The Witches Kitchen — for people who love life

Zucchini Macaroni Cheese With Crumbles

by Linda on January 24, 2012

Have you noticed yet that I have a certain amount of experience with zucchini recipes? There is a Marge Piercy poem that I think perfectly sums up zucchini: Attack of the Squash People. I thought I had learned the lesson: One, no more than two, zucchini each planting break.

But then this year I discovered tromochino. I like climbers in my fortress fenced up-gardens - they maximise the use of space - and I really like trombochino. They taste pretty much like zucchini – a bit firmer and denser, like zucchini minus the middle bit. But I don’t know whether it is just this year – it has been a perfect curcurbit year, cooler and wetter than usual but with the long, light days of summer – but the trombochino are triffid-like taking over the garden. I leave bags of them in the roadside mailbox. The chooks refuse to eat any more.

This is the third in the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge series. It’s an old favourite. It uses about 4 medium zucchini. Eight if you double the recipe – it also makes good leftovers for lunch. Makes a small dint.

The Recipe:

Makes four large serves.

This can be done in half an hour but you have to really multitask at the beginning because most of the half hour is baking time.

Oven on to heat up. You need a fairly hot oven.
Kettle on to boil for water for pasta.
Food processor out. You can do it all without a food processor, just with a grater and a blender or eggbeater, but I can’t promise half an hour.

Part 1: Pasta

Cook a cup of pasta in boiling water till just cooked. Don’t overcook it.

Macaroni, shells, or small spirals work best.

Part 2: The Crumble

Crumb

two slices of heavy wholegrain bread and mix with
two dessertspoons of olive oil and
a dessertspoon of grated parmesan.

I do this in my food processor. Leave the crumbs a bit coarse, not too fine.

Part 3: White Cheese Sauce

In a small pot, heat

a cup of low fat milk with
a cup of low fat cottage cheese and
3 bay leaves,

till the milk starts to rise. It will curdle – that’s ok. Fish the bay leaves out.

While the milk is heating, tip the crumbles out of the food processor and (you don’t need to wash it), blend

1 egg and
2 big dessertspoons of plain wholemeal flour.

With the blender going, add the hot milk-cottage cheese mix. Pour back into the small pot and reheat, stirring with a wooden spoon, till it thickens. This will take just a minute or two.

Part 4 – Grated Zucchini and Feta

Grate

two packed cups of zucchini (or trombochino) and
100 grams of low fat feta cheese.

Slice enough tomatoes to cover the top.

Assembling:

Mix the grated feta and zucchini into the white cheese sauce and tip the lot into a small baking tray. I have a square, pyrex 21 cm dish that is perfect for bakes like this.

Cover the top with sliced tomatoes, then spread the crumble mix on top of them.

Bake in a medium hot oven for around 20 minutes till the top is golden and crunchy and the middle is hot all the way through.

Great on its own, or with a green salad, and makes good left-overs for lunch the next day as well.

Did your Tuesday Night Vego recipe feature zucchini too? Feel free to leave links in the comments.

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Surviving the Frizzle Weather

by Linda on January 22, 2012

Summer is a much harder gardening season than winter in Australia. Most years there’s a set of frizzle days sometime over the summer – days when the temperature is up around 40ºC for a few days in a row. It can be really disheartening. Your garden can be looking good one day, then a few days later it’s all fried.

What to do:

Shade. Don’t be afraid of shade. European gardening advice is go for full sun, but not much likes Australian full sun in summer. The perfect garden site has full sun from the north east round to the north west (because the winter sun actually rises in the north and sets in the north west), but it has shade in the east and west. Short lived trees like leucaena work well in my subtropical climate. I can plant them on the east and west of my circular garden beds and they create dappled shade in summer. They are legumes so as a side benefit, they fix nitrogen from the air, and I can use the prunings for mulch as well.

I also plant very intensively so my garden plants shade each other. Using up all your water and other resources on a small area makes much more sense than spreading it thin to maximise your garden area. Closely spaced plants shade each other. And I use the fencing in my very intensively fenced beds as trellises, and grow climbers in preference to dwarf varieties of everything possible. Climbing beans, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash add to the shade.

Mulch. I try to have a good 15 to 20 cm of mulch cover over my whole garden before the start of summer. I use huge amounts of mulch, for no-dig garden bed creation, for sheet composting and for weed eradication. In summer though its most important functions are water conservation and insulation. My most important garden tool is my 5 hp Honda walk-behind self-propelled mower. With it I can get a trailer load of mulch in less than an hour, and it’s good exercise and meditation at the same time.

Unfortunately the better your soil, the less long-lasting the mulch cover. Mulch cover over very biologically active soil disappears before your eyes, eaten by all the soil-living creatures and turned into compost.

Water : You do need a fair bit of water. I just use sprinklers and a hose because I have to be frugal with water and that gives me more control. I’ve never tried wicking beds but the idea is interesting and the theory is sound. I avoid fixed watering systems because I don’t think they actually save labour. Luckily I’m a morning person because the best time to water is in the early morning.

This year is a La Nina year and the dams are full. Some years though I am trying to eke every skerrick of value out of every drop of water. But even in La Nina years, I don’t water every day. Seeds and seedlings in the shadehouse get water every day. My advanced seedlings get watered in well at planting out. But the garden beds only get a sprinkler if there has been no rain at all for a fortnight or so. If you water too frequently, root systems learn that the best place to get water is the top 10 cm, and they concentrate there – which is exactly what you don’t want in a heat wave. If you water deeply and infrequently, they chase the water down and that sets them up much better for frizzle days.

Plant the right things: Leafy greens have a really hard time – I generally don’t plant them during summer much at all. Big leaved things like cucumbers and zucchini like the heat but have a hard time unless you really have lots of water and mulch, so I plant few of them and give those few all the water, rather than having too many and spreading the water too thin.

Plant sequentially: A week of frizzle weather will wipe out everything adolescent in the garden, but seeds and seedlings in the shadehouse are likely to survive, and mature plants with well developed root systems are likely to survive. If you have used up all the space you have available for pumpkins, for example, in one planting, you’ve put it all on black. If instead you have some at every stage, you’re only likely to be facing a few week gap in the harvest.

We are close now to Lammas, the traditional festival that marks the point when the day length passes the point, half way between the solstice and the equinox, when the days begin to shorten at an exponentially faster rate. (There’s a nice simple graph that explains it here.) The odds of getting more frizzle days now are rapidly shrinking. The season coming, at least here in northern NSW, is a much better one for gardeners. The best thing I can do for my garden this time of year is go to the beach. The chooks need some cuttlefish and shell grit, the seaweed brew needs refreshing, and I’ve already ticked off one of my New Year’s resolutions.

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Bean Burgers

by Linda on January 17, 2012

This is the second in the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge, and already I’m cheating a little bit. Making this easily within the half hour relies on you having fresh or already cooked beans and bread rolls on hand. I’m starting to harvest beans for shelling now. By the end of the summer I’ll have a big jar full of each kind for slow cooking over the winter.

But fresh picked beans cook much much faster than older, drier ones. I used a cup of shelled, dried but fresh, Purple Kings for these – they’re the larger pinker ones in the picture – soaked for the day while I was at work (soaking removes the oligosaccharide in the skin that give beans their reputation for fart-producing), drained, then pressure cooked in a cup of fresh water. They took just 15 minutes to cook to very soft, but if you have older, drier beans they could take anything up to 45 minutes. Slow cookers are another good way to cook beans. Bean Basics gives you the basics of cooking beans. You want them a little bit overcooked for this recipe.

Once you have cooked beans, the rest of the recipe comes together very fast and easy. Beans are fantastically good for you, full of protein, complex carbohydrates, fibre (both soluble and insoluble) and a whole range of vitamins and minerals. A bean burger with no cholesterol and a heap of soluble fibre is double heart tick material.

And burgers are a great meal for hot weather. A nice way to serve them is to set the table with all the makings – bread rolls, sliced tomato and cucumber, lettuce and rocket, fried onions, sauces and pickles, and let everyone assemble their own.