Sweet Irish parsnips are plentiful in October. They are a wonderful root vegetable with a distinctive flavour that fills the house when its cooking.
My mother would always serve them mashed with carrots with our Sunday dinner. I don’t remember having them any other way as a child! Now I like to roast, steam or slow cook them to intensify the flavour. Here we’ve swapped the common potato for parsnip in a really tasty rosti. Made even more flavoursome with the punchy apple aioli on the side, you wont regret trying this one.
Lou 🙂
Ingredients: Makes 12 small rosti and a pot of aioli
For the rosti
450g parsnips, peeled and coarsely grated 1 medium white onion, peeled and coarsely grated 1 egg 6 tbsp plain flour pinch salt and pepper
For the apple aioli 2 apples, peeled, cored and cut into chunks 1 garlic clove, peeled and finely grated 1 tbsp cider vinegar 180ml mild olive oil. salt and pepper
Method:
Step 1: Grate the parsnips and onion and put them in a bowl, squeeze out any excess liquid, and season with salt and pepper. Crack in the egg and spoon in the flour. Mix well with your hands.
Step 2: Make the aioli. Cook the apple in a small pot with a splash of water until soft for 5-10 minutes. Set aside to cool. Then add to a small blender along with the grated garlic, cider vinegar, salt and pepper. Blend again and very slowly pour the oil in to emulsify the sauce. Taste it and adjust if needed.
Step 3: Cook the roti. Warm a non stick frying pan on a medium heat, add some oil to coat the pan. Spoon on 3-4 parsnip mounds and gently push down to flatten. cook for a few minutes on either side until golden. Repeat. Fry in a small bit of butter and then serve alongside the delicious aioli.
Organic orange pumpkins are sweet and delicious and marry perfectly with banana, spices and chocolate! While the supermarkets are jammed with ornamental pumpkins, in October, that will be carved and go to waste we think its much better for the planet that we roast them and cook and bake with them as nature intended.
This recipe will give you a delicious bread that isn’t too sweet or spicy its just right. Add butter if you like and tea or pumpkin spiced latte!
Keep cosy with this one.
Lou 🙂
Ingredients: ▪️100g pumpkin puree (*homemade see below) ▪️2 large ripe banana ▪️4 tablespoons neutral oil ▪️2 medium eggs ▪️70ml maple syrup ▪️300g plain flour ▪️2 tsp baking powder ▪️1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda ▪️2 tsp mixed pumpkin spice or ground cinnamon ▪️80g chopped dark chocolate
Method:
*Follow the link to make your own pumpkin puree and pumpkin spice mix-Click here
Step 1: Preheat the oven 160ºc and line a loaf tin with a liner or parchment paper.
Step 2: Mash the bananas well and add them to a mixing bowl along with the pumpkin puree, oil, eggs, maple syrup, mix well.
Step 3: Sieve in the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, mixed spice. Stir gently, then add 3/4 of the chopped chocolate. Spoon into the loaf tin. Smooth the batter and sprinkle with the remaining chopped chocolate.
Bake for 35-45 minutes until cooked through. Test with a skewer. Cool and slice.
Glyphosate Aka Roundup; we all have heard the name it is the most ubiquitous herbicide used on the planet, nearly 10 billion kg have been used globally.
It is a probable-carcinogen and it now contaminates most non-organic food stuffs.
Using chemicals to fight nature will never work. In the short term it may give a temporary reprieve from a certain disease or pest, but that pest will come back stronger and more resistant next time. It is in a way a self-perpetuating industry and GMO’s are another extension of this very lucrative business.
Bayer the company that bought out Monsanto (the makers of Roundup) are lobbying heavily for its continued use, it’s a massive money spinner for them, why wouldn’t they? They argue its safe, remember tobacco companies said the same thing about smoking!
But we don’t need this stuff on our food, we don’t need it contaminating our waterways, destroying our biodiversity.
Generally, the application of Roundup is the first step when a conventional farmer sets about reseeding fields, or prior to sowing conventional grain, or in fact for weed control prior to harvest of conventional tillage crops. The application of roundup to grain crops prior to harvest is mind-blowing. This stuff is systemic meaning it gets absorbed into the plant, it stays there, and as the grain goes to be processed to flour it stays there.
As a trained chemist, I feel strongly that these chemicals have no place in our food chain. They hurt our bodies, they hurt our land, and it begets the questions are these chemicals necessary? Is there an alternative path we can thread? A resounding ‘of course there is’ would be our answer.
If you follow us on Instagram check out our most recent video there are plenty of “weeds” growing between our kale plants and yet the kale is amazingly healthy and happy and vibrant. Not only that some of these “weeds” are carry over from our green manure of clover and phacelia from the year pervious. They serve many valuable functions, they allow biodiversity to flourish, nature is diverse it is not a monoculture. They also help prevent leaching of valuable nutrients from the soil, effectively acting as a winter cover crop.
When we first took on my granddad’s land here, it was not in great, shape nutrient levels were low and there was a very challenging dockleaf problem, but over the years through careful management we have reduced the burden of docks, there are still dock leaves growing but they are not a problem now. Total elimination was not necessary.
We feel that there is a viable alternative path we can follow for growing good quality, tasty food without the use of chemicals, we have been at it for 18 years now, we still have a lot to learn but one thing is for sure, we will never ever look to the chemical cabinet for a solution to any of our challenges.
Thanks as always for your support.
Kenneth
PS Don’t forget that our Farm shop is open every Saturday from 10am to 5pm, H91F9C5. Also we have the first amazing savoy cabbage and crown prince pumpkin available from Padraigh Fahy in Beechlawn, plus our own gorgeous bunched carrots, fresh parnsips and leeks, see all the great IRISH organic produce we have here.
Autumn squash soup with lots of roast garlic and warming spices. This is a hug in a bowl and we’ve even added a cheese toastie for extra comfort. You can easily swap the butternut squash for Kuri (pumpkin) squash to make an equally delicious bowl of soup.
Roasting the veg first is key to getting in those extra sweet and caramelised notes and we’ve made the prep part easy by just chopping everything in half and loading it on to the roasting tin. We’ve added some lovely sweet Irish carrots, cherry tomatoes from our tunnels and the best of Irish organic onions.
Step 1: Prepare the veg: Chop the squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Wash and chop the carrots in half, slice the top off the bulb of garlic, peel and half the onions. Wash the tomatoes. Put all the veg on a baking tray.
Step 2: Sprinkle with paprika, cumin, salt and drizzle in oil. Roast in the oven for 40 -50 minutes, test everything is cooked by piercing with a sharp knife.
Step 3: Put all the cooked veg into a powerful blender along with hot stock. Blend and then add to a pot with the coconut milk, gently heat through on the hob and serve.
A delicious way to bake with ripe sweet plums. But please make this with Irish apples too, it would work perfectly! The smell of warm autumn spices in the house is very inviting. My granny would make huge trays of apple and cinnamon crumble for special family occasions and serve them up with stewed plums and jugs of custard, I can still remember the smell from her busy kitchen.
There is real comfort in the food we eat and share. And when the nights draw in its the kitchen table that pulls us together. Its good to remember the hands that sowed the seeds, that watered the soil, picked and harvested the fruit and the hands that made the food.
Good food will always be remembered.
Lou 🙂
Ingredients:
For the crumble topping 50g plain flour 40g soft butter 30g sugar 20g flaked almonds
Preheat the oven 160ºC fan. Line an 8inch cake tin (with loose bottom preferably) and grease with butter.
Step 1: Make the crumble topping. Add the flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter to a small bowl. Rub the butter into the dry ingredients with your fingers until it resembles sand, mix through the flaked almonds, set aside.
Step 2: For the sponge. Put the sugar and butter in a mixing bowl and whisk until smooth, use an electric mixer or regular whisk. Next beat in the eggs one at a time then stir in the sour cream. Sieve in the flour along with the mixed spice and cinnamon. Fold in the ground almonds.
Step 3: Transfer the sponge mix into the cake tin. Top with an even layer of most of the plum slices, keep a few back. Then sprinkle the crumble mix evenly over the plums. Top with the remaining plum slices.
Step 4: Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour. Until a skewer comes out clean.
First, I want to show you something: Darragh Wynne from the charity Goal Ireland was here a few weeks back and invited me to talk for a video, if you want to learn a little bit more about and see some cool drone footage of our farm (and even catch a glimpse of George and Florence check this video out.
George and Florence are happy pigs, they couldn’t actually have a better life, I really don’t think they could. Not only do they get to roam around nearly 2 acres of old and newly established forests, they have a dry straw lined shed to sleep in and probably best of all they get fed waste organic veg once a day. They are as happy as two pigs in muck could be.
But they fit into this story very well, as they are the last step in our grandly termed food waste reduction strategy, we don’t have a formal document or anything like that, but we do have a belief system around food waste.
So here is a crazy fact, one third of all food produced on the planet is wasted. The area required to produce that food is 16 million km2, which is roughly an area the same size as Russia, which is a very big place.
We all know we need to take urgent steps to reduce our impact on the planet, no surprise there, and as we pass yet another mind boggling climate record with September being the warmest month ever by a long way, that action is critical.
So wouldn’t it be an amazing if we could cut the land used for agriculture by 16 million square kilometers and instead grow forestry? Of course, it would.
But where is all this wasted food coming from? Well, that is where I will tell you the second part of my story, last week we took a delivery of carrots, we weren’t very pleased with these carrots, they were Irish, they were organic, but they were massive, and I mean they were big but we got our heads together and figured out how we could prevent them ending up in the bin.
So, we set about trying to use them to sell them, to make sure we wasted as little as possible. There is one thing I can absolutely guarantee had these carrots landed at the door of a supermarket they would have been rejected, sent back, or wasted.
Herein lies one of our bugbears, supermarkets insisting without remorse on unforgiving specifications and when produce does not meet them refusing to sell it or accept it. We have been there many moons ago, once upon a time having supplied supermarkets. In the growing season we have had this year, produce may come out maybe a little smaller or bigger or twisted or forked and that in our view is the beauty of nature. We wont grade out twisted parsnips, or forked carrots.
Of course, there is still the possibility that produce will not meet our quality requirements, and this is where we do have a very well-defined system and we put a fair amount of effort into it to make it work.
Maciek our quality manager has done amazing work creating his “Rescue boxes” each week these boxes are filled with “Class II” produce. If we can’t use the produce in the rescue boxes our team get it, and if it is unusable it ends up in one of two places, actually one of three places!
It either A. Goes to one of our three compost bays, or B. go to George’s belly or C. goes to Florence’s belly!
(Interesting fact: We have to make two separate piles of food when feeding the pigs because Florence always bullies George and tries to keep all the food for herself!)
So that is the end of the story for this week, just know you are supporting a little business that manages in our own way to keep the food waste mountain from growing at least on our watch and continues to step by small step help build a better food system.
You are making it possible, thank you.
Kenneth
PS Darragh Wynne from the charity Goal Ireland was here a few weeks back and invited me to talk for a video, if you want to learn a little bit more about and see some cool drone footage of our farm (and even catch a glimpse of George and Florence check this video out.
Blushing beautiful beetroot so vibrant and sweet. They are a nutritional powerhouse, good for your heart and blood and gut. We’ve increased the nutrient value by adding some wholesome ingredients to make these delicious dosas. Eat them as they are, add a sandwich filling with roast veggies or eat along side a spiced dahl. My kids called them pink wraps and thats a good description too.
I love to steam all my beets and then use them in various ways like roasting with balmasic vinegar for a salad, slicing to eat in a sandwich, grated to add to chocolate muffins etc.
How do you like to cook with beetroot?
Lou 🙂
PS – it may not be an authentic dosa recipe but it is really tasty all the same.
Step 1: To a powerful blender add all the ingredients apart from the water. Blend the ingredients and add the water a little at a time to make a batter. The consistency of the batter is really important it should be pourable like crepe batter.
Step 2: Heat a frying pan on a medium heat. Drizzle with oil and carefully wipe with kitchen paper to coat the pan.
Step 3: Add a ladle of the batter to the pan, use the back of the ladle to thin out the batter and form a round shape. Cook on a low heat for a few minutes then use a spatula to carefully flip over and cook for a further minute. Repeat.
We are huge fans of easy homemade snacks and it doesn’t get easier than this! Just 3 ingredients plus sea salt if you have it! Make it with 100% organic ingredients and it can be vegan too if you like! It takes just 5 minutes to make and a wee while to set. This has been a viral sensation recently and we can see why. It really ticks all the boxes with toffee notes from the dates, creamy peanut butter and glorious chocolate to finish.
We feel its best stored in the freezer, just chop off a chunk as needed. Find all of the best organic ingredients needed in our groceries.
Enjoy this one, as always let us know if you try it.
Step 1: Line a baking tray with parchment paper. Open the dates and lay flat on the parchment paper, make a rectangle shape with them. Lay another piece of parchment paper on top and push down with a rolling pin or glass to flatten.
Step 2: Spread the peanut butter all over the dates. Use a pallet knife if you have one.
Step 3: Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water or in the microwave. Pour over the peanut butter and smooth over with a pallet knife. Sprinkle with sea salt if you like.
Step 4: Put the tray in the freezer to set for at least 1 hour. Chop the bark into pieces of shards. Store the pieces in a box in the fridge or freezer for 1 week.
This week has seen another reasonably dry week on the farm which has made life that little bit easier, our harvesting machine for parsnips has worked well, and we are pulling them out of the ground fresh and clean, the kale is vibrant and amazing and we are harvesting lovely sized heads of broccoli. The tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes have nearly run their course, our weekly harvest of courgettes is down from a near high of 500kg a week to just over 100kg now, soon they will be finished for the year.
It is at this time of the year I often reflect on our food system as a whole and whilst there is plenty of good I find myself wondering that there must be a better way to grow our food, there needs to be a better way. The planet simply cannot sustain business as usual. Amongst other things, our food system as run by giant food corporations is crippling out planet, not only that it is destroying biodiversity. Loss leading of fresh food by supermarkets, simply does not leave enough on the table to allow farmers to protect the land, to work with nature, it is a road to nowhere.
What will we do when we have exhausted the soil, when we have polluted the rivers and lakes, when we have pumped enough greenhouse gases into our atmosphere to cause the planet to warm up beyond critical tipping points. We will not be able to sustain ecosystems never mind a healthy balanced food system.
What then? All that profit and greed, and short termism will mean little. Where do we look then for fresh water, for healthy food, how will we feed 8 billion or more people? How will all the other life we share this planet with be sustained?
Can we continue to consume resources and food as we do now? Do we not need to consider what we are eating (and how it is produced) now. The animal industry consumes a disproportionate amount of our land mass and contributes relatively little relative to grains and plants to our calorie and protein intake:
Of our habitable land, 46% is used for agriculture, of that land area 77% is used for animals, and this only produces 18% of our global calorie supply and astoundingly only 37% of our protein consumption. (Source: UN Food and Agriculture association)
And that is without even beginning to talk about animal welfare in the large factory farms that produce the cheap meat? When did chicken literally become cheaper than chips?
Clearly this is not just unsustainable, you can imagine that future generations may look back and wonder at our insanity. Using land to grow more vegetables and eating more plants allows us to reduce the land mass required to produce our food. This is not an argument for not eating meat or dairy it is simply a fact that we need to use our land wisely and cut down on the consumption of foods that have a high land high carbon footprint, low calorie output.
Would it help to approach our living world with a little more empathy, for the land, for the creatures we share the planet, for the environment? Things could and would be so much different if we were all to be a little more mindful and showed a little more respect for our one home.
We all can make a difference; we can all take steps that will help. Of course, bigger stuff needs to happen, governments need to act, net carbon zero needs to occur, policy and infrastructure and systems needs to change, and they are changing but the speed of change needs to increase.
Can our mindset around food change? Embracing the idea of eating more plants, understanding that cheap does not always mean good value, these are the things that will help save our health and that of the planet.
We here on our farm find ourselves struggling to standstill, it is always a tough battle to compete in this supermarket dominated landscape. It is difficult to continue to support local organic Irish farmers including our own farm, it costs more, but that is the course we have taken, and one we will never deviate from.
Your support is making a difference. You are making a difference.
Thanks for your support.
Kenneth
PS The autumnal winter crops are definitely creeping in now, with the harvest of swede and parsnip truly beginning, we are also delighted to have the first delivery or Irish organic carrots next week. It has been a tough year for root crop growing, but finally we are getting there.
Totally worth all the effort, this veggie packed lasagne is a meal in itself! I ordered a rescue box of veggies this week and was spoiled for choice. With a big head of cauliflower, peppers, aubergine, spring onions and Irish courgettes (and lots more) there was only one thing for it!
Add this to your meal plan. Feed a gang or portion and freeze for future dinners. **This can definitely be dairy free and vegan, just make a couple of swaps.
For the veg: Slice the courgette, aubergine and peppers into flat strips. Put them on a baking tray and season with salt and pepper, drizzle oil all over and roast in the oven for 40 minutes until soft.
Step 2: For the cauliflower bechamel sauce: Put the cauliflower florets in a pot of boiling salty water and cook until soft. Transfer to a blender with the milk, nutmeg, ground almonds and blend until smooth. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper..
Step 3: For the tomato sauce: In a wide pot add a tablespoon of oil, add the sliced spring onions and chopped garlic and cook for a few minutes to soften. Add the 2 tins of chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper. Simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Add the chopped basil stalks, give the sauce a quick blend with a hand blender.
Step 4: Construct the lasagne: in a large baking tray spread a tin layer of tomato sauce at the bottom, top with pasta sheets, layer roast veggies, spinach, and then the white sauce. Repeat finishing with the white sauce and topping with the grated cheese.
Step 5: Bake in the oven at 180ºC for 50 minutes. Allow to cook and set then slice and serve.
