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It works with bacon or as a vegetarian dish, with tomatoes or other extras over the top, or plain onion

As mentioned in Day 38 of The Challenge This can be vegetarian, as this was, or with ham and bacon, but

As mentioned in Day 41 of The Challenge Vegetables stewed with prunes and warm (rather than hot) spices served over couscous. What better for a rainy autumn afternoon? Especially not knowing how well the friend coming to lunch tolerates spice... Ingredients: 3 red onions, chopped 2 tomatoes , diced 3 carrots, chopped Half a head of garlic, sliced 6 celery sticks, chopped 400g chickpeas 400ml vegetable broth 1/2 c tomato passata 100 g prunes, pitted and chopped (or apricots could work) 1 cinnamon stick 1/2 tsp ground cumin 2 tsp tandoori powder (I like the light heat and the warmth of this spice, but you can use paprika if you'd rather) 1 tsp of Aloha Spiced Cacao (or cocoa powder) 3 tsp urfa biber or chilli flakes Salt and pepper to taste 1) Put a heavy oven proof dish in the oven without its lid, and heat to 180°C. 2) Chop your veg and add to the preheated dish. Add spices and stock, replace in the oven and allow to cook 1 - 1 1/4 hours until vegetables are almost tender (I like the carrots and celery to have a little bite left) and flavours have blended. Taste test and serve over couscous. Super simple, tasty and easily adapted to different veg, chicken or different levels of spice. It diffuses a lovely smell through the house, and on a cold afternoon warms you from the inside.

As mentioned in Day 39 of The Challenge We haven't had this one in a while, but the local farmer we frequent had beets again so with autumn cool coming on, this was the perfect choice. Ingredients: 4 large beets, chopped 3 carrots, chopped 2 onions, chopped 3 potatoes, chopped 1 tbsp olive oil 1 litre of beef stock 1 c apple cider vinegar 2 tsp thyme salt and pepper to taste 1-2 tsp sour cream per serving 1) Heat oil in a large soup pot and sauté onions until translucent. Add carrots, potatoes and beets. Stir allowing them to sauté for about 5 minutes. 2) Pour in broth and cider, just to a little over the level of the vegetables and add seasoning. 3) Simmer until the root vegetables are tender, then blend to desired smoothness. i like it almost fully blended, but it is also good chunky. 4) Taste test and adjust vinegar or seasoning. Serve hot with a dollop of sour cream. Not too heavy, but warming and autumnal, with a rich colour and rich flavour highlighted by a vinegary tang, I love borscht.

I absolutely love baked eggs! We've been making them for a few years now after first stumbling on the idea in Michel Roux's cookbook Eggs (awesome cookbook by the way. I hesitated over getting it initially because I figured "how interesting can a cookbook about eggs be?" Answer: really.) Since that initial revelation, we've played around with different configurations, different layers, different pairings. We've done sweet and savoury, some with veggie bases, others with some meat, or others again with both. Some are layered, some are dropped into a mixture, like curry. They are the perfect dish for using up micro amounts of leftovers. The only trick is to play flavours and textures off of each other successfully. We use vegetables (left over or raw), meat, cheese, cream, fruits, bread, spreads, chocolate, nuts... And the list goes on. Almost anything works. We've also cooked the eggs, instead of in ramequins, in a baking tray with corn bread batter or pancake batter as a base, nested in roast veggies before. It is endlessly adaptable. Omit meat and it's veggie. Use keto friendly veg and it's keto. Skip the toast and it's gluten free. Play around with it! This one came out beautifully. I used the last of my home made whey ricotta, some leftover (slightly spiced) stir fried veggies, the last of a pack of bacon and some fresh thyme, served with day old bread toasted up to perfection. The trick is to bake them until the yolk is still runny but the white is set, so keep your eyes on it. I usually place the eggs in a bain-marie in the oven, but not always. It allows them to come out moister, but depending on what you've used and what you're planning, you don't have to. Ingredients: 6 tbsp left over veggies 6-9 tbsp ricotta 3 eggs 6 rashers of bacon 3 thyme sprigs salt and pepper 1 tbsp butter Toast to serve 1) Butter 3 ramequins thoroughly. Spoon 2 tbsp of veggies into the bottom of each ramequin. Next, spoon in the ricotta around the edges of the dishes, leaving a well in the centre. Place a ring of bacon around the tops of the ramequins using 2 rashers each then crack an egg into the well created in each dish. 2) Place the ramequins in a baking dish and pour boiling water into the baking dish deep enough to come mid way up the sides of the ramequin. 3) Place in the oven at 180°C. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until the eggs are set to your liking. Serve with toast. These were rich and decadent. The slightly spiced veg played well off the creamy whey ricotta, and egg and bacon is of course a classic combo. The crunchy veggies and the toast added a textural contrast. It was beautiful and creamy and tasty. This is a must try!

As mentioned in Day 87 of The Challenge Butternut and chestnut seasons intersect! This was entirely experimental. I saw the title of this recipe elsewhere but didn't look at the recipe and then couldn't remember where I had seen it, so I made it up. I had no idea how this would turn out, but it was beautiful. The balance of sweet to acid with a little spice went very nicely. Ingredients: 1 butternut squash, halved and with the seeds scooped out 500g chestnuts, parboiled and peeled 3-4 tbsp olive oil 2-4 onions chopped 1 apple, chopped 1-2 tbsp apple cider vinegar 1 tsp sumac 1/8-1/4 nutmeg 1/4 tsp cloves 1-1 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp fenugreek seeds 2-3 c chicken broth 1/3 -1/2 c cream 2 tsp thyme Salt and pepper to taste Toasted pumpkin seeds to top 1) Place butternut, chestnuts, apple in a heavy skillet or a roasting pan ( I used my cast iron skillet) and drizzle with 2-3 tbsp of olive oil and the apple cider vinegar to achieve good coverage. Sprinkle the sumac, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and fenugreek seeds over it all and roast for 45 min-1 hour, until the butternut is tender. 2) Sauté onions in the remaining olive oil in the bottom of your soup pot until translucent and even a little charred. Add the contents of the skillet and mix it up ( the butternut should break up easily. Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes, allowing the flavours to meld. 3) Blitz until smooth, then taste test, adjusting any of the spicing or the vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste, and add cream to your taste too. I do recommend some, but how much you do is up to you. Serve and sprinkle with thyme and pumpkin seeds. I absolutely loved this and I am so glad I tried it! The roasting at the start lengthened the cook time a little, but then pulling the soup bit together went really quickly, so it's six and two threes really compared to other souping. The truly lengthy bit is peeling the chestnuts if you use fresh ones, but then I find it quite zen to settle into a task like that. The other option is to use frozen ones that come pre-peeled. In any case, this soup hit all the right notes for me (and hubby and Little Bit) and I hope it does for you too.

As mentioned in Day 80 of The Challenge Quinces are something that (aside from being seasonal! I know! So many seasonal fruits and vegetables in the autumn!) I had only really encountered in jelly or in preserves until recently. And then a couple of years ago a colleague came to work with a bucket of quinces from her garden for anyone to help themselves, and so I started playing around with them. They are like fuzzy green stones, pear-shaped wannabes when they are raw. They need a bit of cooking, usually boiling (I tried roasting one and it sort of worked) to make them edible. This is the first (or one of the first) savoury things I tried with them. As with so many other recipes, it is one I had seen the title of but then lost the recipe link before reading it, so I made it up. Ingredients: 2 onions, chopped 1 tbsp olive oil 600g of carrots, chopped 1 large quince, chopped 1 tbsp honey 2 tsp sumac 1 tsp garam masala 1 tsp cinnamon 1/4 tsp cloves Salt and pepper to taste Herbs de Provence 1) In a soup pot, sauté onions in the olive oil until translucent. Add carrots and quince and enough water to cover it all. Add spices and honey. Simmer for 45 min or until carrots and quince are tender. 2) Blitz until smooth (or almost. Quince won't go silky smooth like some other vegetables). Taste test and salt and pepper to taste. Serve with garlic and thyme croutons. This was very tasty but my husband said he found it too earthy and sweet. Adding the herbs at the end brightened it all up though and brought the flavours into alignment. Some lemon juice might also work. Let me know what you think!

For World Environment Day on June 5th I was invited to take part in a collaboration making plant based, sustainable meals, and this is the one I came up with. Everything , or very nearly, was locally sourced from local farmers or foraged by Little One and I. After a visit to a local farmer, where I picked up yellow carrots, I started playing around with ideas of what I could make using those. Then there was local barley from the mountains on sale in the grocery store, so I decided on a tart, grinding the barley for the crust. For the other components of the tart I decided to go pick nettles for a pesto, which eventually ended up being nettle and dandelion, and to make ricotta with milk from the local dairy. I found other edible wild flowers too, so those were incorporated into the plan. I am really glad that I agreed to take part in that collaboration as otherwise I wouldn't have necessarily put all these components together, and it was really fun and came out super tasty! Ingredients: For the crust: 1 c barley flower (I ground up whole barley in the coffee grinder) 1 1/4 c whole meal flour 1/4 - 1/3 c cold butter 1/3 c milk For the pesto: 3-4 c nettles, washed in vinegar and then steamed til just wilted 1-2 c dandelion leaves 2 cloves garlic 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp vinegar juice of 1 lemon a little water Salt and pepper to taste For the tart: 7-8 yellow carrots, quartered or eighthed lengthwise 1 c pesto 1/2 - 1 c ricotta OR Goat cheese 1-2 tsp wild thyme 1 1/2 - 2 tbsp honey 1 tbsp olive oil salt and pepper Wild flowers to top: Clover Wild thyme Wood sorrel 1) Make the crust: Place flour and barley flour in a bowl and cut in the butter in small dice. Rub butter into the flower with fingertips until a crumby mixture forms. Add milk and mix until just combined. Chill 30 minutes. 2) Make the pesto. Place all ingredients in a blender and blitz until smooth. Taste test. Dandelion leaves can be a little bitter, so add some lemon juice to counterbalance this if necessary. 3) Assemble the tart. Roll out the crust to the size of your tart plate, and line the bottom of the dish with it. Spread the pesto over the base and then arrange the carrots over the top radially. Dollop the honey and drizzle the olive oil over the carrots. Mix the wild thyme into the ricotta and then spread the ricotta over the carrots. Salt and pepper to taste. Bake at 190°C for 35-45 minutes, until the crust is golden and the carrots are tender but not soft. 4) Allow to cool a little and arrange the wild flowers over the top (optional). This was beautiful! All the flavours balanced each other beautifully, with the bitter dandelions and sweet carrots and honey and the acidic lemon and the creamy cheese. The tart was hot, the flowers fresh, the pesto deep, the lemon bright. And the colours truly popped! Eating it, it occurred to me that goat cheese could work very nicely on it, so when we heated it up on day 2 I added some and it did indeed work very nicely. Otherwise, more ricotta could be nice but is certainly not essential. I was really interested to see how the crust would come out. I don't often cook with non-wheat flours, and some I have used, like rice flour, I am not a fan of. Grinding my own grain into flour was certainly a first too. It came out very well. A little toothier than regular crust because there's only so fine I can get flour in a coffee grinder, and a little sweeter. It was a bit darker too, and I must say that it came out looking a little rustic (which matched the wild flowers, so that's fine.) The only potential change I would make otherwise would be to begin roasting the carrots ahead of time, or parboil them next time to kick start their cooking process. Otherwise, I am thoroughly delighted with this dish, as were Hubby and Little One.

Now, I know this is a weird one. It is as odd an idea as it sounds, but hear me out. They actually worked quite well. Done the first way, no one could tell they were turnippy. They were moist, tender spice cookies. Here's how I arrived at these. I've been cooking with Little Bit since he was tiny. He has a toy kitchen of his own, and he frequently "cooks" for us and has us try his meals. Sometimes they are things he has seen us make, sometimes not so much (like strawberry and banana soup). I want to encourage his creativity and interest in cooking, so I like to try out his ideas. Sometimes they are a direct request to cook together, like "Mama, we can make pear sorbet", sometimes just an idea in play, like "Mama, smell my turnip cookies". Either way though, I try to honour them and make his ideas a reality, and show him that they are viable. So hence the idea of turnip cookies, from my 3-year-old asking me to smell his turnip cookies. I don't know if he really registered that it was an unusual idea, or when a few weeks later, we bought a turnip and made the cookies, I don't know if he made the connection between the two. Cooking to my 3-year-old's imagination is an interesting challenge though, which I enjoy taking up. I spent a couple of weeks turning the idea over in my mind and playing with flavours I could pair with the turnips before settling on these two variants. The first batch, I had wanted to be almond and spice cookies, and so they were, but less almondy than I wanted as I discovered that I was out of almond extract when I went to start baking. I played around with different proportions of different sugars to achieve the flavour I wanted in the first batch, too. The second batch is a heavily adapted spiced molasses cookie from Claire Saffitz's book. As for the turnip itself, I wasn't sure how best to include it. Raw, like grated carrot in a carrot cake? Or precooked somehow? And if precooked, then in what way? I ended up going with the pre-cooked idea, first boiled and mashed, then roasted and blitzed. In terms of just eating the turnip, the roasted one was beautiful, but in terms of the cookies, the boiled ones were more subtle. The roasted ones somehow developed a strong negative turnip flavour from somewhere that wasn't apparent at every bite, but often enough that it bugged me a little. I would therefore steer clear of that method and boil the turnip for both cookie variants. I decided against the raw, grated ones as I wasn't sure how bits of turnip would work, rather than being smoothly incorporated into the cookie dough. Recipe Cook time: approx. 1 hour -- Portions: about 30 cookies -- Difficulty: Easy Almond and Chocolate Spiced Turnip Cookies Ingredients: 1/2 turnip (small) for 1/2 - 3/4 c boiled and mashed turnip 3/4 c butter, soft 3/4 c light brown sugar 1/2 c white sugar 1/4 c dark brown sugar 2 eggs 1 1/4 c ground almonds 2 1/4 c flour 5 cloves, ground (5 is Little Bit's favourite number. Very important!) 1/2 tsp ground ginger 1 tsp cinnamon 1/4 tsp cardamom 1/4 tsp cumin 1 tsp bicarb 1 tsp vinegar syrup (from pickled peaches) OR 1/2 tsp molasses and 1/2 tsp vinegar 100 g dark chocolate chips 1) Boil the turnip until fork-soft and mash. Cool. 2) Cream the butter and sugars together in a bowl. Beat in eggs, then the turnip. 3) Mix in the dry ingredients and combine well. Add vinegar and chocolate chips. 4) Place teaspoonfuls of cookie dough on a lined cookie sheet and bake 8-10 minutes at 180°C. Molasses Turnip Cookies Ingredients: 1/2 turnip 2 tbsp butter 3/4 c butter, melted 1 1/2 c dark brown sugar 2 eggs 1/4 c molasses 1/4 c liquid honey 1/4 c milk 3 3/4 c flour 1 tbsp baking soda 2 1/2 tsp ground ginger 1/2 tsp finely ground black pepper 1/2 tsp allspice 1/4 tsp cloves 1/2 c oats 2 tsp apple cider vinegar (Or homemade rosehip vinegar) 1) Cut the turnip into cubes and roast with the butter at 180°C for about 20-30 minutes, until fork-soft. Cool. 2) Cream the cooled, melted butter with the sugar. Beat in the eggs, then the molasses and honey. 3) Blitz the cooled turnip with the milk until smooth and add to the batter. Mix thoroughly. 4) Stir in the dry ingredients, mixing well, then add the vinegar (this is important both for the flavour balance and to activate the baking soda). 5) Roll dough into 1" balls and place on a lined cookie sheet. Bake at 180°C for 10-12 minutes. Both of these cookies turned out very nicely indeed, although, as stated above, I would stick with boiling and mashing the turnip for both recipes, as the roasting brought out some less desirable flavours. On the whole, I wouldn't know which of the two I liked better. Everyone I shared either with (and not just sycophantic family members who have to tell me they're good) said that they enjoyed both cookies. Each time, I waited until after they had been tasted to divulge the tuber secret, just to avoid a placebo or nocebo effect. Overall, odd as turnip cookies sound, I can't work out what it should be any odder an idea than carrot cake, or red velvet for that matter, which was traditionally made with beets. Side note, I've started using a silicone baking sheet mat instead of greasing cookie sheets. I find it works across different types of cookies and therefore doesn't waste the extra butter or shortening. Feel free if you prefer to grease your cookie sheets or to use baking paper instead. Swaps and substitutions: In both recipes, the different proportions of white to brown sugar can be played around with, although be aware that this will affect the texture and flavour of the cookies. Try preparing the turnip different ways - raw, boiled, roasted - and see how it differs. See how the difference between smooth incorporation and pieces (I would recommend small pieces) of turnip affects the flavour profile. As with the sugars, the proportion of honey to molasses can be played around with in the second recipe. It shouldn't affect texture too much, but it will change the flavour balance a little - darker and deeper with more molasses, lighter and more golden with a higher honey proportion. Try adding some almond extract - only 1/2 tsp or so to the first recipe, as I had intended (and plan to do at the first opportunity). As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

For the next challenge with my sister and my friend, Hibiscus Kook, to make a dish three different ways, and each of us trying something new, we decided on pancakes for pancake day today. Pancake Day, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, whatever you want to call it, is the last day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. Lent, being a period of fasting, prayer and penance leading to Easter in the Catholic faith, is traditionally a leaner period culinarily. Many know it now as being the period during which people tend to try to give up chocolate, but for many centuries it was, and for many it still is, a period when richer foods are given up until Easter. Shrove Tuesday was therefore a good time to use up eggs and fats which remained, and so pancakes became traditional in the UK. I had grown up celebrating the feat of Mardi Gras, but had never heard it called Pancake Day until I moved to Scotland for University. I was completely mystified, especially as no one could explain the significance of the pancakes, they were eaten for supper rather than breakfast, and most of my friends who celebrated pancake day were in no way religious and weren't going to be observing Lent or Easter. I still don't necessarily eat Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, and certainly eat them at other times of the year, but once in a while, it is a fun tradition to embrace. My sister's suggestion, therefore, of making Pancakes our next recipe to coincide with Pancake Day suited me to a T. Here are our three different Pancake Experiments, and a bonus Whipped Cinnamon Honey Butter recipe. For my friend, HibiscucKook's recipe for vegan pancakes on her blog, click here. Sahlep Pancakes by me Piggy Pancakes (AKA Hamcakes) and Whipped Cinnamon Honey Butter by my Sister