Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

Our Recipes - An Introduction

While this site is about living sustainably and not fine dining, it is inevitable that discussions turn to food, one of our basic needs. In other areas of the site you will find information and suggestions on how to produce, preserve and cook food using sustainable techniques but precious little on individual recipes. Needless to say I have decided to amend that shortfall.

There are a number of recipes to which we return time after time. We return to them because they are easy to cook, make the best use of the stuff we produce ourselves (notably veggies and eggs) but most importantly they taste good! Quite often they can also be customised so that a number of different tastes can be massaged out of a single recipe with just minor changes. Also we make a larger amount so that we can eat for two nights with the one batch of food.

We like variety in our dishes so it can be difficult to make a whole dish out of stuff we grow here, but it is a hugely rewarding feeling when we do. Generally we try to have at least one home grown ingredient in every dish we cook and these recipes support that approach. They also lend themselves to energy efficient cooking such as use of a wok or stored heat cooker and at the very least are one-pot dishes.

We are not vegetarians, but try and eat a vegetarian main meal 3 – 4 nights per week. This helps us maximise the use of the food we produce, while reducing our environmental impact, so you will find a preponderance of vegetarian recipes here. One good way to reduce your environmental impact without too much sacrifice is to commit to one night a week eating vegetarian. Who knows? You may grow to enjoy it!

It might not be three star Michelin eating but we like it. If you have recipes you use for good honest home grown meals, send them along to me if you want to share, and I’ll put them up here so others can benefit.

As the French say: “bon appetit!”

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