Ren Behan - Author Wild Honey and Rye

Food Writer

Carrots

A Sow and Grow UK Update and a Visit to innocent Fruit Towers

I’m working with innocent as a Sow & Grow UK Ambassador from February to April 2017. Follow the tag #SowandGrowUK for updates #sp

The sun is shining and we’ve officially leaped into spring! It’s the perfect time to start planting seeds and bulbs and if you’ve been following my #SowandGrowUK blog posts and updates, you’ll see that we’ve been busy on this front already. The cress seeds have grown and have mostly been eaten, the carrot tops are growing taller each day and the green beans are almost reaching the sky! This week also marks National Gardening Week, so if you’re still looking for a reason to don those gardening gloves, I’m hoping this post will inspire you to get growing at home, too.

An update on our Sow and Grow UK growing pots

As you may remember, we started the innocent and Grow It Yourself (GIY) Sow and Grow campaign back in March, when we received a pack of goodies which included a growing guide, a few Sow and Grow compostable cups, a bag of compost and three packets of seeds – cress, baby carrot seeds and green beans.

The children and I threw ourselves straight into the project and started off by planting the seeds (according to the instructions) straight into the Sow and Grow cups. We kept the cups indoors and watered them regularly. We’ve already made some recipes with the cress, including these Salmon, Egg and Cress Open Sandwiches. We’ve also re-planted our beans into a larger pot, adding more compost and a cone trainer. And we’ve continued to water our carrot seeds in the compostable cups, which also grown a little bit more, albeit at a slower pace than the cress or beans.

In the last couple of weeks, the green beans have really shot up and we’ve now added some bamboo sticks to our training cone, as the beans outgrew the cone! We also visited the beans growing at Grandma’s house over the Easter holidays, which are also growing super tall.

We’re still waiting for any beans to appear.

We’ve thinned out the baby carrots (by pulling out some of the tops) to make some more room for our baby carrots to grow. By the time you read our next update, we hope to have planted out the carrots into a raised bed in the garden and we’ll probably be able to move the green beans outdoors too.

So far so good. Keep watching!

Green Beans and Carrots Grow Your Own

Beans in a pot, with a training cone and additional bamboo sticks and our baby carrots. 

National Gardening Week 2017

This week it’s National Gardening Week and we’ve started to think about where to put our new raised bed. We have an area at the end of the garden which gets quite a bit of sun, so we think we’ll build a small raised bed to start with there. In the meantime, we found a ceramic pot outside, with an old root within it which wasn’t doing very much, so we decided use our newly acquired sow and grow skills to plant some of our favourite outdoor herbs in the pot instead.

My 7 year-old remembered all the steps we took when we planted the cress and beans and simply did the same but in a bigger pot. I explained how someone had already started growing the herbs that we found in little pots at the garden centre, and that we could simply bed them in by taking them out of their pots and putting them into some fresh compost. Elena said that she liked this sort of short-cut and she’s excited to see how the herbs continue to grow.

We’re looking forward to adding some of our herbs to our recipes, soon, whilst we continue to wait for our beans and carrots to grow.

A visit to Fruit Towers to meet the innocent team

Ever wondered what happens when you ring the bananaphone? We did, so we rang to arrange a tour innocent’s headquarters in London, known as Fruit Towers. The children were excited to see where their favourite innocent smoothies and fruit juices are developed, as well hearing more about innocent coconut water and innocent fruit bubbles, and in turn we were able to give the innocent team a personal account of our Sow and Grow success so far!

Sow and Grow Innocent

We were all particularly impressed with Fruit Towers and we loved the fact that innocent have been able to bring so much of the outdoors inside – with plenty of indoor plants, a roof top garden, fresh air time (an alarm sounds when it’s time to open the windows!) grass-green smoothie vans and even a mock grass carpet throughout all fives floors of the innocent offices! Plus they have a fun communal area for eating, meeting and playing table football.

It was also wonderful to be able to hear about how innocent themselves have grown in order to become the UK and Europe’s biggest smoothie brand with products available in 15 different countries, whilst being environmentally friendly (they are working towards making Fruit Towers completely paperless soon) and super forward-thinking. All of the ingredients that go into innocent smoothies are sourced sustainably and 10% of the company profits go straight to charity. We also loved hearing more about the innocent ‘big knit’ project (with Age UK) where 25p is donated for each smoothie sold with a little woolly hat on! We also loved the innocent heaven wall – where all the retired smoothies and products go!

So, it’s definitely been a busy few weeks for us. We’re looking forward to the Easter weekend now and are already planning our next little sow and grow project.

Is your school signed up? If so then upload your photos at https://innocentsowandgrow.com/ to be in with the chance to win monthly prizes from innocent and see your classroom crowned as Sow & Grow champions!

Following the repackage of innocent kids drinks, consumers can also win seed packs by following the instructions on pack. Available nationwide now in most major supermarkets. Good luck!

Sow and Grow Innocent

Come back and see how are seeds are doing in a few weeks’ time or follow our updates on Instagram:

Look out for the hashtag #SowandGrowUK

#ad I have been compensated for writing this post. All opinions are my own.

Golden Leek Soup for a Wise Man

You can tell it is January as everyone is writing posts about soup or muesli. We’ve all over-indulged during the festive period and today, as the decorations come down, it is time to face the music. It’s all change for me in many ways as my little boy goes back to school on Monday and my daughter goes to nursery for the very first time, swapping her usual nap time for toddler-filled playtime. I have resolved not to use the time to write, but instead, to hit the gym and enjoy the precious couple of hours I will have to myself. We’ll see how that goes…  

I can’t tell you how much my little boy loves leek soup. He askes for it all the time. This is the simplest of soups to make, just three ingredients and a stock cube, yet it brings such comfort. You might even have these ingredients growing in your veg patch or on your allotment – another of my resolutions! This year, he was a Wise Man in his school Nativity play and given that today is the feast of The Three Kings, I promised I would make ‘golden soup’ for us to eat. The feedback today was: “Mummy, this leek soup is so yummy, I would like to fill up the bath with it and have a rest in it tonight!”  So, in case there are any Wise Men passing by your house tonight, needing a bath or just a bowl of soup, here’s our recipe for Golden Leek Soup.

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Bye bye festive plates and bowls for another year!

I’m hoping to open up Family Friendly Fridays here as a blog event soon as well as rounding-up and re-instating Simple and in Season VERY soon!

In the meantime, I’m also linking this up to Helen’s Frugal Food Fridays!

Frugal Food Fridays

 

Our Favourite Carrot and Parmesan Risotto

For the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to post a ‘family friendly’ recipe on my blog every Friday. Today we’re having  a Carrot and Parmesan Risotto for tea, which we love. Although we try to eat as much veg as possible, sometimes it is easier to keep things very simple with little ones. Ever since we helped my mum pick the carrots she had grown in her garden, my kids have been super keen to eat them, so we now eat carrot risotto at least once a week. It could be worse, I suppose.

I add a little bit of butter in with my olive oil before coating the rice and carrots,  as it really brings out the flavour of carrots. You could add chopped onion, garlic and celery, but we prefer just using carrots chopped up into little pieces. The carrots will cook with the rice so they’ll be nice and soft by the time it is all ready. Don’t forget to use hot stock too, I keep a small pan of stock simmering next to my risotto pan and then just keep pouring a ladleful at a time until all the stock is absorbed. At the end, stir in another knob of butter and plenty of freshly grated Parmesan cheese.   To make a vegetarian version, of course, you can use vegetable stock and a vegetarian cheese instead.

 

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I’m also sending this recipe across to the lovely Niamh of Eat Like a Girl, who is judging a Christmas Carrot Competiton on behalf of Love the Garden. Their competition is open until 21st December 2011, so if you have any carrot recipes you’d like to share, send them across too!

 

And, of course, to Simple and in Season here on Fabulicious Food!

I’m also linking this up to Mediocre Mums’ Slow Cooker Sunday – to cook in a slow cooker, add all the ingredients and set to low for 3-4 hours.

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Wishing you all a lovely weekend.

Polish Supper: Marjoram Steam Roasted Chicken

I’ve been craving really simple, winter warming food. It’s cold and there is something so comforting about all those lovely flavours coming together, especially with winter vegetables, made just the way we have it when we visit home. I have hundreds of cookery books but somehow, I love the way my mum and sister, Elizabeth make roast chicken.

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