This recipe is frugal on the work and energy, but really it’s not for the sake of keeping mangoes I make pickles. It’s for the sake of a condiment, a little bit of flavour sparkle to go with curries or dhal, or on crackers with cheese. Just a little spoonful of a really good Indian pickle can make a very plain lentils and rice dish seem like a feast.
There have been several disparate themes mulling around vying for attention as my focus for 2013. I’ve been thinking about packaging, community, and how sharing food is so central, and I’ve been thinking about the conversation that is surfacing in permaculture circles lately about the misconception that permaculture is about self-sufficiency
I’m very proud of my sourdough these days. I’m making an eleven grain and seed mix that costs cents, takes minutes, and tastes good enough that I’m making it twice a week most weeks with little incentive to experiment. Here it is in pictures.
This Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipe uses egg noodles, which are exactly the same as pasta. I’m a relatively recent convert to home-made pasta and noodles. For years I used to think home-made pasta 1. required a pasta machine, and 2. was just a carrier for the sauce anyway. In fact I was wrong on both counts.
Two years ago I posted Part One of Homegrown Coffee. If you ignore the fact that I skipped ahead a couple of years, we’re now up to Part Two! This year’s coffee crop has been drying on a screen door on the verandah for a couple of months now. The beans are hard and dry and ready for the final stages.
Home made from scratch pasta, made with real eggs, meets all the Witches Kitchen definitions of good – it’s high protein nutrient dense good-for-you. It’s made with local, in season ingredients without excessive packaging or storage costs good-for-the-world. And it tastes very very good.
One of the interesting things I’ve got out of this nearly-a-year-now of Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipes is how often all that is needed is a bit of pre-thinking to allow fast, easy weeknight vego recipes. I guess it’s because besides eggs, the main vegetarian protein foods are beans or ferments.
This is the last of the potato based Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipes for this year. We’ve had a nice month of eating new potatoes most days and the basket is getting low. From now on it will get too hot, particularly at night, for potatoes to crop well here.
It must be the moment in the year when eggs and potatoes both peak together to create the perfect seasonal food moment.
I have a simple, fast, comfort food dhal recipe in my Breakfast Cereal Challenge series from last year – Breakfast Dhal. But I actually managed to harvest some pigeon peas despite the parrots best tries to get through them all, and that was worth a super dhal recipe.