“It’s a bit like Craggy Island”.

The jovial Alastair Dobson was suggesting that the Isle of Arran might have something of the remoteness and quirkiness of Craggy Island, the fictional setting for the equally fictional Father Ted.

Whilst Arran is a rural island outpost and does necessitate almost an hour’s ferry crossing from the Scottish mainland, it’s still within easy reach of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Its appeal as a place to live is evidenced by the fact that many of its 5000+ residents are not native islanders but blow-ins from other parts of Scotland, Northern England and elsewhere.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service.
Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

Boasting the highest density of artisan food producers of any postcode in Scotland – and producing high quality fresh vegetables and herbs, cheeses, mustards, oatcakes, ice cream, beer, Scotch whisky and more – the island also appeals as a place where you can drink and eat, both locally and well.

Oaties, Scottish dunlop cheese and wholegrain whisky mustard - looks like a fine Arran lunch to me

What’s particularly impressive about the food production on Arran, though, is its truly co-operative nature. Taste of Arran and its founder, the aforementioned Alastair Dobson, have a lot to do with that.

When I met Alastair, he was busy serving his Arran Dairies ice cream to a long queue of people at the Brodick Highland Games. Supplies of their Great Taste award winning chocolate ice cream were gone by the time I got there, but Alastair’s favourite, the traditional dairy variety, was in plentiful supply, so I got busy eating.

An Arran Dairies ice cream cone with my name on it

Deftly passing out equal measures of ice cream and good cheer, Alastair talked about his progression from dairying to ice cream production and thence to the promotion and marketing of island-produced food with the establishment of Taste of Arran.

Taste of Arran is not only about shared marketing resources, though. It has fostered an extremely rich co-operative network on the island. You will find, among many others examples, Arran mustard made using Arran whisky, Arran chutney featuring Arran beer and Arran ice cream flavoured with Arran Gold whisky liqueur. You will also find local restaurants (such as the excellent Brambles Seafood And Grill at the Auchrannie Resort) proudly serving (and naming) the Arran products that they use.

Dinner at Brambles with locally sourced Arran fare (clockwise from top left):
chunky fish cake, local seafood platter, apple and bramble crumble with clotted cream

The De Courcys, meanwhile, who run the charming Arran Barn, will proudly tell you that the makings of your breakfast will be locally sourced where possible and, where appropriate, will be harvested to order.

At the Arran Barn, as local and fresh as you can get

All of which explains to me why so many non-islanders have chosen to make this their home. It’s a place that not only gives good cause to visit Scotland but to stay.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Bran Oatcakes

Oatcakes might well be one of the definitive Scottish foods. Goodness knows, they’ve been around for a long time. According to my Little Scottish Cookbook, the 14th century chronicler Jean Froissart recorded that Scottish soldiers would carry a flat plate and a wallet of oatmeal. Using a little water, they could always make themselves an oatcake over an open fire.

In their traditional form, they are an austere kind of food. Just oats, salt and bread soda mixed with a very small amount of liquid fat and water. That doesn’t mean that they’re not good, though. I became very fond of the excellent bran oaties from Wooleys of Arran, which add wheat bran and a small amount of brown sugar to what otherwise seems a fairly traditional formula. Having very quickly eaten through my stash of said oaties, I found myself needing to recreate them and fast.

Taking Wooley’s lead and replacing some oats with wheat bran and adding a spoon of sugar, I ended up with something that wasn’t a bad approximation of the original. Not as crisp and perfectly baked, mind, but I was still happy to scoff them. I also took the step of toasting the oatmeal first to try and bring out its nuttiness, though feel free to skip that step if you like.

You’ll need:

• 175g porridge oats (rolled oats) plus a little extra for rolling out, or substitute with fine oatmeal
• 75g wheat bran
• 0.25 tsp of salt
• 0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tblsp demerara sugar
• 1 tblsp butter, melted
• approx 150ml to 250ml just-boiled water

You’ll also need:

• A couple of large baking sheets (mine were 30cm x 40cm) and a coffee or spice grinder for grinding the oats.

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 200C
• If using porridge oats and you want to toast them first, spread them onto the baking sheets and toast in the oven for 5-10 minutes, just until the flakes have browned lightly and being careful not to let them burn. Allow them to cool slightly and grind to a coarse flour texture using a spice grinder. Alternatively, you can grind the porridge oats directly or just use fine oatmeal.
• In a large bowl, whisk together the oats, bran, salt and bicarbonate of soda.
• Make a well in the centre and add the melted butter and about 150ml of the just-boiled water. Mix together to form a stiff dough – adding more water if the mixture is too dry. Knead the dough so that it comes together smoothly.
• Roll the dough out to a thickness of around 3mm on a surface sprinkled with some additional oatmeal. Cut into triangles, rounds or squares as you prefer.
• Place on ungreased baking sheets and bake for 15-20 minutes or until the oatcakes have firmed up and are starting to turn golden brown at the edges.
• Cool on a wire rack and enjoy spread with butter or topped with cheese.

The Variations:

• For regular oatcakes, replace the bran with additional oats. You could also try adding some grated cheddar to the mixture to make cheese oaties.

The Results:

• Makes around 20 to 25 x 7cm round oatcakes.

My new favourite potato thing: oven-dried crisps

Fond though I am of a proper bag of crisps, I don’t mind telling you that I am more than a little excited by these.

Paper-thin slices of potato, soaked in salt and vinegar, then dried to a crisp in the oven.

Yep, that’s dried, not fried.

I’ll grant you that these are not likely to usurp their fried-in-oil cousins anytime soon, but they do make a good case for themselves as a light and crispy snack in their own right. And they’re positively healthy to boot.

There’s a lot to like.

Alternatively…

If it’s real crisps you’re after, you could do worse that to seek out a new entrant to the Irish crisp market. I had the opportunity to sample some of Ed O’Donnell’s Tipperary Crisps during the week and, my, but they are worthy of your attention.

They are naturally appealing for the fact that they use fine, locally sourced ingredients, like Mount Callan cheddar and cider vinegar from Tipperary’s Apple Farm, but mostly they just taste good. The cider vinegar and sea salt flavour I thought an especially fine example of the genre. Here in Ireland, look for them in SuperValu or Centra.

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/25/potato-crisps/feed/ 23 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/22/ketchup-recipe-rhubarb/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ketchup-recipe-rhubarb http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/22/ketchup-recipe-rhubarb/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:01:29 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=20767

Exotic: (adjective)

1. From another part of the world; foreign;
2. Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange;

There will, no doubt, be much that fits those descriptions at this weekend’s Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. A gloriously bubbling stew of music, dance, crafts and food from the far flung reaches of the globe. Even if food were your only interest – and who would I be to judge you for that – the festival’s International Food Traders would surely warrant a visit, as would the Global Village and the South Asian Mela Market.

All told, not a bad way to spend a few days. However, as luck and my projected geographical location for the weekend would have it, I will miss the entire thing. Clearly I will have to compensate by cooking something with a suitably international pedigree. Like ketchup. And if you suppose that such a ubiquitous sauce is too familiar to be exotic, you might have to revise your thinking when you meet the variety made from rhubarb.

Rhubarb ketchup - yes, such a thing exists

See, the first thing you need to know is that, while tomato ketchup might hold a rather dominant position in the global condiment market, it isn’t even the original of the ketchup species.

What were called catsups originated in China and were discovered there by East India merchants sometime in the 17th century, who then introduced them to other parts of Asia and thence to Britain and beyond. Most early catsups were based on mushrooms and it was only when the tomato become more popular in the 19th century that tomato catsup start to emerge.

The chief virtue of early catsups was that they kept for a very long time and were thus popular on long sea voyages. In her book Curry, Lizzie Collingham reports on a recipe that Hannah Glasse provided in the 1748 edition of The Art of Cookery. The recipe, addressed to the “Captains of Ships”, called for stale beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger and mushrooms in order to make a “Catchup to keep Twenty Years”.

Now, while I do expect this rhubarb ketchup to mature nicely over time, I can’t really guarantee that it will keep for 20 years. I, for one, could not restrain myself from eating such a tangy, fruity concoction for anything like that long.

I hereby issue a warning to all passing lemons.

I am going through a zesting phase and any lemons within range are likely to be relieved of their outer garments sharpish. Zorro-like, I will unsheath my beloved microplane zester, draw razor-sharp blades across their citrusy skins and have my wicked culinary way with the finely shredded results.

Other citrus fruit, I might add, are also at risk.

No lemon is safe...

Ah, yes, it’s true that the zing of a little citrus zest has lifted many a meal lately. I think, however, that my zesting habit started with my first attempt at lemon shortbread bars.

There I was, ready for kitchen action, lured by the promise of the most lemony of lemon bars ever. Suffice to say that the author of the recipe should have their license to use superlatives revoked, because the lemon bars were nothing of the kind.

Fortunately, I realised that the situation could be retrieved by means of emergency zesting. A generous sprinkling of lemon shavings on top and at least I now had bars that spoke of lemon, rather than vaguely hinting at it.

Needless to remark, I have been zesting generously ever since.

Redcurrant shortbread bars with a little inner lemon zest

Many lemons later, the time finally came to return to the scene of the shortbread crime and make a properly tangy shortbread bar.

Rather than go the pure lemon route, however, I looked to my recent harvest of redcurrants, which boast their own particular brand of tartness. They made for a gloriously pink topping but, sharp and all as redcurrants are, they still lacked the oomph I was looking for in my shortbread bars.

One zested lemon later and they had all the oomph they needed.

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/14/lemon-bars-shortbread-redcurrants/feed/ 22 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/11/gallaghers-boxty-house/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gallaghers-boxty-house http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/11/gallaghers-boxty-house/#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:26:49 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=21162 Sometimes it takes a foreigner to capture the truth about a nation:

Ireland … isn’t exactly the sexiest country in the world … constant gray skies, cool temperatures and an obsession with one of nature’s homeliest vegetables….

Clare, from An American in Ireland

Ouch. Harsh but true.

By tradition, we, like our food, are more hearty and plain than delicate and fancy. We are bacon and cabbage and boiled potatoes. We are soda bread, apple tart and the ubiquitous cup of tea. We are the food that you go to your Mammy’s house for. But when we eat out, we generally look to foreign cuisines for something a little outside of our Irish selves.

Perhaps, to my shame, that’s the reason why, in all my years of living in Dublin, I had managed, until now, to avoid darkening the door of Gallagher’s Boxty House. With its traditional Irish menu and diddly-eye music, it sat firmly in my “just for tourists” category.

Gallagher's Boxty House, Temple Bar

Yet a restaurant, of whatever type, that has been around for 22 years, has to be doing something right. And as for Pádraic Óg Gallagher, owner and originator of Gallagher’s Boxty House, I can but admire a man who builds an entire menu around boxty, Ireland’s own particular contribution to the pantheon of potato pancakes. The popularity of Gallagher’s boxty is borne out by the restaurant’s one-tonne-a-week potato habit.

The boxty family: boxty pancake, baked boxty loaf and boiled boxty

Whilst most of the boxty served up is in the form of thick, substantial pancakes, you can also sample boiled boxty, which is dense but lovely in a stodgy way, and the lighter textured baked boxty loaf. The boxty pancakes, meanwhile, you will find wrapped around all sorts of things including (yes) bacon and cabbage. All substantial and satisfying stuff.

Boxty pancake with bacon and cabbage

My visit to Gallagher’s Boxty House, though, was more than the sum of the boxties served.

It lived up to its promise of “bia, caint, ceol agus craic” / “food, chat, music and fun”, thanks, at least in part, to a generous helping of boxty and potato lore from Pádraic Óg himself. As we indulged our obsession with that homeliest of vegetables, I realised that sometimes it takes a local to celebrate the truth of what we are.

That’s the trouble with words. They mean different things to different people.

Time was when any self-respecting paddy would not have thought to call the items in the picture below anything other than biscuits or biccies.

Oatmeal, chocolate chip and redcurrant whatsits

But the fact is that we’re pretty comfortable with the term cookie these days, it being many years since “American-style Chocolate Chip Cookies” started to appear on Irish supermarket shelves.

Some Irish people might even use the terms biscuit and cookie interchangeably, though I think there is a perception that cookies are a bit fancier than your average biscuit. I mean to say, nobody that I know of ever elevated plain ol’ Marietta biscuits to cookie status, while I, personally, have great difficulty in separating the word cookie from the phrase chocolate chip. Where one goes, the other inevitably follows.

Plain old Marietta biscuits
(image from jacobfruitfield.com)

Still, while these words might be the little pegs on which we hang our cultural identity, what I call said baked goods, in the end, really matters less than the fact that they are just the thing to have with a nice cup of Irish tea.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Dried Redcurrants

One of the joys of having a generous redcurrant harvest is that I could afford to experiment with slow-roasting as a means of drying some of my redcurrants out. They lose a lot of volume in the process, but there really is a nice concentrated tartness to the end result.

You’ll need:

• redcurrants

You’ll also need:

• One or more baking trays – enough to hold the redcurrants in a single layer

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 110C
• Wash the redcurrants and drain on kitchen paper
• Spread the redcurrants in a single layer on your baking tray(s) and roast for about about an hour and a half or up to 2 hours, until darkened, shriveled but still a little bit juicy.
• Scrape from the baking trays and use for baking or add some to your breakfast cereal.

The Results:

• 500g fresh redcurrants will yield around 75g dried redcurrants

It was the simplest of ideas. To meet of a summer’s evening, drink tea and eat cake.

Gisela, from Life is a Festival, who organised yesterday’s Dublin Tea Up, asked only that you bring yourself, your favourite mug and a baked contribution if you were so inclined (and yes, as you’ll see later, I was).

The result was an Irish teatime gone into overdrive – currant scones and butter, rhubarb tart, swiss roll, iced buns, treacly flapjacks and more. There was even a lady who, in true Mrs. Doyle style, would (go on, go on) offer you one of her baked treats (you will, you will) until such time as you took it (which I did, I did).

Tea from Clement & Pekoe plus lots of scones, cake, tart and buns

And there was tea, of course. A summer berry iced tea and some lovely loose leafed varieties dispensed by Dairine of Clement and Pekoe.

But more than cake and more than tea, there was chat (and even a tune or two). This was a diverse group of people from the arts, who, by and large, had not met before, except in the internet sense of the word. But it turns out that we had plenty to talk about over a cuppa (or several). It was the kind of gathering that, despite involving neither pubs nor alcohol, could actually catch on.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Lemon Cake With Redcurrants

This was one of my contributions to yesterday’s feast of tea and cake. It’s adapted from a recipe entitled Lemon Crusty Cake in Sue Lawrence’s lovely book, On Baking. I adore the original – tart, sweet and moist all at the same time – a zesty lemon cake drenched in a mixture of lemon juice and sugar as soon as it comes out of the oven.

For a different, but equally tart effect, I have replaced the lemon zest in the cake with redcurrants, which are enjoying their short but glorious season. Raspberries would be an equally good choice.

You’ll need:

• 175g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt
• 150g unsalted butter
• 150g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 3 tblsp cream
• 150g redcurrants, washed and stalks removed (or substitute raspberries)
• juice of 2 large lemons (about 100ml)
• 100g demerara sugar

You’ll also need:

• A shallow-ish rectangular baking tin, mine was about 27cm x 18cm x 4cm deep

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 180C, grease your tin and line with greaseproof paper.
• Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
• Cream the butter until very soft, then add the sugar and continue creaming until pale and smooth.
• Beat in the eggs, one at a time, folding in a spoonful of the flour after each addition.
• Fold in the rest of the flour and then gently stir in the cream and the redcurrants – the mixture will have a stiff dropping consistency.
• Bake for around 25 minutes or until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out fairly clean.
• While the cake is baking, combine the lemon juice and demerara sugar. Pour this mixture over the cake immediately it comes out of the oven. Allow to cool for about 30 minutes in the tin, then cut into squares and transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. It’s very moist and lovely with a cup of tea or as a dessert served with yoghurt or sour cream.

The Variations:

• If you’re making this later in the year, it might be worth trying cranberries in place of the redcurrants or raspberries. You can also leave out the fruit if you like and just add the zest of a lemon to the cake mixture (which makes it very similar to the original recipe).

The Results:

• Make approx 24 x 5cm-ish squares

My First Feta Cheese

There I was, proud as punch, admiring my first batch of feta cheese.

I knew that, before long, I would be all “feta this” and “feta that”, a salad here and a spanakopita there, and still enough feta left over to impress friends and family. It was a big, cheesy win.

Until I remembered that technically I’m not allowed to call it feta.

Not according to the European Union at any rate.

To make real feta cheese, I would need to move my operation to Greece, employ their traditional methods of cheese making and use the local sheep’s milk. Cheese made in a Dublin suburb from the milk of Irish cows doesn’t really cut it.

But who cares?

As long as I keep my faux feta to myself.

And you agree not to shop me to the Greek authorities. Ok?

I have doubts on sprouts
But peas they please
And parsnips give me pleasure.
But of all the veg
I give this pledge
Potatoes are my treasure.

Extract from “King Spud” © 2010 Nick Balmforth

Mr. Balmforth, author of those lines, is clearly a man after my own heart – a heart that fairly swells with pride when my little potato treasures start to blossom, signalling to the world that new potatoes are not far behind.

The sign that says new spuds are a comin'

At the head of my new potato posse are a few mavericks – the offspring of stray spuds that have lingered long enough to produce roots and shoots of their own. Having had a head start on the seeds planted this year, the next generation of last year’s Shetland Blacks and Colleens are all ready for me to meet and eat.

First new potatoes of the year, Shetland Black and Colleen

And when presented with a crop of small, firm new potatoes, it is the most natural thing in the world to want to turn them into potato salad.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Potato Salad with Feta Cheese

When it comes to making potato salad, the possibilities are, of course, endless. If, however, you had just made feta cheese for the first time, then into that potato salad the feta cheese would go. (There will be a full report on the feta cheese making in due course, though I hasten to add that making your own feta cheese is not a requirement for this!)

If you don’t have small, new potatoes, you can really use any waxy potato here – just halve or quarter larger potatoes before boiling so that you end up with roughly even-sized pieces.

The recipe also calls for roasting a head of garlic, with around 6 cloves of roasted garlic used in the dressing – if you roast more than than that, you can always just eat the leftover cloves of roasted garlic as is or spread them on toast.

You’ll need:

• 1 small head garlic
• olive oil for roasting garlic
• 75g walnut halves
• 800g new potatoes
• salt for boiling the potatoes
• 8-10cm sprig of rosemary
• 3 tblsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1.5 tblsp lemon juice
• Zest of half a lemon (about 2 tsp zest)
• 1 tsp dijon mustard
• freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 150g feta cheese, crumbled
• 4 spring onions, finely sliced
• 4 tblsp mint, finely chopped
• 4 tblsp flat leaf parsley, finely chopped

The Steps:

• Preheat the oven to 200C
• Separate 2 cloves from the head of garlic and reserve. Remove the outer layer of papery skin from the rest of the head and slice off the top, just to expose the cloves. Wrap the head of garlic in foil and pour a tsp or two of olive oil over the exposed cloves. Roast for around 35 minutes or until the cloves are completely soft. Meanwhile, prepare the walnuts and potatoes:
• Spread the walnuts on a baking tray and place in your hot oven for around 5 minutes or so, until lightly toasted (they will burn easily, so keep an eye on them). Remove, allow to cool a little and chop roughly.
• Scrub the potatoes and peel and lightly crush the 2 reserved cloves of garlic. Bring about 1.5l of water to the boil in a saucepan, add about 2 tsp salt, a sprig of rosemary, the pieces of crushed garlic and the potatoes. Bring back to the boil and reduce to a simmer. Simmer gently, covered, for around 15-20 minutes or until just fork-tender.
• When the potatoes are done, drain well and return them to the saucepan. Let them sit, covered by a tea-towel, for 5-10 minutes or until cool enough to handle.
• To make the dressing, whisk together the extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, dijon mustard and black pepper. Mash about 6 cloves of the roasted garlic and mix with the dressing.
• Roughly chop the potatoes into bite-sized chunks and toss with the dressing. Add the crumbled feta, spring onions, walnuts, mint and parsley and stir to mix. Taste and add more of whatever you think it may need.
• Eat.

The Variations:

• If I’d had kalamata olives, I would have added some. You could also add capers if you like.

The Results:

• Potato salad servings for around 4.

The scene:

A balmy Saturday evening in London, on a post-curry walk, somewhere in the vicinity of Bayswater.

Not that it’s entirely relevant, but the curry in question was a tandoori king prawn masala, and (cue licking of lips) very nice it was too.

The players:

In addition to yours truly, we have Bethany and Mayssam, 2 ladies with Lebanese backgrounds and, I suspect, a vast amount of hummus-eating experience. This fact is significant.

The background:

It was 24 hours since the massed participants at Food Blogger Connect 2010 had descended on the Hempel Hotel.

24 hours with much discussion of bloggery. From the how-do-I-make-money-at-this talk with Jaden to the craft of writing as discussed by Jeanne, Jamie and Kerrin and the low-down on cameras, photography and styling with Hilda, Meeta and Mowie.

24 hours of eating, drinking and making sure you scored a bowl of posh-looking fish, chips and mushy peas whenever they passed your way. And no little discussion of whether that dessert was crème brulée, as advertised, or, in fact, panna cotta. Be in no doubt, this was a group of people who liked to eat and talk about food. A lot.

It was inevitable, therefore, that the conversation following that Saturday evening’s curry would involve yet more food…

The post-curry conversation:

I don’t know who mentioned hummus and fries first, but both of my companions attested to the excellence of one with the other.

It stopped me – the potato lady – in my tracks.

Call them fries or call them chips, it had never occurred to me to dip them in hummus.

And while it seemed that some might baulk at the mere idea of it (just as they baulk at the thought of a chip butty), I immediately wondered where this combination had been all my life. Fries and hummus would be together on my plate at last. I was sure that they were going to be very happy.

The epilogue:

The trip to Food Blogger Connect might have been worthwhile for the hummus insight alone, but there was much else besides (for some lovely portraits from the event drop over to Mowie and for a run down of the food Sarah is your lady).

It was a joy to catch up with familiar bloggers, like Jamie, Adrienne and Pamela, and to meet new faces like Valentina, Heather, Julia, Anne, Giulia and so many more. My already hefty list of blogs to visit has put on some serious weight after last weekend. There’s nothing else for it but to make some obscenely healthy hummus. To go with a rather large order of fries.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Sprouted Chickpea Hummus

I have long been intrigued by the idea of making hummus using raw, sprouted chickpeas. In fact, every time I buy sprouted chickpea hummus from Natasha’s Living Food, I promise myself that I will attempt to recreate it at home. Today I finally kept that promise and made something approximating Natasha’s sprouted chickpea hummus with cumin and coriander.

The taste is quite different to regular hummus but equally tasty and (it being raw ‘n’ all), it’s just terribly healthy stuff. It does require a certain amount of forethought (4 days worth to be precise, in order to sprout the chickpeas) but it’s worth the planning that goes into it.

You can substitute an equivalent weight of cooked chickpeas here if you like, resulting in something closer to classic hummus.

You’ll need:

• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 400g sprouted chickpeas (see instructions below)
• 2 small cloves garlic
• 4 tsp tahini
• 4 tblsp chopped fresh coriander
• 4 tblsp lemon juice
• 2 tblsp tamari (or use regular soy sauce)
• 2 tblsp extra virgin olive oil
• salt to taste
• cayenne pepper (optional)

You’ll also need:

• A food processor and a spice grinder or mortar and pestle.

The Steps:

• Toast the cumin seeds in a small frying pan over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes or until fragrant. Grind to a powder using a spice grinder or crush using a mortar and pestle.
• Whizz the chickpeas, cumin, garlic, tahini, coriander, lemon juice, tamari and olive oil together in a food processor so that it forms a paste. Taste and add salt and/or additional lemon juice or tamari if it’s to your taste. Sprinkle with a little cayenne pepper if you like and enjoy as a dip with (yes) fries or pitta breads or mix with steamed new potatoes to make a warm potato salad.

The Variations:

• Natasha also makes a sprouted hummus with parsley and black olive which is worth trying to recreate – just replace the cumin, coriander and garlic with some flat leaf parsley and black olives.

The Results:

• Dip for around 4 people

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Sprouted Chickpeas

While it does require a bit of advance planning, sprouting chickpeas really couldn’t be simpler: soak dried chickpeas for 2 days, drain, leave to sprout for 2 days, et voilà, my new favourite snack. I could munch on these as is, though they might just as easily get thrown into salads or made into hummus.

The instructions for sprouting as given below are pretty much as found over on the veggie boards forum.

You’ll need:

• dried chickpeas (to yield 400g sprouted chickpeas, you will need to start with just under 200g dried chickpeas)

The Steps:

• Soak the dried chickpeas for 24 – 48 hours – the longer the soaking time, the easier they should be to digest.
• Drain and let the chickpeas sprout for around 48 hours (I just left them sitting in a colander, loosely covered with a piece of muslin). Rinse them with water about 3 times a day.
• After about 48 hours, the chickpeas should have developed sprouts around 1-1.5cm in length. Eat the sprouted chickpeas as is, add to salads or make hummus (as above).

The Results:

• Each 100g dried chickpeas should yield slightly more than 200g sprouted chickpeas.