The times they are a-changin’…

 

Strawberries!

My jab is booked. Because the NHS in Kent is generally a bit useless, I couldn’t get an appointment until next Thursday, and I will have to take two trains to get there, but it is booked (I’ve got an even longer trip for the second one). Hopefully, this is the beginning of my own personal route out of lockdown, especially as my husband gets his second jab on the same day.

The seasons are slowly shifting as well. Our last veg box brought us parsnips, cabbage and carrot, but with the first English strawberries also available to buy as an extra (yes, of course we bought some). This week we got our first local asparagus (delayed because of the frosty nights we’ve had recently) and raspberries. But at the same time, we haven’t really reached salad-eating temperatures yet, so this has been a week of transitional food.

Here’s some of it…

Roasted fennel and tomato tabbouleh: Essentially, a warm bulgar wheat salad. Recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest, which is all about healthy eating, so I got to feel virtuous as well. I don’t seem to have a photo of this one, but it did taste nice.

Pea fritters with roasted parsnips with date and tamarind sauce: The pea fritters are Ottolenghi, and have made an appearance here before. They definitely feel summery, the parsnips are wintery, but they go surprisingly well together. The parsnip recipe comes from the Jikoni cookbook. They’re roasted with chilli flakes and chaat masala (which has somehow become one of my most used spice blends over the course of various lockdowns; I’d never heard of it before last year) for 45 minutes. While they do, you make a date and tamarind chutney. Serve the parsnips with this and some yoghurt. I’d never have thought of putting parnips with tamarind but it really works.

Parsnips and pea fritters (which look a more attractive colour in real life)

Aubergine in a tomato and tamarind (yes, more tamarind!)sauce: A sort of stew, but made with aubergine and tomato, and therefore also sort of summery. It’s from Sabrina Ghayour’s Bazaar and it is properly delicious. 

Aubergine and tomato sort-of stew, with flatbread and yoghurt.

Celeriac, sweet potato and porcini bake: Using up the celeriac has been a minor theme over the last week, hence this. It’s from Ed Smith’s On The Side, which is a useful book. As the name suggests it’s a collection of side dishes, but we had this as a main, with a fennel side salad. The various veg is sliced up and then layered with really quite a lot of parmesan, and the porcini soaking liquid poured over to keep it moist and provide extra flavour. A mandolin was very useful for this one...

Celeriac, etc bake

The last of the celeriac got made into remoulade by the husband, which we ate with smoked salmon.

Remoulade (the mandolin was useful for this one as well)

And at the end of this week we finally got our hands on some much-anticipated local asparagus, which we actually purchased in person from the farmers’ market. This was simply roasted, and eaten with Melinda’s famous miso and mustard mayonnaise – which is one of many things I am grateful to this blog for.