Spring Veggies Risotto

Sometimes you want a dinner that's easy to make, but still feels a wee bit special. Risotto gets a bad reputation for being a hard work meal - but really it's just stirring. A packet of risotto rice is an essential ingredient in my store cupboard.

If you have fresh green vegetables in the fridge then you can use these for this recipe - anything like leeks, asparagus, sugar snaps will work. But equally frozen vegetables are good in a risotto too!

Using home-made stock from the freezer will make this a Home Made Monday recipe, but if you don't have this then try to keep a good quality stock on hand.

This is the recipe I follow, depending on what I have in the house. If you don't have leeks then start with a white onion instead. It serves 3 hungry (greedy) people, or 4 normal people.

350g risotto rice
50g Butter
Olive oil
1l vegetable stock
5 spears asparagus - cut in to 1cm chunks, apart from the heads
1 leek - cut in half length ways and sliced thinly
Handful each frozen peas and broadbeans
Vegetarian parmesan
Rind of half a lemon

Melt butter in a large pan and add a glug of olive oil. Saute the leeks on a low heat until softened - be careful not to overcook the leeks, if they go brown they get quite bitter.

Add the risotto rice and stir well. Cook until the grains of rice start to go translucent around the edges. Start adding the stock, a ladle full at a time. Stir until the stock is absorbed, then keep adding a ladle at a time.

Once you are about three quarters through the stock add in the asparagus.

Keep adding stock until it is all gone. Add in the frozen vegetables, parmesan and lemon rind with the last of the stock.

Check the rice is cooked through, it should still have a bite to it. If it is too hard then add boiling water, a ladle full at a time, until it is ready.

Serve immediately.

I actually garnished mine with baked leek fries - reserve a strip of leek at the beginning, drizzle with olive oil and bake for 15 minutes until crispy.

Lentil and Butternut Squash Soup

You may have guessed from my blog posts so far that there are a few ingredients that I always seem to have in my cupboards. This is for two reasons; they are delicious, and I have found the best way to keep food costs down is to be predictable with the ingredients you have available. My monthly shop doesn't vary that much in terms of what goes in my trolley and how much it costs, but what I make with these ingredients does.

This recipe is inspired by one of the recipes from my cooking lesson at Greenz, the vegan/vegetarian restaurant in Tulse Hill, but with my own stamp on it based on the food I tend to buy. These are the ingredients I am focusing on today...

And this is why they always find their way into my shopping trolley:

Lentils - cheap, healthy and delicious. Great source of protein.
Butternut squash - versatile, healthy and tasty. Not massively cheap, but you can get a few meals from one squash. Bulks out this soup nicely.
Ginger - this is again not something that one would consider a particularly cheap ingredient, and I'm sure goes to waste in many fridges. But just a little adds great flavour to so many dishes, and a great tip is that you can freeze it and grate it while still frozen as and when you need it.

If you like one or all of these ingredients then you should try this soup - it is Souper Douper healthy, easy to make and delicious. Adding the ginger at the last minute was one of the lessons I took away from Greenz - it gives the soup a really fresh zingy flavour. Pretty much all you need to make this is a large pan and a hand blender (see butternut squash "pesto" recipe for my thoughts or hand blenders).

Half butternut squash - seeds removed. Peel if you like, but the skin wont hurt and it will be whizzed up anyway. Chop into roughly 2 cm cubed pieces.
200g red lentils - thoroughly washed
Thumb sized piece of ginger - grated
2 tsps ground cumin
1 litre boiling water/veg stock
3 tomatoes, chopped into chunks
Glug of olive oil

Heat a large saucepan. Add a glug of oil to the pan. Chuck in the butternut squash and the ground cumin - give it a good stir and fry gently for a couple of minutes.

Make sure you have washed the lentils thoroughly in a sieve under cool running water, until the water runs clear. This will stop the scum that  can appear when cooking lentils. Add the lentils and the boiling water or vegetable stock to the squash.

Cook until the lentils and squash are soft, probably around 15-20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and then take off the heat.

Stir in the ginger and tomatoes. Using a hand blender whizz it up in the pan until it's smooth. Give it a stir to check it is as smooth as you would like it. Reheat gently until hot through. Serve with a swirl of creme fraiche/yoghurt if you have it, and some crusty bread.

Use It All Up Easy Vegetable Stir fry

This week I was looking at an interesting piece examining the amount of food wasted by the average UK household in real terms. Just in the UK the food wasted by households each year is equal to 7 million tonnes - or roughly the same weight as the largest of the pyramids! Of this 7 million tonnes, 4.2 million tonnes represents food that could have been eaten, but ended up past its best and in a landfill.

This drives home to me the reason why I started this blog. Although one of the reasons is that I am trying to cut back on my spending and make cheap and delicious food, I also hate the amount of food that gets put in the bin. As a people we are too greedy and too lazy, and a small change to the way we shop and eat makes a difference to how much you spend on food as well as how much gets chucked away. I'm not saying that I don't still find ingredients festering in the fridge and regret not using them sooner, but I am making a conscious effort to change what I buy and eat to get the most from my shopping.

I always stock up on plenty of vegetables, and one of the best ways I know of using up any of those slightly sad or unusual ingredients is in a stir fry. Obviously this can be made as soon as you get your veggies home from the supermarket too! This sort of dinner is so flexible, and has transformed many a slightly limp vegetable before it can venture into the light and embrace the afterlife in the bin.

Obviously it is easy to buy a stir in sauce, but these can add unnecessary sugar and salt to your meals without you realising it. These are the ingredients I keep on hand for a basic but delicious stir fry sauce. This will work with pretty much any vegetable... I was going to include some vegetables here that wouldn't be suitable, but I'm having trouble thinking of any. A potato? Maybe. But I still think it would be worth trying.

1 chilli - red or green, as hot as you like. Sliced finely
1 glove garlic - sliced finely
Thumb size piece of ginger - grated
Glug of sunflower or olive oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce - I use light
Juice of half a lime
Vegetables of your choice
Rice or noodles to serve

Heat your wok - make sure it is nice and hot. Add your cooking oil (NOT the sesame oil yet!). Once the cooking oil is really hot chuck in the grated ginger, chilli and garlic. If you wanted to use tofu then add this at the same time. Stir fry on a high heat for a minute or so - it does need to be hot, but be careful not to burn these flavours. The key to it is that it's a STIR fry, so keep STIRring!

Add in the vegetables. If you have anything that might need a bit longer cooking - broccoli stalks for example (yes I said STALKS, they are delicious. Please don't throw them away) - then add them in first. Stir fry for a couple of minutes, and then add in the rest of your veggies. You may want to hold off adding any delicate vegetables until the very end, peas for example don't need much cooking. Add in soy sauce and sesame, stir fry for a minute or so.

Splash in the lime juice as well as any remaining vegetables - peas, bean sprouts, spring onions - for the last minute of cooking. Serve with noodles or rice, garnished with coriander or sesame seeds if you have them.