Josephine’s Winter Vegetable Slice

Here’s a recipe I liked the look of, which I’m about to taste for my tea tonight, courtesy of my wonderful wife.

INGREDIENTS:
3 bacon rashers, diced
1 medium onion, diced
2-3 mushrooms, chopped
1 large potato, cubed and lightly steamed
1 cup broccoli florets
3 eggs
1 cup plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk
1 cup tasty cheese, grated
Salt and pepper

METHOD
• Fry the bacon and onion gently till beginning to soften then add the mushrooms.
• In a bowl beat the eggs and lightly stir in the flour, baking powder and oil. When smooth, stir in the milk and cheese and the potato and broccoli florets.
• Season well.
• Pour into a greased, lined 20×20cm baking dish and place in a pre-heated oven 190 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes.
• Serve hot with home-made tomato relish or cold with a tomato, mozzarella, basil and balsamic vinegar dressing.

TRANSCRIPT
Isn’t it great that we’ve got all these different cuisines and in doing that of course and using all those cuisines we tend to forget some of our old fashioned recipes. This is one I used to make many, many years ago and it’s called a winter vegetable slice.

It’s a little bit like frittata which you would make in a pan and finish in an oven but of course it doesn’t have that upmarket gourmet attitude.

This is bacon cooking in here and I’ve got some lovely free range bacon. If you start the bacon in the pan it will just release all the fat and the onion is also chopped and it’s just one onion there.

I’ll just leave that to cook there for just a moment and I’m just going to add some mushrooms. Now I’ve got just white button mushrooms or slightly larger than button mushrooms and you just cut them into smallish pieces.

It’s a really good dish because you can use it for so many different things. I always like the idea of having something like this in the fridge to have a slice for lunch with a salad, to pack it in a school lunch box perhaps. It would also be very good after a Sunday roast because you could use the left over vegetables and it would make a nice light meal for the evening.

Now just whisk the eggs until they’re fluffy, no great deal, you’re not making cakes, you’re making a batter and it only takes just a second or two. You stir in the flour, the baking powder and just cut that lightly in, once around, twice across, that just mixes it lightly without beating out the air. Once that starts to get a little bit tacky, like that, you start putting in the milk and at that stage if you want to, you can revert back to the whisk and just whisk in to get rid of any of those lumps.

I have some cheese to put in as well, but don’t forget that when you’re adding something like a potato, which I’m adding, or sweet potato it needs to be just lightly cooked. So that’s just lightly steamed, but the broccoli which is a different texture all together, doesn’t have to be pre-cooked. Now when a recipe says broccoli florets, this is how you do it (breaking them off by hand), you don’t take knife to it.

Now I will put the cheese in as well, and it’s a cup of a really nice tasty cheese, it’s got to be something tasty to give it a lovely flavour. Now, into a well greased, lined 20cm pan and you just pour it all in and just straighten it all out once it’s in.

This now goes in at 190 degrees for about half an hour and we’ll put that into the oven and it goes in at that level in the oven.

And there is my winter slice, you can see it does look rather nice doesn’t it? You can cut it into squares or wedges or whatever you like. I’m going to cut it into a nice little wedge and we’ll pop that on the plate and you can see all the different beautiful colours there. So any sort of salad to go with it, just for a bit of colour. What about some home-made tomato chutney. And that would also go with it beautifully. So there it is s a meal, you can pack it for lunch or you can take it on a picnic, it is a beautiful winter vegetable slice.

Update:
The vegetable slice was excellent, thank you Carole (and Josephine).

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