For mac’n’cheese, cauliflower/broccoli cheese, layers in lasagnes or moussakas, cheesy mushroom and leek pies and more… This instant powder is so useful to store in your pantry to whip up a quick mid-week meal. Just add oat milk and a little olive oil or melted vegan butter.
Measure all the ingredients into a jar and give it a good shake to evenly mix into a powder. If you don’t have mustard powder then leave it out and add dijon mustard or whatever mustard you like in the wet stage described in the next step.
In a measuring jug, pour 100ml of oat milk per person. Then whisk in 1 tbsp of the powder and 1 tbsp of good olive oil (or melted vegan butter) per person. If you mix doesn’t have mustard powder, add a tsp of Dijon mustard per person too.
Pour the mixture into a pot over a medium/low heat and whisk continuously until it is cooked through. It should be creamy, silky smooth and nice and thick. Taste and adjust the seasoning if you need to, then use the sauce however you like. Fold through cooked pasta, layer up in a lasagne or moussaka, pour over cooked mushrooms, leeks and butterbeans then top with pastry and bake… I always use this sauce for a cauliflower and broccoli cheese as part of our Sunday roast.
Go green this Easter with some veggie meals and treats from our archives. Just click on the photos or the words in bold to be taken to the recipes. Happy cooking! Liz x
To Start
Try this steamed asparagus and artichoke dish with wild garlic butter. Asparagus, artichokes and wild garlic are all really special perennial vegetables, perfect at this time of year and such a treat.
Or how about a soothing bowl of wild nettle soup? Use our organic vegetables as a base and add some locally foraged wild nettle tips from near you.
Or a platter of these vegan devilled eggs? A lightly pickled mushroom replaces the traditional egg white and the yolk is made from beautifully seasoned chickpea puree.
The Main Course
This easy, one-tray dish packs a lot of flavour. Try our portobello mushrooms steaks with roasted potatoes and asparagus, drizzle over some vibrant chimichurri to make the dish sing SPRING!
Try your hand at making a homemade pasta dish? Ravioli is easier to make than it looks and this beautiful beetroot ricotta is just what a spring lunch is calling for.
Rainbow chard parcels are so versatile and you can really make them your own with your favourite fillings. Here’s one way to enjoy this colourful leafy green.
Something Sweet?
Easter isn’t Easter without hot cross buns. Try this easy vegan version. Keep it dairy free by toasting and slathering with our new vegan butter.
Make your own little Easter eggs with these dates stuffed with nut butter and coated in chocolate.
With a nod to the Easter bunny, make this very carroty raw carrot cake. It’s naturally vegan and gluten free, refined sugar free too, but tastes so so good.
Leeks are one of our favourite vegetables. They are so delicious, I like to make them the star of the show when I cook with them. This simple, one-pot, spring dish is all about those luscious, soft and sweet leeks offset by toasty, crunchy hazelnuts (we stock organic hazelnuts in compostable bags here) and tangy caramelised lemon. Orzo is just rice shaped pasta which I love to cook like risotto rice, we stock an organic bag from Irish company, Bunalun. We love their store cupboard staples so much. Top quality, organic and affordable. Add some Bunalun groceries to your next fruit and veg order with us here. We deliver nationwide.
Find a large, deep, frying pan or pot. Start by toasting the hazelnuts in the dry pan. Just turn the heat to medium-high, tumble the hazelnuts into the pan and keep them moving around until they smell amazing and are deliciously toasty. Tip them into a bowl to cool a little then chop or crush into smaller pieces and save for finishing your dish at the end.
Then, in the same pan, add the butter and oil. Place the lemons, cut side down, into the melted fat and let them cook until caramelised. Remove them to a bowl to finish your dish with later too. Caramelised lemon is so delicious. It makes the lemon softer, juicier and sweeter…and it looks pretty too.
Tip the chopped leeks and garlic into the pan and season with salt and pepper. Stir fry until the leeks are starting to soften.
Add the orzo and stock to the pan and simmer and stir until the pasta has absorbed the liquid and is cooked through. Taste and tweak the seasoning if needed with more salt and pepper.
Stir the chopped parsley through, then serve in four bowls, each topped with a caramelised lemon half and a handful of chopped, toasted hazelnuts. Enjoy!
This was a piece I was asked to write for the Sunday Times last weekend:
The start of a new growing season is upon us, and it always fills me with a sense of hope for the future. The plants will grow, and in a few short months we will be harvesting some of Ireland’s finest bounty. As with many growers, and food producers up and down the country this is a key time, but this year it feels different; the costs of producing food are skyrocketing, there is a sense of nervousness, the price of inputs are up and at the same time there is a squeeze on prices to meet the demands of the big retailers. And sometimes the sums just do not add up.
What does all this mean for a little country that is intensely reliant on food imports for its survival? As a food producing nation it seems we actually produce relatively little of what we eat, importing a staggering 77% of our food. We have been concentrating and focusing for many years now on developing an intensive and export driven meat and dairy industry, and as the intensification of the industry has accelerated, it has become more reliant on imported grain to sustain the national herd, with 60% of said grain imported. That equates to 3.47 million tonnes of grain feed imported into Ireland every year to feed our animals.
Our food security as a nation has been brought into the limelight as Charlie Mc Conalogue the minister for agriculture stated during the week.“Food security is really important over the next number of weeks and months and it is something we have to work together on.” Well Charlie, I think it is pretty important just about all the time, and it is unfortunate that the tragic events of the last month are required to bring what food we produce and how we produce it onto centre stage.
Irish farmers were asked last week to consider the idea of growing grain and fodder crops to help feed our population and our burgeoning dairy and beef herd. But the necessary skills cannot be magicked up over-night, it takes time, specialised machinery and experience to learn to grow crops on a reasonable scale.
It’s a pity then that Charlie does not turn his focus on the below cost selling practice by supermarkets which has weakened our non-export focused food industry and is causing more primary food producers to struggle to sustain their enterprises. The Jim Powers economics report published this week, states that retail prices compression threatens the viability of Irish horticulture which could lead to even more reliance on imports to feed our nation. The most recent national field vegetable census showed that the number of field vegetable growers fell from 377 in 1999 to 165 in 2014. That is a contraction of 56%
These skills are lost for ever, and once they are gone are difficult to replace.
If we don’t want to end up being a nation even more reliant on imports maybe we should shift our focus from an export dominated beef and dairy industry, to an industry that produces more crops destined for consumption at home and pay the farmer a fair price for the food. Surely that would allow us to invest and build a more secure and resilient food system.
A resilient food system is one with the ability to prepare for, withstand and recover from a crisis or disruption. This is important at any scale. If you are an allotment holder or have a veg patch in your garden, you want it to be resilient. You want to ensure your efforts can’t be completely destroyed by unexpected pests or weather so you plant a variety of crops in case some fail, you prepare for and prevent damage from pests and weather. The same goes if you have a large farm – it’s wise to plan with resilience in mind too. Planting huge mono-crops, or factory farming animals, although less work and more profitable in the short term, is terrible for the soil and the environment, and you need to use a lot of pesticides and antibiotics to ward off large scale pests and disease. It is a shortsighted, damaging way of farming.
Organic farms on the other hand, have resilience built into their roots. Organic agriculture doesn’t rely on external, artificial or chemical inputs, or genetic engineering to grow sufficient food. Organic vegetable farmers grow trees and hedges alongside a diverse range of crops and cover crops which mimics nature and prevents flooding, drought, pests, soil degradation, water pollution and more. All these protective and nourishing measures combat climate change and future-proof our agricultural land. We dream of a future where organic farming practises are the norm.
We like to think, if you run a country, food resilience and the ability to feed the nation when things go wrong should be one of your top priorities. Resilience-testing events like climate change and wars are no longer just on the horizon. So apart from voting for leaders who prioritise climate action, peace and fair trade with our neighbours, what can we do to ensure Ireland is a food resilient nation? We say, also vote with your money – buy local whenever it’s available and alway choose organic. What are your thoughts?
How many more horticultural enterprises organic or otherwise need to go to the wall before we realise it is too late?
A very significant report has been commissioned by the IFA and published this week: the Jim Power Economics’ report states ‘Retail Price Compression Threatens the Viability of Irish Horticulture’. In other words loss leading and below cost selling of fresh produce is putting Irish farmers out of business.
The report’s findings are far from surprising and many primary producers up and down the country will tell you, the power that large retailers hold is enormous. They have hollowed out the horticulture industry here in Ireland and it is in real danger of closing it’s doors for good unless there is meaningful change.
It states that farmers are the weakest link in the supply chain, they have the least say in what they get for the food they grow.
Imagine the food we eat, put into our bodies, the very stuff that makes us tick and to a large extent will dictate how long we will live, our fresh food as far as supermarkets are concerned should cost as close to zero as possible. Are we all complicit in this race to the bottom though?
It is why in part that we ditched supply to the supermarkets all those years ago, in the famous words of Frank Sinatra we decided “to do it our own way”. It isn’t all roses either here as we are constantly competing with the very idea that food should be cheap, and we cannot compete with the supermarkets.
But it really is only through your support, by reading this, by supporting our business and farm week in week out that we are still here and have expanded our farm and continue to grow healthy happy food, whilst nurturing the land for 16 years.
“A cheap food policy is not a sensible food policy”
It singles out the discounters as the main driver that have severely undercut the price given to Irish farmers, and as a result all other major retailer have had to follow suit to stay competitive. The end result is less for the farmer. This year the second biggest Brussel sprout farmer in Ireland closed his doors for good as the price he was getting for his food meant his business was unsustainable.
I really wonder how many of those farmers that adorn the walls of the supermarket aisles have forced smiles on their faces for fear of losing their contracts?
As real costs increase and as the price the farmer gets paid for the produce decreases how does that equation end up? Yesterday we paid over €2000 for agri diesel for our tractors, last year it was less than half that. It clearly is not sustainable.
Where will all this end, I wonder? Well maybe, just maybe, it will end with change, and with more and more people making the choice to support local food where possible, even if it costs more (and yes in these times that is a big ask).
But the benefits are immense: Local food means better food, healthier food, local jobs, local enterprise in rural areas, higher nutritional content, better flavour. If it is organic too then the health benefits and the benefits to the planet are surely worth something too?
The word ‘sustainable’ doesn’t just refer to environmental issues, it can refer to anything and means ‘something that is able to be maintained at a certain level’, like matters of economy and food security. So when we say ‘supermarkets are unsustainable’ we are not just talking about their over-use of plastic or their mountains of food waste, we are also talking about the way they source their products and pay their suppliers.
It has recently come to light here in Ireland, (read this article for the facts and figures) that local vegetable growers are being squeezed from all sides, so much so that many vegetable farmers in Ireland are forced to quit. Supermarkets demand lower and lower prices and present vegetables as ‘low value’ with ridiculous discounted prices (which, understandably, customers then begin to see as the norm which perpetuates the problem), and yet farming costs go up and up. It is unsustainable. Where will this leave us in the long term? Will there be no more Irish vegetables soon?
You know something is not right when it is cheaper to put potatoes, cabbages, onions, tomatoes, lettuce etc, all things that grow very well here, on a ship or an aeroplane and bring it over to Ireland than to just grow it here and pay Irish farmers enough to cover their costs. Now, just 1% of all farms in Ireland grow vegetables.
This is not to say importing is wrong. We love to trade with the world, who doesn’t love exotic fruit, tea, coffee, chocolate, olive oil, wine…? In fact, even here in Galway, our small business imports plenty of products and fresh produce ourselves to fill the gaps in your boxes (by the way, we never use airfreight). But when there is an Irish, organic option, even if it is more expensive, we always choose that. We grow as much as we possibly can ourselves, then source from other Irish organic farms, then import the rest. We would love to see more organic vegetable growers here in Ireland.
So what’s the solution? Do we just give up trying to produce vegetables here in Ireland? Do we rely solely on imports? Well, with food security issues being what they are at the moment, we believe that would be a very unwise decision. Not to mention missing out on the many benefits of buying local. One way to help is to buy Irish as much as possible. If you must go to a supermarket, spend a few extra cents getting the Irish option, otherwise we urge you to skip unsustainable supermarkets altogether and buy directly from farmers, farmers markets and veg box delivery schemes like ours. The future of food here in Ireland depends on it.
Wouldn’t this pretty pasta be perfect for Mother’s Day? It takes a little more effort than our usual recipes but the ingredients are few, simple and affordable (using our ingredients at the time of writing this blog, this cost €5.64 to make 30 pieces).
Liz x
Ingredients (makes around 30)
~ pasta • 300g fine flour • 1 tbsp olive oil • 1 tsp salt • 150ml water • parsley leaves
~ beetroot tofu-ricotta • 200g extra firm tofu • 1 small cooked beetroot • 1 clove of garlic • the juice of 1/2 a lemon • 1 tsp salt • 5 tbsp olive oil
~ 1/2 jar of pesto to serve
Method
Mix the pasta ingredients (except the parsley) into a shaggy, quite dry dough then knead it very well into a firm, smooth dough. This should take around 10 minutes of kneading. If your dough is too dry, wet your hands occasionally whilst kneading to incorporate just a little extra water. Rest the ball of dough in a bowl covered tightly with a damp tea towel.
Blend all the beetroot ricotta ingredients until smooth. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed with more salt or lemon.
Roll your pasta dough out on a lightly floured surface. Once you have a large oval/rectangle, arrange some parsley leaves on one half and fold the pasta over. Now roll again into a very long strip, just over double the width of the size you want your ravioli. Get it as thin as you can – you should be able to read a paper through it.
Space teaspoons of the pink ricotta along one side, wet the other side to help it stick, then carefully fold the pasta over the ricotta blobs and use your fingers to seal around each one. Use a knife or pasta wheel to cut the ravioli and save any off-cuts, they are just as delicious!
Drop the fresh ravioli and off-cuts into boiling water, cook until soft but still with bite (around 3 minutes or so – test an off-cut) then scoop out with a slotted spoon, dress with pesto and serve!
A sense of possibility and new beginnings is naturally in the air in Spring. On the farm, maybe it is the start of the new plant and seed arrivals that kindles this feeling, there is a sense that we can do things better this year, that we will try a little harder to get things right, that all will be well in the end.
Nature is waking up, the birds are singing, the daffodils are blooming, the new leaves are beginning to unfurl on the trees. The extra daylight means that life cycles are changing and growth increasing, it is a natural rhythm, and it resonates on a subconscious level if you let it.
Even our lovely new season salad is responding well to the extra light, and we will be harvesting our first crop of the new season next week.
The sun is higher in the sky and on clear days you can feel the first tendrils of warmth, there is more power too in its rays, the plants respond to it, we respond to it and the solar panels on our shed respond to it!
Frequently now we can see plants growing, hear the birds singing and the insects buzzing well before it is time. This can be symbolic of a world out of sync and it has ramifications for all living systems.
Planning a season of vegetable growing on the farm becomes more of a gamble as the natural order we rely on can change unpredictably and dramatically.
The change in our weather is a complex global problem, and the solutions too will necessitate change on a global level. But maybe the solutions are also simpler that we think, down at the level of you and I there is much that can be done.
Sometimes it seems to me that simple, traditional solutions can be overlooked. Planting trees is one of the simplest ways to help redress the balance, something we have done quite a bit of over the last number of years.
By supporting local food growers like us and the range of other growers we source from, you too are doing your bit to tackle the climate crisis.
The prediction of the weather for the year ahead was often associated with a saying closely tied to trees:
“Ash before oak you are in for a soak, oak before ash you are in for a splash”.
We are watching this closely, as yet there is no news… Nevertheless, if living and farming in the west of Ireland has taught me one thing it is that the weather is unpredictable it changes fast and sometimes when you least expect it, it surprises you.
Kenneth
PS Thanks, to your generosity over the last two weeks in donating to the Ukraine crisis. We will announce the final figure next week, but currently we have raised with your help just over €4500 for the Ukraine appeal. Thank you so much.
This St Patrick’s Day favourite combines the two best vegetables of all time – potatoes and kale. Don’t let anyone tell you these humble vegetables are nothing less than extraordinary!
Potatoes (especially when you leave the skin on) are a delicious source of fibre, energy giving carbohydrates, antioxidants, potassium (more than a banana!) and magnesium. They also contain vitamin C, calcium, folate and vitamin B6.
Kale is well known for being a superfood. The humble kale, grown right here on our farm in Galway, is one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet and contains well over 100% of your daily needs for Vitamins A, C and K as well as a whole host of other vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fibre and even an omega 3 fatty acid!
So we say this dish is not just for St Patrick’s Day, make colcannon regularly as a side dish or as a topping for your pies.
Liz x
Ingredients (per person)
1 large or a couple of smaller potatoes, scrubbed and chopped into even chunks
3 kale leaves, rinsed, tough stems removed (save the stems, they are delicious finely chopped and added to stir fries, stews, soups etc)
1 scallion, sliced
1 tbsp butter
salt and pepper to taste
Method
Get your potatoes boiling in a large pot of water. Meanwhile tear up your kale leaves into small pieces and place them in a steaming basket or metal colander.
When the potatoes are nearly cooked through, place the steaming basket/colander of kale over the pot and put the lid on. Let the kale steam until wilted and soft – this only takes around 3 minutes so keep an eye on it.
Remove the kale and drain the soft potatoes, then tumble them back into the warm pot. Mash the potatoes with the butter and season with salt and pepper to your taste. Then stir through the wilted kale and chopped scallions.
Serve with an extra dollop of butter as a side dish. It’s also delicious as a shepherd’s pie topping, baked in the oven to crisp up – see pic below.
