Sheesy Pizza

A couple of weeks ago I won the Sheese give away on the Mofo Blog and yesterday my Shieese arrived. One block of cheddar, one block of red cheddar, one block of smoked cheddar and some melting mozzarella. I knew I had to make pizza as soon as possible. Last night I was volunteering at a pumpkin carving which was brilliant fun but hardly gave me time to eat never mind make pizza dough. Today I had the afternoon free for pizza making.

A Sheesy Gift

The first ting I noticed when it was time to sheese up my pizza was the smell. The smell is spot on. Stephen tried a bit of the uncooked taste and said the taste was good too. When it came out of the oven it still tasted fab. The texture is a little doughy but the taste is great. It was only great for three quarters of my pizza though. After that it started to get sickly. Sheese mozzarella? Incredibly good, in moderation.

Melted: with TVP pepperoni

Food Friends: Free-form Chocolates To Make With Little Hands

As I've written about sharing food knowledge this mofo I though I'd also throw in a recipe idea for things to make in the kitchen. These super fun and super cute free-form chocolates are great to make with kids. Or just as a late night snack.

I've made simple circles with Brownies (7-10) and they found it easy to do as long as someone else melted the chocolate. Older kids I've done different shapes with although given enough time and a reminder that perfection is the enemy of good I'm sure younger children would enjoy simple shapes too.

Food Issue: Choosing Fairtrade

Almost 50 million people in the world depend on chocolate... no not like that. They depend on the cocoa crop for their income. And yes, we may think that we depend on chocolate. It certainly keeps me perky but it's important to remember that only 6% of the price we pay, in as consumers in well off countries, goes to growers.

Another problem with cocoa production is child labour. If you are aged between 5 and 17 and you live in a cocoa producing region there is a one in four chance that you are working with cocoa. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect when talking about child labour. We think it is bad and so our immediate reaction is to say ban it. Stop it. I won't buy any chocolate produced with child labour. But it's not like people send their children out to work for no reason. Kids end up working because the family can not be supported with the parent's income or there are no parents in the picture and no other support network. Child labour is a problem of poverty. It's no good ending child labour without supporting the community.

Fairtrade chocolate is our way of supporting cocoa growers and their communities and we especially love Divine chocolate. 45% of Divine is owned by a farmer's co-op and their chocolate is brilliant and delicious. All of their products are suitable for vegetarians and

70% Dark Chocolate, 70% Mint Dark Chocolate, 70% Dark Chocolate Hearts, 70% Dark Chocolate Advent Calendar, 70% Dark Chocolate Mini Eggs, 70% Dark Chocolate Easter Egg, After Dinner Mints and Divine Delights are possible choices for vegans, though we cannot guarantee these products are totally milk-free as milk is used elsewhere in the factory.

Sorry, what? Mint Dark Chocolate. I haven't tried this one before! And as it's vegan mofo, and as it's vegan chocolate, and as they sell it in my local Oxfam shop I'm going to have to try it. Stephen and I shared the entire bar after our tea and I loved it to bits although Stephen found the after taste a bit bitter. I didn't think it was too bitter, but then I often find things too sweet.

I love eating divine chocolate but it isn't just about enjoying eating it, I also get to enjoy paying for it. And that isn't something I say everyday.

All figures, percentages and facts from the first two paragraphs were taken from this Fairtrade foundation report (PDF)

Local Loves: Bonfire Foods and Plenty of Parkin

November 5th is bonfire night. A night when British people celebrate... well bonfires or fireworks. At some point Guy Fawkes managed to attach himself to it but really it was always more about the fire.

Where I'm from, a town called Heywood in north Manchester, bonfire night has plenty of special rituals attached. At least when I was a kid and such things happened by magic. There would be a big local firework display complete with fairground and bonfire and we'd sometimes get together with my cousin Mikey and his family for a few fireworks round and their place or we'd go to the cricket club to see their small display.

Food too is important. No firework display would be complete without black peas, a very local dish of dried peas soaked and boiled into a mush and served with salt and vinegar. Admittedly it's never been one of my favourites but the adults in my family savoured every mouthful. You could make them yourself, I remember my Mum's big batches, or buy them. Newsagents that didn't normally sell food would stay open late to take advantage of the foot traffic coming back form the bonfire selling small cup fulls. Almost everywhere that sold sandwiches and pies for lunch would add black peas to the menu for a couple of autumnal weeks.

Of course being a kid a cup of black peas didn't much appeal to me. My favourite bonfire treat was, and is, treacle toffee. It's a hard toffee flavoured with treacle. It has a rich, dark, heady taste. I guess it's an acquired taste, I've tried to get some Southern men of my acquaintance to try it and they wince and decline. I think it's brilliant.

For the bonfire in your belly

The taste of treacle toffee watered down, mixed with cake and ginger for the fabulous Yorkshire Parkin. So when I tried it for the first time it was a revelation. Rich, dense and beautiful. It keeps fabulously, indeed it's better aged when the flavours mellow and sink into each other. It's a dense, beautiful warming cake perfect for autumn. And if you make one this week you can have it ready for 5th. If you can wait that long.

In which I convince myself that stew is fabulous

It's been a busy week: I've been getting over the annual mofo illness, making all sorts of preserves, spending massive amounts of time baking with frustratingly wet dough. I've taken Guides down a cave, I got them all back out, then I did the same with my Brownies. Now I'm tired.

And I need something comforting, something tasty, wholesome and simple.

Worth arguing for

Tastebuds: Ohhh you know what? We should eat stew.
Rational Brain: We don't like stew.
Tastebuds: just think of it like a curry without the spiciness of it all or a chilli without beans.
Rational Brain: Or a soup with bits. Look, we don't like stew.
Tastebuds: I promise this time will be different.
Rational Brain: Okay then but you better make this good.
Tastebuds: Well let's think of what we've got.
Rational Brain: Why do I have to do all the hard work? Okay, you insisted on us buying some cavelero nero yesterday, and tempeh last week. Which you still haven't ate, by the way.
Tastebuds: Smoked paprika, we still have some of that.
Rational Brain: Yeah, you've only managed to eat quarter of a jar in a month you obsessive freak. So what is the plan then?
Tastebuds: Smoky Tempeh and Green Stew from Appetite for Reduction

Stephen: I can't believe you just spent half of a blog entry talking to yourself.
Clare: Who cares? The Stew was incredible.

Free Friday: Coffee Morning, Coffee Muffins

I'm getting that itch. That itch that every Guide leader gets when she has been too long without a camp. And why has it been so long since we went camping? Well, we need new tents and for that we need to fund-raise. We've got back packing planned and a raffle and all the old standbys. Tomorrow is our Coffee Morning and their will be a stand of cakes to buy.

In Blue

My contribution to the cake stand has also contributed to the short length of my post. All my spare time today has been spent baking. I've made some mini loaves of pain rustique and these wonderull muffins. They are the Coffee Chip Muffins from Vegan Brunch. I know I shouldn't brag about my own cooking but I love the top on these!

Food Friends: Preserving the Love

The reason that I prefer the 35oz jars is that they are small. One benefit is that in a two person household it means less spoilage, the other is that it allows us to put little 'sample packs' of the preserves we've been working on all autumn together as Christmas gifts. I usually don't post about them until I've packed them up and sent them off but this one is going out a little earlier.

One of my Brownie leaders is a big fan of chillies. I had intended to grow a few plants this summer and share my harvest with her by making some kick ass chilli jelly. That didn't happen. I got two chillies. But thanks to apple day I had the ingredients for this jelly hanging around the flat. I thought about string chopped chilli in but instead I went for suspending a single, tiny chilli in each jar. It's lovely and fiery but hopefully not hot enough to scare the people on my Christmas list.

Grow To Eat: Nasturtiums

There are fun aspects to eating flowers. Especially if you do it in front of kids who find it fascinating. Or 'those ladies' who Cara and I were talking about in the comments the other day, they are fun to tease. My favourite flowers to eat are nasturtiums. They have a lovely peppery taste. The leaves go great in salads. I've picked nasturtium leaves to sit on Michelin star plates and ate them from my plain ones. They also make a lovely salsa. The pods can be pickled although I've never done it.

Nasturtiums, on a cold Mofo morning

They are incredibly easy to grow and both the leaves and the flowers look great. They come in a multitude of colours, including vivid red. They are a fabulous companion plant. What's not for the edible gardener to like? My growing advice is this: acquire seeds, sow when frost danger has passed... that's it. I find mine grow steadily over the summer with a spurt in September. they die off with frost. Last year at Occombe we pulled the remaining Nasturtiums out of cold November ground with shards of ice hiding in the foliage and I still came home with flowers.

And their bright red jelly

When I get a few flowers I love to make this jelly. I can't remember where I scrawled the original recipe from but I spent last summer making it, tinkering with it and making it more British. It's a super easy jelly to make, you can do it in just over an hour start to finish and you don't need a jelly bag. The colour depends on the colour of your nasturtiums, I like to grow vibrant reds.

Food Issues: Organic friends

We’re passionate about organic agriculture. We pay for organic food, we volunteer to help grow it and we rant about how more people should have the option of good affordable organic grub. There are many reasons we prefer organic food and think it’s the best way to feed people. This one we’ve been paying close attention to recently. Stephen has been tracking the insects and uninvited plants that have ended up on our balcony. — Clare

When your garden is on a balcony three floors up, you don’t expect to see much wildlife. There’ll be no foxes, badgers, or hedgehogs — to make it here you have to crawl or fly. The sheer range of creatures that have done so has taken us by surprise, and this post details a few of them.

Probably the oddest visitors were two leeches (pictured right), seen a year apart, crawling across the glass of the balcony doors during wet weather. How they made it here is a mystery.

The most surprising visitors, at least in terms of making us jump, are the birds — you just don’t expect to look towards the balcony and see a large bird on it. For a short time we made a concerted effort to attract birds, using feeders that stuck to the balcony glass. Unfortunately the only bird they ever attracted was a magpie — and while I like magpies, I was really hoping for a selection of smaller birds. A carrion crow stopped by once, and for a few months two pigeons (who Clare calls our ‘pigeon pals’) frequently rested in the joists above the balcony.

During the Summer we’re visited by a range of pollinators, and towards the end of this Summer I started trying to identify the species, which included common carder bees (pictured left), European honey bees, common wasps, and the hoverfly Eupeodes luniger. We’ve also had some insect visitors most gardeners wouldn’t welcome, such as the large white butterfly and its caterpillars. Clare’s favourite has been the ladybirds, both for their beauty and their attacks on the aphid population.

Local Loves: Apple Day

Apple Day was started in 1990 to celebrate apples and orchards and the local food landscape. It falls on 21st October and this year Cockington held their festivities on the 16th. Yesterday. And we loved it. Apple Day is one of our favourite days of the year. Better than Christmas in my opinion. Cockington court is turned over to local craft people, food producers and cider... it's a great atmosphere with everyone sharing the food, drinks and fun. We've blogged about it before  (go check out that post for pictures of the rangers working the amazing Victorian apple press) but every year is different and we managed to stuff ourselves with different foods. Onward to Apple Day!

"Boyfriend! Stop taking pictures and hurry up!"

Blog Action Day: Sharing Our Food Knowledge

In this post I'll be combining Vegan Mofo and Blog Action Day. Blog action Day this year is about food so it's not that hard to combine the two. That hardest part is picking a topic. Food seems to be the most simple and the most complicated thing in our lives. I've picked a topic that is very close to my heart. I want to talk about sharing. Not just sharing food but sharing the knowledge that goes with it.

Everyone is saying it. Days barley pass before another newspaper complains about it. Kids today have lost touch with were there food comes from. I think that's wrong. Young people haven't lost knowledge. They aren't born knowing everything and then forget it just to annoy us. It's our fault. We've failed them. We haven't been passing knowledge down. In some cases we've been failed too. Nobody gave us the knowledge, nobody certainly gave us any confidence, or money for ingredients, or time to cook, or decent kitchens. We're in a mess.

One of the ways I try to dig myself, and my community, out of it is to teach young people how to cook. I've held impromptu lessons with my brothers, roped kids walking through Occombe farm into a quick lesson on herbs and vegetables, I've helped at cookery classes for young people and grown-ups alike. One of the best things in my life is volunteering for Girlguiding UK. And you can be sure I've slipped some food into that.

Actually it's not all that hard to combine food and Guiding. It's one of the things we're famous for. Most, if not all of our planning also comes from suggestions from the girls and they suggest eating an awful lot. It's almost always the first thing mentioned when asking my Brownie unit what they want to do this term. We're always happy to oblige.

Saturdays Are For Scalloped Potato Pie

I'm back to cooking, which is great and reassuring. I don't know how I always manage to be ill over Mofo but there we have it. To celebrate being able to stand in front of a cooker again I made the Scalloped Potato Pie from Hearty Vegan. I was hoping the pastry/potato/cheese combo would please Stephen's taste buds but both of us were incredibly impressed. The flaky puff was great and this is defiantly the best non-dairy cheese sauce I've ever had.

Yummy, crispy, cheesy... no vegetables... just how I like it

Free Friday: More Seitan

My cold is progressing nicely, I feel like someone pored cement into my ear and I'm tilting my head to the left because otherwise I feel dizzy but I can now mostly breath through my nose so I think I'm getting over it. Luckily I have good food to comfort me.

Actually I mad this one last week as a treat for myself as Stephen was out with people from work. I needed spicy, I needed filling and I needed to ply around with my new love: seitan. So I turned to the book that stated it all and made the Jerk Seitan from Vegan with a Vengeance

It's nice to eat a huge portion of spicy food when nobody is around to judge you...

Served with white rice and grilled corn it was wonderful and delicious and I ate the caramelized sauce off the bottom of the pan... of course I didn't... I'm way more dignified than that.

(no I'm not)

I Bought A Book: Hearty Vegan

So I was going to blog about sharing food today but I doubt anyone wants to share food with me right now, I have a bad cold and I've spent most of the day trying to sleep it off. So instead I offer you a review of Hearty Vegan and we'll get back to the theme on Monday, when I don't feel like death. Hopefully.

So I bought Hearty Vegan Meals For Monster Appetites because I have one hell of a monster appetite. I love to eat and coming from the north large servings of filling foods is how I was brought up. I don't have a small appetite and I don't do small portions so if I see a book called Hearty Vegan Meals For Monster Appetites, I'm going to buy it.





I must have flicked through it at least a dozen times since I bought it, listing ingredients to buy and trying to persuade Stephen that I won't kill myself trying to make Funnel Cake (Funnel Cake!) and, of course trying out a few new things. The first got eaten without me taking a picture although I used the same dough for the bun here. The White Panini Rolls bridge the gap between the type of bread I like, super crusty, and the type of bread Stephen likes, sickly soft. They are flavourful with a good, lofty crumb and a crust that is soft while still giving you something to sink your teeth into.

Grow To Eat: Carrots

Carrots aren't the most glamorous crop but they are incredibly simple to grow and they are a good litmus test for the balcony gardener. It wont tell us if we are any good but it will tell us if gardening books are. I don't know about you but I own a few books that promise that container growing is easy and there are tips within to help you only to realise, reading the book, that the author probably hasn't spent much of their gardening career container growing. One of the best tests is if they discount the idea of us growing nice long carrots and say 'well I suppose you could grow the stubby ball kind'

The Carrots pictured in a previous MoFo. Because it's dark out.

We can grow carrots long too! All you need to grow a nice long carrot is unobstructed compost that goes down about the size of a long carrot. As I'm sure I've posted about before we grow ours in an office bin with holes in the bottom. It's orange. This amuses me. I've started sowing them with a cover of love in the mist which is gorgeous.

Food Issues: Watching The Waste

Waste is a big deal. Think about everything that goes into your food. The water it takes the crops to grow, fertilizer, perhaps pesticides, labour, transport, packaging, storage, the electricity the lights the shops and runs the fridges so you can buy it. It's a big effort. It costs you money and time to stock your fridge and cook your food. It's great to have a well stocked pantry and fridge, especially if you are food obsessed like me, but not to trow things away before they get a chance to be delicious.

There are plenty of ways you can look at what you are eating, cooking and buying to minimise food waste but what I want to talk about is imperfection. If you have grown food or bought from small organic places you may have noticed something. Not all food looks supermarket perfect. Shocking I know. According to supermarkets we'll only eat the most perfect looking food. We may be so confused by a small broccoli or a carrot with legs we wouldn't know what it is. It would terrify us. Or not.

Feeling Green? Try Swiss Chard and Green Olives

Volunteering at Occombe I often get to take home vegetables that are too ugly to sell like leafy greens with massive holes in them or courgettes grown too big to be a delicate treat. One of my favourite ways to eat this garden waste is to cook some pasta and toss the vegetables with it. It works after a long day of volunteering and makes even the most hole filled piece of chard look fab. It's also great to clear out your leftover bits and bobs. Think of it as cupboard pasta remixed with a little fresh veg.  Here be a rough guide. Pick things from each category and go for it.

Local Loves: Cockington Chocolate Company

I swear that we are not going to use this spot just to talk about chocolate. That being said: chocolate. Cockington has recently expanded it's craft studios and there are some really good new businesses that have moved in. There is a lovely husband and wife team selling all sorts of crafty bits, some fabulous furniture painters, someone making canoes and other shops that I can't remember because I suck. Today, lets talk about the chocolate.

The Cockington Chocolate Company in it's pretty home

Cockington Chocolate Company is owned by the same blokes that run the cafe which means you can get chocolate and ice cream from the same people. Or impress your relatives with a real Devon cream tea and then buy chocolate. You could also buy chocolate from the cafe and then go round the back and buy chocolate from the craft studios, hiding how greedy you really are. Just me? Okay. 

All that camouflage and we still ate them...

Anyway. The chocolate is made right there so you can see all the fancy chocolate making machines and the funky moulds and whatnots. Since it opened we've made it a tradition to go in, tell each other what we want everything in there for Christmas and picking out something little to nibble on our way home. This time we picked these dark chocolate peacocks which are absolutely stunning and incredibly delicious.    

Vegan Iron Chef Challenge 1: Chickpeas

Double blogging today to present you with a recipe whipped up for the Iron Chef Challenge. The secret ingredient is chickpeas so I'm taking advantage of chickpea flour the best way I know how; I'm making pakora.  These light, delicate pakora are made with swiss chard. Perpetual spinach would make a good, seamless sub but any green will work with a bit of experimenting.

Little bites of flavour

I Bought A Book: The Complete Guide To Vegan Food Substitution

I bought two books to kick start MoFo both by Celine Steen and Jonie Marie Newman and both because the contents page contained fabulousness. Both haven't disappointed me so far. The one I'm reviewing this week is The Complete Guide To Vegan Food Substitutions. We'll come to the other one next week.

So vegan food substituting? Cool! The substituting guides are broken up into dairy (including cheese recipes), eggs, meat (with the fab Beef and Broccoli Bowl) and animal by-products. There is also a section on gluten, soy, sugar and fat free cooking. The guides are great, they get you to think about what the purpose of an animal product is in a dish and use that to tell you how to switch it out. There are also incredible recipes which, of course, I've been trying out.

Elderberry Cordial and The Fun Of The Forage

After gaining some extra foraging confidence from The Thrifty Forager it was time to go out and do something I've been meaning to do for a while now. Make. Elderberry. Cordial. Aside from having fabulous flowers that get made into cordial in my kitchen every spring (take a look at this spring's), they have wonderfully purple autumn berries. Just don't eat them raw, the cyanide might make you feel a bit ill.

I've always wanted to pick them but I always forget or don't walk past the trees at the right time. And why did I want to pick them? Well you can make a cordial out of them too and I've always wanted to try it. I picked the berries about ten meters away from the office where Stephen was sat working. I'm mentioning this partly to excuse not having a cute picking picture and also to show that foraging can happen in a town centre. I did get a few looks but curious 'she's mad' way, not in a threatening 'throw things because she is mad way' so I didn't really mind.

Very goth...

Coming home I made the cordial following the instructions Grow Your Own Drugs: A Year With James Wong and, as some didn't fit in the bottle, I had a small sample. I can't say I really made my mind up about it. One mouthful was present, the next a little astringent. One mouthful too strong, the next fell a little flat. Possibly it's a taste I'm going to have to get used to. My brain is like that sometimes, if a taste isn't what it's expecting it freaks out on me and revives all my old food issues. I'll have to try it again with Stephen around...