The blog is neglected, the house is neglected, the garden is neglected, but the kale keeps giving.
In the scale of foods that are Popeye worthy, kale is about as dense a source of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants as you can get, including Vitamin K which is important for bone density and for brain health, and Vitamin A which is important for skin and eyes. But more uniquely, it’s also a source of some important anti-cancer phytochemicals.
My kale is starting to flower, so it was time to finish it off. This hot weather will bring cabbage moths and aphids around anyhow. It has been really hardy and trouble free, and has borne really well for months now. I’ve used it regularly at least a couple of times a week.
Which is a two part dish, consisting of an Asian style omelette in a mildly ginger laced vegetable stock sauce. It’s surprisingly addictive! I used duck eggs for this one, just because we have them, but chook eggs work just as well.
This is a bit of a Tuesday Night Vego Challenge rules cheat. Now the days have started really lengthening, even the geriatric chooks are laying so handmade pasta with real eggs was in my mind. And then I was looking for a cake tin deep in the back of the shelf and came across a fluted flan tin that I forgot I had. And in a moment of inspiration realised…
End of winter, it’s been a hard few months, and I don’t often get sick, but I feel like I might. Phó is my go-to dinner when I feel like I need to ward off I-don’t-know-what. This isn’t a real Phó, but it’s got that ginger/garlic/chili/anise/cinnamon/lemon grass spice profile that my immune system seems to crave.
This is probably a contradiction in terms. Ribbolita is at its best the next day. But it is such a good winter warmer, such a hearty, filling, healthy, cheap mid-winter vego meal, that I needed to rise to the challenge of making it make-able mid-week.
If you don’t have kale, I think the filling in this recipe will work just as well with cabbage if you reduce the water and the cooking time a little.
We stopped in at a fish shop on the way home from visiting our daughter at the coast yesterday. I had just bought a half kilo of squid, thinking calamari, when I noticed they had snapper frames at a ridiculously low price.
Nowadays I quite often make a meal that features vegetables as the main, not the side dish, and I very rarely use any water that will be drained off. If you garden, fresh vegetables are so gorgeous that it is hard to improve on just serving them as themselves.