Crisp and fresh, sweetly sour, easy to make, and loved by all. This Italian salad is usually made with oranges but we have a tree laden with tangelos so I used them instead. Ingredients 200 gm fennel, very thinly sliced (a mandolin is useful here) 2 large tangelos, peeled and sliced thinly 2 Tbsp olive…
Category: Winter 2020
Fennel and kale pie
The days are lengthening, and the garden thinks it is spring already. The chinese cabbage tat soi is flowering, as is the cavalo nero, and the purple sprouting broccoli is in full throttle. I know that the remaining florence fennel won’t last too much longer; the bulbs weigh nearly a kilo, the core inside is…
Leek and silverbeet pie (Prasopita)
I cut this recipe out of the Listener in 1993 (see the photo of the cutting below). It’s a delightful story about Lois Daish and her greek neighbours in Wellington. She describes the smell of the pie wafting down the street and how she learnt from Voula how to make it. There is so much…
Cawl
While reading about leeks last weekend I came across reference to a famous Welsh national dish called Cawl (pronounced Cowl). Meat and vegetables are cooked in a broth which is not thickened but instead reduced by long cooking to concentrate the flavours. I wanted to try it out. Vegetables: There were many versions of this national dish, but…
Leeks with tomato and olives (Poireux a la nicoise)
Possibly the best argument for growing your own, baby leeks are a gourmet food you would never find anywhere else. Sow a whole packet of 250 seeds in late spring. Transplant a third of them to the winter leek bed and thin the rest to eat when they are tiny, like asparagus, teamed with a…
winter in my vege garden – leeks
Leeks can wait all winter in the vege garden and be ready when you want them, but you need to time their sowing so they are big enough before growth slows in the really cold part of the winter. Then, along with carrots and celery (which you also might have managed to grow in time),…
the long pause – winter solstice
From our house, the sun used to rise out of the ocean, until all the trees down by the beach grew. Where it rises swings back and forth along the horizon like a slow pendulum as the year progresses. It pauses at the extreme south-eastern point of its swing in mid-summer, then reverses direction and…
Cauliflower cream cheesecake
Cauliflower cream cheesecake This is a savoury cheesecake that lets the delicate, sweet, slightly nutty flavour of cauliflower shine through. It is a centerpiece, not a side dish. Many cauliflower dishes incorporate strong flavours like anchovies and curry spices but for this I wanted to let the cauliflower shine. And it does. Ingredients 1 cauliflower,…
Red cabbage and soba noodles with white miso dressing
This is something I come back to over and over. It is super fast to make and is more like a warm salad than a stir-fry as the finely sliced vegetables are cooked in the residual heat of the hot noodles. You can make it with any seasonal vegetables (below are photos of two versions,…
Purple cauliflower, tahini dressing
In this flavourful winter salad, I experimented with keeping the purple pigments intact. If you boil a purple cauliflower it will turn bright green. I read that cooking without water, instead tossing in olive oil and gently sautéing or roasting, will keep the purple pigments from leeching out. It kind of worked. The cauli wasn’t…
food ripe from my garden 