What’s not to love about a celebration the trees that involves eating lots of fruits and nuts? No health-harming, deep fried delicacies nor sugar-coated snacks to rot your teeth. The core foods can be kept simple and healthy or added to other dishes.
Every meal of the day can be fruit and nut-centric:
Kick off with crunchy granola showered over a bowl of chopped, seasonal apples, pears and oranges. Slather over some silan (date syrup) if you really must, and mineral-packed tahina to add a nutty flavour. Top with roasted, chopped nuts too! Or if you’re in a hurry, bake up a batch of Lisa Roukin’s date and pistachio granola bars the day before so you can grab and go.
Lunch on a salad of veggies and grains. Even though it’s mid-winter for us in the UK, there are plenty of root veg which are full of flavour. Beetroot, celeriac, swede, parsnips, carrots and sweet potatoes to name a few. Try this yummy carrot and orange salad from Amanda Ruben, which is smothered in seeds.
Or just stick with shallots to make Fabienne Viner-Luzzato’s on-festival shallot, fig and barley salad. Dried figs, barley grains, grapes, date syrup and olive oil bring in a few more of the seven species that are we eat at this time of year.
If you want some greens (or reds) there are a few winter cabbages that will give you some crunch in a lunchtime salad. This red cabbage, date and apple salad from Lisa Roukin includes pecans as well as sweet and sticky dates for a fruit and nut hit.
I’ll be roasting up my new favourite brassica — the kalette. The cute, flowery, sprout-sized balls are the lesser known love child of oh-so fashionable kale and its rotund mate, the Brussel sprout. I’d ignored them until my brother picked them up in the supermarket when he was visiting from Australia. An unlikely matchmaker when he'd grown up on a diet of orange squash, chips and ketchup; but now at the age of nearly 50, he's a born again vegetable lover, and teaching me new tastes.
I’m now hooked. I can take or leave (cow fodder) kale, which sits with celery in my vegetable Room 101, but mate it with the humble sprout and it’s not only pretty, but also darned tasty.
I digress.
Stay on the Tu Bishvat theme, and finish your day with a hearty tagine, packed with dried fruits and Moroccan spices and scattered with toasted, flaked almonds. Works well with plain couscous, or maybe a jewelled version (if serving the recipe on this link with meat, toast the pecan nuts without butter) mixed through with lemon zest, pistachios, cranberries, dried apricots and some saffron.
Finish your meal with a slice of Denise Phillips’s yummy date, grape and pistachio cake, or a simple fruit compote. A traditional Ashkenazi favourite and full of dried fruits. Scatter with toasted, chopped nuts to add crunch and Tu Bishvat cheer. Or, stick with the Mediterranean theme and end the meal with a plate of sliced citrus fruits — mix up oranges, pomelo and clementines, scatter some toasted flaked almonds and cinnamon over the top and drizzle with ginger syrup.
Happy birthday trees - I'll be making the most of your big day. (this year it starts in the evening of February 9)
