There’s a little mind shift I’ve found helps in feeling at home cooking eastern Asian style. Most of the time with western dishes, I amble along, starting with what I have, multitasking, substituting, tasting and adjusting as I go, ducking out to the garden for some herbs or garnishes as I think of them, and getting plates out and ready while it cooks.
My glut crop this week is sweet corn – the last round of sweet corn for the year. Sweet corn is one of the trickier crops for a home gardener. What goes wrong?
Edamame are green soy beans, and most Australians anyway only ever encounter them in a sushi bar. They’re easy to grow in a garden though, and to me, they work so well as a snack food because they have a distinct nuttiness to them. They remind me more of boiled peanuts than anything else.
Today is just the second day in the last two months that it hasn’t rained, a gorgeous sky blue day but my garden is still…
We were all flooded in over the weekend, so we invited neighbours for a curry night. Curry nights are a great kind of potluck dinner, needing no co-ordination, and allowing people to go simple or as gourmet as they like.
I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about gazpacho, until I realised it was the look of it, not the taste, that was uninspiring. The problem with gazpacho is always the colour. If you use red tomatoes and capsicums, but then mix them with green cucumbers and capsicums, you end up with a kind of khaki that doesn’t look very appetising. But its the season of red and gold, and in…
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.
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.