This week's ingredients came from Marylebone Farmers' Market and consisted of a seasonal variety of freshest cabbages and root vegetables. Cooking according to the seasons is an important aspect of FoodCycle, as is the best use of any collected ingredients i.e. from supermarkets where seasonality might not be as prominent an issue. Having a repertoire of generic cooking techniques suitable for production scale cooking and the knowledge and creativity to apply the techniques to whatever ingredients we get and transform them into tasty, nutritious and amazing dishes is an art indeed. The point is, nowadays people are rather indoctrinated into following fixed recipes and have lost the ability and confidence to conjure, adapt and create dishes.
Sometimes we are also indoctrinated into thinking that good food HAS to be expensive, made with rare and costly ingredients. That is so untrue!! A bit of magic lies in transforming a few bits and pieces, especially if they are just unexceptional pieces of cabbages, carrots, etc into a truly magnificent dish say a rich gratin with a little cream, garlic and seasoning.
Here we have some leafy cabbages with chunky, crunchy stalks. Sometimes the stalks may be a bit too chunky in comparison to the leaves which may result in the leaves becoming overcooked and soggy before the stalks are cooked. One good way of overcoming this is to split and slice the stalks, whether leaving some on the leaves and/or cutting chunky bits of stalks out and slicing them separately. The stalks are nutritious and well worth keeping!
More variety of cabbages: pointed white cabbage and green curly kale. The white cabbage was sliced and where one got to the chunky core, some of the core is cut out and sliced thinly to ensure that they cook down well. As for the curly kale, the green chunky leaves were picked off the fibrous stalks and washed. The stalks themselves were just too fibrous and hard for eating and were "recycled" for composting.
As our beneficiaries are fond of aromatic, starchy dishes, potatoes and other root vegetables were par-boiled, seasoned with herb and spice mixes which we devise each week according to what was available from our dry store boxes and then tossed in oil for roasting in the oven.
Patrick made a fresh tomato sauce with over-ripen tomatoes which were given to us and crumbled some goats cheese into it.
Some fresh rosemary which were added to the roasted potato wedges.
Collected vegetable cuttings for the compost bin. We are happy to be able to minimise our landfill waste!
A tasty, well seasoned braised cabbage dish with added chunks of swede.
Patrick's tomato sauce was added into a big vat of spaghetti.
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