Winter Vegetable Medley Soup
White Chocolate & Rosemary Biscotti
I love the unusual white chocolate and rosemary flavour combination. I actually don’t like white chocolate at all, so recommending this is high praise.
I have loads of rosemary from my summer on the allotment, so I’m glad for something extra to use it on too.
The sugar in this recipe is flexible. I normally make it with 45g brown sugar, but you can make it super sweet with as much as 90g. If you don’t want to use icing sugar for sprinkling on the tray, you can get away with using more cornmeal, but I prefer the end result with icing sugar.
Keep an eye on the biscotti in the oven as different ovens run differently, but if you want the biscotti really crispy, return it to the oven for the second time. If you want it more chewy, don’t return it to the oven the second time.
White Chocolate & Rosemary Biscotti
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Serves: 20
Ingredients
- 150g plain flour
- 45g brown sugar
- 65g yellow cornmeal
- 2 tsp dried rosemary
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt (I use Himalayan pink)
- 40g coconut oil
- 2 eggs
- 100g white chocolate
- Extra: 2 tablespoons icing sugar
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 150C
- Add everything (except the icing sugar) to the Thermomix bowl and mix speed 4/30-45 seconds. The mixture should be firm and pliable.
- Sprinkle the icing sugar on a baking tray, then add the dough and roll out to about 1cm thick
- Place in the oven and bake for 25 – 30 minutes until golden and firm.
- Set aside until cool enough to handle, cut lengthwise and then crosswise to make individual cookies. Return to the oven at 100C for 30 minutes.
- Allow to cool before serving
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Slowcooked Chicken & Tomato Stuffed Pepper
Temperatures are dropping and the days are becoming shorter, so for us, it means the slow cooker has come out of the dark depths of the cupboard. We’re trying out a variety of savoury dishes for Halloween, a season not normally known for its savoury foods, but I want to have some options available, at least! 
For this recipe, I’ve used yellow peppers. I didn’t realise until I was cleaning them out that one of the peppers only had two humps on the apex, rather than three, which meant it couldn’t stand on its own. Undeterred, I just cut a small layer off, not so much that the bottom of the pepper was opened up – just enough to make it stand up straight.
Cutting faces in a pepper is a whole lot easier than it is on a pumpkin. Simply use a sharp knife and carefully pop the cutout parts out. 
You can use any filling you like, really. I’ve used a chicken and tomato one. If you want to stretch this meal, add some rice or couscous to the pepper. Alternatively, serve each pepper on a bed of rice. I didn’t bother in this particular meal. 
Once stuffed, I felt the peppers could use a bit of help to stand out a little, so I used a finger to pop some homemade tomato sauce into the eyes and mouths of the peppers.
I love the way the chicken and tomato looks a bit like brains, topping off the Halloween face. It’s simple, and quite effortless and very tasty!
Slow Cooked Chicken and Tomato Stuffed Peppers Recipe
Slow cooked Chicken & Tomato Stuffed Pepper
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Serves: 4
Ingredients
- 500g skinless, boneless chicken
- 1 tin of tomatoes
- 30ml (2tbs) dark soy sauce
- 15ml (1tbs) balsamic vinegar
- 5ml (1tsp) dried or fresh chopped rosemary
- 5ml (1tsp) salt
- 5 fresh tomatoes
- 4 yellow peppers
- For Halloween Faces, you’ll also need a little tomato sauce
- Serve with rice or other grain if you are so inclined.
Instructions
- Turn a slow cooker on low for 6 hours
- Add chicken, canned tomatoes, soy sauce, vinegar, rosemary and salt , put the lid in place.
- With an hour to go, add the fresh tomatoes
- With 30 minutes to go, remove the lid so the sauce can thicken a little
- After six hours, cut the top off the peppers and remove the seeds. (If you’re making Halloween faces, do that now too)
- Stuff the pepper, and using a clean spoon or finger, fill the eyes and mouth with tomato sauce.
Find more Halloween recipes here
Carrot And Cheddar Shortbread Recipe
An odd side effect of growing your own food is that sometimes you have very small amounts of produce. For example, we harvested a handful of carrots this week, thinning out space for the other carrots to grow bigger. This gave us about 8 small carrots which is barely a snack of one person, never mind a side for three, so I had to think of something we could make that use the carrots to best effect.
I decided a good snack for a picnic we were attending would be Carrot and Cheese Shortbread. I know shortbread is normally a sweet treat, but why should it be!?
This recipe was a bit trial and error, but it worked out so well, I’m really pleased with it. And if we have another small batch of carrots I intend to do the same again, but freeze the dough so that we have ready shortbread whenever we want – I think it’s a great way of saving summer produce too! I’ll let you know how I get on with that.
In the meantime, here’s the carrot and cheddar shortbread recipe.
Carrot And Cheddar Shortbread Recipe
Recipe Type: Snack
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Serves: 20 biscuits
In the Thermomix this just takes a few minutes, then there’s a 30 minute chill time. After chilling you need to slice the cookies or you can roll them out to make shapes.
Ingredients
- 115g (4oz) salted butter
- 90g (3oz) carrot and cheese*
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- 1/2 tsp thyme
- 1/2 tsp rosemary
- 220g (1 1/4 cups) plain flour
- 1 tbs water (a bit more if your flour is organic)
Instructions
- (If you’re not using a Thermomix, grate the carrot first)
- Add room temperature butter to a mixing bowl and using an electric beater whisk it till it’s light and fluffy
(Thermomix: add the butterfly and mix on speed 3 for 30 – 40 seconds)
- Add a mixture of carrot and cheese to add up to 90g. In this case I used 45g of each, but more or less of whichever you have, to add up to 90g.
- Add the rest of the ingredients, except the water and mix until combined
(speed 6 for 1 minute)
- Add the water and mix till it combines and pulls away from the sides
- Tip out onto greaseproof paper, and shape into a sausage. Chill for 30 minutes in the fridge.
- After 30 minutes, turn the oven on to 180C/350F. Slice the sausage into 1cm thick slices and place on a baking tray. Bake for 20 -25 minutes.
- Leave to cool.
Honey Rosemary Twist Bread
I was watching a show on TV where the chef made a bread very similar to my usual bread recipe, but instead of olive oil, she added seed oil, and then added a lot of nuts. and seeds. I have a very good seedbread recipe, so I wasn’t overly desperate to try a new one, but when she added honey I remembered the honey and rosemary bread that a Thermomix demonstrator in Australia had made for us, and I suddenly thought I had to try something similar combining the two ideas into one bread. Here is the very delicious result of that experiment.
Honey Rosemary Twist Bread
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Serves: 4
Ingredients
- 650g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
- 2 tsp salt
- 7g sachet or two teaspoons of fast action dried yeast
- 4 teaspoons of honey
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
- 3 – 4 tbsp chopped rosemary
- 350g (1.5 cups) warm water
Instructions
- Add everything to your bowl in the order mentioned.
- In the Thermomix, mix for 20 seconds, then knead for 3 minutes.
- If you’re using a different processor or kneading by hand, you need to knead it until it is firm and springy, about 10 minutes (i.e. if you dent it with your finger, it should spring back to cover the dent)
- Divide the dough into three, and roll out each ball into a long strip.
- Twist each strip into a twisty rope, then put all three together and twist again into one big twist.
- Place on your baking tray – I use a gorgeous Pampered Chef stone bake tray which is perfect for breads – in a circle.
- Cover for 30 minutes to let it rise.
- Switch on the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6 now and place the bread inside, letting it cook for 20 minutes as the oven heats up and reaches temperature.
- The loaf is cooked when it sounds hollow when tapped underneath. If not, then give it another five minutes or so in the oven.
- Once ready remove from the oven and serve with salad. It also goes really well with red meat or roasted butternut soup, or anything that goes well with rosemary.