Stuffed Onions and Rosemary Potatoes with Seasonal Green Beans

This little impromptu dinner started with a lazy morning of recipe browsing, the only thing that makes it worth getting up at 5:50am! I've tried on several occasions to grow my own herb garden, but failed pretty miserably, competing with a garden full of slimy slugs that always got to our lettuce and rockets sooner than we did and other reasons of course... This time I cheated a little and with the courtesy of the lovely herb section of Haskins, brought home a thyme and parsley plant. Parsley because parsley is probably the next best thing in the world after my boyfriend, (I'm just testing whether he will actually read this :) and thyme because it smelled divine, but other than that I hadn't the faintest clue what to use it for! Not until I came across this miracle of a recipe in one of my old cookbooks:

Onion Stuffed with Mushrooms and Thyme

Ingredients:

4 large brown onions
salt
1 teaspoon vegetable stock
400g mushrooms (I used about 150g chestnut mushrooms)
a big handful of fresh thyme and parsley each (aromatherapy galore!)
2 tablespoons of oil (I used olive oil)
freshly ground black pepper
20g butter (I used goat's butter because I'm lactose intolerant)

Peel the onions and cut a little "hat" off the top of each.
Make sure the bottoms are straight as well so they don't roll out of the kitchen :)
Scoop the insides out, leaving a wall of about 1cm thickness.
Boil some water with salt and the veggie stock and place the onions in the boiling water for 2-3 minutes and then remove and let the water drip off them.
Take about a handful of the onion you've scooped from the insides and fry it in the oil until clear, then add the mushrooms chopped into small bits, season with salt and pepper and soften. Finely chop your herbs and throw them on top and stuff the onions with this MOUTHWATERING mixture. Put the "hats" back on (if you can still find them in all this onion chopping business :) and place them on a buttered baking tray. Drop a dab of butter on top of each and bake in a very hot oven (I used around 220 degrees celsius) for 10-12 minutes.

The Rosemary Potatoes and Seasonal Green Beans

Lately I have gotten into the habit of buying as many local and seasonal products as possible (for guidance I very much recommend a website called "Eat the Seasons" ) So that is how a packet of British green beans landed in my shopping basket. While fiddling with the onions I remembered a really simple dish I had learned from a dear friend of mine Zsuzso, and realised I had all the ingredients:

potatoes
green beans
rosemary (I used dried)
garlic and onions

I sliced about a kilo of new potatoes into roughly 1cm slices and boiled them in salty water until they were cooked but not mushy and steamed the green beans above them (I have a special pot I can use for that purpose, but you can just steam or boil the beans any way you prefer for a few minutes to soften them a bit)
I fried the onion (the leftover scoopings from the stuffed onions came in handy, and the wok I had fried the mushrooms and thyme in!) and garlic for a few minutes in olive oil and added the slices of potatoes and stirred them well to get them covered in the oil and onion. I added a generous pinch of rosemary (roughly 1teaspoon) and mixed the green beans in as well. I kept stirring until the potatoes starting going a tiny bit brown, yummy!

The fresh salad is just the cherry on top as I love to make every plateful of food as colourful as I can!

Enjoy - or jo etvagyat as we say in Hungary!

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