An early autumn comfort food round-up

 I was going to call this just an autumn round-up, minus the qualifier, as it feels like it’s been autumn for a very long time now. Unfortunately, we’re only a week into October. It’s going to be a long winter, and this weird sort-of, not-quite lockdown is making it feel even longer. Forget less than a hundred days to Christmas, I’m considering measuring the time in test and trace cock-ups (an Excel spreadsheet you say? Marvellous.).

To cheer myself up, I have bought not one, but two advent calendars – nail polish and a fancy Fortnum’s one.  The only question is whether or not I can hold out until 1^st December before I start opening them.

And, there is food, thank goodness. An autumn abundance of it.  It’s autumn, so there must be root vegetables, so let’s begin with them two ways: fritters and slaw. This recipe comes from Claire Thomson’s Home Cookery Year. You have probably heard Melinda and myself singing the praises of two of her other books, Art Of The Larder and New Kitchen Basics, and this one is also full of good ideas. For this, you need to start by grating a pile of vegetables: recipe says parsnip, cabbage, carrot or beetroot, plus a thinly sliced red onion. I didn’t have parsnips, but I did have both beetroot and carrots, so I used both, and it seemed to work. It feels like a pretty forgiving recipe. Divide your grated vegetables into  two. Mix one lot with crème fraiche or yoghurt and Dijon mustard, and you have your slaw. Add grated potato (yes, more grating) to the other lot, then mix in flour and eggs to create the fritter mix. Form into suitable size fritters, and fry. We had sausages with this, as the recipe suggests, but you could have them on their own, or with pretty much anything else. I wondered about frying some halloumi alongside the fritters.

Sausages, fritters, slaw

From the same book, I also made polenta with blue cheese and radicchio: the polenta is cooked on the hob, and then baked, adding cheese and walnuts for the last five minutes, and then served alongside stir fried radicchio. Another very comforting plateful.

Polenta with radicchio and blue cheese

To return to root veg, some slightly forgotten-about beetroot were rescued to go into Nigel Slater’s beetroot dahl with garam masala, which is a very comforting plate/bowlful. Cook lentils in stock until tender. Meanwhile, fry onions with mustard seeds and chilli flakes, until crispy. Stir cooked beetroot through the lentils, along with garam masala and a knob of butters. Serve with the onions on top of the lentils, and yoghurt drizzled over the top.

Beetroot dahl: tasty and a lovely pink colour

There was also a blast from my past, in the form of leek and bacon risotto. Well, it’s only sort of a risotto as it’s made with brown rice, but it’s one of those things I grew up eating. It comes, my mother tells me, from a Marks and Spencer cookery book published in 1978, the year I was born… First, fry off some chopped bacon until crisp, then set aside. In the same pan, fry a chopped leek, then add the rice and fry for a few minutes. Then add chopped tinned tomatoes, stock, cayenne, cumin and lemon rind. Bring to the boil, then simmer until the liquid is absorbed – about twenty minutes. Then add some butter and put the bacon back in the pan to warm through before serving. This was both delicious and nostalgic eating – and definitely comforting.

Blast from the past: leek and bacon (sort of) risotto

Finally, the ultimate comfort food is of course, cake. In this case, chocolate, blackberry and bay brownies, again from Home Cookery Year. A bit of useful practice for our cookalong, although I don’t know if I’ll have blackberries at that point to make these again. These were delicious, although maybe a little too gooey in the middle, although I was making two thirds of the recipe, meaning I didn’t really know what size tin to do them in, which may have had something to do with it.

Anyway, thank God for food to get us through the autumn and winter. And wine, of course.