Category Archives: Starters

Parsnip & Tomato Bake

29 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Main Courses, Starters, Vegetable Dishes, Vegetarian

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Creamy, warming and savoury and a little sweet, this bake is a meal on its own which I used to cook regularly in the British winter before moving to Spain. Here you didn’t see them as they clearly don’t do well in this hot dryness, the odd time you would find them they would be woody and small, great for adding flavour to a dish but not much more.

So I was surprised to spot some plump ones in the supermarket and decided to revisit this recipe from my dim and distant past. Thin sliced of parsnips layered with slices of fresh tomatoes and ricotta style cheese and seasoned with the usual salt and pepper and a touch touch of sweetness, a sprinkling of brown sugar, or for me today some quince jelly as a have jars of it in my store. I know it might sound too much putting sugar with parsnips and tomatoes that are both sweet, but trust me it really adds to the richness of the dish.

For 2 portions

2 large parsnips

3 large tomatoes

ricotta or similar cheese

salt and freshly ground black pepper

brown sugar

olive oil

Grated pecorino or Parmesan

Slice the parsnips and tomatoes into fairly thin rounds.

Using an ovenproof dish start with a layer of parsnips, then scatter over the ricotta cheese, then season with the salt, pepper and sugar, then add a layer of the sliced tomatoes.

Continue layering in this order until the dish is full ending with a layer of parsnips and seasonings.

Brush over with olive oil and cover with tin foil. Bake at 150C for 1 hour 30 minutes. Remove the foil, sprinkle generously with grated pecorino or Parmesan and put back in the oven for another 10 minutes or so until the cheese is a bubbling golden brown.

Enjoy!

Tagliatelle & Cauliflower Sauce

19 Friday Jan 2024

Posted by in Main Courses, Starters, Techniques, Vegan, Vegetable Dishes, Vegetarian

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Some dishes that I eat regularly are so simple that I almost don’t think of them as recipes worth sharing, but these are most likely the easy dishes that you would want to hear about.

I made my own pasta for this dish, which is much easier than you think, have a look at my post, the beginners guide to making fresh pasta. If you are mostly vegan like me you can choose flour that has a high protein content. I used wholemeal Khorasan flour which has 14.5% protein and holds together very well for pasta, spelt flour is very good too. I’ll put at the end of this post the address of a website for buying organic flours and pulses.

Of course using readymade pasta is perfectly fine. This recipe came from friends Gianni and Cinzia who I visited in Matera in the south of Italy and they use dried pasta.

For the sauce this time I used cauliflower as I have beautiful ones ready to eat in my veg patch,

but you can use quite a few other vegetables, broccoli, aubergines, peppers, courgettes all cut into small pieces, fresh peas or broad beans, the basic idea of the recipe remains the same. The vegetable is braised in olive oil with garlic until just cooked but still with a bit of bite, about a third of it is removed and put to one side, the rest has a little stock added and is braised until soft. This is then puréed with a hand blender or mashed to make a sauce, adding seasoning as you go. The removed vegetables are put back in the sauce to warm through and then the sauce is mixed into the pasta.

I love that this sauce is so light and full of flavour. It’s so versatile too as pretty well any vegetable that is in season can be used, herbs and seasoning can be varied. This has got me thinking about the recipe on this blog for Apicius inspired onions, with their flavouring of lovage, honey and herbs, which if two thirds of the onions were puréed would make a great sauce for pasta. I’ll try that next. it’s great that ancient Rome is inspiring today’s cooking!

Almost forgot the address for organic flour, grains and pulses

https://www.rincondelsegura.es/

Spicy Besan Cake

16 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by in breakfast, Main Courses, Starters, Vegan, Vegetarian

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Continuing with recipes made with chickpea flour or besan, this super tasty cake is not complicated to make. You fry onions, garlic and ginger and then spices to make an intensely flavoured mix, then add chickpea flour and water to make a thick sauce, the cake is then spooned into an oiled dish and left to cool and set. That’s it! It can be eaten cold as pictured below or rolled in desiccated coconut and toasted in the oven.

Makes 2 good portions

1 onion – sliced

2 cloves of garlic – finely chopped

40 grams fresh ginger – cut into tiny batons

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons panch poran – this is a mix of whole spice seeds in equal amounts – cumin, onion, fenugreek, fennel, and mustard.

seeds from 10 green cardamoms

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1 fresh green chilli – finely chopped

150 grams chickpea flour

625 ml water

salt and freshly ground black pepper

desiccated coconut and fresh coriander to garnish

Heat the oil in a sauce pan, add the onions, garlic and fresh ginger and cook on a medium heat until soft and slightly golden.

Add the all spices and cook for a further five minutes.

Put in the chickpea flour and slowly mix in the water stirring out any lumps.

Put on a medium heat and stir constantly, the mix will thicken and start to resemble a bechamel.
Keep cooking and stirring until the mixture is very thick and coming away from the sides of the pan.

Let the mixture cool a bit in the pan before turning it out into an oiled square dish. Don’t worry if you haven’t a dish the right size, the mix will be quite solid and can shaped into a bigger dish as below. You want the cake to be about 2 centimetres thick.

Once the cake is cool, it can cut into cubes, garnished with chopped fresh coriander and either enjoyed as it is with a fresh tomato relish, or rolled in desiccated coconut and toasted in the oven.

Farinata

08 Wednesday Nov 2023

Posted by in Food for One, Main Courses, Starters, Vegan, Vegetable Dishes, Vegetarian

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or socca, torta di ceci or cecina is a thin savoury cake made from chickpea flour. This recipe originates in Italy, though due to the high nutritional quality and good flavour of chickpeas and their flour there are many recipes from many counties that use chickpea flour as their main ingredient. I’m going to give you a selection of these recipes in the next few posts.

This is a super easy and simple dish to make. A batter is made with chickpea flour and water, seasoned, poured into a shallow baking dish on top of smoking hot oil, topped with whichever flavouring you fancy and baked for ten minutes.
You can have your flavouring as simple as fresh herbs, rosemary is particularly good, or vegetables that are part cooked. In the photo below I sliced and fried fresh artichokes, the version above is spring onions and garlic with cima di rapa, a type of mustard green that has a lovely sweet and slightly bitter taste.

For 4 servings – cooked in a 36 centimetre diameter shallow pan

150 grams chickpea flour

450 ml water

4 tablespoons olive oil

salt and freshly ground black pepper

prepared topping for the farinata

Preheat the oven to 230c / 210c if a fan oven/ 450f /gas 8

Put the water into a bowl and slowly whisk in the sieved flour. Whisk to eliminate any lumps.

Put in a warm place for an hour or two when it should have bubbles on the surface.

Stir in 2 tablespoons of oil and season with salt and pepper

Put the other 2 tablespoons of oil in the pan and warm the pan in the oven until very hot and nearly smoking.

Take the pan out of the oven and quickly pour in the batter, arrange your topping evenly over the cake and put back in the oven for ten minutes until golden and crispy around the edges.

Serve straight away with a salad or two.

Marinated Bonito & Mixed Salad

18 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in Fish, Food for One, Main Courses, salads, Starters

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Bonito is a medium sized fish related to tuna and mackerel which is in season in the Mediterranean Sea at this time of the year, so very reasonably priced. I bought a couple of thick steaks yesterday. I like to remove the skin and the little bones that divide the north, south, east and west of the steaks, so that I am left with four mini steaks from each slice of bonito. Two of these make a generous portion per person, so of my eight steaks, four went straight into the freezer, and four I cooked at lunchtime.

I fried them in olive oil together with two thinly sliced garlic cloves and had two of them for lunch with grilled vegetables. The other two I let cool and put in a small dish with the cooking juices of oil and garlic, then I put in enough white wine vinegar to come about half way up the fish. I covered the dish and left the fish to marinate in the fridge. Last night I turned the steaks over to ensure that the pickle was penetrating the fish all the way round.

So today I cut up the steaks and served them on a bed of salad using the marinade as a dressing.

The salad consists of a layer of lettuce and purslane from the vegetable garden, roughly diced tomatoes, avocado slices, the first padrón peppers and okra this season in the garden, thinly sliced radish and purple basil leaves. Yummy!

South American Style Prawn Cocktail

25 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by in Fish, Food for One, salads, Snacks and Tapas, Starters

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When I cook for my friends I quite often like to have a theme to the dishes, so once I’d decided on Chicken Burritos as a main course for this particular lunch, I was looking for something to have as an appetiser. There are generally frozen prawns in the freezer, so why not mix them with typical South American salads, tomatoes, peppers, sweetcorn, add a spicy sauce sharpened with lime juice and have a prawn cocktail?

My guests loved it!


Per person

8 large prawns in their shells

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon quinoa – black or red look good, but if you have neither then the white is fine

1 tablespoon diced green pepper

1 tablespoon diced red pepper

1 tablespoon sweetcorn kernels

1/2 small avocado diced

Lettuce leaves to decorate your dishes

For the dressing

1 small clove of garlic

Fresh red chilli – finely chopped

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh coriander leaves or the same of green coriander seeds

zest and juice of 1/2 a small lime

Boil the quinoa until tender.

Drain and put in a bowl with the rest of the salad ingredients.

Peel the prawns reserving the heads and skins.

Fry the prawns in olive oil until just cooked. Remove to a plate and let cool.

To the same pan add the heads and skins. Fry gently squashing the juices out of the heads with a wooden spatula.

Once the prawn heads are cooked and have given out their juices, add the coconut milk and water. Mix well scraping any solid bits at the bottom of the pan into the liquid and squashing the the heads again to add yet more flavour to the dressing.

Let cook down a little and then take off the heat.

With a pestle and mortar crush the garlic, chilli and coriander with a pinch of salt.

Strain the dressing into the mortar and then mix well.

Add the lime zest and juice, mix again, then add the dressing and cooled prawns to the salad and mix to cover all with the dressing.

Line your serving dishes with leaves and pile on the cocktail.

Enjoy!

Red Pepper & Walnut Pate

23 Monday Jan 2023

Posted by in Food for One, Sauces, Starters, Vegan, Vegetable Dishes

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This rich, spicy pate is popular throughout the Middle East with each country having their own variation of flavourings added to the two main ingredients of walnuts and roasted red peppers. In Turkey it’s name is Acuka, and it’s fiercely picante, in Syria it’s Muhammara. You, of course can make it as mild or spicy as you prefer.

For the red pepper flesh, either roast about 400 grams of thick fleshed peppers in a hot – 180C – oven until the skin is slightly charred and blistering.
The peppers can be roasted over a glowing fire or barbecue as well of course.
Remove to a container with a lid and leave to cool.

Skin the peppers and remove the seeds and stem keeping any juice that flows out of them.
We are aiming for about 300 grams of flesh including any juices.

Alternatively, if you can get hold of a jar of ready roasted and skinned Pimientos de Piquillo, these can be used for making a quick dip.

So you will need –

300 grams red pepper flesh

50 grams walnut pieces

1/4 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/4 teaspoon allspices/ pimienta de Jamaica

1/4 teaspoon black or mixed peppercorns

1 clove garlic

1 small chilli or more to taste

4 tablespoons virgin olive oil

zest of 1 lemon plus 2 tablespoons of its juice

salt

2-3 heaped tablespoons dried breadcrumbs


Toast the walnut pieces in a thick based pan on a low heat, turning them over from time to time until they ara golden colour at the edges and you can smell their rich scent emerging.

Put to one side to cool.

Now put the cumin, allspice and peppercorn seeds in the same pan and toast until their aroma is detectable.

Put them into a small food processor and whizz to a powder.

Add the pepper pulp, garlic, olive oil, a pinch of salt and the lemon juice and zest. Whizz to a fine purée.

Add 2 of the tablespoons of breadcrumbs and pulse to mix in.

Leave for about half an hour for the breadcrumbs to absorb the liquid in the purée and thicken it. If it is not the texture of a spreadable pate and is too liquid add more breadcrumbs.

Add the toasted walnut pieces and pulse to mix in to the pate and be cut up a bit smaller but not too small.

Check seasonings and enjoy

Tortilla de Habas con Menta

20 Wednesday Apr 2022

Posted by in breakfast, Main Courses, Starters, Vegetable Dishes

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Broad bean spanish omlette with mint.

The Spanish tortilla made with potatoes is universally known, but tortillas are also regularly made with other vegetables, peas, green garlics, peppers and beans, as in this case. Really any flavoursome vegetable that is not to wet to hold the cake shape can make a tortilla, or a combination of vegetables of course.

The fresh broad beans from my huerta or vegetable garden are sweet and tender, perfect for this dish.

For 2 portions

220 grams broad beans

3 eggs

1 -2 tablespoons of olive oil

small bunch of mint – finely chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Blanch the beans by pouring boiling water over them and leaving them to steep for five minutes. Drain.

Break the eggs into a bowl and beat lightly to mix.

Add the beans and mint. Season well with salt and pepper.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a small non stick pan. When hot add the egg mix, turn the heat low and cover.

After about five minutes of cooking check how the omlette is cooking. With a spatula pull the egg slightly away from the sides and towards the middle.

Cover again and leave to cook for a few more minutes.

Once you can see that the tortilla is cooked at the edge, but not quite cooked through in the middle, its time to turn it over.

With a spatula make sure that the tortilla is loose from the pan. Put a plate over the pan and in one quick movement invert the pan over the plate.

Return the pan to the heat and add the other spoon of oil, slide the tortilla back into the pan to cook the second side. This will only take three to four minutes.

Turn the tortilla onto a plate and enjoy with a fresh salad….or two.

Autumn Red Salad

29 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by in salads, Starters, Vegan, Vegetable Dishes

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I made this to have with the Potato and Chickpea Cakes in the previous post using ingredients that are currently in season here. Fragrant green peppers from the huerta, this years almonds which I love dry toasted in their skins, big winter radishes and plum tomatoes from the local market.

You will need –

Several leaves of red oak leaved lettuce

2 medium tomatoes – chopped into chunks

2 samall or 1 large green pepper

about 20 whole almonds – either with skins or if you prefer without

1 large cooked beetroot – cut into smallish cubes

Winter radish – about 20 thin slices

2 tablespoons cider vinegar

2 tablesoons water

1 teaspoon honey or agave syrup

2 tablespoons extra virgen olive oil

Start by steeping the radishes. The large winter radishes can be quite peppery, so a sweet marinade will make them less so. Mix the vinegar water and honey or syrup in small bowl, then add the radishes. Leave to marinate for at least ten minutes.

Meanwhile dry toast the almonds in a thick based pan over a low heat. Stir regularly to ensure that they are evenly toasted and a little browned. Remove from the heat and put to one side.

Rip up the lettuce leaves and arrange them on a large plate, then add the chopped tomatoes.

slice the green peppers and arrange on the salad.

Remove the radish slices from their marinade and arrange them over the salad.

Put the beetroot in the marinade and stir to cover all the cubes.

Spoon the cubes and vinegar over the salad, then sprinkle on the almonds.

Finally drizzle over the olive oil.

Enjoy!

Globe Artichoke & Burrata Pasta

18 Tuesday May 2021

Posted by in Food for One, Main Courses, Starters, Vegetable Dishes

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A super simple dish today. Most of the tastiest pasta dishes have few ingredients, and this one is no exception. Good olive oil, garlic, fresh cooked artichokes and Burrata cheese are all that’s needed for the sauce. For the pasta I used my favourite dried pasta, Maccheroni al Ferreto, which I know is not always easy to get hold of. Any of the more substantial pastas will work, tagliatelle, penne, orecchiette or pappardelle.

Per person

tablespoon olive oil

2 cloves garlic – finely chopped

3 globe artichokes

1/2 a Burrata cheese – roughly cut up

salt and freshly ground black pepper

50 grams dried pasta

Bring plenty of salted water to the boil and add the pasta. Let cook at a fast simmer.

Prepare the artichokes by removing the tough outer leaves, then the top tough part of the flower and the stem. Cut into fine wedges.

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and throw in the artichokes. Fry them over a moderate heat turning them as they cook.

After five minutes of cooking add the garlic. Continue frying until the artichokes are cooked.

If your pasta isn’t yet cooked turn off the heat under the artichokes and cover them.

Once the pasta is cooked drain it saving a little of the cooking liquid. Add to the artichokes and stir well to mix. Reheat the artichokes if necessary and add a little of the pasta cooking liquor.

Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper, then add the cheese. Stir once to mix and serve.

Enjoy!