love food hate waste wales
The Carrot and Cumin soup that stole your heart
MDuring Love Food Hate Waste Project 2016 (roadshows and workshops included) there was one soup that definitely stole everyone’s heart both in terms of taste and simplicity of preparation.
An easy recipe to help you use that bag of carrots you bought when you really only needed a couple. Nutritious, warming and satisfying it is versatile in its use of pulses, I actually make it with yellow split peas more often than with red lentils, but if you are in a rush lentils are a better option. If you do not have ras-el-hanout spice mixture you can increase the cumin dose, add some paprika, ground coriander, a pinch of chilli powder and a squeese of lemon. Fresh coriander or spinach complements the recipe very well. The use of almond milk is in my opinion what really makes this soup (use sweetened). And if you serve with toasted almonds it and coriander pesto you have a luxury version to indulge in.
Enjoy!
Ingredients
Makes 2.5lt soup or 6 portions for main
- 700g carrots
- 350g red lentils or split yellow peas
- 2.5 litres stock
- 250ml almond milk
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 1 pinch chilli flakes
- 1.5 tsp Ras El Hanout spice mix
- Salt
- Olive oil
- Fresh coriander or spinach (Optional)
Preparation
45minutes
- Wash carrots well with a vegetable brush and chop finely.
- Coat the bottom of a pot with enough olive oil.
- When hot add the cumin seeds and chilli flakes and fry for a few
- Add the carrots, with a couple of pinches of salt and stir fry for
- Add the lentils and Ras El Hanout and stir well until well coated
- Add the stock, bring to the boil and simmer for 20-30 minutes.
- Remove from the heat, add the almond milk and blend to a creamy
- Add the chopped spinach and/or coriander for a soup that will make you as strong as Popeye!
Lia’s Tips: Mix parsnips or potatoes with carrots to use up leftover vegetable. This soup is great with split yellow peas. Served with pesto and nuts it is a very filling meal. Serve with savoury muffins or toasted stale bread or croutons.
Savoury cornmeal cake
This is a recipe I have been playing with for years and I finalised it recently whilst delivering the Love Food Hate Waste campaign in Roath. I was looking for recipes in my notebook that can help people use their leftovers and what they have in the fridge/freezer. The savoury cake was one our roadshow freebies and was sampled at our last Love Food Haste Waste event on 10 Mach at Cardiff Students’ Union in return for pledges to take action to reduce waste.
It is a delicious recipe that can be adapted to help you use greens and smaller quantities of leftover vegetable. The batter can remain the same and you can be as creative and daring as you like with what flavours you create. You end up with an amazing tasty snack on its own or with some relish or chutney on top and a (gluten-free) substitute to bread which is fantastic with soups or a tin of baked beans.
Cornmeal is a basic ingredient for one of my favourite Greek breads called Bobota. Grated pumpkin and marrow with cornmeal and feta cheese has always been one of my most favourite bakes that my southern Greek Granma Vasiliki used to make for us. And five years ago the lovely Zoe English, of Bird to Market, handed over Nenneh Cherry’s cornbread recipe to me after my excited squeals on tasting it for the first time in my life. So this savoury cake recipe is born from all these influences and is fast becoming one my favourite things to make this spring. I have adapted it to be gluten free – through the use of gluten free plain flour. And with courgette and tomato season approaching and rainbow chard already on the tables at our Farmers’ markets I am very excited for the many versions of the savoury cakes you could be imagining. Enjoy!
Ingredients (1 Bundt or other round 23-25cm baking tin)
- 350g Plain flour, preferably gluten free mix
- 250g Cornmeal (coarse or medium)
- 4 tsp Baking powder
- 80g Sugar (caster)
- 100g Butter melted
- 2 Eggs
- 450-480ml Milk
- 1-2 pinches of salt
- Some extra butter and flour for lining the baking tin
- 1 Small bunch fresh basil or other mixed or frozen herbs, including stems (around 30g)
- 225g Cherry or mini plum tomatoes (up to 300g)
- 1 Onion
- 2 medium or 1 large courgette diced OR
- 1 aubergine diced
- 1 Medium courgette coarsely grated
- 150g grated cheese, parmesan and cheddar mixed (or whatever you have available)
- salt & paper to season
Olive oil for the frying
Preparation (1hr and 15 minutes)
- Prepare your vegetable mixture first to allow enough time to cool.
- Fry the sliced onion with a pinch of salt, cover and let to nearly caramelise whilst you prepare the rest.
- Dice the courgettes or aubergine and halve the cherry or plum tomatoes.
- Add the courgette or aubergine with another pinch of salt and fry for 5 minutes.
- Add the tomatoes and basil, stir and cover until all ingredients soften- for around 5 minutes.
- Taste and season with salt and pepper if needed. Remove from heat to cool down.
- Grate the last courgette and the cheese.
- Mix the flour, cornmeal and baking powder.
- Add the rest of the dough ingredients and mix well so that there are no lumps.
- Add your fried ingredients, raw courgette and cheese.
- Pour into a lined baking tin and bake on 180 Celsius for 40-50 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
Lia’s Tips:
- The batter should be moist but not too runny. You can add 450ml of the milk first and see if you need to add more after you add the tomatoes and vegetable.
- You can use spinach and other greens such as Kale. Feel free to experiment with various herbs ad ingredients. Use what you have in the fridge and for inspiration on flavours look up focaccia recipes.
- This is a great recipe for using those herbs that you have in the freezer or the ones that are about to go off in the fridge!
- For a bread tin and smaller quantity of the cake halve the recipe ingredient.
- The cake rises quite a lot and it keeps well in the fridge for about a week.
Egg and Banana Pancakes
Pancake day is one of my favourite food calendar highlights. Spelt flour or buckwheat flour pancakes are on the top of my list. For your savoury pancakes nothing can beat a good galette bretonne with some melted butter in the mixture. As for fillings spinach, ricotta and sundried tomato and good quality cheddar and ham are two I always choose. And for my sweet tooth I can’t find two more satisfying than a chocolate spread and banana filling or a simple drizzle of maple syrup with cinnamon and crushed walnuts.
But today I am suggesting you try a different kind of pancake, without flour and one that can use those over ripened, even black bananas which you squashed forgotten at the bottom of your fruit bowl.
Egg and banana pancakes, as sung by Jack Johnson the troubadour of the surf, are a fantastic breakfast but can make a great gluten free alternative for pancake day. And all of our Love Food Hate Waste cooking workshop participants, who learned how to make those on 7 February, will tell you they are simple and quick to make. So don’t hesitate to give them a go.
Ingredients:
- 1 mashed overripe banana(large)
- 2 eggs
- ½ tablespoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- 1-2 Tablespoon flax/lineseed ground (optional)
Or - 2 Tablespoons peanut or almond butter (optional)
- Pinch of salt
- Olive oil/butter/or coconut oil.
Preparation:
- Mash the banana well.
- Mix with the beaten eggs.
- Sprinkle the baking powder, cinnamon and salt and mix well.
- If you are adding ground seeds and peanut butter do this last and mix well.
- Alternative just throw everything in a mixer/blender and mix well.
- Add 1-2 tablespoons of the mixture to a slightly oiled pan.
- Cook on very low heat for up to a minute or until the edges seem set and the middle seems almost set.
- Flip with a spatula and cook for another 30 seconds max.
- Serve with crispy bacon and maple syrup, or fruit, yoghurt and honey.
Tips: You can add chopped or mashed fruit in the pancakes. The ground seeds or the peanut butter can help bind the mixture. Don’t worry if the mixture seems too runny. Just cook the pancake at a lower temperature until the edges of the pancake seem set and the middle almost set. You can prepare the mixture the night before and leave in your fridge ready for breakfast.
The savvy soup called Ribollita
Have you ever looked at vegetable leftovers in your fridge or the seasonal mix in your vegetable boxes and thought: ‘What could I make with this?’. Have you every thrown away cooked vegetable leftovers? If yes this soup is for you. If not the soup is still for you so try it anyway.
In the past month I have been working with Green City Events to deliver the Love Food Hate Waste Cities Campaign in Cardiff through Roath based roadshows and cooking workshops. In this process I have been developing and revisiting recipes that can help people be savvy and healthy.
The lovely soups of Ribollita and Minestrone were my natural first choices because they are very easy to make and they can have as many variations as the people who make them.
Ribollita literally means reboiled in Italian. It is a Tuscan soup that uses leftover cooked vegetable and is eaten with stale toasted or grilled bread. You can make Ribollita with any seasonal vegetable at our disposal but the dominant ingredient should be a mix of greens and you should include some kind of cooked bean.
My Ribollita soup can be easily turned to a Minestrone with the addition of more stock or water and pasta or quinoa. This is a great solution if you have less vegetable or more visitors to feed.
On 7 February 2015 at our first Love Food Hate Waste cooking workshop participants prepared four different versions of Ribollita and Minestrone types of soup using different herbs to flavour it, different grains or pasta and mix of vegetables at their disposal. Why not love food and your leftover vegetable too by trying our soup?
Ingredients:
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 celery stick
300 mixed greens - 150-200 g left over root vegetable/squash or potato
- 2 carrots (around 160g)
- 4 Garlic cloves
- ½-1 tin chopped tomatoes Or a couple of ripe tomatoes chopped
- 1 can beans drained and washed
- (280g) 50g rice/quinoa Or 100g pasta 2lt stock or boiling water
- Herbs of your choice such as: 10-15 leaves of basil 1 teaspoon oregano Or 2 teaspoons thyme 3 bay leaves Salt & Pepper
- Pecorino or parmesan cheese garnish (optional)
Preparation:
- Wash and chop all your vegetable and greens.
- Sauté the onion with a pinch of salt until translucent.
- Add the garlic and herbs and sauté for a few minutes.
- Add the chopped tomatoes and sauté for another few minutes.
- Add the root vegetable or potatoes and carrot and stir fry for a bit.
- Add the stock and simmer for ten minutes.
- Add the beans, greens and pasta and simmer for another 10 minutes.
- If you are using quinoa and rice add at the same time as the stock.
- Seasons with salt and pepper.
Lia’s Tips: the authentic ribollita uses recooked vegetable which you can add towards the end of the soup. Sage and parsley are another great combination of herbs for this soup. Kale, Cavolo Nero, flower sprouts, brussels sprouts, broccoli stalks and spring greens are some of the delicious leafs that you can add to your soup.
Lia's Kitchen 
Practice what I preach…
Posted on Updated on
In the past couple of months I have worked with Green City Events and Cynefin Cardiff to deliver two cooking workshops and a roadshow to help the kind people of Roath to find ways to reduce their food waste. We have done this in the process of delivering the Love Food Hate Waste Campaign [1] in Cardiff supported by Wrap Cymru.
The week after our last cooking workshop on 21 February I decided to practice what I preach and took my own personal Love Food Hate Waste challenge. I pledged to shop very little food (apart from fresh essentials) and to eat what is already in my cupboards and freezer for the most part of the week.
The challenge was a great creative success and I saved around £30 as I only bought small quantities of milk, some cheese and some salad to complement the meals we made.
The meal I was most proud of that week was a Mexican spice inspired vegetable dish made from frozen cauliflower, quorn mince and spinach (all commonly kept in my freezer), the leftover greens that we did not use at the cooking workshop on 21 February, the final two spoons of yoghurt, a tin of black beans from my essentials’ pantry and the last cup of couscous from that bag that we have not eaten for ages. Not only did that dish give us dinner and lunch the next day, I actually froze a couple of portions in anticipation of the busy week that followed.
During my challenge I looked carefully through my cupboards and my freezer. For example, I thawed just over half a kilo of meatball mix that was leftover from one of our supper clubs and made a linguini ragú with which gave us a couple of meals for two and another frozen meal.
At the Love Food Hate Waste workshops we aimed to empower people to make personal and household changes to their food consumption and wastage. Lots of people seemed worried about getting a recipe right or that they couldn’t cook with random ingredients. So hopefully through making different mixed vegetable Ribollita soups with various herbs and whatever vegetable was available to us at the same workshop we empowered participants to be creative and daring in adapting recipes to what they have or can afford. Experimenting is the way!
I would definitely recommend Eat-What-You-Have weeks like mine as they will help you sort through your cupboards and freezer. Making shopping lists or using the online Love Food Hate Waste App on your smart phone can help you loads with shopping and meal planning. And if you fancy being inspired by seasonal ingredients or what is on offer, why not browse www.lovefoodhatewaste.com for ideas.
One of the most useful tips I could give you to save food and money is to be aware of what you already store in our cupboards before heading back to the shops. Also storing food correctly, e.g. labelling it, using airtight containers or keeping your fridge temperature low will make you yield more meals from what you buy. Using your freezer more and keeping it tidy is another step to help you achieve this by prepping food in advance, storing the right amount of frozen basics or storing extra portions from meals.
The whole process of this project has made me think long and hard about food waste and food poverty. According to the Trussell Trust the number of people using food banks has almost tripled since last year. And whilst this is because of the increase in the number of food banks set up, a noteworthy effort to help an increasing number of people in need, I cannot reconcile this fact with the amount of food still being wasted in the UK. It is estimated that we still throw away 7 million tons of food and drink a year. This is food is costing all of us £12.5bn each year.
Today I was reading about France’s Good Samaritans law which protects those helping someone in need or peril from being sued or accused if something goes wrong. It is important to protect public health and to minimise risk for people in the food sector. But I wonder, would the introduction of a ‘good Samaritan’ legal principle in the UK encourage all of us personally as well as larger corporations or small (food) businesses to do more to address food poverty or to donate food that we would have otherwise wasted?
Our next and last Love Food Hate Waste Roadshow is on 10 March at Cardiff University Students’ Union.
[1] Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign that has been running since 2007 and run by WRAP, a well-established not-for profit company that is responsible for a lot of good work in on resource efficiency and waste reduction across the UK.
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This entry was posted in Comment, Events and tagged Cardiff, cooking workshops, food poverty, food waste, green city events cardiff, liaskitchen, Love Food Hate Waste, Love Food Hate Waste Ten Cities Campaign, love food hate waste wales.