Jun 18th, 2014

Author: donich_admin

Food from the Garden (and Lidl)

I’m getting food from the garden almost every day now. Yesterday I harvested the first crop of new potatoes, onions and herbs and decided to make a special dish.

This one is vegan (or optionally not if you feel a bit self-indulgent). I also have to mention at this point that my own tomatoes are at the small green marble stage – so I am still getting them from the supermarket. I happened to be round at a friend’s who lives in a not-too well-off part of Glasgow with Lidl as his local supermarket, so I bought some tomatoes in there. I got two sorts – a tray of mixed small ones, red cherries, yellow cherries and chocolates and a big bag of loose ones which Lidl just described as ‘tomatoes’ – but I would have called vine beefsteaks. Both sorts were super good – ripe, flavoursome and not over-packaged – in fact much better than the ones I normally buy from a ‘mainline’ supermarket – as well as being a lot cheaper. My friend swears by Lidl’s products and I have to say I see what he means.

Enough of the plug. I filled my steamer with early new potatoes, scrubbed and in their skins. While they were steaming I lightly fried some chopped onions and garlic in good olive oil. I chopped up a nice mix of tomatoes (all the sorts from Lidl I mentioned above) and cooked down for a minute or two. Then I added a big handful of garden herbs (mostly basil in this case) and a few chopped spring onions. I roughly chopped green and black olives, added to the sauce and simmered for a few minutes. By then the potatoes should be cooked so I tossed them in with salt and black pepper to taste and gave everything a good mix for a minute or two.

At this point you could add a couple of spoonful’s of pesto sauce and/or a few inches of chorizo sausage chopped very small – though actually it doesn’t really need this.

Either way this is exceedingly good – but one of those dishes that is so simple it relies almost entirely on the quality of its ingredients.