Chicory, mushroom and feta spaghetti

An emerging theme in the Confined Kitchen is how much the food we cook acts as a class marker - how many of our storecupboard ingredients and the oddities at the back of our cupboards read as Very Middle Class. And what could be more middle class than a veg box?

I was resistant to the idea of a fruit and veg delivery for a long time, but in these homebound days, I am very grateful for the Oddbox deliveries that we've been receiving weekly for 18 months or so - especially since they, like many other delivery services, have had to stop taking on new customers for the time being. Fresh produce arriving on the doorstep, through the suddenly de rigueur mode of contactless delivery, has a very cheering effect.

I also love the fact that the contents vary from week to week. I find it easy to get stuck in a rut of buying the same things, so the minor challenge of an unexpected ingredient helps stop our family dinnertime being too tediously routine. 

As we got used to life under lockdown this week, I was contemplating what to do with small pile of red chicory from the veg box. I have plenty of cheese in the fridge, having stocked up a week or two ago, since my big fear in these strange times (apart from the obvious...) is running out of cheese. So I was thinking of baking them in a cheese sauce, but we were a bit low on milk, and there was a tub of creme fraiche that needed using up at the back of the fridge. I decided to throw caution to the wind and use some of our limited stock of dried pasta to make chicory into an actual meal.

I try and eat with the kids (nearly 4 and 13 months) every night - which back in the old days, when we left the house to work, meant I never rarely had more than half an hour to cook between us all getting home and sitting down to eat. So throwing everything in a pan and hoping for the best is my standard method. 

I chopped the 5 small heads of chicory and half a box of slightly tired mushrooms, and sauteed in olive oil for five minutes or so while I put the pasta on. Two cloves of garlic, some big shakes of dried parsley (who knew this was in the herb and spice cupboard?), then half a tub of creme fraiche and half a block of feta, because what isn't improved by feta? Another few minutes to cook down into a sauce and it was ready. The kids liked it, I enjoyed it, and it actually tasted like a properly thought-through meal. 

The following evening though, we had vegan sausage rolls with salad and baba ghanoush (to use up an Oddbox aubergine), which seems to represent the chaotic energy working of working from homr accompanied by two small children on lockdown fairly well...