Turnip and lentil salad

Turnips, the unsung heroes of the root vegetable family, the less appreciated vegetable. However this hasn't always been the case, already Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23 – AD 79) considered the turnip as one of the most important vegetables of his day, rating it "directly after cereals or at all events after the bean, since its utility surpasses that of any other plant". Very high praise for the turnip there.

Like Pliny the Elder, I love turnips, they are so nice fresh for example with a dip like hummus. They also made a great addition to this vegan salad, where I combined them with carrot, pistachios, mixed leaves, warm lentils and an onion dressing. I decided to add them as thin shavings to the salad. This was a very nice salad in the end and I'm happy to eat the rest of it at work tomorrow.

I'll share this recipe with Vegetable Palette, a vegetarian cooking challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table and am excited to see whether anyone else has chosen the humble turnip as their white vegetable. 

 

I'm entering this salad also to this month's No Croutons Required, a vegetarian soup and salad cooking challenge hosted this month by Lisa from Lisa's Kitchen and co-hosted by Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes.  

Here's the recipe for my turnip and lentil salad.

Ingredients

60 g mixed salad leaves

3 turnips

1 carrot

½ cup puy lentils

1 tbsp vegetable stock powder

Handful of pistachios

Dressing:

¼ onion

4 tbsp olive oil

4 tbsp white wine vinegar

2 tsp black treacle

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp ground black pepper

1 tsp thyme

Method

Chop the quarter onion very finely and mix it with the rest of the dressing ingredients.

Cook the lentils in water with some added vegetable stock powder.

Toast the pistachios in the oven a little.

Make thin shavings from the peeled turnips and carrot. For example a peeling knife is perfectly fine for making these shavings.

Serve the components together and sprinkle the dressing on the top.

Your VegHog

Roasted heirloom tomato and baby pepper soup

The VegHog's Tomato Festival is going strong and I'm still very much a fan of the humble tomato. I think that I will continue with this theme until Sunday, so feel free to share your vegetarian or vegan tomato recipes as well, if you like!

What I cooked this time, is a roasted heirloom tomato and baby pepper soup. It is a bit of an extra effort roasting the tomatoes and peppers first, but in the end there's a reward in the taste. The soup itself is vegan and I liked it very much. Have a look below at how I made it. 

Ingredients

400 g selection of heirloom tomatoes

200 g baby peppers

2 tbsp olive oil

1 red onion

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp vegetable stock powder

Fresh basil leaves

Ground black pepper

Salt

Method

Cut the peppers in halves or smaller pieces and remove the seeds. Brush the tomatoes and cut peppers with olive oil and roast them in the oven.

Finely chop the red onion and garlic. Once the vegetables are roasted, start cooking the onion and garlic in a saucepan until they are soft. Then add the roasted vegetables and break them slightly with a ladle.

Add the vegetable stock powder to the pan and let simmer under the lid. Season with salt, pepper and fresh basil and purée the soup. I left a few chunks in there, as I found that to be a more interesting solution. You can add little water, if you want a more liquid soup. My soup could have been used as a dip or a sauce as well, as it turned out to be quite thick. It was very filling though, just a suitable summer soup.

Enjoy the soup warm and you can also serve my weird toasts with green topping with it, although the photos didn't quite capture the colour correctly. For the toasts, I ground basil and garlic with mortar and pestle and then added grated mozzarella to them. I toasted some super seeded toast and cut them into smaller pieces, put the cheese mix on the top and baked them in the oven until the cheese had melted. That explains the pale green topping.

I'm sharing this recipe with Vegetable Palette vegetarian cooking challenge by Shaheen from A2K – A Seasonal Veg Table. The theme for this month's challenge is Glorious reds and I think that this tomato and pepper soup meets the brief pretty well.

 

Have a great weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Pomegranate and sea buckthornberry overnight oats

Good morning! I have slept well and long and it's the weekend, I'm happy!

Recently I posted my first overnight oats attempt, the Blueberry and strawberry overnight oats and now I made another variation. I don't think that it's a craze for me yet, but these certainly make an easy and healthy vegan breakfast. This time I made a slightly smaller portion size, but this really hit the spot in the morning. 

I used these ingredients:

½ pomegranate

1 tsp sea buckthornberry powder

½ tsp sea buckthornberry sugar (or regular)

1 tbsp milled flax seed

½ cup oat flakes

1 cup almond milk

Mix the sea buckthornberry powder, sugar, milled flax seed and oat flakes with the almond milk.

Remove the pomegranate seeds and layer them into a jar with the oat mix.

Leave in the fridge overnight and enjoy as breakfast.

The theme of this month's Vegetable Palette is Blushing pinks, so I thought that pomegranate would fit that category rather nicely. I use pomegranates quite a lot in my cooking, I like to scatter them on salads, couscous dishes, pretty much on anything. I have to admit that this recipe doesn't require any cooking as the oats make themselves overnight, but I thought that it could be mentioned anyway as a nice pink food idea. Vegetable Palette is a vegetarian cooking challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table. 

 

Have a great weekend!

Your VegHog

Hedgehog shaped ravioli with a potato, olive and rosemary filling

This week is Hedgehog Awareness Week and I can't keep saying it enough. Yesterday I already wrote an Old Prickly post, but now I am going to continue with the all important hedgehog theme. I made suitable hedgehog shaped ravioli with a potato, olive and rosemary filling. I have made hedgehog ravioli before, but the potato filling was a first for me. All the components tasted in the mix, so it worked really well and I liked this ravioli version a lot.

As the May theme for The Vegetable Palette challenge is “your favourite vegetable”, I thought I'd share this recipe there as well. The Vegetable Palette is a monthly vegetarian food blogging challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table. I though long and hard what would be my favourite vegetable, as it constantly changes and there are many, but potatoes are pretty much always up there on the top of my list. They are so versatile, subtle yet tasty and also easy to cook in many shapes and forms. So there you have it, I love potatoes! In this recipe I of course combined them in a way I have never done before, which was also a great experience. 

 

I will also share this recipe with another food blogging challenge, Pasta Please, which is hosted this month by Jen from Jen's Food and created by Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes. The theme in May is free, as long as the recipe contains some pasta. 

Here is my recipe for these small prickly beasts and it does make quite an array of them:

Pasta:

400 g grade 00 pasta flour

4 eggs

1 tsp salt

Filling:

500 g potatoes

200 g green olives

Sprinkle of salt

Fresh rosemary leaves

25 g grated mature cheddar

Method

Make the pasta first by kneading the pasta flour, eggs and salt into a firm dough. Let it rest wrapped in a cling film in the fridge for at least one hour.

Boil the peeled potatoes until they are done and mash them. Let the mash cool. Grind the olives into a smooth paste with a mortar and pestle and add them to the mash. Also add the salt, rosemary and little grated cheddar.

Start working the pasta dough thinner and thinner by rolling it through a pasta machine. Once you are happy with the texture and thinness, cut some hedgehog shapes from the dough. Put a little teaspoonful of the potato filling onto a hedgehog shape, brush the edges with water and press it closed with another hedgehog.

Cook the hedgehog ravioli until they are al dente and serve. I served them simply on a bed of salad drizzled with olive oil. Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Potato pizza

I was partly influenced by my trip to Copenhagen and partly by the Vegetable Palette food blogging challenge to make this potato pizza. I have been planning this sort of a pizza for ages, but never made one. I made this in the style of a fried pizza (first stage is on a frying pan, then oven), like I have made a few before. In the meanwhile I think that it's the best way to get a crispy crusted pizza with a regular oven. The pizza turned out to be lovely, so from now on I will be making such potato pizzas more often. I used my typical spelt crust as the base and rosemary as seasoning. 

Naturally I want to share this post with the Vegetable Palette for April, where the theme for this month is “White vegetables”. The challenge is hosted by Shaheen from the A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table. 

Here is my Potato pizza recipe:

Ingredients

Spelt crust:

2 tbsp dry yeast

200 g wheat flour

200 g spelt flour

2 tsp salt

350 ml lukewarm water

3 tbsp olive oil

Toppings:

1 small onion

1 garlic clove

3-5 potatoes depending on the size

Mozzarella pearls

Sea salt

Black pepper

Fresh rosemary

Olive oil

Method

Make the pizza dough first: Mix the dry ingredients, then add water and olive oil and knead. Let the dough rise in a bowl under a tea towel for about one hour. Later roll out thin pizzas from it.

Chop the onion in thin half rings and the garlic finely. Cut the potatoes into thin slices. I didn't peel mine, as then the potato taste was even more intense.

Cook the potato slices in boiling water for about 5 minutes so that they are pretty much cooked. Put them into a bowl with olive oil, rosemary, seas salt and black pepper and mix. Leave them in the bowl for about 5 minutes.

Heat a large frying pan with a metal handle to the highest setting and place the pizza dough on the dry pan. Place the toppings onto the pizza and leave in the pan for a couple of minutes. Then put the whole pan into the oven under the grill at 250C. Leave in the oven until baked and golden brown. It can take only a couple of minutes or a little bit longer depending on the power of the oven.

Serve immediately and enjoy! Have good pizza moments!

Your VegHog