Ren Behan - Author Wild Honey and Rye

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Whole Food

Wholewheat Fettuccine with Kale by Amy Chaplin

Yesterday I shared a book review of At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen, a new recipe book by New York-based chef Amy Chaplin, who creates vegetarian and vegan recipes. Today (with the publisher’s permission) I’m sharing my favourite recipe from the book, which you can find on page 98 of the UK edition – Wholewheat Fettuccine with Kale, Caramelized Onions and Marinated Goat’s Cheese. I didn’t have the marinated goat’s cheese to hand (there’s a recipe for that, too, in Amy’s book on page 116) so I used a mild and creamy locally produced goat’s cheese called Childwickbury goat’s cheese. The recipe calls for kale (cavolo nero) but you can use spinach in it’s place in this beautifully simple pasta dish.

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do – it’s become my go-to supper!

Wholewheat Fettuccine

Wholewheat Fettuccine recipe by Amy Chaplin on renbehan.com

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Wholewheat Fettuccine with Kale by Amy Chaplin

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In this recipe, the author, Amy, uses her own Marinated Goat’s Cheese, inspired by Meredith Dairy, in Australia. However, it also works well with a soft goat’s cheese and so I've used a mild British goat’s cheese many times to make this recipe.

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • 3 medium to large red onions, thinly sliced
  • Sea salt
  • 340g (12oz) wholewheat fettuccine
  • 1 ½ bunches 700g (1 lb 9 oz/10 cups) sliced kale or cavolo nero (or fresh spinach)
  • 225g (8oz) marinated goat’s cheese (oil marinade reserved) at room temperature (I used a British goat's cheese)
  • Freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

  1. Warm the olive oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat and add the onions. Sauté for 10 minutes or until beginning to brown. Add a pinch of sea salt, lower the heat slightly and cook for 15 to 20 minutes, or until onions are soft and caramelised.
  2. In the meantime, bring a large pan of water to the boil and add a large pinch of salt. Add the wholewheat fettuccine to the boiling water and cook for 10 to 12 minutes, or following the packet instructions, until al dente. Drain pasta and return to pan.
  3. While pasta cooks, stir the kale (or spinach) into the cooked onions, cover the frying pan and cook for 6 to 8 minutes or until tender, stirring once or twice. Add onion and kale mixture, three quarters of the goat’s cheese and lots of black pepper to the pasta; mix well.
  4. Drizzle in a tablespoon or more of oil marinade from the cheese (or add a drizzle of good quality olive oil) and season to taste.
  5. Divide among bowls and top with a crumble of remaining goat’s cheese; serve immediately.

Courses Vegetarian

Like this recipe?

You can find more of Amy Chaplin’s recipe here on her webpage. 

For a simple, gluten-free supper, try my Brown Rice Noodles with Spinach and Tomato (GF, V, VG)

If you eat prawns or shrimp try my Wholewheat Penne with Prawns

A UK blog that I love which is full of whole food and healthy recipes is Food To Glow by Kellie Anderson- try any of her delicious dishes!

 

With thanks to Jacqui Small Publishing for their permission for me to share this recipe. Photo Credit Johnny Miller. Recipe Credit Amy Chaplin. 

Review: At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen by Amy Chaplin

At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen

At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen: Celebrating the Art of Eating Well
By Amy Chaplin
UK Edition: Jacqui Small LLP, June 2015, Currently £17.00 on Amazon
US Edition: Roost Books October 2014

Genre – Healthy Eating (Vegan/Vegetarian)

You might have noticed that there is a health food trend happening at the moment and as a result, there’s a plethora of healthy eating and ‘whole food’ books to choose from. At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen is an award-winning vegan and vegetarian book, written by Amy Chaplin and it’s certainly a book that stands out to me.

Amy was former executive chef of Angelia Kitchen, a renowned vegan restaurant in New York, and now works as a private chef, teacher and recipe developer. Through her book, she offers readers a very well-considered, sensible and achievable approach to eating well without compromising on flavour or satisfaction.

Structure

The structure  of the book differs slightly from the standard order, in that it doesn’t jump straight into the recipes. Instead, it has a lengthy opening section (Part 1) devoted to ‘the pantry’ – with advice on how to stock your pantry. I restocked mine within a day of owning this book and had a big de-clutter, to include more of what Amy suggests which are whole grains (buckwheat, millet, rolled oats, brown rice, wholegrain noodles and pastas etc.), beans and pulses (legumes), nuts and seeds, superfoods (flax seeds, goji berries etc.), oils, vinegars, seasonings, condiments and spices.

Amy also sets out her go-to ‘fresh’ pantry vegetables (she sees her fridge as an extension of her pantry) as well as other staples in her fridge, such as fermented vegetables, goat’s cheese and nut butters. There are also some great suggestions for whole foods to store in the freezer, such as berries, sprouted bread and sweetcorn.

To follow, there are notes on baking ingredients, including almond flour and wholegrain spelt flour and some ideas for natural sweeteners.

All in all, I love how part one of Amy’s book is set out; the sections are succinct and uncomplicated and you can really start to define (and take control!) of your pantry and the different ‘whole food’ ingredients within it.

Amy moves onto a section on ‘cooking from the pantry’ and again, this is broken down into grains, beans, nuts and seeds, and roasting vegetables with ideas for a week of meals.

From page 85 onward, she moves onto ‘pantry recipes’ – you could try a simple red lentil soup, wholewheat fettuccine with kale, caramelized onions and marinated goat’s cheese (my favourite recipe of the whole book and featured here tomorrow), vanilla chai pudding or pink kraut (a mixture of green cabbage and red cabbage that turns pink!)

At Home in the Whole Food KItchen

Part Two then expands on the basic concepts already introduced and Amy sets out her recipes, including the more traditional chapters:

  • Breakfast
  • Soups
  • Salads
  • Snacks, nibbles and drinks
  • Whole meals
  • Desserts (tarts & sweet treats for every occasion)

Blackberry cornmeal muffins are the perfect make-ahead treat for breakfast or brunch guests, the Peach chia breakfast shake is simple and can also be transformed into a peach-flavoured chia pudding. The soups are both nourishing and cleansing, whilst the salads take inspiration from a whole array of seasonal vegetables, from shaved courgette (zucchini) with purslane and a pine nut lemon dressing, to roasted winter vegetables or a shaved beetroot salad with blood orange and crushed hazelnuts.

The herbed spelt berry salad with peas and feta is both unusual and inspiring and would work equally well as a delicious ‘al fresco’ supper with friends as it would a lunch box for work or packed away for a picnic.

More substantial dishes include a coconut curry, a butternut squash lasagne (with wholewheat lasagne) and a spicy chickpea stew. By this point in the book we’re really eating well!

Following this, there’s a three-part recipe for coconut vanilla pod ice cream with roasted plums and maple coconut crunch which captured my attention (I made the roasted plums part and used peaches instead) and there’s a divine chocolate hazelnut layer cake for special occasions, too, which I can’t wait to make.

Why I like it

This book is really about feeding yourself with good food. It’s not about dieting or deprivation, and so for me, the recipes for desserts and puddings come as a welcome treat. There’s a big section devoted to making tarts, where you can mix and match the pastry and fillings, which is fun.

Amy is clearly an accomplished chef, and, as the title promises, I am left with the impression that this is the way Amy cooks at home. I don’t think that there are any recipes in this book that a home cook couldn’t tackle or try out for themselves.

This is a beautiful book, with bright and breezy photography by Johnny Miller, that offers a simple and straightforward, organised approach to a healthier lifestyle, without taking the ‘healthy eating’ approach to any extremes.

Click here for a handpicked recipe from the book…

Wholewheat Fettuccine with kale, caramelized onions and marinated goat’s cheese

Wholewheat Fettuccine

Photo Credit: Johnny Miller, reproduced with permission from UK publisher, Jacqi Small. 

At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen: Celebrating the Art of Eating Well
By Amy Chaplin
UK Edition: Jacqui Small LLP, June 2015, Currently £17.00 on Amazon (non-affiliate link)
US Edition: Roost Books October 2014

Disclosure:

I received a copy of this book from Jacqui Small for review, which I offered as a giveaway prize in June’s Simple and in Season (won by C. Ammar). However, I found it to be such a beautiful and practical book, that I promptly jumped on Amazon to buy my own copy. Therefore this review is based on my own purchase.

Other posts and books you might like:

Amy’s blog, you can follow her on Instagram @AmyChaplin and Twitter too @_AmyChaplin

Amy’s Whole Food Cooking Column for the Food Network

Review: A Change of Appetite by Diana Henry [Read more here]

Recipe: Orange and Pomegranate Cake by Diana Henry [Find the recipe here] 

Guest Post: Cucina Ceri – Subbing Processed Carbs for Colourful Veg

By Ceri Jones, of Cucina Ceri

Readers of this blog will know that this January, Ren committed to the Whole30 regime, which draws on the Paleo approach to a diet based on whole foods (meat, fish, veg, fruit, nuts and seeds) to enable the body to re-set itself and become less dependent on sugars and processed foods as fuel.  Since my blog, Cucina Ceri, is full of Paleo inspired recipes I was delighted when Ren asked me to put together a guest post for Fabulicious Food. 

I get my recipe inspiration from just about everywhere – meals out, reading magazines, other blogs, cookbooks and cooking shows on the box – I take my inspiration first and worry about adapting it to my nutritional aspirations later!

I love experimenting in the kitchen, and as a reformed pasta-&-dense-carb-a-holic, I love to find new ways of using my existing pasta recipe repertoire to create tasty new and good for you dishes.  My favourite way of doing this is to replace grain and gluten-heavy foods such as pasta, noodles and rice with vegetable alternatives.  This also increases my daily intake of vegetables at the same time – perfect!

Here are 5 of my favourite ideas –

1. Using courgettes as ‘spaghetti’ or noodles.  I’ve got a piece of equipment called a ‘spiraliser’ but very cheap julienne peeler works just as well.  In a matter of minutes a humble courgette can be turned into fabulous ribbon lengths and served alongside favourite pasta sauces such as bolognese, meatballs, carbonara or pesto.  My current favourite recipe is Pancetta with Courgette Linguini. For a cuisine way further east than Italy I recently cooked up a tasty Prawn Pad Thai.  I’ll be posting this up on Cucina Ceri very soon.

Pancetta with Courgette Linguini

Pancetta with Courgette Linguini 

2. Stuffing veg to carry sauces.  I am loving using squash, hollowed out, roasted and filled with a pasta sauce of choice.  My easy on the eye Squash All’Amatriciana is one of my favourite ever recipes.

Squash All’Amatriciana

3. Using cauliflower as rice.  Stick a head of cauliflower through the grating attachment on a food processor, steam or stir fry with some garlic & coconut oil and hey presto you’ve got a pile of highly nutritious cruciferous veg to serve as an accompaniment to a meal.  I recently served this alongside my Burmese Pork Curry . Cauliflower rice can also be used instead of bulgar in Tabbouleh.

4. Using thinly sliced aubergines or courgettes instead of lasagna sheets.  Certainly no less tasty, than a conventional lasagne I had great fun creating this Faux Lasagna – by layering up beef bolognese, vegetables and creamy pesto sauce.

5. Subbing grain-free flour in gnocchi. This is a recipe I haven’t yet published on the blog as I need to perfect it a little further – a gnocchi made from sweet potato and chestnut flour.  I choose sweet potatoes over plain as whilst white pots are a vegetable they are basically a nutritional non-event. Chestnut flour is one of my favourite substitute flours and like the sweet potato has a slightly sweet edge.  This gnocchi dish is starchy carb heavy so saved for a special treat.  The gnocchi carried both sauces I trialled superbly – Creamy Coconut with Salmon and Spinach, Rocket & Parma Ham.

Cucina Ceri

So there you have it – just a few of my favourite ideas I wanted to share. I would be really interested to know if anyone has any similar recipes or ideas?   Thanks so much Ren for inviting me to guest post – and best of luck with the rest of your Whole 30 journey.  I am reading with interest!

Cucina Ceri Paleo Food Blog

With many thanks to Ceri Jones for this lovely and informative guest post – brimming with healthy ideas!

 

Recipe: Chorizo, Chicken and Chickpea Soup

I love making a big pan of soup that uses up lots of ingredients from my store cupboard or leftovers. This chorizo, chicken and chickpea soup ticks both boxes.

The inspiration came to me via Dom’s Random Recipe challenge. This month, we were tasked with selecting a cook book from the shelf to correspond with our birthday date. My birthday is 15th of March, so I picked out the 15th book, which was Ros Dobson’s Whole Food Kitchen. Appropriately for ‘Random’ Recipes, I remember finding this book in a clothes shop sitting beside a large pile of winter clothes as part of their display. I didn’t buy any clothes, but they did sell me the cook book. You can see that my priorities do not lie in fashion!  

Whole Food Kitchen

Anyway, I flicked open the book to page 41 where I found two recipes – Creamy cannellini, leek and sorrel soup or Smoky chorizo and haricot bean soup. Although they both sounded delicious, I had more chance of finding the ingredients for the chorizo soup in the kitchen, so went with that one.

Chicken & Chorizo Soup

As with all good cooking adventures, I departed from the list of ingredients. The basic recipe calls for chorizo sausage, red onion, garlic, Spanish smoked paprika, chopped tomatoes, chicken or vegetable stock, haricot beans and flat leaf parsley. 

I didn’t have haricot beans or Spanish smoked sweet paprika, but I did have a packet of diced smoky chorizo and a tin of chickpeas. I also found a bag of spinach  to use up, a couple of carrots and some leftover roast chicken. For extra texture, I sprinkled in some giant wholegrain cous cous, too. A one-pot meal, bursting with flavour.

Along with some garlic bread, it will make the perfect fodder for keeping warm whilst watching the fireworks in our back garden tonight.

Chicken & Chorizo Soup

Here’s how I made it:

Chickpea, Chicken and Chorizo Soup

Adapted from Ros Dobson’s Whole Food Kitchen

Original recipe – Smoky Chorizo and Haricot Bean Soup

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 150g/one cup smoky chorizo sausage, cubed
  • 1 red onion, chopped
  • 2 carrots, peeled and grated
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 400g/one  tin chopped tomatoes or passata
  • 750ml/3 cups chicken or vegetable stock
  • 1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed (or use harricot beans or even lentils)
  • A handful/one cup leftover roast chicken, shredded
  • 150g/one cup giant wholegrain cous cous
  • 160g bag organic spinach
  • A handful of fresh curly parsley

Method:

  • Heat the oil in a large pot, add the chorizo sausage and fry for a few minutes. Once crispy, take out a little bit of chorizo to garnish.
  • Add the red onion, carrot and garlic to the pan and fry for another few minutes until the onion softens.
  • Add the tomatoes, stock, chickpeas, leftover roast chicken and giant cous cous. Cook for around fifteen minutes on a gentle heat, stirring occasionally.
  • Add the bag of spinach and stir through until wilted. Take off the heat and sprinkle over the parsley and some of the crispy chorizo.
  • Serve while piping hot, enjoy!

Chicken & Chrorizo Soup

As well as linking this up to Random Recipes, I am also sending this across to Karen’s Herbs on a Saturday challenge, too as I love adding curly parsley to soups!

Herbs on Saturday

Don’t forget, Simple and in Season is back home this month, you can link up here.

Any ‘random’ clothes shop cookery book purchases on your shelves?!