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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Lemon Feta Tortellini

by Linda on April 24, 2012

I love my kitchen. It has a great big central kitchen bench in the middle of an otherwise very compact space (in a very compact house). I means cooking can be a social activity – several people can chop and stir and roll and fill at once.  Kids can sit up at a stool and be involved, and if they play it right get to listen in on adult conversations.

It only works though if it is not cluttered.  There are bowls of fresh fruit and veg, and a vase of flowers, and a few tools in daily use, like my garlic rock and mortar and pestle,  allowed on the bench, but nothing else.

Which brings me to my pasta maker.  I’ve just got one, yesterday, at a garage sale. I’m not sure at all whether it will be a stayer. The Rules of the Bench mean that it has to live up on a shelf and there are very few kitchen tools that are valuable enough to be taken down and used regularly to earn their space. Mostly I find the effort of washing up, putting away, pulling down, setting up is more than it’s worth.

With pasta, up until now I’ve always just gone with a rolling pin.  Lasagna and tortellini are easy peasy.  Tortellini are even easy and fast enough for the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge. I’ve been playing with a few different tortellini lately, but this has been our favourite.

The Recipe:

Makes two big serves, or three normal ones.

Pasta by Hand:

Put a kettle full of water on to boil. You will need a big pot of boiling water to cook the tortellini.

In a food processor, blitz until the dough just comes together (just a few seconds)

  • 1 cup of bakers flour (I use the same Laucke Wallaby Unbleached Bakers Flour that I use for my sourdough, but any high gluten flour will work)
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 dessertspoons (or 1½ US tablespoons) of olive oil
  • good pinch salt

Flour the workbench and knead very briefly, then leave it to rest for a few minutes while you make the filling.

Lemon Feta Filling

You don’t need to wash the food processor.  Just blend together until smooth-ish

  • 160 gm feta (low fat is fine)
  • 4 dessertspoons (or 3 US tablespoons) plain yoghurt
  • 8 – 10 green olives (or you could substitute capers)
  • a good teaspoon of lemon rind ( I like a heaped teaspoon, but I really like citrus flavours)
  • Grind of black pepper
  • A tiny bit of fresh chili or chili powder

Assembling

Divide the pasta dough into 15 little balls about the size of a large macadamia in its shell.

Flour the bench well, and with a floured rolling pin, roll the balls out very thin.  (If you flip them several times while rolling, you’ll find you can easily get them very thin without sticking.)

Put a spoonful of filling on each circle. Use a pastry brush, or just your fingers dipped in water to wet the edges.  Fold the tortellini over and seal together like a little pastie.  With the fold towards you, bring the two corners round towards you and squeeze them together.

Cook in a big pot of boiling water for just a couple of minutes till they float to the surface.

The Sauce

And while they are cooking, again you don’t need to wash the blender. Just blitz together:
  • a tomato
  • a good handful of sweet basil
  • a little swig of good olive oil

Drain the tortellini, divide into bowls, spoon over a few spoonfuls of sauce and gently toss, and top with a grating of parmesan.

Have you been doing the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge? Links to fast, easy, healthy, midweek vego recipes are welcome.

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Sweet Corn Egg Drop Soup

by Linda on February 28, 2012

This year’s sweet corn has been less than exciting. First it was mice. There’s an Australia-wide mouse plague going on, and the mice around here have heard about it. I’ve tried a  fake owl, all sorts of elaborate protection, and in the end, bringing them in onto the verandah, using our Weber barbeque as a temporary propagation house, and trying (and not always succeeding) to remember to put the lid on every night!

I have ended up with corn seedlings to plant out, but later and fewer than usual.  Usually I have advanced seedlings of sweet corn 20 cm tall and ready to plant out in September, with succeeding plantings through till February. This year the first batch I successfully got up and planted out wasn’t until November, and then it was only a dozen odd plants.

Which exacerbated the second problem.  Corn is wind pollinated and won’t self pollinate. It does best in a block of at least a few dozen plants, with enough warm dry weather when it flowers (at the top) so the wind can blow the pollen from one plant around the silks of the corn on its neighbours.  We’ve have a distinct shortage of warm dry weather lately, and with just a dozen odd plants in the block, a distinct shortage of suitable dads to fertilize the corn.  I’ve had to hand pollinate, breaking a pollen-bearingflower off one plant and brushing it over the silks of all its neighbours.

Some years there is so much sweet corn, I am using up all my repertoire of corn recipes.  This year, half the cobs were missing kernels. I’ve had to actually choose my favourite recipes to use it on. This one made it.

The Recipe

Makes 4 bowls like this. The recipe has eggs, which give it a decent amount of protein, and corn is such a good, filling, high fibre, low GI food that, with some toast for dipping, that’s a good dinner for four.

  • In a little oil, sauté a chopped onion gently until it is transluscent.
  • While the onion is cooking, strip the kernels from about 3 large cobs of sweet corn, or, if your corn crop is like mine, enough to get two cups of corn kernels.
  • Blend the corn kernels and the onion in 2 cups of vegetable stock. You won’t get it completely smooth – you just want it to the texture of creamed corn.
  • Tip back into the pot and use another cup of stock to rinse out the blender and add it to the pot too.
  • I like to add a couple of tablespoons of grape juice (if grapes are on), or sweet white wine (if I have any) at this point, but it isn’t critical. Sometimes I also add a few drops of sesame oil.
  • Add salt and pepper to taste, then bring back to the boil and simmer for ten minutes or so.
  • While it is simmering, beat three eggs in a bowl.
  • Turn the heat off and stir the soup. Pour the egg into the hot, swirling soup in a thin stream.  The heat in the soup will cook it.
  • Serve in bowls with a little finely chopped spring onions, chives, or chili to garnish.
Did you do the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week? Links welcome.

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The Breakfast Challenge – Huevos Diablos (Devil’s Eggs)

December 28, 2011

I wasn’t going to post until the new year, but my love for patterns got in the way, and it seemed a pity not to make it a clean sweep – a Breakfast Challenge recipe for every week of the year.  And this is one I’ve been waiting all year to get to! It is [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Potato Salad with Two Minute Mayonnaise

December 9, 2011

You can’t really call this a proper, by the rules, Breakfast Cereal Challenge recipe. By the rules, breakfast should be low GI – food with “slow burn” carbohydrates to keep you feeling clear headed and energetic through to lunch time.  And potatoes are high GI (though cooking them skin on and mixing them with eggs helps [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Spring Fruit Salad With Real Egg Custard

November 18, 2011

It looks like dessert rather than breakfast doesn’t it? My daughter came home from a sleepover at a friend’s house when she was little, with a very exciting story to tell.  They had apple pie and custard, for dinner, first! And apparently they did it often in her friend’s house and why couldn’t we have [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Scrambled Eggs With Garlic Scapes

November 11, 2011

If you don’t grow them, you probably don’t know garlic scapes.  They’re the best bit of the garlic plant, and since so much of our garlic is imported from China, a bit that is not often seen in shops or markets.  Around this time of year, garlic sends up a central flower stalk with a [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Cheesy Broccoli Omelette

October 6, 2011

This recipe is a riff on Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest, or at least it owes some heritage to that inspired combination of broccoli, lemon, eggs and cheese – which you wouldn’t think would work but it so does. I’m still picking lots of broccoli side shoots every day and using every broccoli recipe in [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Chocolate Custard Cups

August 26, 2011

This recipe is very similar to the 5 Minute Pressure Cooker Baked Custard featured in the Breakfast Cereal Challenge series back at the beginning of winter.  So it’s kinda nice to have the last of the winter recipes in the same vein.  A warm bowl of custard is the ultimate in comfort food, and with [...]

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