Garlic – Page 2 – food by sole

12th May 202113th May 2021

Pimientos rellenos / bajoques farcides (stuffed peppers)

I absolutely adore stuffed peppers—if Proust had madeleines, I have stuffed peppers.

It’s smelling them and instantly thinking of sunny Sundays and visiting grandparents; chasing the faint scent of the roasted skins all the way from the ground floor through three flights of stairs, across the long corridor leading to the kitchen, and then finally (finally!) digging into the strongly flavoured rice while sitting on a pile of cushions on a chair that was way too low for me… Yummmm!

4th May 20214th May 2021

Aubergine shawarma

This is my version of a recipe from Honey & Co published in the FT magazine.

It is a bit tedious to make the first couple of times, because there are things you have to do in a sequence and others can be done in parallel (to save time), so it’s a bit hard to visualise it all in your head initially, but once you internalise the instructions (which I’ve also “streamlined” to my liking) it should be fairly fast to get it going.

This is how I see it in my head:

Apart from the flavour itself, what I also really like is that you can cook a big portion of this and keep them in the fridge for easy consumption later. I put them on a box and re-heat a portion on the microwave before serving.

A plate with aubergine shawarma, served with a cucumber and tomato salad and black tahini dressing

6th April 20216th April 2021

A happy accident: freadafels (falafel buns)

I was trying to make flatafels, but using yellow peas instead of chickpeas.

Yellow peas, we found out in another attempt to make hummus with them, are sour if you just soak them but don’t cook them. So this time I had soaked and cooked them in the pressure cooker, but it seems that I went a touch overboard with them, and they were too soft. Borderline mushy. Ew.

To make things worse I also blended them in the food processor, as I was sort of just following the normal recipe for falafel.

28th January 2021

Lentil patties

We tried the Clipstone‘s Sunday Arrosto, and they included a card thanking us (you’re welcome!) and also suggesting we could use the chicken bones for a stock. Why, of course! You don’t need to say that twice.

I immediately placed the bones and a few vegetables into my pressure cooker and had it extracting all the flavour that could be left for an hour. But then I was not quite sure what to do with the veggies because they had become a bit too mushy (specially the leeks).

Then I saw Miriam’s recipe and I was like A-HA!

23rd January 2021

Sourdough wholemeal focaccia

I like to cycle flours quickly so that they’re always as fresh as possible and don’t go rancid or off (quite important if you’re using organic flours which have not been treated with chemical products and so have more chances to ‘breed life’).

I had a lot of Hodmedod’s YQ wholemeal flour which I wanted to use, but I wanted to try something different to the usual wholemeal loaf.

I thought of making a focaccia, which is very easy to make, but they’re normally made with white flour. Using wholemeal flour might sound like a heresy when the first idea that comes to mind about focaccia is a soft white fluffy dough, but the result surprised me—it was moist and full of flavour.

But I had nothing to lose, and much to find out!