Cabbage Soup Diet: Thai cabbage and onion soup with coconut, lime and coriander

No new recipes for the last couple of weeks, because we've been away, and now we're back inspiration is still in short supply. This evening I was stumped by the assortment of green leafy things in the vegbox (two Savoy cabbages, and spring greens) until I remembered Denis Cotter's Paradiso Seasons. This is easily my favourite vegetarian cookbook; it may well be my favourite cookbook overall. It's certainly the best one to go to when trying to think of interesting and different things to cook from the vegbox; the recipes are grouped by season and main ingredient, and give seasonal Irish ingredients an interesting twist - lots of Eastern and Middle Eastern influence.

Today I spotted a recipe for Thai cabbage and onion soup which seemed like the ideal way to use one of the Savoy cabbages. Like most of the recipes in the book, it was fairly straightforward to cook, and the result was extremely good - simultaneously soothing and reviving. I threw in some rice noodles to bulk it out a bit, and if I was making it again I might add a splash of fish sauce to add some depth to the stock, but generally a very nice dinner, and a pleasant change from the tried-and-tested recipes we've been having recently.

Let them eat cake: Parsnip, Leek and Apple Cakes

One of the side-effects of getting a weekly vegbox is having to find different ways of using the vegetables that are in season if we don't want to eat the same things week after week. At the moment it's root vegetables and cabbages; this morning the vegetable rack contained a swede, five parsnips, four carrots, a red cabbage, half a white cabbage, four leeks and rather a lot of red onions, which didn't immediately strike me as a particularly inspiring prospect. My first thought was leek risotto, which is very nice but something we eat rather a lot. Or root vegetable and chorizo stew, ditto. Or leeks in cheese sauce, ditto ditto.

And then something made me have a look at the recipes on the Riverford website; I always think they sound nice but all too often we don't have the right combination of ingredients. This time, though, I realised that we did have everything we needed to make parsnip, leek and apple cakes (well, almost everything; I did have to substitute Cheddar for Parmesan) and decided to give that a try.

They turned out very well, I thought. The apple added enough moisture that the cakes didn't fall apart in the frying pan, as happens so often with recipes of this kind, and they tasted very nice. The egging and breadcrumbing was a bit fiddly and used all the bowls (admittedly we don't have a full set of bowls and one of the ones we do have was in the dishwasher), but not too fiddly for a weeknight dinner really, especially as the rest of it was a doddle. We had them with a kind of winter coleslaw: lightly cooked red cabbage mixed with grated carrot and dressed with lemon juice and walnut oil. And now the vegetable rack is a lot emptier and we're happily full of dinner. Definitely one I'd make again.