Blog | Canalside Community Food - Part 24

Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: A latke by any other name. . .

Nigel Slater calls these crispy little pancakes ‘rosti’ but when I brought them to the dinner table Matt quite rightly greeted them as latke. I think in Korean their name is neulgeun hobakjeon. Or you could just call them crispy squash pancakes.
Serve these with salted, dill-spiked yoghurt and a sharp, bright pickle. One of Erica Moody’s beetroot sauerkrauts would be ideal. Or a green salad, the little black dress of all dinner menus.

Crispy Pumpkin Latke
Serves 3

Ingredients
500g pumpkin or winter squash (weigh after peeling and removing the seeds)
3 eggs
4 tablespoons plain flour
Salt and pepper, to taste
Oil for frying

Preparation
Grate the pumpkin using a fine grater. Combine the grated pumpkin with the eggs and flour. The mixture will be thick.

Divide the mixture into 6 parts and shape each into a pancake no thicker than about 2 digestive biscuits.

Heat the oil over medium high heat in one or two frying pans (depending on how fast you want these to be ready). When the oil is hot begin cooking the pancakes, pressing the pancake down a bit with a fish slice to flatten it out a little more. Fry until the underside is golden brown and crispy, and then flip over to cook the other side. The whole process will take about 5 minutes per pancake.

Serve with salted yoghurt, etc., as suggested above.

Recipe adapted from the Observer Food Monthly, 15 Oct. 2017.

Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Taming the Spanish Black Radish

As you may well still have your Black Spanish Radish from this week’s share, here are some recipes from Rebecca that have been waiting in the wings for the BSR’s first appearance of 2019!

These are fierce! They need some sweetness to balance their peppery bite. A dressing with honey and sherry vinegar does the trick. Combined with dried fruit and nuts in a salad, this will temper the outspoken radish.

Another option is to braise them. They emerge from a bath in butter and white wine softened, like a turnip’s more assertive older brother. Toss them with parsley and serve with roast chicken.

Green salad with Spanish black radish, pistachios and fig
Serves 2

Ingredients
dressing
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons sherry vinegar
Juice and zest from 1 lime
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon runny honey
1/4 teaspoon salt
Black pepper

salad
150g salad mix
1 black Spanish radish, peeled and grated coarsely
1 big handful pistachio nuts, toasted in a dry pan and coarsely chopped
4 dried figs, cut into 6 pieces each

Preparation
(Leave the grated radish in a sieve to allow any liquid to drain off while you prepare the dressing.)

Put the dressing, put the ingredients into a jar with a lid and shake vigorously until the ingredients are combined. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary by adding a little more salt, or honey, etc., to balance the flavours.

Place salad ingredients in a serving bowl, and toss with the dressing. Serve.

Braised Carrot and Black Radish with Parsley
Serves 4

Ingredients
100g onions
350g carrots
2 black radishes
2 tablespoons olive oil
150ml white wine or vermouth
3 bay leaves
6 pepper corns
Salt to taste
2 tablespoons butter
25g parsley, chopped

Preparation
Peel the onions and cut into chunks. Peel the carrots and cut into batons.

Peel the black radishes and cut into batons of roughly the same size as the carrots.

Heat the olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions and sauté for a few minutes until they start to brown. Add the carrots and onions and toss everything together.

Pour over the white wine or vermouth, and add the bay leaves and pepper corns. Bring to a gentle boil, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 45 minutes. (This will depend on the size of your batons.) Check it occasionally to ensure it’s not sticking. If it seems dry add some water, stock or more wine.

Once the vegetables are tender, stir in the butter and give the vegetables a good toss. Add salt to taste, mix in the parsley, and serve.

Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Squash and Pink Peppercorns

‘Wow—that looks delicious!’, exclaimed a friend as we unpacked our lunches yesterday. It was. The ribbons of orange squash soften in lime juice spiked with the sweet spiciness of pink peppercorns. (These are essential; substituting black pepper will not work.). You can make this well in advance if you like.

Anna Jones recommends serving with tofu crisped in a pan with honey and soy, and brown rice, to make a dinner.

Squash and Pink Peppercorn Salad
Serves 2

Ingredients
500g pumpkin or squash, peeled and deseeded
1 lime
1 tablespoon pink peppercorns
1 teaspoon salt
Big handful of mint, dill, parsley or coriander, roughly chopped

Preparation
Shave the squash into thin ribbons, using a vegetable peeler or whatever specialist gear you happen to have. Place the ribbons in a bowl.
Zest the lime over the ribbons, squeeze in the juice, and toss together with the salt.
Put the pink peppercorns in a mortar and crush them roughly before adding to the salad.
Stir in the herbs and serve.

Recipe adapted from Anna Jones, The Modern Cook’s Year (2017).

2019 – January news: The Worm Forgives the Plough

Take a walk around Canalside fields and you will notice something unusual for the time of year: freshly ploughed earth. Normally we plough in early spring, but this can be tricky where there is a lot of rainfall – in fact 2 out of the last 3 years we have had to postpone onion planting as it has been too wet to prepare the ground. So the exceptionally dry start to 2019 provided the perfect opportunity to try doing things a little differently, and thus the area earmarked for the earliest plantings – potatoes, onions and early brassicas – were ploughed on Wednesday morning just in time before the rain came.

Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Lentil Soup with Spinach and Lemon

This is just the sort of restorative your body is crying out for after the holidays. It’s rich and satisfying without being heavy. You’ll feel good eating it.

You can also add some cooked potatoes, if you happen to have some lying about.

Ads bi Hamud
Serves 6

Ingredients
375g green lentils, soaked for 1 hour
Salt and pepper, to taste
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, cut in half and sliced thin
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced thin
1 tablespoon plain flour
1kg mixed greens (spinach, chard, kale, etc.)
Juice of 1.5 lemons

Preparation
Wash and drain the lentils. Put them in a pan with water to cover and simmer for 30 minutes or until they are very tender. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in another pan and sauté the onions until they are very soft, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté until you detect a nice, garlicky smell. Add the flour and stir well. Add a teacup of water to the pan and stir to dissolve any tasty browned bits. Cook over a low heat to thicken a bit and then pour the whole thing into the lentils and mix. Heat gently so that the lentils and onions thicken a bit.

Wash the greens and chop coarsely. Add these to the lentils and cook for about 10 minutes.

Add the lemon juice and simmer a bit more, so that the soup is thick and hot.

Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Spicy Pumpkin with Barley

My friend Sharon gave me a copy of Diana Henry’s beautiful new cookbook. It consists of a series of menus. This magnificent recipe is from the menu called ‘Midnight at the Oasis’. She recommends serving it alongside some pickled vegetables with other nibbles, semolina bread with orange and aniseed, olive oil braised leeks with harissa and dill, roast sprouting broccoli with chile, feta and preserved lemon yoghurt . . . well, I’ll stop there but it’s a pretty mesmerising list of dishes, no?

This particular dish combines the buttery crunch of barley with the melting texture of roast pumpkin, all topped with very spicy red shatta. (I’d not heard of it either, but it’s apparently a first cousin of zhug.) It turns out to be a thick, chile-hot blend of fresh green herbs with tomato and cumin. It’s very good.

I have no idea where you get black barley, so I used ordinary pearl (not instant) barley, and it was delicious.

Pumpkin with shatta and black barley
Serves 4

Ingredients

For the pumpkin
3 tablespoons olive oil
10g butter
1.5kg pumpkin
1 teaspoon fennel seeds, roughly crushed in a mortar
3cm ginger, peeled and grated
3 garlic cloves, finely sliced

For the barley
10g butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 small onions or shallots
250g barley
5 tablespoons dry white vermouth
700ml water or stock
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper, to taste

For the shatta
5 red chiles, 4 de-seeded and all roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
50ml olive oil
50ml water
50g tomato purée
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Juice of ½ a small lemon
30g coriander and parsley in any proportion

Preparation
To make the pumpkin, preheat the oven to 190C. Put the olive oil and butter into a roasting pan large enough to allow the pumpkin to lie in a single layer, and melt in the oven while you prepare the pumpkin. Halve the pumpkin and remove the seeds. You can peel it or not as you prefer. Cut it into slices about 3cm thick.

Toss the pumpkin in the melted butter and oil, and roast for 20 minutes.
Add the fennel, ginger and garlic, toss, and roast for another 20 minutes or so, or until the pumpkin is tender and begins to caramelise on the edges. Set aside.

To make the barley, heat the butter and olive oil in a large saucepan and sauté the onions (or shallots) until they are soft but not coloured. Add the barley and stir it about for about 2 minutes so that it gets coated with butter. Add the vermouth and cook until about half of it has evaporated. Add the water or stock, bay leaves, and season with a bit of salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Cook, with the lid on, for about 40 minutes, or until the barley is al dente. The liquid should be absorbed but check a bit beforehand and if it’s still very liquidly, take off the cover and raise the heat a bit so that some of the liquid can evaporate.

To make the shatta, purée everything except the herbs in a blender and pulse into a chunky purée. Add the herbs and pulse it again so that you have a red purée flecked with green—don’t over-blend this. Set aside

To serve, arrange the barley on a big platter and set the pumpkin on top. Spoon some of the shatta over the top, and serve the rest on the side, in a little bowl.

From Diana Henry, How To Eat A Peach (2018).

Rob’s Recipe of the Week: Celeriac Pasta Ribbons

Since we’re getting celeriac this week I thought I would share this recipe with you since I thought it was amazing last time we got it in the share (my first taste of celeriac in fact!) I guess the chard in the recipe can be replaced with the spinach this week too 🙂

Celeriac ribbons tossed with chard, garlic & pumpkin seeds

Ingredients
1 small celeriac, peeled
1 lemon, juiced
40g pumpkin seeds
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
15g butter
4 thyme sprigs, leaves removed
2 finely chopped cloves of garlic
½ tsp of dried chilli flakes
1 bunch of chard, leaves separated from stalks, stalks sliced and leaves shredded
20g pecorino

Method
Using a good vegetable peeler, cut long, wide strips (about the width of pappardelle) around the circumference of the celeriac, into a bowl of water and lemon juice, until you have lots of ribbons. Allow for more than you would if using pasta.

Dry-fry the pumpkin seeds in a pan until they’ve puffed and popped. Set aside.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Add the celeriac for 1 min, drain and reserve the water. In a non-stick frying pan, heat the oil and butter until the butter has melted and foamed up. Add the thyme, garlic and chilli.

Cook the garlic mixture for 5 mins until fragrant and almost golden, add the chard stalks and stir, cooking for a couple more mins. Add the pumpkin seeds and the chard leaves, season and squeeze in some lemon juice. Turn up the heat and stir in half the grated cheese. Add the celeriac and a slosh of the cooking water and toss, shaking the pan until the sauce looks glossy. Divide between plates, top with more cheese and serve.

Recipe from Good Food magazine, October 2017 and available online at: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/celeriac-ribbon-pasta-tossed-chard-garlic-pumpkin-seeds

Fundraising target met!

The exciting news at Canalside is that we have met our fundraising target of £105,000 to buy the land! After just 4 weeks we had reached the target, but a few early investors were willing to flex their investment amount to allow as many people as possible to help us in safeguarding and stewarding this land for future generations.

We are now receiving the final few payments in preparation for starting conveyancing and the rest of the process to transfer the land into community ownership. We hope you are one of those stewards! Huge thanks to everyone who has generously helped us reach our share target!

If you are a shareholder and haven’t yet made your payment, please do so as soon as possible. If you haven’t received an email from us, please contact us to ask us to resend the email about making your payment.

If you missed out on being a shareholder, you can still help us with the process by making a donation. This will help to cover all the associated costs (conveyancing, administration, and all the other costs associated with running the share offer) and will mean we don’t need to dig quite so deeply into our emergency reserves.

 

Shares and BBQ on Sunday 10th June 2018

Three weeks to go and we are half way to our target of raising £105,000 to buy the land! Thanks to all those who have so far invested generously helping to ensure that Canalside is secure into the future. However we still have some way to go (the carrot is only half full) so if you haven’t had a chance to apply for shares why not come along to our BBQ on Sunday (10th June) where there will be an opportunity to do so in good company! And Dom will be giving tours of the farm so apart from food and drink there is a great chance to see how the season is going and how the veg is growing.

If you can’t get down to the farm don’t panic! You can apply for shares online at https://www.canalsidecommunityfood.org.uk/share-offer/buy-shares-in-the-land/

Diverse benefits from farms like Canalside!

(We knew that but now here’s academic proof!)

See the recently published report, ‘A Matter of Scale’, on research into the benefits of small-scale, agroecological* farms here: 
https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/…/small-scale-agroecol…/…