New Urban Farmer Recipes

Here is a delicious lunch that I had this week. It is a recipe from Celia Brooks Brown’s upcoming book The New Urban Farmer. They are Pea and Feta egg cups that include fragrant fresh mint out of the garden. They are really quick and satisfying to make as they puff up in a muffin tray in minutes. They made a tasty interlude for lunch before I went onto cook some of Celia’s other dishes.

I am one of a team of recipe testers working on trialling Celia’s recipes at the moment to make sure they are just right before it goes to print. Celia is The Urban Farmer from Times Online.

The recipes are designed to make the most of fresh garden produce. This is great for me as I am reasonably new to growing my own vegetables and cooking with them. It’s sometimes tricky to come up with ways of using a glut of any particular vegetable and do something interesting with it for the 4th night running.

I tried out some other recipes including Chard Kuku. It should have been Sorrel and Chard, but I had to substitute with spring greens and spinach as sorrel is not something I am growing this year. Here it is cooling on the windowsill ready to receive it’s topping of freshly chopped parsley. It’s a really good alternative to a spanish style tortilla which is a bit of a standby dish for us.

The other dishes are quick snaps that I managed to take before we ate our way through the dishes for a mezze style tasting session with friends. There was Roasted Garlic and Broad Bean Hummus, which went down particularly well with homemade fougasse and shards of toasted pitta bread. I think it would make a great topping for bruschetta too.

Soy Glazed runner beans was a really good dish to use the fantastic crop of runner beans that we have this year and had a real kick of chilli, it would make a really fine meal with the soft boiled eggs tossed in as suggested.

I have some more recipes that I plan to test soon and I’m looking forward to Celia’s book to be published to try out the rest. The book is due out in Early Spring 2010 ready for next years harvest.