An Embarrassment of Riches, or How Do You Solve A Problem Like Veggies?

Like everyone else, we've been trying to reduce the number of times we go outside. To that end, I have been taking a look at the endless lists of places that deliver groceries now, and decided to sign on with Natoora. This was more of a faff than it ought to have been -- which, given their target audience until a month or so ago was the restaurant trade -- should have tipped me off, in hindsight. Everything is sold either in units (don't forget to buy 6 eggs!) or kilos (sucks to be you if that is meaningless). The app doesn't have a basket: you get assigned a delivery, and whatever you've ordered at midnight of the delivery day is what you get. If it's in stock. Oh, and compute your own bill, pleb. (OK, my email inbox tell me they've changed this. As of yesterday.)

If I sound bitter, it's because we were awakened on Good Friday to discover a delivery man carrying fully three of those enormous flat cardboard boxes: Natoora had somehow managed to duplicate my order, but with a handful of exceptions, they'd tripled, or even quadrupled, the amount of veggies we ordered. Hooray, I have two kilos of tomatoes, a kilo of mushrooms, a kilo of spinach, three cucumbers, three head of broccoli, and the better part of 500 grams of wild garlic! (The fridge was stuffed.) (And, yet, only 2 apples, which together weighed 300 g. Feh.)

Well, when the going gets tough, the tough turn on the stove. Here's a quick gallop through what we made!

1. Mushroom ragú, with a kilo of tomatoes, a punnet of mushrooms, and several carrots. Simmered for 5 hours, and straight into the freezer for a rainy day.

2. Broccoli and stilton soup: BBC Good Food has a decent recipe. Guess what we had for lunch last week?

3. Mama Curator's Noodle Auflauf (translated by me): makes at least 4 servings

300-350g pasta (linguini if you want to be true to Mama Curator -- we weren't)
250g ham, chopped
400g chopped mushrooms, sauteed (we added some sage -- Mama Curator approved!)
1 can chopped tomatoes
shredded cheese
basil
bechamel sauce (I think we made about 500 mL in total, but the Curator doesn't bother measuring bechamel, I have learned)
2 eggs, beaten
bread crumbs
butter

Cook the noodles and let them cool. Make a bechamel sauce, then carefully stir in the eggs. Grease a baking dish, then layer: pasta, cheese, mushrooms, ham, tomatoes, basil, noodles, cheese.

Here's one we made earlier

Pour the sauce over the top, scatter with breadcrumbs and butter. Cook at 200 C (180 C fan-assisted) for an hour. This is dleicious, and reheats well.

Und schau mal!

4. Sweet potato and wild garlic soup

This I basically made up, and (as with most of our soups) we had Julia's help. Adjust timings accordingly if you have a pot rather than a pressure cooker.

1 lg onion, diced
225g wild garlic, stems and leaves separately chopped
1 tsp tomato puree
1 tsp harissa
500g sweet potatoes, in cubes
~3 tbsp Calvados
750 ml stock
Bay leaf
1 tsp Ras El Hanout
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
½ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp sour cream

Saute the onion and wild garlic stems in oil, or a mixture of oil and butter. After they're soft and translucent, add the tomato puree, harissa, and ras el hanout, and saute a bit longer (you can also add the sweet potato here); deglaze with Calvados.

Add the stock,wild garlic leaves, and bay leaf. Simmer until the potato is soft: if using an Instant Pot, this is 5 mins at high pressure.

Blend until it's to your preferred consistency, then add the remaining ingredients. This also went straight to the freezer, so now we don't need to worry about lunch for a bit!

5. Creamy Chicken Spanakopita Skillet

This is based of the recipe at Serious Eats, so I won't go into huge detail: we didn't have scallions or dill, so skipped them, added nutmeg to the spinach, because duh, and half-and-half is an American product (with a fat content halfway between milk and single cream -- it's the quintessential coffee additive), so we just used whole milk. We also couldn't find phyllo, so used the pre-made puff pastry we could find. Have some pictures!

Spinach mixture and chicken being added to the garlic cream sauce

Incidentally, that's Madam Speaker (she's tough as nails, can take the heat, and gets the job done!), who is a cast-iron skillet from Marquette Castings (shameless plug -- you can take the girl out of the mitten, but not vice versa).

Finished product

As seen on plate

This was delicious, but word of warning: it left a residue on the sides of the pan that was incredibly hard to remove -- we reseasoned Madam Speaker afterward, in fact!

6. Broccoli and Stilton pasta, using the New York Times' recipe: we cooked the broccoli first, and in hindsight didn't need to.