cheese-baked egg-stuffed tomatoes - Sally Butcher recipe

Baked tomatoes with eggs and cheese

For no particular reason, I've been making a few things lately that involve baking eggs inside things.  I love eggs and baked eggs are a great way to have eggs for dinner, rather than the usual breakfast.  I also rather enjoy the thrill of fitting the eggs inside whatever it is.

I have Sally Butcher's Veggiestan out of the library at the moment and one of the recipes that I instantly wanted to try was this one for tomatoes stuffed with eggs and topped with cheese.  Cunningly, it involves putting some bread underneath to sop up the juices and make more substantial.

These were pretty easy - just scooping out the inside of tomatoes, frying some onions, mixing some of the inside of the tomato with the onions, cracking an egg inside each and topping with cheese but look a lot more impressive.  I did think that they might go better with brunch than dinner, though.

Hollowed out tomatoes

Hollowed tomatoes with eggs inside

Stuffed tomatoes with eggs and cheese

Baked tomatoes with eggs and cheese

Salsa

For some reason, it's taken me ages to get salsa right.  It's not that different to Gujarati chutneys (not what is in English considered a "chutney" but spicy sauces of various descriptions to accompany samosas and bhajias and other such savoury things) which I can manage just fine but salsa just never worked for me.  I tried various recipes online but the consistency just didn't come out right - too watery or too chunky or both. ARGH.

Anyway, the other day, we were having Mexican food and I resolved to try again with salsa.  I've tested this recipe out a couple of times since (in the interests of science, obviously, not just because it resulted in more Mexican food) and it appears to work.  Hurrah!  I no longer have to buy it at the supermarket and feel like a dismal failure.

Salsa

Recipe:

Quantity:  plenty for two people who really like salsa.

Chop four tomatoes and two onions finely (do not use a food processor, this makes it all too watery) - I like pretty much a 1:1 ratio of tomatoes to onions but, obviously, if you aren't as fond of onion, you may want to dial back on the onions.

Add the juice of a lime.  If you don't have a lime, lemon works pretty much equally well.

Add  about two tablespoons worth of tomato puree - I find this is the key to making it not watery.

To taste, depending on how hot you like your salsa:  red chilli flakes, paprika, sumac, black pepper.  I find the blend of different types of pepper gives it more depth.

And, obviously, a bit of salt.  Optionally, a little bit (like a teaspoon or so) of vodka gives it a little kick that's quite nice.  Topping with chopped coriander is also good but not vital.

Sweet potato, bean, cheese and mustard burritos

I realise that these sound bizarre but they are incredibly tasty.  Honestly.  In our house they have a collective noun of their very own and are known as "mustardy sweet potatoey beany goodness" which sums it up rather well, we feel.  We have fed them to a variety of people all of whom seem to have enjoyed it - including my lovely in-laws who are usually more meat and plain veg types.  The recipe is here.

The only tweak that I've made to this when I've made it is that, rather than peel, chop and boil the sweet potatoes, I put them unskinned in a plastic bag in the microwave, leave the bag slightly open, and then microwave.  My grandmother gave me this tip - it works with other vegetables too, potatoes/aubergines if you're wanting to add them to something but don't have time to cook them more conventionally.  I have absolutely no idea what made her come up with this method but it is genius.

Anyway, having cooked some sweet potatoes in the method of your choice, you mash 'em:

Mashing sweet potato

Mashing sweet potato

Cook up a tasty mixture of onions and a tin of tomatoes:

Tomato and oniony goodness

Cook up some beans - mmmm, beans.

Beans

Stir in a whole jar of seedy mustard - no really!

Mashed sweet potatoes with mustard

Stir in lots of grated cheddar (also added in some chopped coriander because why not?).  Actually, this is a really good sweet potato mash in general, we've used versions of it to top vegetarian cottage pie.

Mashed sweet potatoes with mustard, cheese and coriander

And then the beans - gently!

Mustardy sweet potatoes with cheese and beans

Then you wrap in tortillas and bake for 10-15 minutes:

We usually make a lot of them and freeze - they freeze really well, except that they take quite a while to defrost.  If possible, it's best to defrost them overnight and then bake in the oven.  If you can't defrost overnight, give them a quick blast in the microwave before baking in the oven from frozen.

American food

This article on "Why do Brits love American food?" bemused me.  We do?!

Now, there's plenty of good American food - Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, for example - but, mostly, I think British people tend to think of Italian/French food as the food that they are particularly fond of.

Not least because of things like this that I spotted in the American section of the World Foods aisle at my local Tescos.

Really, America?  Why put a pumpkin in a tin?  And, if you do, please don't pretend that it's natural.  You know what is natural?  AN ACTUAL PUMPKIN.

Hadley Freeman - teenage vegetarians and eating disorders

I'd like to start this post by saying that I love Hadley Freeman.  I've never met her but, in my view, she is the best columnist out there.  She's funny, insightful, she writes beautifully and she doesn't take herself too seriously.

This recent article from her is vintage Hadley, sample quote:  "The idea of trends emerging from festivals always strikes me as a pretty hilarious one, and only someone who has never actually been to a festival can actually believe in this concept. Most people can barely find their tent by Saturday night, let alone deal with the idea of Working a Look."  Genius.

However, this article from her on how to parent girls is absolutely horrible.  Why, Hadley, WHY?

Why am I writing about this on a food blog?  This section:

If your daughter wants to be a vegetarian, urge her to wait until she is 16

When Lena Dunham announced that "a lot of times when you are a vegetarian it is a just not very effective eating disorder" she was duly pilloried. But speaking as someone who has been a vegetarian for 30 years and has a certain amount of knowledge about eating disorders, I'm going to defend Dunham here, even though she slightly missed the real point. Vegetarianism is not an ineffective eating disorder – it is a potential gateway to eating disorders.

Obviously not all vegetarians become anorexic and not all anorexics are vegetarian (although in my experience, in regards to the latter part of that sentence, there is a heavy overlap). But vegetarianism encourages people to divide foods between the good and the bad, and it then becomes a legitimate means of limiting one's diet. Your daughter has a whole lifetime ahead of her to think of food as something other than a pleasurable physical necessity. Why let her start early? 

I hardly know where to start! I read this and literally said AAAAARRRGGHH out loud.

I have been fuming about this on and off for days and it's taken me a while to organise my thoughts properly because there are so many disparate things that irritate me about it. I have numbered them in a pitiful attempt to pretend that they are now organised because they are in a list:

1. The cultural assumptions in it. There are plenty of communities, in particular, mine, which has a strong presence in the UK, which are vegetarian and for whom vegetarianism is a way of life that has been practised for hundreds of years and has absolutely no connection to eating disorders.

2. The clear assumption that obviously your daughter couldn't possibly have grown up as a vegetarian (related to #1). 

3. The assumption that vegetarian food is healthier. This is just wrong. Some vegetarian food is healthy. Some is gloriously indulgent. And, of course, the vast majority of desserts are vegetarian. 

4. The idea that omnivores somehow don't limit their diets. Everyone limits their diets in some way, shape or form, ranging from "don't want to eat horse meat because the horsies are cute" to "don't want to eat brussel sprouts because I don't like them". I honestly find not eating beetroot has more of an impact on my day to day life than not eating meat. (Because so many people put tasty goats cheese in with evil beetroot - why do you hate me, people who do this? WHY? But I digress.) 

5. I can't speak for all vegetarians (obviously, since the usually lovely Hadley is a vegetarian) but that bit about how vegetarians think of food as something other than a pleasurable physical necessity and divide it into good and bad and stuff.. bizarre to me. I just don't think about it that much. Honestly, I don't think I spontaneously think about meat and the fact that I don't eat it and never have very often at all. When I do think about it, it's usually because someone else has raised it in conversation or written an incredibly annoying comment piece in a newspaper about it. I really don't think, when I'm picking my sandwich from M&S, "good sandwich, bad sandwich, good sandwich, bad sandwich" or anything like that. Apart from anything else, not all vegetarian food is good. Some of it is badly cooked and some of it is beetroot and stuff.

6. Finally, and probably most importantly: I just think it is a spectacularly bad idea "not to let" your child become a vegetarian if they want to. I mean, even if you buy into this stuff about how it's the first step on the road to anorexia, is forbidding your child to become a vegetarian going to help? Does turning food into a battleground between you and your child ever help your child avoid food issues?

7. And another thing. If your daughter is on the road to anorexia, SEEK SOME HELP on how to support her. I don't think just asking her not to become a vegetarian is going to cut it.

Sorry, Hadley, I still love you but this piece was dreadful.

Pasta with yoghurt, peas and chilli - Ottolenghi recipe

Pasta with yoghurt, peas, parsley , feta
with walnuts toasted in chilli olive oil on top

Various recipes lately have been making me realise how awesome peas are.  Including this unusual recipe from Ottolenghi for pasta with yoghurt, peas and chilli.

Overall verdict:  lovely.  Though unexpectedly not that hot (in the temperature sense) because the yoghurty mixture isn't hot when you mix it with the pasta - it kind of tastes more like a pasta salad than a main course pasta dish, if you know what I mean.  I really really liked the nuts toasted in olive oil with chilli flakes especially - that is totally happening again for me on top of other pasta dishes.  And I think I might test out other options with the yoghurty pasta sauce concept as well - burnt aubergine in it would be nice, I reckon..

Anyway.  Back to this recipe:   you blend some yoghurt, peas, garlic and olive oil in a food processor:

Yoghurt, peas, garlic and olive oil

While you cook the pasta, toast some nuts in olive oil with chilli flakes.  Ottolenghi says pine nuts but I went for walnuts because I like them better and had some left over from this pesto experiment.   And also I didn't have any pine nuts.  You should, at the same time, cook the remaining peas - Ottolenghi suggests doing this in a third pan but I didn't want my lovely husband to hate me (he does the washing up) so I just put them in with the pasta, half way through.  You can totally tell from Ottolenghi's recipes that he creates them in a restaurant kitchen where he does not have to do the washing up or be married to the person who does the washing up.

Toasting walnuts in olive oil with chilli flakes

Toasting walnuts in olive oil with chilli flakes

Toasting walnuts in olive oil with chilli flakes

Chop up some feta and herbs - Ottolenghi says basil but I went for parsley for roughly similar reasons to the pine-nuts/walnuts thing earlier!  I think mint/dill would be nice too.

Feta and parsley

You then stir it all together - adding the yoghurt mixture slowly to the pasta to avoid it splitting - and with the nuts on top to look artistic.

Pasta with yoghurt, peas, parsley and feta

Pasta with yoghurt, peas, parsley and feta

Pasta with yoghurt, peas, parsley , feta
with walnuts toasted in chilli olive oil on top

Khachapuri - the food of the gods

Mmmm, khachapuri

So, we went to Moscow about a year ago, and - apart from the Kremlin and other irrelevances - the best thing was the Georgian food.  And the best thing about the Georgian food was khachapuri.  I could try to describe it but it wouldn't really work - you just need to try it.  There are variants but, essentially, it's flat bread with cheese on top and eggs cracked in and cooked on the hot bread.  I know, what you're thinking, "I can eat bread, cheese and eggs any time", but khachapuri is just SO much more than the sum of its parts.  It is glorious stuff.

As soon as we came back, we investigated Georgian restaurants in London - Tamada, in St Johns Wood, is pretty good but, really, I wanted to make it at home.  I was thrilled to see that Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook, which I have out from the library, had a recipe, so I gave it a whirl.

It was great fun to make - particularly the final bit where you had to make little boats with the dough (made in a similar way to this recipe) and put an egg yolk in each one, along with as much of the egg white as you could fit in.  The recipe suggests that you  pinch two ends of dough and then straighten the side "walls" but I found it easier (after a bit of trial and error) to make the "walls" first and then pinch the ends.

Khachapuri

Khachapuri boats

They were yummy.  Key, I think to them, is the spicing - za'atar, along with some lemon and salt and pepper.  It's odd because I hadn't previously realised that khachapuri were spiced but, as soon as I'd spiced the cheese mixture, I knew it was going to taste like the khachapuri of Moscow.  The mixture of ricotta, halloumi and feta also worked well but I'd be inclined - next time - to have more cheese mixture: dough ratio.  And probably to make a couple of bigger ones to split rather than the small ones as they are a) fiddlier and b) mean that there's more bread than eggy/cheesey goodness!

Putting egg yolks in the khahapuri

Putting egg yolks in the khachapuri

Khachapuri with yolks ready to go into the oven

Khachapuri all done!

It does all make me realise how geographically close Gujarat is to Georgia/other Middle Eastern countries generally, "khachapuri" means "undercooked bread" in Gujarati, doubtless referring to the fact that the egg cooks on the bread.