A member of the chicory family sometimes known as red chicory, radicchio has distinctive pink-red leaves with white veins. Its firm, cup-shaped leaves have a strongly bitter taste. It is generally used in salads mixed with other salad leaves. In its native Italy it is often served shredded. Alternatively, tear the leaves into bite-sized pieces. But there are also a number of recipes that make use of it cooked.
Yotam Ottolenghi cooks it lightly and mixes it with walnuts, lentils and honey for a tasty dish. And Sarah Raven has this recipe for Radicchio and lemon pasta in her Garden Cookbook which she says is quick to prepare and delicious cold the next day.
Serves 4
Preparation and cooking: about 15 minutes
Ingredients
100g chopped pancetta
2-3 tbsp olive oil
½ onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
200g dried egg tagliatelle
200g radicchio
3 tbsp dry white wine
50g butter
grated zest of 1 lemon
100ml double cream
handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
grated parmesan, to serve
salt and black pepper
Method
Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Put the chopped pancetta into a wide shallow pan over a moderate heat with half the olive oil. When the fat begins to run, add the chopped onion and garlic, and then cook with the pancetta for about 3-4 minutes, until the onion has softened.
Put the pasta into the pan of salted boiling water and cook until al dente.
Slice the radicchio into thin strips and add to the onion mixture with the wine and sauté until the radicchio begins to wilt. Add the butter and lemon zest; pour in the cream and season well. Add this to the drained pasta with the remaining olive oil and the chopped flat-leaf parsley. Finish with a generous topping of parmesan.
This moist and incredibly more-ish cake comes from Nigel Slater’s Tender Volume 1. The mixture turns a lurid pink colour when you add the beetroot, but tones down by the time it comes out of the oven.
If you want to save time and beat the eggs up whole rather than separating them first, it seems to make no difference to the quality. The only other tip I have is: Go easy on the icing – a drizzle will do. (But then I always say that!)
I shared the cake with friends on a glorious summer’s day beside the River Fal at Quay Cottage, Trelissick next to King Harry Ferry. It didn’t last long.
Serves 8-10
Preparation / cooking: 65-70 minutes
Ingredients
225g self-raising flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 scant tsp baking powder
½ tsp ground cinnamon
180ml sunflower oil
225g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs
150g raw beetroot
juice of half a lemon
75g sultanas or raisins
75g mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, linseed)
For the icing:
8 tbsp icing sugar
lemon juice or orange blossom water
poppy seeds
Method
Set the oven at 180C/gas mark 4. Lightly butter a rectangular loaf tin (20cm x 9cm x 7cm deep, measured across the bottom) then line the bottom with baking parchment.
Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and cinnamon. Beat the oil and sugar in a food mixer until well creamed then introduce the beaten egg yolks one by one, reserving the whites for later.
Grate the beetroot coarsely and fold into the mixture, then add the lemon juice, raisins or sultanas and the assorted seeds. Fold the flour and raising agents into the mixture while the machine is turning slowly.
Beat the egg whites till light and almost stiff. Fold gently but thoroughly into the mixture with a large metal spoon (a wooden one will knock the air out). Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake for 50-55 minutes, covering the top with a piece of foil after 30 minutes. Test with a skewer to see if done. The cake should be moist inside but not sticky. Leave the cake to settle for a good 20 minutes before turning out of its tin on to a wire cooling rack.
To make the icing, sieve the icing sugar and stir in enough lemon juice or orange blossom water to achieve a consistency where the icing will run over the top of the cake and dribble slowly down the sides (about three teaspoonfuls), stirring to remove any lumps. Drizzle over the cake and scatter with poppy seeds. Leave to set before eating.
We have so many tomatoes in our weekly veg boxes at the moment we hardly know what to do with them!
Some of us are roasting the split, slightly over-ripe ones with garlic and onion, then whizzing them up into a tasty pasta sauce with basil and parsley from our veg boxes. Others are busy making green tomato chutney from the fruits that drop before ripening.
I keep the small, sweet cherry tomatoes in a bowl on the worktop and dip into them like sweets. The larger ones are so full of flavour they’re ideal for cooking.
This variation on the classic tomato gratin is from Lindsey Bareham’s new recipe collection The Big Red Book of Tomatoes.
Serves: 4
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 35 minutes
Ingredients
1kg tomatoes, ripe, full-flavoured cored, scalded, peeled and thickly sliced
150g wholemeal bread, without crust
2 medium onions, very finely chopped
1 very large clove of garlic, finely chopped
25ml flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
30ml basil, finely chopped
6 tbsp parmesan, freshly grated
4 tbsp olive oil
25g butter
Pre-heat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6. Chunk the bread and process to crumbs in a food processor. Mix together the breadcrumbs, onion, garlic, herbs and parmesan, and season generously with salt and pepper.
Use 1 tbsp of the olive oil to grease an approximately 25cm x 5cm metal oven dish. Cover the bottom with a third of the bread mixture and top with half the tomatoes. Season, then dribble over a tbsp of the olive oil. Cover the tomatoes with another third of the bread mixture and then the remaining tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and another tbsp of olive oil. Finish with the remaining third of bread mixture and dribble over the remaining olive oil. Finally, cover the bread with thin slices of butter.
Cook for 35 minutes in the middle of the hot oven or until the top is well-browned. Serve from the dish, cut like a cake using a fish slice. Dust with more parmesan.
Another simple, late summer recipe from Nigel Slater in the Observer. It’s a fresher, more up-to-date version of the traditional dish of carrots in parsley sauce.
Nigel says: “A bunch of young carrots doesn’t last long in this house. Munched like sweets, they often go before I even have time to rinse them. The usual cooking method is to steam them and toss them in butter and chopped parsley. Nothing wrong with that, but this way is much more interesting.”
Serves 4 as a side dish
Preparation / cooking: 20 minutes
Ingredients
slim, young carrots 2 bunches
shallot 1, medium-sized
basil 1 small bunch
parsley 6 bushy sprigs
dill 8 sprigs
crème fraîche 200ml
lemon juice a good squeeze
Wipe or rinse the carrots, but don’t peel them, then place them in a steamer basket or colander set over a pan of boiling water. Steam for 7-10 minutes till tender, but not soft. If you prefer to boil them in lightly salted water, do so, then drain them.
Peel and very finely chop the shallot. Remove the leaves from the basil and parsley and discard the stems, then chop them, quite finely, together with the dill fronds. You should have a couple of good handfuls of chopped herbs. Put the crème fraîche into a saucepan large enough to take the carrots in a single layer, add the shallot, herbs and the lemon juice and bring to the boil. Season with black pepper and a little salt, then add the drained, whole carrots. Leave to simmer for a couple of minutes with the occasional stir, taking care not to break the carrots up. Serve immediately.
This simple but tasty version comes from The Hairy Bikers. Perfect for the tomatoes and chillies in Camel CSA’s veg boxes this week.
Raw salsa is a delicious and easy accompaniment to all sorts of food – from simple Mexican corn chips to Tex Mex dishes from chilli con carne to guacamole to beef fajitas to beef tacos to vegetarian nachos. It also makes a very good chunky dip for raw vegetables.
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: None
Ingredients
250g/9oz fresh tomatoes, finely chopped
1 small onion, finely chopped
3 mild chillies, finely chopped
bunch coriander, finely chopped
salt, to taste
lime juice, to taste
1 tbsp water
Method
To make the salsa, combine all the ingredients together in a bowl and serve immediately.
Couldn’t be easier!
A Nigel Slater salad from the Observer. It goes beautifully with Cornish smoked mackerel and is perfect made with the red chillis in Camel CSA’s veg boxes this week.
Nigel says: “Anyone who likes cooked beetroot, but isn’t fond of it pickled, may like to try this way with them. The salad has some of the crisp, acidic flavour of a good pickle, but is infinitely more mellow. I had intended this to be a side dish, but it is so good, it became the focus of a light lunch with smoked salmon and rye bread. Lovely fresh flavours and a good introduction to beetroot for the uninitiated.”
(I used cider vinegar instead of sherry vinegar.)
Serves 4 as part of a light main course
Preparation / cooking time: 60 minutes
Ingredients
raw beetroot 6 small to medium
oil vegetable, rapeseed or groundnut
For the dressing:
ginger, freshly grated 1 tsp
orange juice 125ml
lemon juice 3 tbsp
dark soy 3 tsp
small, red chilli 1
sherry vinegar 1 tbsp
Scrub the beetroot and trim its leaves, without tearing the skin, then either boil or bake till tender to the point of a knife. To bake, set the oven at 200C/gas mark 6, place the beetroots on a sheet of foil, pour over a glug of mild cooking oil then close the foil loosely over them. Bake for 40 minutes or so, depending on the size of your beets, till you can insert a skewer easily into them. To boil them, drop the beetroots into boiling, unsalted water and simmer, partially covered, for 20-30 minutes till tender.
Remove the skins from the beetroots – they should be easy to push off with your thumb. Slice the beets roughly the same thickness as a pound coin then put them in a serving dish.
Make the dressing: put the grated ginger in a mixing bowl, pour in the orange and lemon juices then add the soy sauce. Halve, seed and finely slice the red chilli, then add a little of it to the dressing with the sherry vinegar, and mix well. Check for balance – it should be sweet, sour and fruity. Add more soy or juice, or chilli as you wish. I find that barely half a small chilli is enough. Spoon the dressing over the sliced beetroot and leave for a few minutes before serving.
Camel CSA’s weekly veg box members keep asking: “What’s that pale greenish-white sputnik-like vegetable in the veg boxes? And what do I do with it?”
Kohlrabi are easy to grow, not often seen in the shops and highly underrated. They have the combined taste and texture of radishes and turnips – but are milder, crisper and more juicy.
I love to eat smaller ones raw – just peel and slice them into batons or matchsticks. They can be grated as a crunchy addition to salads, made into a kohlrabi remoulade, or cubed and steamed before dressing with oil and lemon juice. Some people even stuff them! (But I think life’s too short for that.)
This recipe comes with some useful tips on cooking with kohlrabi from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian. He says: “If your kohlrabi still has its green leaves attached, combine them with the spinach in this tasty gratin.”
The spinach could be replaced with some of the Swiss chard we’re getting in Camel CSA’s weekly veg boxes at the moment. Oh – and I used creme fraiche instead of double cream.
If you have just one kohl rabi, you could make this for two people (or for four as a side dish) simply by dividing the amounts by three.
Serves 6
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 35 – 40 minutes
Ingredients
1 tbsp sunflower oil
1 knob butter, plus a little more for greasing the dish
2 medium onions (about 600g), halved and finely sliced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
500g kohlrabi, peeled and cut into 3mm thick rounds
250g potatoes, peeled and cut into 3mm rounds
2 tsp thyme leaves, chopped
200ml double cream
200ml water (or chicken or vegetable stock)
1 big handful baby spinach, or spinach mixed with kohlrabi leaves
1 tbsp parsley, chopped
For the topping
60g fresh breadcrumbs
25g butter, melted
45g cheddar or hard goat’s cheese, grated
Method
Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/gas mark 5. Place a medium-sized frying pan over a medium heat. Add the oil and butter, wait until it foams, then add the sliced onion and a pinch of salt, and sauté for 12 minutes, until soft and starting to take on a little colour.
Throw in the kohlrabi, potatoes and thyme, and season generously with salt and pepper. Cook, tossing the mixture occasionally, for another five minutes.
Pour over the cream and stock, simmer gently until the liquid is reduced by half, stir in the spinach and parsley, then place in a lightly buttered gratin dish, about 30cm x 20cm x 7cm in size, levelling it out with a spatula as you go. Place the gratin dish on a baking tray.
Blitz together the breadcrumbs, butter and cheese in a blender, and sprinkle over the top of the filling. Bake the gratin in a hot oven for about 35-40 minutes, until all golden and bubbling.
I stumbled across this way of cooking the chard in Camel CSA’s veg boxes this week in The Times. It’s from Lindsay Bareham‘s Dinner Tonight column. And very delicious it is too.
Trouchia is essentially an omelette made with chard, but it’s actually more chard than omelette. Lindsey describes it as “dense with green and just enough egg to bind it together, the spinach-meets-cabbage flavour pointed up brilliantly with garlic and a little Parmesan”.
She adds: “The outside will be lightly crusted and golden, inside will be creamy and soft. It’s more like a frittata than the usual French omelette and is delicious hot, warm or cold.”
As a matter of interest, when most cooks make la trouchia (which is unique to the Nice area of France) they add a thinly-sliced onion when stir-frying the chard.
Serves 2-4
Preparation/cooking: 40 minutes
Ingredients
500g chard
3 fresh eggs
2 tbsp freshly grated Parmesan or Gruyere
5 large garlic cloves
Olive oil
Salt and black pepper
Method
Fold over each leaf and slice off the stalk (use these for another dish). Make a pile of leaves as you go. Using a large chef’s knife, shred the leaves finely. Place in a colander, rinse, then sprinkle with 1tsp salt.
Leave for five minutes while you whisk the eggs in a bowl, seasoning lightly with salt and generously with black pepper. Add the Parmesan.
Crack the garlic, flake away the skin, chop finely then crush to a paste.
Fill a saute pan with water and boil. Rinse the chard and add to the boiling water for 10 seconds. Tip into a colander and hold under running water to cool, then squeeze dry with your hands or against the colander.
Heat 2 tbsp oil in a frying pan over a medium heat. Add the garlic and fry quickly before adding the chard. Stir-fry constantly for about 10 minutes until soft and juicy. Stir thoroughly with a fork into the egg.
Heat a small, non-stick frying pan over a high heat, add 1 tbsp oil , swirling it round the sides. Pour in the omelette mix, stirring and smoothing with a fork without touching the pan. Cook for a couple of minutes, then reduce the heat to very low, cover the pan and cook for about 8 minutes until set.
Using the lid or a plate, quickly invert the pan. Add a little more oil, increase the heat, return the omelette and cook for a couple more minutes. Slide on to a plate and enjoy.
A recipe from a recent Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall bean recipe round-up – as he says, ‘summer is a time when all of us can be full of beans’. If you’ve got more than you can cope with in your box, why not freeze some for winter use?
This simple, tasty salad works with runner beans, too.
Serves 2-4
Preparation and cooking: 20 minutes
Ingredients
280g french beans, trimmed
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
juice of ½ small lemon
small handful of mint leaves, tough stalks removed, and chopped
small handful dill, tough stalks removed, half the fronds chopped, the rest reserved to garnish the dish
flaky sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
150g feta
50g walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped
Method
Top and tail the beans. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and cook the beans until just tender, about three to six minutes, then drain and refresh in cold water. Dress the beans in the olive oil, lemon juice, mint, some of the dill, salt and pepper. Serve topped with crumbled feta cheese, walnuts and the remaining dill fronds scattered over the top.
[Photo: Colin Campbell for the Guardian]
Before the recipe – which comes from Nigel Slater’s Tender – a few points about chard. After all, it grows well on the CSA’s plot so we’ll be seeing it in our veg boxes pretty often and might as well learn how to enjoy it!
- If the stems are wide, they need to be cooked separately from the leaves. Best to cut the stalk a centimetre or so below where the leaf starts. The stem is still tender at this point but will help the leaf keep its shape better during cooking. The leaves can be cooked just as you would cook spinach.
- In a gratin-type recipe, as below, the chard leaves need a good squeeze to get rid of their water.
- Yoghurt, fromage frais and mascarpone are all good as a dressing for freshly cooked chard. Add a trickle of olive oil too, and perhaps a scattering of paprika.
- Chard stalks, however thick, never take longer to boil or steam than three or four minutes.
- Seasoning your chard: anchovies – chopped and cooked to a pulp in olive oil; parsley – can calm the mineral notes of older stalks, especially if used with olive oil and lemon juice; lemon juice and a peppery olive oil – as a dressing for warm leaves and stalks.
Serves 4
Ingredients
450g chard stems and leaves
1 tbsp grain mustard
400ml double cream
a good handful of grated parmesan
Method
Cut the chard leaves from the stems. Chop the stems into short lengths and then cook briefly in boiling, lightly salted water until crisply tender. Dip the leaves in the water briefly, until they relax. Drain well and put them in a buttered shallow dish. Put the mustard in a bowl and stir in the cream and a grinding of salt and black pepper. Pour the seasoned cream over the stems and leaves, cover with grated parmesan and bake at 180C/gas 4 till the top has a light crust the colour of honey.
