For the past few months, we’ve been hosting live cooking demos every Thursday on our Facebook page. This week, though, we’ve changed slightly how we do things, and we’ll be recording the demos live, uploading them to YouTube and then sharing them on the blog, here, with an accompanying recipe!

In this week’s ***Cegin y Werin LIVE***, Steffan cooked up a traditional Welsh cawl, using all of the classic ingredients of the traditional Welsh peasant dish that we all know and love, most of which feature in our CSA veg boxes this week.

Cawl was a staple food for folks of a Wales past, born out of necessity and poverty. Simple and nourishing food was needed to sustain farmers, coal miners, quarry workers and fishermen. Dating back to the 14th century, it is said that the word “cawl”, the name of a traditional broth, comes from the Latin calidus, meaning warm. It was essential food to help folks keep warm, and was made from the vegetables traditionally harvested at this time of year - carrots, swedes, leek and celery leaf etc.

Celery greens are a great flavour boost to any stocks, stews and soups. Traditionally any vegetable stock cube or sauce had celery in it for its unique flavour. Celery Leaf wilts very quickly and like most green vegetables, vitamins reduce in quality as soon as they are picked. If you don’t intend to use this celery leaf in your cooking today or tomorrow then I suggest chopping the celery into manageable chunks and putting them in a container in the freezer, this means you always have access to good stock flavour whenever you require it.

Glasbren Cawl Recipe with Celery

Ingredients:

300g potatoes, 300g swede, 200g carrots, 200g parsnips, 200g onions, 200g leeks, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 teaspoon of crushed coriander seeds, 1 handful of celery leaf, 1 handful of kale, a handful of wild leaves (dandelion, plantain or dock).

Dice the onions and fry them in a large pan until golden/caramelised.
Cut the potatoes and swede into around 1cm sized cubes and add them into the onions, gently fry for 5 minutes. Add 1.5 teaspoons of salt and a generous amount of pepper.
Now add in chopped carrots, garlic, leeks and parsnip with a small amount of water at this point to avoid the veg sticking to the bottom of the pan. Let this mixture sweat in the pan on a low heat for a further 10 minutes.
Get all your green leaves together and slice finely and add them to the pan. Top up with boiling water so that it covers all the vegetables. Gently simmer for 25 minutes. (Add more water if required and extra seasoning if desired.
And I don’t need to tell you how to serve, it’s soup. Enjoy!