Christmas Trifle

by Nessa Robins

A big bowlful of trifle has always been synonymise with Christmas. It looks so impressive, yet isn’t time-consuming to make. The spiced berry chia jam is filled with festive flavours, and can be prepared with fresh or frozen berries – if you happen to have a stash saved in the freezer. The base and custard layer of this trifle can be prepared and assembled the day before it’s needed, so on the big day it will only take minutes to add the cream and a few toppings. If you haven’t a large trifle bowl to hand, the mixture can easily be divided into individual serving bowls, or even glasses.

Enjoy!

Happy Christmas. 

Nessa x

Christmas Trifle

Ingredients

Serves 8

Spiced Berry Chia Jam

  • 500g raspberries & strawberries, fresh or frozen
  • 2tbsp water
  • 2tbsp honey
  • ¼ tsp cinnamon
  • Pinch of nutmeg
  • 2tbsp chia seeds
  • Zest of 1 orange 

Trifle Layers

  • 350g Madeira cake, homemade or shop-bought, thinly sliced
  • 250g fresh raspberries & strawberries, sliced or cut in half
  • 500ml good quality vanilla custard
  • 500ml cream, lightly whipped

Toppings

  • 50g hazelnuts, chopped
  • Zest of ½ orange 

Method

  1. To prepare the chia jam, place the berries, water, honey, cinnamon and nutmeg into a medium-sized saucepan, and place over a medium heat. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes, mashing the fruit intermittently. Remove from the heat and stir through the chia seeds and orange zest. Allow to cool fully before making the trifle.
  2. To assemble the trifle, place a layer of the cooled chia jam on the base of the trifle bowl. Top with the thin slices of Madeira cake. Add some more of the jam and continue layering the cake and berries until all have been used up. 
  3. Top with a layer of fresh berries, before adding an even layer of custard, if not serving immediately the trifle can now be refrigerated for up to 24 hours.
  4. Before serving, add the layer of whipped cream and sprinkle the hazelnuts and orange zest around the edges. Serve and enjoy!

Christmas Gravy & Simply Prepared Sprouts 

by Nessa Robins

For me, Christmas dinner is one of my favourite meals of the year. There are so many different elements on the plate, which merge so deliciously together, and a good-quality gravy always elevates every mouthful. The gravy recipe I’m sharing is packed with wholesome Irish vegetables and herbs, with plenty of fresh sage, as a nod to the traditional Christmas flavours. I’m using a roasting tray which is also suitable for the stovetop, but after roasting the vegetables you could transfer this mixture to a large saucepan either. It may be a little time-consuming to make on Christmas morning, so it’s probably best to make it in the run-up to Christmas, freeze flat in an airtight freezer bag, and then heat completely through just before serving dinner. 

Brussels sprouts are rich in fibre and packed with nutrients. They are delicious served in so many ways, but when serving sprouts, I still prepare them the way I remember my mother preparing them. The sprouts are cut in half, and added to a saucepan of boiling salted water, and simmered for no more than five minutes, when a tiny bite will remain. They are then drained, added to a warmed bowl, and topped with butter – dairy or plant-based – and a sprinkling of sea salt. Simple and delicious!

Enjoy!

Nessa x

Christmas Gravy

Ingredients

  • 2 onions
  • 2 carrots
  • 2 sticks celery
  • 10 sage leaves
  • 1 sprig rosemary
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • Salt and freshly ground pepper
  • 1tbsp plain flour
  • 1 vacuum packed bag (180g) chestnuts 
  • 1lt vegetable stock

Method

Once the vegetables are soft, take the rosemary sauce from the pan and blitz the gravy. Carefully pass it through a sieve, into a clean saucepan, which gives the gravy a smooth consistency. Place back on the heat and fully heat through before serving. 

Preheat the oven to 200°C/fan 180°C /Gas Mark 6.

Place the onions, carrot, celery, sage and rosemary into a large roasting tray. Drizzle over the oil and season with some salt and pepper. Place in the preheated oven for 40 minutes, stirring regularly. 

Take from the oven and place on a low heat on the stove. Sprinkle over the flour, stir through the chestnuts and add the stock. Turn the heat up a little under the tray. 

Stir to combine and bring to a boil, before simmering on low for 30 minutes. 

 Frozen Mulled Berry Pie

by Nessa Robins

If you are searching for a show-stopping dessert which can be made in advance and basically served straight from your freezer we have you covered. This pie is indulgent but also surprisingly light in texture. For the pie to be removed from the tin with ease, it’s best to use a springform/loose bottom tin. Also, take from the freezer about 20 minutes before serving and when cutting, use a large knife, which has been dipped in hot water and wiped dry, to help cut through the cake quickly and evenly. 

With a festive feel, thanks to the mulled berry topping, and wreath-like decorating, this pie would make for a welcome addition at any gathering this Christmas.

Enjoy!

Nessa 

Frozen Mulled Berry Pie

Ingredients

Base

  • 175g digestive biscuits
  • 75g butter, dairy or plant-based

Filling

  • 500ml cream, dairy or plant-based
  • 1 tin (397g) condensed milk, dairy or plant-based
  • 2tsp vanilla extract

Topping

  • 200g raspberries & blueberries
  • 50ml port
  • 25g caster sugar
  • ½ tsp cinnamon

To decorate

  • Reserved cream mixture
  • Raspberries, blueberries, rosemary sprigs

Method

1. In a food processor, blitz the biscuits until they’re like a fine dust. Gently melt the butter either in a pan or in the microwave and add to the crushed biscuits. 

2. Stir to combine and pour into a 17cm springform tin. Press it down firmly and evenly, and place in the fridge for about 30 minutes to chill.

3. To prepare the mulled berries, add the berries to a small saucepan with the port, caster sugar, and cinnamon, and set over a medium heat. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and simmer for about five minutes, stirring regularly. Take from the heat and allow to cool completely before blitzing until smooth.  

4. In a large bowl, or using a mixer, whisk the cream until it is lightly whisked. Add the condensed milk and vanilla extract. Continue to whisk for a couple of minutes until combined and thick but be careful not to over whisk. Reserve a few tablespoons of the cream mixture into a piping bag with a large nozzle attached and place in the fridge.

5. Evenly spread the cream mixture over the biscuit base. Add dollops of the cooled, blitzed berry mixture and using a skewer gently swirl to combine. Reserve some of the berry mixture to serve on the side of the pie – it will keep well in the fridge for up to three days, or pop into a bag in the freezer and defrost when needed. 

6. Pipe the reserved cream mixture on outer layer of the pie, and top with a few raspberries, and blueberries.

7. Place in the freezer, uncovered for an hour, before loosely covering in cling film. Place in a freezer-proof container and return to the freezer for at least 4 hours, or until ready to serve. 

8. Take from the freezer about 20 minutes before serving, add some sprigs of rosemary, dust with icing sugar and enjoy!

Our Christmas Shop is OPEN

by Kenneth Keavey

We are delighted to announce that our 2024 Christmas Shop is now open and accepting orders for Christmas week.

We have a wonderful selection of Christmas Veg Boxes, Chocolates, Wines, Gift Vouchers and an array of other Organic Christmas Goodies! Check out some of the highlights of our Christmas offering below and detailed instructions on how to smoothly place your Christmas order through our online store.  If you would like to celebrate local Irish organic food this Christmas, and support local organic Irish farms, and keep chemicals off your Christmas dinner plate, and be blown away my the amazing tastes and flavour of freshly harvested vegetables, then one of our Christmas boxes is exactly what you need. These boxes are jam packed full of as much Irish organic produce as we could get our hands on from our farm and other small Irish organic farmers. From our own amazing parnsips, to organic brussels sprouts grown right here in Galway to fantastic floury potatoes, to carrots that taste like carrots used to taste! These boxes for your Christmas order will be delivered direct to your door anywhere in Ireland on the 23rd of December as fresh as can be and exactly in time for your Christmas preparations. Read on for more info. Please get our order in as early as possible to ensure availability and to help us planning our harvest and harvest from our other Irish farmers. Christmas Order Cutoff & Delivery Days As Christmas Day falls on a Wednesday this year, we’re delivering a little differently so that everyone will receive their organic goodies in time for the festive celebrations!


We will be delivering as normal from Monday 16th December to Saturday 21st December. You can order a regular delivery for this week. CHRISTMAS BOXES WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR DELIVERY ON THESE DATES.
We will be running a dedicated Christmas Delivery run on Monday 23rd December. All Christmas Boxes and regular items can be ordered for delivery on this day. Orders must be placed by 10am on Friday 20th December. Early ordering is advised to ensure we can fulfil your order, and it helps us with harvesting and planning.

 Order Process for Christmas Deliveries

Once Off Orders: You can navigate to our full Christmas selection here. Our four set Christmas boxes can only be ordered for delivery on 23rd December. You can order any items in addition to the Christmas boxes from our regular store for Christmas delivery. There are a few exceptions that are mentioned below.  When placing your Christmas order you will see the Order Type option at checkout for ‘Christmas Delivery 23rd December.’ Make sure this is ticked if you are ordering for Christmas. It will be pre-ticked if you have a Christmas Box in your order. Restricted items – some items such as milk and yoghurt will not be available for delivery on 23rd December. There are also certain seasonal items like Irish broccoli that you cannot order for Christmas week as they will not be in season by then. Any of these items will be automatically removed from your cart at checkout.

Subscription & Repeat Order Customers: If you are due a delivery on the week of 16th December, your order will be shipped as normal. If you would like a Christmas delivery please do not try and place your Christmas order through your account – this will not be possible. Please log out of your account and place your Christmas order as a one-time GUEST order. Even though you will be prompted to log in at checkout with your email address, please do not log in. We are closed from Tuesday 24th December until Monday 6th January. There will be no deliveries during this period so please stock up before then! For repeat order customers, your order will be automatically skipped these weeks and it will restart on the week of 6th January.  If you have any questions about how to set up an order for Christmas week or how to manage your recurring orders over the Christmas period, please send our customer care team an email on info@greenearthorganics.ie or give them a call on 091 793 768 / 01 460 0467. 

Christmas recipe roundup

by Simone Kelly

It’s almost Christmas, so let’s get all the lovely christmassy recipes into one place! Here’s some inspiration for a meat free christmas dinner and so much more.

Simone’s Spiced Apple Loaf

by Simone Kelly

This recipe was handed down through my family, from my great-grandmother to my mother and when I moved to Ireland from Germany, I brought it with me – every year in the weeks before Christmas, this is one of my favourite things to bake. It just so happens to be vegan, too! A gently spiced, moist, sumptuous treat that’s amazing with a bit of (vegan) butter and a cup of tea.

Ingredients

  • 500g peeled and grated apple
  • 200g sugar
  • 125g raisins
  • 6 dried apricots, chopped
  • 70g almonds, chopped
  • 1 heaped tsp cocoa powder
  • 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • a pinch of salt
  • 40ml rum (or fruit juice)
  • 250g plain flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder

Method

  1. Mix the apple and sugar in a large mixing bowl and allow it to sit in the fridge overnight or for an hour or so at room temperature.
  2. Pre-heat the oven to 175C. Line a loaf tin with baking parchment.
  3. Add the rest of the ingredients to the apple and sugar mixture (which should now be very wet) and mix to evenly combine the ingredients into a thick, spoonable batter.
  4. Spread the batter into the lined loaf tin and bake the cake for 1 hour and 15 minutes or so until it is risen and set. It should still be moist but when you insert a skewer it should come out mostly dry with a few damp crumbs.
  5. Allow the cake to cool in the tin then remove and slice it thickly. This cake stays fresh for a week in the fridge if tightly wrapped.

Christmas Clearout Cous Cous

by Liz Child

Who has leftover Christmas vegetables to use up? We always tend to have leftover braised red cabbage and roasted parsnips, carrots and sprouts. What about you? What are your most common festive leftovers? And what are you favourite ways to use them up? This year we are making a very quick and easy cous cous salad with our leftovers. The sweet and warm spices in the braised red cabbage go perfectly with cous cous. We eat this as a simple lunch topped with salty olives or feta. But it is also nice as a side to a jammy tomato, onion and chickpea stew. This recipe is very flexible, so please take the amounts and ingredients suggested below as a rough guide and just use up what you have. If you have any uncooked cabbage or carrots around still, try shredding and adding them raw for extra crunch and much needed freshness. Share your best leftover ideas in the comments.

Liz x

Ingredients (serves 4 or 8 as sides)

  • 1 mug (250ml volume) cous cous
  • 1 tbsp vegetable bouillon powder
  • 1 mug (250ml) hot liquid (try the juice of a clementine topped up with just-boiled water from the kettle)
  • a handful of almonds (or any nuts or seeds), chopped
  • leftover braised red cabbage, roasted carrots, parsnips and sprouts
  • optional feta, olives or chickpeas to serve

Method

  1. In a heatproof bowl, stir the cous cous with the bouillon powder. Then pour in the hot water and clementine juice, give it another quick stir and place a plate over the bowl to let the cous cous soak up all the liquid.
  2. Meanwhile chop the nuts and gather your festive leftovers.
  3. Fluff up the cous cous with a fork then stir through the vegetables and nuts. Enjoy as it is or serve with feta, olives or chickpeas for extra oomph!

Snowballs

by Liz Child

These are so delicious and are very simple to make with only 4 ingredients. They are crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy inside. They make a lovely, festive, edible gift and are a great way to use up that half bag of desiccated coconut we all have lurking in the back of our kitchen cupboards. Enjoy and Merry Christmas everyone!

Liz x

Ingredients

  • A slice of lemon
  • 50ml aquafaba (the liquid in a tin of chickpeas)
  • 80g sugar
  • 150g desiccated coconut

Method

  1. Turn your oven on to 100C and line a large baking sheet with baking parchment. Wipe a clean mixing bowl with the lemon slice. This helps the aquafaba form stiff peaks.
  2. Pour in the aquafaba and start whisking with an electric whisk. Once the mixture is foamy, start incorporating the sugar as you whisk, a tablespoon at a time. Then whisk hard for around 8 minutes or until you get stiff, glossy peaks.
  3. Fold in the desiccated coconut, spoon out into balls on the baking sheet and bake for an hour or until they are just set in the bottom. An easy way to tell if they are done is if they slide on the paper or can be easily picked up, that means they are no longer sticky underneath.

Perfect Potatoes

by Liz Child

To me, the perfect potatoes for a roast dinner, especially for a Christmas roast, are soft and fluffy inside with a gorgeous crunchy, golden exterior. Do you agree? They must be perfectly seasoned (this mainly happens when you par boil in salty water) and finished with a delicious garlic and herb sprinkle which ignites all the senses. For Christmas potatoes, I add the zest of an orange too! I wish you could smell these potatoes through the screen, they are so incredible. I can never make enough of them, they are always the first thing to go. Here’s how.

Liz x

  1. Peel and cut your potatoes into even sized pieces. Place them in a pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Once the outsides are tender but the insides still under-cooked, drain them through a large colander. Now shake the colander, carefully tossing the potatoes to rough up the outsides and make them look fluffy like the next image.

2. Get a large oven tray that will comfortably fit all the potatoes and fill the bottom of it with a couple of millimeters of neutral vegetable oil. Place this tray of oil into a hot oven set to 200C. Once it has heated up, carefully place the potatoes into the hot oil and use tongs to turn them all over so that they are completely coated with the hot oil. Now get them in back into the oven for an hour. Every twenty minutes, take them out and turn them over so that they can get golden brown and crispy all over.

3. While they are cooking, finely chop a few sprigs of rosemary, zest an organic orange (you don’t want the zest of a sprayed and waxed orange, make sure it is one of our organic ones) and finely grate or crush a clove of garlic. Then, when the potatoes are done to your liking, sprinkle over this fragrant mixture, the kitchen will suddenly smell even more amazing, add some flakey sea salt and enjoy!

Mushroom Gravy Powder

by Liz Child

This homemade gravy powder is so handy to have on standby in your kitchen cupboard. It will bring bags of flavour to your festive feast and can also be used to thicken up and flavour stews and pies. To make this powder into gravy, we like to use a nutty browned butter and rich red wine base. Read on below to see how it comes together.

Liz x

Gravy Powder

  • 6 tbsp corn starch (or potato starch or tapioca)
  • 3 tbsp crumbled dried mushrooms
  • 6 tbsp vegetable bouillon powder
  • 1 tbsp garlic or onion powder/granules
  • 2 tsp dried thyme
  • 1 tsp ground black pepper

Method

  1. Simply measure the ingredients into a strong blender and process until they come together into a fine powder. Then store in a clean, dry, labelled jar.

Ingredients to Make Gravy:

  • 1 tbsp butter
  • 100ml red wine (white wine works well too)
  • 300ml milk
  • 3 tbsp gravy powder (above)
  • salt to taste if needed

Method

  1. Add a tbsp of butter to a hot pan (we use Naturli vegan butter which browns beautifully) and cook for a couple of minutes on a high heat until it foams then starts to brown. (Browning the butter creates a complex, nutty flavour and the butter also gives the gravy a shiny and silky texture.)
  2. Next add 100ml of red wine and boil for a few minutes to cook off the alcohol and reduce slightly.
  3. Meanwhile whisk 3 tbsp of the gravy powder with 300ml of milk (we use delicious, creamy oat milk). When the red wine has reduced, add the milk mixture to the pot, then whisk and simmer until the gravy is thickened. If you’d like a looser gravy, add a splash more milk or water.
  4. Taste and season if needed with a pinch of salt. Serve hot and enjoy!