Root vegetable pie with a skin-on mash topping

Autumn cooking can be so great, as I noticed again tonight. How have I missed the hearty potato mash topped pies! It's not really cold enough yet for proper winter dishes, but since it's late September, I find that a few pies can be made. So I found that a root vegetable pie was in order for a Monday dinner.

I want to share this recipe with this month's Vegetable Palette vegetarian cooking challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table, which is very much the inspiration for this recipe anyway. Vegetable Palette's theme for September is “purple and blues” and this very much caught my imagination. During the whole month I was considering so many options for purple or blue recipes by using different vegetables and it was getting difficult to decide. I just didn't necessarily want to resort to blueberries, which I would've done, if no other good idea would've come along. Luckily I found these purple carrots and purple garlic, which somehow wanted to go into hearty pie, and I paired them with some golden beetroots and also fairly purple red onion. It's probably my twisted sense of humour that instead of the naturally purple beetroot, I used its golden cousin. Well, it did work well together. This recipe is also very easy to veganise, I just preferred using butter and cheese in the mash. 

Here is the recipe for my purple root vegetable pie:

For the filling:

100 g purple carrots

4 golden beetroots

1/3 cup puy lentils

1 large red onion

3 purple garlic cloves

Olive oil

A dash of dry cider (I used organic Black Fox cider)

1-2 tbsp vegetable stock powder

Sage

Thyme

Salt

Ground black pepper

For the topping:

500 g potatoes

2 tbsp butter or margarine

1 tsp salt

50 g grated Emmental (optional)

Method:

Cook the potatoes in salt water until they are done. Drain most of the water off, but leave a little bit of it in the pan, add the butter, salt and cheese and mash. Set to side.

Peel the root vegetables and cut them into cubes. Chop the red onion fairly coarsely and the garlic finely and start cooking these in olive oil. After a few minutes, add the root vegetables. After again a few minutes, add a dash of cider and vegetable stock powder and let simmer. Add a little bit water, if needed. 

In the meanwhile cook the lentils in water in a separate pot.

Once the vegetables are almost done, add the lentils and seasoning. Let simmer for a while until the flavours have blended nicely, season to taste.

Put the root vegetable and lentil mix onto the bottom of an oven dish and spread the mash on it as cover. Make any patterns on the top, as you desire and bake in the oven at 200C for about 25 minutes until the mash is baked golden brown.

Enjoy the pie warm on a cosy autumn night. I'm also looking forward to having it tomorrow as lunch.

Your VegHog

Roots & Rice

This recipe is by Nigel Slater and published in the Guardian. It's simple, vegan, light, cheap and perfect for a weekday. It contains root vegetables combined with rice and onions. I must admit that I never before reading this recipe thought of combining root vegetables with rice. Somehow it just didn't belong to my regular cooking ways, but I got curious once I saw this recipe and tried it out. I also haven't been cooking much rice at all lately, so even that makes a welcome change.

I think that this was a rather nice dish, even though I left the beetroot of the original recipe out, which makes my variation a bit paler, but it was still very tasty. Otherwise I followed the recipe pretty closely.

This dish works either as a stand-alone dish, or served on the side in fashion of a pilaf rice. I think just a fresh salad, pomegranate seeds and little halloumi would be great with this.

What do you think of this dish?

 

Chickpea and roasted root vegetable hotpot

As snow falls over Britain (in many places, here I only saw about 5 snow flakes), it's suitable to post a warming winter dish. For the life of me I couldn't decide whether to call this dish a soup or a stew, so I went for a hotpot in the end. This dish can be a little bit of all of them, but I do find that it's a nice mid-winter dish. I haven't published too many soup or stew recipes here lately, but the other day I had the idea for this dish. It's cheap and easy to make and it tastes lovely and savoury in all its simplicity.

This is yet another vegan dish. Although I didn't commit to Veganuary, I have noticed that I've been cooking amazingly many vegan dishes this month. For me it's probably better not to be “forced” to eat vegan, then I do it quite voluntarily and almost without noticing. Don't get me wrong, there has been a lot of cheese, hot chocolate etc., so I haven't changed my ways.

Ingredients

2 parsnips

2 carrots

3 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp thyme

2 shallots

3 garlic cloves

1 cup cooked chickpeas

1 l water

1 vegetable stock cube

Salt and pepper to taste

Fresh coriander leaves

Method

Peel and chop the parsnips and carrots into cubes. Brush them with olive oil, sprinkle thyme on them and roast in the oven until done with roasting marks.

Chop the shallots and garlic finely and cook them in a saucepan in olive oil until soft. Add the cooked chickpeas to the pan and shortly after that, the water and vegetable stock cube.

Let simmer for a while and just towards the end, add the roasted root vegetables and season the hotpot.

Serve warm, maybe with a slice of bread.

Your VegHog

Roasted root vegetables

Roasted root vegetables are always a good side dish choice for a heavy, festive dinner. You can use any of your favourite root vegetables or squashes etc. I chose potatoes, parsnips, carrots and shallots this time.

These are the three separate roasting tins I made to make this dish:

1)

3 large potatoes

Olive oil

Paprika

Salt

2)

3 parsnips

3 large carrots

Olive oil

Thyme

Salt

Chop the vegetables into lengthy sticks, approximately to similar sizes.

Roast them brushed with olive oil and seasoned at 180C for about one hour.

The roasting time can vary depending on the oven performance and the thickness of the vegetables. Just check when the vegetables are soft and have brown roasting marks. Then they are good to go.

3)

3 small shallots

Olive oil

Peel the shallots and brush them with olive oil. Roast them under foil. Remove the foil only about 10 minutes before the end in case the shallots haven't browned enough.

Here I just served a cheese sauce and salad on the side.

What are your favourite roasted root vegetables? And do you usually have them at Christmas?

Root vegetable pancake

This is one great pancake for this season, and this is a good trick to get your kids eating root vegetables. And this can also be how to get your kids cooking, as the recipe is so easy. Then of course the contents hiding wouldn't work anymore, but the magic word “pancake” might just save you? Well, I'm sure that some kids like root vegetables anyway. I have tested this on bigger kids and they really liked it.

I found the recipe on Valio's pages, but made my own version of it. Have a look below. 

Ingredients

1 parsnip

1 carrot

1 shallot

2 eggs

300 ml milk

2 dl spelt flour

½ tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

150 g Greek yogurt

Method

Grate the root vegetables and chop the shallot finely.

Whisk the eggs and then add the milk, spelt flour, salt and sugar.

Add the grated root vegetables and chopped shallot to the batter. Then add the Greek yogurt.

Pour the batter on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake it at 225C for about 35 minutes.

Let the pancake cool slightly before serving and then cut it into suitable sized squares.

Your VegHog