29 Mar 2025
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, has been rooting through her shelves…
The calendar might say we’re now firmly into spring, but the weather seems to have missed the memo. Early spring often has a slight identity crisis, unsure whether to be sunny or rainy. Or even outright snowy. We never know what we’re going to get.
In spite of the uncertain weather, spring is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, and it’s with this in mind that I took to a wee ‘spring clean’ of my pull-out pantry, which is more of a heave-out, laden as it always is with far too much.
If I’m honest, it was my decluttering-obsessive husband who made the call to empty everything out and lay it all on the kitchen island for inspection. The pack of spaghetti that had been squeezed in upright but that kept leaning over and blocking the pantry from closing was last straw for him.
Only the upper layer of items on each shelf had been visible for a good while, meaning countless packs of squid ink, saffron strands and other more esoteric ingredients had lain forgotten and abandoned, and now adorned my counter top, awaiting either exile or re-appropriation in a more organised, findable spot in the pantry.
There was a third option, too: leave out and use, which was the fate of certain packs of grains that had been there too long.
The spelt caught my eye first, as I’d recently eaten my first spelt risotto, or speltotto, at a restaurant in Saint-Gervais-les-Bains while on holiday in the Alps.
It was the satisfying chewiness that I remember over the flavour: spelt grains are robust and unyielding and therefore more rewarding to eat than their arborio, vialone nano or carnaroli counterparts. Having also discovered a couple of packs of dried porcini mushrooms in the pantry’s depths, as well as a pack of porcini
mushroom stock cubes my parents had brought back from Italy a year or so ago, the obvious solution here was a mushroom speltotto.
Although not as creamy as a regular risotto, because the starch isn’t released so easily through spelt’s fibrous outer layer, it didn’t disappoint: nutty, hearty and full of woodland flavours.
I’d contemplated livening up the meal with a rocket salad to eat alongside, but decided against it and instead embraced the soft, comforting carb-fest. Perfect for the drearier days of spring.
The pantry clear-out also gifted me a bag of wholemeal flour not too far off its best-before and crying out to be baked into a delicious treat under the guise of being vaguely healthy. Don’t mind if I do.
A little package of cinnamon had somehow ended up in the pull-out pantry, despite having a home in an overflowing spice drawer (but that’s for another column).
Cinnamon in a baking context immediately screams one thing to me: carrot cake. The healthier version of carrot cake is wholemeal carrot muffins – spicy, warming and more-ish while still scoring high on the nourishment scale.
The mascarpone topping I added admittedly somewhat lowered that score, especially because I’d initially planned on topping them with halo-sporting pumpkin seeds, but once again, the view out the window of a leaden sky scuppered my resolve.
The tang of the topping beautifully complemented the earthy spice of the muffin.
I’d added some walnuts to the muffin mixture for texture, too, so a single bite offered the full spectrum of cool creaminess from the topping to nutty warmth from the sponge. A mouthful of pantry pleasure. Who says spring cleaning’s a bore?
