog. I think the addition of chilli flakes is definitely a good thing and I also popped about 4 unpeeled garlic cloves into the roasting tin, squeezing the roasted garlic out of the papery cases when I made the soup – as I said above, colds always make me want to eat garlic! The roasting really brings out the flavours and is definitely worth the trouble, especially as you could put the pan of vegetables into the oven ahead of time while you’re roasting something else. This is now my favourite squash soup.

6) Finally, Rowley Leigh’s Chickpea and Spinach soup is a hearty, substantial meal in a dish. It does require advance planning as you need to soak the chickpeas overnight. Although I suppose you could make it with tinned chickpeas, I don’t think you’d get the same texture and flavour as the original. The recipe includes lardons, but if you wanted to make it vegetarian you could omit these, and perhaps add a parmesan rind with the tomatoes to boost the umami flavour.

I hope one of these fits the bill for you too and would be interested to hear what other people find comforting to eat when they have a cold.