Cottage Cooking Club Last Month, Three Recipes

It's time once again for the cottage cooking club to come together and posts our thoughts and experiences for the month. We are a group of international blogger's bound together by our love of fresh seasonal veggie dishes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's cookbook, "River Cottage Veg". Our group is meant to be a project aimed at incorporating more vegetable dishes in our everyday cooking, and is and has been inspired by our dedicated leader Andrea of The Kitchen Lioness. Each month Andrea picks one recipe from each of the 10 chapters and then we pick and choose as many as we have time for. Sadly this is our last month of cooking from this wonderful book as we have completed the 220 recipes in “River Cottage Veg”.

But never fear in May our little group will start two more of Hugh’s books. One is titled "River Cottage Every Day" and the other one is "Love Your Leftovers". Please join us! Our motto for the month of April is: “Last but not least”.

The first recipe I prepared was the roasted potatoes and eggplant. Roasting vegetables in the oven helps them to caramelize just a little and gives them extra flavor. The potatoes were nice and crisp and the eggplant was soft and silky. Garlic was added at the end and roasted 10 more minutes. When removed from the oven the veggies were given a squeeze of lemon. Hugh also recommends freshly grated lemon zest, hot smoked paprika or chopped herbs. I will be preparing this dish often as I loved the combo. Also this was simple and easy to prepare.

The second dish I prepared was the Various rarebits. Welsh Rarebits is a dish of savory cheese sauce served over toast. In this version Hugh had us make a simple béchamel sauce with cheddar cheese. Bay leaf and onion are infused with milk to give the sauce even more flavor. I first toasted the bread then added the sauce, topped one sliced with celery slices that had been sautéed in butter until tender but still crisp. The other slice was prepared with leftover zucchini that I had grilled the night before. I thought the flavor was delicious but both of my toast were a little soggy in the middle. Not sure how everyone else did at this point.

The third and last recipe was Linguine with mint and almond pesto. Here the pesto is made out of toasted almonds, mint, garlic and lemon zest. Notice there is no cheese, the cheese is added as a garnish at the end. The pesto is then given a good squeeze of lemon and a little salt and pepper. This was easy to put together. The cooked pasta is tossed with pesto and half of the tomatoes. The other half is added to the individual serving bowls with the Parmesan cheese shaving when ready to serve. This was light and refreshing. Hugh also recommends using this pesto for salad dressing, just thin with a little olive oil.

These recipes have been slightly adapted from the "River Cottage Veg", by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. First recipe; from the chapter "Roast, grill and broil” Roasted potatoes and eggplant (page 351). Second dish from the chapter "Bready things" Various rarebits (page 209). Third recipe; from the chapter “Pasta and rice” Linguine with mint and almond pesto and tomatoes (page 266).

To see what recipes the other members chose for this month, head over to the LYL post for April 2016 on the CCC website, by clicking here.