Beautiful Wedges

These are truly spectacular.

This is how you make them:

1. Preheat the oven, around 200 degrees Celsius.
2. Peel and chop floury potatoes in to wedge shapes. (The best way is to cut a rectangleish piece, then slice diagonally to make two triangular pieces. Otherwise known as wedges.)
3. Boil the potato for about ten minutes, until they are almost cooked, but still pretty firm.
4. Drain them using a colander and leave them to steam their moisture out for a bit.
5. While you're waiting chop up some fresh rosemary.
6. Put a good swig of vegetable oil in a baking tray and put it in the oven for a few minutes until it's hot, you can tell by shaking the tray to see how quickly the liquid moves. Another way to tell is to add a drop of water, if it spits and dances it's the perfect temperature. If it tries to burn your eye balls and alarms small animals in the vicinity then it's too hot. Put a little more oil in and turn your heat down. Open the oven door till the light goes on then put it back in and repeat this step. Got it?!
7. The reason for all of these shennanigans is that you want the wedges to start crisping up as soon as they hit the oil - it will make for wedges that are soft on the inside, crispy on the outside. Armadillo...
8. When your oil is a good temperature and your wedges have stopped steaming (or if you're really organised, you can put them in the fridge and take them from cold) then it's time to place them in the baking tray. Don't overlap them; use a few trays. You'll eat more than you think, promise.
9. Sprinkle salt over the wedges, then the rosemary. Leave them to cook in the oven for about seven minutes, enough time for the underside to start to brown, and for the other edges to get nice and dry.
10. Now, get the baking tray out and turn over each wedge, making sure all edges have some oil on them. Leave them cooking nicely for about ten minutes.
11. There are a lot of steps here, it may be because I like to get things out of the oven and fiddle with them. It may be that you would get the same results without following these steps, but I think that it's worth doing. Also, you can eat one each time you get a tray out, just to test them.
12. If you're not like me and would rather leave them you could always make some ketchup. Check out Dara's recipe: http://peasandloveblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/home-made-chips-and-ketchup.html
13. Keep cooking and occasionally shaking them around to prevent sticking until they are lovely and golden. Ideally I would have cooked the ones in the photo a little longer, but there was a room full of hungry people and all the other food was ready. Sometimes a cook must compromise...

Voila! Here are your wedges. YEEEEEESSSSS!!!! Ahh, the humble potato.

Tofu, Mushroom and Olive Scramble

This was an experiment well worth undertaking.

I mashed a block of plain tofu with a fork and sprinkled about a teaspoon each of bouillon and inactive yeast. Next I fried some diced mushrooms in a very small amount of oil, leaving a lid on them to keep the moisture in. When they started to brown I added the tofu mixture and a few halved olives. That's it!

This time I ate it with boiled potatoes, salad and a healthy dollop of hummous. Tomorrow I will have the other half in a pitta bread for my lunch.

Creamy Lentil Curry

Another recipe that used some of my Christmas skipping haul. I washed and cooked up some red lentils till they started to go a bit mushy (I actually blended them as well for a smooth consistency). I fried up some various curry spices, onion, and garlic in a frying pan with lots of oil. I added this to the lentil mixture, along with some cooked chickpeas and some carrots and broccoli that I got from the skip and let it all mellow out together.

I don't eat dairy, but I had six cartons of skipped cream to use up, so I threw one in to the curry. It really set it off and gave it a lovely, well, creaminess. Coconut milk would give the same effect, but you don't often find that in the skip. Serve with some rice, or potatoes, or whatever you have lying around and you're done. It's pretty quick, and an especially good way of using up left-over veg, of which there is plenty at Christmastime.

Vegan Apple Crumble

In my Christmas Eve skipping haul there were about a dozen packets of pre-sliced apples & grapes in snack-packs. There was also a bag of peanuts & cashews. And a few dozen pitta breads. So, for Christmas dessert I decided to make an apple crumble mainly from these ingredients.

I mixed the apples with some fair trade muscovado sugar and spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, mixed spice). I placed them at the bottom of a baking dish. Then I made the topping. I crumbled about four pittas into a bowl with some of the nuts (washed as they were salty) and some brown sugar and a bit of flour. I added in a good bit of oil and mixed it all up until I got some nice crumbly clumps. I piled this on top of the apple mixture and stuck it in the oven. You don't want the top burning, so don't have it on too hot. I also poured some maple syrup over it towards the end. It's done whenever you want to eat it! It depends on your crumble preference.

It will hold out of the fridge in a cool place for a few days and I think it's even better cold.
(Props to Erin and Anna for getting me on the crumble train.)

- Dara

Skipping Christmas

I've been doing a good bit of skipping these days, or dumpster-diving as the Americans call it, somewhat less pleasantly. To those who have not tried it, I would highly recommend it. It's essentially reclaiming often-perfect food from going to waste, usually from a skip out the back of a supermarket or shop. I'm at home in Ireland currently and haven't really done much since I came home for Christmas. So, at 11pm on Christmas Eve I decided I must go and see what my hometown had to offer. I dragged my brother (and his car) along with me and soon hit the jackpot out the back of the big, evil, British supermarket chain. You know, the blue one, starts with a T. Anyway, this is what we took home, but we could have taken twenty times this amount and fed the entire town for Christmas dinner. But we didn't, we just took what we could use and carry.

      (I even found a chocolate bunny, but that didn't make it into the picture. )

Skipping is my favorite way to scavenge for food. It sure beats shopping, which I really hate and need money for. You don't have to queue, worry about prices, fair trade, ethics, animal treatment, the carbon footprint of your food - it's all rotting in a bin, so anything you take and use can only be positive. You're not supporting any unsustainable or cruel industries, in fact you're feeding off the waste they're causing. It's beautiful.

Though there is a stigma when people first hear about skipping. Like my brother said, 'You imagine someone eating a half-eaten pizza from a dirty bin,' like in those (American) movies. But it's really not like that at all. Often supermarkets are quite meticulous in their binning of foods, double- and triple-bagging goods. Heaven forbid, even the bin should be a mess. And everything's wrapped in plastic these days, which is quite convenient. Even if you don't eat the food you take from the skip, you can compost it and recycle the packaging.

My favorite bit of it all is probably creatively using up the food. It's like 'Ready, Steady, Cook'. Work with the ingredients you've got. In fact, I'm sure that could be a good show: 'Ready, Steady, Skip'. Someone may have suggested that to me before (Webby, was it you?). If no one claims it I'll take full credit for the idea.

My next few entries will concern using these ingredients to make some creative veggie dishes (and even the Christmas hams were used up on the day by the non-veggies in the house). More to come!

- Dara

Grilled Garlic Aubergines with Wilted Chard

Chard? It might be.... It's a green leafy vegetable from the veg box that is nice wilted anyway.

The aubergines were slices and grilled, with salt and olive oil on them. When they were cooked I spread a bit of crushed garlic on each piece and put it under a low heat on the grill for a few minutes. If it gets brown it gets a bit nasty, so keep a close eye on it.

I ate this with slices of smoked tofu, and olive oil drizzled all over. Tasty!

Eggs on a bed of Chickpeas, Peas and Onion.

The base of this dish was originally soup. In it's first incarnation I fried some onion and garlic, added some water and veg stock, then chickpeas and finally frozen peas. The stock was so delicious I drank it all and was left with a solid base on which to place boiled eggs. Before I did this, I mixed it with my lovely fennel fronds in olive oil, and some herbs provençal. Looks a bit strange perhaps, but it's truly delicious.