Uses for Leftover Vegetables

I was hunting around on the Sainsburys website for recipes that I could either use or adapt. I am rather biased towards Sainsburys because they used to pay me large amounts of money every week, but I think that their online Recipes and Tips feature is incredibly good. Recently they were doing a promotion called Feed Your Family for £50, which provided recipes for the main meal of the day along with a shopping list. Of course most of the ingredients are Sainsburys own, but despite the fact that it's obviously a marketing strategy it also has lots of great recipes.


One of those is the recipe for Vegetable Charlotte. I realised that the savoury crumble from the centre pantry would be a good replacement for the breadcrumbs, pepper and cheese, and with the tomato and chilli sauce swapped in for the Siciliana sauce it was perfect. We used up some left-over vegetables and the only ingredient we had to buy was the creme fraiche.

I didn't manage to take a photo because once again my camera has a flat battery, but mum and I ate it and I thought it was very nice. Mum isn't so keen on chilli and neither mum or my stepdad like the savoury crumble, so I took the remaining sauce and the final packet of crumble with me when I went on holiday with my dad, his girlfriend and my brother. It went down much better with them.

In a similar vein, last night we had a sort of vegetable bake, with broccoli, courgette (the courgette harvest is very successful this year!), carrot, cauliflower, mange tout, garlic and a ready-made vegetable bake sauce, with slices of potato and grated cheese on top. It was delicious and so easy. I often forget that it isn't necessary to have a recipe or a fancy name for food to be good. And everything except the sauce was freshly picked from the garden!

I'll miss having home-grown vegetables when I go back to university. As a starter we ate globe artichokes, which I don't think you can even buy in most shops in the UK, but we have a bumper crop this year and are eating them every couple of days.