Ok I’ll admit it – I got confused and thought this week was pancake day! I knew I had half a cabbage plus my eggs left so I was thinking some sort of savoury pancake and then I remembered the fabulous Japanese pancakes I’d had. A bit of googling later and I had supper sorted out. Apparently Okonomiyaki roughly means “as you like it”, and is almost the Japanese equivalent of bubble and squeak. It can be filled with whatever you’ve got, but apparently the essential ingredient is cabbage. It is supposed to be served with Okonomiyaki sauce, which is kind of like Japanese HP sauce and a Japanese version of mayonnaise.

I’ve mangled the recipes so much that I daren’t call it Okonomiyaki, so I shall go for Japanese inspired pancakes:

Japanese inspired pancakes with home sauce
125g plain flour
1 tbsp cornflour
½ tsp baking powder
1 egg
160 ml stock (veg stock, or dashi if you can get hold of it)
½ cabbage finely shredded
Random other fillings (I used some chopped mushrooms and some smoked salmon: traditionally it would be prawns or shredded pork)

Mix the plain flour, cornflour and baking powder together in a largish mixing bowl. In a small bowl gently whisk together the egg and stock. Add the egg and stock into the flour mix and mix gently until you have a pancake batter.


Now add the cabbage and other fillings.


Take a large frying pan and heat a tbsp of oil. Put all the mixture into the pan and cook, turning it over at least once.

Whilst it is cooking you can make the sauce.


Mix together:


3 tbsp tomato ketchup
3 tbsp Worcester sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp cornflour mixed with a little water.



Put them all in a jug and microwave for 1 minute. Stir and then microwave again for another 30s.

Serve the pancake with the sauce artistically drizzled on top (or in a jug on the side!)









Note: next time I thing I will either use a bigger pan or cook it in two batches as it took a bit of cooking in the middle!

I’m not really a great fan of TV cookery programmes, but I have to admit I have a soft spot for Nigel Slater. He just seems to be more in touch with the real world. I really enjoyed his “Simple Suppers” series that was on recently: and it’s still available on iplayer. One of his recipes from the series was “Tidy Friday Pan Fry” which basically used up the last contents of the fridge at the end of the week. Even though it’s Monday I’ve taken inspiration from this idea and come up with “Hungry Monday Pan Fry” which used stuff I had in the fridge. It is completely flexibly and could easily be made vegetarian by omitting the bacon and adding, say, some mushrooms or whatever else you have.


Hungry Monday Pan Fry

1 onion, finely chopped
4 rashers of bacon, chopped into small lardon
4 small potatoes
½ dozen cherry tomatoes
½ small cabbage finely shredded

Cut the potatoes into quarters and put into a pan of cold water, bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 15 minutes – until just done.

Meanwhile put some oil into a medium frying pan and when it has heated add the bacon bits and cook until crispy. Remove the bacon from the pan and put to one side. Now add the onions to the pan and fry until softened.

By this time the potatoes should be ready, cut them into smaller chunks and add them to the onion mixture, and continue to fry gently.

Now put the cabbage into a separate saucepan and cook until just done (probably only a couple of minutes). In theory you should now add the bacon, tomatoes and cabbage into the frying pan and fry for a couple of minutes, possibly increasing the heat until things start to crisp. However, I didn’t have enough room left in the pan so I just served the cabbage on the side!

Serve with lots of nice wholegrain mustard.

And sorry there are no photos, but it was cold and snowy – and we were very hungry!!!

I love soup, it ticks so many boxes. It is a great lunch with a couple of slices of nice bread, I usually take a wee tub of soup to work and after a couple of minutes in the microwave I have a lovely hot lunch. And it is a great way of using different veg, whatever I have lying around that needs using up.

My usual strategy is 1 litre of veg stock (I cheat and use Marigold Bouillion powder – fantastic stuff) per kg of veg. The veg can be pretty much anything, so long as it includes at least one onion. I chop everything up, then gently fry/sauté the onion in some olive oil in a largish pan for about 5 minutes. Add the chopped veg, put the lid on the pan and sauté for another 5 minutes.  I might at this point add some herbs and/or spices. Then add the stock, bring to the boil, and simmer gently until the veg are tender. Then if I fancy chunky soup I take half the veg out and blitz the rest with billy the blender, or I just blitz the whole lot. Favourite combinations at the moment are: parsnip with curry powder, carrot with ginger and cinnamon, or mixed veg with some sweet chilli sauce added at the end.

Today I fancied a broth. I’m not sure what the technical difference is, but to me a broth is when you have small dice of everything plus some pearl barley, or rice or small pasta. So I made mixed veg broth:

Mixed veg broth

2 medium leeks, finely sliced
2 largish carrots, peeled and finely diced
6 small potatoes, peeled and finely diced
1 small can sweet corn
100g pearl barley
2 tbsp olive oil
1.2 litre veg stock.

Saute the leeks in the olive oil. Then add the carrots and potatoes, put the lid on and sauté for another 5 or so minutes. Add the veg stock and bring to the boil, and the pearl barley and turn down to a gentle simmer. Simmer with the lid on for 30 minutes or so until the pearl barley is cooked. Finally add the sweetcorn and allow it to heat through.

This made enough for 2 huge lunchtime portions plus enough soup for me for lunches all this week. Next time I might try adding some Thai Tom Yum paste before adding the stock and then add brown rice instead of the pearl barley.





So at the end of the weekend the contents of the veg bag are reduced to:

1 onion

1 small cabbage

3 small potatoes

Plus ½ dozen eggs

When I think of carrots I normally think of those orange root vegetables. But apparently that wasn’t always the case. Originally carrots were various different colours, including purple ones, which may or may not have come from Afghanistan. By the 17th Century carrots were firmly established in Europe, including in Holland, and came in a variety of colours including red and yellow. And so the story goes that, in order to impress their Royal Family (the House of Orange), some farmers managed successfully to cross and breed orange carrots, which have been the dominant sort of carrot ever since!




All this is a prelude to what I found this morning: yes it looked like there were some heritage carrots in my veg bag this morning as, after scrubbing them thoroughly, I discovered I had purple carrots. Not only were they purple, but they were fantastically sweet, so I decided the best use for them would be in some carrot pate.

Carrot pate

2 large carrots peeled and cut into big chunk
1 large onion, peeled and finely diced
2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tsp harissa paste (or more if you like things more spicy)
½ tsp caraway seeds
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp sugar
Pinch of salt

Put the carrots into a saucepan with water, bring to the boil and cook until done. Drain, and when cooled cut into smaller chunks.

Meanwhile, heat 1 tbsp of the oil in a frying pan and cook the onions until softened and slightly coloured.

Put the onions and any excess oil into a large bowl, add the harissa paste, cumin, caraway, sugar, salt and the other tbsp of oil. Mix together. Then add the carrots and mix again. Now either mash or blitz the mixture to your preferred texture of pate. It was great with oatcakes, but would probably work well with pita bread too.