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.

Elephant Garlic

Now, according to the label, this beast is supposed to taste delicate, more like leek than garlic. And it only takes an hour to cook. Well mine didn’t, on both counts. Even I couldn’t eat this simply “spread on toast”. But never mind, I gave it another blast in the oven, which gave me some more time to think what the hell to do with it. In an ideal world, the garlic would have been great in a creamy almond and orange soup, but I don’t think my family could stomach that, particularly on the only warm weekend we had all summer. But this bulb goes to show that cooking disasters can often turn into something delicious. So here’s what I did with mine.