Menu for a 1st Birthday Feast
FREE TO READ: A summer feast to celebrate the 1st birthday of this newsletter; a HUGE gift offer; and teary, gushing, sentimental hugs of thanks from me
It’s my (sort of) Birthday
My newsletter, Tales From the Veg Patch, is one year old this week. That’s 82 (eighty two!) posts of seasonal recipes, stories from the veg patch and videos of me getting things wrong in the garden.
And it’s all thanks to you
Without you lovely lot, it’d just be me and a marauding spaniel, so thank you. Thank you for subscribing, reading, sharing, generally coming for a virtual cuppa and a natter in the greenhouse. Inboxes are busy places and I don’t take it lightly that you let me into yours. You are brilliant and I am very honoured to be read by you.
You are also pioneers. You are changing what it means to be a food writer. Thanks to you and the direct relationship Substack offers, I can focus on creating recipes and stories for you rather than engaging in the fickle nonsense of TikTok and Instagram to try and get work seen, let alone paid for it. You are game changers.
A gift: BOGOF (in a nice way)
I’ve already sent a little thank you gift via email to current paid subscribers (check your Spam or message me if you didn't get your Tales From the Veg Patch ebook):
But since Birthdays are all about gifts, here’s one for readers currently on a free or weekly subscription:
For more on what an annual subscription includes see here.
HOW IT WORKS: sign up as an annual paid subscriber by Sunday night then message or email me with the name and email of the person you’d like to gift the other subscription to and I’ll add set them up.*
(*
can we have a neater way of doing this please and thank you.)Stay tuned for ‘News’…
Enough gushing, let’s get cooking. But do stay tuned this week because I have celebrations planned almost every day and all of them are free to read. Tomorrow’s newsletter is particularly exciting because I have news to share. I mean, News…
(TECHNICAL NOTE: There are a LOT of recipes here and they might not all fit in your email. If so, just hit VIEW ENTIRE MESSAGE at the end of the email, or head to the app or online version.)
A birthday feast for summer
People can get in a right old pickle about cooking for a celebration. I blame MasterChef. It makes cooking for other people seem more complicated and more stressful than brain surgery. Well, not on my watch. This menu is almost entirely made ahead of time. It is abundant with special, seasonal ingredients and is decadent in its variety of flavours and textures. But it doesn’t require much of the cook. Which is good, because this is a party and there’s a birthday to celebrate.
Here’s the menu
Boozy Peach Slush Puppie
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Raw root remoulade on rye
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Green gnudi
Lettuce
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No-churn thyme & plum crumble ice-cream
All the recipes follow here and in recipe card form in the PDF below, where you will also find a prep plan (yes, I am channeling the queen of mise-en-place and timing plans
)
Right, aprons on, folks.
Boozy Peach Slush Puppies
This is a version of a recipe I created for one of my regular Seasonal Sundays classes at Fortnum and Mason to showcase their much-tastier-than-Pimms Summer Cup drink. It’s peachy and aromatic and makes a very grown-up Slush Puppy to kick things off.
Serves 4-6
175g sugar
1 peach, sliced
Combine the sugar with 250ml water in a pan set over a low heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Cool, then add the Summer Cup.
Pour the mixture into a wide, shallow tub and freeze for 2 hours. Remove from the freezer and use a fork to rough up the semi-frozen mixture then return it to the freezer for 45 minutes. Repeat 3-4 more times until the mixture resembles a slush puppy. Leave in the freezer overnight to firm up.
To serve, spoon the rubble into glasses, add a slice of peach and whisk to the table. Straw or spoon, you decide.
Raw root remoulade on rye
The knack with a good slaw is twofold. First, there must be pops of texture and flavour beyond the sweet crunch of the veg – seeds, nuts, capers etc – to add interest. Second, the dressing must be liberally salted and should really pack a punch, so if you don’t feel like you want to drink this dressing, tweak it with a dab of honey or more salt.
Serves 2
2 small beetroot, peeled
1 small kohl rabi
1 small apple
2 spring onions, chopped
1 tbsp leafy herbs (parsley, mint, fennel, sorrel etc), finely chopped
1 tbsp pumpkin seeds
1 tbsp sunflower seeds
3-4 caperberries
A few fennel pollen tops (if you can find them)
2 slices dark rye bread
For the dressing:
½ tsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp apple cider vinegar with honey
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp apple juice
In a large bowl, whisk together all the ingredients for the dressing, plus a generous pinch of salt.
Think chefy thoughts as you chop the beetroot, kohl rabi and apple into thin matchsticks. The more chefy you feel, the more delicate the matchsticks will be.
Add these to the dressing bowl together with the spring onions, herbs, seeds and capers. Toss and check the seasoning.
Toast the rye bread, pile the slaw on top and tuck in.
Green gnudi
Yes, I did do a gnudi recipe a few weeks ago, but I just can’t get enough of them at the moment – so pillowy, so versatile, so easy to make – that I am making them on repeat. This time greener, sauced and not fried. See, the options never end… This sauce uses fields of spinach and can be in bulk and frozen. Great for pasta.
Serves 2 gluttons
For the gnudi:
350g ricotta
40g parmesan, grated
1 egg yolk
1 heaped tbsp basil, finely chopped
2 tbsp 00 pasta flour, plus extra for dusting
Semolina, for dusting
For the sauce:
400g perpetual (or regular) spinach
10g basil leaves
1 fat garlic clove, crushed
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
½ small lemon, juiced
25g grated parmesan
20g pine nuts
Start with the gnudi. Tip the ricotta into a sieve you have lined with a piece of muslin and sat over a bowl. Leave to drain for at least an hour.
Mix the drained ricotta with the parmesan, egg, basil and season generously with salt. Add the flour and bring together into a wet, pillowy paste-like dough.
Pour a handful of semolina and half as much pasta flour into a deep-sized dish (a lasagne dish or tuppaware is ideal) then, with damp hands, scoop up a small tsp of dough, roll it into a ball and toss it in the semolina/flour to coat completely. Repeat until the mixture is used up, ensuring each ball is nestled in its own bed of flour and none of them are touching. Cover with baking paper (not cling film, it will sweat). Leave in the fridge for a couple of hours to form a ‘crust’ but up to 24 hours.
For the sauce, roughly chop the spinach, discarding any tough stems. Wash, then, with the water still clinging to the leave, wilt the spinach in a large frying pan for 3-5 minutes. Drain and rinse in cold water (this helps the colour stay bright). Squeeze out all the water you can from the spinach then tip into a blender. Add the remaining ingredients, plus a pinch of salt, and whizz to a smooth green paste.
When you are ready to eat, spoon the sauce into a pan and set over a low heat to warm through. Boil a large, deep pan of salted water. Lower the gnudi to the boiling water and cook for 3-5 minutes. They will float to the top when cooked. Lift the gnudi out of the water and straight into the sauce. Add a spoonful of the gnudi cooking liquid to the sauce to loosen if necessary.
Remove from the heat, check the seasoning and serve, scattered with more basil and parmesan as you see fit.
No-churn thyme and plum crumble ice-cream
What to do when you have a glut of plums but it’s too hot for crumble? Solution: crumble ice-cream! This quick, no-churn ice-cream method is endlessly adaptable to suit many crumble-able summer fruits – gooseberries, strawberries, rhubarb etc. You can use whichever biscuits you prefer, but I find a Hobnob gives the best oaty, nutty rubble texture of a good crumble topping and is tough enough not to go soggy in the ice-cream mixture.
Serves 4
200g very ripe plums, stoned and quartered
100g light muscovado sugar
1 tsp chopped thyme leaves
½ tin (200g) condensed milk
300ml double cream
1 tsp vanilla paste
70g Hobnobs, roughly chopped, plus extra – whole - to serve
2 tbsp chopped hazelnuts
Begin by making a plum compote that will later be swirled deliciously through the ice-cream. Put the plums, sugar and thyme in a pan set over a medium heat. Stir until the sugar dissolves then simmer for 5-8 minutes until the plum skins are soft. Set aside in a tub to cool.
Meanwhile, combine the condensed milk, cream and vanilla paste in a bowl and whisk to stiff peaks.
Transfer the cream mixture to a wide, shallow, freezer-proof tub and spread it out evenly. Spoon the cooled plum compote on top and scatter over the crushed biscuits. Using something like the end of a wooden spoon, stir the compote and crumble into the ice-cream in big, blowsy swirls to create ripples of compote. Freeze for at least 4 hours.
When serving, thaw the ice-cream in the fridge for a few minutes then scoop into bowls and serve with a Hobnob or two on the side.
Happy Substack birthday, Kathy! Here's to many more x
Congratulations! Happy Substack birthday.