June 4th, 2009
The cold has settled in and we’re in for a long run of wintery days by the looks of it! One comfort is food – soups and homecooked meals fill the kitchen with gorgeous smells that’ll bring them running. Look for dishes based on seasonal vegetables, or inexpensive vegetables which one tends to pass over in favour of something more exotic (think cabbage – how many times do you walk past that and buy something three times the price because you think cabbage is boring).
Potatoes are an excellent ingredient to fill hungry tummies. They’re especially good for us when jacket-baked.
How do you get those gorgeously-crunchy potato skins on jacket-baked potatoes? Easy. Scrub the potatoes and while they’re still damp sprinkle them with salt. Move them to a dry part of the bench, turn them over and sprinkle the top side also with salt. Transfer to an oven preheated to 200°C / 400°F (fanbake) and bake for at least 1 1/2 hours, even longer – up to 2 hours. Immediately you remove the potatoes from the oven, split them in half with a sharp knife, otherwise the steam inside the potato will soften the skin. Either serve as they are, with butter, salt and pepper, or with sour cream, or top them with a homemade Bolognese or tomato sauce – such a great way to use up small amounts of leftover pasta sauce, and you don’t need any added fat!
Alternatively, scoop out the flesh and mash with a little hot milk and butter and pile it back into the potatoes, top with grated cheese and grill until sizzling. Or mix the potato flesh with any manner of ingredients before stuffing it back into the potato shell: chopped ham or bacon or roast chicken, chopped spring onions or snipped chives, canned beans or sweet corn, chopped onion and celery softened in a little olive oil, and so on and so forth. The recipe here is one my kids loved when they were growing up.
Jacket Potatoes with Bacon and Sweet Chilli Sauce
One of the great things about pasta dishes is their speed. They’re also nutritious and fill you up. I always keep canned beans in the pantry, and many types of pasta shapes, and with a bunch of rocket from the garden, a meal like this is easy on the budget, and on me – over and done in twenty minutes.
Rocket & Beans with Fusilli
A mug of homemade soup is an inexpensive nutritious after-school warm-up.
Make the soup, even a double batch, then when it is cool, line soup mugs with snap-lock bags and fill with soup. Seal and freeze, then remove mug. Then you have the perfect amount to thaw quickly in the microwave (or in a saucepan) to fill a mug. Potatoes help thicken the soup, and leeks are inexpensive at this time of year. You could use homemade chicken stock in this soup, and even swirl in a little leftover roast chicken at the end.
Chunky Leek and Potato Soup
Tags: Baked Potatoes, Budget Cooking, comfort food, Homecooked Meals, Jacket-baked Potatoes, Pasta, Potatoe Recipe, potatoes, Soup, Winter Food, Winter Recipes
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May 28th, 2009
Radicchio appears to be native to Italy, and the three types are named after the towns of their origin: Chioggia, Treviso and Castelfranco, all in the Veneto region. Chioggia is the most common radicchio found here, available pretty well throughout the year. It grows in a tight ball, resembling a small red cabbage and should feel weighty for its size. It has an agreeable bitterness and is excellent in salads on its own, mixed with other leaves, or with fennel. Treviso has long tapering red leaves with meaty white ribs, resembling a white witloof in appearance. It’s milder in flavour and is excellent grilled, baked or roasted and in risotto (I used the Chioggia variety for the recipe above, as Treviso is not readily available, and found it quite successful). Castelfranco is more open, like a young butterhead lettuce, creamy in colour, tinged with pink and speckled with purpley-red. It’s used in salads. The latter two are seasonal, appearing in late autumn.
Here’s one of my favourite salads with radicchio. Capers, garlic and parmesan cheese make a gutsy dressing that stands up well against the bitterness of radicchio. Just be warned; it’s very moreish!
Radicchio Salad with Caper & Parmesan Dressing
Tags: Capers, Garlic, Parmesan, Radicchio, Salad
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April 1st, 2009
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The start of autumn (fall) always fills me with great anticipation. I love it as much as summer, maybe more, and as much as spring, and certainly more than winter. Along with crisp morning air, cloudless warm days and cooler night temperatures, it’s the produce which marks a definite seasonal change. Top of the list is apples, so crisp they spray juice everywhere as you bite into them, then there are pears, kiwifruit, tamarillos, passionfruit and feijoas. Now feijoas (often known as pineapple guava in the US)… I won’t beat around the bush – I am addicted to them!
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We used to eat bags of them when I was a kid. We’d scrabble around under the feijoa trees picking up any that felt firm, leaving the rest to rot, and take our horde to the back steps outside the kitchen and gorge ourselves. No knife, no spoon. Just bite into the astringent skin and suck out the contents. We’d munch up a bit of the skin, too, which seemed to balance the fruit’s sweetness. I don’t know what it is about home-grown feijoas, but they’re always smaller and sweeter than commercially grown fruit. We’ve got two baby trees now – they were about 30cm high when we brought them 18 months ago from the nursery – with about 30 feijoas between them. Next year we’ll get a monster harvest, I’m sure of it, then I’ll relive those childhood days.
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They tell me that commercially-grown feijoas are never left to fall off the tree. The feijoa has to be treated carefully because it ripens from the inside, and it bruises easily, too. Pickers look for an abscission, a natural separation between the fruit and the stalk, which indicates the fruit is ripe and about to fall. Then they give the fruit a little nudge and collect it as it falls, avoiding bruising. If fruit is picked hard, it will never ripen. Firm feijoas will ripen after a day or two in the fruit bowl. If you’re not ready to eat them, store them in the refrigerator for 2-3 days. They also freeze very well – either peeled and kept whole, or chopped or pureed.
How do you pick a good feijoa? You can be sure that if they feel soft, they are past their best. A ripe feijoa should should yield a little to pressure, like an avocado. When you cut a feijoa open, the jellied sections in the centre of the fruit should be clear. If they are white, the fruit is not ripe, and if they are tinged with brown the feijoa is past its best. Perfection is a scented fruit with creamy-coloured flesh and clear juicy jellied sections. Mmmmm.
I love the tropical fruit scents which burst out when they’re cut open. Crisp and fresh like a Marlbourgh sauvignon blanc. And the taste, a heady mix of pineapple, banana, guava, melon and pear, with a sharpish lemony tang and lingering ripe strawberry taste. One is never enough. So just as well that this year the Feijoa Growers Association is predicting a bumper crop, thanks to our great summer weather. And eat plenty of them you should as they are high in vitamin C, and also contain anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.
Here are three easy recipes to try, but feijoas can also be used in smoothies, in salsas and sambals, in muffins and cupcakes, in place of apple in apple cakes and sponge puddings, and believe it or not, they are great roasted around pork.
Four Fruit Crumble
Feijoa and Banana Crumble
Feijoas in Red Wine Syrup
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Tags: autumn fruits, crumbles, desserts, feijoa recipes, feijoa tips, Feijoas, pineapple guava
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February 2nd, 2009
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I was hopeful that our Jersey Benne potatoes would be ready for the Christmas table, but as the big day drew close it become obvious that there was not much going on in the potato patch and that like many other people we’d be paying a fortune for a box or two of organically grown new potatoes for Christmas lunch. Oh yes, the plants had shot up, flowered and were wilting, but several excavations revealed nothing – just hairy dirt, really. We were bitterly disappointed – I had hoped to eat homegrown potatoes in the Year of the Potato. Oh well, we left the plants in the ground in the hope that something might grow, even a cupful of tiny tatters would be nice.
But today was the day and we decided to get in with a garden fork and forage. And there they were! I nearly cried with excitement – as did Remo, my husband and gardening buddy. I don’t feel this way about everything we grow, but potatoes, well, potatoes, they’re engraved on my heart (there’s a little red heart with an arrow going through it with ‘I love potatoes’ on it inside me, for sure). It’s the Irish in me. I can eat them any which way and love them every way.
The amazing thing about your own potatoes is not just the flavour, but the texture. Being freshly dug, the peel just slips off under running water with the dirt, and the texture is fudgey and dense and when they cook they smell all sort of mealy and starchy and remind me of my mum. And they’re loaded with Vitamin C, a great healthy antioxidant.
There’s not much to be done to new potatoes. They’re so good just with butter, salt and pepper, but my daughter Ilaria doesn’t eat butter so she has hers with extra virgin olive oil. I steam them, rather than boil them, because, sitting above hot water, rather than in it, preserves more of their flavour and nutrients (Vitamin C is water soluble, so you lose some of if you soak potatoes, or when you cook potatoes in water) and there’s less chance of the potatoes becoming waterlogged or overcooking.
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The thing about growing potatoes is this: you don’t need a big garden to grow them – you can buy potato tube thingies – they’ve got a name I’m sure but I just can’t think of it – and grow them on your deck. Or convert a clean trash can (metal or plastic, but plastic is lighter and easier to move around) into a potato grower. Drill a few hole in the bottom and on the sides coming about one-third of the way up the container and fill the bottom with any smashed crockery or broken terracotta pots you might have around the place (we’ve always got a stack of broken things, and this is a great way to recycle them). Cover the broken china with 15cm of rich potting compost. You could use dirt and beef it up with seaweed or plant food if you want. Then take half a dozen sprouting seed potatoes and sit them on the compost with their sprouts pointing up. Cover them with more potting compost and give them a good watering. Once the green leaves appear, cover them with more compost, and just keep on with this little game letting them grow, then covering them, until you reach the top of the container. Keep them watered throughout and in a sunny position. Make sure not to drown them with water, or they’ll rot, but don’t let them get dry, either or they’ll not grow well, just regular and even watering. Once the plants flower and die down and the leaves dry and turn brown, dig ‘em up!
And lucky old me, we’ve only dug up a quarter of the potato patch so we’ve got plenty more potatoes to unearth!
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Tags: cooking, gardening, growing potatoes, potatoes, preparing potatoes
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