It’s Thursday – and today I have at least three reasons to be cheerful:
1. My hens have finally decided it’s spring and have started laying again. Well I say hens, but I’ve only had 2 eggs from them in a week so I suspect that only one of the girls is laying. However, the sisterhood is standing firm and they aren’t letting on who’s pulling their weight and who isn’t!
2. It’s Valentine’s Day, so here’s what I made my husband. Yes I know it’s cheesy, and I know it doesn’t have any veg in it, but hey!
3. It’s veg bag day. As ever the cheerful squirrels were there with their veg bags. And this week there was talk of workshops: a mushroom growing session and a curry cooking session coming to a campus near us soon: yes please! Checking out the contents of my bag revealed:
1. My hens have finally decided it’s spring and have started laying again. Well I say hens, but I’ve only had 2 eggs from them in a week so I suspect that only one of the girls is laying. However, the sisterhood is standing firm and they aren’t letting on who’s pulling their weight and who isn’t!
2. It’s Valentine’s Day, so here’s what I made my husband. Yes I know it’s cheesy, and I know it doesn’t have any veg in it, but hey!
3. It’s veg bag day. As ever the cheerful squirrels were there with their veg bags. And this week there was talk of workshops: a mushroom growing session and a curry cooking session coming to a campus near us soon: yes please! Checking out the contents of my bag revealed:
6 medium potatoes
2 large parsnips
3 huge carrots
1 beetroot
3 leeks
3 onions
A couple of dozen sprouts
That’s got to be the best £4 I’ve spent for a while! I also got ½ a dozen eggs to keep me going until my hens really start laying again.
Tonight’s recipe was inspired by those rather yummy veg pots that you see in the supermarkets. They look great: a mixture of funkiness and healthiness and so easy to heat up a healthy lunch – what’s not to like. But, let’s face it they are pretty pricey and then there’s all that waste: the cardboard wrapper (ok you can recycle it) and the plastic pot. So surely I can come up with my own not-quite-so-innocent pot. What follows makes enough for two hearty lunches.
The pots start with some rice or grain: so I took 140g of bulgar wheat, put it in a glass bowl, added a tsp of ground cumin, and then add enough boiling water to just cover the bulgar. Cover the bowl and leave to stand for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile make 1 portion of the spicy carrot pate that I tried out a couple of weeks ago. But don’t blitz it quite so thoroughly, it needs to stay quite chunky.
And then there is always some green healthy stuff in one layer. So I took a dozen sprouts, washed them thoroughly and chopped them up into really thin slices. The idea with these is that you don’t pre-cook them, so they need to be in small enough pieces that 3 minutes or so in the microwave will cook them, but leave them with some crunch.
Now assemble your pots: put half the bulgar wheat in each pot. Then add a layer of shredded sprout, top with the chunky carrot pate, and then sprinkle on some seeds (I used sunflower and pumpkin). And there you have it, veg pots that can be heated in the microwave for about 3 minutes to provide a yummy healthy lunch.
Meanwhile make 1 portion of the spicy carrot pate that I tried out a couple of weeks ago. But don’t blitz it quite so thoroughly, it needs to stay quite chunky.
And then there is always some green healthy stuff in one layer. So I took a dozen sprouts, washed them thoroughly and chopped them up into really thin slices. The idea with these is that you don’t pre-cook them, so they need to be in small enough pieces that 3 minutes or so in the microwave will cook them, but leave them with some crunch.
Now assemble your pots: put half the bulgar wheat in each pot. Then add a layer of shredded sprout, top with the chunky carrot pate, and then sprinkle on some seeds (I used sunflower and pumpkin). And there you have it, veg pots that can be heated in the microwave for about 3 minutes to provide a yummy healthy lunch.
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