Category: Vegetarian

For once: not Nigella.

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Apologies in advance if this post is a little lacklustre – have just watched a lot of telly and am pretty tired.

I have a difficult time staying consistently ‘healthy’ in my eating habits. I’ll do pilates, have some soymilk, and then follow it up with a buttered chocolate bar. Okay, I’m joking…barely. Last night’s dinner was a good enough example of this – salad and lentil soup (healthy) with homemade mince pies (unhealthy.) However, in my opinion, as long as there are lots of vegetables and other good things present, it can’t be too bad.

The lentil soup came from Alison Holst’s Dollars And Sense cookbook. I have no snarky comments to make – it was great soup, very easy and made from stuff I had in the cupboard. Yet another reminder of why this book is worth reading over.
Above: Lentils, vegetables, spices, water – this pretty much cancels out buttery pastry…right?

So taken was I with the beetroot and feta tarts that I thought I would make the pastry shells again and fill them with (much cheaper) mince to make a kind of homespun Big Ben pie, if you will. As you can see I got a little excited with the leftover pastry scraps…

Above: Twinkle, twinkle little pie…These were not just a pretty picture, they tasted rather lovely too. I could only manage one (my pie tin makes four) probably because I’d eaten too much pastry while making them, but Tim snarfed his down. He had my second one for breakfast this morning and said it was the best he’d ever had. Well, I guess anything beats Weet-bix (to which I have a particular aversion.)

Finally, balancing this out was a salad of beans, cucumber, and our old friends feta and walnuts. I didn’t have cucumber so replaced it with fennel, quelle surprise! This recipe comes from the New Zealand cookbook, and is a fabulous combination with a lovely lemony dressing. Tim and I hoovered it up in about ten seconds – it’s very more-ish.
Above: Hopefully everyone isn’t sick of seeing things scattered in feta and walnuts…

Dinner tonight was something I’ve been craving all day- a vast pot of pasta. I don’t know if there is Italian blood coursing through my veins somewhere but few things make me happier than pasta. Of course, creamy cheese-laden pasta dishes are a lot easier to love than the more austere tomato sauce that we had tonight, yet it was still richly flavoured and filling and all those other good things. I based the sauce on a Moroccan recipe in The Accidental Vegetarian, which adds cinnamon, cumin and tumeric to give aromatic depth. I biffed in a handful of red lentils and let them simmer away into nothing. It was delicious! I suppose it didn’t help that I ate half a packet of wine gums while watching America’s Next Top Model (oh the irony!)

Above: Made with canned tomatoes for 60c from Kmart! Tip for the wise: never buy your canned tomatoes from the supermarket, they are much cheaper at Kmart or the Warehouse. By the way…I crumbled some feta over the pasta, as you can probably see, but hastily stirred it through so it wouldn’t be a focal point of this picture.
Right, am off to bed now: being crosseyed and dozy does not make for a sparklingly witty blog.

“My conscience, thou art feta’d…”

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On the one hand: overkill. On the other hand: It’s what Shakespeare would have wanted…

But really, I am going to have to reign it in.

Last night’s dinner used up the last of the pork. I thought there wasn’t much left on the bone, but once I started digging I amassed a sizable pile. To go with I made Feta Bread from The Accidental Vegetarian, and the Red Peppers with Feta and Almonds from Nigella Bites. Except I didn’t have almonds so I used walnuts. I like to get the most out of my luxury items (guess which two things they are this week?) which is why you may notice some repetition in ingredients this week…


Above: Doh! This is the dough after rising for an hour or so – I halved the recipe, and this is our biggest bowl – I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d kept to the original proportions. I don’t know why this photo came out so dark, but I rather like how it looks rather sinister and dark side of the moon-esque…

The recipe was incredibly easy, the only difficult bit was kneading in the feta, mint and olive oil after it rose. I think if I were to make it again, I’d add the oil at the start, as putting it in at the end made the dough completely uncooperative, and nothing would cohere. I eventually managed to bully the dough into incorporating the feta but it looked a bit messy. Luckily it cooked up well and tasted amazing!


Above: The finished product. It tasted wonderful! I think it would be great as part of a ‘bread and dips’ selection.

As I mentioned up there, we had red peppers sprinkled with feta and walnuts to go with. For the two of us, I cut one large red pepper into six – they are still pretty expensive, hence the holding back, as I could eat cooked peppers till the cows come home! This is a very simple recipe – just shove the peppers under the grill for a bit, and that’s about it. I added some sliced fennel for contrast and, well, extra presence of veges. The combination was, not surprisingly, fantastic.


Above: Pretty, too! I imagine this would be fab chopped up and stirred through pasta as well.

After that we all drank wine and beer (prompted by Emma, who had her last exam yesterday) and stayed up yarning till 3am asking all those questions that life throws at you – like, “why are students taxed so bloody much when we earn so little?” and “is it pronounced di-PLOD-oh-cus or dip-lo-DOH-cus?”

Is This A Beetroot I See Before Me…

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After handling the stalks and leaves of a bunch of beetroot yesterday, I came to the conclusion that Shakespeare is trying to tell me something from beyond the grave…Hamlet style! Or perhaps more in the style of Richard III, after all…okay, I’ll stop, I mean I have finished my exam and everything.


Above: Out, damned spot! I guess it makes sense that if beetroot make your hands red, so will their stalks. If there is one thing I enjoy more than a pun it is a visual pun, and as soon as I saw my hands turn so “incarnadine” I knew that somewhere out there, Shakespeare was endorsing my continued delight in misusing his words.
Anyway –

Above:These are the intensely pink stalks of beetroot, which, with the leaves, went into my intensely healthy lunch yesterday: Noodles with Beet Greens from Nigella’s How To Eat. I made this because I had noticed that our beetroot from the market was so, erm, well endowed with stalks, and didn’t want to waste them, even though it had never occured to me to eat them before. A word of caution – apart from the obvious, that they stain – only use the very thin stalks, anything too thick will taste unsurmountably fibrous and woody. So: into boiled soba noodles go the steamed and wilted beet bits, followed by a few Asian flavourings.

Above: Once I got over the fact that like a panda, I was eating shoots and leaves, I really liked this. The greens (and pinks) had a strong silverbeet flavour which went well with the soy sauce I’d put in, and it was satisfyingly filling.
For dinner we had leftover pork, which I augmented with some Beetroot (waste not, want not) and Feta tarts from The Accidental Vegetarian. Well. They are incredible. I simplified the recipe somewhat, making my own pastry – smugly, I didn’t even use a recipe. Well, I think pastry is justifiable to be smug about, but then maybe it’s not – all you do is use flour, half its weight in butter, whizz it up, add a little water…and that’s it!
I got to use some awesome little tart tins that I bought impulsively at the Food Show earlier this year (all the while telling Tim “of course I’ll use them!!”) The very cool thing about them is that the base lifts out of each little indentation to make it easier to lift them out.

Above: I can’t believe something that dinky sprang forth from my hands.
I filled them with a mixture of roast beetroot, parboiled brocolli, feta and walnuts. Ooooooh they were good.
Above: Ooooooh. Words fail me.
I guess it goes without saying that after dinner we watched Outrageous Fortune…

Gentlemen Prefer Blondies

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I bought some more pork. I wasn’t going to, but I thought – My public needs me. However, I made a different recipe to the last, semi-disastrous time, mostly because Marsala is relatively pricey and the Roast Pork Cinghiale uses rather a lot of it. I turned instead to the much simpler Slow Cooked Pork from Nigella Bites, actually a recipe for 12 people (with 9 1/2 kilos of pork!!) so I had to scale it down…a lot. You are supposed to cook it in a low oven overnight, after smearing it with a chilli-garlic-ginger paste, but I just left our comparitively meagre 1.6kg in for about 5, while Tim and I went off to do our exam. Still tender as a woman’s kiss. I presume.

Above: An actual photo of pork! Look, you guys didn’t miss out on much last time because…I still haven’t figured out how to make pork look good on camera. I believe studio lighting and some photoshop might help.
To go with, I made a dish I’ve been eyeing for some time, from The Accidental Vegetarian: Fennel, Asparagus and Roast Potato salad. I fiddled with it slightly, in that I didn’t add the Italian dressing or rocket leaves, but it was amaaaazingly good. The roasted potato gave crunch, the asparagus gave its own brand of magical deliciousness, and the crisp shards of fennel gave cool, fresh contrast, not only to the slight oiliness of the other veges but also to the rich pork.

Above: The reason I am thankful for the vege market.
We ate this while watching The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, which is a pretty amusing film, though I think I prefer the book. I particularly like how the doors on the spaceship open and close with a sigh – and how we caught a glimpse of New Zealand at the end when they are zooming all over the world. Then, as you know, we went and watched the spectacular fireworks, from the top of the Cable Car lookout, which is a 5-10 minute walk from our place. It was a very clear, still night – miraculously – so perfect for such an occasion.
When we got back I was going to make something for dessert but didn’t have the energy. The idea of having to measure flour made me want to weep like a bairn, so I left it till this morning to make…White Chocolate Brownies (or Blondies, if you will.) These come from Nigella’s How to Be A Domestic Goddess and are child’s play to make.
Speaking of which, I found the following amusing:
Above: Zoom in – gorgeous white chocolate.
Above: Zoom Out – Why yes, that is a pack of loo roll and half a roast chicken on our dining table.
Anyway, melted white chocolate and butter goes into beaten eggs and sugar (I used half brown to give it extra fudginess) and flour gets folded in (or flung, in my case – I can never keep the stuff in one place.)

Above: photo by Tim, who is as adept at capturing slow-moving batter as he is with fireworks. Even though you can only see about 1/18 of my hands (okay, 1/3, they’re pretty small) what is visible is very floury and smeary. Imagine That!

Above: The finished blondies. These are great, in that they are no effort to make and yet repay you with such gratifying squidginess. The only thing that I think would improve these is a handful of white chocolate chips or the like in the batter but…I just really like white chocolate (even though there is a vogue for claiming to love the intensely bitter 300% cocoa solids dark chocolate these days.)

No pudding again? Souper…

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First post of November! Wait, it’s November already? Aaargh! Tim and I spent 4 hours at the library today, watching the BBC production of Richard III, which although erring on the side of endless, is really very enjoyable, with lots of fantastic lines. But still: Four Hours. I am drained…

I have restrained myself from making pudding lately, because, well, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to lay off the sugar a little. And boy, do I miss making pudding…sometimes a quartered orange just doesn’t cut it, but it is, as Nigella accurately notes in How To Eat, “something to stave off that moment of loneliness and despondency that always threatens to settle when you realise eating is over for the day.” Though it pains me a little to quote Meatloaf, she took the words right outta my mouth. The words were no doubt covered in butter.

Last night I made another recipe from Nigella.com, Tomato, Red Lentil and Chorizo Soup. I realise that chorizo probably isn’t the thing to eat if one is worrying about having too much pudding, but I figure the inclusion of red lentils and canned tomatoes instantly squashes any of that…At any rate, it was flavoursome and full of veges (and lentils!) and was very easy to make.


Above: Everything looks good in the bowls Ange left at our flat. Thanks, Ange.

Speaking of which, this soup would, I’m sure, be fine if you wanted to take it in a vegetarian direction and leave out the chorizo, or indeed you could replace the chorizo with bacon or somesuch to make it gluten-free. Now that I’ve talked it up, I feel I should provide the recipe, which is…here! Note – I halved it, used canned tomatoes, and didn’t have any capsicums. Still great!
To go with, I used a recipe from Annabel Cooks, a book by a very pleasant NZ cook, which I haven’t really used much because of the…expensive…nature of many of her recipes. I realise that someone so devoted to Nigella can’t throw stones but it’s different with her!! Anyway, Annabel Cooks is all “feta cheese” and “creme fraiche” this and “pine nuts” and “boneless skinless chicken breast” that. I did however find a recipe containing things I had in my cupboard, which was her variation on a dish that I consider to be a Kiwi ”classic” – potato bake.

The main difference in this one is that the potatoes are grated (kindly done by Tim.) It bakes slowly in the oven, ensconced in a mixture of eggs, milk and cheese, and comes out almost like a giant baked rosti, with lots of delicious crunchy bits on top and creamy yielding potato below.

Above: Looks good, right? Also vegetarian and gluten-free…oh what a world we live in.

Tonight’s dinner was a bit dull because I was pretty drained after all that Richard III and hadn’t planned anything exciting (and obv there was no pudding.) More soup though – something from Alyson Gofton’s Flavours cookbook, which is a million times superior to her schilling Watties products for Food in a Minute. Flavours has a good concept, too – each recipe is dedicated to a different flavouring, some familiar, like cocoa, vanilla pods, and ginger, some a little more interesting, like sherry, tumeric, and walnut oil, and some are those “I bought this on a whim and now what?” flavourings like saffron, verjuice and tamarind. I made the Garlic Soup, which although worryingly flatulent in title is nothing more taxing than onion soup with garlic in it. It is easy to make, with a lovely creamy texture – despite no cream – and is good for when you don’t think you have anything in the cupboards.
Above: Someone else: “Why is that photo cut off…let me adjust it a…” Me: “It’s supposed to be creative!” Just as some people can strew throw-pillows about their houses without looking messy, while others just look like they dumped cushions everywhere, well…you guess which category I fall into.
PS: Without wanting to sound like I’m asking for them…Don’t be shy with comments!

A Simple Tart…

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When I bought the rhubarb that has graced many of my posts here, I also grabbed a big bag of apples for $2. As they sat on our kitchen table, threatening to fester at any moment, I realised I’d better do something with them. Apple Crumble was the first thing that popped into my head, but although I love it immensly I felt like something a little more challenging. Nigella’s butterscotch tart from How To Eat called my name, especially after reading about its success on this lovely blog.

With that in mind, I thought I ought to have something relatively healthy for dinner. And so I turned to someone who would never replace butter with a low-fat margarine – Nigella. Her Vietnamese Coleslaw from Nigella Bites is so good, it would be one of her recipes that I make the most. It is basically a shredded cabbage, carrot, and chicken salad with Vietnamese dressing, but I hardly ever put chicken in it as it is wondrous and cheaper without. I’ll give you my adapted recipe for the dressing as no one needs to be told how to chop carrots and cabbage (mind you, it is infinitely easier and quicker whizzed up in the food processor)
Mix together:
-1 1/2 t rice vinegar
-1 1/2 tablespoons each of lime juice, fish sauce, vegetable oil, and sugar.
With this goes a crushed garlic clove and as much chilli as you can handle. I suppose you could replace the sugar and chilli with a spoonful of sweet chilli sauce. I usually have lemons, not limes, to hand, which works fine, and I quite often leave out the oil and replace it with a few shakes of sesame oil. Anyway, mix all this into the vegetables, along with chopped mint, which gives it an incredible freshness. Seriously, I could eat this by the bucketload. It even looks quite beautiful, so one can revel smugly in their healthy dinner –

Above: World’s. Best. Coleslaw.
With that I made the Chicken with Soy and Sherry from the New Zealand cookbook. Except…we don’t have sherry, so I replaced it, a little recklessly, with Sake, ie Japanese rice wine, a substance that I looooove to cook with. This recipe (which I deviated from slightly) is a very simple combination of great flavours. Basically, in a roasting dish I put chicken pieces, ginger, soy sauce, garlic, onions, Sake, and sesame seeds for crunch. I realise that putting Japanese and Vietnamese flavours together may seem a little dismissive of the respective nations’ cuisines but…if food tastes good, eat it!

Above: A sliiightly blurry photo of the chicken. Despite having no added fat (oh alright, a few shakes of sesame oil) it was crispy and toothsome.
While the chicken was in the oven, I got started on the pastry. I have to say, pastry makes me nervous, but Nigella does have it pretty sorted. As with the cole slaw, life is much, much easier if you use a food processor. Okay, so cleaning it is a bit of a pain, but it knocks so much time off the making process. I am suspicious of anything labelled ‘fool proof’ (ie, my learners driving liscence…”any fool can pass it,” they said…not this one) but Nigella’s pastry pretty much is. The crucial thing is to freeze the flour, and half its weight in fat, for a bit in the actual processor bowl. Cold= good, warm=bad for pastry, and the less you handle it the better. Whizz the two together, add a little cold, lemony water, refrigerate for a bit, and then roll out. It actually is remarkably do-able, even for someone like me who gets flour everywhere.

Above: the pastry, which was a dream to roll out waiting to be pressed into my silicone pie-tin.

One of the BEST things about this pie, no, THE BEST thing about it, is that it doesn’t need baking blind. Oh, how I hate baking blind. I can never manage to escape from burning myself while removing the weights.

Above: I did manage to use quite a few apples in this and thus justified my desire to make pie!

This doesn’t really further the plot but I thought this looked pretty, which I am not always capable of in cooking. Looking capable isn’t always my forte either, come to think of it…
All that happens now is a dense mixture of brown sugar, cream, eggs and flour is poured over, and the pie is baked.
Above: The finished product. Isn’t this wholesome and comforting to look at, with its monochrome butterscotch colours and bits of apple peeking out from the toffee flavoured filling. That’s a statement, not a question.
This was so, so yum, the filling had a texture similar to frangipane and contrasted delightfully with the sour apples, while the pastry was feather-light and crisp.
In other news, Tim and I have been studying hard for our exam next Monday, so things may be a trifle slower round here…I had a dream about Shakespear’s Cymbeline last night in which I altered the ending, I don’t know if this a good thing or not!

What would Scarlett O’Hara Do?

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I admit that I haven’t actually seen Gone With The Wind, but I remember reading years ago in…a Sweet Valley High book (oh the delicious juxtaposition between high and low culture) that she was particularly resourceful. Incidentally, is it worrying that “Johanssen” not “O’Hara” is the first thing that pops into my head upon hearing the word Scarlett?

Anyway, what S’OH might have done, if she found out that her boyfriend had deleted the photos of roast pork and the ensuing stir fry (when of course, she should have uploaded them sooner so the blame is on both sides)…is shown the world some photos she prepared earlier! This year, before I started this blog, I was taking photos fairly regularly of recipes (usually Nigella’s) that I’d made. In fact, it was in pondering why I took these photos that I first considered starting a blog.
So; with a flourish to distract you from the empty promises of previous posts- a trip down memory lane! Disclaimer – these photos were taken before I started this blog and so aren’t that great – not that the rest of my photos are – but, well, this is what our food looks like under the light of our kitchen.

Above: Custard Cream Hearts, from Nigella’s Feast. The custard buttercream filling is quite, quite addictive. I’m lucky there was any left to fill these beauties!

Above: Chickpea and Zuchinni Filo Pie, from Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. It sounds much more like something you’d buy at a cafe and not ever contemplate making at home, but it isn’t tooooo fiddly (despite the word ‘Filo’ in the title) and tastes soooo good, all fragrant with cumin and tumeric. I recommend this if you are ever needing to seduce a vegetarian.
Above: Chocolate Fudge Cake, from Nigella Bites. It is an old fashioned, solid chocolate cake and the icing is just ridiculously good.I made it for Tim’s birthday in September.
Above: Pasta from my impulse-bought pasta machine. It is more delicious than any pasta I have ever had…definitely worth the effort! I used the pasta recipe from Nigella Bites (1 egg to every 100g flour, which feeds one person – an easy equation) and got Tim to help me crank the machine. It cooks in literally seconds, in boiling salted water, and I dressed it simply in butter and nutmeg. If I had the time, I’d probably eat this every day.
The roast pork, by the way, was from Nigella’s Feast, and was an Italian recipe for New Years called “Roast Pork Cinghiale.” The marinade involved marsala fine, pink peppercorns, garlic, allspice, olive oil, brown sugar, and a few other bits and pieces. Once roasted, the sugar and the wine caramelised it wonderfully while the pepper and spices provided a densely earthy flavour. A seriously great way of treating pork.
In honour of the New Years Pork: I resolve to be more organised!

Do You Remember The First Time?

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Asked Jarvis Cocker of Pulp in their song of the same name. I thought it would be rather pleasing for my first post here (not counting the long winded introduction below!) to be about the first ever Nigella recipe I made, which I recreated for dinner the other night. I was about 14 or 15 when I first saw her TV show Nigella Bites and while I didn’t quite have an epiphany involving God-beams, I was pretty enthralled and had never really come across what we might now call a “celebrity chef” with such passion and such a way with words. Jamie Oliver was the big thing at the time and I found him interesting but too…frantic. Nigella was different.

Anyway, one of the things she made was this gorgeous looking creation called lemon linguine which I attempted for dinner that night using (cringe!) a can of reduced cream instead of the real thing, as it was all we had. It still tasted fantastic and since then I guess Nigella was destined to be part of my life. So, in the interest of having a nice starting point for my blog, and because I had all the ingredients to hand, I made it for dinner the other night. Was going to serve as is before remembering that well-meaning relatives would see the picture and so hastily boiled up some brocolli that our flatmate Stefan brought back for us from his parents’ orchard in Hawkes Bay.


Lemon Linguine with brocolli!