Meat Free Monday - Carrot Soup & Welsh Rarebit

As Tennyson said "In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love". He could just as well have said "In the Autumn a young woman's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of melted cheese" but he seems to have idealised skinny, consumptive women who didn't know how good fondue and raclette could be.

The weather has turned cold and nothing seems more appetising than a simple bowl of soup and cheese on toast. I decided that instead of doing a regular grilled cheese on toast, I'd make it a bit fancier and do a rarebit - it's George Gaston's fault, he did one recently that gave me such a craving!

This is a good Meat-Free Monday meal, but I am also going to send it over to Deb for her Souper Sundays round up!

Carrot & Leek Soup

2 leeks, washed and sliced finely (this was an excuse to use my new mandolin)
500g carrots, sliced finely
vegetable stock
butter

Melt the butter in a big saucepan, add the vegetables. When the leeks start to soften, cover with the vegetable stock and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer until the leeks have collapsed to a puree and the carrots are soft. Season with salt and pepper.

Welsh Rarebit

4 slices of good, sturdy bread
1tsp butter
1tsp flour
1/2 cup brown ale
grated cheese (I used a mixture of mature chedder and parmesan)
worcestershire sauce
cayenne pepper
Dijon mustard

In a small pan, make a roux of the butter and flour. When it starts to bubble, gradually add the ale, stirring constantly until you have a smooth sauce. When the sauce comes to the boil, gradually add the grated cheese, stirring constantly while it melts. How much you need is a matter for you and your cardiologist - I used about 150g. When the cheese is almost melted, taste and season with a splash of worcestershire sauce, a sprinkle of cayenne pepper and a teaspoonful of mustard.

Place the slices of bread in a shallow baking dish. Pour the hot, smooth cheese over the slices of bread, and put the baking dish under the grill for a couple of minutes (watching closely) until the cheese colours and bubbles.

Quince Bakewell Pudding

You may remember that last year I made marmalade from our ornamental quinces. This year our crop was a lot smaller (the knobbly one is from the bonsai quince that Captain Haddock is growing) and I decided to try something different.

My plan was to peel and core them, poach them until tender in a sugar syrup and then preserve them in brandy. Well that didn't really work out at all. They collapsed in the sugar syrup into a fragrant mush, which then set into a very firm, tangy jam.

I decided to turn the jam into a classic English pastry - the Bakewell Pudding. The difference between a Bakewell Tart and a Bakewell Pudding is that the tart uses shortcrust and the pudding uses puff. There are probably other differences but that is the main one.

I followed this recipe, substituting a thick layer of quince jam for the raspberries and omitting the almond essence.

Delicious. Not too sweet, not too heavy, just a really delicious combination of fruit and almonds. With a hefty spoonful of clotted cream, naturally!

Nutmeg & Apple Buns

We had some friends staying for the weekend, so I decided that it'd be nice to make some spiced buns for breakfast.

These spiced plum buns worked well but I was keen to get something really traditionally British into them: the Bramley apple. Bramley's are what they call a cooking apple over here - they are quite sour and collapse into fluff when you cook them. They are the best thing in the world for making apple sauce to go with pork or goose.

I also wanted to make the buns a bit more decadent, so I had a crack at making a laminated dough. It worked very well, although I didn't do quite as many folds as I should have.

The friends I was making these for had sent me a gift of some lovely nutmeg jam from Grenada, so I wanted to feature that as well. To make the nutmeg flavour stand out I left the cardamom out of the dough, spread it thickly with the jam and sprinkled it with a chopped Bramley and a handful of dried sour cherries before rolling, slicing and baking.

I think next time I will definitely do the laminated dough again, but actually make a proper croissant pastry. These were lighter than a normal yeasted bun, and you could see how delicious and rich they would have been if I had persevered with the rolling and folding.

Green Tomato Relish

This year - our third attempt - we finally managed to harvest some ripe tomatoes. Which I completely neglected to get a picture of. But then it started to get colder and we realised that we were going to have to harvest the remaining green tomatoes before frost got them.

So what to do with the green tomatoes? I decided to make some really simple green tomato and chilli relish.

I chopped the green tomatoes, a couple of onions and 4 ripe serrano chillies, and put them in a pan with some white wine vinegar, salt, sugar and celery seeds and cooked it until it was thick. Most of it I bottled to mature, but some got dolloped immediately onto thick, juicy cheeseburgers. Spicy, tangy and just how I like relish to be.

Happy Halloween

Australia doesn't really do Halloween. You get some kids trick or treating, and the odd person who throws a party to provide an excuse for dressing up as a slutty pirate, but it isn't particularly widespread. In the UK it runs much deeper, but the celebration now is still more informed by American TV than by traditional practices.

But this week in my veg box there was a small, smooth, orange pumpkin. And I just knew that it had to become my first jack o' lantern.

As it happens, the hardest part was scraping out the seeds. No matter what I tried I could NOT get the fibres out. The carved-away flesh joined another pumpkin in becoming a pot of velvety soup.

Fig and Walnut Flapjacks

The other weekend I went to a dance festival. It wasn't the best-organised event I have ever been to - no joining instructions were sent out, no details were available about the facilities etc. So I was heading off for 6 hours of workshops without knowing if there was going to be food available. And you must know that for me that is an impossible situation.

So - just in case there was no food available - I decided to take a snack and a hell of a lot of water (the last festival I went to ran out of bottled water half-way through the last day). My snack needed to be nutritious, sustaining and portable. Something with oats and nuts seemed to fit the bill.

I decided on Nigel Slater's Fig and Pumpkin Seed Bars (at the bottom of this page). Of course, the pumpkin seeds that I was sure I had turned out to be sunflower seeds, but the substitution wasn't a problem. The walnut flavour was much more dominant than the sunflower seeds, and calling it a "bar" doesn't appropriately convey the sticky moistness so I renamed it.

As it happens, there was some food available, but a piece of my flapjack was very welcome in between the Dynamic Duos and Spins and Formations workshops and it saved me from whatever horrors lurked in the snack vending machine.

Roast tomato sauce

A recent trip to Costco yielded a 6kg box of lovely ripe tomatoes. Paul and I decided to have a cook-off - split the box in half and each produce a tomato sauce to our own taste and then compare. But this is my blog so you only get to see my efforts...

I decided to concentrate the tomato flavour by roasting them. I peeled, quartered and seeded the tomatoes, then pushed the seeds through a sieve to get as many of the juices into the sauce as possible. I packed them in a single layer in a roasting tin, sprinkled a little olive oil over them and studded the tomatoes with whole peeled garlic cloves and a couple of sliced green chillies. A small seasoning of salt and into a slow oven for 2 hours.

The tomatoes cooked down almost to a puree. I split the cooked sauce into 3 portions, froze 2 and used one the following night for dinner.

We had a lot of rare roast beef left over from a previous meal. I'd been thinking about a week of beef sandwiches for lunch, but then I decided it had a better fate. Apparently it used to be traditional to mince the leftover Sunday roast and produce it for Monday dinner - as cottage pie or rissoles or something.

I chopped the beef (and another green chilli, just in case you were concerned by the green flecks in my mince) and put it through the mincer.

I fried a chopped onion and some sliced garlic in some olive oil, added a heap of dried herbs (rosemary, celery seed, oregano, thyme and marjoram) and a sliced yellow pepper. When the pepper was slightly softened I added the mince, then a portion of the roasted tomato sauce.

After a nice slow simmer I served it on wholemeal spaghetti with grated parmesan.

It was very tasty! The ground beef produced a much finer-textured sauce than raw mince does. There was a lot of liquid (normally my meat sauce can support a spoon) but it was very full-flavoured and much richer than I would have expected.