Corn on the cob

Haven't updated this for a while, I know - we've been out/away/poorly quite a bit since creating it.

Today's dinner was hardly a culinary masterpiece but it gives me a chance to enthuse about our local farmers' market, and about farmers' markets in general - not only a way more fun and fulfilling shopping experience, but also make it ludicrously easy to make a tasty vegetarian meal without really even trying. The lady on the veg stall today told me that the corn we were buying had been picked this morning, and dammit you could taste that fact. And the little cardboard sign on the potatoes was not telling a lie when it said they were 'excellent roasted'.

WHAT WE ATE

- Corn on the cob (boiled for 6-8 mins then slathered with margarine, yum)
- Skin-on roast potatoes (little ones - cut into small-ish cubes, then sprinkled with mixed herbs, salt and pepper once in the roasting tray)
- Runner beans (sliced cross-ways and boiled for maybe 5 mins)

Grand total prep time probably about 10-15 minutes, total cost for two people around £2. And by god it was good.

A TEDIOUS NOTE

Being the tedious person that I am, I decided to test my theory that farmers' markets are almost always cheaper than supermarkets, so that I could feel smug about the bargains I got.

So. Today at the farmers' market I spent an unusually hefty £18 (which may or may not have been accurate, since they took the dangerous step of letting me add it up myself as I went along), for which I got:

Two punnets of plums, one of blackberries and one of blueberries; six eating apples and four cooking apples; two ears of corn; five white onions, one red onion, one bulb of garlic; one aubergine; one green pepper; one broccoli, one punnet of fresh peas, a bunch of runner beans; four tomatoes; one-and-a-half kilos of potatoes; six free-range eggs.

Here it is, in all its glory:


According to the Sainsbury's website (I did try Tesco, but it wouldn't let me unless I faffed about getting a Clubcard), this would have cost me £24.11 to buy there. Well, almost - I had to substitute blackcurrants for the blackberries, since apparently Sainsbury's aren't selling blackberries, despite the fact that they are falling off a bramble bush near you as I type. Tch.

Um, yeah. Farmers' markets! Yay!

Chickpea and Aubergine Tagine

I won't lie: the credit for this goes almost entirely to Mark. The honey and cinnamon was my idea though.

WHAT WE USED

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
spices to taste (we used about 1tsp each of cumin, coriander, cinnamon and turmeric, plus a pinch of chilli powder)
1 small aubergine, cubed
1 tin chickpeas
1 tin tomatoes
a handful of dried apricots, chopped into chunks
a squeeze of honey

WHAT WE DID

1. Fry off the onion and garlic in some vegetable/olive oil with the spices, till the onions are soft (about 5-10 mins).

2. Empty the tins of tomatoes and chickpeas into a second saucepan (including the chickpea water), and add the onion mix. Simmer it over a low heat.

3. Add some more oil to the first pan (the one that had the onions in) and use it to fry the aubergine till it's soft (around 15 mins). There should be some spice residue in the pan, making the aubergine yummy.

4. Tip the aubergine into the chickpea stew, give it a stir and leave it to simmer for basically as long as can be bothered.

5. Add the apricots and honey (we did this when it was nearly ready, but you could add it along with the aubergine to minimise faff).

WHAT WE ATE IT WITH

Cous cous (measured by volume, about 80ml each, soaked in about 250ml hot vegetable stock for 5 mins in a bowl with a lid over it)

Salad (mixed leaves and fresh chopped tomatoes; I made a quick dressing from mustard, oil & vinegar)

THINGS TO NOTE

Mark is a way more patient cook than me. I'd have just bunged the onions, garlic and aubergine all in together, fried them for about 5-10 minutes and then added the chickpeas/tomatoes/other stuff, thus saving time and washing up (but compromising a bit on yumminess). Either way, the actual prep time for the tagine shouldn't be more than about half an hour.

Edit: Mark is also way more picky than me. He points out that I have tagged this recipe as vegan even though it contains a squeeze of honey, and honey is technically not vegan. I could write a lengthy essay about why honey is not very relevant to the reasons I try to eat vegan (and the fact that most of my vegan friends seem to agree, and also treat it as acceptable), but obviously technically speaking I did, in fact, lie. This blog should probably come with a health warning that my definition of vegan is pretty, um, fluid. I will generally tag stuff as vegan if it has trace amounts of non-vegan stuff that you could easily omit if you were really that bothered.

It's another blog!

So. Mark and I, while not actually vegetarian, try and eat as little meat as possible, and when cooking at home tend to make almost exclusively vegetarian (or occasionally pescatarian) food. We like to think that we eat pretty damn well.

Recently, a few friends of mine have been talking about how they feel they should eat less meat, and have said something along the lines of "I just don't know what vegetarians eat every day!"

After a particularly tasty meal tonight, it occurred to me that it might be Useful and Nice if we started blogging some of our meals. We pretty much make most of our dishes up, so none of the recipes are copyrighted; we spend relatively little on food; and although it's true we do enjoy cooking, we rarely spend hours slaving over a hot stove (and we both have full-time jobs).

So this blog is basically for those who'd like to eat more vegetarian food but are seeking a bit of inspiration. I'm hoping it'll come in handy for our friends and family, but if anyone else happens to stop by while surfing the interwebs, so much the better.

Of course, it's possible we will fail entirely to find the time in our oh-so-busy schedules to actually maintain this blog, but you never know...