I was flicking through the Sunday Age last weekend when I came across this article on the amount of food waste that Victorians send to landfill.

The story claims that on average each household in Victoria throws out 25o kg of food matter each year, and that over 1 million tonnes of food waste is sent to landfill creating 1.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

The article attributes the large scale waste to affluence and a belief amongst householders that it’s better to have a full fridge and throw out unused, rotting food than go hungry.

These claims got me thinking. Since moving from a tiny apartment with no garden to a full-blown house, we’ve invested in a worm farm and a compost bin. Separating out our food scraps and watching it pile up so quickly each week has made me very conscious of the amount of food materials that go unused. While I like to think that we use most of what we buy, if we weren’t composting the food or feeding it to our busy worms, food scraps would probably make up the biggest proportion of our household waste.

On top of the issue of people buying more food than they need, I think another factor in the large amount of food waste is that people have lost the knack, time or desire to use up excess food.

Composting and worm farms might not be for everyone, but there are some great recipes that allow you to make some use of leftovers. A good example of this is vegetable stock. Aside from using up older vegetables, you can you make a great base for soups and risottos that suits your tastes and you also get to control the amount of salt and oil that goes into it. So, inspired by the article, this is my weekend herb blogging entry for the week: vegetable stock flavoured with bay leaves.

Vegetable stock

Ingredients

2 carrots or half a sweet potato
2-3 potatoes or 4-5 baby potatoes
3 celery stalks plus leaves
1 onion, peeled
5 cloves of garlic, peeled
5 bay leaves
3 sprigs of rosemary
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Chop up all the vegetable ingredients into the same-sized pieces. The smaller the pieces the faster the water will absorb their flavours. You don’t need to peel the vegetables but you do need to wash them.

Put the vegetables in a large, heavy-based saucepan with a lid (preferably a stockpot but a big saucepan will do). Throw in the bay leaves and rosemary leaves and mix them in so that they are spread throughout the stock pot. Add 2-3 teaspoons of salt. Cover the vegetables in water so the waterline is a few cm higher than the top vegetables.

Bring to the boil, then simmer on a low heat for two hours with the lid on. Taste occasionally to test the flavour, adjusting the salt and pepper if necessary with half an hour to go.

Remove the saucepan from the heat and strain the base from the vegetables. The stock will keep for a few days in the fridge, but if you make a decent quantity it’s best to freeze it in small containers where it will last for three months.

Notes on the recipe

• The great thing about vegetable stock is that you can use whatever you have in your fridge - so use the list of ingredients as a guide only.
• The vegetables I always use in a stock are potatoes, celery, garlic and onion. These give the stock a nice, soft, salty base and don’t make the stock overly sweet or ‘vegetably’.
• Other ingredients that make a great base are leeks, carrots, fresh parsley and mushrooms.
• Adding pumpkin, corn, sweet potato and carrot will make the stock sweeter.
• Adding peppercorns to the stock will make it cloudy, so it’s best to add these at the end.
• The vegetables do make the base quite salty, so it’s best to go easy on the amount of salt you add at the start and then adjust the flavour at the end once the full flavour of the vegetables has been absorbed into the base.
• If you want a richer taste to the stock, you can saute the vegetables in butter or oil first.

Bay leaves

• Bay leaves are a staple of European cooking.
• The bay leaf comes from the laurel tree family.
• It’s most commonly used in stocks and soups, and when cooking meat. Dried bay leaves are added for their fragrance as much as their taste.
• Bay leaves are not substitutable for Asian leaves used in cooking. So-called Indian and Indonesian bay leaves are unrelated and have a distinctly different taste.

If you want to find out more, check out wikipedia and about.com.

This week’s weekend herb blogging is hosted by Ulrike at Kuchenlaten.

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I’m a vegetable fiend, easily seduced by juicy green beans, rich maroon beetroot or soft, comforting potatoes. But if I had to name my favourite vegetables, the humble cauliflower would be right up there.

OK, so it doesn’t have the strong flavour or brilliant colour of many of its vegetable compatriots, but the intricate florets and delicate taste make a wonderful addition to so many recipes.

Cauliflower cheese has been a favourite recipe of mine since childhood, but I’m also fan of the Indian standard aloo gobi (or potatoes and cauliflower). Andy and I would regularly order aloo gobi while we were in India, because it’s one of the few North Indian curries that doesn’t come slathered in a rich creamy sauce or served with paneer. Since we’ve been back in Australia we’ve had a couple of Indian dinner parties, all of which have featured our cauliflower fave.

This aloo gobi recipe is a modified version of one my friend Bianca picked up during a cooking class in Udaipur.

Aloo gobi

Ingredients

1 flower of cauliflower, chopped into florets
5 baby potatoes, peeled and chopped into cubes
2 tomatoes
4 Tbs vegetable cooking oil
¼ tsp fennel seeds
¼ tsp mustard seeds
15 - 20 fenugreek seeds
¼ tsp garam masala
1 tsp turmeric
½ tsp chopped green chilli (minus the seeds)
½ tsp chopped ginger
1 tsp salt (to taste)
Squeeze of lemon to taste
Fresh coriander to garnish

Heat oil in pan. Drop in a single mustard seed. If it pops, add the fennel, mustard and fenugreek seeds and fry for a minute. Then add turmeric powder, potatoes, cauliflower, and garam masala. Cover and cook until potato and cauliflower are soft. If your stove top is hot, you can steam or microwave the potatoes and cauliflower for 5 minutes before cooking to soften them. Add chopped tomatoes, ginger, and chilli, cook a few minutes more then serve with lemon and coriander to taste/garnish.

The cauliflower

• The cauliflower comes from the same family as brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and kale (brassica oleracea).
• In addition to the usual white variety, cauliflowers can be orange, purple and green.
• Cauliflower is high in folate, fibre and vitamin c and low in fat.
• It’s a versatile vegetable that can be used in pies, stir-fries, soups, salads and bakes.

For more information, check out wikipedia and food.org.

This is my entry in Weekend Herb Blogging, originally started by Kalyn from he Kalyn’s Kitchen blog.  This week it’s being hosted at Anna’s Cool Finds, so make sure you stop by to check out the full wrap-up.

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Andy I chose to spend half our honeymoon in Jamaica because we’d heard that the Rastafarian movement had bequeathed the island a strong vegetarian heritage.

Of all the vegetarian food we stumbled on, I was most taken by a fruit called ackee.

Ackee is cooked before being eaten. It has canary yellow flesh about the colour of jackfruit. The flesh is very soft and often separates into curved pieces the shape of a bird’s claw when cooked.

Ackee is legendary in Jamaica. The traditional (and still popular) Jamaican breakfast is ackee with saltfish. However, when we were there we were given a vegetarian version of scrambled ackee with capsicum and onion, served with small, savoury dumplings (called Johnny cakes) and fried plantain banana.

Cooked Ackee is often compared to egg, partly for its colour, partly for its texture, but also for the taste which is creamy and readily absorbs other flavours.

As a vegetarian I think it makes a great substitute for egg - certainly better than tofu. Best of all, you don’t end up with that oily, heavy feeling that comes from eating scrambled egg or an omelette.

Ackee trees were a common sight in Negril (the place we stayed in Jamaica) and small shops and roadside market stalls often sold fresh ackee. I was interested to read Sarina from TriniGourmet’s comments that ackees could be bought in cans in Trinidad but they were very expensive. I had the same experience in Jamaica. When we went to the local supermarket to get some ackee to take home we were shocked to see that a can cost over $6.

I thought Weekend Herb Blogging would be a great opportunity to try my hand at ackee scramble, so I cracked open the can today. I was pretty pleased with the result.

This recipe for ackee scramble is a mix of advice I was given in Jamaica, this recipe from the BBC, and some ideas of my own.

Ingredients

1 can of ackee, drained
2 small chillies, seeds removed and finely chopped
2 tomatoes, finely chopped
1 capsicum, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 brown onion, finely chopped
1 tsp of thyme
black pepper
1 tsp of capers

Method

Sautee the onion and garlic in oil, then add the chilli, pepper and thyme.

Add the capsicum and tomato and cook on a medium heat for another five minutes. Add the ackee and capers. Cook for another couple of minutes until the ackee is cooked through.

Serve immediately.

Notes on the recipe

I think the basic version of this dish uses onion, thyme, black pepper, tomato and / or scotch bonnet peppers and ackee. Adding both tomatoes and capsicum beefs it up. I added chilli because I couldn’t find hot peppers, and the capers to add a salty vegetarian touch.

When we were in Jamaica this dish was always served on a plate like scrambled eggs. Because we were eating it for lunch I served it on top of brown rice (another thing I loved about Jamaican cooking).

Ackee

• Ackee originated in West Africa, but was imported to Jamaica by Captain William Bligh in the late 1700s. It is now used predominantly in Jamaican cooking.
• The fruit has a reddish skin, but inside the flesh is yellow and the seeds are big and black.
• As anyone in Jamaica will tell you, ackee is poisonous if eaten before it’s ripe. The only edible part of the ackee is the arils (the yellow pieces of flesh that grow over the seed).
• You shouldn’t cook with it until the fruit has ripened naturally. You can tell because the skin cracks open so that the seeds are exposed.
• Ackee is usually boiled before it is cooked - the BBC site has more detailed instructions on how to prepare it.
• Another way to cook with ackee is to use it in a souffle. I wonder whether it could be used in small savoury tarts as an egg substitute, but unfortunately we only brought one can home with us!

For more information, see wikipedia,

This week’s weekend herb blogging is kindly hosted by Ulrike at Kuchenlaten. Visit her site to see the full round-up.

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I was really disappointed to miss weekend herb blogging last week, especially as it was hosted by Kalyn, the founder of the event. But this week I swung back into the saddle, hefting a trusty daikon with me.

Daikon is a white radish. Its Japanese name means big (’dai’) root (’kon’) which pretty much sums it up.

I’ve often had it pickled or shredded raw in Japanese food and Asian-flavoured salads, where I’ve suspected it’s been the ingredient that makes the dish memorable. But I’ve never cooked with it before.

About a month or two ago I decided to give it a try. I couldn’t find it anywhere. More embarrassingly, I had no idea what it looked liked as I’d only ever had it in a prepared form.

Then, last weekend I was rushing through the specialty grocery store, Norton St Grocer, when I saw a giant, starkly white vegetable. It looked like an overgrown carrot with its V-shape body and spurt of green foliage, only with old-man wiry facial hairs poking out every now and then. I checked the sign above it: I had found my first daikon.

Although I’d been hankering to buy a daikon for awhile, once I took it home I realised I didn’t know what to do with it. Since I’d also bought some enoki mushrooms, I decided to make a loosely-Japanese themed soup using miso paste. Dutifully, I searched google for “miso daikon.” Immediately, it came back with a link to a recipe, which I broadly followed.

You know what, I was disappointed. The daikon (which I probably didn’t cut finely enough) took a long time to cook, but didn’t absorb the flavour of the miso. Instead, it just stayed stubbornly radish-like.

So now I only had half a daikon. I’d read in World Vegetarian Classics that daikon is also used in the Middle East. I figured that perhaps I should try it in a non-Japanese setting.

Opening the fridge I saw potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots, and I couldn’t help but wish for pasties. With some puff pastry lying idly in the freezer, I decided to give them a whirl.

Ingredients

Half a daikon (about 10 cm in length)
2 potatoes (i.e. sebago)
2 sweet potatoes
2 carrots
2 - 3 sprigs of rosemary, finely chopped
4 sheets of puff pastry
1 egg
1 tbsp of milk
sesame seeds
sea salt
olive oil

Method

Peel and chop all the vegetables into 1cm sized cubes. It’s important that the cubes are all the same size so that they cook evenly. Lightly oil a baking dish (I use a spray) and add the vegetables so that they are not covering each other too much. Drizzle some good quality olive oil on to them and sprinkle with sea salt. Toss to cover all the vegetables in the mix. Bake at 180 degrees for 50 minutes, occasionally tossing the vegetables. Remove from the oven and mix in a bowl with the rosemary.

Take a sheet of puff pastry and cut it into quarters. This should leave you with four 15cm x 15cm pieces. Add a spoonful of the vegetable mixture to the centre of the first quarter.

Carefully lift up two corners of the square that are diagonally opposite and press them together, pinching the sides together on either side. Make sure the point is clear of the vegetable mixture - you may need to give the pastry a very gentle tug to do this. Take the remaining two corners and press them together so that they join with the existing point, again pressing along the sides so that the mixture is secured.

Put the pastie onto a pre-greased oven tray. Separate the egg yolk into a small bowl and add the milk. Mix together. Carefully brush the pastie with the mixture. Complete the rest of the pasties. Sprinkle the pasties with some sea salt and sesame seeds. Bake in a 180 degree oven for 15 minutes, or until the pastry is cooked and has turned golden brown.

Notes on the recipe

• These vegetables were a great combination, but you could easily substitute them for similar vegetables like swedes, parsnips, pumpkin or turnips.
• For a healthier alternative to roasting, you can boil the vegetables in some slightly salted water.
• The recipe I loosely modelled this on used pine nuts, marinated feta, roasted pumpkin and oregano.
• I added some plain yoghurt to my pasties, but couldn’t tell in the final product so I’ve left it out of the ingredients. If you want to make the inside more moist, I think it would go well with goats cheese.
• The two times I cooked daikon it took a long while. Longer than the sweet potato, and potato, for instance.

About Daikon

• Daikon tastes mild and slightly sweet. It doesn’t have a peppery taste like the standard red radish - it tastes more like turnip and has a similar texture.
• Its also known as a Japanese radish, Chinese radish and mooli.
• Daikon is a common ingredient in Japanese, Chinese and Korean food, but this versatile vegetable is also used in Indian, Nepalese, Turkish and Moroccan cooking.
• It can be eaten raw (for maximum nutritional value), pickled, dried, roasted, and cooked in stews and soups.
• In Japanese and Korean cooking it’s used for the beautiful, delicate carved garnishes of roses, birds etc that are often served with a meal.
• The sweetest part of the daikon is the top of the root, just below the leaves.
• The leaves and seeds are also edible, however the leaves do not last in a refrigerator, unlike the root.

For more information see Wikipedia, Charmaine Solomon’s Encyclopedia of Asian Food, and World Vegetarian Classics.

To read the full recap, visit this week’s host, Pat, at Up a Creek without a Patl.

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This weekend I tried my hand at a recipe from World Vegetarian Food by Cecilia Brooks-Brown. It’s called Houby Paprikas, or Mushroom Paprika, and is originally from Hungary.

The recipe caught my eye because it uses dill, which I have a major food crush on. I can’t get enough of its fresh, almost aniseed, fragrance or its delicate, beautiful fern-like leaves.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much of a dill repertoire. I either use it in potato salads or it wilts on my kitchen window sill. I’ve always known that such a beautiful herb could really make a dish, but its distinctive flavour and fiddly texture makes me chicken out of adding it to dishes on a whim.

Ingredients

1 brown onion, diced
margarine
450g mixed mushrooms, chopped in large chunks
1 tbsp of fresh, Hungarian paprika
Pinch of cayenne pepper
1 cup of sour cream or creme fraiche
3 tbsp of fresh dill leaves, finly chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Melt the margarine in a large saucepan over a low heat. Add the onion and cook until its translucent.

Add the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper to taste, then increase the heat and stir. The mushrooms will hiss and pop and lose their moisture. Let this moisture evaporate to concentrate the flavour. The speed at which this happens will depend on the mushrooms.

Add the paprika and cayenne and fry briefly until the paprika change colour. Add the sour cream and dill, cook for about five minutes, then serve.

Notes on the recipe

• First, the good news. This dish tasted good! The combination of dill, sour cream and paprika worked well.
• Now the confession: what I made looked nothing like the photo in the cook book. It’s meant to end up looking like sauteed mushrooms with a dusting of paprika. Mine came out more like a stroganoff. I think its because I used less mushrooms that the original recipe but forgot to adjust the sour cream. I apologise to Hungarians for committing a sacrilege with your national dish.
• Apparently chanterelles are traditionally used in this recipe, but Celia suggests a mix of wild and cultivated mushrooms. I used standard white mushrooms as I already had them lying around in the fridge.
• The mushrooms are meant to be served over rice, pasta or noodles. I coudn’t help myself and served them over mashed potatoes instead.

Dill

• The origins of dill are unclear, but it’s thought to come from the Mediterranean or west Asia.
• Dill is used in both its fresh and dried form. Dill seeds and dill oil are also used in food preparation as well.
• Dill is normally paired with potatoes or cucumber.
• In medieval times it was used to ward off witchcraft. It’s also thought to ward off flatulence. How convenient.

Read more here, here and here.
OK, so I’m officially hooked on Weekend Herb Blogging, kindly hosted this week by Glenda of a Fridge Full of Food.

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Seeing as Weekend Herb Blogging was so much fun last week, I thought I’d have another go this weekend.

My aim was to use up some of the leftover veggies in my fridge. With a thunderstorm brewing outside, and a brown paper bag of sebago potatoes just asking to be eaten, I couldn’t go past a thick, hearty soup.

The question was what to pair with the potatoes. On a whim, I picked up what I hoped was a fennel in my local fruit shop. I’ve never cooked with a fennel before so I wasn’t sure exactly what it tasted like or if it would be a good potato companion, but its thick white bulb and feathery leaves just had a soup-vegetable look to me.

After some quick Internet research I found out that fennel had an aniseed flavour (yum) and there was a strong tradition of combining it with potato to make soup (phew). So with thunder pounding over Bondi and rain streaming down my street I set about making what turned out to be a great dinner.

Ingredients

1 fennel
3 sebago potatoes
1 small brown onion
3 cups vegetable stock
1 can of chickpeas
1 tsp caraway seeds
dash of lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste
drizzle of olive oil

Method

Cut the leaves and stems off the fennel, and the bottom off the bulb. Chop the fennel bulb into thin strips much like you would a leek. Finely chop the onion. Cut the potato into evenly sized cubes.

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Saute the onion until it turns translucent. Add the caraway seeds. After a minute add the potato and fennel and cook for about five minutes.

Add the stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer on a low heat until the potato has softened so that it breaks up easily when pushed with a spoon.

Put the soup in a food blender and puree. When the consistency is smooth, transfer back to the saucepan. Add the chickpeas and a dash of lemon. Heat for a few minutes until the chickpeas are hot then serve immediately with a sprinkle of cracked pepper on top.

Some notes on the recipe

• I used caraway seeds because I had them lying around in the cupboard. They gave a nice flavour to the soup, but they’re not essential. Don’t think you need to rush out and buy them in you don’t have some already.
• I used my own homemade liquid vegetable stock and the same amount of water.
• My stock is heavy on the salt and garlic, so I didn’t add either to the recipe. If you’re using stock cubes, I’d fry a few cloves of minced garlic with the onion. If you want to make a really tasty soup, roast some garlic cloves in aluminium foil for about 20 minutes then break the flesh out of the papery shell and add it to the onion.
• You can use a hand blender if you don’t have a food processor. But it will be messier.
• I threw the chickpeas in because a couple of weeks ago I had the potato and chickpea pasta ragout pictured below at an Italian restaurant in Adelaide, and it rocked my world. It worked well because the whole chickpeas added some structure to the thick pureed soup base.

Better the fennel you know

So, if like me you’re not a fennel expert, here are some facts:

• Fennel is herb, and hails from Southern Europe and South West Asia.
• You can use multiple parts of fennel, including the bulb, the seeds, and the leaves.
• Apparently fennel was one of nine herbs sacred to Anglo Saxons.
• It has also been used as insect repellent, and to ward off witchcraft. I call that versatile.

For more info, take a look at wikipedia, or learn about growing it here.
Sher of What Did you Eat has the full round-up so stop by to check it out.

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Around this time of year the temperature in Canberra starts to drop with the onset of Autumn.  It’s around this time that I start thinking about winter “comfort food” recipes. 

So, here is a recipe for one of my favourite, simple, tasty winter soups.  I can’t remember where I got this from.  I also don’t know that there is really anything particularly “Middle Eastern” about it, but that’s just what I’ve always called it.

Ingredients

1 cauliflower, cut into chunks
3 or 4 potatoes, diced
1 onion, diced or sliced
Vegetable stock
Oil
Dried, powdered herbs: coriander (cilantro), cumin, turmeric, paprika
Salt/pepper
Cream or sour cream (to serve)

Method

There’s no real secret to this: it’s “soup making 101″.  Just fry the onion in the oil until its browned, add the cauliflower and potato and allow to sweat (covered) for a few minutes, before adding enough stock to cover the vegetables.  Then add generous amounts of the herbs, season with the salt and pepper and bring to the boil.  Allow to boil for 20 minutes or so - til the potato is cooked, however long that takes.  Then liquidise it in a blender or food processor.  Serve with a dash of cream or sour cream, and some crusty bread.  Yum!

Variation

You can substitute broccoli for the cauliflower, which is equally nice.  But I’d recommend not using a mix of broccoli and cauliflower.  I’ve tried that once, and it really doesn’t work.

- AC

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