Look at my silver beet! It won’t be like that for much longer. Pretty soon it will think about going to seed. The grasshoppers will arrive, and the frizzle days of summer, and that will be the end of the season of leafy greens.
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. One of my very favourite ways to use a huge bunch of silver beet is Saag, vegetarian or with meat. And that’s where this lot is going. It’s been simmering now all afternoon in the slow cooker smelling delicious, using excess solar power, to be served with sourdough garlic naan bread, homemade yoghurt and a sprinkle of chopped coriander on top. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it!
I always, always, start with what needs to be used, in the garden or the fridge or the pantry. If we harvest a big bunch of bananas, I start thinking banana bread for lunchboxes. If the yoghurt in the fridge needs to make way for a new batch, I start thinking labneh. If there are macadamia nuts in the pantry, the pesto is never ever going to be made with pine nuts.
That doesn’t mean I don’t get cravings, or at least “what I feel like eating”, but if it’s a curry kind of dinner I’m hankering for, it will be Creamy Green Bean Curry With Macadamias in autumn, Pumpkin and Chick Pea Curry in winter, Egg Curry in spring. If it’s pasta, it will be Fettucini With Kale Pesto in spring, Pasta Puttanesca in summer, Lemon Feta Tortellini in autumn. If silver beet is looking gorgeous and needing to be eaten, I can take it in the direction of Picnic pie, Spanakopita, Gozlemes, Frittata, Pakora, Polenta, Pasta, Saag. But the starting point is always what’s in gorgeous seasonal excess, at its peak in quantity and quality.
I can think of a dozen reasons to advocate for this style – it’s frugal, it avoids food waste (and the greenhouse gas consequences), with fresh, in season ingredients you don’t need to do much to make it gourmet, dinner can nearly always be expanded just by adding more of whatever was in excess in the first place, which warms my hospitality gene.
You can stay out of supermarket sticky traps for a long time and if you do it well you never have to face the dreaded task of fridge (or freezer, or pantry) clean out. Fresh ingredients at the peak of their season will have had less need for pesticides, they have more nutrients, less food miles, less cold storage, less packaging, and they taste better. That’s eleven. You can add number twelve in the comments!
I don’t think there’s any special skill to thinking about what to cook this way. There’s a certain familiarity with recipes and ingredients that is useful, but the internet is so chokka with recipes these days, you really just have to type in key ingredients to find dozens of options. After a little while you start to build up a repertoire of keepers. Before this blog, I had a handwritten scrapbook but even then it was organised by season and key ingredients rather than by course.
I think it’s just a mindset, but it’s one with a real cascade of consequences at both a household and a global level. There’s research that one-third of global greenhouse emissions come from food systems, and a serious percentage of that is sheer food waste, and that’s such a waste.
