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Category: Vegetable Recipes

A white bowl of mashed potato with cabbage in various shades of green all through it and a knob of butter melting on top.

Colcannon

Colcannon is Irish mashed potato with cabbage, and it is one of those surprisingly wonderful recipes that have you going “aha! I understand how this became a national dish”. It has just four ingredients and like any of those classics that every kid remembers grandma making, there are more versions than you would think possible with so few ingredients. This is mine.

Gremolata

This is so simple, yet it is one of my most used recipes this time of year, when both parsley and lemons are in glut and dinner is often a long slow-cooked soup or stew that could do with some brightening up.

A large pile of leafy greens, lots of different shades and textures, all of the named ones pretty identifiable in there. At the top, you can just see the bottom of an EzyYo container with some yoghurt in it, a blue plate with a block of white cheese, four eggs, and a bowl of red cherry tomatoes. On the right, you can see half of an unbaked pie crust filled with baking paper and beans ready for blind baking.

Picnic Pie

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.

Barbequed Marinated Eggplant Skewers

I picked a couple of eggplants on my picking walk, and there were at least another three or four needing to be picked this week. It had to be eggplant for dinner. These barbeque skewers turned out so well that I had to write out the recipe even if just to remember it myself, for next eggplant glut, next week.

A salad on a plate, with lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts, cucumber, red onions, mayonnaise, and bunya nut felafels that look like little rissoles crispy brown on the outside with a hint of something green on the inside.

Bunya nut felafels

It’s bunya nut season, and though it’s not one of the bi-or-triennial bumper seasons like last year was, it is worth checking the ground around your favourite bunya pines for fallen cones. Here’s how I process them, and how to make bunya felafels.

A white bowl with a decorative edge, with fettucini pasta in a sauce. We can see onion, eggplant tomato, basil.

Pasta alla Norma (Eggplant Pasta)

Sometimes I think we overelaborate recipes. Last night I made a Middle Eastern style stuffed eggplants for dinner, and it was good, but when I compare it with tonight’s Pasta alla Norma, I think it was over-elaborated. In-season produce needs so little. Pasta alla Norma does justice to eggplants – so good, so much better than you would think for something that simple.