Cooking Outside the Box: The Abel and Cole Seasonal, Organic Cookbook

Cooking Outside the Box: The Abel and Cole Seasonal, Organic Cookbook
Keith Abel

A cookbook to love, a cookbook to read. Delicious, beautiful, organic, seasonal recipes from Britain’s organic food hero!A cookbook to love, a cookbook to read. Delicious, beautiful, seasonal recipes from Keith Abel, the utterly charismatic co-founder of Abel & Cole, Britain's most successful organic home delivery company.Cooking Outside the Box : The Abel & Cole Seasonal, Organic Cookbook provides mouth-watering excuses for eating glorious food exactly when it comes into its best. These are inspiring yet unfussy recipes that let simple ingredients speak for themselves (but don't try to stop him speaking on their behalf). Brilliantly written and entertaining, even the most timid cook can approach these recipes with gusto. Who wouldn't want to cook Keith's way? So throw out your measuring cups, get rid of your scales, and get to know your food!Recipes include Pork Loin Chops on a Bed of Sweet Orchard Apples, Husk-Wrapped and Roasted Garlic Corn, Venison Fillet with Black Kale and Port, 45-Minute Pumpkin & Parmesan Bread, Chargrilled Asparagus and Halloumi with a Citrus Dressing, and Rhubarb Bread and Butter Pudding.Keith also suggests delicious smoothies and soups to help you find a use for that inevitable glut of leftover fruit and veggies at the end of the week.Fully illustrated with beautiful finished food shots, inspiring atmospheric pictures and charming visual references to Keith's own quirky style. Cooking Outside the Box also features Keith's anecdotes on organic farms and small producers, stories about the friends and family who have inspired him, and hilarious suggestions for getting the most out of your cooking experience.So eat with the seasons and eat well!

Cooking Outside the Box

Keith Abel

The ABEL & COLE

Cookbook

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#udb31193c-298f-56b6-bca7-bb7d1a91ee1e)

Title Page (#uf66492e5-2e8f-512e-b74e-b007d2cd0c95)

Introduction (#ufdfb575f-be80-5683-a58c-efa28ee86dcb)

Spring (#ue864f127-8554-57a7-b7cb-b0e06a11da2e)

Summer (#litres_trial_promo)

Autumn (#litres_trial_promo)

Winter (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_159cc01f-ac3d-57af-8d2e-d0af41885b13)

If you’ve bought this book thinking I’m somehow related to Delia Smith or have some “Fat Duck” palate for mixing bananas and worms, I want to come completely clean and apologise profusely. Someone in the marketing department obviously got carried away. With some basic dishes I am a complete failure, and even my 11-year-old Jessica continually trumps me in the toast, spaghetti and boiled egg departments.

But before you start clogging up the returns department at Amazon, or boycotting Waterstone’s thinking you’ve been sold a dud, I do have one thing over most cooks in that I have spent the last 18 years of my life working with the finest organic farmers, cheese-makers and artisan bakers, who produce a range of beautiful and delicious food that makes your average supermarket look positively cold-war Russian. Furthermore, for all these years I’ve been responsible for choosing the weekly vegetable shop for some extremely talented cooks (and a few chefs) across Britain who were just a bit fed up with the air-freighted, plastic-covered, plastic-looking, and plastic-tasting, produce being offered to them after the demise of their local greengrocer. The challenge for me and for Abel & Cole has been to keep the variety of organic foods coming month in, month out and, as word has caught on, to show the less adventuresome cook (like me) how to prepare, store and cook all the wonderful food on offer in the UK throughout the seasons.

The farmers I work with deserve 100% of the credit for my cooking inspiration. They invariably have a hundred-and-one serving suggestions for their much-loved and much-nurtured produce. I wanted to pass these ideas and recipes on to my customers, and so began the Abel & Cole weekly newsletter with headlines like: “The thing in your box that looks like a brain this week is celeriac.” And the great thing about our customers is that they have always reported back on what works and what doesn’t, and often send in recipes of their own. So grew a great bank of knowledge which I am now sharing with you.

The Abel & Cole Story

In 1988, after two successful previous summers of degree-taking, I got cocky and failed the bar exam. I had escaped the rigours of study (or lack of it) for the comfort of a tent in the south of Spain in a very old VW Beetle (damn, now I’ll have to change the bank password) with my new (and first) girlfriend Catherine Ciapparelli (Chippy to everyone, Mrs Abel to me). The tan was going well, the windsurfing was improving and I felt pretty chuffed having this gorgeous girl as my beach bunny. I had been there about three weeks when I put in the call to get my exam results from my most amusing friend, Jeremy. When he told me I’d failed I asked him to stop ****ing joking around. He wasn’t, which meant I was in real trouble…and a lot of debt. I had the option of carrying on clowning around on the beach or doing the sensible thing by heading straight back to London, putting in two months’ hard graft with the books, and resitting the exam. Naturally I chose the former.

Over the next few days, though, I resolved to go home and set up business flogging potatoes door to door, a profession I’d mastered earlier to pay for my vices at Leeds Uni. So the plan was hatched. On my return I borrowed some traveller’s cheques from my big brother and roped my friends Jules Allen and Paul Cole and my Mum into joining me in my fledgling business. One night in the middle of September I pitched up with the boys, £200 and a posh accent to New Covent Garden market to buy a load of spuds. By 7am, they’d been hand-selected and packed; by 8am we were double-sausage, egg, chips and beaned; and by 6pm the whole lot was sold. We were cashed-up and home via the pub by 10. Up again at 2am with Jules and Paul picking me up wearing their permanent smiles and constant good humour.

A few months in and we had a fleet of complete wrecks doing the rounds with a handful of handsome Kiwi fellas at their wheels. We’d added free range eggs to our service (taking the total product offering up to two), and emblazoned our new motto: “STOP BREAKING YOUR ARMS AND EGGS” all over our vans.

I should probably mention that at this stage I had no idea what “organic” was. Indeed, I was rather sceptical the first time I was offered organic potatoes. Of course potatoes were organic, I thought, they’re vegetables. A farmer I knew told me about this organic thing and encouraged me to ask my supplier at the time (a Kent farmer) to show me what he used to fertilise his crops and keep the pests off. I tried hard not to look too shocked when the doors to the shed were pulled back. It was like a laboratory, and all of those chemicals were being dumped on our food…not the kind of thing you’d brag about while flogging spuds door to door. I got hold of my first organic potatoes and our sales pitch changed from “bakers or mashers?” to “with chemicals or without?”

Up until then, our main challenge had been getting people to stick their heads out of the door for long enough to ask us, “How much are they?” Now, people were genuinely interested. Like me, they were discovering for the first time the amount of sprays used on their food. They had a lot of questions to ask and we knew some of the answers.

By the time summer came we had a large handful of very cool customers buying our first mixed boxes of organic vegetables. Their enthusiasm gave us a great sense of encouragement; meanwhile they were also telling all their friends about us.

Over the next ten years we carried on doing what we were doing, trying to run the business in a fair and decent way, and being constantly amazed at how rare this was in the modern food industry. It seemed that all the supermarkets were inadvertently employing sadistic post-pubescent buyers whose job descriptions appeared to read: “Bully, use your muscle, humiliate and bankrupt as many farmers as you can. We’ll always be able to find others. Use any techniques you choose, no matter how underhand – they won’t be able to say a word against you publicly or we’ll put them out of business. Make them pay for promotions and if you cock up your weekly order, no need to worry: just say the produce is not up to scratch and make them pay for you to throw it away.”

The more I heard about this, the more I was encouraged to just sell safe, healthy, local organic food bought from people I got on well with, supplied to people I liked, by people I enjoyed working with. While great on paper it was a financial catastrophe! Regardless, I kept believing it would work and eventually manna from heaven fell down in the shape of the good friends and mentors, past and present, who I’ve been so lucky to work with. And, like all good things in our part of the world, if you are prepared to show that you’re not a lightweight and stick to your principles, the great British public will support you. For the last five years, one big virtuous circle has grown. All the hard-working farmers who were prepared to help us in the first place (quite often getting paid very late!) are now sustainably getting on with what they do best without a gun in their backs, and our wonderful customers are telling their friends about this strange bunch of people with their yellow vans who answer the telephone without a script and deliver fabulous food that you have to cook yourself.

A brief ethical guide to help you enjoy your fruit and vegetables…and meat!

Christmas is currently celebrated once a year, but I’m quite sure that if the people who run most of Britain’s food shops had the chance, they’d be lobbying to see if perhaps there could be a second official Christmas in June as well, or maybe even once a month. And if this plan were to go ahead, would we enjoy the whole thing as much? Well, the first year might be rather novel but I’m sure that after a few years, Christmas would lose its magic.

This is exactly what has happened with our food. Now that you can buy strawberries in January and “new season” lamb all year round, many people just don’t know what’s in season any more, or that food eaten in its proper season actually tastes better. The most common question I’m asked by fruit ‘n’ veg junkies is, “so, what is in season?” As I’ve tried to show in this book, each season has loads of treats to offer. Not only is that how and when nature intended them to be eaten, but they won’t be forced up out of the ground synthetically or duped into thinking it’s another time of year with costly heating that causes all sorts of environmental havoc. Most importantly of all, by eating seasonally you are able to enjoy things shortly after they are harvested, and as anyone who has ever had a vegetable patch or allotment can tell you, food flavour and time out of the ground are directly related.

Finally, a real bugbear of mine is the method by which this out-of-season produce gets onto the supermarket shelves: airfreight. A common misconception is that all produce from abroad is airfreighted, and this is not the case. It simply doesn’t make business sense for the supermarkets to airfreight apples which can be grown locally and stored for use, or bananas which can be sent by ship and then ripened on arrival in our ports. What is therefore likely to be sent by airfreight is produce that is expensive, light, delicate – and from far away, obviously. Look at the labels in the supermarket – if out of season, your asparagus is likely to be from Peru, your prepared French beans from Guatemala, and your baby sweetcorn from Thailand.

There is one great big caveat to bear in mind, and it’s an important one to remember before you start to think this is all too daunting: there is no need to be puritanical about eating seasonally. Just as the odd pint at lunchtime doesn’t make me an alcoholic, so feeding my children bananas or tomatoes all year round (and heaven knows it’s difficult to cope without tomatoes all year round) doesn’t make me either a bad parent or an ecological outcast. The message is just that if you make a point of becoming aware of what’s best when and how it was grown, you’ll not only enjoy the flavour more, but over time the scales will tilt in the right direction for the environment, your health, and the welfare of the people who grow your food.

Cooking “My Way”

Cooking: v. cooked, cook•ing, cooks To prepare food by the action of heat, or to become ready for eating through such a process.

Cooking has quite a broad meaning. There seem to be no rules in doing this cooking thing, nor is there any specific result a part from making something ready for eating. (OK, OK, unless you’re baking, or making something French.)

Bearing this in mind, most of the recipes in this book use local produce and can be played with, added to, miss things out, chuck it in, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, oops that’s going to be a bit spicy, I think it needs more wine, hey I think I need even more wine…You might end up with the odd disaster if you get too carried away, but that’s what cooking is about – experimenting and trying new things. So you haven’t got any carrots, use a parsnip! No potato? Try a swede. Substitute your heart out, it can be very rewarding!

Most of the time you can work on the assumption that…

Spinach = chard = kale = pac choi = all the cabbages = dandelion leaves if you’re really desperate

Potatoes = swede = turnips = parsnips = Jerusalem artichokes = beetroot if you’re feeling colourful = kohlrabi if you’re in a box scheme (good luck finding it anywhere else!)

Squash = pumpkin = sweet potatoes = parsnips again = carrots

Rocket = watercress = young spinach = lettuce

Leeks = onions = shallots

Celery = fennel = celeriac

Pears = apples

Broccoli = purple sprouting broccoli = asparagus = peas = green beans = runner beans = broad beans = all the beans

Cooking is also about enjoying yourself in the kitchen and not taking it all too seriously. Don’t stand in silence when cooking – throw on a CD and shake your booty! Sing out loud and embarrass the kids. Take off your clothes and throw on a pinny. Take off your clothes and don’t throw on a pinny! (Mind the Aga…) They say the kitchen is the heart of the home, so make it the place where people want to be, make it fun, and share the experience with your family and friends.