Category Archives: Vegetables

Ginger, Carrot & Kumara Soup

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Today was truly miserable weather here in Wellington. Not autumnal. Wintery. It was so dim and grey it felt like it was 5.30pm all day … only when you looked at the clock it kept telling you it wasn’t even lunchtime. And there was sideways rain.

Ugh.

At least I had some cheery soup for lunch and didn’t have to leave the office. So today’s a good day to share the recipe.

I don’t have a lot to add to that short introduction today! Time to make a hot chocolate and turn the electric blanket on. Sometimes it seems a long stretch until September doesn’t it?

Ginger, Carrot & Kumara Soup

1 Tbsp olive or canola oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cup good quality chicken stock (or vege stock for a vegetarian soup)
1 cup water
1 medium kumara, peeled and chopped
4-6 carrots, chopped
5cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped (or about 1 Tbsp minced ginger)
plain yoghurt and rolls to serve

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Gently cook the onion for 3-4 minutes, until soft. Add the stock and water, and the kumara, carrots and ginger. Bring to the boil and simmer until the vegetables are tender, probably about 20 minutes.

Now to blend the soup – with either a stick blender or a food processor. I don’t have a stick blender so you’re on your own for instruction there! I just spoon my soup into the food processor and puree it in batches. Pop all the blended soup back in the saucepan and let it heat through again. Season to taste.

Serve with a spoonful of plain yoghurt and a grainy roll.

And set spoons on the table so your reflection makes it into the photo. That’s hot.

Mushroom & Barley Soup

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Well, well, well. The last weekend of April already. Two thirds of autumn already gone!

It’s really only started to feel autumnal in the last week or two, I think. We now leave home in the dark and come home in the dark. I put thick black tights on in the morning without worrying that I’m going to look like a dork if the day turns out to be a blaze of glorious and fiercely hot sunshine. Because now I know it’s not going to. It might end up sunny but it will not be warm. Reassuring on one hand, if a little depressing on the other.

The onset of autumn and winter means soup for lunch on Sundays for us. A few months ago, I started making an effort to cook a proper-ish meal for lunch on Sundays, and it’s becoming a nice little tradition. It’s usually soup or quiche or something, but it’s lovely to have something hot, and to sit down at the table with the Sunday paper’s crossword. Wow. I sound old. I mean, it’s great to sit down and listen to my new One Direction CD. That’s better, right?

I made this soup a couple of weeks ago. It really looks from the ingredients like it would be the blandest soup on earth, without any herbs etc, but it’s really tasty – and perfect for autumn. I’ve been putting pearl barley or soup mix in most of my soups lately -super cheap, super healthy, and makes the soup souper filling. If you haven’t come across it before, soup mix is a packet mix of split peas and pearl barley; it’s with the stock and soup stuff at the supermarket.

Enjoy your Sunday… and know it will be improved by soup.

Mushroom & Barley Soup
adapted from a recipe in Mindfood magazine

1 Tbsp olive oil
400g mushrooms, roughly chopped
2 onions, finely chopped
2 carrots, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1 potato, diced
5-6 cups chicken stock
½ cup white wine
½-¾ cup pearl barley or soup mix

Heat the oil in a large pot, and gently cook the mushrooms, onion, carrot, celery and potato until the onion softens. Add the stock and wine and bring to the boil. Add the pearl barley and simmer until the barley is tender (about 25 minutes). Season well and serve with crusty bread, and a dollop of unsweetened yoghurt.

Saganaki Prawns on Toast

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It’s Sunday again, and I’m in my usual routine of cooking something fun for lunch and sitting down to a blog post while it does its thing. Making pea and ham soup today; it’s part of a pet project to try cooking new cuts of meat (bacon hock this week). I’ve been annoying busy butchers with my many questions. It’s working well so far.

But today’s recipe is a prawn dish. I find prawns great; it doesn’t matter if you need to defrost them just before you start cooking because they thaw fast, they’re quick to cook, healthy and superlecker (my favourite German word of all time, meaning emphatically tasty). I usually cook them with chilli, ginger and garlic, but this dish is tomato-based and pairs them with feta.

I hadn’t come across prawns saganaki until recently… I never really associate prawns with Greek cooking, but it makes sense, I guess. Anyway this dish has gone to my favourites pile – really good for weeknight cooking as it’s simple, fast and offers a bit of variety from same old same old. This is a really healthy dish too – pretty light on kJ for a main meal, and will fill you up, specially if you serve it with colourful salad.

Saganaki Prawns on Toast
Serves 2

½ red onion, finely sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
½ tsp (or to taste) minced chilli, or finely chopped fresh chilli
½ tin chopped tomatoes
½ cup vegetable stock
250-300g prawns, deveined and heads removed, but tails left on
30g feta
2 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped, plus extra to garnish
sourdough bread, sliced thickly and toasted

Spray a fry pan with a little olive or rice bran oil, and cook the onion and garlic over medium-high heat until the onion softens (3-4 minutes). Stir through the chilli for a minute or two.

Add the tomatoes and vegetable stock, and gently simmer (uncovered) for 10-15 minutes. If you want the recipe to stretch further, feel free to add more tomatoes.

Add the prawns and just simmer til they’re cooked – probably 4-5 minutes. I just nick off the corner of one and if the flesh is white all the way through, it should be done. I bite the corner that I nicked off to check it tastes firm and cooked too.

Season to taste and stir through parsley. Place your toast slices on plates and spoon prawn & tomatoes over the toast. Crumble the feta over and maybe some extra parsley too.

Chargrilled Salmon with Avocado & Corn Salad

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This is another dish that I actually cooked some time ago, but hadn’t got around to posting yet. But this is surely the time for it, given the abundance of corn at the moment… I’m sure the next time I go to the supermarket they’re going to offer to pay me to take corn away from them.

I’ve had this recipe in my book for ages… but I’m not quite sure where it came from. It’s not my own. So if anyone recognises it let me know! And if nobody does, then we can send a collective thank you to its author.

It’s a lovely summer meal and doesn’t take long to make. It’s extra good for you, too – fairly low in fat with lots of omega 3 and coloured veges. My camera or photo editing has captured some eerily bright colours – the salmon doesn’t in fact look so thermo-nuclear in real life. Try it and find out!

Grilled Salmon with Avocado & Corn Salad
Serves 2

corn kernels – from say 1 cob (or about half a can if you’re using the tinned variety)
½ a medium avocado
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 ripe tomato, copped – or use a few halved cherry tomatoes
½ a red onion, finely chopped
¼ cup chopped fresh coriander
salt and pepper, to taste
2x salmon fillets, skin removed if you prefer (or if you want the even healthier version)
2 tsp moroccan seasoning
cooking spray – canola or olive oil
baby spinach or lettuce leaves, to serve

Cook the corn in the microwave until just tender (this won’t take long at all). Set aside to cool.

Place the avocado and lemon juice in a medium bowl and toss to coat the avocado. Add the warm corn, tomato, red onion and coriander. Toss gently to combine and season to taste.

Heat a char-grill pan, barbecue, or frypan over medium heat. Sprinkle the salmon fillets with moroccan seasoning, salt and pepper, and spritz with cooking oil spray. Cook the salmon for 4-5 minutes each side.

Place salmon on plates with salad leaves, and serve with the corn & avocado salad.

Simple Tomato & Chickpea Curry

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I actually made this um, months ago, and had completely forgotten about it have been saving it up specially.

I like to have a few tricks up my sleeve to make a filling, healthy, comforting meal at short notice, and to make said meal from a few cheap ingredients that are always in my pantry. These recipes are my best friends on hungry and/or grumpy and/or flustered and/or busy evenings when I just need to Eat. Something. Now. Or. Will. Fall. Over. I think that no matter how amazing your life is, you always have days like this. And if you don’t, you really ought to share the secret with the rest of us in the comments section.

There are loads of tomato and chickpea curry recipes out there – I can’t claim this as an original idea. Most recipes are a variation on tinned tomatoes + chickpeas + spices = good. So as long as you have those things in the cupboard, and bonus points for an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, you can be munching through this in a lot less than half an hour.

Tomato & Chickpea Curry
My recipe notes that this is supposed to serve four, but from memory, that assumes you are serving it with bread or rice. Serving just the curry, Mr. J and I got through the whole lot on our own! So if you have a large and hungry family, it would pay to at least double the recipe. If you end up with too much, you can always welcome it back for lunch tomorrow, or freeze it and enjoy it on another hungry,flustered and busy day.

Another note – if you’re missing one or two of the spices, don’t worry, just press on ahead!

small dash of rice bran or canola oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp chilli powder (or adjust quantity to taste, or leave out altogether)
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp garam masala
1x 400g tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed (or dried chickpeas, soaked)
1x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
5cm piece of fresh ginger, finely grated
chopped fresh coriander, to serve
Heat the oil in a large saucepan or frying pan. Add the chopped onion and garlic, and cook gently until softened, and just turning golden. Add the spices and stir for a couple of minutes, coating the onion with the spices.
Add the drained chickpeas, and stir to coat them in the spices too, then add the tomatoes. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the ginger and stir through.
Serve with crusty bread or, ideally, brown rice, and garnish with chopped fresh coriander. You may also like to add a dollop of low fat natural yoghurt.

Hot Smoked Salmon Pasta with Asian Flavours

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I read an article some months ago in the Listener about smoked salmon – in fact, now that I come to write this post, I find myself googling it – it turns out the article is available here. It’s a great introduction to salmon if you’re new to cooking with it.

We don’t eat a lot of hot smoked salmon – it is rather expensive as far as meat and fish go – but for every once in a while, it’s a really healthy option, it doesn’t require cooking, and tastes like luxury.

At the time of reading the article, I was seduced by the fresh-sounding flavours in the recipe for a ‘hot smoked salmon salad with hints of Asia’, and cut it out. It’s a recipe for a dinner party entrée-type salad with cos leaves, hot smoked salmon and salmon caviar. Reading back I now see it was invented for a ladies’ golf tournament at the Sheraton in Fiji, which is rather a different setting to my brief: at home in Porirua on a Friday night.

As you can appreciate, the dinner party entrée feeling quickly fell by the wayside, but I adapted the dressing into a pasta sauce and added in some extra veges, and lo, Friday night dinner was born. I love the asian flavours in Lauraine Jacobs’ dish, so kept all of those in.

If you’re looking for an easy, healthy, tasty, weeknight meal, but still something classy, this is a great option. Or, feel free to mess around with quantities and keep it as a dinner party entree, either as a pasta dish, or returning it to its original salad form.

Hot Smoked Salmon Pasta with Asian Flavours
Serves 4. Adapted from this recipe by Lauraine Jacobs.

Dressing/Sauce:
Note: you may like to increase this recipe if you like very ‘saucy’ pasta.
4cm piece of fresh ginger, roughly chopped
stalk of lemongrass, bruised and roughly chopped
6 peppercorns
1 small fresh red chilli (tip: I have a huge bag of little red chillies in my freezer from Moore Wilson’s; I use them for everything)
1 Tbsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp rice (or red) wine vinegar
pinch finely grated palm sugar
1 lime, finely grated zest and juice
2 Tbsp avocado (or olive) oil

Place the ginger, lemongrass, peppercorns and chilli into a food processor and whiz until finely chopped. I am lucky and have a tiny whiz designed for just this. If you don’t, just finely grate the ginger, pound the peppercorns in a mortar and pestle, finely chop the lemongrass and chilli, and mix all together.  Add the fish sauce, vinegar, palm sugar, lime zest and juice, and oil, and either whiz again or mix well together. Season and set aside.

Pasta:
280g pasta, fresh or dried, over to you
4 shallots, finely sliced
2 courgettes (zucchini), sliced diagonally
2-3 Tbsp red wine vinegar
baby spinach leaves
200g wood roasted/hot smoked salmon (I used Aorangi this time)
2 limes, cut in wedges, to serve (not crucial)
chopped fresh coriander, to garnish

Cook pasta according to packet directions. Meanwhile, spray a frying pan with a little oil, and gently cook the shallots and courgettes over medium heat, adding splashes of vinegar as required, just to keep them moist, soft and delicious. Once they’re just tender, add the spinach leaves and just stir over gently heat until the leaves wilt. Place the cooked and drained pasta in shallow bowls (toss with a little oil here if you feel it is deeply necessary), and arrange the courgette mixture on top. Gently flake the salmon into pieces and top the pasta with it, and drizzle the dish with dressing. Serve with lime wedges and garnish with chopped coriander.

Fennel with Walnuts and Oranges

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope you had a lovely Christmas with friends and family, a good break, some great food, and a fun New Year’s Eve yesterday! We spent last night at Osteria del Toro in Wellington. Really good cocktails and gorgeous food (at extremely good prices, by the way). Even if the weather was so rotten the fireworks were cancelled!

And now we have 2012 to look forward to. What do you hope for from the year ahead?

I’m going to focus on enjoying life, as it is. Taking good care of myself and my family, eating well (and feeding others well), keeping fit and healthy, and having more fun instead of getting hung up on details! I’ve got a few things to tick off my Thirty By Thirty list (starting tomorrow with a nervous visit to Adrenalin Forest in Porirua), too.

I’m looking forward to conquering new frontiers in my kitchen, but also to preparing simple food with delicious ingredients. Like this salad of Fennel with Walnuts & Oranges.

The recipe comes from The Silver Spoon, one of Italy’s best selling cookbooks. It has quite a focus on authenticity, and while I haven’t cooked from it a lot, anything I have cooked has been delicious, and well worth a repeat effort.

I had blood oranges to hand, so used them instead of the more standard variety. They’re such a creepy fruit! Beautiful orange skin with red speckles of warning, hiding flesh that really does look… bloody. They are perfectly named. Surely, I thought to myself, there are good jokes to be played on children who have never come across blood oranges before.

Enjoy the salad, and there’ll be more posts to follow later in the week. Have a happy 01/01/12!

Fennel with Walnuts & Oranges
from The Silver Spoon. Serves 4.

4 tender, round fennel bulbs, trimmed and thinly sliced
olive oil, to drizzle
salt and pepper, to taste2 oranges
6 shelled walnuts, chopped

Place the fennel slices in a salad bowl, drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Peel the oranges and cut off pith, then slice and add to the fennel (I was happy segmenting mine). Add the walnuts, mix and serve.

Watermelon & Mint Salad

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Time for another salad for bbq season!

This may be my favourite salad ever. Mum picked it out of a newspaper years and years ago and we make it all the time during summer. Specially to take to bbqs – people love this salad and always ask for the recipe. And the colours are so beautiful!  I think I might make this as part of our Christmas dinner spread.

The original recipe used watermelon, red onion and red capsicum; I was making it to take somewhere a couple of weeks ago and there wasn’t quite enough watermelon available at the supermarket, but they did have pomegranates on special, so I added the seeds to the salad to juzh it up a bit. They may become a permanent feature :)

Watermelon & Mint Salad
Adjust quantities to taste, and to how many you need to serve…

Watermelon
Red onion
Red capsicum
Pomegranate seeds (optional)
Mint sauce

Just toss together chopped watermelon, sliced red onion, sliced red capsicum, and pomegranate seeds, if you’re using them, and dress with mint sauce. A few fresh mint leaves wouldn’t go astray, either.

Enjoy!

Making the most of spring & summer produce

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Strawberries were 4 punnets for $5 at my local market this weekend! I’ve been eating them for breakfast, lunch and dessert. I’m even eating them as I write this post. I’ve mainly just been adding them to other things like muesli or ice cream, but I have a few new strawberry recipes to share. This is a salad that makes the most of late spring asparagus and strawberries… eat them while you can! It also looks very festive, it might work as a side dish for a Christmas meal. Enjoy!

Strawberry & Asparagus Salad with Strawberry Dressing
Adapted from a Robyn Martin recipe. Serves 4 as a side salad.

500g fresh asparagus (2 bunches)
2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled
2 spring onions, sliced diagonally
2 shallots, peeled and finely sliced
2 Tbsp vinegar (I used cider; white or red wine vinegar would also be nice)
2 Tbsp olive oil
freshly ground black pepper

Break any woody ends of the asparagus spears, and steam them gently in the microwave or on the stove top until they are JUST tender (I microwave on high for about 1 minute). Place them in a bowl of cold water to refresh, then drain well. Chop spears into 3-4cm pieces and set aside.

Put about ½ a cup of strawberries to one side, and chop the rest into halves (or quarters if they’re monsters). Arrange the chopped asparagus, strawberries, spring onions and shallots on a serving platter.

Whiz the reserved ½ cup of strawberries in a food processor or blender. Gradually add the vinegar and olive oil and blend well. Season to taste. I serve it on the side in a jug, and grind more black pepper over the salad to serve.

Fresh Broad Bean Salad

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A wee salad for Mondays.

I don’t think I ever had broad beans going up. My parents HATED them as kids and they were a vegetable they didn’t want to inflict on the next generation.

I am nothing if not curious. Last year I decided to give them a try, just to see what the (negative) fuss was about.

I’ve just been using the frozen variety. Tipped out of the bag into hot water and steamed gently in their pods, they are pretty average. Not that bad, but kind of grey and a bit too chewy. I think this is what mum and dad were fed, but maybe boiled for 15 minutes longer than that, even.

If you just lightly steam broad beans though, and take them out of their pods, Good Things Happen. I admit, shelling beans is not a fun pastime. It’s a bit time consuming and possibly too fiddly for a weeknight. But it’s worth it once you know the secret: grey broad bean shells are hiding tender, zingy little bright green nuggets of goodness inside.

I think they’re a nice green side (instead of, or mixed with peas, or green beans etc), or I came across this salad recipe last year and have been loving it ever since. In fact, I made it for my parents without really saying what we were eating… and they loved it. Mum even copied out the recipe. I think she’s made it a few times since and has surprised herself by becoming a broad bean fan!

The recipe’s not mine, it’s from Healthy Food Guide, so I won’t reproduce it, but I really recommend it! The recipe can be found here.

Hope your Monday’s been swell :)