Use Up That Vegetable Box With Joe Woodhouse
Fridge full of vegetables from a trip to the market or a weekly farm share? Joe Woodhouse can help you get yourself set for the week ahead.
Joe Woodhouse, the beloved UK food photographer, chef, and author of Weeknight Vegetarian (as well as Your Daily Veg and More Daily Veg) lights up when he mentions the boxes of vegetables he gets each week from a local farm: “They always grow sort of weird and wonderful varieties of things that they’re testing out,” he says, and “you don’t actually know what’s coming until it arrives.”
“They grow masses of different peppers,” he says: Padron peppers, different kinds of frying peppers. “I mean, I ate a lot of peppers last year,” he laughs. Peppers with lentils. Peppers in salads. Peppers in soups. Peppers for breakfast with eggs.
The season of produce we’re just entering, Joe says, is a thrilling “moment in the year where you have these things—and then they’ve gone. And that’s actually quite a beautiful thing because you’re kind of like, you just have to wait ’til next time, but you’ve got something else taking its place.”
Any big vegetable haul presents a puzzle: “The saddest thing with veg boxes is letting anything waste,” Joe says, “and you kind of figure out that great thing of, okay, well cook this straight away. We’re going to eat the salad today.”
By Saturday, they’ve devoured the lettuce and any of “the fresh stuff that’s going to wilt overnight,” so it’s time to “just kind of cook as much as possible. That sets you up for the weekend, but also for the week ahead, easing into the week ahead for packed lunches or dinners.”
A raw beet might feel like too much to tackle on a Tuesday, but if you’ve already got them cooked and in the fridge, Joes says, they’ll last. “And then you can slice off a bit and put it in a sandwich, or dice off a bit and put it in a salad, or dress them in a bit of vinegar.” Easy.
Today’s episode walks through Joe’s routine for transforming a farm box or CSA box into soups and noodle dishes, salads, and most importantly, pickles. I highly recommend the pickled chiles and subsequent canned-fruit hot sauce Joe shares in the book; I’ve bookmarked so many other pages, but I know I’ll be making those again soon.
Below, you’ll get a peek at two recipes to cook right now: the flexible vegetable hotcakes Joe makes with grated zucchini and leftover cooked broccoli, and the crispy baked mushroom parmigiana he couldn’t stop eating on set. As they disappeared, he says he realized, “I better take the picture, ’cause I’m just, I’m eating them rather than taking the picture.”
The book’s recipes tend to be quick, but Joe urges us to think differently about the time we spend cooking. These days, he says, “We don’t have time for anything, whereas actually making dinner, it should be your way of winding down…It’s a way of relaxing. It’s a way you can hang out together and you build it into your day.”
Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
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Joe mentioned:
Tomato beans (beans in sherried tomato sauce) recipe from Your Daily Veg
Simon Hopkinson’s tomato curry with baked lemon rice
Laura Jackson’s goat’s curd tart is in Towpath: Recipes & Stories
Lori De Mori and Jason Lowe’s Bean Eaters and Bread Soup
Rachel Roddy’s weekend column and courgette pasta
Rachel Roddy’s A to Z of Pasta
James Walters’s Arabica: Small Plates, Big Connections
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Watch I Changed My Mind with Dan Souza of America’s Test Kitchen on Netflix
Maggie mentioned:
Jenny Rostenstrach’s Tofu Shawarma Dinner Salad
Tartine Bakery’s quiche—there’s an adapted recipe here.
The Dinner Plan’s massive list of cookbook recommendations
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Baked Mushroom Parmigiana
Excerpted with permission from Weeknight Vegetarian by Joe Woodhouse. First published in Great Britain by in 2026 by Kyle Books, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, distributed in the US by Hachette Book Group.
I like these with simple boiled new potatoes and a green salad, or in a sandwich (peak satisfaction). After the initial breadcrumbing is done, the oven does the work here; you just need a carb on the side.
Serves 4
olive oil, for roasting
50g (1oz) hard cheese, such as Spenwood (other hard sheep’s or cows’ cheeses work fine too), coarsely grated
1 tablespoon dried oregano
200g (7oz) breadcrumbs, or roughly torn day-old bread
4 eggs, lightly beaten
500g (1lb 2oz) oyster mushrooms
100g (3oz) plain flour or all-purpose flour
salt and black pepper
extra virgin olive oil, to serve (optional)
For the tomato sauce:
2 tablespoons olive oil
5 garlic cloves, sliced
15g (oz) basil, leaves picked, stalks finely chopped
2 400g (14oz) cans of plum tomatoes
100ml (3fl oz) white wine (optional)
Preheat the oven to 475°F/240°C/220°C fan, Gas Mark 9. Brush a large baking tray with olive oil.
Mix the cheese and oregano together with the breadcrumbs in a dish. Put the eggs in a second dish and the flour, seasoned with salt and pepper, in a third.
Dust the mushrooms with flour to coat (it doesn’t cling exceptionally well, but will help build a crust). Dunk the mushrooms into the egg and then the breadcrumb mixture, placing them on the prepared baking tray as you go. Don’t crowd them; use a second tray if needed. Drizzle the mushrooms with olive oil and bake in the oven for 15–20 minutes, then flip them, as well as rotating the trays in the oven. Cook for a further 10–15 minutes until golden and
crisp but not dried out.Meanwhile, make the tomato sauce. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the garlic and stir for a minute, then follow with the basil stalks and the canned tomatoes, crushing the tomatoes with a wooden spoon or masher. Rinse out the tomato cans with about one-quarter their volume of water and pour into the pan, along with the wine, if using. Bring to a simmer to reduce and thicken the sauce, and just marry the ingredients. It shouldn’t be watery, so increase the heat if needed.
Remove the mushrooms from the oven to a wire rack to cool for a couple of minutes, then transfer to serving plates, dotting the tomato sauce in between the mushrooms and scattering over the basil leaves with a few twists of black pepper. A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil is also welcome.
Broccoli & Spelt Hotcakes
Excerpted with permission from Weeknight Vegetarian by Joe Woodhouse. First published in Great Britain by in 2026 by Kyle Books, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, distributed in the US by Hachette Book Group.
Between the grated courgette and the spelt flour, these end up with a lovely custardy texture, and, spiked with loads of greens, they are really satisfying at any time of day. I often make them for breakfast for the family, as they come together so easily and don’t take long to cook. As well as breakfast, they work well in packed lunches or
as dinner, perhaps with a bean salad alongside and/or your favourite sauce.
If you don’t have any leftover broccoli or other pre-cooked veg in the fridge, simply blanch it in a saucepan of well-salted boiling water for about 4–5 minutes until tender, then refresh under cold running water. A sweet potato, coarsely grated and stirred into the beaten eggs, also works really well.
Cheese is a nice addition to this, too, so mix in 200g (7oz) of cubed feta, if you have some and feel like it.
Makes 8
1 head of broccoli (450–500g/1lb–1lb 2oz), blanched and chilled
2 courgettes (zucchini), total weight about 300g (10oz), coarsely grated
200g (7oz) frozen peas, preferably petits pois, defrosted
3 spring onions, finely sliced
3 eggs, lightly beaten
300g (10oz) white spelt flour, or other flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
flavourless oil, for frying
salt
Roughly chop the broccoli (slices around 1cm/½ inch thick are good) and put it in a mixing bowl with the rest of the veg and the beaten eggs. Follow with the flour and baking powder, as well as a good pinch of salt. Stir gently to combine everything well, then form into 8 pucks.
Heat a heavy-based frying pan or flat griddle over a medium–low heat. Add 1–2 tablespoons of oil. If using a frying pan, you will need to cook these in a couple
of batches. Cook half the hotcakes for 3–4 minutes on each side until golden and set. They tend to puff up in the middle when cooked through and feel fairly firm to the touch. They should end up being about 3cm (1¼ inch) thick.Keep the finished hotcakes warm in a low oven while you cook the second batch, then serve.
Correction: Last week’s harira recipe from Madaq mentioned adding lentils in two different steps; the error has been corrected.
Those hotcakes are right up my alley.
Okay, the veggie hotcakes went a long way to using up my random veggie box. A little more substantial than a fritter too, and toddler approved. I think I’d probably spice them next time, a fun recipe to remix!