If you are out walking in the wilds for some fresh air and perspective and come across a patch of wild garlic here is a quick recipe for Wild Garlic Pesto. Continue reading
Recipe: Wild Garlic Pesto
Recipe: Honey Roast Parsnip, Apple & Puy Lentils with Crispy Kale
I’ve been making this dish a lot this autumn, it’s perfectly seasonal now but is actually great right through the winter months as you should be able to get local parsnips, kale and apples until spring. I really love parsnips and I think they tend to be a bit underrated and underused, often only appearing as a side to roast dinners. Parsnips are excellent over the winter months but you can buy locally grown (or at least British) almost the whole year. Continue reading
Recipe: Irish Shortbread
This must be the easiest shortbread recipe in the world! It makes the most deliciously decadent (take note of the amount of butter!) and crumbly shortbread and only takes about five minutes to make the dough, you don’t even need to line or butter the tin. It does take a hour in the oven, but that’s an hour that you can spend drinking tea and watching the Bon Appetit You Tube channel (what I would like to have been doing this morning) or cleaning your kitchen and washing a million Tupperware boxes (what I actually did this morning). Continue reading
Recipe: Apple, Cabbage & Caraway Sauerkraut
Making sauerkraut is much easier than many people think, it is basically just a mixture of finely chopped or grated vegetables mixed with salt (1-2% of the total weight of chopped vegetables) and then left to ferment. The sugar is optional, it will ferment without it, but I think it makes for a nicer kraut by rounding out the flavours a bit. It’s always good to have some hard, crunchy vegetables in the mix as they keep a bit of texture as they ferment, which is why crunchy white cabbage is so good. Continue reading
The Edible Flower: Three Years In
This weekend, on 26th July 2019, The Edible Flower became three years old. Yay! We’re still here, still standing and still smiling.
It’s become a tradition that on our Edible Flower anniversaries I publish a little financial summary of our business. It all started when, after our first year of business, I wrote this. It was surprisingly popular – despite containing graphs and a whole section on VAT!
I’m writing this at home, with our babies asleep upstairs, while Erin is out catering a wedding for 80 people. The highlight of the year was, of course, the birth of our two gorgeous twin girls, Forrest and Frida in October. However, I don’t think either of us have ever done anything as tricky as balancing running your own business and looking after babies. It’s so easy to feel like you’re doing both badly – all the time. And having enjoyed almost two years of running our business together, it’s also been incredibly hard to never have any time to work together. One of us is always working and the other looking after the babies. Or we try and do some work together while both looking after the twins – and the result is you do it all badly, or very very slowly.
Suddenly going from a family of two, to a family of four, puts pressure on the business to actually start making some money. And on that front, there is good news and bad news… Continue reading
Recipe: Stuffed Breads with Greens & Wild Garlic
This recipe is adapted from Olia Hercules’ book Kaukasis. We made them with her in Ukraine last summer, or perhaps she did all the making and we did all the eating! They are truly delicious!
This Spring, these breads are seeing us through the hunger gap as a brilliant way to use kale, perpetual spinach & chard from the garden – some of the few crops still in plentiful supply. Adding in a bit of foraged wild garlic gives a little bit allium zing. Olia uses beetroot leaves in her recipe, which is great for the summer months. The leaves from beetroot, chard, perpetual spinach and sea beet are all pretty much interchangeable as they are all variations on the same plant Beta vulgaris. Continue reading
Recipe: Roast Butternut Squash, Mozzarella & Hazelnut Salad
Is there anything better to eat in the summer than a salad made with ripe, sweet tomatoes, handfuls of fragrant, aniseedy basil and good quality creamy mozzarella? It is perfect alongside hunks of rich olive oil focaccia as an al fresco lunch. As the days shorten and autumn rolls into winter it is impossible to get delicious tomatoes. Our homegrown tomatoes are long gone and the supermarkets have reverted to selling the watery ones that are available out of season.
If you get hold of good quality mozzarella it seems a shame to cook it (except perhaps on top of a wood-fired pizza) so I developed this mozzarella salad for the winter months; it is a celebration of the flavours of autumn – the sweet, nuttiness of roasted squash and creamy, crunchy hazelnuts paired with the soft, lactic acidity the mozzarella. Continue reading
The Nature of Design – Five Reasons why Catering and Property Development are the Same!
Last year we did a lovely catering job as part of Belfast Design Week. And it got me thinking about the nature of design and the design world I used to work in – my world before The Edible Flower! Continue reading
Recipe: Mushroom, Rosemary & Pearl Barley Broth
I developed this recipe for a lovely couple who are getting married in Autumn 2018 and wanted a simple seasonal start the meal before a magnificent spread of sharing platters to be served as the main course. It reminds me of the beautiful broths we ate in Ukraine earlier in the year; there they are always finished with a dollop of smetana (a rich sour cream), so I’ve added some as a garnish to finish this dish. Sometimes a simple but delicious starter like this is the perfect complement to a dramatic and colourful main course. Continue reading
