A colourful (and almost vegetarian) meal

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Did you know that it’s National Vegetarian Week this week? There is lots going on promoting vegetarian food, and Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes is sharing some of her favourite veggie recipes, as are other bloggers, so if you are looking for some inspiration get over and have a look.

In honour of that, I will gloss over the leftover pork with fennel and new potatoes that I cooked up out of River Cottage Everyday, using up the pork from Sunday (it was lovely though), and major on a couple – actually 3 – side dishes that I culled out of Veg Everyday, all of which I am pleased to say, went down extremely well.

Granted it was rather a colourful meal, and perhaps I wouldn’t have put all the dishes together in the ordinary course of things, but a lot of the fresh ingredients needed eating up and I found it was a good way to get the kids to try lots of different things – I ‘bigged’ the meal up as a ‘buffet’, with lots for them to help themselves to, and it worked. Kids can be so gullible!

Stuffed peppers with new potatoes, feta and pesto

This recipe almost passed me by on my many flicks through this great book, but it’s there, and it only just caught my eye. Here’s my version. It would double up easily.

Ingredients:

100g cooked small new potatoes, 2 red peppers, 100g feta cheese, 2 tablespoons of pesto (homemade would have been nice, but Sacla was easier this evening), olive oil

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 200⁰C/Gas 6. Halve the peppers lengthways and remove pith and seeds. Drizzle a little olive oil over the skin of the peppers and rub all over, then place skin side down in a baking dish. Halve or quarter the potatoes (depending on how big they are to start with – you’re going to stuff the pepper halves with a mixture that includes them so judge by eye how big they will need to be for your peppers!), cube the feta cheese and add to a bowl with the potatoes. Add the pesto, season, and mix everything together. Spoon the mixture into the pepper halves and then bake for 40-45 minutes until browned on top.

I wasn’t expecting the kids to like the peppers that much, particularly because they haven’t been huge fans of feta before, but they both enjoyed their helpings. However, in anticipation of a refusal, I also made:

Honey roasted cherry tomatoes

This is such a doddle, and the oven was on anyway. I had a load of cherry tomatoes looking at risk of going to the chickens unless I did something quickly, and this was perfect:

Ingredients:

500g cherry tomatoes, 2 cloves of garlic, crushed with sea salt, 1 tablespoon of honey (Hugh specifies clear, but I didn’t have any and used ‘hard’ honey instead, as to which more later) 2 tablespoons olive oil, good grind of pepper

Method:

Halve the tomatoes and place them cut side up in a baking dish that will take them all but so that they fit tightly. Beat together the rest of the ingredients and smear over the tomatoes. I suspect that if I’d used runny honey, there would have been less smearing and more pouring, but there you go). Whack it in the oven for 30 minutes or so until everything is bubbling and the tomatoes are juicy and sweet.

Finally, to use up an orange that had already been zested, and some carrots which were also looking pretty sorry for themselves:

Carrot, Orange and Walnut salad

Ingredients: 4 large-ish carrot, 2 oranges, a handful of walnuts or whatever nuts  you have to hand (Hugh uses toasted cashews but we were all out), olive oil, cider vinegar, salt and pepper

Method: Slice the carrots into fairly thick matchsticks and put into a large bowl. Grate the zest of one of the oranges into the bowl on top of the carrots, then peel the oranges and segment them over the bowl with the carrots. This is damn fiddly – but it’s worth it because it gets rid of the pithy bits. You need a sharp serrated knife, and you basically hold the whole orange in your hand and work around slicing the orange flesh out from between the membranes. Make sure any left over juice gets squeezed into the bowl too, then chuck in the nuts, and a sprinkle (a few drops) of oil and of cider vinegar and season.