Look at my silver beet! It won’t be like that for much longer. Pretty soon it will think about going to seed. But what made me think about this post was not just the silver beet begging for a photo but a conversation with a friend this week about how we decide what to cook.
This morning on my picking walk, I picked silver beet, lucullus, chives, spring onion greens, nasturtium leaves, dandelion leaves, chickweed, scurvy weed, aragula, leaf amaranth, sweet potato leaves, lemon basil, dill, oregano, parsley, sorrel, curly kale, dino kale, rocket, warrigal greens, molokhia. So I made a last minute pie to take to a picnic lunch.
The silver beet looked so gorgeous this morning, and the patch needed thinning. And the basket just filled and filled. Spankakopika it has to be.
This is a bit of a Tuesday Night Vego Challenge rules cheat. Now the days have started really lengthening, even the geriatric chooks are laying so handmade pasta with real eggs was in my mind. And then I was looking for a cake tin deep in the back of the shelf and came across a fluted flan tin that I forgot I had. And in a moment of inspiration realised…
Saag is the dish I order whenever I go to an Indian restaurant, and this time of year, with silver beet and mustard both in bulk in the garden, one of my home cooking regulars. I posted a vegetarian Saag recipe a few weeks ago, in the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge series. This meat version is, sadly, no more photogenic.
Saag just isn’t photogenic. Unfortunately, because it is very delicious, and I have bucketloads of silverbeet (chard if you are not in Australia) in the garden at the moment and saag is one of the very best recipes I know to use bucketloads of it (and still want to come back for more tomorrow).
At the moment I am giving away armloads of silverbeet to visitors and using every silverbeet recipe in the repertoire, but any day now I expect the grasshoppers to arrive and the urge to bolt to seed to win out and the bounty will be over. Seasonal eating. Make the best of it while it lasts, then leave it off the menu till next winter.