If you are a vegetarian, probably better if you don’t click. We hit a wallaby on the way home a little while ago. It was just on dusk, right when the wallabies become most active, and it just jumped out right under the van.
It’s hard to do justice to a ragu in a photo, especially when it’s a winter dinner and there’s no natural light. But a ragu in the slow cooker is bliss to come home to on a winter night, and there are a lot more vegetables in this meal than appear.
I post a lot of vegetarian recipes here but we’re not vegetarian. Sometimes we go for ages eating vegetarian, but more because that’s what I feel like cooking and eating and I have all the ingredients I need without going shopping, than for any philosophical reason. If you’ve ever seriously tried to feed yourself out of a garden, you will know that animals – big ones and very little ones…
Though I’m very critical of the intensive farming of animals for meat, I’m not a vegetarian. If you’ve ever seriously tried to grow enough to feed your own household (let alone enough to fully support it), you will know that food webs include predators, prey, animals, plants, insects, funghi, bacteria – the whole complex web. If you take animals and predation out of the system, it teeters and falls.
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.
Sadly this isn’t one of my better examples of photography! I’ve been waiting all year to post this recipe. Chili con Kanga is good on its own, but this time of year there is a little window of time when avocados, limes and coriander are all in season together, and the salsa with it makes it sensational.
The kangaroo mince in our local supermarket comes from South Australia. It’s really unfortunate. Coz otherwise it fits every criteria for the Witches Kitchen definitions of good, good and good.
Some friends for dinner who had never eaten kangaroo before and were a bit dubious. In this pie, you really can’t tell the meat is kangaroo – it could just as easily be chuck steak. Not that I usually try to disguise it – kangaroo is our red meat of choice these days, for all sorts of reasons – ethical, ecological, cost, health benefits – but taste is also up…
I’ve never got into the habit of cooking ahead. But this one, when I make it I make a decent sized batch and we eat it for a couple of lunches and dinners. It’s just as good cold as hot and good enough to still look forward to the third time.
If you’ve visited here before, you will know my thoughts about kangaroo as the red meat of choice for Australians. The recent controversy about live cattle exports has brought it to the front of my mind again.