I am a massive fan of mince pies! I am all here for the boozy, sugary, dried fruit of Christmas time. This babka makes a very festive and extremely delicious alternative to mince pies and because it is a ‘bread’ you could definitely get away with having it for breakfast! A babka is an enriched, yeasted bread dough which is rolled out and then spread with a filling, before being rolled back up and twisted into a loaf. It was developed by the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe; traditional fillings include chocolate, poppy seeds and cinnamon. I’ve used a mix of butter and mincemeat.

I’ve been experimenting lots with using different flours in my sweet bakes this year, it adds a bit of goodness to cakes and lots of additional flavour. In this recipe the rye flour and the olive oil give the cake a nutty, almost spicy flavour and the apple keeps everything moist. otherwise I find bundt cakes can sometimes end up a bit dry as there is much cake to relatively little icing.

When I lived in London and commuted to and from work, I’d routinely get through a couple of books a week. It’s much less now that I have small children and no longer use public transport, but I still manage to carve out a bit of time to read everyday. I read a lot of fiction – but this isn’t a list of my favourite novels of 2021. Instead it’s the books that Jo and I read this year that helped us see the world a little bit differently – the ones that opened our eyes to hidden worlds, helped us understand a topic better or offered a vision for a better world.

In our opinion there are few better ways to eat beetroot than roasted whole in their skins with a bit of oil and salt. If the beetroots aren’t too old and if you make sure to roast them in a dish with a tight fitting lid the skins should slip off easily. Then chop them into chunks and they are the perfect addition to wintry salads (though to be honest we eat them all year round). If you can’t be bothered to roast your own beets, then pre-cooked beetroot can be used here, though I do think roasted beets have a better flavour.

Inspired by Polish chlodnik, I made this chilled beetroot soup for one of our Twilight Gardening dinners this summer. It was surprisingly popular, I often think chilled soups can be a bit divisive – but that might be because Jo is always a bit suspicious when I suggest a chilled soup. The colour is so gorgeously pink and the earthy beets are balanced out with the tangy buttermilk and little sweetness from the date syrup. If you don’t have date syrup in the cupboard you can use a little honey instead.

Larb (or laap) is a Laotian dish traditionally made with minced meat (either raw or cooked) mixed with lots of chilli, lime juice, fish sauce, herbs, ground toasted rice and other aromatics. It is often very, very spicy and was one of our favourite dishes to eat with a side of sticky rice when we were travelling in Northern Thailand and Laos. Somehow I find eating really spicy food in tropical climes makes you feel cooler, especially if you have a cold beer to sip alongside.

This recipe was a big hit at our Summer Solstice Supper Club in June 2021. It’s a vegetarian adaption of a recipe in the gloriously summery and brilliant cookbook, Taverna by Georgina Haydon.

I was asked by Adam at Seedhead Arts if I wanted to do a talk for this year’s Out To Lunch festival (part of Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival). He suggested ‘Preserving for the Apocalypse’ might be an amusing and timely title. With over-buying during the early (and some of the later) stages of lockdown and Brexit bumps (or almighty earthquakes) causing custom hold ups it definitely feels like an appropriate time to rediscover some of the forgotten skills of food preservation. I can’t promise you will be able to live off jam and chutney should the apocalypse actually come – but a really good jar of chutney might make those bugs we’ll be eating a bit more palatable!

Chutney is really easy to make. You don’t need to worry about setting points or pectin or anything tricky. You basically just chop up the veg you have and boil it up with some sugar, vinegar and spices until is starts to break down and reduces by about half of the original volume.

Making ketchup is not a dissimilar process to making chutney – you are basically simmering ingredients up with vinegar and sugar. But I think it something most people don’t think to do as it seems like a product made in a factory, rather than something you can easily make at home. I first make ketchup at Ballymaloe Cookery School, and ever since then I’ve been hooked. I discovered that a staple (often ultra processed) product that we eat all the time was actually super easy to make, lasts absolutely ages and was way more delicious when homemade!

Making jam is super rewarding (the jars look so beautiful) but it can be tricky if you have never made it before or no one has shown you how to do it. Here are a few tips I have found really useful.

Sauerkraut and other fermented foods are different to most of the pickles that you buy – or indeed make – as instead of using vinegar to preserve the vegetables you are creating an environment where certain bacteria thrive and it is those bacteria that will both create flavour and preserve your vegetables.

This is my autumnal take on a classic lemon meringue pie. I’ve been inspired by my friend, Clare McQuillan, who is a talented forager and cook. Clare made a number of delicious meringue pies over the last year or so using wild ingredients, a couple of which I have been lucky enough to taste. Making a curd (which is basically the filling in a meringue pie) is a great way to use wild and trickier to process ingredients as you can just boil them up whole (without a lot of peeling, chopping, deseeding) and then strain them through a muslin to get the juice for the curd.

As we move into early summer the green salads we grow here at The Edible Flower have more lettuce and less of the rocket and mustard leaves – which grow better from late summer onward. This year we are growing two delicious cos-style lettuce leaves; a bright green variety called ‘Maureen’ and an absolutely gorgeous very dark purple (almost black) variety called ‘Deronda’. Cos-style lettuce is perfect for a Caesar salad as it’s robust enough to hold up to the thick, silky dressing without collapsing at the bottom of the bowl.

This is such a gorgeous dish and healthy too. It’s a great way to showcase our beautiful salad leaves and with all the herbs and the lime juice it just tastes so fresh and zingy.

This salad is very much inspired by a delicious salad I had at 26 Grains of Stoney Street in March, just before the Covid 19 lockdown. It was really delicious, but maybe it has stayed with me because it was almost the last thing I ate out before all the restaurants closed and we were all confined to eating at home until goodness knows when. I hadn’t thought of using dried figs in a salad before but if you have some/can buy some (I got mine in the Asian supermarket in Belfast) then I encourage you to try, they are really very yummy.

This dish is somewhere between a soup and a stew, satisfyingly hearty and lush with creamy beans and lots of olive oil. It’s definitely a main course soup rather than a starter soup. It’s also a really great store cupboard/slightly sad vegetables at the bottom of the fridge/the heel end of the bread dinner, hence posting it at the moment when none of us are able to go out and get fresh ingredients quite as much as we usually would.

There is something aromatic about jerusalem artichokes, and I’m not really referring to their tendency to make you fart! Do you know what I mean? When you eat them their flavour is very much in your nose. it makes me think of galangal and lemongrass, and other fragrant South East Asian ingredients. This soup marries artichokes with ginger, chilli, lime leaf, turmeric and coconut, for something that is comforting yet still a little bit exotic.