50 Shades of Green

Ok, Cynthia said that I should do another blog about the vegies I am growing.  She said to call it 50 shades of green for some reason.  Apparently it is guaranteed to arouse interest.  So here goes.

First cab off the rank is Broccoli.  We harvested 8 heads like this one 3 weeks ago.  Because it was so fresh, it lasted in the fridge for over 2 weeks.  As a bonus, it was bug free!  The next batch will be harvested this week and it looks even better.

These are crunchy green Sugar Snap Peas.  Today we picked a couple of kg.  These are great cooked or raw in a salad.  I am picking Snow Peas as well.  I will sow about 6-7 times in a season and eat them for almost 6 months in a year.

These green plants are Rocket.  They have a peppery taste and are easy to grow.  You can also eat the flowers.  They taste peppery as you would expect but give you a burst of honey on the tongue.

English Spinach is a winter favourite.  I harvest this for 6 months from about 4 sowings.  Great in omelettes, salads, pies, or whatever takes your fancy.   It's the same stuff as you get in the bags in the supermarket called 'baby spinach'.  This is what it looks like if it matures. 

This is Silverbeet.  Some people call it spinach but it's not.  This stuff is best cooked.  Just boil it, add butter salt and a bit of lemon juice.  The flavour can get a bit strong over the hotter months so eat the leaves young and plant more often. 








A favourite in our house is Coriander.  The trick with this little baby is to sow it every couple of weeks and pick it young.  If you get a hot day or 2 or let it dry out it will start to flower and it will not be as good.

Basil.  Make a pesto for goodness sake!  We also make a mean basil salad of fresh leaves, spring onions, tomatoes, avocado, olives, feta and toasted walnuts.  Use a oil and balsamic dressing.  Oh yes!  I planted seedlings last weekend.

Lebanese Cucumbers have been sown and will be ready in about 6-8 weeks just in time for the warmer weather.  

I also have Lettuce growing in the Hydroponics.  I have an endless supply of salad greens all year round.  

Parsley is a herb that we cook with all the time.  Chop it and chuck it into your scrambled eggs.  There is also Dill,  Asparagus, Chives, Oregano, and Spring Onions.  All shades of green that will tittilate the taste-buds and give you energy.

the new toy

Hello people. Things have been quiet in blogland recently because I have a new toy. A new kitchen toy. Ho yes. I find that instead of slumping on the lounge every night to watch telly, I am in the kitchen whipping up some new creation. And it's working its magic not just on me - but Meyles too! Yes. We are taking it in turns to use it. 

Here it is in it's full glory - a brilliant piece of quality German engineering, which replaces about 10 different appliances that I now will never use again, because now we have a new Thermomix.What did I ever do without it?

Why is it so?

Because it weighs, chops, whips, grates, blitzes and cooks in the same bowl. 

Soups are a piece of cake. Chuck in the stuff, chop by pressing a button, and cook by pressing another button. All done and dusted in one bowl. 

Bread? Ho yes. We've made roti, pizza bases, scones, pastry - although in these cases I have used the oven or frypan to cook. 

Cake. Last night we made a weird but wonderful Red Bean Chocolate cake (would you believe). Today I've made boiled orange cake. 

Stroganov. Last night Meyles cooked beef stroganov - chopped up stuff and cooked in the same bowl.

Lemonade. Fresh. 

Vegetable Stock. 

Lentil curry. 

Orange marmalade. 

Polenta. 

For tea tonight we're having mushroom soup with a few garden greens and asian chicken balls on the side. Oh, and did I mention I made cheese souffle for breakfast today?

We are both delighted with the new toy. And so we should be, as it costs a freaking fortune. But if it helps us eat better, quicker, healthier, with more food options, then I say bring it on.

Anyone have any recipes they think would go well in this baby?

weird food combos

Ever since I was a kid I have eaten avocado & vegemite on toast with salt and pepper.  Ho yes!  I thought it was normal, that everybody ate avocado and vegemite on toast.  But it seems evident that it does actually fall into the ‘Weird Food Combo’ category.

I once met a guy who liked tomato sauce on his breakfast cereal.  Ewww!  But weird food combinations can sometimes run in families.  And you don’t realise they’re weird because you’ve been eating it all your life and it seems normal.  Until someone else reacts to the idea.


This here to the right is an Avocado Smoothie. Yes folks, it is delicious. Made with fresh avocado, banana, honey and enough water to make it tulupsty. Top with cinnamon. It's fantastic.


Lots of people are shocked at my love of salted chocolate.  It’s a very ‘now’ thing.  But until you’ve tried it…  That reminds me, I must chase up Lindt for pinching my idea and making a salted chocolate block.  It’s fabulous.  But they must’ve gotten the idea from yours truly!


A week ago we were sitting around with some of the Meyles clan, talking about all the Dutch bickies and cakey things the Dutchies do really well.  They use a spice mix called Speculaas (speckle-ass) in their cooking, and when you buy speculaas bickies they are a biscuit with lots of flavour and crunch. Turns out Meyles and his brothers and sister all admitted to loving speculaas bickie sandwiches with lots of butter! Who would have thought? 


The Dutchies also make the most wonderful Salty Licorice – a strong, hard, licorice which is very salty. An acquired taste for sure. In fact, I love that too. 




What are the weird food combos you’ve had, or heard of?  Come on, people. Tell us your faves and gross us all out.

an hour ago

One of the things my muvva used to say when we were kids was...


"An hour ago these vegies were growing in the garden. And now... they're making US grow!"     ~ Vera Sleight




This is a Jamie meal, slightly adapted to what we had on hand.  It consists of:

• Sweet potato mash
• Smoked salmon fillets
• Asian Greens

mash:  this has flavours of fresh coriander, chutney, soy and lime mixed through sweet potato


greens:  broccoli, chilli, green pea shoots, soy, olive oil, sesame oil, lime juice


salmon:  vacuum packed, smoked, and what we had in the fridge slightly warmed in the microwave


Did I mention everything here (except the fish) is from the garden?  Yup. Everything! It's very satisfying. 


And the flavours, people! Jamie just comes up with fantastic combos every time. Freshness, zing and full of interest and deliciousness. 


Sometimes the meals you make up at the end of the week because you've forgotten to leave chicken out of the freezer to thaw... turns out better than anything you possibly imagined. This is definitely going to happen again. And again. Yes it is.

pickled gerkins

See these babies? Beauties, aren't they? 

These are gerkins (a type of cucumber). This is the 'before' photo.

Meyles grew these in our garden and has been picking them every few days over the last 10 days or so. Now we have this many and I'm going to pickle the little suckers.  Yes I am!

Sterilise the jars first.

I do this by whacking a few jars with metal lids in the oven@150 for 30 minutes.

This is what's going in the jars:

• gerkins

• chillies

• garlic

• onions

• dill

Make the pickling liquid. This is a combo of white wine vinegar, water, salt and peppercorns.

This stuff is used to fill the jars and also to briefly boil the onions.

Chop stuff up.  

Boil the onions, garlic and fresh chilli for 3 minutes only.  

Also, I did the 3-minute boil trick with enough gerkins to make one jar too.  The rest are pickled raw. Why?  Because some recipes tell you to, and some just use fresh. I know that using raw will work, because that's what I did last time. But I trialled one jar with boiled gerkins - just to see which ones we like better.

Assembly. Watch out, because the jars are hot from the oven. And so are the lids. So is the pickling liquid.  I put a few onions, chillies, garlic and fresh dill in the bottom of each jar, then stuff it full - really tightly - of as many of those little green suckers as you can squeeze in there.  

Try not to spill the pickling liquid all over the bench like I did. Put the lids on tight. See these babies? The jar on the left is the one that has the boiled gerkins. 

I have to wait 2 weeks now, for the pickling to take place. Then it's, sharp and crumbly cheese, gerkins and slices of turkey rolled up. Ho yes! We gave a jar to the neighbours and they reciprocated with a jar of their mum's secret-recipe-tomato-chutney! I love tomato chutney.

These taste just like those little green suckers they stick on Macca's burgers.  

Recipe

Pickling Liquid:

1 cup white wine vinegar

6 cups water

3 tbsp flaky salt

4 tsp peppercorns

What goes in the jar:

3 brown onions

3 chillies

3 garlic cloves

1.5 kg gerkins

big bunch of fresh dill

what to do with leftover easter goodies

Got any leftover 2-day old hot cross buns you don't know what to do with?  Cream?  Eggs?  Check this out - a 

Cardinal-Cyn-Made-Up-Post-Easter-Special.  Ho yes!  It's sort of a cross between French Toast, bread'n'butter pudding, and all things eggy and bready.

  

Amounts are sort of approximate, and can be very flexible.

Here I have broken up (no-longer)-hot cross buns in a baking pan;

Cooked off a bit of bacon; 


(Incidentally, this is Weight Watchers bacon, so this is healthy!  Yes it is!)

in the hot pan after the bacon has been cooked, add some chopped bananas and strawberries;


These don't need to cook for long - maybe 5 minutes

Get the bowl of cream and add 5 whipped eggs.


Also add a bit of maple syrup (about this much: glug, glug, glug) 

Add everything to the baking pan, cover and put in the fridge for 2 hours or overnight.

Slow bake @ 160 degrees for 25-30 minutes, until firm and brown.


If you can wait, let it sit for a few minutes. But we couldn't wait.


Yum!


Recipe
6-8 hot cross buns, broken up
1 cup cream
5 eggs, whipped
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla paste
1 pkt Weight Watchers bacon
2-3 chopped bananas
1/2 punnet chopped strawberries


1.  Put broken buns in baking pan
2.  Fry bacon and chop
3.  Fry bananas and strawberries for a few minutes
4.  In separate bowl, combined cream, eggs, vanilla, maple syrup
5.  Add bacon, bananas and strawberries to the buns
6.  Pour creamy eggs mixture over the buns and roughly mix
7.  Cover with clingwrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours
8.  Bake at 160 degrees for 30 minutes or until brown and firm

baked breakfast oats

In looking for new breakfast ideas which could possibly be cooked ahead of time so I can just whip it out of the fridge and eat it (maybe nuke it first) I came across Baked Breakfast Oats which I adapted from Wholefoods Market.  

It takes all of 5 minutes to mix ingredients, and 50 minutes to bake. It's a matter of:






- a bowl of dry ingredients


Dry ingredients:
Rolled oats
Frozen berries
Chopped walnuts
Fresh pear
Salt and Baking Powder

- a bowl of wet ingredients


Wet ingredients:
Milk
Greek yoghurt
Egg
Maple Syrup
Vanilla paste

Mix together and whack into a baking dish 

 Bake for 50 minutes at 190 degrees

Recipe
2 cups oats
2 cups frozen berries
1 chopped pear
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup Greek yoghurt
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 egg + extra yolk
2 tsp vanilla paste
1 cup milk

peanut butter sloice

This here is my 
Peanut Butter Sloice 
which I adapted from Epicurious. Meyles wolfed down a goodly few chunks of this before it even cooled down.  












I made this to put in our lunches this week, but I don't know if it'll last, quite frankly.


If you make this, let me know how you enjoyed it.

Recipe
1 cup plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup puffed rice
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
100 butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla paste
2/3 cup chopped mixed nuts
1 tbsp glace cherries
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp marmalade


1.  Put oven on 180, and line a baking tin with oiled foil
2.  In food processor, blitz peanut butter, sugar, butter, egg, vanilla.
3.  Add flour and baking powder and blitz
4.  Add puffed rice and pulse till just combined.
5.  Press out dough into lined baking tin
6.  In a small bowl combined nuts, cherries, honey, marmalade. Dollop mixture over the top of the slice, and gently spread.
7.  Bake 30 minutes, then cool completely before slicing (if you can wait that long)

slug chicken in the firepit

We've started experimental cooking in our firepit, would you believe! Spurred on by our unbelievably excellent damper, cooked in tin foil the other night and et with butter, herbs and cheese, we promptly went to the camping shop and purchased a cast iron camp oven. Basically it's a big black pot with a lid and weighs a ton. You don't want to drop this sucker on your foot, I promise you.

After realising that the promised 'recipe book inside' was actually nowhere to be found, we commenced extensive research via Mr Google. We learnt to use heat beads, that camp ovens need to be heated up first, and that once they're hot you don't need a whole lot of heat beads to cook stuff with. 

So we launched our first experiment.  Slug Chicken.  You'll see why... We sort of used our own made up recipe using ideas and inspiration from our vast experience (!) of firepit cooking.

First, light the heat beads and when they're hot,
heat up the camp oven like this. I don't know how long this
is supposed to take, but we did this for about 45 minutes and
it was plenty hot enough.

Prep the food. That bowl there is full of spuds, onions, chorizo, carrot, capsicum, garlic cloves (whole), and apple quarters that wouldn't fit up the chook's jacks. The chook just has a fistful of fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary, dill) in there, plus apple quarters. We oiled, salted and peppered the chook. A bottle of white wine stands at the ready..  

It's wise to add stuff to the camp oven away from the heat. As soon as we dribbled oil in, it was so hot it started smoking. We added onion quarters, garlic and chorizo for a bit to start them browning. 

We also browned the chicken like this too, and tipped in the rest of the bowl
of veg, plus more rosemary. We also added a generous slug (hence the name) of white wine. By now the camp oven was not so blisteringly hot.

The camp oven is positioned in the firepit with most of the heat
beads surrounding it and some on top. Then we watch and wait (we learnt this skill of watching/waiting in our adventist days). We waited an hour and a half, and by then we could smell the beautiful flavours all over the back yard.

This is what we saw when we removed the lid! I can't repeat what I said. But it rhymed with mark.

Having apple and wine in this was fantastic and I would do it again. The apple went gooey and was freaking fantastic. The chicken was 'fall-aparty' cooked.

ooh, hot! so's the chicken!

it's full of wonderful flavour. So easy. And that, my friends,
is Slug Chicken in the FirePit!