How does you garden grow?

Had a very nice day in the garden today. It was well overdue! The snow peas were suffering from the extremes of weather that we've been experiencing - first the searing, drying westerly winds, then a few days of rain, and their continued battle against the slugs meant that they had really come to the end of their time.

So, I picked the last few peas, and pulled the plants. And it didn't stop there... I picked our spinach, parsley and rocket, and hunted all the grubs off the cabbages. I built up around the leeks again - I'm so looking forward to using our leeks! - and planted out some holy basil and some sweet genovese basil. I put some fertiliser on the sweet peas (I thought they should have been flowering already, but it doesn't seem so!), and planted a beefheart tomato.

We got these great little implements for watering our plants. They're a plastic spike with a few little holes in them. You fill the spike with sand, then using an old soft drink bottle, put that into the mouth end of the spike. It seems to work a treat, and for those of us with busy lifestlyes, you can't really go wrong with anything that will look after itself when it comes to water!

So, we had a glut of spinach and parsley today, so I made a few magic recipes that invented out of my imagination. As usual, quantities are only approximate, because I go by feel...

You can see the big pile of spinach that I used here:


After washing and chopping finely (almost shredding) I did the following:

3 eggs, whites whisked to frothy peaks, yolks beaten with about 1 cup of milk and/or cream, then all folded in together gently.

I also added some garlic that I had simmered and then pounded into a paste. I boiled them so that they would n't be too strong and they seemed to have worked out fine.

I then tossed the damp spinach with:
3/4 cup of type "00" flour, with 1 1/2 tsp baking powder (making a rudimetary Self Raising Flour)

Then I chopped up some boiled spuds (ideally, you can use cold leftovers, but I had to use mine that were still warm) into round slices, and in a lined, well-greased spring-form pan, I formed these into a layer, reminiscent of a tart tartin. I then put my spinach and flour mix on top of this, then poured my combined wet mix over the top. Bunged it into a medium oven for about 30 minutes, et voila, this delicious concoction appeared!
I am a big fan of eating these types of things doused in a rather nice tasting balsamic vinegar.

As you can see, the potatoes achieved a nice golden colour, thanks to the butter I used when greasing my pan.

Also, you might notice that I said to put the potatoes in the pan first - that's how they ended up on top...using a spring-form pan for these types of dishes really make life so much easier...

I also made some dip/spread from the parsley (though there are really buckets of it left so will ahve to think of some more things to do with it before I resort to chopping and freezing!).

250g of fetta, 3 schallots, handful of almonds, parsley to the hearts desire...

Blend everything, without the fetta, until coarsely chopped, then add a thin stream of olive oil for moisture. Then, add the fetta (chopped first is the best approach) until you reach the desired consistency, from a coarse pesto through to a smooth paste.

I think you could also do this with things like garlic, parmesan, pine nuts, maybe a bit of chilli for fun.

World Vision Family Challenge

We decided to sponsor a kiddie last night. That TV stuff really does work.

I'd been thinking about doing it for a very long time, but guess what, as usual I hadn't done anything to make it happen. And as I was watching the TV last night, and Tim Costello was suggesting that World Vision hadn't even reached halfway in it's target to get 5000 kids sponsored in a month, I thought, well, I'm not going to be the one that's responsible for him not getting his 5000! Luckily Marty agreed!

So, ever so easily, we went over the world vision website, and were confronted with sooooo many children in need of help. We really weren't sure how to choose a child to help, as there are so many, and they are just so lovely. So, we decided to sponsor a kiddie in memory of Granny, so we narrowed the thousands down to 10 littlies. Then we had to decide who to sponsor out of that. There was a wide range of ages, from 4 to 10, and both boys and girls. How did we decide in the end? We thought it would be the best idea to choose the eldest simply because older kids are least likely to get sponsored (not as cute, maybe?) and because it's possible (or even likely) that older children will have younger siblings. So they can benefit too. And the clincher for me was that the child we settled on loved to play with dolls. I think Granny would have liked that especially...

Surprise...

So, the surprise chicory dish was a real surprise after all. It wasn't very inventive, coz I didn't feel much like cooking tonight, but I did anyway. To make things easy, it became an omelette! So I got my two eggs, 2 tbspns grated parmesan and some milk...just a little bit too much milk, because the omelettes didn't stay together so well when it was time to fold them.
just cooked the chickory with some onion and garlic, and Marty threw together a tommy salad.

Lucky there are easy things like omelettes, which I swear were invented on a Monday!

Dinners for the week

Monday - Ginas surpise chickory dish
Tuesday - Lotus root and chicken stir fry
Wednesday - Pho (Gina)
Thursday - Artichokes, lima bean puree? carrot dip. Garlic dip and some lamb koftas? and a few other mezz bits. Middle Eastern feel. (Martin)
Friday - Gina
Saturday - Thai feast at Macs?
Sunday - Steak and veg (Martin)

Yum

And everything was totally yummy! Marty, you have to stop being such an awesome cooking person, because now, between the two of us, I think we're going to suffer dreadfully at the hands of our gluttony.

So, while Martin spent his time chopping, slicing and making lists, I helped keep the work space tidy, and whipped up a banana cake/bread for Father's Day tomorrow.

We're off to visit the in-laws, and I was thinking of something we could take. I didn't want it to be too involved, but I wanted it to be tasty, and I didn't want to have to go to the shops again today! I wanted to use something that we had already, and we had a whole bunch of bananas that had been in the freezer for a while. I had threatened them with making them into something tasty for a while, but had never gotten around to it. So, today I made banana bread, which funnily I have never made before, so I hope it turns out okay! Just one note, when you defrost bananas, they lose ALOT of liquid. Drain most of this off before you mash them, otherwise they'll be really gloopy. This one was maybe a bit dry, and could have perhaps done with a little less flour, or a little less cooking time.



Banana Bread

2 1/2 cups plain flour
3 tspns baking soda
1 tspn salt
3 tspns cinnamon
ground cardamom (to taste - this can be overpowering, or leave it out if you prefer)
3/4 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup slivered almonds, broken into pieces
1 cup unsalted butter
2 cups sugar (I used about 1 1/3 cups light muscovado, and made the rest up with castor sugar)
1 tspn vanilla extract
5-6 bananas (or about 2 cups)
4 eggs.

Combine the dry ingredients really well and set aside. Cream the butter and sugar, add vanilla, then add bananas until well mixed and then add eggs. Mixture will look a bit curdled, but that's okay. Fold dry mix in, then pour into either a springform pan or a couple of loaf tins and bake in a moderate oven until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Make sure the tins are well lined and greased for easy removal - melted butter is the easiest, I find.

Plus, baking sweets and cakes and breads and so on is alot of fun...until something comes out burnt... A trick I learnt from my mum in helping her make Xmas cakes so many moons ago was to make sure you put a few layers of paper between the pan and the cake - no need to settle for the traditional single layer! Although in all honestly, Mum used to tie an old paper bag around the outside of her cake tin when doing the Xmas baking. I think she does something right, because people keep asking for them from her, year after year after year...

Now to dream of what do do with the box of broad beans we shelled today...

Lunch & Dinner

Lunch got rid off the rape (pronounced rar pear, basically italian for turnip greens), which didnt even make the ingredients list.

Pasta with rape'

3 or 4 cloves of garlic
4 or 5 anchovie fillets
chilli flakes
olive oil
rape
pasta

Cook the sliced garlic, chilli flakes and anchovies in olive oil over a slow heat. CHop the rape roughly, leaving out the majority of the lower stalks, where no leaves grow. Once the garlic has colored and the anchovies have dissolved, add the washed, drained rape to the pan. Cover and allow rape to collapse, cooking for around 7 - 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook some pasta, prefferable a spagettini or some variant of long thin pasta (not egg fettucini), top with rape and grated parmesan, maybe a drizzle of good olive oil. Yum.

Dinner consisted of a pad thai and a pineapple and guava salad, both out of David Thompsons definative book, Thai Food. Its a bit of a bible, with a great history of thai culture, food, ingredients and cooking methods. He has a great writing style and sense of humour, which I got to witness first hand when I had the extraordinary pleasure of having David cook for us at a special event at his old restaurant Sailor Thai in Sydney.

I won't include the recipes, as the are far too complex and have many ingrdients. I suggest running out and buying a copy of his book, or looking here to buy online.

http://booko.com.au/books/isbn/9780670867615

Note to self - less chili powder for Ginas pat thai. Half a teaspoon should do it.

Many of the items purchased for the thai dinner weren't exhausted, so I still have a guava, half a pineapple, chinese chives, tofu and bean sprouts.

Whats in the fridge

I've made a list of all the items in our fridge - theres no chance of remembering everything in there and chances are stuff will go off before we get a chance to use it all.

So, the idea is

• list all the perishables;
• come up with some ideas and recipes on how to use them;
• prioritise items that are most likely to spoil.

Vegetables

• Corn - frozen and fresh and frozen for pastel
• Broadbeans
• green beans
• snake beans
• artichokes
• carrots
• fresh garlic
• chickory
• bean sprouts
• chillies - green, red and birds eyes
• eggplants (japanese)
• roma tomatoes
• lotus root
• brocollini
• chinese chives
• frozen peas
• argentinian garlic
• red shallots
• sweet potato
• onion (red) spanish
• beetroots
• shallots / spring onions
• mint
• coriander
• ginger
• thai basil

Fruit

• tangelos
• apples
• pineapple
• banana
• nashi pear
• strawberry
• guava

Meat

• ham hock
• eye fillet
• new york cut steak
• veal schnitzel
• smoked beef
• chorizos (frozen)
• Black pudding / blood sausage (frozen)
  

Other

• deep fried tofu
• egg noodles
• eggs

Thats a lot of food for 2 people! I guess we got a bit excied at the market today. Again. The moral is, don't go hungry! Actually, we already had coffee and cake at a greek(?) bakery in Rockdale by this stage. Not the best galaktoboureko (which is at Sweet Fantasy in Bankstown in my opinion),l but not bad. Baklava was tasty though, and the coffee, very drinkable.