Delicious Kake Food

Salmon en papillote with sundried tomato and anchovy tapenade.

Red pepper salad. Slice a red pepper thinly, dress with seasoned sushi vinegar.

Steamed tenderstem broccoli.

Cold boiled potatoes. Left over from earlier in the week.

Olive ciabatta. Bought from supermarket and warmed in the oven.

Black bean, red pepper, and chorizo stew. Render fat from cubed chorizo, add chopped onion, soften. Add garlic purée and tomato purée, cook 2 minutes. Add cooked black beans with their cooking liquid, along with stoned quartered black olives, plenty of paprika, and a slosh of vegetable stock concentrate. Cook down until the liquid has reduced, then add chopped red peppers and broccoli florets, and continue to cook until the vegetables are done.

I served this with a slice of sourdough bread and a glass of Rioja.

Gnocchi with broccoli pesto. Cook broccoli florets in boiling water until soft; chop very finely and reserve. Blanch chopped red pepper in the same water for a minute or two; remove and reserve. Cook gnocchi in the same water until done; drain. Mix chopped broccoli, blanched pepper, drained gnocchi, quartered canned artichoke hearts, a couple of spoonfuls of ready-made pesto, a glug of olive oil, a little finely-grated hard cheese, and freshly-ground black pepper to taste.

I used parmesan, which is not vegetarian, but you could use any hard cheese. You could also use dairy-free pesto (which I in fact did) and omit the cheese to make it vegan.

Broccoli and artichoke pasta. Mix together: artichoke hearts from a can, drained, rinsed, and halved; broccoli florets, boiled until done to liking; pasta quills, boiled until done to liking; a good slosh of olive oil; a couple of spoonfuls of tomato pasta sauce from a jar; plenty of black pepper. Reheat if necessary.

I used gluten-free pasta, and it worked fine. I also put some grated parmesan on mine. The pasta sauce was non-vegetarian (it had anchovies in) but a vegetarian or vegan sauce would have worked fine. The idea with the tomato sauce is just to add a little extra flavour, not to make it very tomatoey.

This is very quick and easy if you have the ingredients on hand.

Lentil soup with (optional) chicken and broccoli. Sauté finely-chopped onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. Cook red lentils in water in a separate pan until mostly gone mushy, then purée and add to the vegetables. Add vegetable stock, season with soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce (I used vegan Worcestershire sauce since I wanted to have a vegan option for this). Simmer for as long as you like, but at least an hour, making sure it doesn’t catch on the bottom; add water if it gets too thick. Add chopped broccoli half an hour before serving. If you want meat in it, add some chopped cooked chicken 5 minutes before serving (I used some that I poached and froze a couple of weeks ago).

Served with thickly-sliced brown bread and optional cheese.

Gnocchi with artichoke hearts and broccoli. More assembly than cooking, really. Boil a pan of water, add some small broccoli florets, boil for about 3 minutes, add some gnocchi (from a packet), boil 2 more minutes, drain. Add some quartered artichoke hearts (from a can) and a few dollops of tomato sauce (from a jar), mix well. Grind some black pepper, grate some hard cheese, serve.

A simple, fresh-tasting vegetable stew served with jasmine rice done in the rice cooker.

Vegetable stew. Finely-chopped onion and garlic sweated gently in olive oil. Added celeriac and carrots, cut into batons. Stewing liquids: cider, vegetable stock, tinned tomatoes, splash of soy sauce. Later, added green beans, broccoli, radishes, courgettes, and a finely-chopped pickled gherkin. Cooked with the lid off until done.

Vegetable and tofu stew. The tofu was from the freezer (freezing makes it spongier), defrosted, cubed, and fried on all sides to form a crust (this takes a long time and some patience), then left to marinade with a bit of soy sauce.

The stew base was chopped spring onions, garlic, and carrot, sautéed in some olive oil, deglazed with a few splashes of white wine, then turned into a sauce with some chopped tinned tomatoes and a bit of vegetable stock. I added a bit of a kick to it with a few spoonfuls of home-made chopped fermented chillies. I added chopped celeriac, let it cook for 20 minutes, then added chopped broccoli, courgette, and cabbage along with the tofu cubes. Cooked this down until the veg were done.

Served with bread and butter; rice or couscous or mash or something like that would have worked too.

Braised goat shoulder with prunes and preserved lemons. Made pretty much as the recipe states, but I added some garlic (I’m not sure this made much difference).

Butternut squash and sweet potato. Cut into chunks, mixed with olive oil and a bit of salt, and roasted.

Tenderstem broccoli. Cut into short lengths and boiled. According to the packaging, this is a cross between calabrese and 芥蘭/jiè lán/Chinese kale/Chinese broccoli. I don’t like calabrese much; I like this a lot more.