Roast vegetables and Venison Burgers

Many winter vegetables, such as parsnips and carrots are almost unbelievably good when roasted! Even if you don't like these vegetables boiled or raw, I'd suggest given them a try this way. Here, I've roasted some carrots, parsnips and shallot onions.

I sliced the parsnips length wise into halves and did the same with the larger of the carrots - the smaller ones can be left as they are. I peeled the shallots, but otherwise left them whole. Simply place the lot in a baking tray or roasting tin and cover liberally with oil. I used cold pressed rapeseed oil, which has a wonderful yellow colour and a good flavour for this kind of cooking. However, olive oil would work well to. Add a good sprinkling of salt and pepper and then place in the oven at 180C (I don't know what gas mark that is, sorry!) for about 40 minutes, or until you can push a fork into the parsnips fairly easily. The end result should look something like this:

I used my roasted vegetables to go with pan fried Venison burgers, which I simply did in the frying pan over a moderate heat and served with boiled potatos.

Crops (rapeseed and potatoes)

I'm sure anyone who has been through some British countryside recently will have noticed the bright yellow fields of Oilseed rape. I always think that these look absolutely beautiful, especially when contrasted with the green of other fields nearby and a clear, blue sky. As far as I am aware, most of this crop will be used to make vegetable oil for cooking, or bio-diesel. I did a feature a while ago on rapeseed oil, which has a high smoke point making it ideal for, amongst other things, stir frying.


I also noticed that potatoes have been planted and are just beginning to shoot. These don't look quite so pretty, but are certainly quite useful!

Rapeseed oil

Shopping at the Farmers Market certainly seems to provide opportunities to try new things! Whilst shopping there yesterday, I got talking to one of the stall holders who was selling a product called "Oleifera Rapeseed Oil", which is a cooking oil made from locally grown rapeseed. As I have mentioned previously, I have been using hemp seed oil for my cooking (where butter doesn't suffice). This has worked really well, although the smoke point of this oil is quite low, which really makes it unsuitable for the more 'aggressive' cooking styles, such as stir-frying. The Oleifera product has a much higher smoke point (about 230 C, according to the website), which means that it can be used for a wider range of cooking styles. I tried some of the oil, soaked into a small cube of bread at the stall and it tasted great, even on it's own, so I decided that I would have to buy a bottle so that I could try it out.

Today provided the perfect opportunity to do that on my Sunday dinner, which consisted of honey-glazed pork chop with potatoes, peas and carrots. Sure enough, I was able to sear the meat in a hot pan without the oil starting to burn, which was great. The pork tasted great, but how much of that was down to the meat and the honey and how much was because of the oil, I'm not sure. I will have to conduct some further tests. There is plenty more information about the rapeseed oil on the website: http://www.borderfields.co.uk/oleifera/