Bean Basics

February 23, 2011

We’re eating green beans just about every day at the moment – in salads and stews and sautés and steamed vegetables - and and I’m still harvesting about this many beans for drying every few days.  Beans are one of my real staples – super easy to grow, prolific, a good source of protein, soluble fiber, [...]

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Asian Style Bean and Capsicum Salad

February 8, 2011

After floods followed by heat wave, my garden has practically no leafy greens in it.  The parsley and celery keeled over in the wet – they hate waterlogged roots and although my drainage is pretty good, it wasn’t up to 150mm of rain in a day.  The lettuces and rocket keeled over in the heat [...]

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Slow Cooked Green Beans Italian Style

December 18, 2010

Beans are like octopus – they need to be cooked either very fast or very slow. I love snake beans cooked in an Asian way – just barely blanched, so they are still crunchy and tossed in a dressing.  But these purple king beans have such a nice deep flavour, I think they go better [...]

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Nina’s Minestrone

July 5, 2010

This time of year, part of the evening ritual is chopping some firewood and lighting the slow combustion stove.  I’m not a huge fan of winter but I do like the stove. It’s a lovely old Rayburn we bought second hand about 20 years ago, probably half a century or more old. It warms the house, [...]

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Moroccan Style Kangaroo Tagine with White Beans and Preserved Lemon

May 20, 2010

If you are new to kangaroo meat, this is not a bad recipe to start out with.  The preserved lemon is the interesting flavour in it, and kangaroo is a great meat for a tagine because it is so lean and dense. And I also believe kangaroo is the most ethical choice for Australians. Kangaroos [...]

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Ginger, Mint and Culantro Besan Pancakes

April 11, 2010

This all started with an item in the Sunday papers about how women really should do weights training. I looked at the weights, but that idea lasted all of about two seconds. But then I spotted the tray of beans drying ready for storage. The trusty old hand grinder and five minutes grinding beans and [...]

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Summer Pasta in Five Minutes

February 18, 2010

Into the blender, a good handful of basil leaves, a small chili, a clove of garlic, swig of good olive oil, pinch of salt. Add some fresh oregano if you have it, and perhaps a small handful of macadamias or cashews. Into the pan, a chopped onion, capsicum, zucchini, snake beans, olives in a splash [...]

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Green Bean and Mango Salad

January 30, 2010

The nice thing about bean gluts is that you can just let them fully mature and dry on the vine, then store them for using in dried bean recipes, like refried beans or nachos or baked beans or ful medames. But I don’t quite want to let these beans go yet! Once you stop picking [...]

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