Quick Tomato Soup/ Berlin Skipping

 

On the way to breakfast at my friends I couldn't help but stop off at the skip. It's sort of an addiction. I was pretty late for breakfast, but from the above skip haul, I whipped a quick and easy tomato soup for lunch. I basically chopped up all the tomatoes and simmered them with some garlic, basil and oil. And the freshly baked rolls from the skip went perfectly. This is basically my favourite way to cook, when the skip decides what I'll be preparing.

- Dara

Creamy Mushroom Tart / Skipping in Dublin

I went skipping in Dublin recently. There was a lot of food in the bins, but this is all we could carry.

Among the skipping haul was a box of mushrooms, double cream, butter and pastry. Inspired by all these ingredients, I decided to make a creamy mushroom tart.

I fried the mushrooms in some of the butter with plenty of garlic. I was bold and I added some salt. Once they were cooked to my liking/ patience, I added in the carton of double cream and let the mixture cook and thicken for a few minutes.

While all this was happening, I pre-heated the oven and flattened the pastry out in a baking dish (I'm lying, I just threw it in the oven - I despise waiting for pre-heated ovens). After the pastry cooked a bit, I took the pot of creamy mushrooms and spread it evenly over the pastry. I popped this in the oven for a bit until the pastry was crispy.

I also made some garlic bread with some skipped ciabattas. I cut them into slices and spread the butter on them, then rubbed in some diced garlic and threw them in the oven. Delicious. Watch yer heart.

- Dara

Vegan Banana Ice-Cream

Time for another skip tip! If you go skipping/ dumpster-diving a lot, you're bound to find lots of bananas. I love bananas. They're great in cereal and smoothies. Sometimes they can be brown and squishy and some people don't like that. But, don't throw them out! They're perfect and sweet like this for ice-cream!

Peel them and put them in a container, then place them in the freezer. And the next time you feel like some vegan ice-cream, simply put them in a blender with a few spoons of soy milk and blend it all up until it's smooth. You can also add some cinnamon, and even cocoa powder to make chocolate banana ice-cream, if you like!

- Dara

Rice + Parsley Pesto

I was at a friend's house a while ago and they had a rather large amount of parsley. And I hear parsley has a rake of vitamins. So, this happened.

 

I blended up the parsley in a pot with some garlic, sunflower seeds, nutritional yeast and possibly a bit of balsamic vinegar. Some pepper also. Maybe you want to add salt, if you like it. I warmed it all up in a pot, but not too hot as I didn't want to kill the vitamins. I wanted to get that vitamin C in 2 me.

My friend made the rice part of the meal, first frying the uncooked rice in oil to get more flavour out of it (this was news to me). Then they added water to cook it. And also some onion, garlic, and bouillon powder.

The bread is there as I found a couple of loaves in a skip the day before, but it contrasted perfectly with the sloppy components of the meal.

- Dara

Hanging Bottle Herb Garden

Inspired by this photo, I have decided to create a hanging herb garden on my living room wall. Filling the base with gravel (for drainage)  then covering with top soil should do it.

As well as herbs, small lettuces could be an option. Do you have any ideas which other plants could thrive like this?

Using Stuff Up: One

Using stuff up is one of my preferred ways of cooking. Especially if I'm a guest and cooking at somebody's house. I never feel bad about using ingredients if they 'need to be used up'. Same reason I like skipping. And it means I don't have to make big decisions about what to buy and deal with that horrible ordeal. So, this is one of those and I don't have a name for it.

The base for this was the end of my rocket pesto pasta. It was quite oily but there was a lot of flavour there. So I wanted to expand on it and make it something different. I threw in a lot of things that were around me and I'll try to recount them, mostly.

I chopped up the leftover, oily spaghetti pasta and heated up the pot. There was some really stale bread that needed using up, so I broke it up and stirred it around in the oily mixture, adding some tahini and some old juice that may not have been so nice to drink but worked to offset the bitter-but-creamy tahini and softened the bread. I threw in some tomato puree, some chopped carrots, possibly some vinegar and maybe nutritional yeast. I'm not sure. It's a bit of a blur. But I enjoyed it more that the original pasta. Don't follow this as a recipe. Just use stuff up.

It's fun to use stuff up.

- Dara

Skipped Rocket Pesto

I'm in Vienna at the moment. With a friend, I found two packets of organic rocket (or ruccola in German) in a skip near an eco shop. The ruccola was on the way out, so I decided to make rocket pesto, so it would last a few days longer.

 I washed then sliced up the ruccola finely and add lots of diced garlic, oils (olive, peanut, and pumpkin seed), lemon juice, salt, pepper, and a few finely diced capers for extra flavour. I left it overnight to let the flavours get to know each other. Then, when the time came to feast (it is always time to feast), I just stirred it in to some nice brown organic (or bio as they say here) pasta.

I used 500g of pasta and it was still rather oily. I'd recommend bread for soakage. Afterwards I turned the remainder of oily the mixture into another meal, which you can see in the next post. Hope to see you there. Goodbye for now.

- Dara