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.
Madagascar beans are a tropical semi-perennial bean – they kinda take the niche occupied by seven-year beans (aka scarlett runner beans) in more temperate climates. Reliable, prolilfic, versatile.
This time of year it’s the tomatoes sun dried in the peak of summer that are the treasure. They go in pasta and gnocchi and minestrone and on pizza. A whole handful go into ragu or bean stew. They go on crackers with feta and in tapenade for spreading on toast. And I have to admit, I have been known to eat them straight from the jar.
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.
The thing I love about snake beans is that you pick all these today, and tomorrow there’s the same amount again. And the other thing I love about snake beans is cutting them into finger lengths, lightly blanching, and dressing with a garlic-olive oil-balsamic-soy-honey dressing while they are hot.
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
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.