Spinach & agushi curry

I recently chaired a panel on women in food at the Abergavenny Food Festival which included the wonderful Zoe Adjonyoh. I hadn't seen her book Zoe's Ghana Kitchen before but discovered it was full of the most delicious recipes, many of them vegan.

There's also a really brilliant section at the beginning of the book showing and explaining the more unfamiliar ingredients she uses.

Here's one of the recipes that particularly appealed to me.

Spinach & Agushi curry

Serves 4-6

Here’s my twist on traditional Kontomire or nkontomire stew – a delicious vegan spinach curry, to which you can add extra steamed veg of your choice to make it into a more substantial meal.

1 tablespoon coconut oil

1 small onion, thinly sliced

2 teaspoons curry powder

1 teaspoon chilli powder

350ml (12fl oz) uncooked Chalé sauce (see below)

100g (3½oz) or about 2 heaped tablespoons agushi (dried ground melon seeds, available in West African and Caribbean shops and also online )

8 guinea peppers, crushed (also known as grains of paradise - optional)

juice of 1 lime

150–300ml (5–10fl oz) water or good-quality vegetable stock, if required

200g (7oz) baby leaf spinach

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

Grilled plantain (optiona)

4–6 ripe plantains

1 tablespoon ground ginger

½ tablespoon dried chilli flakes

sea salt

coconut oil (melted) and olive oil, for drizzling

Heat a large, heavy-based saucepan and add the coconut oil. When it has melted, add the onion and sauté over a medium heat for a few minutes until softened, then add the curry and chilli powders and stir well. Stir in the chalé sauce and simmer over a low heat for 20 minutes.

Gently stir in the agushi, using the back of a wooden spoon to break down any lumps that may form – the sauce should start to turn creamy and resemble scrambled eggs. Add the guinea peppers, if using, and the lime juice. Leave to simmer over a medium heat for a further 10 minutes. If the sauce becomes too thick, add the water or vegetable stock a little at a time to loosen it. The colour of the stew will have changed from pink to a mustard colour.

Stir in the spinach and sea salt and black pepper, then simmer gently until the spinach has wilted.

Meanwhile, prepare the grilled plantain, if making. Preheat the grill to medium-high. Using a sharp knife, peel the plantains by cutting the tips off each end and slicing through the skin lengthways (avoid cutting into the flesh), then use your hands to remove the skin. Cut the plantains in half lengthways. Rub with the ground ginger, chilli flakes and sea salt, and drizzle with coconut or olive oil. Grill for 12–15 minutes, turning over halfway through. Serve alongside the spinach curry.

Chalé Sauce

This basic recipe is based on my dad’s everyday cooking sauce. He would whip this up and then literally throw in any type of meat, fish or protein, but it was always tasty.

You can just blend the ingredients and store the uncooked sauce for later use, or cook it and then leave to cool – either way it saves time when making many of the recipes in this book. I make a big batch of this at least once a week – you can easily double the quantity if you want to make a bigger batch, although it’s not necessary to increase the Scotch Bonnet unless you like it extra-extra-hot!

400g (14oz) can tomatoes or 250g (9oz) fresh tomatoes

30g (1oz) or 2 tablespoons tomato purée

1 onion, roughly chopped

5cm (2-inch) piece fresh root ginger, grated (unpeeled if organic)

1 red Scotch Bonnet chilli, deseeded

1 tablespoon dried chilli flakes

1 teaspoon sea salt

3 garlic cloves (optional)

To cook

1 tablespoon sunflower oil

1 onion, finely diced

1 teaspoon curry powder

1 teaspoon extra-hot chilli powder

Makes 500ml (18fl oz)

Place all the ingredients except the ‘to cook’ ones in a blender and blend together until you have a fairly smooth paste. This is your uncooked chalé sauce.

For cooked chalé sauce, heat the oil in a heavy-based saucepan, add the onion and sauté over a medium heat for a few minutes until softened. Then add the curry powder and chilli powder and stir thoroughly to coat the onion evenly. Add the blended tomato mixture and simmer gently for 35–40 minutes.

Use straight away, or leave to cool then store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days, or freeze for future use.

What to drink: Zoe has a number of delicious-sounding drink recipes in the book - I'm liking the sound of Sobolo or sorrel juice with this dish. Otherwise you could go for something like a dandelion and burdock or even a lager but I don't think it's a wine kind of dish.

Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen by Zoe Adjonyoh, is published by Mitchell Beazley £25 www.octopusbooks.co.uk

Image credit: Nassima Rothacker

Tomato Tonnato

Few recipes are truly original but this twist on the classic vitello tonnato from Ed Smith of Rocket and Squash, using tomatoes as the base instead of roast veal is just inspired.

It comes from his brilliant book On the Side which, as the title suggests, is all about side dishes.

Ed writes: This might seem a surprising combination, but a fishy, umami-rich tonnato balances tomato’s natural acidity beautifully, punctuated by a sprinkling of salty and sour capers. I’ve enjoyed this with veal chops, pork belly, monkfish and cod, and I’m sure there are many other fine matches.

You’re likely to have some tonnato sauce left over, but it’s not efficient to make it in a smaller quantity. Happily, it keeps well for 2–3 days if covered and refrigerated. Use it to lubricate cold meats or roast lamb or as a flavoured mayonnaise in sandwiches. The tomatoes must be at room temperature and sliced thinly so that there’s plenty of cut surface area for the sauce to cling to.

Time needed: 30 minutes to an hour

Serves 6

6 medium (about 500g) tomatoes

2 tablespoons capers

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Tonnato sauce

50g tinned anchovies in oil

160g tinned tuna, drained (120g drained weight)

2 teaspoons fish sauce

1 garlic clove, chopped

2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

3 egg yolks

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

100g light olive oil

First, make the tonnato sauce. Put the anchovies with their oil, along with all the other sauce ingredients except the olive oil, in a blender or small food processor. Pulse, then blitz for about 1 minute, or until smooth. Add the olive oil in a steady drizzle until the mixture has completely emulsified and is smooth and glossy. Transfer it to a bowl and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour. It will firm up a little in that time – not essential, but nice.

Spoon 4–5 tablespoons of the tonnato sauce over a large serving plate. Slice the tomatoes thinly and layer them on top of the sauce. Add a good grind or three of black pepper, and just a little salt (the sauce and capers are themselves quite salty). Sprinkle the capers over the top and serve.

What to drink

I drank an albarino with this on one occasion and a dry rosé on another. Both worked really well, as would most unoaked Italian white wines.

Extract taken from On the Side: A Sourcebook of Inspiring Side Dishes by Ed Smith (Bloomsbury, £20)

Photography © Joe Woodhouse

Raw cauliflower, mushroom and feta salad

This delicious salad is inspired by one I ate in a brilliant fast food restaurant called Food Chain in Montreal last year. They shred the vegetables to order then serve them in bowls with an accompanying dressing and topping (mixed seeds in this case).

You pour over the dressing when you’re ready to eat which keeps the salad crunchy and fresh.

I thought it would be easy to recreate at home and it is. You just need to slice your vegetables really thinly. For two I’d suggest using a mandolin - for larger numbers a food processor with a slicing attachment. Needless to say your ingredients need to be super-fresh. This is not a salad to make with the fridge leftovers!

Serves 2 as a main meal, 4 as a side

1 small or half a medium red or sweet onion* (about 50g)
Half a medium-sized cauliflower (about 250g)
A good big handful of flat leaf parsley
125g button mushrooms
100g feta cheese, crumbled
Mixed seeds (optional)

For the dressing

2 tbsp lemon juice
Grated rind half a lemon (about 1 tsp)
5 tbsp olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

First make the dressing. Put the lemon juice and rind into a bowl with a little salt and plenty of black pepper and whisk in the olive oil. (Or shake all the ingredients together in a screw top jar

Peel the onion and slice finely on a mandolin. Discard any chunkier pieces. Soak the onion slices in cold water for 10 minutes then drain and pat dry.

Break the cauliflower into large florets removing the thicker parts of the stalk and mandolin them too

Chop the parsley coarsely removing any tougher stems

Wipe and finely slice the mushrooms

Put all the ingredients in a large bowl together with the crumbled feta. Whisk the dressing again and pour it over then toss all the ingredients together. Sprinkle with seeds, if using. Eat immediately.

What to drink: I see this as a healthy post-weekend option so I personally would drink sparkling water with it but you could serve a glass of crisp dry white wine like a Picpoul de Pinet or an albarino.

Drowned tomatoes

Before summer finally disappears here's a brilliant way to make use of the last of the season's tomatoes from chef Florence Knight's lovely first book 'One'. Good tip about skinning garlic cloves too!

Serves four to six

550g mixed heritage tomatoes

4 garlic cloves

1 bunch of thyme

2 or 3 bay leaves

1 tsp sugar

a pinch of salt

about 250ml extra virgin olive oil

These tomatoes are swimming, or even drowned, in olive oil, which accentuates their sweetness and depth. Especially pleasing through crisp salad leaves, toppled over a soft poached egg on toast or even steamed with clams. You can use any variety of tomato to make this recipe, from golden cherry to sweet baby plum, but I find that heritage work particularly well.

Preheat the oven to 170ºC/gas 5.

Run the tomatoes under cold water and pick out any stalks.

Place the garlic cloves in warm water for a couple of minutes – this helps to loosen the skin. Pop them out of their skins.

Slice the tomatoes in half and gently lodge them cut-side down in a pan or casserole dish that can go in the oven. Thinly slice the garlic and scatter it over the tomatoes. Drop over the thyme and bay leaves, and sprinkle with the sugar and salt. Pour over the olive oil until the tomatoes are sitting in about half a centimetre of it.

Bake for about forty-five minutes until the tomatoes are soft, a little wrinkly and blistered and have absorbed most of the olive oil.

These will keep for a few days in a jar or airtight container stored in a cool place or, if cooled first and kept under a layer of olive oil, up to a week in the fridge.

What to drink: It's hard to recommend a match without knowing what way you're going to use these but you should be pretty safe drinking Italian - Chianti if you fancy a red or almost any kind of dry Italian white like a Verdicchio or Vermentino.

Recipe extracted from ONE: A Cook and her Cupboard by Florence Knight, out now published by Saltyard Books, £26. © Florence Knight 2013. Photography © Jason Lowe.