This recipe is adapted very slightly from a recipe in

I eat this soup with bread.  It doesn’t really need anything else.  It serves around 5-6 people, depending how hungry they are.

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Now what will you do with it?

Start by making stock.  Yes, you could use the bought stuff, but I really, really wouldn’t for this – the flavours are fairly delicate, and bought stock tends to be pretty heavy-handed.  It will drown your soup in salty fakeness.  Don’t do it.   In fact, if you really can’t face making stock or have none on hand, I’d suggest just throwing some saffron and a few herbs and salt and pepper into a couple of litres of water and letting that simmer while you are preparing the rest.  While the stock is going, prepare your vegetables.

The nuisance value of chopping all these vegetables cannot be overstated, but you’d better get onto it.  Basically, you want your onions, carrots (peeled!), zucchini and celery in dice of approximately 1 cm, and your beans should be topped and tailed and cut into length of about an inch.

At least they look pretty...

And while you are chopping everything, skin the tomatoes, which just involves putting them into a bowl, cutting a cross in the base of each tomato and pouring boiling water over them.  Leave them for a few minutes (chopping time!), then pour out the hot water and replace with cold water.  The skins should slip off fairly easily.  After which – you guessed it! – you chop the tomatoes.  I quartered them lengthways and then sliced each quarter into thirds or quarters, depending on size.

Start by getting out a big oven-proof skillet, or a big stove-top proof roasting dish and pre-heating the oven to 220°C.  If you don’t have either of these, don’t worry, just start with a big skillet  and put everything into a roasting tin later.  More washing up, but that is the job of the person you are cooking for, don’t you think?

Heat a generous amount of olive oil in the pan and stir the garlic around until it is golden, then add the carrots, onions, zucchini, celery and beans.  Sauté the whole lot for a couple of minutes until getting a bit golden around the edge, then remove from the heat and add the tomatoes and salt and pepper to taste.  Toss everything around a bit, then bung it in the oven for about half an hour, turning things halfway through, until the veggies are nicely roasted.

While your veggies are cooking, make the pistou.  Soak the bread in 4 tablespoons of the stock (or you can do what I did yesterday and just dip it into the stock which is still cooking, like Thetis dunking Achilles into the Styx, but without the unfortunate implications regarding vulnerable body parts.  And with a much higher chance of scalding your fingers.  So maybe that isn’t such a good idea after all…), and put it in a food processor with the basil leaves, salt and extra virgin olive oil.  Blitz the whole lot until it is a fairly good purée.

Now peel the potatoes and – you know what’s coming here, don’t you? – dice them.  Sorry.  Bring 6 cups of stock to the boil in a large saucepan, and simmer the potatoes in the stock for about 5 minutes.  Add the roasted veg back in for another five, then the beans for a final 5 minutes.  By this stage, the potatoes should be done, and you can serve the soup with a big dollop of pistou in each bowl.

Yum.

Variations

Woo-hoo, we’re already vegan, nut-free and fairly low-GI, and gluten-free is just a matter of replacing the bread with a handful of pine-nuts, or indeed, a gluten-free bread!  Way to go!  The main things I’d fiddle around with here are the pistou and the vegetables.  Frankly, you can switch a lot of the vegetables out for things you like more, though this is a really nice combination.

For the pistou, which is basically pesto by any other name, you could have a lot of fun substituting other herbs for the basil, so long as you stick to the ‘soft’ herbs – mint, parsley, rocket, coriander or anything else you’d add at the end, not the start of cooking (oregano, rosemary and thyme, for example, are all a bit too pungent to be used in those quantities).  This particular soup tastes like summer, due to the summery vegetables and basil, but a winter version with rocket or parsley might be good.  If you are trying to avoid nuts and gluten as well as animal products, I suspect you could get quite a good effect from blending the basil, oil and garlic together without any other additives, to make more of a drizzling oil for this soup.

Really, this is a soup to try on the kind of cold days Melbourne sometimes gives us in summer – it’s warming but still sunshiney, and eating it will make you  feel happy.

None of this really applies in post-industrial Australia, where it never really gets cold enough for the hens to stop laying (though they can die of the heat in this sort of weather), and anyway, we’re in a season of abundance and heading into Autumn anyway. 

But  we should still get to have pancakes. 

My mother wasn’t that into Pancake Day when we were growing up – I know she did it some years, but I’m not sure she did it every year.  But when we did have pancakes, it was always crêpes, not those funny puffy things you call pancakes in the USA.  And we had them with lemon and sugar, or sometimes with plum or apricot jam, warmed in the oven.

In my undergraduate days, when I moved out of home into share accommodtion, crêpes therefore became the special breakfast thing I did when people were staying.  Not my mother’s crêpes, these, but a recipe I got from an encyclopaedic Family Circle Cookbook given to me by my aunt when I turned 17.  The recipe contained 1 tablespoon of brandy, which quickly evolved into 2 tablespoons and thence into a quarter of a cup, and so forth, until my breakfast brandy pancakes were  rather infamous for their alcoholic nature.  There was also at least one episode which involved setting my hair on fire, but I honestly can’t remember how I did that.  I blame the brandy.

These crêpes are not the brandy pancakes of my insufficiently-mis-spent youth, but they do have rather more brandy than Family Circle would recommend.  I maintain that this is absolutely appropriate to the spirit of indulgence encouraged by Shrove Tuesday. Also, my recollection is that this recipe makes a *lot* of pancakes.  You have been warned.

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Now what will you do with it?

If you are the sort of person who follows recipes, do feel free to sift the flour and salt together and put them into a bowl.  It’s a great idea.  We should all follow recipes sometimes.  And I should get a seive, preferably one of those funky ones that doubles as a flour container.  But I digress.  Already.  Are you scared?

Make a well in the flour and pour in the eggs and milk.  Using a whisk or  your trusty fork, beat the liquid ingredients vigorously, slowly incorporating the dry ingredients around them until everything is smooth.  Ish.  I’m often too lazy for this part, and I don’t mind the odd lump in my crêpe.  Incidentally, if you want thicker pancakes add less milk and consider adding a teaspoon of baking powder to puff them up; for thinner crêpes, add more.

Once your pancake mix is smooth, beat in the melted butter and the brandy.  Maybe a bit more brandy.  And one for the chef, if you are so inclined.  I’m not, but that’s because I am quite mad enough without adding alcohol. Let the mixture stand, covered, for an hour or so or until it starts complaining that its feet are hurting.

When you are ready to cook the pancakes, melt a little butter in a non-stick frying pan.  Have a pancake flipping thingie ready to hand, unless you are the sort of macho person who likes to flip the pancakes using the pan, in which case I hope you are either more co-ordinated than me or really enjoy cleaning the ceiling.  Pour a little batter into the pan, and turn the pan to spread it around into a big thin circleish thing.  Cook over medium-high heat until little bubbles appear all over it, and it doesn’t look quite so ‘wet’ on top.  Flip the pancake carefully, and cook for maybe twenty seconds on the other side (my book says one minute, but I think my pancakes would burn if I did that), before removing to a plate, and starting on the next one.

Bear in mind that the first pancake is the sacrificial pancake that always ends up being too buttery and a horrible mess.  This is the nature of pancakes.  Don’t panic, just throw it out and make the next one.

Serve with lemon and sugar, or jam, or nuttella.  The proper way to serve them with lemon and sugar is to sprinkle on some sugar, then squeeze enough lemon juice over that the sugar dissolves, then sprinkle on more sugar, then more lemon, and so forth, until your mother tells you off and takes away the sugar .  But it’s so worth it…

Variations

More brandy!!! Or cointreau!!!!

OK, more seriously, I actually take out the brandy, add some salt and herbs, and use these as a savoury wrapping for all sorts of things.  The classic is, of course, spinach and ricotta crêpes, but just about anything in bechamel sauce is fabulous in crêpes.  As is bolognese sauce.  Or ratatouille.  Or you could mexican and make pancake enchiladas.  You get the picture.

I’ve made crêpes using chestnut flour to replace the plain flour, and they have worked surprisingly well.  I did use a slightly different recipe though, and I’m afraid I don’t remember what it was.  But in principal, the substitution works.  I have not yet made socca, a chickpea flour and olive oil pancake, but this may also be something for my vegan and gluten-free friends to look up.  I believe there is a good vegan crêpe recipe in Veganomicon, but I have not yet tried it.

And then we get days like last Thursday, when I had a totally brilliant idea for dinner while I was still at work, and sent Andrew out to buy the ingredients while I was at choir.  I was going to make my amazing pan-roasted fillet steak salad with home-made mayonnaise, and in my head, I had already started drafting my cheerful, friendly, reassuring post about how, despite what you may have heard, mayonnaise is actually really *easy*!  I’ve made it five times, and it has worked without a fuss every time!  And here are my secrets!  I even had a delightful little side comment about saving the egg-whites for meringues or, if one was feeling ambitious (as indeed I was), for macarons!

Ha, I say, and Ha again.  I got home on Thursday night and found that my lovely husband had indeed bought the ingredients I didn’t have, and had roasted the garlic, just like I had asked him to.  So I settled down to make mayonnaise.  I even took photos! And it didn’t work.  Not even a little bit.  And I have absolutely no idea why.  So I threw out the first batch and tried again.  This time, I know exactly why it didn’t work.  Apparently, adding way too much vinegar very early in the piece ruins everything.  Since I no longer had any roast garlic left, I grimly added another egg yolk, and decided that it was time to get out the beaters, rather than using the fork method.  And finally, finally, it came together.  I was so relieved that I promptly flicked a large dollop of the mayonnaise into the egg-whites which I was so frugally reserving for future meringue needs (and this is why you should cover things you leave on the benchtops, even if it’s only going to be for a few minutes)…

So yes.  Do try making mayonnaise.  It’s delicious when you make it at home, and so exciting when it comes together.  But if it’s late at night after a long day of work and choir, I strongly recommend having some of the good quality bought stuff to hand.  It will save you a great deal of frustration…

Oh, and one final confession.  After all that, I no longer had the faintest idea what quantities of olive oil I had used in the mayonnaise!  So I have come up with my quantities by looking online and through my cookbooks until I saw something that looked about right.  And on my merry way, I ran across this website which talks a lot more about how egg yolks emulsify things, and it’s all very fascinating, so I think you should have a look at it – though I don’t recommend using 100 cups of oil for each egg yolk…

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Now what will you do with it?

Let’s start with the part where we are on solid ground, shall we?  So, your first move is to roast the garlic.  You do this by getting the whole bulb and *not* peeling it.  Instead, just slice off the top of the bulb, so that all the cloves are just a little bit exposed.  Put the bulb in the middle of a small sheet of foil, and pour a bit of olive oil over it.  Roast in the oven at 200°C for about half an hour, or until the bulb is soft when you squeeze it.  Squeeze the innards out of the papery bits of the garlic.  I’m afraid you need to do this while the garlic is still pretty hot, as it hardens on cooling.  My method is to burn my fingers.  Sensible people use rubber gloves which will never smell the same again.  But how sensible is that, really?  Fingers grow back…

Anyway.  Let your roast garlic cool.  You only need half of it for this quantity of mayonnaise, so I suggest you use the rest to make fresh butter with roasted garlic (from which you can make the world’s best garlic bread), or else just put the rest away in the fridge, to use in a dressing for a salad of tomatoes, beans, and croutons.  Yum.

Put the garlic which is not going to become garlic butter into the bowl you plan to make the mayonnaise in.  If you are a lunatic like me, get out your trusty cake-making fork.  Otherwise, beaters might be a thought.   Or a whisk.  I gather other people don’t break their whisks within days of purchasing them, and thus own whisks.  Those people are weird.  Anyway.  Smash the garlic up well with the salt and pepper, add the egg yolk, and mix it all together well.

Now for the tricky part.  Before you start, you need to know two things about adding the oil to the egg mixture:  first, start very, very, slowly, and second, keep the mixture moving constantly.  You need to do this because you are basically denying the proposition that oil and water don’t mix, which means you have to start by being sneaky, and then by moving so fast that the oil and water in question don’t have time to realise what you are doing.  It’s possible that what I just wrote was in fact not strictly factual, but I can’t get my head around emulsions today, so it’s the best I can do right now.  If you ask me very nicely, I will go off later and see what my friend Harold has to say about all of this.  With luck, it will involve turgid vegetables.

Back to the recipe!  This is the part where you either need to be at least minimally well-co-ordinated or have a helper to do the pouring.  Get a nice whisking movement going in the bowl with the eggs – or turn on the beaters, you slacker, you – and then with your other hand, drizzle in the oil.  The recipes all say ‘drop by drop’ unless you are using a mixer.  I ignore this.  Come to think of it, this might be why my emulsion failed on Thursday, but, you know, I’ve got away with this impatient attitidue many times before.  Basically, you can, in fact, add the oil in a (slow!) stream provided the whole mixture is moving fast and constantly and that you pause pretty frequently in your pouring to make sure everything is emulsifying nicely.  After all, you’re making a fairly small amount, so it’s a nuisance to use a mixer.

What you will find, if you haven’t managed to make a mess of it, is that the egg-yolk mixture will thicken considerably and get a lot paler.  And it will suddenly start having the consistency of mayonnaise!  Awesome! Normally, my mayo winds up quite creamy in colour, but I had these really fantastic fresh farm eggs that were blindingly yellow to start with, so my mayonnaise ended up pretty yellow even at the end.  I add the vinegar and tarragon at the end, whisking like mad, and then add more oil if I think it needs thickening.  Normally, the entire process takes me about five minutes with a fork.

And there you go.  You have mayonnaise – indeed, you have aïoli, which is much trendier than mayonnaise – which you can use on lightly poached or cooked vegetables or on steak or on anything else you like.  The internet is pretty firmly convinced that your mayo will keep for a week, but I start getting nervous about it after two or three days.  Not on any evidence, mind you, I’m just paranoid.

You know, this is probably the worst recipe ever, because I really have lost all faith in my ability to make mayonnaise reliably.  But that’s OK.  I have faith in *you*, O my Reader.  *You* probably have enough sense to follow instructions, even if they do look annoying and boring…

They call me mellow yellow... Note that this is 2 egg-yolks worth of mayonnaise, not one. Don't expect to get this much from the recipe, or from what it looked like above.

Variations

Given the circumstances, I’m not even going to attempt coming up with an eggless mayonnaise recipe.  Something tells me that doing so would require such a totally different approach that it’s not worth attempting in this context anyway.

However.  You can flavour your mayonnaise with many things!  You can leave out the garlic and the tarragon and have it plain.  You can add mustard or lemon juice or herbs or curry powder.  Margaret Fulton, who is normally a reliable sauce, even suggests adding roquefort cheese and tomato sauce, which I feel is taking things a little too far.  But you get the picture.

Oh, and don’t use all extra-virgin olive oil, or your mayonnaise will taste entirely of olive oil, which is all very well, but you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make it *not* olive oil, and you don’t want to waste that.

We did, eventually, have ours over the steak salad.  And the leftovers are going on the hamburgers I’m making this evening.  Yum…

This post is a bit late, and will probably get later again, because my week has been eaten by a combination of grant applications by day and music by night  – the King’s Singers are in Australia for the first time in 28 years, and I went to their Masterclass yesterday (I was in the third row, too – *swoon*), and then a friend very kindly bought me tickets to their concert tomorrow as an early birthday present, which has me bouncing off the walls with excitement and not doing a very good job of talking about anything else.  My scientists are quite amused.

This is where the King's Singers are! No, not on my kitchen table. (That really wasn't as funny as you thought it was, you know.) It's not so much that I'm feeling patriotic as that I had all these green and yellow vegetables...

And back at home I am doing terrifying domestic things like cleaning out the freezer (if I can’t remember what that box contained, it probably isn’t edible anymore) and fridge in preparation for Lent.  And for being able to find things.  Cooking is thus rather functional in nature at present, though the apricots baked with white wine and vanilla last night deserve a better adjective…

Also, Happy Valentine's Day! (Yes, I'm putting the love back into love-apples)

All of which is straying terribly away from a really lovely market day with so many gloriously coloured fruits and vegetables, and several vendors I hadn’t met before.

Why are there so many songs about vegetables and what's on the other side (of the plate)? Kermit wants to know. So do I.

By far the most exciting thing about Sunday’s market was the presence of a new stallholder who specialises in stone fruit.  The one thing I’ve found disappointing about this market is the fact that they have basically one stall selling apples, pears, and the odd quince; one selling oranges and blood oranges and tangellos, and the odd stall selling berries in season.  This was one of the things I mentioned when the market convenor asked me what stalls I’d like to see more of, so I was delighted to see a stall full of peaches, nectarines, apricots, and plums of many colours.

Many people are unaware that purple food is quite fond of folk dancing (unlike red food, which is more into marching bands).

The stallholder made a quite determined effort to either get us to buy everything or to come and visit his orchard (where, no doubt, we would be even more strongly encouraged to buy everything).  We may do that sometime.  I was simply thrilled to get the very last apricots of the season and blood plums like the ones I grew up with.  Though the bright yellow plums very nearly seduced me.  Maybe next fortnight.

Phwoar, nice plums! (I'm sorry, I really, really, mostly tried not to go there but I couldn't help myself.)

I had eggs, so I didn’t really need to visit the egg-man, but he also had  freshly dried bay leaves (is that even possible?), which is something I haven’t seen before.  I actually have an ancient roman recipe for little cakes (biscuits, really) with a bay leaf pressed into the base of each, so I know just what I’ll be doing with these.  Also, they were rather pretty.

All the puns I could come up with to caption this photo were so bad that even I wasn't willing to put them in this blog.

We are now on the opposite week from my lovely Italian lady, and will be until May, when we will be back in sync with her, just in time for the cardoons.  So no more quail eggs or zucchini flowers just now.  But my colourful vegetable stall was back in force, with tomatoes of many colours, purple beans, yellow and striped zucchini, baby leeks, pink-purple carrots, roma tomatoes, lebanese eggplants, and rocket.  I bought… pretty much some of everything.

So many vegetables in startling colours! You can see why I adore this stall...

The tomato lady was back, which meant that I had to buy even more tomatoes, and also capsicums, because I really love those long red ones, and our supermarket and greengrocer don’t tend to have them.

Tomatoes, peppers and strawberries, looking strangely menacing. It's like this army of vegetables and strawberries, coming to get you. Beware!

There was a chap there selling lots of different kinds of pistachios and insisting we taste them all.  This was actually fairly fascinating, until I realised that my favourites of the lot were the boring variety that everyone sells.  I am such a pleb.

Plebean pistachios. You'd never catch a roman emperor eating one of these, even if the skins *are* purple.

Still, I’m pretty sure nuts are an important part of this whole vegetarian thing, so I bought my plebean pistachios (I do like that alliteration) and continued on my way, trusting that nobody would see me and take away my foodie badge.  Not that I have a foodie badge.  I’m a terrible foodie, because my tastes are terribly middle-of-the-road – I just cook for picky eaters and people with allergies…

This is not my foodie badge. Though it is vaguely reminiscent of the Illuminati. Are the apricots engaged in some sort of government-undermining conspiracy? Should someone tell the capsicum to watch its step? Or is it, in fact, the ringleader?

Potato man’s wife was here again this week.  Apparently, they don’t have any purple potatoes this year, which makes me very sad.  They do, however, have pink-eye potatoes, which are apparently very popular in Tasmania.  The stallholder told me that they keep on getting people asking if they have pink eye.  I expressed concern for the poor potatoes with conjunctivitis, and she looked at me as though I was slightly insane.  Clearly she doesn’t know me very well, or she would realise that I am far more than *slightly* insane.

I was looking for the proper photo to illustrate my claims to insanity, but you know, just about any of them would do...

She also had their wonderful strawberries and garlic again.  I’ve been getting the impression, from one thing and another, that strawberries and garlic grow well together.  People seem to sell them at the same stalls a lot, at any rate, and Diggers wanted me to put them in the same patch.

I don't need three punnets of strawberries. But if they will price them at $10 for three, what's a girl to do?

A new vendor this week was a Frenchman from near the Swiss border who sells French-style cheeses.  I’m not really one for just eating cheese (I like it melted on things, see aforementioned notes on my plebean tastes), but I really, really liked the ones he had made, especially the one which was a lot like raclette.  Indeed, it reminded me a great deal of the cheese we used to stink out half the Institute at our Australia Day lunch.  Irresistible. Also, opportunity to speak French!  You would think the thrill of this would wear off with all the French people where I work, but it doesn’t…

Cheeeeeeeeeese. Yeah, I really like this cheese, stinks and all.

And then, because we had been very, very good marketers and bought our fruit and vegetables and still had some money left, we were allowed to buy CAKES.

It's not that I can't make cupcakes. It's that these cupcakes are irresistibly cute.

And really, I have to end with a close up of the Cookie Monster cupcake, because I really do think that is the most awesome cupcake ever.  I’m going to have to make some myself, I think.  Maybe some other muppets too, but hehas a cookie in his mouth.  How awesome is that?

Very awesome. Can you deny it? Of course you can't.

Yeah, I thought so too.

Despite all this uncertainty, I like to go vegetarian for Lent for a few reasons. For one thing, I have a profound love of food-related traditions (Nobody is surprised by this).  Be it the (old-school) religious tradition of eating no meat on Good Friday or Christmas Eve or the (Catherine-school) tradition of purchasing quinces, blood oranges, asparagus, and fresh raspberries whenever I see them iat a market, I am all over any chance to use food to mark the changing seasons, meteorological or liturgical as the case may be.    Actually, I also have a (possibly strange) appreciation for religious dietary laws generally.  The whole idea of kosher or halal food has always struck me as inspired, because brings the divine into the mundane and every day – if you have to be mindful of everything you put into your mouth, then you have this constant reminder in the things you live by of the things you believe.  I love this.  Though I might love it a lot less if I had to follow any of these laws myself.

Being vegetarian – at least as a habitual omnivore – requires a similar mindfulness and awareness of what I am doing and why.  If I were doing Lent like a proper Anglican, the why would be about preparing for Easter.  And I’m not saying that there is nothing of that in my tradition (after all, if it were just about going randomly vegetarian, I could do it any time), but the main reason is that while I find vegetarianism to be a good thing on environmental and compassionate grounds (and sometimes even health grounds), I’ve found so far that trying to be vegetarian in the long term hasn’t worked.  Partly, I suspect, I haven’t quite got the nutritional aspects right.  Partly, it’s just that I really do love the taste of meat.  And partly, it’s because my repertoire of healthy, everyday vegetarian recipes that I can make quickly and without thinking is not yet wide enough.

So I go vegetarian for Lent because 40 days (47, really, because I continue up to Easter Sunday) is finite enough that I can generally get through it no matter how tired and stressed I am, but long enough that it is meaningful.  And it has the added bonus of letting me see the world through vegetarian eyes (and get really irritated by the number of pubs and cafés who have precisely one vegetarian option, which is risotto, which I can make better and more cheaply at home).

Anyway.  Some years this works better than others.  Last year was dreadful – I was craving meat by the end of the first week, which is fairly pathetic given that we quite often go vegetarian for a week or so by chance (or economic necessity) without trying.  And it didn’t help that I had all this bolognese sauce and pre-made rissoles and so forth stashed away in my freezer just calling to me on those nights when those grant applications were keeping me late at work.  Worse still, I haven’t had occasion to eat out so often in years, and every single time I did, I was faced with menu choices that filled me with ire and despair.

This year is actually shaping up to be even more exhausting in the matter of grants and similar commitments, which means that if I want to have any chance of doing this right, I’m going to have to get organised.  Lent starts in twelve days, and I have a three step plan for the next couple of weeks:

1. Use up all the meat currently residing in my fridge and freezer.  Which is actually going to require more organisation than you might think, because we will have to eat meat every second day to get through it all.

2. Make at least one week’s worth of vegetarian meals and basics to freeze.  At a minimum, I want to have a big batch of vegetarian chilli, a double batch of mushroom and cashew burgers, a batch or two of re-fried beans, a bean and vegetable stew of some kind, a couple of litres of vegetable stock, lots of pre-washed and blanched greens and, ideally, a batch of cooked black beans, since the tinned kind are hard to come by.  Which means I need to organise the freezer, and we probably also need to eat a lot of ice-cream in the next week or two. Oh, the humanity…

3. Write myself a list of vegetarian meals that I can make in my sleep, and put it on the fridge.  Ideally, put a list of ingredients next to each item so that I have a cheat-sheet for those tired days.  And read through some of my favourite veggie cookbooks again for inspiration on the not tired days…

Looking at all this, I realise I’ve made it sound as though being vegetarian is really hard.  Which, admittedly, it was last year, but it was dead easy the year before.  I suspect that the thing which is hard is not vegetarianism but trying to change one’s food habits at a time of year when work is particularly prone to  long and exhausting hours.  If I get home from work after seven (or, indeed, after eight), I’m not going to want to cook adventurously – and if my default easy meals all have meat in them, then that’s a problem…

I’m not sure you can call something with exactly one ingredient a recipe, per se, but this is a really useful thing to know about, very easy, and a basis for all sorts of yummy things.  This is basically a yoghurt cheese, which you can make as firm as you have the patience (or planning) for.  It’s somewhat similar in personality to cream cheese, but has the advantage that you can choose what ever variety of dairy product you like to start with – low-fat or full-fat, cow, goat or sheep’s milk, according to taste or lactose tolerance.  Rumour has it you can even make this using soy yoghurt, but given the difficulty of finding a plain soy yoghurt in Australia, this is probably not going to be practical for my local vegan friends.

The only trick to this recipe is that you do need to start it at least 6 hours ahead of time (though I understand that soy labneh takes less time).  But since you don’t actually have to do anything with it during this time, we’re really talking a matter of planning rather than work.

The fun part, of course, is all the stuff you can do with it when it’s done… see below for many, many ideas.

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Now what will you do with it?

Line your seive with your cheesecloth, chux or sacrificial tea towel, and place on top of a bowl (you don’t want the bottom of the seive touching the bottom of the bowl, and ideally you want it to sit fairly high above the bottom of the bowl so that you won’t have to keep coming back and pouring off the liquid).

Pour the yoghurt carefully into the tea towel and colander, and draw up the corners a bit so that you can cover the top of the yoghurt.  Try to resist the urge to start squeezing liquid out immediately (I rarely resist the urge, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t behave more sensibly than I do).  You’ll find quite a bit of liquid comes out of it quite quickly – I often leave the yoghurt at room temperature for half an hour or an hour, as this speeds the process up.

Pour off whatever liquid has gathered in the bowl, and put the whole arrangement in the fridge for at least 6-8 hours or up to a couple of days.  Pour off the liqud periodically.

What will happen during this time is that the yoghurt will thicken as it is drained of much of its moisture, giving it a creamier texture, a stronger flavour, and eventually a consistency that can be rolled into balls of yoghurt cheese.

When it is done to your liking, remove it from the cheesecloth and store it in an airtight container in the fridge.  Or follow one of the suggestions below.  I recommend experimenting with different kinds of yoghurt and different draining times, to see what you like best.

Variations, which in this case are mostly things to do with your labneh

This is the fun part, really.

A traditional thing to do with labneh is to spread it on pita bread with a bit of za’atar or cumin and maybe some olive oil and have it for breakfast with a bit of tomato and cucumber on the side.  I feel that one could do much worse.

Labneh at the thick-but-not-cheesy stage is a really good basis for tzatziki dip that you don’t want to go all watery.  Grate a cucumber and squeeze out the moisture, then add to a cup or two of labneh with some crushed garlic, olive oil, mint, lemon zest and a little salt.  Lovely.

Labneh that has been allowed to get very thick can be rolled into little balls and then you can roll the balls in dried herbs or za’atar or whatever you like, really, and serve as a mezze.  Or you can preserve the balls in olive oil, with or without coating.

One completely un-traditional thing I like doing with very thick / cheeselike labneh is making a yoghurt cheesecake (which is both egg-free and gelatine free, so double points for me!).  This is really easy.  You start with whatever your preferred cheesecake base is (I’m rather fond of crushed gingernuts held together with melted butter), and then mix your labneh with lemon zest and sugar to taste, and spoon over the base.  Top with strawberries or other fresh fruit, and you’re done.  Yum.  This is, of course, adaptable to just about any flavour you like.

You could even make a savoury version of this as a yoghurt pie for summer, with salad vegetables and a cracker base.

I seem to recall there is rather a lovely middle eastern dish that involves layers of toasted pita bread with labneh and chickpeas and a tomatoey sauce (probably seasoned with cumin and thyme, and maybe with some mint over the top).  I bet you could figure this one out retroactively if you tried.  Add lamb meatballs if you want a carnivorous version.

Labneh is also nice at the semi-thick stage spooned into a bowl and scattered with pomegranate seeds and pistachios, a drizzle of honey, and a sprinkling of cinnamon.

]]> http://catescates.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/recipe-drained-yoghurt-labneh/feed/ 0 catescates OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA http://catescates.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/shakespeare-post-coriolanus/ http://catescates.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/shakespeare-post-coriolanus/#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:13:46 +0000 Catherine http://catescates.wordpress.com/?p=1852 Continue reading →]]> Well.  That was fun.  I’ve heard Coriolanus described as ‘relentlessly political’, and it was certainly that.  It does remind me a bit of Julius Caesar, with the easily-manipulated and vocal citizenry and the two conspiring tribunes muttering to each other in the background of all the Roman scenes.

Sadly, we had quite a few people get sick at the last minute, which meant that we wound up with nine people reading a play that has forty-seven speaking parts.  Given that one of those speaking parts is talking for most of the play, and a lot of the others overlap this meant that most of us ended up with at least five parts to keep track of.  Special mentions go to A, who wound up playing Second Everything (Citizen, Senator, Lord, Roman, Messenger, Watchman, Officer…) and H, who spent several scenes goading himself into rebellion.

There's something slightly medieval about the combination of real and constructed fruits...

It wasn’t quite Coriolanus – The Comedy!, but it certainly had its moments.  Especially since none of us could refrain from seeing inappropriate romantic subtext (text, really) where Shakespeare probably didn’t intend it, and played it accordingly.  Also, Coriolanus’s mother is positively terrifying.  I suspect she was brought up in Sparta.

It’s been hot all weekend, but the thunderstorm hit about halfway through Act I of the play, upstaging everyone.  Actually, every single change in the weather – we had thunder, hail, crazy winds, and heavy rain, for all that Melbourne is now sunny and beautiful and pretending it has never heard of storms *or* really hot days – distracted the entire cast thoroughly.  None of us are fond of the heat, and I certainly wasn’t the only one plastering myself against the screen door whenever there was a scene that didn’t require me.

As for the food, I actually had a lot of fun with this one.  I did keep my Raw and Roman theme, mostly, and certainly only had one cooked item on the dessert table, though I had a handful on the savoury set up.  I got out both my Roman cookbooks for savoury inspiration, and wound up making a lot of herb, cheese, nut and vegetable purées, and things to go with them.  All very healthy, if you don’t count the truly terrifying amounts of cheese…

The savoury spread

One of the trickier things about Roman cookery is ingredients.  A lot of ingredients used in modern Italian cookery come from the New World (hmm, if the Americas are the New World, what does that make Australia?  The Post-Modern world?), and were not available to Roman kitchens, unless you want to start theorising about lost Roman colonies or Pompey in exile winding up in Australia by accident.  And to make life even more fun, quite a few of the ingredients they do use have changed a bit over time.  Or aren’t readily available in Australia.

I'm fairly confident that the Romans enjoyed spicy pork sausages and smoked fish - but the spices probably didn't include chilli, and I doubt the fish was salmon.

The Romans were very fond, for example, of something called ‘cucurbit’, which translates to squash or pumpkin – but all the squashes and pumpkins used in modern cuisine are New World vegetables, which makes them a little tricky.  A bit of (lazy internet) research suggested that the vegetable in question was in fact a gourd or kalabash, which is possibly my new favourite word.  Sadly, my local greengrocers don’t do kalabashes (kalabashi?), so I decided to go with my Peter and Pompey nostalgia trip and use an Australian blue pumpkin instead of an American one.  The result was quite nice, though I think I’d prefer this purée warm.

Roasted garlic dip, celery and olive pâté, pumpkin dip

Another unusual purée was a lettuce purée, which is far nicer than it sounds when I tell you that it bears a strong resemblance to yesterday’s lettuce salad left in the fridge overnight.  You basically cook a few bunches of lettuce and then purée them with olive oil, red wine vinegar, mint, lovage and celery seed, though lacking the latter two, I went with fennel seed instead.   Also, since I am reliably informed (this is code for ‘I read this somewhere yesterday and now I can’t find where) that Roman lettuces had a stronger flavour than modern lettuces, I replaced half the lettuce with endive, for a more bitter flavour.  The result was this deep green and surprisingly refreshing-tasting purée which is oddly addictive for something that smells a lot like a chlorinated swimming pool, at least to my nose.

I love this shade of green. Not a lick of spinach anywhere in this recipe, incidentally, but you wouldn't know it.

I couldn’t resist the roasted garlic purée, even though garlic was considered terribly plebian (indeed, in Coriolanus the rebellious citizens of Rome are referred to disparagingly as ‘garlic eaters’) in Rome.  I’m plebian, so that’s fine with me, though I would draw the line at following the original recipe which called for 4 bulbs of *raw* garlic!

Bread and dips, Roman style. Except for the plastic bags...

And of course, I had to do my Ancient Roman standbys, pine-nut and herb purée and olive and celery paté.

Pine nut and herb purée

Celery and green olive pâté

And there was feta pickled in white wine vinegar and honey.  This weekend would have been a great opportunity to test the theory that if you pickle cheese it will keep just fine in hot weather and you don’t need to store it in the un-Roman fridge, but I fear I wasn’t quite bold enough to make the experiment.

Pickled cheese with herbs

To go with these, we had bread, of course, and crudités (including proper Roman purple carrots), and a bit of salami and smoked salmon, because I felt as though there wasn’t much substance to this meal so far, and I also decided to make some ancient Roman bar snacks.

Roman bar-snacks: cheese balls with poppy seeds and nigella seeds; barley cakes

I made a basic ‘barley cake’ from barley flour, honey and water, that looked a lot like a water cracker but was rather harder and more wholemeal in taste, with a faint sweetness to it.  It went amazingly well with the lettuce purée.

Barley cakes

I also made a more exciting Roman snack-food – little cheese pastry balls which are fried in olive oil, dredged in warm honey and then rolled in poppy seeds.  You can eat them hot or cold – I chose cold, under the circumstances – and they are surprisingly more-ish.

You know, I don't think I've ever made black and grey food before. These little cheese balls look strangely ominous.

Then I had a terrible premonition that there wouldn’t be enough food (this was before four people cancelled), so I had to make more things…

... because it would be *terrible* if there wasn't enough food...

I have this fatal fascination when it comes to stuffed vine leaves: I don’t like them.  I have never liked them.  A good half of the time, I fail dismally at them. And yet, I’ve never seen a stuffed vine leaf recipe I haven’t wanted to try… At our last Roman feast, I attempted vine leaves stuffed with smoked mackerel, and they were horrible.  This time, I went for a more peasant-style filling of rice and goats’ cheese with a little egg to bind it.  These  vine leaves are then cooked in beef stock (actually, chicken stock, because that’s what I had in the freezer) and, like the cheese balls, dredged in honey.  The Romans seem to have been rather big on the whole cheese and honey thing, and since I refused to indulge them on the garum side of the equation, I figured I should go along with them on the cheese and honey.

Vine leaves with rice, chêvre and honey.

Actually, these weren’t bad.  I almost liked them.  If they hadn’t been stuffed into vine leaves, I probably would have liked them. Sigh.

Then, of course, the book said that the vine leaves should be served with something spicy, so naturally I had to make spicy lentils with sumac and coriander (leaf and seed) and pepper, which turned out to be absolutely amazing – lovely and sour and earthy and a little spicy – and possibly my favourite thing I cooked all weekend.  Seriously, I’ll be making these again just as an everyday thing, because they were also really easy.

Lentils with sumac and coriander. Some of the best lentils I've tasted.

Yes, I really did overcater.  And then there was dessert.  Which was, on the whole, quite healthy.

You'd never know it was good for you...

I had planned to have just a couple of kinds of fruit, some fruit and nut balls, and a few other things, but I was utterly seduced by the tiny, perfect corella pears at my greengrocer and the sugarplums, and the black grapes and peaches which were on special… and then I wanted a few kinds of fruit and nut balls, and I had to make sure the nut ones were distinct from the others.  So I decided to pair the little fruit and nut balls with the fruits.

I made fig and almond balls, and formed them into miniature pears to go with the pear platter.

I feel happy just looking at these. Tiny pears! Even tinier fig and almond pearlets! So much tininess on one platter!

My apricot and orange balls I made into rounds and gave a crease down one side, so that they would match the peaches.

Peaches and apricot balls. Aren't they cute?

My un-Roman cherry and cacao balls were small and dark enough to match the grapes and sugar plums.  And, incidentally, they are still absolutely delicious.

Grapes and cherry-cacao-date balls

I thought the effect was absolutely gorgeous, and will definitely do something similar any time I want to produce a healthy dessert platter in future.

I drained Greek yoghurt for 24 hours, and served it with (slightly under-ripe) pomegranates and vincotto (made by my cousin!).  This is not, perhaps, an entirely Roman dish, but curd cheese with honey and fruit certainly is, and I felt this was in much the same spirit.

Drained yoghurt with pomegranate (the vincotto goes on at serving time). Honey, pistachios and cinnamon would also be lovely on this.

Of course, this was all far too healthy, so I dug out Nigella Lawson’s gorgeous recipe for raspberries in chardonnay jelly, which is the most enticingly red dessert that never saw a lick of food colouring.  It also didn’t want to set, and I wound up melting more gelatine and reheating the whole thing at midnight last night, in the hope of getting it to behave (I then discovered at bedtime that one of my feet was covered in half-set clear jelly and I have no idea how this happened! I know that jelly comes from cow’s feet, but I’m fairly certain one needs to do more to the foot in question than wander around the kitchen thinking about jelly…) Fortunately it did.

Raspberry and chardonnay jelly. Do not eat this before driving...

And then I decided that what we really needed here was cake, so I made a Sicilian-style apple cake with raisins and pine-nuts, and substituted half the flour for chestnut flour (mostly because I ran out of flour and didn’t want to go to the shops again).  I think I was the only person who didn’t like this cake, but you win some and you lose some.

Apple, raisin and nut cake with cinnamon. Not Roman, but the Romans would have loved it.

And that, as they say, is that.  We are positively swimming in leftovers, even after sending care-packages home to one of the cancellees, who has a horrible virus and shouldn’t have to cook, but they are fairly healthy ones – I used less than two cups of sugar and 120g of butter in the whole meal, though I also used over a kilo of cheese and a whole jar of honey, which is not precisely the recommended daily dosage.  Though very yummy.

I’m making a pasta bake out of the leftover veggies and one or two of the purées,  as I write this and we will be having some very, very good sandwiches for lunch this week, with lots of good, fresh fruit.  Or maybe I’ll just take in some bread and dips tomorrow and the rest of the lentils.  Mmm, lentils…

How lurid are those radishes? Also, when sautéing asparagus for a crudité platter, it is generally not advisable to set the pan on fire...

Ugly, certainly, but that just means you won't have to share...

I have a friend who is allergic to quite a few things, with nuts and eggs being at the top of the list.  She’s always terribly apologetic about this and tells me not to cook for her (fat chance), which drives me nuts (tee hee!), because she’s also extremely awesome – intelligent, creative and kind, and clearly deserving of delicious food.  And, actually, I don’t find nuts and eggs  all that difficult to work around most of the time

Of course, it does become a trifle more challenging when I’m experimenting with raw foods, because raw food recipes have nuts in everything, replacing flour, biscuits, and even dairy.  Which, actually, is fascinating, and it’s entirely possible that I just accidentally went online and ordered a whole book of raw food desserts, but that’s beside the point.  Anyway, I’m not the world’s greatest nut fan (though there are those who would say I am more than a little bit nutty), but I am most definitely fond of things chocolatey, which brings me to a favourite new discovery of mine: cacao beans!

Cacao beans are basically proto-chocolate. They are the primeval fluid from which chocolate, bubbling, evolves.  OK, this may not be entirely true.  I’ve been cooking non-stop for the last 8 hours, and am possibly a little silly.  But they certainly are the things which, after a certain amount of processing which I knew once but have temporarily forgotten, get turned into things like cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and of course CHOCOLATE. 

Cacao beans also behave pretty much exactly like nuts for culinary purposes, with the useful exception being that they don’t give people like my friend anaphylaxis (which was never my favourite nutty property anyway). 

You do see where I’m going with this, don’t you?  The lovely Hannah over at Wayfaring Chocolate keeps creating all these lovely raw truffle / cookie recipes which are really irresistible in this weather.  I looked at the ones made of dates and dried cherries and cashews and thought, I wonder what would happen if I used cacao beans instead of the cashews?

It turns out that what happens is I get very, very tired of shelling cacao beans, and then wish I’d shelled a lot more, because these little sweetmeats are amazing – dark and chocolatey and neither too sweet nor too bitter, with a definite cherry kick to them.  You can’t taste the dates – they are basically acting as sweetener and glue – and you don’t really taste the Stealth Oats, hanging out in there, making you healthy when you aren’t looking.  I can’t express how delicious these are, and I’d never had known this if my friend wasn’t allergic to nuts...

(And before I get on to the recipe, I feel I should reiterate that this really is Hannah’s recipe – I changed one ingredient, and increased the quantities slightly, but that really was all I did.)

Your Shopping List

Now what will you do with it?

First, shell your cacao beans.  I do this by soaking them in hot water for a few minutes until they swell and I can get a sharp knife under the skin and peel it off.  Some you can get off with your fingernails, but others will fight you to the last cacao nib, and if you are me, you will probably have several near-misses with the knife.  Don’t worry, it’s worth it!

Stone the dates.  No, don’t throw stones at them, that isn’t nice.  Don’t get them high, either.  That may or may not be nice, but it’s certainly not legal, and I’m fairly sure they can’t consent to that sort of thing anyway, which is definitely not nice.  What I’m actually suggesting you do with these dates is remove the stones from them.  It’s possible that the dates don’t think that is very nice either, but if we keep anthropomorphising the dates we are never going to get anywhere with this recipe so we’re going to stop now.

So much verbiage for a recipe which really is only two sentences long.

Put dates, cacao beans, dried cherries and oats in the food processor and process until they go from being finely chopped objects into a big cohesive ball that is careening around the food processor in a somewhat alarming fashion and looking as though it could escape at any moment.  Stop the food processor, get out the giant truffle ball, and pinch off bits the size of medium-sized marbles and roll them into balls.  Refrigerate or eat at once.  I recommend the latter.

See what I mean? Nowhere near enough.

Variations

This recipe is vegan, low-GI and nut-free, but what is really important is that it is unbelievably good and I now want to try it with every kind of dried berry known to man.  And then with dried apricots, dried pears, dried apples, and so forth.  I am so very, very taken with this cacao+dried fruit truffle concept that you wouldn’t believe it.

You could make this recipe gluten-free by replacing the oats with cashews or rolled quinoa if you could find it.  Then it would be high protein as well, and practically a dietary requirement!  I do think you could use this as a template for just about any combination of fruit, nuts or cacao you like – just keep the quantities fairly standard.  Actually, I’ve been doing just that, ruthlessly adapting Hannah’s truffle recipes to suit my own ends.  So far, I am finding that there’s nothing wrong with any combination I’ve tried that can’t be fixed with a bit of brandy, marsala, kirsch or cointreau, but then, I am a bit of a lush when it comes to cooking.  You do need to think about keeping similar proportions of dry and sticky ingredients, and if your mixture isn’t sticky enough and you aren’t the sort of person who likes adding alcohol to everything, you could use agave nectar or honey if it needs to be sweeter, or orange, apple, or any other suitable juice if you don’t want too much of a sugar kick.

I’m leaning tentatively towards a Roman / Raw Food theme, which is going to be wildly inauthentic one way or another – if I try to stick to only ingredients that Romans would have had access to (with maybe a bit of fudging on the grounds that there was trade with parts of Africa and Asia), a lot of the Raw Food classics (agave nectar, coconut butter) are not really appropriate; and I’m fairly sure that pickled feta cheese doesn’t count as a raw food, either, though that won’t stop me.  For bonus points, I also need to work around allergies to nuts and onions among my guests, and of course the Romans absolutely love their onions and raw foodists love their nuts.  I’m pretty sure they do this to annoy me, though I do not have conclusive proof of this…

Anyway, the main purpose of this post was to write down some of my menu ideas before I went to bed, so…

- bread

- pickled feta, other more normal cheeses

- celery and olive paté, assorted cheese and herb and garlic purées from Roman cookbook.

- assorted vegetable crudités, but no capsicums or tomatoes.  Cured meats?    Maybe do Ligurian sausage recipe, but only if cool enough.  Ha.

- vine leaves stuffed with rice and goats cheese, if I can get them done early enough.

- fresh fruit: grapes, apricots, peaches, plums are all in season and authentic; may also find red or white currants, cherries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, but these are all more expensive

- dried fruit balls: apricot with orange, fig with almond, possibly something wildly inauthentic involving dried cherries and coconut and cocoa butter, because I have cocoa butter, and these are highly un-roman ingredients but not actually New-World, so not 100% implausible

- yoghurt or curd cheese with vincotto, honey, cinnamon and pomegranate seeds (not actually a Roman recipe as far as I know, but I bet they had something like it)

- other dried fruit and nuts.  I wonder if I can make an apple and pine-nut and raisin cake?  Again, not officially Roman, but I’ll bet they ate things a lot like that.

This is all looking woefully inadequate, to be honest.  The savoury side needs at least one more reasonably filling / protein rich dish, which I will have to figure out tomorrow.  The sweet side needs something biscuity or cakey or both.  I may have to resort to buying things from the Italian bakery because I’m really not feeling up to my usual levels of Shakespeare culinary madness.  I may wind up doing random scones or cupcakes because they are easy.  I could proably justify anything that looks sufficiently red and bloody on the grounds of all the wars and the stabbing at the end of the play, but I’m really not in the mood just now.  Besides, my favourite really red food needs sheet gelatine, and I don’t know if I can get that on a Saturday…

Maybe things will look brighter in the morning?

And speaking of things which explode, if for some reason you decide to boil an egg in the microwave and you’d rather not have it explode, make sure you prick a hole in the shell first.  This one isn’t from my own experience – the mother of one of my friends decided, in a spirit of scientific enquiry, to find out what happened if she didn’t follow the instructions in her microwave cookbook.

There is, however, more to food security than not exploding things in ovens.

Two books which I wish I’d found years before I did were The Student Grub Guide (sadly out of print these days) and The Vegetarian Student Grub Guide.  These are both aimed at people who have never cooked anything in their lives, and tell you useful things like how to boil eggs, make toast, bake potatoes and cook rice and pasta – things that most cookbooks assume you already know how to do.  And they have a fair number of good basic recipes, too.

Two other books that I adore are Diana Henry’s Cook Simple and Food From Plenty – both are full of recipes which require very little culinary knowledge or ability but produce amazingly flavourful results.  Cook Simple is really about the art of putting a few ingredients together and then leaving them in the oven or to marinade until they are wonderful, with little hands-on work required from the cook.  Food From Plenty is a good general cookbook with a lot of tips on using leftovers and making the most of cheap cuts of meat and seasonal vegetables.   I’m yet to find a recipe in either of these books that wasn’t absolutely delicious the first time I made it, and I fully recommend them both.

On the frugal side of the equation, two blogs which I have found excellent for interesting and cheap recipes are Frugal Feeding and the $120 Food Challenge.  Frugal Feeding is based in the UK, and the $120 Food Challenge is Australian – so you might find it more useful to follow the one in your hemisphere just because most foods are cheaper in their season, and it’s a lot easier to cook seasonally if you aren’t following a calendar from the wrong side of the globe.

And speaking of seasonal food, this is a handy thing to be aware of, food-security-wise.  I go to the Farmers’ Market basically because I love going to the Farmers’ Market, but it’s also useful for getting an idea of what is in season in my area at any given time.  Generally, this is the food which will also be cheaper at my local greengrocer or supermarket, and it’s handy to know what to look out for (of course, I also view Farmers’ Market shopping as increasing my food security in the long term by contributing to keeping farmers in business – one never knows what share the farmer gets of the price one pays for a supermarket tomato, but one can be confident that he or she is getting a higher share when you are buying directly from the farmer.  This is, of course, an attitude I can afford to take because I do have a reasonable amount of food security – Farmers’ Markets are not always more expensive than supermarket shopping, but around here they often are.).  Your supermarket or greengrocer will, however, also tend to put the seasonal foods out the front and on special.  It’s worth having a few recipes in your repertoire that can work with just about any vegetable, and buying what is affordable…

My Fall-Back Pasta Recipes

My go-to recipe when I have no idea what to cook is What’s In The Fridge Pasta.  The basic method is this:  bring a huge pot of water to boil for pasta, and measure out 100g of any pasta you like for every person you plan to feed.    Boil pasta until al dente, and drain.

While the water for the pasta is coming to the boil, heat some olive oil in a skillet and add an onion (I cut mine in halves, then half-moon slices, then in halves again), a few cloves of crushed garlic, and some dried oregano, rosemary, thyme, chilli, or whatever.  I then chop up any likely vegetables I can get my hands on – zucchini, mushrooms, peppers, eggplant (best to sprinkle this with salt and leave to drain for ten minutes, then rinse before adding to the pan), leeks, carrots, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, etc, and add them to the pan.  I’ll keep the heat fairly high and cook until a bit golden (incidentally, you can add  tinned tuna or chopped ham or bacon or leftover cooked meat or salami or roasted vegetables, too), and then add a bottle of passata, or a tin of chopped tomatoes, or some ready-made tomato-based sauce, and stir it all around.  Mix through the pasta, and serve, with cheese if you so desire.  A more precise template for this recipe is here, but it is endlessly variable.

Alternatively, sauté a few veggies and pop them into a casserole dish, add any likely leftovers from the fridge (cooked meat or vegetables – roasted vegetables are gorgeous here) along with crumbled or cubed leftover bits of random cheese,  or some ricotta from a tub, or even leftover hummus or babaganoush or cream cheese or any other dips, mix together with cooked pasta, put a bit more cheese on top, and bake at 180°C until browned and bubbling.

A more planned version of this is my macaroni cheese with green leafy vegetables, which you can use as a template for a pasta bake with virtually anything in it.  Note that you will need to make a béchamel sauce for this, which may seem daunting, but is a very useful thing to learn, and I promise my recipe will work if you follow it.

Seven Easy Recipes Which I Make Every Chance I Get If I Am Feeling Lazy, Cheap, and in need of Vegetables

Vegetarian Chilli – this is a good, filling recipe which makes enough to feed at least a dozen people, and freezes well.  You need to remember to soak the beans overnight or in the morning before you go to work, and you need to know how to chop vegetables and boil water.  The beans take a couple of hours to cook, but you don’t have to supervise them.

Roast Pumpkin Soup – you need an oven and a big saucepan and about an hour of cooking time, though most of that you can spend doing something else.  This recipe also has a basic vegetable stock recipe which is very useful for risottos, soups and casseroles – worlds better than anything you can buy at the supermarket, and cheaper, too.  It’s literally 2 minutes of preparing vegetables, and then letting everything simmer for half an hour to an hour.

Vegetables and Cheese on Toast – this is a good summer recipe that takes about fifteen minutes from start to finish, provided you have a decent grater.  Very tasty and very easy and the only expensive part is the cheese – if Gruyère is out of your budget, try Jarlsberg or a basic Swiss cheese.

Baked Potato with Hot Pink Coleslaw – this is absolutely delicious and also looks really mad and dramatic.  What more could you want?  Again, all you really need here is an oven and a grater and you are set.

Lentils with Rice and Onions – this is a Claudia Roden recipe which is so much better than it sounds.  You can add anything you like to it, but it’s actually gorgeous plain, and we just have it with some plain Greek yoghurt on top and a few seasonal vegetables on the side.

Bean and Pepper Tacos – these are just delicious and very fast and easy to make.  You can use the filling for nachos etc, too.

Balsamic Strawberries – any time strawberries are cheap, I make this.  It’s dead easy, and it makes even mediocre strawberries taste incredible.