It’s always tempting to pick up a pre-packaged fruit salad from your local supermarket, but the price is often too steep to justify one of your five-a-day.
Why not try making your own packed-lunch-sized fruit salad? They are incredibly easy to prepare, all it takes is a selection of fruit and a chopping board!
The Classic Fruit Salad
1 x Kiwi Fruit
1x Banana
3 x Strawberry
10 x Grape
1 x Peach
1 x Apple
If you struggle to pick up the more exotic fruits, try our super-easy student fruit salad:
The Student Fruit Salad
1 x Tin of Peaches
1 x Apple
1 x Banana
The combination of textures make a fruit salad memorable, as long as you combine soft fruit with hard you’ll be in for a treat!
Colour can make a big difference too. The greens from a kiwi fruit or hand full of grapes give a fresh, natural colour to a predominantly soft, yellow & orange palette.
For more information about fresh fruit salads, get in touch with FN Foods today and receive a box of fresh fruit at your door.
This month, we’re celebrating that rare winter treat: the quince. Related to pears and apples, these fruit are used almost exclusively as a cooking ingredient as their flesh is hard an bitter. Also, because of their high pectin content they are excellent for making preserves and jellies with.
Our home grown British quinces are in season between October and December, so make use of them in short window you have. Instead of giving you one recipe to work with this month, we’re actually going to do the quince the justice it deserves by discussing a number of different uses, ways of cooking and ways of pairing with other ingredients.
When roasted, the flavours of the quince intensify, and if you poach them first, the flesh becomes even more melt in the mouth. You can roast them in the same way as apples, coating them with something sweet and sticky like honey or maple syrup, and using fragrant spices like cloves and cinnamon. You could eat quinces roasted in this way as a desert with ice cream, but you could also serve them with a meat like gammon – salty gammon and sticky sweet quinces is a match made in heaven.
As said earlier, quinces are great for jellies and preserves because of their high pectin content. You can pickle them just like you would an onion, paired beautifully with Sunday roasts. If you make a paste out of the quince, you could serve it with cheese – layer a slice of quince paste on a slice of cheese such as Manchego to create a delicious nibble or desert. If made into a jam, you can turn it into a quick sauce for lamb by cooking cubed quince with the jam, port and red wine vinegar for a rich, slightly acidic and sweet sauce that goes well with the richness of lamb.
We hope this has gotten your taste buds ready for a delicious Christmas ahead, it certainly has ours!
To make your holiday time as convenient as possible, why not check out our fruit and vegetable delivery in Swindon and beyond, and have the freshest ingredients delivered right to your door!
We have focused on vegetables and fruit up until now, but with the coming of October we’re taking a brief departure by turning to shell-fish – specifically, Mussels. Although this dish does benefit from fresh chillies and shallots! Because we are serving the mussels up Thai-style, cooking them in a traditional manner but adding a bit of spice.
This dish is fresh, with zesty lime juice and lime leaves complementing the juicy mussels and spicy chillies. Try use birds eye chillies for this dish for an authentic Thai heat, but you can use whatever chillies are available.
Thai-style Pan-Steamed Mussels
Serves Between 4-6
1kg mussels
2 stalks of lemon grass
4 kaffir lime leaves that have been roughly torn
4 chopped shallots
2 sliced chillies (use less and remove the seeds for a milder dish)
1 tablespoons thai fish sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 spring onions, chopped
coriander leaves (as a garnish)
- Prepare the mussels by scrubbing them and removing the ‘beards’, and discard any which are damaged or do not close when tapped. Place your mussels into a large saucepan.
- Finely chop the lemon grass and add to the pan with the shallots, chillies, lime leaves fish sauce and lime juice.
- Cover the pan and steam over a medium-high heat for 5-7 minutes, occasionally shaking the pan until the mussels open (discard any that haven’t opened).
- Place the mussels on a serving dish with the liquid in the pan, garnish with coriander and spring onions and either serve by themselves or with rice.
Broad Beans are a luxury at this time of year that more people need to take advantage of – but be sure to be quick about it, as the season for fresh broad beans ends mid-September. And the key word here is “fresh” – by that we mean truly fresh, not ‘picked two weeks ago and kept frozen for half of that time’.
If you can’t get your hands on really fresh examples (if not, why not! Take a look at our fresh vegetable delivery), then frozen will be better – as it is with peas. Frozen peas and broad beans are frozen immediately after picking but pre-packaged varieties found in supermarkets are often kept wrapped in their plastic container long enough to lose their natural sugars that make them such a delight.
Broad beans, again like peas, are delicious in a creamy sauce with salty bacon, and this recipe uses this partnership to its fullest.
Farfalle with a Creamy Broad Bean & Bacon Sauce
Serves between 4-6
500g of farfalle
300g of really fresh (or frozen) broad beans
2 tablespoons of olive oil
4 rashers of streaky bacon, diced
2 leeks, finely sliced
300ml carton of double cream (single will do if you’re watching those calories!)
1 lemon, rind grated
- Cook the broad beans in a pan of boiling water, covered, for 3-5 minutes. Drain and place into cold water and when cool enough to handle, remove the beans from the pod (if present) and remove the skin surrounding each bean by making a small cut (your finger nail will do!)
- Cook the farfalle according to the pack instructions (take away 1-2 minutes for al dente)
- Fry the leeks and bacon in a frying pan with the oil over a medium heat for around 8 minutes
- Add the cream and lemon rind to the pan, and after two minutes, add the broad beans to heat through
- Mix the sauce together with the farfalle and serve with the obligatory grated parmesan
Enjoy! This is a fantastic way of introducing some vegetables into your children’s life, just go easy with those creamy sauces.
