25/10/09 Imperial College cooking session

This week's donations were fewer - not that it was a problem - because the market we collected from was busier than usual. (We are, of course, very happy for our trader donors/supporters that trade was good!!) A good selection of vegetables were collected which included: potatoes (way hey!), savoy cabbages, carrots (the really tasty, smaller and slimer variety with their green tops still on), leeks, a cauliflower, aubergines, mizuna lettuce, romaine lettuce and cooking apples.

As the weather cools down and autumn arrives, we get given more root vegetables e.g. potatoes, turnips etc. Potato wedges are easy to make and a populer crowd pleaser, particular when an imaginative range of spices is used to vary the recipe each time we make it. This week, our chief potato wedges chef is Lindsay, who used a variety of dried mediterranean herbs (oregano, basil and sage) as well as some Korean chilli powder (which is quite mild and much mellower than standard chilli powder). She was careful to parboil the potatoes beforehand as well as "shake" them up a bit once boiled to create a fluffy outside on the wedges so that when they were roasted, the outside became very crispy and tasty.

We now compost our offcuts and peelings!! Thanks to Donat's and Ankoor's networking, our group is now able to take compostable waste to a compost heap located on campus which is run by another Imperial College group. This reduces our group's landfill waste significantly and we are really happy.

In addition to crispy potato wedges, we also made a pasta dish with most of the vegetables which we sautéed with tomato puree and lots of minced garlic. We had a lot of rice pasta in our larder box which we used up. However, we noticed that rice pasta is a lot softer than hard durum wheat pasta when cooked and breaks more easily. This really didn't affect the taste of the dish, though.

Finally, Ashley rolled out some ready made puff pastry to make a pastry case for a large apple flan. We made it more or less like how we did it last week but with extra ground cinnamon and without the pecan nut paste and sultanas. Instead, we added lots of fat free syrup donated by one of our supporter organic food shop chains.

18/10/09 Imperial College cooking session

This session was all about improvisation using a repertoire of generic cooking techniques and applying same to donated ingredients. We collected: carrots, parsnips, pointed cabbage, broccoli and purple sprout broccoli, carvollo nero cabbage, potatoes, cooking apples and spring onions. We made the best of what was available without following a fixed recipe - this aspect is special to FoodWorks cooking because we get what vegetable donations we are given. Creativity and technique application are crucial so that we make really tasty and nutritious dishes for our beneficiaries because we care.

The carrots, parsnips and potatoes were cut into chunks and wedges, blanched and then roasted with seasoning (salt and pepper), cumin and various dried herbs we had in our larder box.

The rest of the vegetables, except the cooking apples, were quickly sautéed and made into a vegetable curry by Ankoor who spiced the dish personally using individual dried spices i.e. not using a pre-packaged spice mix. This is authentic home style Asian cooking and something very special!

Finally, the cooking apples were made into a dessert dish by first tossing apple wedges in sugar, some white wine vinegar and dried sultanas. This was then roasted off quickly for about 10 minutes in a very hot oven, after which big dollops of pecan nut paste were mixed into the hot apple wedges. The vinegar (in place of lemon juice, which we didn't have on the day) helped the sugar to dissolve as well as caramelise the apples wedges. The pecan nut paste added a nutty flavour to the dish.

As our beneficiaries are from central Africa mostly, we are currently exploring what their food ways are back home so that we can adapt our techniques to produce dishes which would appeal more to them. It would seem that central Africa food (www.congocookbook.com) feature often peanuts, tomatoes, yams and palm oil. (Palm oil is high in cholestrol which is not ideal so we would prefer to substitute sunflower oil and such like) So that's something we are looking into right now.

11/10/09 Imperial College cooking session

Yay! We are now back cooking at the Imperial College Student Union's kitchen.

Again, we are humbled by the generosity of the traders at Islington organic market. Large quantities of the otherwise very expensive and classy carvollo nero (a chard like vegetable much prized by Italians and celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver) were donated along with curly kale, spinach, broccoli, cherry tomatoes and other herbs.

Guess what? Yeah, potatoes!!! We love 'em. We made baked crispy wedges (with the skin still on for better fibre content) with generous seasoning of salt, pepper, dried herbs (oregano, basil etc) tossed with vegetable oil.

The vegetables were made into a pasta dish using dried pasta we already had in our stores and which were previously donated by generous shopkeepers. We used a well known brand of pasta made with good quality hard durum wheat which meant when the pasta is boiled and cooked, it retains its firmness (al dente) and bite which is important because we don't want them to become soft and soggy when the vegetables sauce is mixed in.

A quick tomato sauce was made using the donated cheery tomatoes by slicing them in halves, adding some roughly crushed garlic and roasting them quickly in the oven (at the bottom and beneath the racks where the trays containing potato wedges were being cooked). The roasted tomatoes were then sieved to make the sauce. To this, tomato puree, red pesto and red pepper puree were added (the latter 2 items were donated by my next door neighbour as she moved flat yesterday and had items to clear out from her kitchen - no good food wasted).

Finally, the sliced carvollo nero and assorted sliced greens were sautéed and the tomato sauce added. This was then mixed in with the cooked pasta, seasoned with salt and pepper and finished off with a sprinkling of granted cheese (also donated by my next door neighbour).

More good food, folks!!

10/10/09 Stand at a Camden Good Food Day event - Seedy Saturday and Food Swap event to Somers Town Community Centre

Attended aforesaid event as a FoodWorks volunteer and exhibitor and met members from likeminded groups such as Love Food Hate Waste. I managed to knock up some banana and coconut bread the day before the event using ingredients I already had at home in my kitchen cupboards: notably, using up some dessicated coconut, light brown muscavado sugar, self-raising flour and bananas (it was a big £1 bowl I got from a place in Borough/Bermondsey). Only extra ingredient to buy were eggs. So said banana and coconut bread can be seen in one of the pictures above, put out as a freebie sample :o) Well, there was no waste of this as the event drew to a close, another exhibitor's daughter asked to take the leftovers home for her tea!

07/10/09 Gift of kitchen utensils!

Hearty thanks to Chris and his girlfriend @ Freecycle who passed on their surplus kitchen utensils to help FoodWorks make more good food while helping the planet to reduce waste! It is much, much appreciated. Thank you.

Also, I will be at the Good Food for Camden event this Saturday 10th October as a FoodWorks participant. Pics will be posted after the event!