Smashed Warm Potato Salad

by Linda on May 15, 2012

This is the second of my potato harvest Tuesday Night Vego Challenge  recipes. I often have lots of these tiny chats in my spud harvest, and they’re the best bit. Add some egg for protein and avoid loading up with mayonnaise, and it’s a healthy and very delicious dinner.

New harvested chats are easy enough to wash, that you don’t avoid teeny ones because of the tedium of washing them.  I put them in a cotton bag (a recycled flour bag) and put bag and all in a sink full of water, then just rumble them in the bag.  Potato skins contain a decent percentage of the nutrient value of the potato, and reduce the amount lost in cooking.

The Recipe

(For two)

  • Boil or pressure cook 350 grams of new chats until they are soft.  In a pressure cooker this will take just a couple of minutes. Drain and allow to sit for a minute or two for the steam evaporate off.
  • Finely slice a red onion, chop 3 or 4 cloves of garlic up fine, dice a red capsicum, and roughly chop 10 black olives
  • Heat a frying pan up to very hot, add a good slurp of good olive oil and all the vegetables at once.
  • Cook on high for 5 minutes or so, with minimal stirring.  You are looking for the potatoes to develop brown crispy bits without  breaking up.
  • While the vegetables are cooking, soft boil 3 eggs, drain and peel.  You want the yolks still runny. If you start with cold water, this will take between 3 and 4 minutes from boiling, depending on the size of the eggs.  Eggs that are very fresh will be impossible to peel – just scoop them out with a teaspoon.
  • And make the dressing: Blend together a big handful of herbs with a little olive oil and the juice of half a lemon. I like basil, flat leaf parsley, thyme, and aragula or rocket for this.
  • Chop some celery to give it a bit of crunch.
  • Toss the warm vegetables together with the eggs, dressing, celery, salt and pepper and serve.

Did you have a Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipe?  Feel free to share links in the comments.

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Latkes With Cottage Cheese

by Linda on May 8, 2012

I think these are latkes.  The have eggs, so they’re more latke than rosti, but they have no flour, and I don’t think the cottage cheese is part of any traditional cuisine.  Whatever. They’re very fast – fast enough to be a breakfast option as well as a Tuesday night vego. The cheese and eggs means they have a decent quantity of protein, and though they’re fried, they don’t absorb lots of oil.

I dug the late summer planting of potatoes on the weekend. Usually this is the best potato harvest of the year here. Spuds do better when the nights are getting cooler as they set the crop (as opposed to the spring planting, when, by the time they are ready to harvest in November, the nights are often so warm that the plants just don’t seriously go into food storage mode).

Home grown new potatoes are a gourmet delight, absolutely nothing like supermarket spuds.  They’re so good that they spoil you for out of season potatoes (and we don’t need the calories anyhow). So I treat potatoes like I treat asparagus, looking forward to the season, relishing it, then letting go till it comes round again.

The crop this time was a bit disappointing in quantity. It has been so wet and overcast this year, I think they just didn’t get enough photosynthesis in.  Nevertheless, there’s enough here for potatoes to feature for a few weeks.

The Recipe:

(Two generous serves)

Grate 2 potatoes – a waxy variety like Dutch Cream, Kipfler,  Bintje, Nicola,  or Pink Eye. I used the  kipflers that I grew this year for these.

Mix with

  • 2 eggs
  • 1 spring onion, chopped
  • a good handful of chopped parsley
  • 3 dessertspoons (30 ml) low fat cottage cheese or ricotta.

No flour makes them hard to handle until they start to set.  So heat a large pan with a little olive oil, wait till it’s hot,  and then use wet hands to make little patties and drop them in.  Place them carefully because you can’t move them till they set.

Squash them down with the back of your eggflip. Wait till they are set and golden on one side, turn and cook the other side.

Serve with a tomato salsa and a salad or steamed vegetables, or just make a platter of small ones and eat them as is, dipped in chili jam or tomato sauce.

Did you do the  Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week? Links are welcome in the Comments.

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Spicy Eggplant and Bean Stew

by Linda on May 1, 2012

I cheated again. But it was worth it. The bean stock base makes this both really healthy and really satisfying, and (without going all Masterchef) it has some lovely complex flavours.  Beans are so high protein, and complete protein when they are combined with a grain, that even regular meat eaters feel like they’ve had a real dinner.  And they’re low GI, high fibre, full of vitamins and minerals.

The thing I am finding about the  Tuesday Night Vego Challenge is that the range of healthy, from scratch, vegetarian dinners you can make in half an hour is much bigger if you put a bit of pre-thinking into it.  Proving dough, soaking beans, salting eggplant all take only minutes to do, but you have to do them ahead of time.

This dinner came together in half an hour, including the naan bread to go with it.  But I put the beans in water to soak, the eggplant salted, and the naan bread dough proving before I left for work in the morning. All very fast easy morning jobs, and they meant that when I got home I could just put it all together.

The Recipe:

Makes three adult serves.  Leftovers are even better the next day.

In the morning:

  • Soak ½ cup white beans.
  • Chop a large eggplant (or the equivalent in small eggplants) into 2 cm dice, put in a colander, and sprinkle with a heaped spoonful of salt.

In the evening:

Drain the beans, add 2 cups of fresh water and a good pinch of salt, and pressure cook for 8 minutes or simmer for 25 minutes until they are very soft.  Then blend the beans in the cooking water to get a smooth liquid bean stock.

While the beans are cooking:

Prepare Dry Spice Mix:

  • 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
  • ½ teaspoon brown mustard seeds
  • ½ teaspoon fennel seeds
  • ½ teaspoon cumin seeds
  • ½ teaspoon dill seeds

Prepare Wet Spice Mix

Use a mortar and pestle or a spice grinder to blend to a paste:

  • Thumb sized piece of fresh turmeric (or substitute a teaspoon of dried turmeric)
  • Thumb sized piece of fresh ginger
  • 2 medium hot chilis (more or less to taste)
  • 2-3 cloves garlic
Chop the Vegetables:
  • 1 onion, finely sliced into half moons
  • 1 capsicum diced
  • 1 large eggplant chopped into 2 cm dice, salted and rinsed.

In a large heavy pot:

  • Fry the dry spice mix until the seeds are popping.
  • Add the wet spice mix and the rinsed eggplant, capsicum and onion.
  • Cook on high stirring for a few minutes to seal and coat the vegetables in spices, then add the bean stock along with a good dessertspoon of tomato paste and two kaffir lime leaves (or substitute juice of half a lime and a little grated zest).
  • Turn the heat down and simmer for 15 minutes or so, stirring occasionally, until the eggplant is cooked.
  • Serve in bowls, over rice or with naan bread. Fresh coriander makes a nice garnish.

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Lemon Feta Tortellini

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