vegetarian

Salad Spinner

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3890 smWe had our first salad from the new, spring-planted lettuces yesterday—a carnival of colours and flavours!

It got me thinking about salad, and the preparation of salad.

Which of course, led me to think about salad spinners.

Now, I don’t own a TV, so I don’t know if there are still salad spinner commercials, but I remember back in the 1980s when they were all the rage—fancy machines that spun your salad leaves dry. A quick Google search tells me that salad spinners are still out there, though whether they rank as such a gourmet sort of tool anymore or not, I have no idea.

Growing up, I never considered the water on my lettuce leaves. You washed it, gave it a good shake, and that was that.

But when I married, I found my husband prefers dry lettuce. I wasn’t about to buy a salad spinner, and I wasn’t going to put my lettuce in the spin cycle of the washing machine, as I’ve heard some people do (What?!).

Instead, we use a high-tech, oh-so-fancy way of spinning our salad.

Remember when you were a kid and you learned the trick where you swing a bucket full of water around without spilling a drop? Now, put your salad greens in a tea towel (I use my cheese cloths—they’re perfect!), hold onto the corners, step outside, and do the same. A few good twirls, and your salad greens are nicely dried.

Best of all, the kids LOVE doing it, especially if they get to spray a sibling with the water as they whip the towel around. One more dinner preparation task Mum doesn’t have to do!

Out of the Comfort Zone—Lavender Cupcakes

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3879 cropsmAs with everything in life, the only way to grow is to move outside your comfort zone, to push yourself beyond your normal boundaries.

In that spirit, several months ago I photocopied a recipe for lavender cupcakes from a book I checked out of the library.

I had to wait until the lavender was flowering to make them, but today was the day.

I don’t generally like floral flavours, and lavender is an incredibly strong one. The only way I normally use lavender is as a small component of a fresh herb mixture I put on the outside of some of my cheeses. I’ve never used it as the only flavouring for anything.

I was intrigued, but dubious. Would the cupcakes even be edible? Who wants to munch on a lavender flower? Eaten directly, lavender flowers have an overpowering bitter resinous taste.

But then, so does rosemary, and I was won over to rosemary shortbread when my mother-in-law made it for us a few years ago.

I vowed to remain open-minded.

The cupcakes came out of the oven, and I iced them with lavender icing.

With some trepidation, we tried them.

“Peculiar,” said my daughter, a thoughtful look on her face. “Yes. Not bad, just…peculiar.”

I agree. This isn’t a recipe I will necessarily make again, but I’m glad I did it, at least once.

Fennel Salad

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_3864 smIn the course of clearing the winter weeds from the garden every spring, I always find some volunteer fennel that’s perfect for the picking.

With our summery weather this week, I decided to make a simple fennel salad with my find. It was perfect with a light pasta for a hot day, but would also be excellent as a side dish to lighten a heavy winter gratin.

4 fennel bulbs, plus a few fronds

4-5 sprigs flat-leaf parsley

1 ½ Tbsp each olive oil and white wine vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

Slice the fennel as thinly as possible, and coarsely chop a small amount of the frond. Pull the leaves off the parsley. Whisk together the oil and vinegar, and add salt and pepper to taste. Toss the fennel and parsley with the oil and vinegar.

 

A Saucy Meal

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100_3799 smI made kūmara (sweet potato) chips for dinner today. Normally I would just serve them with ketchup. But our new chickens are already laying, and Ian celebrated by making mayonnaise with one of the new eggs. I remembered a bit of salsa verde sitting in the fridge, and voila—we had a very saucy meal!

It was quite the mix of cultures—ketchup originated in China, salsa verde (my version with tomatillos) is Mexican, mayonnaise is French (or Spanish, depending on which side of the border you live on). And the sauces were all served on a South American vegetable that spread to Polynesia around 700 AD, and came to New Zealand as a traditional Maori food.

But there was no clash among these cultures this evening. All three sauces tasted great on the chips!

So…

¡Buen provecho!

Bon appétit!

Kia mākona!

Chī hǎo!

Enjoy!

Everyday Cake

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3796 smI made an ‘everyday’ cake today—a whip-it-out sort of chocolate sheet cake. I normally don’t frost my everyday cakes, but I had a hankering for peanut butter with chocolate, so I looked for a peanut butter icing recipe…and didn’t find one I really liked the look of.

So I tried a new one—a broiled icing—a hot mixture of butter, honey and peanut butter spread on the warm cake and lightly broiled.

“Hmmm…Looks like moth-eaten dragon breath,” said my daughter when she saw it.

“Caramel sludge!” declared my son.

“It looks more like a disease than an icing,” I said.

But the disparaging comments ended when we tasted it—very nutty and not too sweet.

“Pretty good, even if it does look…weird.”

For an everyday cake, that’s really all that matters.

Lemon Curd

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_3769 smContinuing with the vitamin C theme from yesterday, this morning’s breakfast was lemon poppy seed muffins with lemon curd.

Lemon curd is one of my favourite excesses. On muffins, scones, cake, or even my morning granola, it is a marvellous burst of flavour that sparkles.

Joy of Cooking (the 1997 edition), has two lemon curd recipes, one of which is reduced-fat lemon curd. I ignored the reduced-fat recipe for years, but one day I didn’t have enough eggs to make the regular recipe, so I tried the reduced-fat one.

Much to my surprise, the entire family preferred the low-fat recipe. I don’t pretend it’s any better for us. Indeed, it’s almost certainly less healthy, as it has twice the sugar (to compensate for the reduced fat). But less butter and more lemon juice make it even tangier than the full-fat recipe.

So for perhaps the first time in my life, I prefer a low-fat version of something! Now I’m working on the recipe, notching back the sugar (because the low-fat version really does taste a bit too sweet), to get the perfect balance of sweet/fat/sour.

Of course, that means I’ve got to make lemon curd regularly…just for scientific purposes, of course. 😉

 

Doing my best

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3242 copyMy post Springtime Pests was picked up by World Organic News today, and I was bemused.

Not so much that the post was picked up, but that I’ve never particularly thought of myself as an organic gardener.

In the same way, I rarely think of myself as vegetarian.

Or as a blogger.

And, clearly, I’ve not got the blogging thing down, because I have never tagged a post as ‘organic’, and only recently thought to tag a post as ‘vegetarian’.

I grow food.

I eat food.

My only claim is that I think about what I eat and grow, and how I do it.

I am neither perfectly organic, nor perfectly vegetarian, but I do my best.

That’s all we can ask of anyone.

PB and J Cupcakes

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3693 smI love PB & J sandwiches. So why not a PB & J cupcake? I’ve never tried this before, and I was a little worried it wouldn’t work, so when I made peanut butter cupcakes last night, I only put jam in half of them (chocolate buttons on the other half). But next time, I’ll do them all with jam!

Just make a little well at the top of the cupcake batter and put a teaspoon of your favourite jam (I used strawberry) into the well before baking. The gooey, jammy centre is delicious inside the nutty exterior!

Cabbage Salad

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

100_3672 smAt Christmastime last year, I walked into a bookstore. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but I know I wasn’t looking for a cookbook.

But there, facing outward on the shelf was Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. The simple beauty of the cover made me stop. I picked up the book and opened it, and suddenly my will was no longer my own.

There was an entire chapter on eggplants, and another on mushrooms, and pulses, and brassicas. There was even a chapter titled “Green Things”, featuring everything from artichokes to broad beans to asparagus. All accompanied by mouth-watering photographs.

I had to have the book. So I gave it to my husband for Christmas.

This afternoon, I was faced with cabbage in the garden that either needed to be picked or weeded. I chose to harvest. I had a longing for a cabbage salad, but didn’t want cole slaw. I went to Ottolenghi’s book, and found the perfect recipe.

Not that I actually made the recipe from the book, of course. It called for macadamia nuts, two different kinds of cabbage, mango, papaya, and fresh chilli…none of which I had. But I was intrigued and inspired, particularly by the dressing, which involved lime juice, lemongrass, maple syrup soy sauce and chilli flakes reduced over high heat to a thick syrup, then mixed with sesame oil and vegetable oil.

The original salad had you caramelise the macadamia nuts in butter, sugar and salt. I did the same with pumpkin seeds. I substituted oranges for the mango and papaya, used my one variety of cabbage, and fresh mint and cilantro from the garden.

The result was a marvellously complex, fresh, and delicious salad.

And even more importantly, I learned new flavour combinations and new techniques (the caramelized nuts, and the reduced dressing) for future salads. The best kind of recipe!

Lazy Woman’s Chocolate Yo-Yos

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3645 smThese are perhaps the easiest cookies ever. They’re great if you just can’t bring yourself to beat butter, or you’ve forgotten to soften butter beforehand. They’re not the best cookies in the world, but they’re perfectly passable. They’re great cookies for young kids to make, because they don’t require a mixer. These were inspired by a sugar drop cookie recipe in Joy of Cooking.

2 ½ cups all purpose flour

3 Tbsp cocoa

1 ½ tsp baking powder

¾ tsp salt

¾ cup sugar

¾ cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, combine the sugar and oil. Add the eggs and vanilla to the sugar and oil, and beat well. Add the flour mixture and mix thoroughly.

Roll the dough into 1.5 cm balls and flatten them slightly onto an ungreased baking sheet. Bake 8-10 minutes at 190°C.

When the cookies are cool, sandwich them together with frosting (I used cream cheese frosting left over from last week’s cupcakes).

I tried mixing in white chocolate chips this time, but the dough is so greasy, they just popped out. If you want to add chocolate chips, I suggest you do it by pressing them in as you roll the dough into balls, rather than trying to mix them in.