recycled robo

I’m happy to be taking part in the Grow, Share, Cook project from Tamar Grow Local. The project provides free fortnightly vegetable bags to people around Plymouth with locally grown, seasonal produce and a suggested recipe to try. They’ll also be running cooking classes around the city.

The timing of this is quite lucky for me, as I recently had a rougher-than-usual few weeks and was surviving entirely on peanut butter toast for a while but getting a bag full of fresh vegetables made me feel that I had to make use of them!

This is the first bag I received, containing spring greens, leeks, potatoes, wild garlic leaves and rhubarb (I snapped the stalks in half to fit them in my sink for washing).

I used the suggested recipe as a guide for the first meal I made using the veggies. To make this I boiled potatoes, then fried them with a leek and spring greens. This was then seasoned with a pesto I made using the wild garlic leaves and sprinkled with some dukkah (an Egyptian spice/nut blend) made by my dad. It was simple, tasty and made me feel good that I’d prepared and eaten a healthy meal; clean-up was also easy because it only used two pans and when you don’t have a lot of energy, I think that’s really important. I enjoyed this meal so much I ended up making it three times!

To make the wild garlic pesto, I blended all of the wild garlic leaves (approx 90g) with 50g chopped mixed nuts, a bit of lemon juice, salt and olive oil until I got the consistency I wanted. Normally you would use pine nuts and add Parmesan (or a non-dairy substitute) but I’d had a long day and was too tired to go and buy those things! I was a bit skeptical of how it would taste but it was really nice!

This is another simple meal I used the potatoes and garlic pesto for, this time with frozen broccoli, Quorn pieces and soy beans. I found adding a bit of soy sauce helps to add flavour and colour to the potatoes.

To use the rhubarb, I made a rhubarb and apple crumble filling. Again, this was really simple – just chop the rhubarb and apples and throw them in a saucepan with some sugar and a little lemon juice. As much as I love rhubarb crumble, I really didn’t have the motivation to make the topping and I hate cleaning the dish afterwards so I just sprinkled some granola on the top. It’s obviously not as nice as a lovely crumble with custard or ice-cream but it still satisfies a sweet craving on a lazy day!

I did use the rest of the rhubarb on another day to make a rhubarb upside-down cake but I don’t want to share a photo of because although it was yummy, mine was not at all photogenic – sorry!

I was really happy with my first veggie bag and I’m looking forward to the next one!