Cooking
Rachel has always had an interest in cooking. Producing meals from scratch to utilise our home grown produce has become an integral part of our lives. Preserving and canning enables us to store many of our crops and reducing food waste is a key part of making sustainable changes to our lifestyle. The kitchen isn’t completely Rachel’s domain – Anthony can make a mean flapjack too!
Vegetable Scones
It is a Boxing Day tradition in our house to make savoury scones with leftover veg from Christmas Day.
This is a simple recipe that uses leftover mashed vegetables and cheese to make a tasty scone – great served with (more) cheese or with a nice chunky soup (made with leftovers of course)!
#allotment #growyourown #frugalcookingChristmas dinner: home grown is always best!
Nothing beats homegrown!
If you are new to growing or would like to grow your Christmas Dinner for next year take a look at our guide to Christmas VegButternut Squash Gnocchi with Bacon & Sweetcorn
Gnocchi is easy and quick to make. It is a great way to use up leftover potato, squash or beetroot.
Gnocchi is very similar to pasta and which is made by adding egg and plain flour to produce a dough that is poached in salted boiling water.
Here I used leftover steamed butternut squash.
Tomato Soda Bread & Tomato Butternut and Bean soup
We have a number of pumpkins and butternut squash that need using. I decided to steam a few of the smaller butternuts so I can use them in quick meals this week. Tonight I used some of the squash to make a simple dinner of soup and soda bread which can also be taken for lunch tomorrow at work.
Blazing Hot Apache Chilli Chutney
Apache chillies are easy to grow in a greenhouse or polytunnel
Yes, another chilli recipe! Yesterday I found that some of the bramley apples I had stored in the garage really needed using up. In addition, there was a full bag of Apache chillies left in the freezer from last year where the whole of this year’s crop had also been squirrelled away. I decided to make another batch of Chilli preserves – this time a super hot one! This would use up all the apples and frozen chillies. Warning this is very hot. The fumes pretty much knocked out most of our house-hold whilst cooking. However, if you like a very hot chutney – similar in style to those red Indian style chutneys you get an Indian restaurants then this could be for you.
Parsnip-Beetroot Rosti
Always keen to reduce food waste, we try not to throw food away. I was left with a portion of beetroot ragu from this weeks dinners and some of the giant parsnip I had harvested a couple of weeks ago was sitting in the fridge. Root veg are built to store well at low temperatures so there is no worry of the parsnip keeping well, but with over 20 more similar parsnips left in at the plot we better get eating them!
What, Pasta Sauce again? No, it’s Beetroot Ragu.
When you batch cook and freeze it is very easy to end up with an endless supply of the same meal again and again. I remember the early years of allotmenteering – I nearly convinced myself that the bags of broad beans were breeding in the freezer when I was pulling the 50th bag! From my experiences, I quickly realised that the key to using up your supplies (and keeping buy-in from the rest of the family) is to be creative in making a range of meals. If you can freeze a base recipe that can be made into a novel meal you are onto a winner. No more complaints of ‘Oh no, not pasta sauce again!’.
This is not a full recipe as such, I wanted to share methods I use to make a base recipe for cooking and then turn this into a variety of dishes.Christmas at the Allotment
Snow at the Allotment – Christmas 2009 Home-grown veggies for the perfect Christmas Dinner, using your garden to decorate your home, the gift of growing, what to put on your your list to Santa and how to escape the chaos for a bit of allotment time. Here is Don’t Crop Me Now’s guide to a perfect Christmas at the Allotment!
Freekah grain salad with celeriac leaves
One gardening fail leads to another cooking adventure! Back in October I posted about my abundance of celeriac leaves on our Facebook group. I have never grown celeriac before and my plants simply did not swell up at the roots. So, my creativity has been challenged in trying to make the most out of this crop.
Beans for drying: a discussion
Butter beans 
Bolotti beans 
Cobra French beans
Beans, sometimes called “pulses”, are the edible seeds of the legume family. In the UK the term ‘bean’ often includes the pods of the legume plant; runner beans and French beans are popular on allotments all over the country, but growing for eating the seed is less common.
I have become quite interested in growing bean seeds as they store well, are very low maintenance crops and are a good source of protein. Here I discuss our experiences so far of growing beans for drying and my plans to expand the varieties of beans for drying that we grow for 2020.
