Browsing: vegetarian

So Easter is coming and one of the great traditions of Easter is the Hot Cross Bun. I have never made them before so I decided I would have ago this year. The Hot Cross bun is a celebration food that celebrates the end of Lent and piles in all the things you may have given up for the last seven weeks. Made from a heavily spiced dough, the bun is laden with rich fruit. A delicious treat – and one we shouldn’t eat too often!

Hot Cross buns cooling in Andy's Kitchen

So with apologies to Nigella and Felicity Cloake of the Guardian who’s recipes I have butchered here is the official Ethical Superstore guide to making your own Ethical Hot Cross Bun.

Ingredients

200ml milk
¼ tsp powdered nutmeg
½ tsp powdered Suma Organic and Fairtrade cinnamon
¼ tsp powdered mixed spice
Pinch of saffron
7g of powdered “easy bake” yeast (or Doves Farm quick yeast)
50g golden Traidcraft Fairtrade caster sugar
450g Doves Farm organic strong white flour
100g butter
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground ginger
3 eggs
150g Suma Organic currants
50g mixed peel
3 tbsp Doves Farm organic plain flour 

Cooking time: In total this is going to take four hours and for the best flavour prepare the spicy milk the day before.

1. Heat 200ml milk gently in a pan along with the cinnamon,  nutmeg and mixed spice until just boiling. Set aside, preferably overnight.

2. Next day warm the milk to body temperature and then add yeast and 1 tsp sugar.

3. Mix the flour and  butter in a large bowl and rub together until well mixed.

4. Add the rest of the sugar, the salt and ginger.

5. Beat together two of the eggs and add with the yeast mixture to the flour\butter mixture. Stir in, adding enough milk to make a soft dough.

6. Place on a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic.

7. Cover and leave in a warm place for  a couple of hours until it has doubled in size.

8. Place back on a floured surface and knead for a minute or so. Flatten it out and scatter over the fruit and peel. Knead again to spread the fruit around evenly.

9. Divide into 16 equal pieces and roll these into round, bun shapes. Put on If you care grease proof paper lined baking trays and mark a cross on the top of each one. Cover and put in a warm place until doubled in size (again!).

10. Set the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and beat together an egg with a little milk. Mix the plain flour,  a pinch of salt and enough cold water to make a stiff paste. Paint the top of each bun with egg wash, and then draw a thick cross where you scored the cross on each bun.

11. Put into the oven and bake for about 25 minutes until golden.

12. Meanwhile, mix 1 tbsp caster sugar with 1 tbsp boiling water. When the buns come out of the oven, brush them with this before transferring to a rack to cool.

13. Eat with lots of butter, lots of friends and lots of chat of how to make the world a better place.

Have fun and have  a great Easter. Once consumed on Easter Sunday you will a strenuous Easter Egg hunt to burn off the calories. Make sure you have lots of Divine Easter eggs well hidden around your garden!

Next week is National Vegetarian Week. This annual awareness raising campaign promotes innovative and inspirational vegetarian cooking, and awareness of the benefits of a meat-free diet. Celebrated by the Vegetarian society since 1992, National Vegetarian Week events are held around the country by schools, offices, big corporations and community group. Check the map to see what events are being held near you.

Read the rest of National Vegetarian Week »

So Easter gets ever closer – just 10 days left in the Ethical Superstore diet (regular readers will recall I have been challenged to only eat food and drink that can be purchased from ESS for the whole of lent).

I guess the biggest change for me is that I have ended up cooking virtually all of my meals for the last few weeks. Helen (my long suffering wife and fellow blogger) has put up with cooking me a vegetarian option for years, but the idea of then having to cook my option separately using Ethical Superstore ingredients was a step too far! So most evenings I’ve come home and cooked a meal for myself. Previously, this would have been getting a veggie ready meal out of the freezer, popping in the microwave and 4 minutes later sitting down to a portion of vegetable (plus salt, sugar and fat) goodness. For the last five weeks I’ve been looking at a pile of ingredients and waiting for inspiration.

I suspect this will be the biggest change when this little project comes to an end. Ready meals just don’t do it for me having now cooked for myself for the last 5 weeks. Even with my cooking and slap-dash approach to quantities, the taste and the freshness is way better than the average pack of freezer fodder.

So what have been my highlights?

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So just 2 weeks to go until Easter and the “eat only stuff I can buy at EthicalSuperestore.com” has been going pretty well. I am now a total convert to having a vegetable box delivered every week. I love the serendipity of opening the box to see what we are going to be eating this week – healthy soups, stir frys and casseroles are now the order of the day.

However, my unblemished record has been a bit tarnished in the last 10 days. Ethical Superstore was nominated in the Emerging Retailer category at the Retail Week Awards. I had to go down for the plush event with 2000 guests in my bow tie and dress suit. Having paid £400 (how can that be justified???) I decided I’d better eat the food and as far as I know the Grosvenor House hotel doesn’t buy its food from us. The event was pretty good fun – Jimmy Carr was very entertaining . . .

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So we are now in week 3 of Lent and still the Ethical Superstore diet is going pretty well (in summary, for six weeks I’m only going to eat what we sell in the Ethical Superstore range).

At first my biggest problem was giving up milk in tea and coffee. I really didn’t like the taste without milk and the various substitutes work well for most things apart from in tea and coffee. However, I think I’ve become acclimatised to no milk in my hot drinks now – in fact I accidentally put it in my tea on Tuesday morning and couldn’t understand why my tea tasted so horrible. Maybe black tea and coffee will be a change for life….

Bread making continues to be the high point using the Doves Farm bread kit. Experimented with adding a little sugar and vegetable fat (around a teaspoon of each) and ended up with a bigger loaf and a more even “rise”.  There is a chocolate cake in the range too – so I think I’ll make that my treat this weekend.

I guess that the biggest challenge of eating only from the Ethical Superstore range for anyone with a  busy life, is the lack of ready meals. The Just Wholefoods range comes close and has allowed me to make meals with cous cous and biriyani without too much effort. The veggie bangers are lovely too. Also at £1.35 for  a pack that serves two people – they are good value too.

However, the only reason why the challenge can work at all is the fantastic

Read the rest of A Change for Life? »

Having messed around with my family’s food and drink options during Fairtrade Fortnight, I’ve decided to sneakily introduce Meat Free Mondays at a time when their defences are low.

Before I move on to that, my fair trade education went down a storm. As expected, there was outrage when one member of the family got a bar of chocolate and the rest got none. Not sure how much the message got through their own seething sense of injustice at that stage. Then the emotional pressure exerted on the most fortunate one worked and we experienced a family bonding moment as he broke the chocolate into pieces into the fondue pot and let us all dip fair trade fruit into it. Touching. Memorable. An insight into fair trade? Time will tell…

Back to Meat Free Mondays. This idea has been brewing for a while, having read about it in a magazine. My husband is back to being a full-time vegetarian; my ten year old daughter is toying with the idea; and we are definitely eating more vegetables since joining the organic veg box scheme. Even my oldest son is being pressured by his girlfriend to eat

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Lunchtimes in our office have seemed a little tame recently.  Following the success of the recent Ethical SOUPerstore challenge, when a number of us demonstrated it was possible to beat the credit crunch by sharing a tasty and ethical lunch, we’ve been developing a culinary itch we just had to scratch.  But how?
Enter the Morphy Richards Ecolectric Slow Cooker.

Slow cooking has much to recommend it
•    Convenient – fits a busy lifestyle, put all you ingredients in that morning and come home to a delicious meal in the evening.
•    Flavoursome – Slow cooked food is cooked in its own juices fully absorbing all flavours.
•    Economical – Low levels of energy are used to power a slow cooker.
•    Versatile – Cook everything from curry, soup, chowder, casserole and even desserts.

Environmentally, slow cooking has advantages too – slow cookers use low levels of energy, making them economical to run (rather than heating a large conventional oven). Better still the Morphy Richards claim that this Ecolectric Slow Cooker uses up to 44% less energy than other slow cookers on the market.

So four of us have got together to give it a thorough trial. . .

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As the second ‘Souper cook’ to take part in this weeks lunch time soup challenge the bar had been well and truly set with John’s carrot and coriander number.  It had set the bar high not only on cost , flavour and ethical values but also on presentation (I noticed John’s post neglected to mention his smart place mat’s and designer salt and pepper mills!)

The pressure was on and I had to deliver a home made soup that was not only flavoursome but different as my main ingredient would also be the humble seasonal orange carrot!

So after much debate I came up with a stock cupboard favourite Carrot and Lentils with a Moroccan twist. A really easy recipe to put together which would also allow me some  extra time to create a couple of homemade naans, to accompany  the dish and maybe score me some extra brownie points…game on.

Read the rest of The Morrocan Twist »