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…/…
The research was conducted by the Land Workers’ Alliance (LWA) in conjunction with the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University, and Canalside was one of the 69 farms that participated.
* agroecological = an ecological approach to agriculture that views agricultural areas as ecosystems and is concerned with the ecological impact of agricultural practices
Open Farm Sunday, 11th June 2017
Come to an open day on Sunday 11th June at:
Canalside Community Food
Southam Road, Radford Semele CV31 1TY
- Tours start at 11.30am and 2pm – meet one of our growers and look round the fields, polytunnels and orchard
- Find out how our community supported agriculture scheme works and what vegetables and fruits we grow
- Bring a picnic to enjoy in our social area
- Children’s activities and play area
More information about Open Farm Sunday across the country on:
https://farmsunday.org/
Open day and apple pressing at Canalside, Sat 1st Oct ’16
Coming up is our second opportunity of 2016 to look around Canalside and find out more about what we do.
Apple pressing from 11am – bring apples to press and bottles to take juice home in.
Tour at 1.30pm.
Bring a picnic to enjoy in our grassy social area.
Children will love trying their hand at apple pressing or playing on our chunky play equipment and in the willow play tunnels.
Children on an open day tour at Canalside
Apple pressing
Open Farm Sunday at Canalside this Sunday (5th June ’16)
If you’ve never been to Canalside, or if you have but didn’t have the opportunity to look around, or it was a long time ago, why not pop down this Sunday to join one of our tours for Open Farm Sunday.
Come down between 11am and 3pm.
Tours at 11.30am and 1.30pm.
Bring a picnic to enjoy in our grassy social area – the forecast is looking good for this!
Children will love our chunky play equipment and willow play tunnels, with activities to take on the tour and fun farm activity books* and other freebies* to take away.
*limited availability
Children on an open day tour at Canalside
Job opportunity at Canalside – assistant grower
Canalside Community Food, a pioneering CSA based outside Leamington Spa, is looking for a new grower. We are seeking an assistant grower to join our team producing organic vegetables and fruit throughout the year for our community of over 150 members. The successful candidate will work alongside the grower manager, administration team and seasonal staff. We currently have 7 acres of field scale vegetables, 7 large polytunnels for protected cropping and a 2 acre orchard of top and soft fruit. This position is for 30 hours a week year round (equivalent to 7.5 hours per day for 4 days a week – we are also open to a job share if suitable candidates apply) £15,912, with statutory holiday entitlement and auto-enrolment in the company pension scheme if eligible.
Email mail@canalsidecommunityfood.org.uk for more details and full job description, or download from here. Application deadline – noon Friday 13th May 2016. Selection will be based on a half-day working interview, to take place in the month following the application deadline. To start mid-July.
Dates for 2016 events
All the dates for this year’s events are now uploaded.
Find out where you can see us.
See what member events we’re planning this year.
Education visits will restart from 1st April. Discover what opportunities we offer to school groups.