Turmeric likes my subtropical climate, which is very lucky because fresh turmeric is one of my all-time favourite spices and hugely healthy. I have a patch of it that takes absolutely no attention. All I do with it is dig up a rhizome when I want it for curries or stir fries or to add a touch of spiciness to just about anything.
Search Results for: lemon beans
This recipe fills two dozen wonton wrappers – what we get in a packet of wrappers from the supermarket. Using bought ones makes the recipe really really fast and easy, but making your own isn’t hard especially if you use a pasta machine, so I’ll include the wrapper recipe too.
Guavas are in glut right now and I keep seeing unharvested trees everywhere. Guava jelly, which can be made as jam to spread on toast (just by using half the quantity of sugar) but is spectacular as a firm jelly to eat with cheese on crackers is the only really good thing I know to do with a glut of guavas, but it’s a really good thing to do with it.
My favourite variety of beans at the moment – brown seeded snake beans. So long as I can keep water up to them, they don’t mind how hot it gets, and they bear really prolifically over a month or more. They make a great salad, blanched then dressed with a balsamic olive oil garlic dressing while they are still warm. Or, like this, lightly sauteed with lots of garlic, then cherry tomatoes and lemon basil thrown in at the last minute, pan turned off, mixed to warm through so the flavours blend.
Since I’ve discovered roasting the chilis and garlic first, harissa has become one of my very favourite things to do with the summer chili glut. It’s fast and easy to make, and though it’s spicy hot it’s not raw – it’s also complex and interesting with lots of depth.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and when life gives you a heat wave, make sundried tomatoes. Last year I sun dried the principe borghese and made the yellow cherries into passata. The flavour of the passata was good but the yellow colour was just a bit too odd for many dishes. This year I thought I might try sun drying the yellow ones and making passata from the red ones.
This has been a very recurring staple in our household lately, one of my very favourite recipes for both dinner parties and just us at home. It’s really fast and easy and cheap and healthy for weeknight dinners, but also good enough that it’s been our dinner party go-to recipe lately too. It’s easy to glam it up a bit and serve with crusty sourdough to make it special.