Sunday 2nd June is Global Sharing Day and this year's theme is food. The idea behind it is to get as many people across the world sharing food together, whilst also highlighting the food surplus and waste we produce. There are loads of events going on to get involved with including The Big Lunch, which aims to get people to arrange a meal to share with their neighbours, by holding street parties.
I'm doing my bit by teaming up with Liv from Grub Club to host a lunch as part of 'People Who Share' - a partner of The Big Lunch, who asked us to join tens of millions of people across the world in sharing food with each other for a day, and to think about the tonnes of edible food that get sent to landfills - in the UK alone nearly 7 million tonnes of purchased and edible food goes to waste every year.
I'm also going to an evening that Action Aid are putting on to talk to bloggers about Enough Food IF, a campaign to reduce and eliminate world hunger (that affects nearly one in six globally). More on that campaign to follow....
Grub Club are also doing more than just our lunch to highlight the issue of food waste. From the 1st - 14th June, Grub Club are hosting a Nose to Tail fortnight. They, like so many of us, are fed up with the amount of edible food that is sent to waste while people are going hungry. So they've teamed up with Ethical Eats and Slow Food London to put on a range of events to get you inspired. They've got foraging and fishing cookery courses, a series of '2 dinners, 1 lunch' pop up restaurants in Peckham, an informal butchery masterclass, learning about the less commonly used cuts of meat, with Hill Street Chews in Hackney, and so much more.
As a little treat, Grub Club are running a competition to give away a couple of pairs of tickets to their kick off event, It's Ghana be Nasty, this Saturday. For your chance to win, either sign up for Grub Club's newsletter here or share their facebook post here.
What are you doing to get involved with food sharing campaigns?
It was the last game of the Premier league season on Sunday, so I cooked up some food we could eat while we watched the games, nervous for several teams results (I'm an Arsenal fan) and sulking over a game that couldn't make any difference in the boys case (he's QPR). I wanted to cook something I could heat up at half time to serve, and this is the perfect dish for that. I served it with a rack of BBQ ribs, cooked in my BBQ sauce. It's also great if you got friends coming over and want to serve them some snacks to nibble on.
Serves 6.
6 shallots
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp dry oregano
1 to 2 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 level tsp chilli flakes
Half tsp salt
1 tsp garlic granules
500g minced beef
200ml beef stock
100g cheddar cheese
Pot of sour cream
Large bag of nachos chips
For the guacamole:
2 avocados
2 limes
Handful coriander
For the salsa:
8 cherry tomatoes
4 spring onions
1 lemon
The thing that makes this recipe taste SO good is the spice mix for the beef. I know you can buy premixes in the supermarkets for fajitas and tacos, but this mix tastes much better than those. You can make lots by doubling or tripling the quantities, and store it in a spice jar.
Measure out all your spices and salt. Grind into a fine powder with a pestle and mortar. If you don't have one, just use ground cumin.
This is a complete cheats pudding. It's something I make on nights we haven't planned to have pudding, but I can whip it up from what I already have in the cupboard and fridge. Of course, you can use fresh fruit for this, but when you don't even have that to hand, tinned works fine.
Serves 6.
1 pack of shop bought puff pastry
2 tbsp soft brown sugar
2 tins of peaches
2 tbsp agave nectar
1 free-range egg
Preheat the oven to 220C (200C fan).
Roll your puff pastry out to about 5mm. Lightly score a line about 1.5cm in from the edge of the rectangle. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the small rectangle you have created. If your peaches are in halves, slice each half into quarters and lay the slices in lines inside the scored rectangle until the rectangle is full of peaches. Drizzle the peaches with agave nectar. Whisk the egg and brush it onto the exposed outer rectangle of pastry.
Cook for 20 minutes or until the pastry is golden.
Serve with vanilla or honeycomb ice-cream.
When I'm in France, there are 2 things I make sure I eat while I'm there - mussels with frites, and steak tartare. And if raw meat is up your street, then there's no reason you can't make it at home. As long as you have good quality meat (see my post on good meat suppliers here), and fresh, free-range eggs, then it's actually really easy, and you can adjust the seasonings to your own taste.
Serves 2.
200g fillet steak, free-range, organic
2 ping pong ball sized shallots
3 cornichons (about 3cm long)
2 large caper berries
Half a handful of parsley
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper
1 free-range egg yolk
All this recipe really requires is a lot of chopping. Chop the steak into small cubes, about 3mm square. Chop the shallots, cornichons and caper berries into slightly smaller cubes, about 2mm square. Chop the parsley as finely as you can.
Mix the oil together with the mustard and Worcestershire sauce, and stir in the chopped steak. Add the rest of the chopped ingredients, season, and mix together.
Tibits is a purely vegetarian restaurant, nestled just off Regent Street, in the Heddon Street food court, and is a cross between a sit down restaurant and a fast food take away place.
I was invited to try the food at Tibits and chose to go on a weekday evening. Despite it being a school night, it was really busy, and although it's right in the middle of tourist-ville, it felt like there were quite a lot of regular customers there too.
We started the evening with a fresh fruit juice cocktail - both going for the Apple and Cucumber mojito, that I thought was really good. It was really refreshing and I can imagine how good it would taste sitting in the sun outside the restaurant (the day we visited was sadly not one of the 3 sunny days we've had so far this year!)
'Breakfast is the most important meal of the day', we're often told. And although I rarely wake up hungry, once I've got ready for the day I am ready for my first meal of the day. Breakfast during the week involves a big bowl of tropical fruit and a black coffee. Not great, I know! But the weekends are when I can really indulge on breakfast, and make something special, and healthy. Though there's not really much cooking involved with these recipes. We normally end up having a late breakfast/brunch and one more main meal on weekend days, which allows us to pig out a little, whilst not overdoing it completely!!
My favorite weekend breakfasts vary, depending on how much or little sleep I've had the night before, but they generally include one of 3 or 4 ingredients - berries, fish, avocado and sweetcorn. Not necessarily all together! Here are some of my favorites.
TUNA, EGG, AVOCADO
This is best if you've had a night out and a long lie-in, as I don't think even I could eat a tuna steak before 11am - so think of this one as more of a brunch! It's a big smack of protein to get you right and ready for the day.
For 2.
2 responsibly sourced tuna steaks
2 free-range eggs
1 avocado
Pinch dried chilli flakes
Sea salt
Lemon juice
2 slices of rye bread
Olive oil
Put a small pan of water on to boil. Once boiling add the eggs, and cook for 5 minutes.
Heat a small amount of oil on a medium to high heat in a frying pan. Once hot, add your tuna steaks and cook for 90 seconds on each side. Remove from the pan, and put to one side.
Mash the avocado, chilli flakes and sea salt together with a squeeze of lemon juice. Smear onto the toasted slices of rye bread, and serve alongside your halved egg, and seared tuna steak. Drizzle with a little olive oil to finish.
BACON with AVOCADO and SWEETCORN SALSA
For 2.
6 rashers free-range bacon
1 small tin of sweetcorn, no added sugar and salt
1 avocado
1/2 red onion
1 red chilli
Lime juice
Heat a large frying pan. Add the bacon and put another pan on top, to flatten it out and make it really crispy. Fry over a high heat for a couple of minutes. Lift the top pan off, turn the bacon over, replace the pan and continue to fry for a couple more minutes, until crispy and cooked.
In the meantime, make the salsa. Chop the avocado and red onion into cm chunks. Finely slice the red chilli. Mix together with the sweetcorn, avocado, onion and lime juice.
Serve the bacon piled high with salsa.
FROZEN BERRY YOGHURT BOWLS
This takes about a minute to prepare, but once ready, tastes like heaven and you can actually feel the good it's doing you.
For 1.
200ml natural probiotic yoghurt
100g frozen berries
Teaspoon of manuka honey
Handful chopped basil and mint
Pour your yoghurt into a bowl, top with berries, honey and chopped herbs. The frozen crunch of the berries is particularly delicious on a lovely sunny morning. Tuck in, and feel better about the day!
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