Author: Meg

Categories
fish recipes salad

Fresh sardines with zucchini, herb and caper salad

Tonight’s dinner was the delightful product of serendipity and greed. I was feeling restless when I woke up this morning, so headed out for a jaunt on the bike, planning to follow the river around New Farm and out to Newstead House. I footled over there (via various detours), lazed about on the hilly lawns for a while watching the calm river and the less calm sporty people dashing along its banks, then got back as far as the Powerhouse, where I found the path blocked off for the weekend markets.

I totally intended to wheel my way around the edge of the markets and get home for a shower, when my eye was caught by a stall selling early cherries. Stonefruit is the one thing – the only thing – I like about Brisbane summers, and the good stuff is just starting to show up now. I was caught in the cherries’ tractor beam and found myself buying half a kilo before I was fully aware of what I was doing. Once having pushed into the crowd while wheeling my bike, I figured I might as well press on through, and manfully (ha!) resisted buying the several dozen other delicious but unnecessary things that caught my eye… until I got to the fishmonger. I’ve been craving sardines for weeks. Screw the meals I’d planned for the weekend, those sardines were coming home with me. And they did. I escaped without further purchases (except for two small buffalo mozarella, which can be squeezed into the planned meals quite nicely, alright?), and spent an enjoyable afternoon planning how I was going to eat the first few fillets.

In the end I decided to make something almost precisely like this salad of Helen’s, sans anchovies. I love julienned zucchini (especially since Matt and Leonie gave me a julienne peeler so I no longer need to brave the terrifying mandoline) and this combination is crispy, fresh, and sharp, the perfect complement to some quickly panfried sardines.


Sardine dinner for one

1 medium zucchini, julienned finely
1 handful parsley leaves, torn
1 handful mint leaves, torn
2 teaspoons salted capers, soaked and drained
8 tiny cornichons, cut into slices

1 small clove garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon or so seed mustard
juice of half a small lemon
top quality olive oil

fresh butterflied sardines (I ate 6 small and thin ones)
good bread (a ficelle from Chouquette in this case)

Toss the zucchini, herbs, capers and cornichons together in a bowl. Make the dressing by combining the garlic, mustard and lemon juice, then whisking in olive oil to emulsify. Combine salad and dressing well.

Heat a frypan over moderate heat, and add a little olive oil. Fry the sardine fillets until just done – mine took 2 minutes on the skin side followed by about 40 seconds on the other side.

Plate up the sardines, salad and bread, and eat at once. Divine. Fresh cherries for dessert just make it even better.

Categories
indian recipes vegetarian

South Indian cabbage with yoghurt

It’s November, and I think this year I must have eaten close to 50 meals of dal. Curried pulses, how I love you. I often make a giant pot on a Sunday and freeze portions to take for lunches, and it also gets eaten now and then for dinner too. I think of it as lazy-girl dal – lazy because I end up eating the same thing for lunch 3+ days a week; lazy because it means I don’t have to plan dinners with leftovers in mind; lazy because I can rarely be bothered cooking a second curry to get my veggie quota so always just chuck loads of vegetables (sweet potato, spinach and zucchini in the most recent pot) into the dal.

This, however, could be a game-changing vegetable curry. It’s easy and quick, but very tasty and hits my palate’s current (and recurrent) obsessions of cabbage, yoghurt and spice. The cabbage is cooked till it’s just tender, but still has a bit of crispness to the tooth. It’s sweated down in a flavourful mix of spices and onions, then dressed with coconut and the slight sourness of yoghurt. (Don’t, despite what Marth Rose Shulman says in the original recipe, use low-fat yoghurt for this – apart from the fact that you’d just be eating a bunch of stabilisers, low-fat is much more likely to curdle in the heat.)

This quantity is supposed to serve 6 just with rice, but it was so good that I ate about a quarter of  it with both a little brown rice and a serving of that lazy-girl dal. I think I have found a perfect lunchtime match.


2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
3-4 tablespoons grated coconut (fresh or dried)
peanut oil
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
2 teaspoons urad dal
1 teaspoon ground or flaked chili
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 medium onion, halved and very finely sliced
1 small cabbage, cored and finely shredded
salt
1 cup plain yoghurt, at room temperature


Toast the cumin and coriander seeds lightly, then grind them with a mortar and pestle.

If you are using dried coconut, put it in a little bowl covered with warm water to rehydrate.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil in a large saucepan. Add the mustard seeds and urad dal. As soon as you hear a few pops from the mustard seeds, add the ground cumin and coriander, the chili and the turmeric. Stir together then add the onion and cook 3-4 minutes, stirring, until it is softening. Add the cabbage and a good teaspoon of salt, and cook, stirring, for another minute until it begins to wilt and everything is well mixed. You can deglaze the pan with a tiny dash of water at this stage if necessary.

Cover the pan, turn the heat to low, and cook for about 8 minutes, until the cabbage is just tender. Drain the coconut and stir through the cabbage. Taste for seasoning. Remove from heat.

Stir the yoghurt through the cabbage. Serve warm.

Categories
asian recipes vegetarian

Kimchi bokumbap with sesame-fried egg

This afternoon I went to the first grant-writing workshop of the season, and with it came the usual stomach-churning sense of dreadful intellectual inferiority and self-chastisement for wasted time throughout the year. I know from experience that this will only last a few days, but it’s nasty while it does. Works well to get your productivity skyrocketing, though. I’d felt like I’d already been running on all cylinders for the last few weeks, but the grant panic kept me going for a 13 hour day at uni today, setting analyses running on all cores of my computer and half a dozen nodes of the new cluster as well. It’ll snap my eyes open at 5.30 tomorrow morning too, and have me back on my bike to work by 6.

Anyway, I finally cycled home tonight and made this in about 15 minutes, and god it was satisfying. Crispy and chewy and squishy by turns; sour and hot yet mellow. I’ve got about a kilo of kimchi in the fridge and I can see many variations of this dish in the offing.


2 large golden shallots (or 1 small onion), chopped
sesame oil
2 scallions, green parts, chopped into 2 cm lengths
1 extremely large handful of kimchi, roughly chopped, plus its juice
1 handful cooked chopped silverbeet or other greens
1/2 cup cooked brown rice (leftover rice better than freshly cooked)
soy sauce
salt and pepper
1 egg

In a frypan, heat a dash of sesame oil over moderate heat and add the shallots (you can use peanut oil for this step if you prefer). Cook until softened and coloured, then add the scallions, kimchi and greens and cook another three minutes until the scallions are softened. Add the rice, a little dash of soy sauce, a good drizzle of sesame oil, salt and pepper, and stir to mix well. Spread the mixture over the bottom of the frypan and turn the heat up. Let it cook another few minutes, getting a little crispy, or at least toasty, on the bottom.

At the same time as you’re adding the rice, heat another dash of sesame oil in a small frypan over lowish heat. Crack an egg into the pan and fry it until the white is just cooked but the yolk is still runny.

Once the egg is cooked and the rice is toasted, tip the rice mixture into a bowl and slide the egg on top. Eat at once.

Categories
recipes vegetarian

Lemon-roasted chickpeas with silverbeet

I was taken by this recipe for lemon-roasted chickpea, silverbeet and red onion salad, but got home tonight to discover that my red onions were sprouting magnificently large green topknot-shoots and I’d also run out of cumin. Even modified, however, this was a good dinner. I particularly liked the chickpeas (though when do I not like chickpeas?) – roasting them makes them ever so slightly crisp and seems to infuse the flavour of the lemon and spices into them. I at this with a spoonful of yoghurt on top, and I bet it would be even better with the roast red onions as well.

1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
olive oil
juice of a lemon
1 heaped teaspoon cumin (I used garam masala, also good)
sea salt and black pepper
garlic-infused olive oil
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 bunch silverbeet, stemmed and roughly chopped

Heat the oven to 180C. Line a baking tray with paper, and tip the chickpeas onto it. Drizzle with olive oil, lemon juice, spice, salt and pepper, and toss well. Roast for approx 15 minutes, until golden and slightly crispy. Remove from oven.

Heat the garlic-infused olive oil (or plain olive oil with some crushed garlic) in a pan, then add the fennel seeds and sizzle for a minute. Add the silverbeet, and cook until wilted and soft. Taste it to make sure – it wilts quite a bit before it becomes sufficiently soft.

Toss the chickpeas and any remaining roasting liquid through the silverbeet, and taste for seasoning or more lemon. Eat warm.

Serves one extremely hungry chickpea-and-silverbeet fiend to complete satiation.

Categories
fritters indian recipes vegetarian

Hell yes, madam (spring onion, coriander and besan flour fritters)

Who’s our first elected female prime minister? Julia Gillard, that’s who. Hell yes, madam.

Anyway, celebration in this household took the form of fried food and beer for dinner. I have complete blindness for recipes that call for deep-frying – it simply doesn’t occur to me that I could do it. So I am extremely grateful to Tiny Banquet Committee for posting about their fritterized, shallow-fried version of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s deep-fried spring onion bhajis. Deep-fried spheres, eh, whatever. But greens-packed, besan flour fritters: intriguing.

Despite my intention of fritterizing the results, I followed Hugh FW’s recipe to the dot up to the cooking stage. Mysteriously this produced not the “smoothish batter” promised, but instead a bowl full of chopped up spring onions lightly and unevenly coated with faint smears of batter. Seriously, it looked like there was about 5% batter to 95% onions by volume. I’m not sure if I used the wrong kind or quantity of spring onions (I used one full bunch of the long green onions sold as shallots in Australia), or perhaps cut them wrongly (into 1 cm rounds), or what. But there wasn’t quite enough batter to even stick the onions together for any kind of frying. So I dumped in another couple of tablespoons of besan flour, followed by another slosh of beer, and miraculously things came together.

My fritters were much more greens-heavy and therefore raggedy-looking than the ones on Tiny Banquet Committee, but man they tasted good. The besan flour gives a great savoury flavour, the spices perk things up just enough, and the fritters were crisp on the outside, and soft and green-oniony on the inside. The raita adds an essential sharp/sour/creamy complement – I made it with goats curd and yoghurt a la HFW, but tasted very little of the goatiness. You could probably up the goat cheese for more of a hit, or just use all Greek yoghurt instead if you want to keep things simple.

Cheers Julia! I raise my beer (and a fritter) to you.

 

For the raita
100 g fresh radishes, trimmed and washed
50 g soft goats cheese
150 ml whole milk yoghurt
3 teaspoons chopped fresh mint leaves
1 pinch salt

Slice the radishes very thinly (1 mm). Beat together the cheese and the yoghurt until smooth, then add the radishes, mint and salt and stir to combine.

 

For the fritters
90 g chickpea (a.k.a. gram or besan) flour
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 heaped teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large pinch cayenne pepper
1 large pinch black nigella seeds
4 tablespoons chopped coriander leaves
180 g spring onions, trimmed, cut into 1cm slices
100-120 ml beer or water
peanut oil

Sieve the besan flour, plain flour, coriander, cumin, salt and cayenne pepper into a bow. Add the onion seeds, coriander leaves and spring onions, and whisk together. Gradually add the beer or water, continually stirring, until you have a batter. If you find that this is not enough batter to hold things together, add a bit more besan flour and beer until it is. Mine was still very much spring onions only just held together with batter, and that worked great.

Heat a frypan over medium heat and add a slick of oil. Make each fritter by scooping up about a dessert-spoon of the mixture, dropping it into the pan, and pressing down with the back of the spoon to make a flattish circle (about 1.5 cm thick). Fry for a few minutes, until the bottom is browned. Flip and cook another couple of minutes until the other side is also browned and the middle is cooked. Drain on kitchen paper, repeat with the rest of the mixture. Eat hot, with raita and beer. Makes about 10 fritters.

Categories
chitchat

Meg + bike = OTP

My long-suffering Facebook friends are used to being updated on my continuing love affair with my bike. Another week, another paean to the joys of commuting under my own power between home and uni, along the river. Most days it’s the simple exercise I value most – the cranking up of my poor clockwork brain that needs to be wound up with a bit of cardiovascular activity so it can tick on throughout the day. Or it’s the 40 minutes spent away from computer, papers and iPod, leaving room for my thoughts to wash up and back like the tide. Or it’s the fact that it’s free, and I’ve saved both bus fare and gym membership for one more day.

But there are a couple of less tangible things about it I think are worth even more. The first is the way that a memory of a town is ground into you by riding (or walking) a route over and over again. If I close my eyes I can walk again my commutes in Dublin and Brighton, remembering every turning, the horse chestnut tree on the side street, the change from concrete to cobble footpath at a particular corner, the white-painted walls of an alleyway, the metal of an old manhole cover worn slippery, the long, long wait at a particular pedestrian crossing, the low winter sun glinting on the windows of my office as I round the last corner. It’s the same in Brisbane now. There’s the slow climb up to the Storey Bridge, the twisty zip down the path and precipitous Ivory Lane to the river, the slow weaving in and out between pedestrians getting off the ferry at Riverside, the wrist-shaking juddering over the cobbled paths in the botanic gardens, looking out at where Lightfoot used to be moored before Michelle and Graham set off for Canada, then the brackish smell of the mangroves, the roar of the freeway above, watch out for the lip of the curb there, the winding back and forth with the river, up onto the road at Toowong, two hills in the looping St Lucia backstreets (on one of which I was almost run over by a garbage truck coming the other way, a year ago), and the final run into uni, past the old parasitology buildings, and down the ramp into the courtyard of our building. I’ll never fully lose this fine-grained knowledge of this route, not completely.

And the second: freedom. My bike lets me go places I wouldn’t venture on foot at night. Down by the rowing sheds at uni. Around the factories and warehouses in West End, when the streets are silent and deserted. Through the city botanic gardens, dodging ringtail possums hypnotised by my lamp, past the sleeping homeless people, even though QUT apparently sends out occasional emails suggesting that women keep out of the park when it’s dark. I feel like the city is mine, in a way it would never be if I were in a car or walking. I can cycle for miles, go wherever I want, explore whatever makes me curious, and sense it all directly.

Tonight, riding home from my Italian class at about 9.30, I found the river walk blocked off  just coming into the city. At first I was cross at the thought of having to take the suggested detour, which involved lots of road-crossing and getting involved with traffic. But then I decided instead to cross over the Go Between bridge to West End, cycle along the south bank of the river past the Cultural Centre, and cross back over on the Goodwill Bridge. Coming into West End, suddenly alert again, I smelled the sharp, sour smell of the milk factory on the night air as I turned into Montague St. I slowed down as I passed the old Montague hotel on the other side of the road, looking over at people sitting talking at tables outside on the footpath, under iron lace balconies, in warm pools of light, quiet amongst the empty streets around. When I came to the museum of modern art, I missed the turnoff for the cycle path, and since there was almost no-one else around I continued on and followed the narrow twists of the pedestrian path for a while, then bumped over the edge of the path to coast down the steep rolling hill of lawn between the garden beds, back to the river’s edge and the boardwalk. It was like a dream – somehow intense but full of floating potential. I smiled the rest of the ride home, thoroughly aware again despite the familiar route.

Categories
pasta recipes vegetarian

Orecchiette with peas, zucchini and lemon

Greetings from the land of frantic work panic! This is my 15 minutes of web time between dinner and getting back to an analysis. But I still had time to make this extremely tasty (and simple) pasta tonight, which was so good I want to preserve it for future remaking. I bet it would be even better with a mixture of mint and parsley, rather than parsley alone.

150 g orecchiete
1.5 cups frozen peas
3 slender zucchini
garlic-infused olive oil
finely grated zest of one large lemon
2 dessert spoons of the best creme fraiche
a piece of feta about 10 x 5 x 1 cm , finely crumbled
leaves from a small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
sea salt and black pepper

Cook the orecchiete in boiling salted water.  Defrost the peas by putting them in a bowl with hot water.

Meanwhile, slice the zucchini finely with a mandolin or slicing side of a grater. Saute it with some garlic-infused olive oil for 5 or 6 minutes, till it is soft.

Three minutes before the pasta is done, add the peas to the saucepan in which the pasta is cooking. Once the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the frypan with the zucchini. Toss together for a minute over low heat with the lemon zest, creme fraiche, feta, parsley and salt and pepper.

Eat up. Serves 2.

Categories
pasta recipes vegetarian

Saturdays are not for work

No work today! None! And I feel I ought to record, for reminding myself later, how awesome a work-free Saturday can be. This morning Edwige and I went to a sewing class at Gardams, where we cut out our skirt patterns, adjusted them in tissue, and chose fabric. After a lot of dithering I went for an abstract red and black number that looks like a cross between curtains and QANTAS uniforms from the 1960s – it’s going to be either horrific or really great. Cutting out and sewing begins next Saturday!

Back to Edwige and Jean’s for lunch, which translated to 5 hours on the couches in front of the pot-bellied stove, eating pate and rillettes with good bread (delivered from Chouquette by Ted, along with pastries) and salad, drinking wine, and chatting.

And finally home in the twilight, and much later a dinner of pasta and mushrooms, as below. This is a wintery tangle of nutty spelt linguine, mushrooms with an edge of garlic, green herbs and slightly sweet comté cheese. I would happily make this many times again – hopefully always after such an enjoyable day.

Spelt linguine with mushrooms, herbs and comté

200 g spelt linguine
butter
a dozen or so swiss brown or other tasty mushrooms, sliced
a dash of garlic-infused olive oil
fresh thyme and flat-leaf parsley, chopped
100g comté cheese, coarsely grated

Cook the linguine in boiling water until al dente.

Meanwhile, heat the butter in a  pan and saute the mushrooms until brown and soft. Add a dash of the garlic-infused olive oil a bit before finishing. Season with salt and pepper.

When the pasta is done, drain and toss with the mushrooms, herbs and cheese. Eat at once.

Serves 2.

Categories
hippie-food recipes vegetarian

Baked barley and vegetables

I spent most of the last couple of weeks in California, first at the Wolbachia conference in Asilomar, and then visiting Devin in Berkeley, and Carolin and Dave in Merced/Nelder Grove/LA. It was one of the most intense holidays I’ve had for a long time, and readjusting to a more quotidian lifestyle has been a bit of a shock. Where is my daily change of scene and people? You mean I’m just supposed to oscillate between the lab and home and do my usual boring stuff? Huh?

I was given a lot of different cooking inspirations during my trip. Various shrimp and fish tacos in Merced and LA. Carolin’s breakfast pancakes made with rye, chickpea and almond flours, with maple syrup and berries. A sweet skinny mango eaten with a spoon, sitting beside a river in Yosemite, after a lunch of bread and cheese. Jon-Paul’s one-dish bliss pilaf with pistachios, artichokes and greens, and his foaming sourdough pancakes the next morning. A slender rack of lamb drizzled with ume plum vinegar, eaten outside in the twilight while listening to the cicadas. Basil ice cream at Ici.

I can’t easily recreate all of these dishes here – not least because I’m missing the company that made them so good – but I’ve been reminded yet again of how much enjoyment there is to be had from cooking with friends, eating good food at each meal rather than accepting bad robot-kibble from the uni refec, spending the half-hour chopping and roasting and chatting at the end of the day for the sake of the pleasure to be had from a proper dinner. I’d fallen into the habit of having pasta or toast for dinner, eaten at the computer all too often, before I left. That was partly the mad rush to finish off some research before the conference, but also partly laziness and forgetting what actually makes me happy.

After summer meals in California, the dish below probably seems like a bit of a contrast. It has the potential for stodge, but it’s warming and comforting rather than lumpen, honestly. I arrived home an hour or so before Ted on Friday night, and pottered around the kitchen, wanting to use up various bits and pieces left in the fridge from the week before. A couple of heels of cheese, half a pot of cream, assorted vegetables rattling around in the crisper. I considered a pasta bake but wanted something earthier, nuttier, more chewy. This dish of baked barley and vegetables, held together with scraps of cream, cheese and egg, was the result. I think it would also do very well with other combinations – maybe mushrooms, spinach and herbs with a smoked cheese? You could also swap the cream for some vegetable or chicken stock, as it’s just to add some moistness rather than creaminess per se.

1 large butternut squash
olive oil (preferably garlic-infused)
salt and pepper
3 zucchini
1 large bunch spinach
2-3 cups cooked barley
150 ml cream
1 egg
a couple of handfuls of grated mozzarella
a smallish chunk of feta, crumbled
coarsely grated parmesan

Peel the squash, cut into 1.5 cm cubes, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roast at 180 C until softened and golden around the edges.

Coarsley grate the zucchini, then saute in a pan with garlic-infused olive oil and a pinch of salt for 5 minutes, until softened. Drain and set aside. Wash and chop the spinach, then wilt in the pan, drain any liquid and set aside with the zucchini.

Mix together the vegetables and barley. Whisk the egg into the cream, then mix that into the vegetables together with the feta and mozzarella. There should be more vegetables than barley, and the mixture should be damp and hold somewhat together, but not be runny. Add a little extra cream if needed.

Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish (a lasagne dish works well), smooth the top, sprinkle with parmesan, and bake at 180 C for about 30 minutes, until the top is bubbling and light gold. Rest it for a few minutes then serve.

Serves 6.

Categories
indian recipes vegetarian

Pumpkin and [spinach|silverbeet] curry

I’ve got no idea if this is an authentic curry from any location at all other than suburban Australian kitchens, but it is delicious.  It’s very slightly adapted from the recipe here, where they say that the fenugreek seeds are optional. I’d argue that the fenugreek is one of the essential flavours here, along with the curry leaves and lime juice.  I used silverbeet rather than spinach and it works fine – just chop it well.

Leftovers of this (together with a panch dal) are going to be lunch for  me for several days this week. Can’t wait!

oil or ghee
1 heaped teaspoon brown mustard seeds
3 green chillies, deseeded and thinly sliced (or equivalent dried chilli flakes)
12 fresh curry leaves
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
2 onions, finely chopped
425 g can tomatoes
200 ml coconut milk
300 ml water
500g  pumpkin, peeled and cut into 2 cm chunks
1 bunch spinach or silverbeet, chopped
1 lime, juiced

Heat the oil in a large pan over medium heat, then add the mustard seeds and cook for a minute, until they start to pop.  Add the chillies, curry leaves, fenugreek seeds and turmeric, and cook another couple of minutes until they are aromatic. Add the onions and a pinch or two of salt, and cook for 5 minutes, or until they’re soft. Now add the tomatoes (break them up with the spoon if they’re whole), coconut milk, water and pumpkin, and simmer, partly covered, for 15 minutes or until the pumpkin is a few minutes away from done. Add the spinach or silverbeet, stir it in, and cook until wilted. Sqeeze in the juice of half the lime. Taste the sauce and add more lime juice if needed.