Potato boulangère

There are few totally new recipes but sometimes just thinking of one in a different way as Joe Woodhouse has done with his gorgeously crispy potato boulangère in his inspiring new book Your Daily Veg takes them to another level.

Joe writes: I used to make this with the potatoes cut into slices and all laid out flat, which works just fine. But standing the potato slices up gives a brilliant crunchy element on top, while the bottom half steams and softens, going wonderfully creamy.

When slicing the potato, a mandolin is great but by hand is fine; what’s important is to slice them as evenly as possible.

SERVES 6

– 150g (5½oz) unsalted butter

– 3 onions, finely sliced

– 4 garlic cloves, finely sliced

– 3 thyme sprigs, leaves picked

– 1.25kg (2lb 12oz) floury potatoes, such as Maris Piper or Desirée, peeled and finely sliced

– 300ml (10fl oz) vegetable stock

– sea salt flakes and black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F), Gas Mark 4.

2. Melt half the butter in a large pan that will hold all of the ingredients over medium heat and add the onions, garlic and thyme leaves. Cook gently for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the potato slices to coat well with the buttery onions. Season well with salt and pepper.

3. In a 30 × 20cm (12 × 8 inch) baking dish, roughly stack the potatoes upright along the length of the dish. Their edges should point upwards like a roughly shuffled pack of cards and they should sit snugly.

Pour over the vegetable stock and dot the remaining butter evenly over the top of the potatoes.

4. Roast the potatoes in the oven for 50–60 minutes. As they cook they will become creamy and tender underneath and the top edges will crisp. If browning too much on top, cover loosely with foil until tender.

5. Once done, remove from the oven and allow to sit for a few minutes before serving.

What to drink: You're perhaps unlikely to pair a wine with the potatoes alone but they'd be an ideal accompaniment for roast lamb or beef so match whatever meat you're serving with it or, if you're keeping it veggie take account of what you've got on the side.

Extracted from Your Daily Veg by Joe Woodhouse, published by Kyle at £22. Photograph © Joe Woodhouse.

Burmese Mango Salad with Peanut and Lime

I've loved all of Meera Sodha's books but her new one, East, which includes vegetarian and vegan recipes from the Indian sub-continent to the far east may be the best yet. And I love the zingy fresh flavours of this mango salad.

Meera writes: This is inspired by a dish I ate at one of my favourite restaurants in Mumbai called Burma Burma. So it is that I offer up my memory of its mighty and mouth-watering mango, peanut and lime salad.

note / When freshly made, this salad is great by itself or with seasoned and fried tofu, but if left a day it will release delicious juices and is wonderful with rice noodles. You can hand-cut the long strips, but a julienne peeler will make quick work of it. Make sure you buy the hardest, greenest, most unripe mangoes you can find, because ripe mangoes will juice when you cut them.

NB contains nuts

Serves 4

2cm fresh ginger, peeled and julienned

1 bird’s-eye chilli, finely chopped

5 tbsp lime juice (from 3 limes)

1 tsp salt

rapeseed oil

1 onion, halved and thinly sliced

4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

1½ tbsp chickpea flour

2 tbsp crunchy peanut butter

½ a sweetheart cabbage, finely shredded

2 unripe mangoes (500g)

2 medium carrots (200g), peeled and julienned

a handful of fresh mint leaves

a handful of fresh coriander leaves

a large handful (60g) of crushed salted peanuts

Put the ginger and chilli into a bowl, add the lime juice and salt, and leave to steep.

Put a plate by the stove and cover it with a piece of kitchen paper. Heat 5 tablespoons of oil in a non-stick frying pan over a medium flame and, when smoking hot, add the onion. Separate the slices using a wooden spoon and fry, stirring once or twice, until brown and crisp. Scoop out with a slotted spoon and put on the prepared plate. Fry the garlic in the same pan for 2 minutes, until golden brown (be watchful: it cooks quickly), then transfer to the plate.

Stir the chickpea flour into the remaining hot oil in the pan over a very low heat to create a paste. Stir constantly for a minute, then add the peanut butter, stir for another minute and take off the heat.

Put the cabbage into a large bowl. Peel the mangoes and shave with a julienne peeler until you hit the stone; or, if cutting by hand, cut the cheeks from the stone on all four sides and julienne. Add the mango and carrots to the cabbage. Reserve a handful of the fried onion to garnish, then add the rest, together with the fried garlic, to the cabbage. Toss, then pour over the chickpea and peanut paste and the ginger, chilli and lime mixture, and toss again. Taste, and adjust the lime and salt if need be.

To serve, finely chop and add the herbs, toss one final time, and top with the crushed peanuts and remaining fried onion.

What to drink: I'd go for a riesling with this, preferably from the Clare or Eden Valley or a passionfruit or mango cider

See also The best wine pairings for mango and mango desserts

From East by Meera Sodha, published by Penguin Figtree at £20. Photo © David Loftus

Parsnip, Miso, Oat and Shallot Boulangère

A gorgeously hearty, warming vegetable-based dish from Gizzi Erskine's inspiring book Restore which is full of and advice on how to eat ethically and seasonally.

This recipe is from the Autumn to Winter section and combines one of my favourite winter vegetables, parsnips with miso and, intriguingly, with oats.

Gizzi writes: Boulangère is a gratin of potatoes made by cooking potatoes in the juice (stock) and fat of lamb - the unsung hero of the potato dauphinois. Playing around with root vegetables in a gratin is a great way to really understand them. I've replaced the lamb stock and fat with a chicken or vegetable stock pumped up with miso and oat cream, that you can buy or make yourself. The flavour of the oat is what I want here, not the creaminess, and oat and parsnip are dreamy together.

This dish is a good way to show how we often overlook the flavours of the modern plant-based movement. This gratin is superb as a main dish for a supper or served as a side dish, and if you make it with vegetable stock, your vegan friends will thank you."

SERVES 4 as a side dish

Preparation lime 15 minutes

Cooking lime 45 minutes

2 tbsp oil

4 shallots, very thinly sliced

500g parsnips, cut into very fine rounds (ideally using a mandolin e or a food processor with a thin slicing attachment)

500ml fresh vegetable stock (or chicken stock if you're not making it for vegetarians or vegans)

1 tbsp white miso paste

½ tsp salt

250ml oat cream

few sprigs of thyme

freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 240°C/220°C fan/gas mark 9.

Start by sweating the shallots. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium-low heat, add the shallots and cook gently for about 20 minutes, stirring regularly, until beautifully soft and caramelised.

Add the sliced parsnips (I don't think they need peeling - the peel adds a nice texture) to a separate saucepan, along with the stock, miso paste and salt. Bring to the boil then take off the heat immediately. Drain the parsnips, reserving the stock. Return the stock to the pan and cook over a high heat until the volume has reduced to about 150ml and the stock has a thick, syrupy consistency.

While the stock is reducing, you can start constructing the dish. Once the parsnips are cool enough to handle, take a gratin dish (about 2 litre capacity) and make a layer of parsnips on the bottom, two or three parsnip slices thick. Spoon over a thin layer of the shallots, season with pepper and the leaves from the sprigs of thyme. Repeat this process until you have used everything up.

To finish the sauce, add the oat cream to the stock and allow to reduce further for a couple of minutes until thickened slightly. Pour this over the parsnips and put the dish in the oven to bake for 20 minutes, until the top is crisp and golden. Remove from the oven and leave to sit for a couple of minutes before serving.

What to drink: I'd go for a rich white with this, maybe with a lick of oak. I'm thinking white Rhône or Roussillon (anything from grenache blanc or gris), oaked white rioja or a Douro white

Extracted from Restore: a modern guide to sustainable eating by Gizzi Erskine is published by HQ at £25

Photography credit – c. Issy Croker.

Roast crown prince squash, ricotta and caramelised chilli sage butter

One of the most evocative cookbooks to have been published recently is Lori de Mori and Laura Jackson's Towpath, a series of recipes and reminiscences from the charmingly quirky Towpath Café. It's divided up month by month and this is in fact a September recipe but as squash is still in season and wonderful warming at this time of year it works equally well now.

Lori writes: This dish to me epitomises this time of year. The combination of the sweetness and earthiness of the squash with the crispy warmness of the sage work wonderfully as a pair. Add in a blob of rich, creamy and savoury ricotta and some caramelised sage and chilli butter and it warms the soul."

Serves 4

1 large or 2 medium crown prince squash, weighing around 2kg/41/2lb

2 tablespoons olive oil

Caramelised Sage and Chilli Butter (see below)

150g/51/2oz ricotta

salt and pepper

Notes

Any type of pumpkin or squash could be used here. You will just need a robust variety that is happy to be roasted and doesn’t have a high water content like spaghetti squash.

Preheat the oven to 210°C fan/450°F/gas mark 8.

Cut the squash into four. If you have one big squash, be very careful as the skin is super tough – I put a tea towel between my hand and the tip of the knife to prevent my hand going through the top of the blade. Remove the seeds and discard. Remove the skin. I find using a serrated knife the best option and if you get slightly further under the skin, it’s much easier to remove – you want to remove the green colour under the skin.

Cut into big wedges – I normally cut each quarter into three or four wedges lengthways.

Toss in the olive oil. Season and place on a large baking tray with the wedges standing up. Cook for about 25–35 minutes until the squash has browned and is fully cooked. This stage can be done in advance and kept in the fridge for 2–3 days and you can reheat without affecting the squash.

Make the Caramelised Sage and Chilli Butter (see below).

Plate up using one large platter or four individual plates. Place a bit of ricotta on the bottom so that it can secure the squash wedges, then layer up a few of the squash wedges and scatter some blobs of ricotta around. Layer up the rest of the squash and blob more ricotta over and around.

To finish, generously drizzle over the caramelised sage and chilli butter with lots of sage and lots of the butter. Season.

For the sage and chilli butter

bunch of sage

150g/ 5 ½ oz butter, cut into pieces

½ lemon, juiced

2 cloves garlic, minced

½ –1 teaspoon chilli flakes

salt and pepper

Pick the sage, saving the stalks for a stock. In a medium-sized frying pan, place the butter in the pan with the sage leaves. Melt over a medium-low heat. Continue cooking until the sage leaves start crisping. Turn the heat to low to prevent the butter and sage from burning. Once the leaves are crispy, turn off the heat. Add the lemon juice to prevent the sage and butter from cooking further. It will sizzle loudly! Add the garlic and chilli flakes. Stir well and season to taste. Pour into an appropriate container and leave in a warm place until needed.

What to drink: Given the spicy butter I'd go for a viognier with this but you could also drink a good Soave.

The best wines to pair with squash and pumpkin

Extracted from Towpath Recipes and Stories by Lori de Mori & Laura Jackson published by Chelsea Green at £27. Photograph © Joe Woodhouse