The riff of sweet, caramelised figs, salty white cheese, peppery leaves, and nut crunch is a classic one.  And like most classics, for very good reason. This salad was so good it’s been repeated regularly this year since the figs started coming on.  It’s a starring role salad – a dinner party first course, or a totally indulgent lunch, or a plate to take to a party.  If you are in Australia, figs are now in season, and only for a little while.

The Recipe:

Turn the oven on to medium hot to heat up.

Quarter the figs, spread them out on a baking tray and drizzle them with equal quantities of balsamic vinegar and honey.  I used a tablespoon of each with six large figs cut into quarters for this platter salad I took to a party.

For the pecans, in a small saucepan, melt together a teaspoon of honey, a teaspoon of butter, juice of half an orange, a scant teaspoon of garam masala, a pinch of salt, and a pinch of chili powder. Toss the pecans in this mix and spread them out on another baking tray. (I thought about using macadamias first, but the first of ours are only just coming on now, and I still have some of last year’s pecans needing using.)

Put both trays into a medium hot oven and roast for about 20 minutes until the figs are soft and caramelised and the pecans are roasted and their marinade reduced to just a coating.

You should be left in the  fig pan with a couple of tablespoons of juice.  If it is already reduced to a syrup, then you can just cool the lot.  If it is not syrupy yet, pour it into a small saucepan and reduce. If it has turned to sticky toffee, take the figs out and add a little water to dissolve.

Arrange a bed of rocket on a serving tray. Cover with a good sprinkle of cucumber quarters, then a layer of crumbled feta, then the figs and pecans, then a light sprinkle of mint and/or basil leaves.

Drizzle the fig juice over and serve.

I have tomatoes.  Tomatoes for giving away.  The brandywines are still fruit fly free, this late in the season.  Up here in northern NSW, I can usually get them fruit fly free for a few months, but often by now it is one for us and one for the chooks.  I love giving them to people who don’t have a garden and watching that moment of stunned surprise as they taste them.

Tomatoes for drying.  The Principe Borghese make the best dried tomatoes.  They’re small enough to sun dry in one hot day on the dashboard, large enough to be not too fiddly to halve, dense and fleshy without being too juicy. Fully dried they go in a jar covered in olive oil for storing, semi-dried they go in the fridge in olive oil with some garlic and oregano, for adding to pizza or pasta or on crackers or made into tapenade.

Tomatoes for eating fresh, in salads, on sandwiches or as my current favourite breakfast, soft boiled egg and tomato mash on toast.  The yellow cherries are great for this.  They are sweet and not too acid, and they pick without splitting which means I can keep a bowl on the kitchen bench.

Tomatoes for passata and tomato sauce. The little cherries that split easily are great for this.  They are juicy and flavoursome and you don’t need to worry about splits or go to tedious work cutting them.  But I have enough passata on the shelf, and still lots of cherries.

So Salmorejo is a favourite lunch lately.  Salmorejo is a cold soup but that idea doesn’t do it justice. It’s very fast and easy, and it will keep for a day or two in the fridge so you can make ahead of time (which also makes it great for a first course for summer dinner parties or barbeques).  You can also blend left overs with semi-dried tomatoes to make a dip or spread.

Like many really famous traditional recipes, it is simple – just three real ingredients.  But they all have to be nice enough that you go yum even when just tasting them alone.

Salmorejo

Makes 2 serves for lunch, or 4 for as a dinner party first course, or probably even 6 if you serve in cocktail glasses. Multiply by as many as you need.

You need 1 ½ cups of tomato juice.  I blend the little cherry tomatoes in the food processor then strain out the seeds and skins, spending a little bit of effort to stir through as much as I easily can of the jelly surrounding the seeds, since according to Heston Blumenthal that’s where the unami is.

Add a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and salt and black pepper.

Blend the tomato juice with a cup (loosely packed) of sourdough bread, minus crusts.  I’ve made it with wholemeal and even multigrain but this is a recipe that really calls for white bread.  Stale is fine.

The next bit is easy to get right, but also easy to get wrong.  Blend till smooth, then, with the blender going, add ¼ cup nice tasting olive oil in a thin stream.  Thin stream.  If you add it slowly, it will emulsify like mayonnaise does, making the soup creamy.  If you add it too fast it will split.  Stop the blender as soon as it is all in – you don’t want to split off the bitter aromatics in the olive oil.

Traditionally salmorejo is served topped with chopped hard boiled egg and crispy ham, but I like it best with lots of finely chopped cucumber.

Yes, yes, a hundred times yes from me.

It’s good, good and good.

♥  You get to use real eggs, which makes pasta not just empty calories but a decent protein and nutrient source.  If you use wholemeal flour and vegetables in it as well, it can be super food. Who ever thought spag bog could end up a superfood?

♥  You get to use ethically produced eggs and locally produced and/or organic flour and avoid packaging and food miles and the energy costs of processing and storage. And with some flour and an egg or two in the house, a near empty pantry and a teeny herb garden, you can make something so enticing that takeaways or a quick trip to the supermarket lose their lure.

♥  You get to eat something delicious even if it’s just cooking for one after a hard day when boiling water is about the extent of the energy left in the pot. Or if it’s five unexpected teenagers staying for dinner.  Or if it’s a dinner party with a friend’s new partner who just happens to be a five star chef.

Nearly four years ago I found a pasta machine at a garage sale.  I had been making pasta from scratch before that but rolling it out with a rolling pin, which meant that lasagna and ravioli were much more likely than spaghetti or tagliatelle.   I wrote at the time that “I’m not sure at all whether it will be a stayer.” But it has.  It has joined my (short) list of loved kitchen stuff, along with my pressure cooker, food processor, maca cracker (and a tortilla press has joined since then too, but that’s another story).

Mine has no brand name on it and a dodgy handle that looks like it isn’t original.  This post was inspired by a comment from Katie on the last post asking if I know how to choose one.  I’d love your thoughts.  Do you have one you love? Or know what to look out for to avoid?

There are hundreds of pasta recipes on the internet, and I really use just one varied in a few ways – just whole egg, plain flour (preferably high gluten but any will do), a little olive oil, a pinch of salt, knead to make a soft dough, rest if possible (but it works anyway), fold and roll several times to laminate if possible (but it works anyway), roll out thin, cook in boiling water for just a couple of minutes.

I have just a few tricks perhaps worth sharing:

• Fast, simple pasta is still way better than bought dried pasta, and it can be made in literally 5 minutes.  Skip the resting, laminating, drying, fancy shapes – just blend, knead, roll, cook.  It isn’t going to impress the chef, but it works fine.
• A bit of extra effort and you can impress the chef: an egg yolk or two along with the whole egg and it’s a bit richer, rest the dough for an hour or so before rolling it out and it’s a bit more elastic, laminate it by folding it and taking it through the pasta machine a couple of times on each setting and it’s more al dente.  The kids won’t notice but the Masterchef judges might.
• Flour the bench, the machine, your hands, the pasta dough. Toss the rolled and cut pasta in flour and if you are cooking pretty well straight away you don’t need hang it up to dry.
• Get the water really boiling before you put the pasta in, and have the sauce ready too. It cooks in two or three minutes.
• Fresh, home-made pasta is wonderful just tossed with olive oil, finely grated lemon rind, garlic, and maybe some olives or cherry tomatoes or chopped parsley or basil.  Or some cooked pumpkin and crumbled feta.  “Sauce” doesn’t have to be fancy.
• If you are drying it, a broom suspended between the bench and a shelf, or a clothes horse, or a baby gate all make good drying racks.
• Blend cooked vegetables with the pasta dough to make rainbow pasta. Silver beet, spinach, pumpkin, carrot, beets, sweet potato all work really well.  If you use high gluten flour, you can add quite a lot and the pasta is a bit more fragile but it works.
• It goes a long way.  One egg and half a cup of flour makes pasta for two. We had a pasta night at the community centre a while ago, where everyone brought a sauce, and I made pasta for thirty with a dozen eggs and it was eminently do-able.
• It’s very easy to make a double batch and freeze some for when even five minutes of pasta making is beyond the call of duty.  It cooks really well from frozen.  Just dry the pasta enough so that it isn’t sticky (not too long or it goes brittle).  Twirl it up into little nests like in the photo, freeze the nests in a single layer, then when they are frozen you can pack into a container or bag and take them out as needed.

There’s usually a reason why popular vegetables are popular, and ones nobody has ever heard of are ones nobody has ever heard of.

If you were starving celeriac wouldn’t make it into the garden – five months to harvest a root the size of a beet from a plant that takes five times as much room. If you were broke celeriac wouldn’t make it into the garden – an ugly knobbly hairy root that can’t be cleaned up for sale without the cut surfaces oxidising.  If you were on subsistence rations celeriac wouldn’t make it into the garden – even though it’s loaded with good fibre and minerals,  it is only about a third of the kJ of potatoes.  But hey, I have enough time and space, I’ve learned not to judge a vegetable by its cover, and I’m not in any great need of calories!

I plant celeriac same time as celery, from early autumn till mid-winter.  They both have a long slow start, the plants staying small and very vulnerable to drying out for a couple of months.  So it is  May before the first of them get out of the shadehouse and into the garden and August before the first harvest.  Those late winter harvests go wonderfully well as mash with stews and caseroles – a mild creamy sweet flavour perfect for soaking up rich sauces.

These ones were the last of the harvest, cleared out of a bed that the chooks will be going into this week.  This time of year they are either julienned into slaw with cabbage and carrot and roasted pecans and homemade mayonnaise.  Or made into latkes like this.

The Recipe:

This makes eight latkes.

Celeriac oxidises (like potatoes) once it is cut, so you can’t do any of this ahead of time.

• Finely chop a good handful of parsley (or you could substitute dill or fennel).
• Finely dice a small onion or a spring onion (greens and all)
• Put them in a bowl and add salt, pepper, two eggs and a small handful of plain wholemeal flour (or you could substitute besan or polenta or semolina).
• Peel and grate two celeriacs and add to the bowl.  Use your hands to squish it all together.
• Heat up a pan with a couple of centimetres of oil till quite hot, then drop in balls of the celeriac mix and flatten them with the back of a spatula.
• Fry until golden both sides.

The flavour of celeriac is delicate and creamy and sweet, so to my taste they are best just on their own with a side salad, but a yoghurt or sour cream based sauce is ok too.