The Cottage Cooking Club | February Recipes

The CCC cooking through River Cottage Veg
by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

My recipe selections for February:

Avocado and Ruby Grapefruit with Chile
Roasted Beet Soup with Horseradish Cream
Winter Stir-Fry with Chinese Five-Spice
Roasted Squash and Shallots with Merguez Chickpeas
Potato Rösti
 

To see the complete list of recipes offered for January, click here.

Avocado and [Blood Orange] with Chile

How gorgeous is this?!! 

I so enjoyed this extremely easy and quick salad.

This simple salad consists of only an avocado, blood orange (the recipe calls for a ruby grapefruit; however, not only do my meds say no grapefruit, but I have a blood orange tree that was quite plentiful this year), a fresh red chile, cilantro, and olive oil.

The "dressing" is just spooning some of the citrus juice over the salad, with a sprinkling of salt & pepper, minced chile, and a drizzle of olive oil.

So simple. So tasty. So beautiful.



Roasted Beet Soup with Horseradish Cream

 

 
Whole beets, smashed unpeeled garlic, bay leaf, and thyme sprigs are tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper in a baking dish. A cup of water is added, the dish covered tightly with foil, and baked until the beets are tender.

The scent of the beets baking was sublime.

The cooked beets are coarsely chopped and placed in a blender along with the garlic (squeezed from their skins), and some vegetable stock. This is puréed until smooth, and then transferred to a sauce pan to be warmed up, and more broth added if needed, depending on how thin you like your soup.

The horseradish cream is made by mixing Greek yogurt (or sour cream, or crème fraîche) and grated fresh horseradish if available - otherwise use creamed horseradish. The fresh was available to me, and I would have preferred using it, but cost wise, I went with the jarred. The fresh would have cost over six bucks, and the jarred was only two something, and being I don't ever use the stuff, I won't feel as bad for tossing out the rest, after the expiration date.

Too bad the sublimeness did not carry over to the final dish. The flavor of this soup, I did not care for at all - I added some extra salt and dried thyme to punch it up a bit, but to no avail. Such a bummer, for we are beet lovers.


Winter Stir-Fry with Chinese Five-Spice

I love stir-frying! It's amazing that you can have a delicious and healthy meal on the table in no time at all.

 Mise en place.

Stir-frying is a quick process, so you want to have all the ingredients prepped and ready to go. 

One important note about stir-frying in general, is to make sure your ingredients are as dry as possible to avoid hot oil splatters when the vegetables are added to a hot wok.

This wokful of deliciousness is comprised of carrot, parsnip, mushrooms (I used shiitake), Brussels sprouts, noodles, shallots, chile, garlic, sugar (just a pinch), salt, pepper, soy sauce, rice wine (I use dry sherry), Chinese five-spice - which adds a warm, and slightly sweet flavor, and a splash of lime juice squeezed over just before serving.

This meal took less than ten minutes to cook! And the prepping of the vegetables wasn't much longer than that - using a food processor or mandoline will make shredding of the Brussels sprouts fast and easy, but I was too lazy to pull either piece of equipment out, so I just used my chef's knife. 

It's apropos that this recipe was included in the February line-up. February 19th was Chinese New Year, and certain foods have special meaning to the Chinese people; for example, noodles (uncut) stand for a long life, mushrooms signify longevity, and mixed vegetables mean family harmony, to name just a few.

Hope your Chinese New Year was wonderful!



Roasted Squash and Shallots with Merguez Chickpeas

No, there isn't any sausage in this dish (merguez is a small, thin, spicy sausage). Hugh takes the same seasonings used in the sausage to spice up the chickpeas.

First, butternut squash is roasted along with shallots and garlic until they are tender and caramelized.

While the vegetables are roasting, the chickpeas are prepared (if using canned as I did - otherwise using dried, they need to be cooked beforehand). Cumin, fennel, cilantro and caraway seeds are toasted until fragrant. The seeds are then transferred to a spice/coffee grinder to be crushed into a course powder. In a small pan, the ground seeds are mixed with some garlic, rosemary, paprika, cayenne, salt, olive oil, and the chickpeas, and cooked gently until heated through.

The squash mixture is plated and topped with the chickpeas, and is garnished with some parsley.

As pretty as this dish is, and as much as I love chickpeas and squash, this one just did not do it for me. My husbands comment was, "it's different".



Potato Rösti

Potato Rösti, as the Swiss call them, or here in the States, we call them hashbrowns.

Not much to them - shredded potato, salt and pepper. These can be made in small patties, as I have done here, or in one large pancake. I always like mini versions best - more fun that way.

Hugh suggests par-boiling the potatoes first (I skipped this), and allowing them to cool completely before shredding. I did place the shredded potatoes between paper towels to squeeze as much moisture from them as possible before cooking, though this was not in the instructions to do so.

The shredded potatoes are mixed with salt and pepper, then formed into patties and fried in oil until browned and crispy on both sides.

To try and pizazz them up  a bit, I added a dollop of Greek yogurt, and some sambal oelek for a little kick.

Hashbrowns have never really been my thing - and they still aren't. The hashbrowns I have had, have been a lot tastier. My husband informs me it is because of the melted butter that is drizzled over them while cooking - and we all know, butter makes everything better!



To see what recipes the other members chose for this month, head over to the the CCC website and look for the February LYL post - you will be taken there directly by clicking here.

We have been asked not to publish the recipes here on our blogs. We encourage you to go out and purchase the book and join us on this fun and healthy adventure!