red pepper – Bangers & Mash

Roast vegetable sauce for pasta

January 21, 2014Posted in Recipes, VegetarianTagged butternut squash, carrot, celery, courgette, Family Foodies, pasta, red pepper, roast vegetables, sauce, vegetables, zucchini15 Comments

I have been cooking this sauce, or versions of it, since I was weaning my two girls onto solids. They are now five and eight and still enjoy it just as much, although the portion sizes are considerably bigger now. Back in the early days, they would eat the sauce on its own and as they grew older I started stirring it into penne or fusilli to make a delicious pasta sauce. They still love it this way, especially with a huge heap of grated cheese on top, along with a drizzle of olive oil.

It’s one of the easiest sauces in the world to make. All the ingredients are simply roasted in one pan and then blitzed in a food processor with some stock. I don’t even bother to peel the garlic.

It’s extremely adaptable too and you can experiment with whichever vegetables take your fancy – or whichever vegetables you might be trying to sneak past your unsuspecting fussy eater.

I generally cook up a big batch of this sauce and freeze it in individual portions; perfect for a quick tea after school when the kids have clubs to rush off to.

Roast vegetable sauce for pasta

450g tomatoes
1 butternut squash, chopped into large chunks
1 red pepper, cut into large chunks
1 red onion, peeled and cut into wedges
3 sticks of celery, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 courgettes (zucchini), chopped
3 garlic cloves
glug of olive oil
500ml vegetable stock (low salt)

Preheat the oven to 220°C / gas mark 7.

Place the tomatoes, chopped vegetables and garlic into a large roasting tray. Drizzle with olive oil and give it all a good mix to make sure everything is thoroughly covered. Roast in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes until the vegetables are tender and beginning to char a little.

Put the vegetables into a blender with the stock and blitz until smooth. Job done.

Simply stir into cooked pasta for an easy peasy supper.

Freeze the remainder of the sauce in individual portions. You should get around 12 portions out of it.

As this pasta sauce is an ideal way to introduce your children to vegetables and entice them to eat a few they might not be so keen on, I’m entering it into this month’s Family Foodies challenge, where the theme is ‘Hidden Goodies’.

Virgin Bloody Mary soup – a recipe for Live Below the Line

April 25, 2013April 26, 2013Posted in Campaigns, Recipes, VegetarianTagged bloody mary, credit crunch munch, croutons, Fab Food 4 All, frugal, Fuss Free Flavours, garlic, live below the line, red pepper, Save the Children, soup, tabasco, tomato, virgin mary, worcester sauce6 Comments

When Save the Children first invited me to contribute some frugal recipes for the Live Below the Line challenge, I knew immediately I had to get involved. Trying to eat good food on a budget is what I’m all about after all. But as soon as I started pulling together possible recipe ideas, it dawned on me this was going to be really rather difficult.

People taking part in Live Below the Line are getting sponsored to live below the poverty line on a measly £1 a day for five days from Monday 29 April to Friday 3 May. That’s just £1 for all their food and drink. No foraging or gifts allowed. £1 wouldn’t buy you a cup of coffee in your average cafe. It’s harsh, but it’s also the reality 1.4 billion people around the world wake up to each and every day.

Everyone taking part in Live Below the Line for Save the Children will be doing their bit to raise awareness of the plight of people facing extreme food poverty, while raising vital funds to help change the lives of vulnerable children everywhere.

Save the Children has challenged food bloggers to devise dishes that cost less than 40p to make from scratch. Every single ingredient has to be costed; every grind of salt and every splash of oil.

As I was thinking up ideas, it quickly became painfully clear just how difficult it is to eat well on such a low budget. Fresh vegetables and meat are practically out of reach, making tinned and frozen foods so much more attractive. While sliced, white bread might offer virtually no nutritional value, it does has the advantage of being cheap, and fills you up for a short time at least.

If you’re going to try to eat anything vaguely tasty or interesting while on the Live Below the Line challenge, as opposed to surviving solely on beans on toast, it pays to cook in bulk to get your money’s worth. Team up with others as it’s pretty much impossible to cook cheaply for one. And plan your meals. For instance, to get the cheapest onions you need to buy a big bag of them. So then you need to plan a whole list of meals to make sure you get your money’s worth. That’s why the three dishes I’ve come up with for Live Below the Line all revolve around onions, oil, garlic and spices to make sure I made the most of them.

Coming in at just under 34p a serving, the first of my dishes is a spicy tomato and red pepper soup, flavoured with celery, Worcester sauce and hot pepper sauce rather like a Bloody Mary, but alas without the Vodka. You really couldn’t sneak that in on this budget! I did intend to use Tabasco but found I couldn’t afford that either, so had to find a cheaper alternative. The soup is served with crispy garlic croutons, which I reckon is a pretty good use of cheap white bread, and helps bulk it out.

Virgin Bloody Mary soup with garlic croutons

Serves 4

1 tbsp vegetable oil (15ml)
ASDA sunflower oil £3 for 3 litres = 1.5p

1 onion, chopped (around 100g)
ASDA Smartprice brown onions £1.16 for 2kg = 5.8p

1 celery stick, sliced (around 35g)
ASDA celery sticks £1 for 350g = 10p

1 red pepper, chopped
ASDA red pepper = 40p

1 400g tin chopped tomatoes
ASDA Smartprice chopped tomatoes 400g = 31p

500ml vegetable stock (made from one stock cube)
ASDA Chosen By You vegetable stock cubes 12 for 78p = 6.5p

Dash Worcester sauce (5ml)
ASDA Lea & Perrins £2.16 for 290ml = 3.72p

Dash hot pepper sauce (5ml)
Tesco Frank’s Red Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce Original 148ml for £1.00 = 3.37p

Salt (2g)
ASDA Table Salt 29p for 750g = 0.07p

Pepper (1g)
ASDA Smartprice Ground Black Pepper 25g for 20p = 0.8p

2 tbsp olive / vegetable oil (30ml)
ASDA olive oil £1.98 for 500ml = 11.88p

4 slices white bread, cubed
ASDA Smartprice medium sliced white bread 50p for 22 slices = 9.09p

3 cloves garlic, crushed
ASDA loose garlic 30p for approx. 8 cloves = 11.25p

Total cost = £1.35. Cost per serving = 34p.

Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 6.

Heat the vegetable oil in a large pan and cook the onion, celery and red pepper until soft. Stir in the chopped tomatoes and vegetable stock. Add a dash of Worcester sauce and hot pepper sauce and season with salt and pepper to taste. Leave to simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes while you get on with the croutons.

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive or vegetable oil in a frying pan and gently fry the garlic until it has just turned golden. Throw in the cubed bread and stir well so all the pieces are coated in oil. Turn the bread out onto a baking tray and cook in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. When the croutons are looking crispy on the top, use a spatula to turn them over and cook for another 5 to 10 minutes depending on how just how dry and crunchy you like them.

When the soup is cooked, blend in a liquidiser until you achieve a fairly smooth consistency but not completely – it’s good to have a little texture. Serve in bowls and sprinkle a handful of garlic croutons on each. Grub’s up!

As this dish is so utterly cheap and cheerful, I’m entering it into April’s Credit Crunch Munch, a wonderful blog challenge celebrating the very best in fantastically frugal food. This month it is co-hosted by Helen from Fuss Free Flavours and Camilla from Fab Food 4 All.

Kale, red pepper and potato pithivier

October 26, 2012October 26, 2012Posted in Recipes, VegetarianTagged great british bake off, kale, pithivier, potato, red onion, red pepper13 Comments

I’d never really bothered with the Great British Bake Off before, but this series I felt compelled to watch it. I’ve spent quite a bit of time on Twitter over the last year, and there had been so much talk about #GBBO I just had to see what all the fuss was about. And of course I was hooked from the first show.

In the final, John, Brendan and James tried their hands, rather successfully, at baking pithivier. Until then I had never even heard of pithivier. It turns out it’s a classic French pastry, sometimes sweet with fillings like frangipane and fruit but in this case savoury.

I rather liked the look of the pithivier so decided to give it a go myself. Mine is a much simplified version of Brendan’s recipe. You could probably go so far as to say it’s a cheat’s version, particularly since it uses ready-made puff pastry. For my filling, I opted for curly kale, red peppers, red onion, garlic and new potatoes, with lots of mature Cheddar cheese.

I was rather pleased with the end result and it went down with the family too. It’s like a big posh pasty. It didn’t have a soggy bottom, so Paul and Mary would have been happy. Although saying that, since I didn’t make my own pastry I guess they wouldn’t have been all that impressed. But I was. It’s lovely served warm and it’s also great cold the next day. And the next. It’s a bit of a monster, and kept us going for a while.

Kale, red pepper and potato pithivier

450g new potatoes
knob of butter
1 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, peeled and chopped
2 red peppers, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
bunch of fresh thyme, picked
230g curly kale, washed and shredded
100g cream cheese
2 eggs
salt and pepper
2 x 500g packets of ready-made puff pastry
180g mature Cheddar cheese, grated

Preheat the oven to 200ºC / gas mark 6

Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain and set aside to cool. When cool enough to handle, slice the potatoes into half centimetre thick slices. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat the butter and olive oil in a large pan and gently fry the red onion for about five minutes until translucent, then add the red peppers and continue to fry until they are softened. Add the garlic and stir fry for a couple of minutes, before stirring in the balsamic vinegar and thyme. Next throw in the kale, stir well and then cover with a lid. Allow the kale to cook down for a few minutes until al dente and set aside to cool a little.

In a small bowl, combine the cream cheese with one of the eggs and season with salt and pepper to taste. Stir this into the kale and red pepper mixture.

Flour the work surface and roll out one lot of dough until it is around 3mm thick, and cut out a disc 32cm across for the base. Roll out the second amount and this time cut out a disc 35cm across for the top. Place the base onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper or a non-stick sheet.

Layer the sliced potatoes on to the base, leaving a 4cm border all around. Next pile on the kale and red pepper mixture on top of the potatoes and finally sprinkle the cheese over the top, using your hands to press the cheese down to form a tidy mound. Brush the pastry border with the remaining egg.

Carefully place the larger disc over the top, pushing down around the mound to seal the pastry and cutting off the excess. Cut around the pastry border to form a sunshine shape and using the back of a knife, decorate the top with a sunbeam pattern and score the base. Be careful not to cut all the way through. Make a small hole in the top to allow steam to escape. Brush it all over with more egg.

Bake in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes until golden brown. Cool for 10 minutes or so on a wire rack and serve at room temperature or leave it to cool completely. You’ll get around 10 slices out of this, so perfect buffet or picnic food.