celeriac – Bangers & Mash

Winter minestrone with pancetta

January 17, 2014January 17, 2014Posted in RecipesTagged celeriac, chard, kale, minestrone, pancetta, soup, swede, winter greens7 Comments

This article was first published in my Eat the Season column in the Wells Journal on 16 January 2014.

I am rather partial to a big bowl of minestrone. It’s such a versatile soup and lends itself brilliantly to whatever vegetables are in season.

During the summer months I like to make minestrone using produce straight from our small veg patch – ingredients like peas, beans, asparagus and lots of lovely fresh herbs, such as basil, oregano or mint. It makes for a wonderfully light and crunchy dish, especially when you serve with a spoonful of pesto on top. And there’s something rather virtuous and wholesome about cooking up a pot of soup from things you’ve grown yourself. I come over all Barbara from The Good Life.

But winter minestrone is quite a different affair; much more comforting and satisfying. It transforms what can seem quite dreary winter vegetables into a fine meal, and succeeds in persuading my youngest daughter to actually enjoy leafy greens.

Everyone tends to have their own way of making minestrone. Some add rice or pasta, others don’t. Common ingredients usually include beans, onion, celery, carrot and tomato.

Minestrone of course hails originally from Italy. Almost every Italian region has its own version, which varies from a thick, mushy soup to something more like a broth with lightly cooked vegetables and sometimes meat too, such as sausage or bacon.

This is my recipe for winter minestrone, featuring pancetta for a rich, smoky flavour. I’ve also used the tiny, rice-shaped pasta, orzo, but feel free to substitute with rice or any other small pasta or even broken spaghetti.

Winter minestrone with pancetta

Serves 6

2 tbsp olive oil
260g pancetta, diced
1 onion, peeled and diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced
2 sticks of celery, diced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
250g root vegetables, diced (I used swede and celeriac)
400g tin plum tomatoes, chopped
250g winter greens, finely shredded (I used Swiss chard and curly kale)
handful fresh thyme, picked from the stem
1 litre hot chicken or vegetable stock
2 large handfuls orzo
salt and pepper
Parmesan to serve

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and slowly fry the pancetta, onion, carrot and celery until soft.

Add the garlic and root vegetables and continue to cook while stirring to prevent sticking.

Stir in the chopped tomatoes and cook for about 5 minutes until they have reduced a little.

Add the winter greens, thyme and the hot stock, and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for 20 minutes.

Add the orzo and cook for another 10 minutes or so until the pasta is tender. Season to taste.

Serve hot with freshly grated Parmesan.

As the soup is packed full of healthy vegetables, I’m entering it into January’s Four Seasons Food challenge, hosted by Eat Your Veg and Delicieux, where the theme this month is Virtuous Food. I reckon you can eat a bowlful of this minestrone and feel very virtuous indeed!

Celeriac soup with Shropshire Blue and a hint of chilli

March 21, 2013Posted in Recipes, VegetarianTagged blue cheese, Blue Shropshire, celeriac, chilli, soup, stilton12 Comments

Celeriac isn’t the prettiest of vegetables but you should never judge a book by its cover as they say. Despite it looking like a close-up of an insect under a microscope (as someone described it recently over on my Facebook page), I tend to get very excited when I discover one in our weekly veg box.

It’s wonderful simply boiled and mashed with a little butter, in a gratin with potatoes and lots of cream and garlic, or grated raw in an Ottolenghi-style root vegetable salad. I reckon it’s one of the most versatile vegetables around.

But my personal favourite is to partner celeriac with some kind of blue cheese in a soup. The mellow earthy, nutty flavour works so well with the tang of a good blue cheese. Stilton is always popular but I prefer a Shropshire Blue, which isn’t quite so in-your-face and gives the soup a wonderful orangey colour.

For a little extra kick, I do rather like to add a little chilli too, although I generally leave this out when I’m making it for the children. But as I cooked this last week for just me and my husband, the chilli was most definitely in, helping to boost the central heating on a wet, chilly day.

Celeriac soup with Shropshire Blue and a hint of chilli

2 tbsp olive oil
knob of butter
1 onion, peeled, and chopped
500g celeriac, peeled and diced
1 small red chilli, finely chopped
1 litre hot vegetable stock
120g Blue Shropshire cheese

Heat the oil and butter in a large pan and gently sweat the onion until soft.

Add the celeriac and cook a little, making sure the pieces get a good coating of butter and oil.

Throw in the chopped chilli and fry for a couple more minutes before adding the hot stock. Allow to simmer for around 15 minutes until the celeriac is tender. Cool a little before liquidising to a smooth consistency.

Return the soup to the heat while you crumble in the Blue Shropshire cheese and warm through gently until the cheese has melted. Serve with big hunks of crusty bread. Heaven in a bowl…

Homity pie

March 14, 2012March 16, 2019Posted in Recipes, VegetarianTagged celeriac, cheese, cranks, family food, homity pie, onion, pie, potato, potato and onion pie, recipe, vegetarian, wholemeal pastry5 Comments

Before I go any further I want to say that Cranks today is probably quite different from how I remember Cranks growing up in the 1980s.

My step-mum was a big fan of Cranks. When we went shopping in the West End, we’d invariably end up in the Cranks restaurant just off Carnaby Street and we ate many dishes from their recipe book.

In case you don’t know Cranks, they’ve been around since the 1960s and were one of the first brands I’m aware of that were exponents of healthy eating. This of course is fantastic. But as a kid, I grew to associate Cranks with worthy food: brown rice, heavy wholemeal pastry, nut roasts and – this for me was the worst part – wholemeal pasta. Now I know we need roughage in our diet. But there is a right way and a wrong way to eat your fibre, and a bowlful of wholemeal spaghetti is for me most definitely the wrong way.

I’ve just taken a peek at the Cranks website. They are still going strong it seems and they look very different from the Cranks I knew growing up. There are some recipes I’d actually be quite interested in trying.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for Cranks as a youngster, there was one dish that my step-mum could make time and time again from their recipe book and I’d be happy, and that was Homity Pie – a tasty open cheese and potato pie. OK so it was made with wholemeal pastry but I could cope with that when balanced with the lovely buttery, cheesey, garlicy potatoes and onions. As with all my favourite foods, so very simple and so very delicious. In fact, when I left home for university, this was the only recipe I copied out to take with me.

I’ve played with the recipe a little. I use half wholemeal and half white flour for the pastry. Sometimes I add ham or bacon to the filling. And quite often I add whatever leftover vegetables I happen to have in the fridge. Last time I baked it, I used half a celeriac I had hanging around, so this appears in the recipe below.

Homity Pie

For the pastry

100g plain white flour
100g wholemeal flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
100g butter
3 tbsp water

For the filling

300g potatoes, peeled and diced
300g celeriac, peeled and diced
3 tbsp olive oil
450g onions, peeled and chopped
50g butter
handful fresh parsley, chopped
150g Cheddar cheese, grated
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tbsp milk
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 220°C/gas 7.

To make the pastry, place the wholemeal and white flour, baking powder and salt in a basin and rub in the butter with your finger tips until you have a breadcrumb-like mixture. Gradually add the water and mix in with a knife to form a dough. Wrap in clingfilm and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes.

In a large pan of salted water, boil the potatoes and celeriac until just tender, then drain and return to the pan.

Heat the olive oil in a pan and gently sautee the onions until golden. Add the onions to the potatoes and celeriac along with the butter, parsley, 100g of the cheese, garlic, milk, salt and pepper and combine well.

Butter your flan dish – I use one that’s 25cm diameter. Take your dough out of the fridge and roll out on a floured board. Don’t worry if it’s quite crumbly. Mine always falls apart a bit and I end up moulding it into position to line the flan dish.

Simply tip your ingredients into the pastry case, flatten it out a bit so the pastry is well covered and sprinkle with the remaining Cheddar cheese.

Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is crisp and the cheese topping has melted and is golden brown.