Parcels

The 'hungry gap' has come round again, that time of the year when (before the days of unseasonal imports) winter food stocks had run out but the new crops were not ready. To make matters worse, some key person at the local produce wholesaler is on holiday and the staff have been dumping reject goods in the skip instead of leaving them out for the cafe. (We aren't allowed to use anything from the skip however acceptable it might be.)
 So all the fresh stuff we have in hand is roots, citrus fruit and bananas.

For my cooking session today I took in a big bag of wild garlic I'd gathered for a soup and I was about to start on yet another potato gratin when some Savoy cabbages arrived - organic too, at least they had slugs in. So the outer leaves were quickly blanched and stuffed with a mixture of cooked rice, fried onion and the remains of a jar of mushroom pesto that had been languishing in the fridge. Having arranged the  parcels in a dish, I used a sachet of ready-made mushroom soup as  a sauce and here they are ready to go into the oven.

Toffee bananas, baked with lime juice and mock maple syrup (donated from a sailing ship at the end of its cruise) completed the menu for tomorrow. 
 
Ingenuity is the name of the game.

(Yes, the cafe does supply free food parcels for those who need them although that is not our main function.)