Fritters are a fab summer lunch with salads and a great way to use up a glut of vegetables. Courgettes are having their ‘glut moment’ on the farm right now, so here’s a delicious courgette fritter recipe for you to try if you get a lot of courgettes in your box and you’re stuck for ideas.
I usually make a gram flour (chickpea flour) batter of just gram flour, water and seasoning, and then stir in shredded/finely chopped veg to make fritters, but I didn’t have any gram flour so here’s a wheat and corn flour variety which works well too! Fritters are fairly forgiving, just use whatever flour you have in. Courgettes are quite watery vegetables, so I like to grate and salt them, then after the salt has drawn the liquid out, mix in enough flour to make a fairly thick batter. No need to add any other liquid or you’ll end up with soggy rather than crisp fritters!
Liz x
Ingredients (makes 6-8 fritters)
1 large or 2 small courgettes
a large pinch of salt (about 1/2 a tsp or to taste)
black pepper to taste
a big handful of chopped dill or fennel fronds (or any herbs you like – mint or parsley work well)
a block of feta, crumbled (or make my tofu feta recipe here)
4 tbsp plain flour (or more/less – see method)
4 tbsp cornflour/cornstarch (or more/less – see method)
olive oil for frying
lemon wedges, salad & tzatziki to serve
Method
Start by grating your courgettes into a large mixing bowl. Use the course side of the grater.
Sprinkle over the pinch of salt and pepper and mix well. Then taste and decide if you’d like to add more. The courgettes should just taste pleasantly seasoned.
Give the salt time to draw the liquid out of the courgettes and use this time to prepare some salads and make a tzatziki (simply mix grated cucumber through thick yoghurt, season with salt, pepper and a little crushed garlic, stir well and add a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and fresh dill or mint).
Once the courgettes are wet, this only takes 10 minutes or less, you can start adding the flour. I like to use an even mix of cornflour and plain flour. The corn flour makes the fritters a little crispier.
Add one heaped tbsp of each flour to the wet courgettes then stir the mixture. Keep adding more of both flours and stirring until you have a thick fritter batter. If your courgette is very watery you’ll need more flour, if it’s drier you’ll need less.
Then stir through the herbs and crumbled feta and warm up a frying pan to medium with a generous slick of olive oil in the bottom of the pan.
Fry spoons of the mixture in small batches in the pan. Turn over after 3-5 minutes, once golden brown and crispy underneath and fry the other side for a further 3-5 minutes.
Keep the heat at medium, don’t be tempted to turn it to high or you may get fritters which are burned on the outside and raw and doughy in the middle.
Serve with salads and tzatziki for a lovely lunch. The fritters are delicious eaten hot with a squeeze of lemon. Or pop the fritters into a burger bun or sandwich as a summery veggie burger or sandwich filler alternative.
Have you ever tried grilled peaches? They’re amazing on the barbecue but this morning I tried them in my little panini grill and they were really good so I thought I’d share.
No real recipe. Just slice them in half and twist out the stones. Our delicious flat peaches tend to de-stone quite easily but use a small knife if you’re having trouble. Then brush them with a 50:50 mix of olive oil and maple syrup and place on a hot grill until nicely charred, smokey, sweet and sticky. Serve on natural yoghurt with granola for the best summery breakfast! Or serve with ice cream after a barbecue for a refreshing dessert.
This is my simple and adaptable method for BBQing our gorgeous new potatoes! I have fond memories of pricking large jacket potatoes, wrapping them in foil and packing them in with the food for camping trips. Then we would carefully tuck them into the BBQ coals to bake while the rest of the grilling was done, they’d often come out perfect if we remembered to turn them occasionally, but more often than not, half the potato would burn and half would be raw, or the coals would burn out before the potato was done and there’d be some disappointment… So this way of par-boiling, dressing then skewering little salad potatoes provides a much more consistent result.
Start by boiling scrubbed new potatoes until they are nearly cooked through. Test a few larger ones with a sharp knife or skewer. Then drain the potatoes and allow them to cool in the colander while you prepare a tasty marinade or dressing!
I love potatoes with garlic and herbs. This time I mixed olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed garlic, rosemary and lemon zest in a large bowl. Then toss the par cooked new potatoes in the dressing.
Push the potatoes on skewers (or cook in a BBQ basket) and get them onto a plate or tray ready to pop over the coals.
Cook on the BBQ, turning often until soft, smokey and delicious!
Then push them off the skewers, back into the dressing bowl and toss again to get any last bits of dressing and flavour back over the delicious, charred potatoes. Enjoy!
We are in the midst of a classic courgette glut on the farm. Next week we’ll add some free courgettes to all the boxes, we hope you enjoy them. Expect lots of courgette recipes to come your way. We’d love to know your favourite courgette recipes too please! Let us know in the comments or over on our community Facebook group. I’ll start us off with this super simple salad. It’s so easy to make (just a matter of combining raw courgettes with a lemony dressing, then scattering over some toasted hazelnuts) and oh SO delicious! I have this salad often this time of year as a side to pretty much any meal, or it’s brilliant stirred through freshly boiled pasta or bulked out with a drained tin of lentils.
Liz x
Did you know, our organic hazelnuts come in compostable bags?
Ingredients
Courgettes (2 small or 1 large)
2-3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
the juice of half a small lemon (have you tried our new season verdelli lemons?)
1 small garlic clove, crushed
salt and pepper to taste
a handful or two of hazelnuts, toasted in a dry pan then roughly chopped
Method
Using a potato peeler, slice the courgettes into delicate, thin ribbons. For ease, slice them directly over a serving platter or large salad bowl.
Make the dressing by stirring together the olive oil, lemon juice and crushed garlic with a pinch of salt and pepper.
Drizzle the dressing over the courgette ribbons. You could toss the salad now to evenly coat the ribbons with the dressing, or just leave it drizzly.
Then toast the hazelnuts in a dry frying pan until nicely coloured. Tip them onto a board and carefully chop them up a bit to make them go further through the salad.
Scatter them over the dressed ribbons and finish the salad with a little sprinkle of flakey sea salt. We LOVE Achill Island sea salt for exactly this type of dish.
Enjoy as is as part of a salad buffet or alongside a BBQ. Or make it a light, refreshing meal by tossing through some freshly boiled pasta or a drained tin of cooked green lentils.
Well here’s a tongue twister if ever I did see one. Kumquat Curd. Try say that ten times in a row without messing up! Have you ever eaten a kumquat? They have very sweet skins and very sour middles. I love using them for curd rather than lemons because all you need to do is remove the seeds, the rest of the fruit can be blended up and simmered into this perfect preserve. No need for zesting and juicing.
This stunning little curd is delightfully sweet and tangy and so simple to make. The perfect use for this tiny citrus. I love curd on toast as an alternative to jam but it also makes the best filling for a cake or topping for a tart. Curd is great sandwiched between shortbread biscuits or rolled up in pancakes. I think a sunny jar of kumquat curd makes the perfect Mother’s Day gift, especially if accompanied by a stack of pancakes in bed and a vase of daffodils!
Bring a little warm sunshine in your winter kitchen with beautiful, organic blood oranges from Italy.
Blood oranges are in season now and they are unmissable! Add them to your order here to make the most of their short season. They are sweeter and more perfumed than regular oranges and our organic ones are wax free. Zest to make the most of the bright, citrus flavour in their orange oil scented skin before slicing. Stir the zest through this pancake batter or through the polenta cake batter in the recipe below.
Polenta cakes are naturally gluten free and go so well with citrus flavours. They are moist and moreish with a gorgeous, sunny crumb…possibly my favourite type of cake! This is a riff on a classic lemon polenta cake recipe which is normally baked, then soaked with a zingy lemon syrup. In this recipe, instead of the lemon syrup, I have placed juicy slices of blood orange in the bottom of the cake tin to make the most of their stunning, ombre blush.
Let us know in the comments of over on our facebook group if you make this cake. I’d love to see your photos. Liz x
Preheat the oven to 175C. Butter a 23cm cake tin with the tbsp of butter (preferably a loose bottomed one, but a regular cake tin is fine too).
Zest the oranges into a mixing bowl. Then trim a thin slice off the top and bottom of the oranges, and using a small, sharp knife, slice off the skin and white pith. Then slice the oranges into discs and arrange them in a neat layer in the bottom of the buttered cake tin.
Measure the rest of the ingredients into the mixing bowl with the orange zest and whisk until smooth.
Pour the batter over the layer of orange slices, even it out with a spatular and bake for 30 minutes.
Allow the cake to mostly cool in the tin. Then run a knife around to loosen it from the sides. Put a plate over the cake tin and turn it upside down. Carefully lift the cake tin off the plate and you should be left with a beautiful upside down cake. You may need to pop bits that stick to the bottom of the cake tin back onto the cake.
TIP: if you don’t have ground almonds you can easily make your own. Just blend whole or blanched almonds in a food processor until they resemble a rough flour.
“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.
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.
