The Circus Gardener's Kitchen

seasonal vegetarian recipes with a side helping of food politics

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tempura vegetables with sweet chilli dipping sauce

This week is national vegetarian week. It’s an incentive for non-vegetarians to give up meat for a week. A vegetarian diet tends to be naturally lower in saturated fat and cholesterol than meat-based diets, and on average vegetarians generally enjoy better health and longer life expectancy than their meat-eating counterparts. Vegetarianism is also a more efficient way to consume the Earth’s increasingly precious food resources. Currently 83% of farmland and […]

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rocket, crispy shallot and Parmesan salad

The underpinning principle of organic gardening and farming is that if you feed the soil by adding organic matter to it, usually in the form of compost, it will provide the best growing environment for healthy plants. By contrast, in non-organic farming the soil is simply used as a medium for tethering plants. Nutrients in the soil are gradually depleted and the loss is never made good. Manufactured chemical fertiliser […]

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carrot and apricot falafel with whipped feta and dukkah

This recipe for carrot and apricot falafel with whipped feta and dukkah is the latest in a monthly series of recipes I have created in association with Suma Wholefoods. In these recipes, I use products from Suma’s extensive range of organic and ethically sourced products, and the recipes appear both here on my blog and on the Suma website. Carrot and apricot may sound like a surprising combination, but aided […]

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chard and butter beans with wild garlic

The meat industry is a staggeringly inefficient vehicle for producing enough food to feed a growing world population. An astonishing 83% of all agricultural land is now devoted to livestock, yet meat produces only 18% of the world’s supply of calories. The imbalance is growing: as nations become richer – in monetary terms – they tend to increase their meat consumption, placing even more strain on finite agricultural land. The […]

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Lebanese-style rice and lentils with crispy onions

For the second time in less than a year, a US court has found that the weed killer Roundup is responsible for causing cancer. In this second case, the jury also found that Roundup’s manufacturer, Monsanto (which has since been taken over by German multinational Bayer) had deliberately manipulated records to hide the risk of cancer from exposure to Roundup. The judge in this most recent case stated that “there […]

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katsu curry with panko tofu

This recipe for katsu curry with panko tofu is the latest in a monthly series of recipes I have created in association with Suma Wholefoods. In these recipes, I use products from Suma’s extensive range of organic and ethically sourced products, and the recipes appear both here on my blog and on the Suma website. I’ve tried lots of different variations of katsu curry, some good, some not so good. […]

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vegan Irish stew

Not for the first time, the US ambassador to the United Kingdom, Woody Johnson, last week insisted that the UK must lower its food standards if it wants to trade with the USA post-Brexit. In an article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Mr Johnson referred to our existing food regulations as coming from the “European museum of agriculture” before he put forward an unconvincing case for the virtues of chlorinated […]

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vegan rhubarb crumble and custard ice cream

So much of our food supply is controlled by huge agribusinesses and multinational corporations. As they have tightened their grip over the food industry, so they have become increasingly rich, influential and powerful. Their domination of the various processes that bring food to our plates means we have a food supply heavily reliant on monoculture (where vast areas of land are devoted to growing a single crop), supported by agrochemicals. […]

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roast parsnip with cannellini bean puree and crispy lentils

This is the latest in my monthly series of original recipes created for Suma Wholefoods: roast parsnip with cannellini bean puree and crispy lentils. It’s vegan, gluten-free and absolutely delicious. In this series of monthly recipes I use products from Suma’s extensive range of organic and ethically sourced products. The recipes will appear both here on my blog and on the Suma website. There are a number of different stages […]

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vegan vegetable hotpot

Most informed scientific opinion now agrees that we are either heading for or already within the Sixth Age of Extinction. For us humans, as well as many other species, this could well mean terminal decline unless we dramatically change the way we live by embracing a balanced, sustainable existence. And of all the human activities that have brought us to the edge of this precipice, it is the way we […]

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