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We use rhubarb in so many dishes here. In rhubarb tarts,crumbles and meringue pies,in relishes, in soup,as a stuffing for mackerel and it makes a tasty cordial. This however is one of our best rhubarb recipes. I found it years ago in one of my Grandma’s cook books and tweaked it and its become a favorite. It’s simple and fast and makes a good sized cake It was exactly what I needed for the local Altzheimers Society teaday at the start of the month and my girls made one on sunday to take to a barbeque. An excellent cake also for brunches. Rhubarb Coffee Cake 1/2 cup butter 1/2cup sugar 1 egg 1 cup buttermilk or sour milk 1tsp baking powder 1tsp vanilla 1/2tsp salt 2 1/2cup flour grated rind and juice of an orange Mix up the above until smooth then add 3 cups chopped rhubarb pour into a greased 13x 9 inch pan then sprinkle 1cup brown sugar with 1/2cup chopped nuts across the top of the batter and bake at 350 for about 45 mins. Serve hot or cold on its own or with cream or custard You can substitute ginger or coriander for the vanilla, leave out the nuts or the orange and use other fruits such as apples, plums or peaches instead of rhubarb.
Rhubarb can be grow from stools ( lumps of rhubarb root) or from seed. Most established gardens have a rhubarb patch so a good option to get your patch started is beg some pieces from a kindly gardener. My neighbour Matt very kindly gave me 20 stools this spring .The advantage of getting local rhubarb is that it should be adapted for your local growing conditions . Its too late to put in stools this year as they need to go in while the plants are dormant but check out the gardens of people you visit for the rest of the year so you know who to hit up for stools next spring. You can also pick up potted rhubarb in most garden centers and plant them at any time. Timperly Early and Glaskins Perpetual are the recommended seed varieties and available in most seed merchants . You can sow those all through summer and spring. Start them in seedtrays or small pots. Rhubarb can tolerate a bit of shade and a bit of damp but dont let it get waterlogged.Prepare the area before hand by removing all the perrenial weeds and put in loads of well rotted manure before planting.
Now that the weather has started to warm up thoughts turn to barbeque. I’m not a big fan of the under or overcooked meat you get at a barbeque and I’ve found that once you are feeding more than eight people quality control goes out the window . Gotta love those crunchy sausages and that samonella chicken. Traditional barbequing also means somebody needs to stand at the barbi for hours instead of relaxing . Our new outside summer meal has an eastern theme . Most of the food can be prepared earlier and it takes very little time to finish off (it looks very complicated though) . A well stocked garden will also provide most of the vegetables for this so you get kudos for that too.
Flatbreads /Pitta/Naan We make flatbreads using our basic bread recipe and we cook them on the barbeque. It looks so good and they taste fabulous. Use whatever pizza/bread dough recipe you have and make breads brush them with oil and grill. Or buy some naan bread or pittas and toast them on the barbeque Mixed salad greens we use a mix of normal lettuce an more sharp greens like mustard and mizuna salsa felafels kebabs/ chicken / spicy beef Here we marinade lamb or chicken in a spicy yougurt mix ( yougurt and chili and cumin) and cook them on the barbi. Use whatever spices or sauce you like . For the spicy beef we fry ground beef with equal amounts of onions a touch of chili and cumin and then finish cooking it on a tray ( or doubled tinfoil)on the barbeque grill. hummus coriander pesto here we whizz up 2 handfulls of fresh coriander with a few tablespoons of olive oil, juice of a lemon ,salt and pepper and enough wter to make it into a drizzle, gorgeously fresh tasting. yougurt There to mute the spices down, have a bowlful for the less spiceloving roast courgette/ zucchini strips and roast pepper strips cooked on the barbi and brushed with olive oil then sprinkled with rough sea salt
some sort of chili sauce eg. Nando’s peri peri or your own special recipe which you can leave on its own or mix a bit with some yougurt as another sauce. For carbohydrate we have couscous with a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil , baked potatos and/or fried potato slices with a sprinkle of spices. For last years summer party here we fed 40 people with minimum effort this way.
Today is one of those days. No chickpeas and no tahini.What the shop did have was sesame seeds and I have chana dal in the cupboard. Chana dal is small split chickpeas Its readily available and you can get it in large bags from ethnic stores (we use it for felafels). You only need to let them soak for a few hours and they cook in under an hour. The consistency of hummus made from them is slightly softer than when using whole chickpeas but its still good.
So I figured I’d make my own tahini in the food processor from the sesame seeds. I whizzed up about a cup of seeds with a tablespoon ofoilive oil and a 1/2 teaspoon of coarse sea salt. This took a few minutes and wasnt completely smooth but I figured that wouldnt matter. Hummus to this I added about 3 cups of cooked chickpeas 2 lg garlic cloves juice of 1 lemon 3 T of olive oil a big big handful of coriander leaves 1T cumin seed add cold water if the hummus is too thick and adjust the salt ,olive oil, and lemon to taste as every one has their own idea of how hummus should be. (Alex went to a Lebanese restaurant last year with his aunts and since then has been overly critical about my hummus. ) You can leave out the coriander and cumin, add basil or pesto, roast some red or yellow peppers and add those (very yum) or try adding chilis.You can also replace the chickpeas with butter beans if you are really stuck. Just play with it. Once you’ve whizzed it all up put it in a bowl and drizzle it with olive oil. Serve with pittas or salad ,use as a dip for veg or chips.whatever. Hummus freezes well so we make lots and freeze batches for later.
One cereal that everyone here eats however is Granola. I know its not as healthy as a plain homemade muesli because you add oil and sweetener and then cook it, but at least people will happily eat it as it. I get the kids to help make it which is one of the reasons they like it but the other is that its just so darn tasty. As I’ve said Granola is basically muesli with added oil and sweetener. In this recipe I’ve used marmalade as the sweetener but you can use ,honey ,date sugar, brown sugar , maple syrup/sugar whatever you like. You can vary the amounts and types of fruit and nuts to suit your palate and your cupboard. This is the recipe the kids made this week. Granola 1kg oats 1kg dry fruit( I used 750g raisins and 250g apricots ) 200g dessicated coconut 100g flaked almonds 100g sunflower seed 100g pumpkin seed 3big T linseeds 3 tablespoons sunflower oil 4 lg T marmalade
I used raisins and apricots as my dried fruit because the kids are picky but you can add your fruit of choice , figs, prunes, banana chips etc. The same goes for the nuts and seeds. Tailor it to your familys taste. My kids eat it with milk and chopped apple.I like chopped banana or strawberries and yougurt with mine and Ive seen people eat it with apple juice so its also a great way of slipping in a bit of extra fruit into your day.
Persillade is a mix of parsley and garlic which is added to dishes, whilst being cooked for a mild flavour ,or at the end for a herby, garlicy oomph. Its a French thing as you might have guessed and widely used in french derived cuisines. Actually to be honest I’ve never really cared for parsley, a bit to school dinner garnish for me. I grow it, as parsley is the only abundant herb available during the spring and winter in our temperate climate, but didnt love it the way I love my oregano or basil. That has now changed thanks to persillade. When I saw the recipe I thought Id give it a go as there was still a bit of parsley in the garden after the winter and Oh My God Im so glad I did. So simple and yet such a wonderful addition. I made Pommes Persillade. which is basically fried potato with persillade mixed through it after its cooked. This is the rough recipe Pommes Persillade about a handful of chopped parsley ( I used curly) equal amount of garlic about 2 tablespoons of butter About 2lb potatoes cubed then fried in oil Salt and pepper to taste mix the parsley ,garlic and butter together and then mix through the cooked potatos. Done! According to our french wwoofer Anne, its great added to casseroles , frogs legs, snails and mussels. You can use oil or butter to bind the herbs and garlic and apparently replace the parsley with other herbs such as oregano or marjoram. Im now planning out the huge bed of parsley I need to put in keep me in enough persillade for the year.Yippee!
I thank the garden gods for kale. All through the winter and early spring its there , providing a much needed source of fresh greens. Its extremely versatile and has a delicate an almost perfumed flavour. Just dont overcook it . We add it to salads , cook it with cream and garlic, use it in stir frys, make soup, bake it into pies and quiche and my favorite ,turn it into Colcannon. The market stalls are full of kale at the moment so get out there and get some. Colcannon I know Colcannon is the traditional Halloween dish but I love it so much we have it all the time. I dont have exact measurements for this as it depends on how much kale to potato you like . As a rough measure we add twice as much uncooked kale as potato. So one colander of potatos to 2 squashed down colanders of kale . Potatos(we dont peel them for this but you can) Kale (twice as much as potato) chopped roughly Onion or leek (optional) finely chopped milk butter salt and pepper to taste. Put the potatos in a big pot cover with water and bring to the boil. Cook for about 15 mins until almost completely cooked then add the kale to the top of the pot a handful at a time.When it has all wilted drain the pot and mix up the potato and kale and add the leek then roughly mash, adding milk butter and seasoning to taste. Voila ! all done. (You can also cook the potatos and kale seperately then mix together , also you could prefry the onion or leek) We eat it on its own with lashings of butter. Sometimes we put the colcannon in an ovendish , make some egg sized holes ,crack some eggs into them and then cover the whole lot with cheese and bake for about 20 mins. Yum! Last week we had some left over so I made colcannon cakes . I just rolled the left over colcannon onto fat sausage shapes and fried them in a butter and oil mixture. The reason for the sausage shapes is because you can fit more on a frying pan in that form than in flat cake shape and it saves so much time.
Not all kales are created equal. Some varieties have been bred for cattle fodder and the taste and texture show that. So dont buy rough coarse leaved kale .The varieties we grow are Black Tuscan Kale, Irish Seedsavers variety ” Raggedy Jack” and Dwarf green curled. Sow seeds in April and May in seed trays and plant the seedlings out June or July. 18 inches apart. Kale is much hardier than other brassicas and will grow in any reasonable soil.
Heres a few things to think about when buying your seeds( vegetable and herb seed rather than flower and tree seed) . There are many, many seed companies out there. I try and go to privately owned seedsellers as they are more customer friendly. Many of the regular seed companies have been bought by giant chemical companies which aren’t so geared towards the customer. Unless specified otherwise most seeds available here are grown in mainland Europe . They are not at all adapted for our climate , neither the rainfall nor the temperatures. So try and buy seeds from smaller companies that grow the seeds in conditions similar to ours . The Organic Centre in Leitrim, Irish Seedsavers and Brown Envelope Seeds all stock Irish seeds. My favorite seed company is Chiltern Seeds. in the UK .You can get seeds for almost anything you can think of from them, Sugar maple , coffee, obscure himalayan flowers. They also carry a wonderful range of herb and veg seed, many heirloom and some organic. The day the catalogue arrives is one of the best days of the year for me. I then spend weeks reading the catalogue and refining my seed list. ( super plant nerd) Try some heritage varieties of seed .They are often much more resistant to disease and have better flavour. F1 seed is expensive and not necessarily worth the money. Buy seeds for early varieties of plants if you are planting in an exposed area like a hillside . This gives a better chance of you getting a decent crop. I know its easier said than done but dont get carried away and buy a gazillion packets of seed . You’ll just feel bad when you can’t deal with them all. Make a plan. Do you really eat enough swedes to warrant planting a whole row of them?.I refuse to plant cauliflower anymore because I just don’t like it enough to bother. I never plant spinach either because swiss chard gives me my greens and yummy stems too, so we put in loads of that. Plant more of what you love and vegetables that are expensive to buy like mangetout. Do you really need a whole packet of seed for everything. If you only need 5 tomato plants . buying a packet of seed means either keeping excess seeds for later years or sowing the whole lot and then having a whole bunch of baby tomato plants to repot and get rid of ( I never have the heart to just throw the excess away) Buy your plants from a local grower in your market or beg them from somebody who grows . They are usually happy to share . This goes for other veg such as cucumber, courgette and pumpkin. You can always buy more seed later. Don’t think that because you havent figured out the whole seasons planting you cant buy the seed yet. Get what you need to start and chill. Buy one packet of seed of something completely different you’ve never tried before. We tried some japanese greens last year yum! If you are going to plant a lot of anything it may be worth your while getting commercial seed . I got the Moles commercial seed catalogue last year and bought some of my seeds from them.I bought 100 pumpkin seeds from them for the price of a a normal retail pack containing 10 seeds.(Of course them I had far too many pumpkin plants so I was pushing them on visistors, but hey) Cheap seed from Lidl or Aldi seems to work fine for some people . Thats where my parsley is from. I prefer for more important crops like tomato to spend a bit more on my seed. Find yourself a good local seedsuplier . I get most of my seed from Gardenworld in Ellen St Limerick. 061 414202, limerickgarden@eircom.net . They ordered my commercial seed for me and carry a good stock of Suttons, Thompson and Morgan, Suffolk and RHS seed. Keep records. I promise myself every year that I’ll keep a perfect record of everything I planted and when and how it performed. This year I’ll definitely do it. Have fun picking your seeds!
I love stuffed mushrooms and now I have access to reasonably priced large mushrooms they have become a regular meal in our house. They are simple and quick to make and very very yummy. You can freeze them either cooked or uncooked and reheating them from the fridge works well too. Very handy for feeding visitors and they look much more complicated than they are so you can impress everyone with your culinary genius . I especially love to make this when the wild mushrooms are out as their flavour is so good. About 2 mushrooms per person is enough for normal people . Hobbits or good eaters need more like 3-4 each. This is enough for a breakfast, lunch or starter/ side dish serving. Big Flat mushrooms are the way to go here . If you can’t find them in the supermarket try your local market or the wholesaler. They should cost the same price as smaller shrooms so argue if someone tries to charge a giant mushroom premium. I get punnets from the wholesaler which hold about 25-30 mushrooms and cost about 6.50 euro. Stuffed Mushrooms The basic recipe is to fry the mushrooms in a little olive oil or butter untill slightly soft , then stuff and bake at 200 degrees for about 10- 15 mins .You can remove the stem if you like and either discard or add to the stuffing but I usually just leave it in unless its huge. The exciting part is the stuffing, you need about 2 tablespoons of stuffing per shroom. Our usual stuffing (enough for 4 mushrooms) breadcrumbs ( see note below) from about 2 slices of bread chopped small onion or shallot chopped garlic (2 cloves) Chopped mushroom stem chopped pepper( about 2T) red ,green or yellow olive oil about 1T salt and pepper Optional :any fresh herbs you have such as parsley, rosemary, oregano, chives can be added, chop finely and add a tsp to the stuffing before putting into the mushrooms. Bacon pieces can also be added to the frying pan with the onions.
note:When we make stuffing we don’t use fine bread crumbs. We pull bread(crusts and all) into the smallest pieces we can with our hands and use that. This means there is a great variation in size between pieces as sometimes the stuffing maker gets bored with pulling apart bread and leaves big hunks but hey it all tastes the same. To make the stuffing fry up the onion , pepper , mushroom and garlic in olive oil until soft, then add the bread crumbs, and fry gently for a minute or two until all the olive oil has been soaked into the bread. Add salt and pepper to taste. Then place about 2 T of the stuffing on the cooked mushroom and then bake .You can also sprinkle some cheese on the stuffing before baking . We usually use a cheddar but try different ones. Bake it for 10 mins then check to see if it needs any more time. The mushroom should be soft with its gorgeous juices oozing out into the baking dish. (With the wild mushrooms the juice is an inky black and fantastic). We experiment a bit with stuffings and have made some great mushrooms stuffed with pesto, sundried tomatos and pine nuts. Goats cheese, balsamic vinegar and pine nut mushrooms were excellent too. Ive seen recipes for crab stuffed mushrooms which look fantastic . Must make those. Also try mushrooms stuffed with a mexican style mince beef or spanish rice with chorizo.
You can then use leftover soup as a pasta sauce or a chili base.This is a great simple and fast recipe. Thanks Annamarie!. We roast the pumpkin first as it gives a better depth of flavour but you dont have to. This is a rough recipe, its very much adjust to personal taste. Pumpkin Soup about 6 cups pumpkin few Tb olive oil 3 med onions 2-4 cloves garlic 2 pts stock, vegetable or chicken salt and pepper to taste 2cans or more of tomatos (I also threw in a few carrots for extra veggieness but thats not required.)
Peel and roughly chop pumpkin. Place in a roasting tray and drizzle with olive oil. Roast at 200 deg for about 40 mins untill nicely brown and soft. Chop the onions and garlic roughly and fry in some olive oil until soft.
Serve with a nice crusty bread or savory scones. You can drizzle a bit of cream on it and sprinkle some grated cheese. Yumm!  Bramley apples Yesterday I went to the fruit and vegetable wholesale warehouse and stocked up on onions and apples for Christmas cooking. Most people don’t realise that fruit wholesalers aren’t just for producers they will sell to anybody with cash. If you intend to make a batch of anything to freeze or just use a lot of any particular fruit or veg its well worth checking the price at the wholesaler. Fruit and veg in season can be extremely cheap and even out of season is often still a bargain. However more luxury produce may not be cheaper than the multinationals price especially when they are having a special so do your research. I bought 13kg of Irish cooking apples for 9 euro . Thats a lot of apples and a great deal cheaper than in the supermarkets. Since they will keep for weeks its well worth it even if you arent making lots of chutneys and jellies like me. That’ll make a lot of apple pie. If you cant get through that amount share with somebody else. The bag of giant spanish onions I bought cost 8 euro and weighed 20 kg. Excellent. I also picked up a 5 pound punnet of flat mushrooms for stuffng for a fraction of the supermaket price. They often have specials on fruit like bananas which are too ripe to sell to supermakets but are perfect for smoothies and banana bread . Banana freeze well for either of these. Speaking of smoothies. Frozen fruit for smoothies is very expensive to buy in supermarkets so try and source it somewhere else. Fruit wholesalers may have it but not always . Try a local fruit farm or a frozen food supplier. Again they will sell to anyone not just producers. They also often have an extensive range of fruit not normally available in supermarkets. Fruit such as Raspberries can be bought as whole fruit or broken fruit . Broken is obviously cheaper and fine for smoothies and most cooking so ask the supplier. Whether whole or broken though, its still a lot cheaper.The only issue is that they usually come in 10 kg boxes so you need to have space in the freezer. |
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How fantastic is rhubarb. It sits there in the forgotten corner of the garden waiting for you raid its leaves.It never complains though you dont remember to feed it or weed it and it goes on producing for years and years .Its one of the first spring foods growing in your garden and it keeps going for months .It can be used in so many dishes both savory and sweet .It really earns its space on the plot.
Alternative Barbeque fixin’s
Sometimes I get cravings for gorgeous rich garlicky hummus.The only problem is I never remember to restock on chickpeas and tahini ( hummus’s main constituents) and living out here in the boonies means I can’t just nip down to the local shop and pick some up.
Tahini
Choosing breakfast cereal for our family is a real pain. One person won’t eat weetabix and one will only eat it. Two eat porridge but only some days. Cornflakes or rice crispies soon lose their appeal and I have to make rice crispie buns to use up the end of the box. Many mueslis and healthier option cereals have the taste and texture of animal feed and if they don’t there is often so much hidden sugar ( check the labels. ) you may as well be eating super chocolate frosted sugar bombs.
Mix the dry ingredients together then add the marmelade and then the oil. Spread it about 2 cm deep on a baking tray .Put in the oven at about 160 degrees. Check it after 10 mins and stir it around as the granola at the sides cooks much faster and the raisins have a tendancy to burn. Keep checking and stirring every ten mins until its light golden brown. (about 40 mins) . Let it cool completely then place in an airtight container. It lasts for weeks.
We were having a heated discussion on Facebook with a canadian friend over the culinary merits of Putine ( which is basically chips covered in gravy and cheese, surprisingly yum). In defence he put up a link to the wiki page on putine and there I discovered a new ( to us ) culinary joy : Persillade.
There isn’t a lot growing in my garden at the moment . A couple of of parsley plants, some sprouting broccolli (which isn’t yet sprouting), a few varieties of oriental salad greens, a bit of swiss chard, and kale, lots of kale.
I love this time of year. My seed catalogues arrived last month and I’m making the final decisions on what to plant this season. I’m so full of anticipation. I can see in my minds eye the sun shining down on my garden overflowing with veg and herbs . I don’t see the mess in the garden left from the snow and a winter of neglect or the grey overcast sky. I can taste those first tomatos already, smell the basil and hear the ears of corn hissing on the barbecue. Of course with the last few summers so wet I didnt have quite the overflowing baskets of veg that I’d wanted, but hope springs eternal.
I have my friend Annamarie to thank for this recipe. By accident she discovered that soup made with sweet orange vegetables such as sweet potato, squash or pumpkin can be disguised to get kids to eat it without complaint. Now I dunno about you but I dont know any kids who will happily eat any of those veg much less in soup form. The secret ingredient is a couple of cans of tomatos added to the soup. Thats it . It then tastes like canned tomato soup all sweet and yummy and all kids eat seem to like that. Mine now actually request that I make it once a week or so.
Add all the rest of the ingredients and cook for about 10 minson a medium heat then whizz up with a hand blender. check the seasoning and if you need more tomato or a bit more liquid.
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