Inspiration for incorporating supermarket surplus into your delicious meals!

It’s my third week of blogging about cooking with supermarket surplus and I am delighted to hear that people are taking a look and recreating some of the recipes for themselves, how wonderful?!

I had one of those brief and slightly awkward distanced chats that we’re partaking in at present with the co-founder of Aber Food Surplus, Heather, the other day. There are two points of interest from that which I would like to mention. Firstly, the Surplus Food Selection scheme is perhaps the most engaging enterprise undertaken by the team – it makes a lot of sense in a time like this, when we’ve had to think about out shopping differently. Secondly, is it possible that people and shops see Aber Food Surplus as an excuse not to change their shopping habits and over-ordering because the surplus is being redistributed? We’re sure that lots of people do see the initiative like this, when really the whole point is to raise awareness that we have an issue in society where we don’t value food highly enough and that suppliers and shoppers should only be buying what they need. There are of course lots of positive knock-on consequences of that, like producers being paid fairly, but for now just to say that the success of Aber Food Surplus lies in it not being needed any more.

Whilst we do still have over-stocked food in town, let’s dive back into recipes that help us make the most of it…

Read as a whole or please scroll down through the blog to find the following recipes and the surplus ingredients highlighted in italics:

Iranian Vegetable Stew – potatoes, tomatoes

Garlic Mushroom & Goat’s Cheese Pizza – mushrooms

Kale, Apple, Walnut and Sumac Onion Tabbouleh – apple, satsuma

Homemade Gnocchi with a Romano Sauce – potatoes

Vietnamese Noodles – carrot, assorted salad fruits & veggies

Katsu Curry – carrot, potato

Week three of surplus food from Aber Food Surplus. You’ll notice that the strawberries don’t feature in this blog, but they will do soon!

Iranian Vegetable Stew

This is a very simple recipe that can be adapted by the spices you have in your kitchen and to the vegetables you can lay your hands on. You can follow the prescribed recipe from Simply Cook for timings and experiment with your own ingredients and flavours. You’ll need tomato puree, mushroom stock and ras el hanout to follow the authentic flavour profile. Any stock could be used here instead and ras el hanout can be created with a mixture of black pepper, ginger, cardamom, turmeric, cinnamon, ground coriander, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, cumin and allspice.

Serve as is, or bulk it out with some carbs, maybe some thick-sliced bread!

Iranian Vegetable Stew which works as a warmer on those overcast days as well something fresh-tasting on a sunnier day.

Garlic Mushroom and Goat’s Cheese Pizza

When the country went into lockdown, I was barricaded with more bags of flour than I would care to admit. One of the flour types that adorns my shelves, is 00 the type used for making pasta and I decided to sacrifice the last of my pre-corona era type 00 to trying my hand at a proper pizza base. I followed a recipe that requires three days of preparation and thoroughly enjoyed the process, but best just to follow an online pizza-base recipe that suits the flour that you have around and the time you want to dedicate to it. Normally, I actually make pizzas using a yeast-less dough that whips up instantly. It calls for 250g self-raising flour, 3 tablespoons of oil, 1 teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of sundried tomato paste – mix it all together and roll out into a pizza shape. It’s more like a pastry-base in texture, but I find it really delicious and it’s incredibly quick and easy. Thank you to Joanna Farrow and the ‘30-minute Vegetarian’ cookbook for that recipe, I really do use it a lot.

My first ‘proper’ pizza dough and my old yeast was probably dead, but it was no less scrumptious!

To make this delightful topping I took the mushrooms from my surplus delivery and fried them up in generous olive oil with 3 finely chopped cloves of garlic and dried thyme. I sliced creamy and delicious Pant-ysgawn goat’s cheese and laid that over the base before drizzling the cooked garlic and all of their oil over the pizza. A few minutes before the pizza was cooked I scattered over some wild garlic flowers – they didn’t provide much in the way of taste as it was already so garlicky, but they looked pretty and didn’t go to waste – and shavings of pecorino cheese and ground black pepper. DE-licious.

Kale, Apple, Walnut and Sumac Onion Tabbouleh

I’ve been looking for ways to include any fruits that I’ve received into savoury dishes and one such way is a tabbouleh, traditionally an Arabic mixed salad including a grain, we’ve come to use the term for mixed salads of finely chopped ingredients. This recipe is one of the latter and a great antidote to my indulgent pizzas and pastas!

I followed the ratios and sumac onion preparation from this recipe, but in place of pomegranate seeds I used halved satsuma segments and it worked perfectly in balance with the rest of the flavours. The kale was from The Treehouse and I picked the tenderest of stems, meaning that a bowl of dressed raw kale was an absolute delight and not a jaw-ache!

Homemade Gnocchi with a Romano Sauce

After last week’s delicious, moreish gnocchi and my recent potato glut, I couldn’t shake the idea of making my own from scratch. I’ve always been put off by an assumption that it must be a very fiddly process, but let me assure that it wasn’t at all! Now, I’m not suggesting everyone ditches the shop bought variety, why would you? It’s quick and easy and tastes great! However, if you are one of the people who feels like they have a bit more time on their hands at present, or someone who likes to escape to the kitchen then I definitely suggest having a go!

The recipe I followed was for a vegan gnocchi, I’m not actually vegan, it was more to do with not wanting to buy eggs especially for this one dish. Having said that, after making it, I would probably stick to this recipe because it was so good!

The recipe (found here) talks you through the process, but in essence you mash potatoes and mix them with flour, it’s that simple! I swear by my potato ricer for lump free and easy mashing. I treated myself to one from The Old Bakery Cookshop in Aber, so do pop in and grab one when they’re back open again!

I achieved crimping my using my cutting wheel (also a treat to myself from The Old Bakery Cookshop!) so it took no time at all to chop to size and shape.

I wanted to recreate a gnocchi dish I’d tried recently in Seattle over in the Pacific Northwest of America. It was a simple, classic romano sauce which we had as take-out from Amaro who were still serving during ‘shelter in place’, the much kinder sounding version of the UK’s lockdown.

Funnily enough, I realised as I came to write this blog, the gnocchi recipe blogger happens to be from the Pacific Northwest as well – a happy coincidence!

On to the sauce… I followed the sauce elements of this fettucine recipe – it was spot on and absolutely delicious! I had enough to use with some shop-bought ravioli a few nights later as well.

Homemade pan-fried gnocchi with romano sauce, pecorino and basil.

Vietnamese Noodles

In January, I took part in Veganuary and one of the things I took away from it was my enjoyment of the instagrammable, seemingly fad-like ‘bowls’. Having embarked on a few, I realised their worth as a great way of upping your veg intake, using up fresh foods and having a delicious lunch at the same time. In effect, a ‘bowl’ is made up of a chosen carbohydrate, protein, veggies and a sauce. This all sounds like the obvious makings of a meal, but I find it a really helpful structure to follow.

I followed inspiration from my Thug Kitchen cookbook and made rice noodles and veggies served with a toasted sesame dressing and peanuts. They offer lots of recipes online, but it doesn’t include this one so I don’t think it’s fair for me to share it publicly. Do take a look on their website, I think they have some brilliant ideas (all vegan), but please don’t head over there if you are offended by ‘bad’ language as it’s kind of their forte! There are loads of sauce and dressing ideas online if you don’t want to invent your own.

For my vegetable options I used up the remaining swede (sliced into matchsticks and lightly fried), kale, pineapple, cucumber, basil and coriander I’d used in other meals. You can use whatever you like! Chopping finely means you can have varied mouthfuls and also helps with that pretty veggie bowl effect.

I didn’t go protein heavy here, I used a sprinkling of nuts, but you could go for meat, tofu, quorn or cheese perhaps depending on the flavour combination you’re going for.

Vietnamese rice noodle bowl from the Thug Kitchen recipe book.

Katsu Curry

I often cite Japanese food as one of my favourite cuisines so I thought I had better have a go and recreating one of my favourties, a katsu curry. As a vegetarian, I often take recipes that include meat and adapt them which is exactly what I did here. I followed a recipe from Delicious Magazine, who are perhaps my most reliably tasty recipe source, for chicken katsu which I swapped out for aubergine instead. I followed their exact recipe, but I didn’t have access to a Japanese curry roux so I made my own and I ran a lot of the steps together so that I plated up in a much quicker time than if I ran all the steps in the order presented. I also used oat milk instead of egg to help the breadcrumbs bind – works perfectly.

The outcome was this fabulous-looking dish! I was a bit disappointed with my curry sauce which did not pack the punch I had hoped, but I have a frozen portion left over which I can add more spices (and more heat) to when I want to use it again. Otherwise, the aubergine worked fantastically and rice is always delicious!

Whilst preparing the sauce it occurred to me that it could be a great meal option for anyone needing to sneak vegetables on to the dinner plate unseen!

Thanks for taking the time to learn about my ideas for Aberystwyth’s surplus food. I enjoy sharing my meals with you at this time of isolation and I hope it’s of some use!

About the author. Kathy is a naturalist working in natural history programming and conservation. Food production and diet is intrinsically linked with conservation and planetary heath which plays a large role in the food choices she makes. Kathy runs her @naturebitesuk Instagram account to share her love of cooking and eating, but also to inspire people to make space for good and well sourced food in their lives.