Roasted Vegetable Salsa

There comes a point when you have to admit that autumn is coming. I’m not ready to think of winter yet, give me time for that... But when summer days start ending on a chilly note and you find yourself reaching for your stash of vests (everyone has one, right?), it’s time to adapt your food to fit. This is often helped on by supermarkets, who begin to stock basic ingredients that just don’t work as well as they did in summer months. Take tomatoes. They’re ripe and juicy in the summer, albeit for a price. By autumn, the packets that grace the shelves are full of fruit as hard as stones and just as tasteless. Luckily, salt, pepper, olive oil and a spell in a hot oven at everyone’s favourite gas mark (6, duh!) is enough to get the tastebuds excited again.

Red Lentil Dahl

Everyone has at least one emergency recipe in their arsenal, even if it’s just frozen chips with cheese. When the cupboards are bare and it’s lunchtime, this is the one that I fall back on time and time again. It’s based on a recipe I saw a few years back in The Guardian by Yotam Ottolenghi (before he was famous, yeah?). Lots of budget foodstuffs like pigs ears and oxtails have recently been picked up by celebrity chefs and so thrown off their uncool reputations. Lentils, on the other hand, still bring to mind images of dingy 1970s bedsits and hippies. I’m not going to fight for their cause but I do always have some in the cupboard and they taste great in spicy soups or as sloppy rainy day meals like this! I make this recipe by memory and according to what doesn’t have a thin layer of mould on it in the fridge; the results are always slightly different but still tasty.

Plum-go Chutney

Sorry if this is a boring photo, but you can't really sex up chutney.

It’s no secret that I love fruit straight from the tree at harvest time, but when I got back from the Scilly Isles and took the train home, our neighbour Ken gave us a BUCKET of plums and I began to feel pretty scared that they might go off if I didn’t deal with them quickly enough. The end result was that I embarked on a large-scale operation of chutney and cake making. We had crumbles coming out of our ears and compotes filling up the freezer, not to mention sauces and pickles taking up every empty jar.

After I’d made an old favourite (Nigella’s Chinese-style plum dipping sauce), I began to consider the other options that were open to me. Having looked up a few recipes online, I decided to make a few jars of mango chutney: with plums. Hence “Plum-go” chutney. Basically, all of the spices are the same as those that you’d find in a mango chutney and it does taste very similar. It’s a good idea if you’ve got a glut of fruit to use up, rather than shelling out for precious mangoes!