Cheese, chard and the lovely Nigel Slater

The veg box has proved a fantastic hit.  The carrot and ginger soup barely lasted 2 days, as I ate a bowlful for my lunch and then my lovely friends who babysat the next night polished off the rest.  The tomato soup made a tasty family lunch on Saturday (I bulked up Baby Bird's portion with a little Organix 4 Grain Cereal so that it was easier for Miss Independent to handle the spoon herself) and there are a couple more pots in the freezer.  The fruit has rapidly disappeared, particularly the kiwi fruit.

So I began pondering the more unusual offerings in the box.  What to do with the rainbow chard?  I pulled down from the cookery shelf my favourite veg book, Tender Volume 1.   I love Nigel Slater's food writing in any event.  I could sit and read his books for hours and return to them again and again, particularly his Kitchen Diaries, but Tender is probably my favourite.  It is simply fantastic. It runs through pretty much every vegetable you could wish for and discusses growing, cooking and eating them.  It appeals to the aspirational part of me, which has been mentally designing a veg patch for the last three years, but hasn't quite managed to do anything about it, and also to the hungry vegetarian in me, which often gets a little overlooked now that I eat fish and want meals that appeal to the Carnivorous Hubbo as well as to me.  (I would also go on about the wonderful look and feel of the book, the comfort of a big, weighty hardback, with beautiful creamy pages, but then you'd never shut me up and get me on to the recipes).

I knew I could do plenty with chard as a side dish, but I really wanted something that would showcase its ability to be the main event; to prove that the humble vegetable can be the point of a meal, not just the background.  Making the vegetable the main event is something Nigel's book does really well, without all the overtones and preachiness that so often accompanies (and spoils) vegetarian cookbooks - if only all meat-eaters could admit that veg can be tasty in the way Nigel does.

Two recipes caught my eye, and, after weighing my bag of chard, I discovered I had enough to make both.  I also had most of the other ingredients knocking about the house, making it easier to stick to the weekly food budget (a perennial problem for me).  Win!  So, this week's Experimental Thursday is going to be a two-for-one: potato cakes with chard and Taleggio... sort of... and a shallow tart of chard and cheese.

The tart will make a great lunch with a salad and will be easy to portion up and send in Hubby's lunch-box.  The potato cakes will make a tasty dinner for Baby Bird and I this evening - mine will be topped with wilted chard as in the recipe, and I will probably add a little cheese sauce to Baby Bird's, to make it more enticing for her.  Potato cakes should be a good food for her - I can cut them into handleable pieces and can also mash them up.  The only thing I was missing for the recipe was the taleggio cheese.  Hmm, the perfect opportunity to try out that new deli down the road... So, I bundled up the Bird, and off we trotted this morning.

It turned out that they didn't have any taleggio, but the lovely Brent, who owns the deli, was very helpful, recommending and allowing me to try a selection of possible alternatives.  He also said he could happily order some taleggio in for me (but that would have made Experimental Thursday a little tricky...)  We discussed the need for the cheese to melt but not too much, the need for it to be fairly pungent to counteract the soft fluffy potato, the general wonder of cheese...  Cheddar Deli is great, and they deserve to do well.  They are having their grand opening on 24 September - if you are in and around Ealing, do pop along.  I will certainly be making a special effort to pop back there to sample their Stinking Bishop (a favourite of mine) and the Baby Wigmore, which was a contender for replacing the taleggio.  

What we settled on in the end was some Gubbeen.  This is an Irish semi-soft cheese.  Smooth and creamy in texture, it smells just the right side of "feet".  Brent conceded that he didn't know how it cooked, so this will be a bit of an experiment (which is surely the point), but he thought the flavour would make a good sub.  So, I'm all set.  My only problem now is resisting the desire to eat it all with some crusty bread for lunch!