Vegetable garden pasta

The summer holidays are over for now and returning to work has been fairly painful as always. But the good thing is that I still have loads of veggies to harvest from my balcony and can make fresh weekday meals with them, like this humble vegetable garden pasta dish. All veggies in this recipe are home grown by me apart from the onion and garlic. I really like my flat summer squashes or courgettes this year. They look cute and make a nice addition to many dishes. Same goes for the chillies. It's an incredibly satisfying feeling cooking with mainly own produce. Late summer is so great going over to my favourite season autumn!

Have a look at the recipe below.

Ingredients

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 red pepper

2 small pattypan squashes

2 small chillies

4 tomatoes

Olive oil for frying

Salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

Fresh basil leaves

Fresh courgette flowers

Grated cheese for sprinkling on the top

300 g fresh regular and spinach strozzapreti pasta

Method

Chop the vegetables into small pieces and cook them in olive oil in a hot pan for a few minutes. They should be a little bit cooked, yet still firm. Season the mix with salt, pepper and basil.

Boil the pasta until al dente and combine it with the veggies.

Sprinkle the fresh courgette flowers and cheese on the top and enjoy.

I'm sharing this recipe with Chris at Thinly Spread blog and the Pasta Please! cooking challenge.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Your VegHog

The VegHog's Tomato Festival 2016 Round Up

I can proudly announce the end to this year's Tomato Festival. This week has been full of cooking with tomatoes for me and without a doubt, the tomato cooking will continue. Sometimes posting daily can be quite challenging, but I somehow managed, and you can find my tomato recipes in the sidebar on the right hand side. Rather than talking about my cooking, I want to dedicate this post to the wonderful contributions that I received through several different channels. I am very grateful for each and every contact. Thank you so much for being part of the Tomato Festival again this year!

So let's start with the contributions. I received a lovely email and recipe from a reader called Vegan Rob. He sent me a vegan tomato curry recipe that sounds so tasty! He also attached a picture of the dish to the email and he wrote:

“Hello Veghog

I often read your excellent blog to get recipe ideas. Even though I don't blog myself I thought I'd share my recipe for vegan tomato curry with you for your tomato festival. It's not a very precise recipe, but it should work anyway!

You will need:

Tomatoes (I used 12 medium vine tomatoes, each about 4-5cm in diameter, chopped into 8 pieces)

Chickpeas, about 250-300g, cooked beforehand, or 1 can

2 large onions

Fresh coriander leaves

Tomato puree

5 cloves of garlic

A chili pepper

A thumb sized piece of ginger

Vegetable oil

Spices

Bay leaves

Fry 2 large onions in a little vegetable oil on a medium heat until they are caramelised and deep brown. Add a pinch or two of salt to help draw the moisture out of the onions. Be careful not to burn the onions, you'll want to fry in a large heavy pan with a lid and stir every few minutes. This might take anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour.

When the onions are done, add about 5 cloves of garlic, a medium sized chili and a thumb sized piece of ginger, all finely chopped. Fry for a further 2 minutes, with stirring. Add another splash of oil if the mixture looks a little dry.

Add some garam masala and fry for a further minute. I made my from the seeds from a single green coriander pod, 3 cloves and a level teaspoon each of coriander seeds, ground cumin and onion seeds. All these components should be ground before use, and rather than precook the mix it worked fine just frying it with the other ingredients.

Add a teaspoon each of ground turmeric, fry for a further 30 seconds then add the tomatoes and chick peas. The tomatoes will start to release their juices, but add a little water so most of the mix in the pan is covered. Add two bay leaves, remove these just before serving. Reduce to a low heat so the mixture boils, and reduce for at least 30 minutes.

About ten minutes before serving, taste and add enough tomato puree to get the colour and taste correct. This might be one or more tablespoons. Also add a teaspoon or so of smoky paprika and check for seasoning and spicing.

Add a generous amount of roughly chopped coriander leaves just before serving. I served the curry on its own, but it would work well with rice or breads.

I hope you like the recipe, keep up the good work!

Vegan Rob”

Thank you so much for your contribution, Rob! I really have to try this recipe soon!

I also received some posts from fellow vegetarian food bloggers.

Shaheen posted another vegan recipe for Ramiro Pepper and Harissa Tomato Potatoes with Black Pudding. This dish is nice looking and vibrantly red. It's made with new potatoes, tomatoes and red pepper and spiced with harissa. I'm very curious about the vegan black pudding that Shaheen served the dish with. Maybe I'm brave enough to taste it one day to find out what it tastes like. I have seen it in my local health food shop and Shaheen has shared several recipes with it.

Laura shared two tomato recipes from her blog archives, a tomato sauce for preserving and tomato koftas. A homemade tomato sauce for preserving is a very nice and useful idea. I hope I'd have the time to make some this year. The tomato koftas also sound very delicious, chopped tomatoes are made into a mixture with herbs and then fried until golden brown. This would be a very nice summer snack with a dip.

Then I received pictures of homegrown tomato plants in Twitter from Valeria Valo (@ValeriaValo) and I thought it would be nice to share them with the Tomato Festival, as they fitted the theme so well. She is growing her tomato plants in my home country Finland and wanted to share the progress of the plants. She is growing jersey, beefsteak and roma tomato variations. The vines are looking very good and I'm sure that she will have a wonderful crops.

Thank you again so much everyone!

Your VegHog

Tomato and basil omelette

Here is my Sunday breakfast from earlier today and it gave me quite a nice start to the day. I don't have many plans for today and as usual I'm already planning what to cook for dinner and to prepare for Monday's work lunch. I hope that you are having a relaxing Sunday.

So into this omelette I put three eggs, a dash of almond milk (would've put normal milk, but didn't have any), a handful of homegrown mini tomatoes, fresh basil leaves, little grated Emmental cheese, ¼ onion, salt, black pepper and olive oil for frying.

First I whisked the eggs, milk, cheese, basil, salt and pepper together, chopped the onions finely and cut the tomatoes in halves. Then I started frying the onion in the olive oil and once they were soft, I added the egg mixture and placed the tomatoes. I turned the omelette in the pan once and enjoyed it with coffee and pineapple juice.

Your VegHog

Garden update

Now from the spectacular scenes from the Botanic Garden in Oxford to my own mini garden. May wasn't a great month for growth on my balcony. It has been mainly chilly here in southern England and the plants aren't growing much. I'm starting to get a bit worried about this years' crops, but hopefully some warmer weather will follow soon to get the plants properly growing. Also today it's a bit too autumnal weather, rainy, windy, unpleasant and more storm on the way.

My viola is giving me most joy to look at at the moment and the strawberries are doing fine, which surprises me slightly. I thought that they would be pickier. Some of the strawberry photos I have posted here are a couple of weeks old, so there has been progress since then.

Radishes were good to be harvested already, but everything else is still pretty small in size and especially the peppers don't seem to be growing at all. Also the chilli plant is having a hard time.

How are your plants doing? Have you had any successes yet?

Your VegHog

First plantings

Sun was shining earlier today, and that inspired me to start the gardening season. In the meanwhile the weather has changed into miserable again. I had purchased a few seeds before and also got bush tomato seeds from my partner's father from his 2014 crops. Although my vines were very proud last year, I thought I'll try with a bush tomato variation again. I also made a hard decision: I won't be planting any courgettes this year. They are nice, but on the balcony they take an awful lot of space away.

Unfortunately during the winter I managed to kill my chilli plant that I've had for a few years and want to replace it with an equally successful plant. So now I planted some red demon chillies. I'm excited to see, how they'll grow. Other items on my incubation trays include: chives, sweet peppers and French breakfast radish. I will surely plant more things shortly, but really wanted to get the peppers into the ground as soon as possible to hopefully get a good crop.

I will keep you updated of the growth of my plants. Have you already been working in your garden? What is growing there?

Green tomato chutney

“A Tigerella never loses its stripes”, I said when I had finished this chutney. With mixed feelings I have now officially ended my tomato growing season and next week I will cut the remaining vines down. Couple of weeks ago I harvested the green tomatoes that weren't able to ripen anymore in this lack of light and cold nights. Some I was able to ripen in a vase indoors, but there was still a fair amount left that I didn't want to go to waste. So I explored the possibilities what to make of them and went with the chutney idea. I just made a basic chutney like I normally would, and it got actually very nice. Now I can still enjoy my tomatoes during the winter.

Ingredients

400 g green tomatoes

1 onion

100 ml Aspall cyder vinegar

200 g sugar

1 tsp chilli flakes

1 tsp ginger powder

Method

Chop the onion and the tomatoes.

Cook the onion with the vinegar, sugar, chilli flakes and ginger powder for 5 minutes.

Then add the tomatoes to the pan.

Let the pan contents simmer for about 40-50 minutes or until the liquid has mostly evaporated and the mixture has reached a sticky texture.

Pour the chutney into sterilised preservation glasses and store. I got a large jar and a small one out of this.

Chutney has many uses, have it for example with cheeses, veggie nuggets, sandwiches or roasted vegetables.

Your VegHog

Tomato Tigerella – A love story

Would you like to have a wild guess, which of these is The VegHog's balcony? I'm sure you'll get it!

Earlier this summer my lovely reader Adi requested me to publish a photo of my whole balcony, so now I'm trying to show you in some wider shots what it looks like. Please also visit Adi's great blog Vegetarian Courtesy, where she writes about vegetarianism, food, environment, animals and more. 

So, in case you've missed my previous praise for the cute stripy Tomato Tigerella that I am growing this year, here comes more.  

I'm so proud of how well the Tomato Tigerella vines have done. I guess weather wise it was quite a good summer, too. Earlier this year I was planning to plant bush tomatoes like last year, which are bit more suitable for balcony growing. The fascinating looks of the Tigerella however got me distracted and I realised only when it was too late that they actually were vine tomatoes. Luckily the growth is slower now and they shouldn't get much taller. Besides there's still a little bit room before they reach the upstairs neighbour's balcony.

I've already harvested and cooked loads of the tomatoes and there still are so many more. Do you have any good suggestions what I should cook with them next? Tomorrow I'm going to post a recipe cooked with these tomatoes, but I need more ideas, and would be very grateful for any input. I will also soon post an update on my other balcony plants.

Your VegHog

Lemon and courgette risotto

My courgettes are growing nicely on the balcony, which means that it's time to cook with own produce again – exciting! Now the courgettes start coming in bulk, so it's good to have many different recipe ideas for them. I love my yellow courgettes, but I also planted green ones additionally. As I haven't made a risotto for a while, I decided to make one and the courgettes should play an important part in it. Lemon is a good complimenting flavour to courgettes, so I used lemon infused olive oil and pressed lemon juice as seasoning.

Sense the taste of summer with my lemon and courgette risotto!

Ingredients

250 g arborio rice

3 small courgettes (or one medium)

100 g sweet baby peppers

2 shallots

2 garlic cloves

2 tbsp lemon infused olive oil

1 l vegetable stock

250 ml dry white wine

25 g butter

25 g vegetarian pasta cheese

½ lemon's juice [add grated zest for more lemon flavour (optional)]

1 tbsp Herbes de Provence

1 tsp ground black pepper

1 tsp salt

Method

Cut the courgettes into thin slices and the baby peppers into small cubes. Also chop the shallots and garlic cloves finely. Warm the vegetable stock up.

Cook the shallots, peppers and garlic in one tablespoon of lemon infused olive oil for about 10 minutes, until they are pretty soft.

Add the butter and arborio rice and stir for a few minutes until the rice becomes translucent. Pour in the white wine and let it evaporate.

Add a few ladles of the warm vegetable stock and let simmer under lid. Stir often and add more vegetable stock when needed.

When the risotto is almost cooked, heat one tablespoon of lemon infused olive oil in a separate pan and cook the courgette slices in there for a few minutes. Don't cook them too long, as it's nice when they still have little bite to them. Add the courgettes to the risotto.

Season the risotto towards the end with grated vegetarian pasta cheese (vegetarian parmesan), lemon juice, Herbes de Provence, black pepper and salt. Add more white wine, if needed.

I served my risotto with a fruity halloumi salad (similar to the one in the previous post), which makes a great summer side dish.

What is your favourite vegetarian summer risotto combination?

Your VegHog