A cabbage can be a tricky beast to use up and we get asked for cabbage recipes all the time over on our community facebook group. If you are stuck on what to do with the cabbage in your box this week, then this is the video for you. Although I used a beautiful January King from my weekly subscription box, of course the recipes can also be applied to a savoy cabbage.
These are just four of the many ways that I use up a cabbage regularly. Please share your favourite cabbage recipes with us and other readers in the comments. There can never be too many cabbage recipe ideas…especially at this time of year! Liz x
Cabbage Rolls (serves 4)
8-10 outer leaves of the cabbage
1 mug or so of leftover cooked short grain brown rice (or cook fresh. Simply measure 1/2 a mug of rice into a pot, add 1 mug of water and bring to the boil with the lid on, then turn down and simmer until the rice has absorbed all the liquid)
10 minced mushrooms sautéed with garlic, salt and pepper
a tin of kidney beans, drained, rinsed and squished
a pot of simple tomato sauce (a sliced onion and 2 cloves of diced garlic fried in a little olive oil, simmered with a tin of chopped tomatoes, a little water, salt, pepper and a tbsp of dried dill)
Rinse your cabbage well and remove as many outer leaves as you can. I try to get 8-10 to feed the four of us.
Use a rolling pin to roll out and flatten the chunky stem that runs up the middle of each leaf.
Mix together the mushrooms, rice and kidney beans. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed.
Then neatly roll up a couple of tbsp of the filling into each each cabbage leaf and tuck them snuggly into the sauce. They should be sealed side down so that they don’t unravel in the sauce. See video above for how to do that.
Put the lid on the dish and roast it in the oven for 30-40 minutes or until the cabbage leaves are soft and the sauce is bubbling.
Serve with tangy natural yoghurt, pepper, more dill and a slice of sourdough bread.
Heat up the sliced apple with the butter/oil while you shred the cabbage.
Add the shredded cabbage and season it with salt and pepper. Let it cook down for a little while.
Once it starts to sizzle, add your liquid (cider/wine/apple juice/vinegar-water) and give it a good stir.
Pop the lid on the pot and let the cabbage and apple gently braise and soften for 10 minutes or so. This is a perfect side to a Sunday roast or with mashed potato, veggie sausages and wholegrain mustard!
Cabbage ‘Slaw (serves 4)
ribboned carrot (use a peeler to stripe thin ribbons off 1 large carrot)
Mix the carrot and cabbage in a large bowl with the dressing.
Top with the nuts, seeds, chilli and spring onion.
Serve rolled up in soaked rice paper wrappers for crunchy, raw spring rolls. Or just eat it as it is or with some of our Thai rice noodles for a fresh and crunchy, zingy salad.
Make a tarka first by frying the cumin, mustards seeds, chilli, garlic and curry leaves in hot vegetable oil until very fragrant.
Add the sliced cabbage and season it with salt and pepper. Then add the ground ginger and turmeric and stir to coat the cabbage in the spices.
Add the juice of 1/2 a lime and a tin of coconut milk and simmer until the cabbage is cooked through but still a bit crunchy.
Serve as a side to other curries and rice. Or make it the main event and bulk it out by adding cooked potatoes and a drained and rinsed tin of chickpeas.
One of the best parts of being an ethical, transparent business is having a good relationship with our suppliers. Green Earth Organics are proud of the people and ethical businesses we support, so in this ‘About Us’ section of the blog we want to introduce you to them too, and get to know them a little better ourselves. Passionate people behind the products are a force for good in this world and we want to shine a light on them.
I spoke to the lovely people over at Blakes Always Organic to find out more about their business and their wonderful, locally roasted coffee which has been getting me through these long lockdown days.
Tell us about yourselves. How did you get into roasting and selling coffee?
Our company, Blakes Always Organic Ltd, started out as Blakes Organic Chocolate Ltd and the original owner of the start-up company wanted to create healthy, organic and Fairtrade chocolate. We bought the company as a going concern, but wanted to create Irish Organic products – the chocolate was imported from Switzerland rather than made in Ireland.
At around this time, one of our owners/directors, John Brennan, was working with Colombian coffee and cocoa producers to help them set up a Farmers Cooperative, to get better value for the products. He travelled to Colombia and saw first-hand the conditions that farmers worked in. Therefore, Organic coffee was an obvious product choice for us. With the help of a local coffee expert in Carrick-On Shannon, in 2016, we launched our first blend of whole bean coffee: Blakes Always Organic ‘Culture Blend’ Coffee. This blend won the Bord Bia Organic award in 2017 for the Best Prepared Product category, despite stiff competition. In the Summer of 2018, we were proud to add a second blend of coffee to our products: Purely Arabica Blend, and recently launched a third Organic coffee: a Peruvian Arabica, decaffeinated using the CO2 method rather than solvents for a coffee with all the flavour but little or no caffeine.
We also started producing Organic Kefir, hear in Drumshanbo, County Leitrim, made from locally sourced Organic milk. With the successful launch and ever-growing demand for these products: our Organic Coffee range and our Organic Kefir, we decided to close down the chocolate side of our business and focus our energies on locally produced Irish products instead. With this decision came the need for a new Company name Blakes Always Organic Ltd.
Where do you source your beans? What is special about that area?
We source our Organic Coffee beans from various different regions of the world, through a reliable distributor in the Netherlands, Initially, we considered single origin coffee, and there were few worthy candidates, but by blending different beans from different areas, we found that we got better results. We spent a lot of time mixing and blending beans, and changing the proportions of different beans within the mix, to find the unique flavour that we wanted for our ‘Culture Blend’.
Choosing an Old World bean, such as the Indonesian Raja Gayo Arabica, that is at the heart of our Culture Blend, we found a coffee bean that was rich in flavour, but that also gives plenty of body to the blend. Added to this, we brought some ‘New World’ beans from Peru in South America, well-known for their fruity light, delicate flavours. To this we added a small amount of high quality, Indian Cherry Robusta to our Culture Blend, to give it a stronger Caffeine kick and extra body.
Some of our loyal customers asked about a lighter blend of coffee, and from this inspirational feedback started to process of creating a second blend, the Purely Arabica blend. Initially, we considered blending the lighter bodied, full flavoured beans of South America with some decaffeinated coffee, but the practicalities of blending the different beans made that impossible.
The New World South American coffees have excellent flavour, but lack the body of the Old World beans, so by focusing on just New World Arabica beans of Peru and Colombia, and blending these without the addition of a Robusta, we created a full flavoured, the lighter bodied coffee, lower in caffeine but not decaffeinated, that was perfect for an after-dinner coffee, when you don’t want to full caffeine kick of the Culture Blend.
However, there was some of our customers still sought high quality Organic decaffeinated coffee, and there was a niche in the market for this. Most decaffeinated coffees are extracted using solvents, which means a lack flavour. Even with Organic coffees, most use the Swiss water extraction method, which although far better than the solvent extraction, still extracts all the flavour out of the beans, before putting it back in. It is only with the more expensive CO2 extraction process, that the caffeine is extracted from the beans, without extracting the beans unique flavours too. It is for this reason, that we chose the Peru HB Grade One Arabica bean, extracted using this method, for our own brand of Decaffeinated coffee.
Why organic? What makes you passionate about organic farming? Why is it so important in regards to coffee growing?
Organic Farming and food production is at the heart of our business, and we are passionate about Organic and sustainable farming. During John’s visit to Colombia, he saw just how much pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers were being used in the conventional coffee and cocoa production in South America. It is vital to encourage sustainable farming practices and support FairTrade practices that see the farmers in South America, Indonesia etc, get a fair price for their produce, see schools, education and infrastructure being put in place, and to stop the exploitation of these farmers for short term gain by Multinational companies, so that they, their children, and their children’s children, can continue to grow their produce and make a living from the land, as much as it is for Irish farmers to embrace sustainable greener practices and look to the future, rather than the next cheque from the EU for some headage scheme. By buying Organic produce, can we force a change in the Multinationals, and make change to a more sustainable future, and in order for this to happen, companies like Blakes Always Organic, need to make such products available to the consumer, to give them a choice.
Tell us about the blending and roasting process. Is it more of an art or a science? What is the difference between the blended coffee and the pure Arabica?
Coffee blending and production is both an art and a science, and full credit must go to our Coffee Guru, Georgia, in The Art of Coffee, who does our roasting for us in Carrick on Shannon. Her state of the art coffee roastery relies on both the computers that are plugged into the roaster, recording fluctuations in the temperatures, etc, but also, to her own senses of hearing, listening to the sounds of the beans crackling as they roast, smell, and sight, checking the colour of the beans to get the roast just right, and comparing it to previous batches colour.
As for the blending, again Georgia was a great font of knowledge, helping to guide us in bean selection. After that, it came down to trial and error, mixing different beans, and combinations, to find what I liked in my coffee, and hoping that what I liked, was also what other people would like. Once I was happy with the bean selection, we tested the proposed blends out with other people, and using a variety of coffee types, to be sure that the blends worked well in an Espresso, Latte, Americano etc.
Any top tips for brewing coffee at home? How do you like yours?
Personally, I like my coffee as a rich Americano, black and with a spoonful of Stevia to bring out the rich fruity flavours of our blends. At home, I now have a relatively inexpensive Morphy Richards Brewer that grinds the beans and makes my coffee in the morning. It’ll even do it on a timer. Nothing fancy, but still produces a decent cuppa. Before that, it was a grinder and coffee press, but the results were the same. Grinding fresh beans in the morning is part of my breakfast ritual, and the smell of freshly roasted coffee is a small bit of heaven. I like both the Culture Blend and the Purely Arabica, but as I usually drink coffee early in the day, I would opt for Culture Blend at a push, to get that extra boost to start my day.
It is fascinating to hear about all the work that goes behind a simple cup of coffee isn’t it? We agree that it is so important to source global ingredients from farmers who respect nature, biodiversity, sustainability and their land-workers rights. By buying organic, you can be reassured that you are supporting farmers to do the right thing.
“Cooking from scratch is the single most important thing we can do…to improve our health and general wellbeing.” – “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Michael Pollan
At Green Earth Organics, we are on a mission to help you Eat More Veg and Cook From Scratch. These two phrases are the cornerstones of good health, not just for us but for our planet too! Cutting down on processed food, ready meals and animal products and preparing and eating lots more whole, organic, fruit, veg, beans, nuts and grains is not only great for our health, it means less packaging, less harmful emissions from factories and animal farms and a lot less unhealthy, unnecessary ingredients.
With our modern, busy lifestyles, it can seem like too much effort to shop for groceries, fruit and veg and get into the kitchen and cook from scratch after a long day at work. It is easy to just take something out of the freezer and microwave it or pop it in the oven. But you owe it to yourselves to cook from scratch. You are worthy of home cooked, healthy food and it will positively impact the rest of your life. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be delicious and satisfying.
So as well as making it easy for you to get the good stuff straight to your door with our weekly veg box subscriptions, we are starting a new weekly series called ‘4 Ways With…’ This series will showcase a seasonal vegetable or other ingredient and demonstrate four simple ways to prepare or cook it. We want to inspire you and give you the confidence to get into the kitchen and whip up a simple but satisfying meal. Follow us on Instagram or subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch the videos each week. Please feel free to comment and share your favourite seasonal recipes with us and the rest of our community. We love to see what you make from our weekly boxes. Liz x
4 Ways With Cauliflower
First up is the humble, but every versatile, cauliflower. Cauliflower has had one of the biggest ‘glow ups’ of all vegetables over the last 10 years. Once simply boiled and relegated to the side of the plate, cauliflower is now the captain of the vegetable patch! Roast it covered in Middle Eastern spices, blitz it into a rice or cous cous alternative, turn it into steaks, batter and deep fry it and transform it into a fried chicken substitute, even use it as a gluten free pizza base! If you’ve got a need for a vegetable to pretend to be something it’s not, cauliflower is your man. And it is delicious. Cauliflower is a bit of a blank canvas and is very good as a vehicle for delicious herbs and spices. It is absolutely fantastic in a curry or to top my baked biryani. Here are just 4 of the many ways I use cauliflower regularly. Vegan Cauliflower Cheese, Winter Tabbouleh, Spicy Roast Cauliflower and Chickpea Salad and Curried Cauliflower Fritters. What is your favourite cauliflower recipe? Let us know below or over on our healthy eating facebook group. Liz x
The recipes shown in the video above are just quick ideas and inspiration for dishes you can create with a cauliflower from your veg box. Below are the same recipes with amounts adjusted for a whole cauliflower in each recipe.
Vegan Cauliflower Cheese (serves 4-6 as a side for a roast)
150g plain flour (gluten free plain flour works too)
Preheat your oven to 200C. Find a large baking dish which will accommodate a whole cauliflower.
Rinse and quarter the cauliflower and break it into florets. Put them in the roasting dish. Add the sliced leaves and cores too.
Drizzle over the olive oil and season the cauliflower with salt and pepper. Mix well to spread the seasoning evenly. Then pop the dish in the oven to roast the cauliflower for 20 minutes.
While the cauliflower is roasting, prepare your vegan béchamel.
Simply whisk together the flour, nutritional yeast, nutmeg, mustard and oat milk. Add a big pinch of salt and some freshly ground black pepper.
Give it another which and pour the uncooked béchamel over the now roasted cauliflower. Return the dish to the oven to cook for a further 15 minutes or until golden and bubbling.
OPTIONAL EXTRAS: you could add a crunchy topping to your cauliflower cheese before you return it to the oven. I like to roughly blend extra proportions of pumpkin seeds and nutritional yeast. You could also use breadcrumbs.
Winter Tabbouleh (serves 6)
1 cauliflower
8 large kale leaves (or use lots of fresh parsley or a mix of the two)
option extras like chopped walnuts, z’atar or dukka
Grate a rinsed cauliflower into a large bowl. You should end up with a rice/bulgar wheat like grain substitute.
Rinse the kale, remove the tough stems and very finely chop the leaves. Add to the bowl of cauliflower.
Finely dice the red onion (or slice the spring onion) and add it to the bowl.
Slice the sun-dried tomatoes and add to the bowl then make the simple dressing.
Mix the juice of the mon with a small crushed clove of garlic, and 4 or so tbsp of oil from the jar of sun-dried tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and mix the dressing through the tabbouleh.
Serve as part of a salad bowl with some hummus, roasted vegetables and bread or with a tagine-type stew. It’s very good with something crunchy and nutty/seedy on top too. Simply toasted, chopped walnuts or make a dukka (a mix of toasted nuts, sesame seeds, cumin and coriander seeds) or z’atar (a mix of toasted sesame seeds, dried thyme and ground sumac).
about 6 tbsp of ready made chilli sauce like harissa or sriracha or a mix of your own favourite spices (eg 1 tsp chilli flakes, 1 tbsp cumin seeds, 1 tbsp ground coriander, 1 tbsp smoked paprika and 2 tbsp maple syrup)
Pre-heat the oven to 200C and prepare a large roasting dish.
Rinse and chop the cauliflower (leaves, core and all), peel and slice the onions into thick wedges and drain and rinse the chickpeas.
Put them all into the roasting dish and drizzle over the olive oil. Season well with salt and pepper and add the chilli sauce or your own mix of spices.
Mix well and roast in the oven until the cauliflower is lightly charred and cooked through – around half an hour or so.
Serve warm with salad leaves and a cooling hummus or yoghurt and tahini dip or allow it to cool and keep in the fridge for 4 days for quick salad lunches.
1 tsp each of cumin seeds, brown mustard seeds, chilli flakes, turmeric, salt…some freshly ground black pepper and about 15 fresh curry leaves if you have them
vegetable oil for frying
Start with the gram flour batter. Mix the gram flour and spices with a mug of water.
Chop the cauliflower (leaves, core and florets) into small, pea sized pieces and mix it into the gram flour batter. There should be enough gram flour batter to coat all the pieces. If your cauliflower is very large and the mixture seems dry just make a bit more of the batter.
Heat a frying pan to a medium heat with a generous slick of vegetable oil. Fry spoonfuls of the batter in batches and flip them over once golden brown underneath. Ensure the heat is not too high as if it is the fritters will burn on the outside and be raw in the middle. A medium heat allows the fritters to cook slowly all the way through.
Serve warm as a side to a curry or salad or as a sandwich or wrap filling. I like mine in a wrap with some spinach or lettuce leaves, yoghurt and mango chutney.
Leftover mixture will keep well in the fridge in an airtight box for three days.
Granola recipe illustration from my book, available to add to your fruit, veg and groceries order here.
Shop bought granola is delicious, but usually quite expensive and stored in a plastic wrapper. So if you are wanting to save money and avoid plastic packaging, making your own is the solution. Often shop bought granola is surprisingly high in sugar too! My recipe is sweetened with just date syrup (or if I can’t find date syrup I just blend dates and water into a smooth sauce and use that – in fact it’s better this way as you keep all the good fibre of the dates in the granola too). We sell oats, nuts, seeds and dried fruit in plastic free or compostable packaging and this recipe blows any shop bought one I’ve tried out of the water. Store it in an airtight container like a large glass jar and it should stay fresh and crunchy for at least 1 month…that’s if you don’t eat it all up before then! Liz x
100g small seeds(linseeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds…)
330g date syrup (or 200g chopped dates soaked with 130g water then blend into a smooth sauce)
250ml olive oil (or any good quality oil you prefer)
300g chopped dried fruit (apricots, raisins, figs, mulberries…)
Method
Pre-heat your oven to 150C and prepare a couple of large baking dishes or the bottom of your grill tray. Line them with re-usable or compostable baking parchment.
In a large bowl, measure out your oats, spices, salt, nuts and seeds. Do not add the dried fruit yet! Give the dry mixture a good stir to evenly disperse the spices and salt before adding the oil and date syrup.
Add the oil and date syrup/sauce and stir well to coat all the dry ingredients.
Spread the granola out onto your lined trays into a thin 1-2cm layer.
Bake the granola in the oven. Take it out every 10-15 minutes and stir to ensure the granola gets evenly baked.
Once it’s nice and crunchy and tastes perfectly toasted, remove the granola from the oven and stir through all the dried fruit.
Allow the granola to completely cool down in the trays before storing it in an airtight container.
Enjoy with your favourite milk or yoghurt or sprinkle it on top of ice cream or smoothie bowls, or just eat it dry as a snack!
A page from the Sweet chapter of my book, available to add to your veg order here.
Flourless chocolate cakes are not just great for the coeliacs in your life, they are simply lovely cakes – somewhere between a brownie and a chocolate truffle – and incredibly delicious! The lack of flour means they are naturally rich and fudgy. The bitterness of the dark chocolate makes what would otherwise be quite a sweet and heavy cake, something quite sophisticated and moreish. Perfect served with some whipped coconut cream and a mug of coffee! I wrote this recipe with nut and gluten allergy sufferers in mind, but you can substitute the sunflower seeds with ground almonds if you wish. The recipe illustration above is from my book which is available to add to your veg box order on our website. The recipe video can be found on our Instagram @greenearthorganics1 or at the end of this blog on our YouTube channel. Liz x
Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line a loose bottomed cake tin with a circle of baking parchment.
Pulse the sunflower seeds in a food processor or large blender until they come into a course flour. Careful not to process for too long as that will turn the seeds into butter!
Add the tin of black beans to the blender – including all the aquafaba (that’s the viscous liquid that the beans were cooked and sitting in) from the tin. Blend again until smooth.
Add the sugar (or a sweetener of your choice eg maple syrup), baking powder, cocoa powder, salt, vanilla, olive oil and melted dark chocolate and blend again to combine. To keep it dairy free, check the ingredients in the chocolate – most dark chocolate is dairy free but it’s always worth checking the label. I usually just melt the chocolate in the microwave in little 10 second bursts, checking and stirring between each. You can put the chocolate in a bowl over a small pot of simmering water to melt it gently that way too.
Then scrape the mixture into the lined cake tin, smooth it out with a spatular and bake it in the centre of the oven for 30 minutes or until cracked on top and with minimal wobble.
Allow it to completely cool in the tin before carefully removing it onto a plate and dusting the cake with a tsp of cocoa powder.
Serve slices of the cake with whipped coconut cream from a tin (we sell these in the grocery section of our shop) – it’s also delicious with fresh, tangy raspberries in the summer, to cut through the richness of the cake.
Enjoy! Don’t forget to tag us @greenearthorganics1 on instagram if you make this recipe and join our friendly facebook group to share recipes and tips.
Introducing the slightly more laborious, but much more exciting cousin of macaroni cheese! Béchamel Baked Butternut Gnocchi! This is comfort food at it’s finest.
My vegan béchamel sauce is very simple to put together, and for this I’ve simply whisked it up and poured it over sautéed celery and leek. Then I popped in lots of freshly boiled butternut gnocchi (not as tricky to make as it seems), scattered over some tangy capers and crushed pumpkin seeds and baked it until the béchamel was bubbling and thickened! I got some gorgeous cherry tomatoes in my box last week so I placed them on top to roast in the oven. Their bright acidity is the perfect foil to the creamy richness of the béchamel and gnocchi.
I’d love to see your photos if you make this dish. Share them with us over on our friendly facebook group or tag us @greenearthorganics1 on Instagram and don’t forget to share this blog post with your friends. Liz x
enough plain flour to bring it into a dough (this varies depending on the water content and size of your squash)
salt, pepper and optional herbs or spices (sage/rosemary/thyme/chilli flakes…)
Method
Pre-heat your oven to 200C.
Cut a small butternut squash in half, scoop out the seeds and bake it – cut side down – in a hot oven (200C) until the flesh is soft all the way through. Test it with a small knife, it should easily slide into the soft, roasted butternut. (This normally takes 30 minutes or so. While it’s in the oven, get on with the sauce and preparing the toppings below.)
Allow the squash to cool to the point where you can easily handle it, then scoop out all the roasted flesh and mash or blend it into a smooth purée.
Find your biggest pot, 2/3rds fill it with water and get it on the stove to heat up to a rolling boil while you make the gnocchi.
Season the purée with salt and pepper and taste to check the seasoning. It should be slightly too salty as you are going to fold in a fair bit of flour. You can also add optional extra flavours at this stage. For example chilli flakes and sage or rosemary and lemon zest… or just leave it plain, that’s delicious too!
Then stir in enough flour to turn the purée into a soft dough. You can use plain flour (make sure there are no raising agents in it) or strong bread flour or even a gluten free plain flour blend. Gnocchi works best with white flour rather than wholemeal.
The amount of flour varies depending on the size and moisture content of your squash. Just start with a mug or so, gently fold it in and keep going until it’s the right consistency to be tipped out onto a floured work surface and very briefly kneaded. You want to work it as little as possible to keep it tender, but just enough to bring it together into a manageable ball of dough. It should be soft and sticky, get a helper to keep dusting the work surface and your hands with flour to make it more manageable.
Cut the ball of dough into 4, then roll one of the quarters into a thick snake. Chop the snake into little bites. If you want to make little traditional looking grooves in the gnocchi you can stamp each bite with a fork or you can roll them over a gnocchi board if you have one… or simply roll them into balls.
Then drop the gnocchi into the now boiling water in batches. Gently loosen them from the bottom of the pot with a slotted spoon. When they rise to the top of the water they are done and can be scooped out and placed in the sauce below. I do them in batches of one snake at a time, then while that batch is boiling I get the next snake ready.
Keep going until all your gnocchi dough is used up. If you make too much for the bake, then you can cool down and keep the excess boiled gnocchi in the fridge/freezer and use it another day (pan fry it with a little olive oil or butter and serve with pesto and salad?)
In an oven and hob safe, large, wide pan, sauté the sliced celery, leek and garlic with the butter or olive oil and some salt and pepper until soft. Then turn off the heat. (If you don’t have an oven and hob safe large dish like this, you can just sauté the veg and tip it into a roasting tray instead.)
Then whisk the flour, milk, mustard, nutritional yeast, nutmeg, salt and pepper in a large jug or mixing bowl and pour the mixture over the sautéed celery and leeks.
Boil the gnocchi in batches as above and pop them into the dish on top of the sauce.
In a small blender or large pestle and mortar, crush/blend the handful of pumpkin seeds with a small handful of nutritional yeast for a crunchy, savoury topping. Scatter this over the gnocchi and sauce.
Sprinkle over the capers and cherry tomatoes then pop the dish into the oven (with an optional drizzle of olive oil) to bake until the gnocchi are burnished golden brown and the sauce is thick and bubbling. This should take around 20-30 minutes.
Serve with a simple green salad and an ice cold glass of white wine and enjoy!
A page from my book – available to add to your order on Greenearthorganics.ie here.
Turmeric is an incredible, powerful ingredient. It’s many, scientifically proven, health benefits including being an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant are very interesting to read up on. Anecdotally, I have terrible knees from a combination of hyper-mobility, multiple dislocations and corrective surgery that went badly wrong, and I find, when I remember to have a tsp of my turmeric paste at least a few times a week, be that in porridge, smoothies or golden milk, my knees do feel less swollen and painful at the end of the day. As a chef, I love it for it’s vibrant colour and interesting flavour. Curcumin, the compound responsible for most of turmeric’s potential health benefits, unfortunately doesn’t absorb well into the bloodstream so I always add black pepper and oil to anything with turmeric in to increase it’s bioavailability. You can read about the science behind the bioavailibity of turmeric here. So don’t leave the black pepper and coconut oil out of the recipe!
Turmeric & Ginger Paste and three things you can make with it – golden smoothie, turmeric latte and golden porridge – watch the video at the end of this blog to see how!
Peel the turmeric and ginger roots using the edge of a teaspoon.
Slice the roots against the direction of the fibres and put them in a strong blender.
Add coconut oil, ground cinnamon, ground cloves and ground black pepper.
Cover the ingredients with maple syrup and then blend until smooth.
Transfer the mixture into small jars and refrigerate. They should last in the fridge for about a month, so freeze what you won’t use up in that time. Use the frozen turmeric paste within 6 months of making it.
Did you make this recipe? Let us know how it went in the comments or over on our friendly Facebook group. Don’t forget to share this blog post with your friends. Liz x
As one of our 5 Pledges for the Planet, we promised to Speak Up for the environment. And when you talk about environmentalism, you cannot avoid talking about our diets. What we eat, as in what we grow, produce, import and export, all has a massive effect on the environment. But what we eat is a difficult topic to tactfully tackle isn’t it? For example Veganism, despite being a peaceful movement which simply aims to do as little harm to our planet and all of its residents (including humans) as possible, seems to bring out a lot of very high emotions. I’m sure some of you reading this right now already feel quite strongly about it one way or the other. And we certainly don’t need something else to divide us… but why does this topic get us so riled up?
Our 4th Pledge for the Planet – Speak Up!
Perhaps it is because change is so hard? Changing our current world view is hard. Take it from me, an ex meat-eater married to an ex-butcher who used to think veganism was extreme and never thought she would ever change her views on the subject! Confronting the consequences of our way of life can be painful, and opening our eyes and changing our minds – and in fact changing the way we see the world – is really quite unsettling. It’s much easier to carry on the way we are and distract ourselves from the reality of where our food comes from with comforting phrases like ‘free range’, ‘grass fed’, ‘regenerative agriculture’… But what has made us thrive and survive on this one and only planet of ours, is our ability to adapt and change. We can do this! In fact, although it sounds hyperbolic, it is not overstating things to say, we must do this to ensure the survival of future generations!
The overwhelming evidence points to the fact that we simply cannot continue to sustain our current animal-product-heavy diets without causing catastrophic damage to our ecosystem. The sad reality of modern farming, exacerbated from the demand from both consumers and supermarkets, is profit over planet. When farmers are under enormous pressure to meet the demands of supermarkets, the results are not good for anyone – not for the animals, us the consumers, the planet and indeed, the farmers! Factory farming, despite almost everyones distaste for it, is still far and away the main source for stocking the meat, milk and egg shelves of supermarkets, and unfortunately that trend is only increasing. And to be fair, when you have such huge disparities in wealth as we do all over the globe, you cannot expect the 99% to be able to afford animal products that have been produced ‘humanely’. It is a luxury and a privilege not all of us have access to or can afford. But the truth is, even if everyone could afford such products, and only those products existed, there would simply not be enough room on our planet to cater for everyones current diet in that way. ‘Regenerative’ animal agriculture, whilst marginally better for the people, planet and animals involved, requires far more land than factory farming. It simply is not possible to meet current demand in this way without grabbing even more of the already dwindling wild spaces or in fact running out of room completely. So demand for animal products has to decrease. Earth’s resources are not infinite.
Eating animals is in short, inefficient. And efficiency is so important in the era we live in now where the worlds resources are already stretched. Did you know that the global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories? Luckily there is a delicious solution to this problem. Plant based food is affordable and much more environmentally efficient. Compared to their animal-derived counterparts, plant-based foods use far less land, water and energy and their production emits far less greenhouse gases. Yes, even the much maligned avocados, soy and almonds!
The contents of a veg box from Green Earth Organics. Including a diverse range of fruits and vegetables in your diet is important for our health, we make it easy with convenient weekly deliveries of the best organic produce.
So we have the solution, reducing our consumption of animal products. But the hard part is acting on it. Changing our habits. They say it takes 21 days to break a habit. Why not challenge yourself to go a few weeks without meat and dairy and see how you feel?
Still unsure? Do you believe it’s our natural place in the food chain to eat animals? Do you think it’s unnatural for us to pretend to be herbivores? Well you might be surprised to hear me say that I completely agree! We are naturally omnivores. Read this article by Macken Murphey which explains why veganism is not natural, but how that doesn’t mean it’s not right (and it doesn’t mean we can’t thrive on a plant based diet). There are a lot of wild and inaccurate theories flying around the place which can, quite rightly, put a lot of sensible people off veganism. Murphey comes at it from a refreshingly honest perspective as a human evolutionary biologist.
Apart from the health and environmental implications, the thing that makes it stick for most of us plant eaters is opening our eyes to the plight of animals. I’ve changed my mind, veganism isn’t extreme, it’s a simply choosing to no longer fund an inefficient way of eating.
One of the rescue pigs at the farm – we’ve seen first hand, the inefficiency of meat production. These two eat a stunning amount of food! If Green Earth Organics were to turn them into bacon and sausages, don’t worry they won’t, the end result would be a tiny fraction of the food that they consumed. Eating more veg simply cuts out the middle man (or middle animal rather).
I think it’s also very important to acknowledge that changing our diets is a really big step. It’s not easy for most people. But although I believe it’s important, it doesn’t have to be an overnight thing, or even an ‘all or nothing’ thing. The best advice I ever got when I was starting on my vegan journey was, if you don’t think you can go without a certain product, why not just be vegan apart from that thing (eggs? cheese? real butter?) to begin with and see how you go? It’s still better than doing nothing and it still makes a big difference. Just cutting down on animal products makes a big difference. I love that saying, that it’s far better for millions of people to make the changes needed ‘imperfectly’, than for just a handful of people to do it ‘perfectly’. In my house, we started off being Flexitarian, only eating meat once or twice a week, then we cut it down to once a month or so and then naturally lost the taste for it altogether. Eggs took a while longer to give up and we still slip up every now and then. But if we judge ourselves harshly we would just give up.
What are your thoughts? Are you already trying to cut down on animal products? What are you finding difficult about it? Let’s chat about it (in a friendly way and without judgement) in the comments or over on our friendly facebook group. Liz x
A page from my illustrated cookbook, available to buy from Green Earth Organics shop here.
Dal and fritters are staples in our house. The dal is especially useful to have in your repertoire for those days when you are low on fresh veg just before your next veg box arrives. And of course bulking out a dal with whatever seasonal veg you have is always a good idea. I like to make it with a tin of coconut some days, usually in winter when the weather calls for something rich and creamy, and with a tin of tomato on other days when I want it lighter and tangy (as in the recipe illustration from my book above).
My fritters are not dissimilar to onion bhajis. Here with curry spices in the gram flour batter they go particularly well with the dal and you can add whatever shredded veg you have around – cauliflower, squash, carrot etc. Fritters also make great sandwich fillers or burger patty alternatives and of course they don’t have to be curry flavoured, add whatever herbs and spices you like to make them your own. I love courgette fritters with fresh herbs in the summer, squash chilli and sage in autumn, celeriac, preserved lemon and parsley…the possibilities are endless.
As always, let us know in the comments or over on our community Facebook group if you make this recipe. We love to see our recipes leave the screen. Don’t forget to share this blog with your friends and family.
1 tsp each: brown mustard seeds, cumin seeds, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, fenugreek, salt and chilli flakes or chopped green finger chilli to taste
Dice the onion or leek and soften it in a large pan on a medium high heat with the oil.
Add the cumin and mustard seeds and stir to toast them until fragrant. Then add the ground turmeric, ginger and fenugreek and stir to briefly toast for just a few seconds.
Add the mug of red lentils and the diced swede and stir to coat them in the spices. Then add the tin of coconut milk and two tins of water to the pan.
Season with salt and pepper and add the curry leaves (if you have them – buy online or at specialist Asian shops) and chilli flakes or chopped green finger chilli to infuse while the lentils and swede cook.
Bring the pot up to boil then turn down the heat and simmer, stirring often, until the lentils and swede are cooked through.
Meanwhile get the fritter mix ready. Whisk the gram flour, spices and water together into a smooth batter. Then grate the parsnips and add them to the batter. Stir well to coat all the grated parsnip with the batter.
Heat a frying pan with a generous slick of vegetable oil. Turn the heat to medium-high and fry whatever sized dollops of the fritter mix in the pan. Cook on both sides until golden brown on the outside and cooked through. It’s better to cook them slowly if they are large so that they don’t end up burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. Raw gram flour batter can be a little bitter.
Stir chopped and rinsed kale through the dal about 10 minutes before serving. Serve the dal and fritters in bowls with Indian chutneys and optional rice, popadoms etc.
A red and white cabbage, apple, caraway and bay kraut I made before Christmas 2020.
The Perfect Place to Start your Fermentation Journey
Once you have mastered the basics of sauerkraut, and it really is basic, you can apply these principles and techniques to many other ferments and play around with the ingredients. You can use a variety of cabbages, you can add other vegetables like grated carrot or beetroot, you can use different herbs or spices to create different styles of sauerkraut, you can even suspend whole apples into your crock/jar to ferment along with you sauerkraut as a German friend of mine taught me to do.
My kimchi recipe, which I will share with you soon, uses the same technique as sauerkraut. The difference being the cut of the vegetables and the all important spice paste. My fermented hot sauce uses the same technique too! Brine fermentation also works through the same simple process of lacto-fermentation to acidify the vegetables. Salt + vegetables + a jar is all you need to produce incredible delicious and nutritious ferments.
My fermenting shelf from last summer.
Why Ferment?
I first got hooked on fermenting many years ago when I had a surplus of cabbages delivered to my old cafe from our local farm. There’s only so much cabbage soup and coleslaw you can sell so we decided to try making sauerkraut as a means to preserve them, stop them from going off and being wasted. It was a revelation! We had no idea then about the health benefits, we were just blown away by the taste. Since that day, I bought lots of books on the subject, incorporated ferments into much of our menu and even started a stall in a farmers market called ‘Fermental’ selling fresh, unpasteurised ferments made with local, organic ingredients.
The science and nutritional benefits behind vegetable fermentation are really interesting to read about. There are so many perks to including ferments into your everyday diet. The importance of encouraging and introducing beneficial bacteria into our digestive system is becoming more well known and rather than taking a pill, this is a delicious way to do that. Fermenting vegetables also makes them easier to digest and makes the nutrients in them more readily available, and the organisms that enable fermentation are themselves beneficial too! All of this is good news for your body and your immune system, but its also great news for your taste buds. Fermented food is delicious! Complex, tangy, crunchy, sour and salty.
Is it Safe?
Lacto fermenation is a very safe way of preserving vegetables and it’s very easy too – no need for fancy equipment, all you need is a knife, board, jars, vegetables and salt. It can sound scary dealing with microbes. We have been trained to try to disinfect all surfaces and food from bacteria, moulds and yeasts so perhaps encouraging bacteria to thrive will feel strange at first. But the importance of our microbiome and the diversity of microbes that we need in our guts to be healthy is now becoming common knowledge. For me, as a chef, the main reason I ferment is for flavour, not medicine. The health benefits are just a bonus. And yes, it is perfectly safe as long as you follow some basic principles.
Submerging vegetables in brine protects them from harmful bacteria and allows ‘good’ bacteria to thrive. Lactobacilli, the good guys, are anaerobic, meaning they don’t need oxygen. So by keeping the vegetables neatly submerged in brine we are protecting them from the ‘bad’ bacteria that need oxygen to thrive, thereby taking out the competition for the ‘good’ lactobacilli. Salt in the brine also inhibits yeasts which would break the sugars down in the fruits/veg into alcohol instead of lactic acid. Salt is the perfect preservative for vegetables, but it’s important to get the right amount. Too much will inhibit fermentation and too little will result in a rotting crock/jar. Thankfully its quite simple, your best guide is your tastebuds! Your salted vegetables should just taste pleasantly salty.
optional herbs/spices like fennel seeds, dill, juniper, caraway, turmeric, pepper…
Method
Prepare a large jar to hold your ferment. Just give it a good wash and a rinse, no need to sterilise. Find and wash a smaller jar which fits neatly into your large jar. This will act as a weight.
Rinse your vegetables and pull off some of the outer leaves of the cabbage and put to one side. These will act as ‘followers’. A ‘follower’ is like a cartouche which neatly holds down any bits of chopped veg under the brine which may float up and become exposed to air.
Shred the cabbage (and any other veg if using) into a large bowl or your biggest pot.
Add extra flavourings to your tase if you like. A few juniper berries, some chopped dill, fennel/caraway seeds, turmeric and black pepper etc… just choose one or two flavours at most.
Massage in about 1 tbsp of natural, fine/flakey sea salt per regular sized cabbage volume. If you are unsure about doing this instinctively, you can weigh the shredded vegetables then work out what 2% of that weight is and add that amount of salt. Once the salt is fully incorporated, taste it and see if it is salty enough. It should just taste pleasantly salty. If its too salty add more vegetables, if it’s not salty enough add more salt. Easy!
Cover the bowl and allow the salt to do some of the work for you for about half an hour. Then give the mixture another good massage and you should see a lot of brine forming. There should be no need to add extra brine or water, the salt draws the water from the vegetables and creates its own delicious brine.
Once your veg is nice and briney, when you squeeze a handful lots of brine comes out, you can start packing it into your jar. Do this carefully and thoroughly. Take one or two large handfuls of the mixture at a time and firmly press them into the bottom of your jar ensuring there are no air pockets.
Keep going until you have used up all the mixture or until you have a good couple of inches left of head room in the jar. If you made a large amount or only have smallish jars then you may need to use a few jars.
Now its time to add your ‘follower’ or cartouche. Get the cabbage leaves you saved earlier, break them to size if you need to, then wedge them into the jar, neatly covering the whole surface area of the ferment. Take your time to carefully tuck the leaf down around the edges of the ferment. Ideally the level of brine will rise above the ‘follower’.
Digitally coloured illustration of a sauerkraut recipe from my book which you can purchase at the farm shop here
Then you need to add a weight to ensure the shredded vegetables stay submerged. The cheapest and easiest weight is simply a smaller jar filled with water. Make sure its nice and clean, no lables left on the outside. And make sure the lid does not come into contact with the brine. Salt and metal react and you don’t want a rusty metal lid sitting in your ferment! So just make sure the smaller jar can’t fall over inside the bigger jar and it should be fine.
Other weights you can use are scrubbed and boiled beach pebbles (make sure they are not chalk/limestone), you could even use a ziplock freezer bag filled with water/stones. You can also buy specially designed fermentation weights of course. made from glass or ceramics – if you really get into fermenting then these are a worthwhile investment.
Then loosely cover the jar to allow the gases produced during fermentation to escape. Use the lid, or if the lid doesn’t fit over your weight then you can cover the jar with a tea towel and secure it with an elastic band or string.
Place the jar on a plate or tray to catch any potential overspill. Then ferment at room temperature, out of direct sunlight for a week or two.
Check on your ferment daily. Push down on the weight to expel any air pockets/bubbles that form during fermentation. Taste it after one week and if it has soured to your liking you can remove the weight and follower and refrigerate it. Otherwise keep fermenting it at room temp for another week or so for a funkier, tangier taste.
Once refrigerated it will keep well for a very long time up to and over a year even, if you look after it. That means no double dipping – you don’t want to introduce new bacteria from your mouth into the jar, scrape down the sides to keep all the veg together – bits that dry out and are exposed to air are more likely to catch mould. Consider transferring your finished ferment into a few smaller jars before refrigerating. This will mean that the ferment is exposed to less air and last longer.
Newly made kraut on the left, and one that has finished fermenting on the right. The purple cabbage will turn into that beautiful crimson colour as it acidifies.
Let me know in the comments or over on our friendly Facebook page if you have any questions or need me to troubleshoot. More fermenting blogs and videos coming soon. Happy fermenting! Liz x
