August 2, 2009: Zippy warm potato salad

For Sunday night's dinner I planned chickpea burgers. Our favourite burger side is oven-baked potato 'chips' but with 4-6 eaters expected and 8 burger patties prepped, the oven couldn't fit my side-dish wish. My online recipe stash failed to inspire and I pulled out a few choice recipe books - here I found what I was after almost immediately! A 'warm potato salad with green olive dressing' from vegie food, with all heating provided atop the stove.

Though it looked to be precisely what I wanted, I prepared myself for some disappointment. Most of the photos in vegie food show food that's just my style, yet for every great recipe we've tried, there's been one with terrible timing or quantities.

Thankfully this one was bang on. It takes little more than the 15 minutes the potatoes need to boil - time I had while the burgers were baking. All the spuds need then is a quick toss through a zippy dressing of lemon and olive oil, green olives, capers, parsley and garlic. Served hot, it's everything I was after in a chip replacement. Served at room temperature, I reckon it'd make a lovely alternative to the standard mayo-drowned picnic potato salad.


Zippy warm potato salad
(from vegie food)

1.5 kg small waxy potatoes
1/2 cup green olives, pitted and chopped
2 teaspoons capers, chopped
3/4 cup parsley, chopped
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste

Boil the potatoes for 15 minutes or until just tender (test them with a knife).

While the potatoes are boiling, whisk together the remaining ingredients in a large bowl.

When the potatoes are done, drain and cool them just until you're able to handle them. Slice the potatoes into large chunks, then toss them through the dressing.

Serve the salad warm or at room temperature.

February 15, 2009: Roasted beetroot salad

Though a handful of green leaves might be enough to transform a slab of risotto cake into a meal, this was a weekend meal and I was willing to go further than that. I flipped through the Salads section of Vegie Food, created a shortlist and asked Michael to make the final decision; he chose this roasted beetroot salad. It's actually written as a double-beet, double-onion salad, featuring the oft-neglected beet leaves as well roots and a pungent dose of garlic cloves and French shallots.

Our salad didn't quite work out like that; we blindly followed the suggested roasting times to disastrous effect. You know how you can roast garlic until the cloves are sweet and squishy and spreadable? I think we were aiming for a stage just before that, where the cloves are soft and sweet but still hold together when peeled. Instead we learned that after the squishy stage, garlic cloves re-harden and eventually they covert to little rock-like chunks of blackened coal. Whoops. Thankfully the French shallots were a made of tougher stuff and we were able to peel off a couple of layers and make use of their sweet, tender centres.

Regardless, this salad impressed us both. The bitter leaves are well offset by the sweet beetroots and shallots, and the single fresh garlic clove in the tangy mustard dressing made quite an impact - I didn't miss the other 12 roasted cloves at all! Adding the walnuts for crunch, this salad has all the variety in flavour, texture and colour you could ask for in a side dish. It's a little fiddly and time-consuming as salads go but I don't think that'll deter us from making this again - we'll just set the oven timer a lot earlier next time.

Roasted beetroot salad
(based on a recipe from Vegie Food)

13 cloves garlic
12 French shallots
a large bunch of baby beetroots with leaves
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 cup walnut oil (we used macadamia oil)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 cup walnuts
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Roast the shallots, beetroot and 12 of the garlic cloves, leaving all their skins on, until tender. The recipe recommends 1 hour for the shallots and garlic, 1 1/2 hours for the beetroots, but they could take a lot less time - check them regularly. Allow the vegetables to cool slightly, then gently peel them; slice the beetroot into large chunks.

Mince the one remaining clove of garlic. In a small bowl, whisk it together the vinegar, mustard, and walnut/macadamia oil; season the dressing with salt and pepper. Toss the beetroot chunks through the dressing and give them a few minutes to soak up the flavours.

Arrange the beetroot leaves, shallots, garlic, and walnuts on plates or in a salad bowl. Spoon in the beetroot chunks, then drizzle over the dressing.

November 15, 2008: Warm pasta & sweet potato salad

After a somewhat decadent night out on Friday and in anticipation of more decadence on Sunday, I was keen to prepare something comparitively light and nourishing for dinner on Saturday. Unusually, I consulted our modest cookbook collection rather than my online bookmarks and picked out this warm pasta salad from vegie food. It takes advantage of the season's asparagus, features sprinklings of feta and pine nuts, and with pasta and sweet potato involved it's definitely a full meal on its own.

Though it's colourful and contains some lovely ingredients, this salad didn't quite work for us. The proportions seemed out of whack, with too much pasta and not nearly enough spinach or pine nuts. The feta we bought was tough and the flavours never really mingled, even as we ate it gradually over a number of days. I'm sure there's a great salad waiting to burst out from this ingredient list, but I think it'll need new proportions and a different dressing to really shine.

Warm pasta & sweet potato salad

750g sweet potato
2 tablespoons olive oil
500g pasta
325g marinated feta cheese in oil
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 bunch asparagus, chopped into short lengths
100g baby spinach leaves
2 tomatoes, chopped
40g pine nuts, toasted

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Peel the sweet potato and chop it into large cubes; plonk it into a large baking dish, drizzle it with the olive oil, season it with salt and pepper, and stir it all through. Bake the sweet potato until tender, about 20 minutes.

While the sweet potato is baking, boil a large saucepan of water and cook the pasta, draining it when it's done.

Drain the oil from the feta and whisk the oil with the balsamic vinegar as a dressing - we added some extra olive oil here to make up for our lack of marinating oil.

Steam the asparagus until tender, but still keeping its colour.

Stir all of the ingredients together in a large bowl - the sweet potato, pasta, asparagus, feta, spinach, tomatoes, pine nuts and finally the dressing.

January 13, 2008: Morsels for the Moonlight Cinema

Between Cindy's network of expat-Brisbanites and my stash of $10 tickets, we rounded up quite a gang for a Sunday evening at the Moonlight Cinema in the botanic gardens. The evening's entertainment consisted of a selection of shorts from the Melbourne International Film Festival, but of course the real focus of the evening was the pre-film picnic. After some success with my previous dip-focussed picnic food, I decided to repeat the performance. This time I flicked through our cookbooks rather than Cindy's bookmarks, and came across a couple of relatively easy and tasty-looking choices.

First up was the amazingly straightforward garlic, herb and bean pate from our CookSmart Vegetarian flip book. This takes all of five minutes to make and is really pretty tasty. I might go a bit lighter on the garlic next time, as it really was a bit overpowering.

Given how simple the first dip was, I decided to be a little more ambitious with the second. This beetroot hummus recipe came from our little Vegie Food cookbook and looked a delicious and bright addition to the relatively plain bean dip. It turned out even pinker than the picture in the book suggested and was worth the extra effort. A word of warning though: this recipe makes an awful lot of dip - we're still working through the leftovers.

We brought along a pile of chopped carrot, cucumber and capsicum as well as some Turkish bread to dig into our dips. Really, between these two dips and Cindy's muffins (coming soon!) there was enough food to feed our whole gang, but of course everyone else had prepared for a picnic as well and we were all stuffed to the gills long before anyone's provisions were exhausted. Better to be safe than hungry I guess. Indeed, by the time the films started, we'd all decided that this picnic idea was a winner, and one we could probably replicate without needing to pay for the privilege.

Still, the films were mostly pretty entertaining, with a couple of odd, slow ones that tested the crowd's patience. Unfortunately the cold drove some of our group away before the last couple of shorts, which were easily the best: Advantage (a ridiculously creepy encounter on a tennis court) and Spider (both disturbing and hilarious, watch it here).


Garlic, herb and bean pate

1 410g can of navy beans (the recipe wanted flageolet beans, but we couldn't find them anywhere), drained
125g quark (the recipe specified cream cheese, but Cindy was keen to buy more quark, and it seemed to work fine as a substitute)
2 garlic cloves, chopped
3 tablespoons pesto (I used some of the leftover agresto)
2 chopped spring onions
salt and pepper

Stick everything in the food processor and whiz until combined. A splash of olive oil probably wouldn't hurt, if the texture is a little dry, but is otherwise unnecessary. And that's it, you've got your first dip.


Beetroot hummus

500g beetroot
1/3 cup olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 tablespoon ground cumin
410g can of chickpeas, drained
1 tablespoon tahini
1/3 cup plain yoghurt
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup vegie stock

Scrub the beetroot and boil in a large pot of water for about 40 minutes, until they're nice and soft. Drain them and let them cool for while and then peel (the skin should come off really easily).

Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a fry pan and cook the onions for about five minutes. Add in the cumin and stir it through, cooking for another minute or so.

Chop the peeled beetroot into manageable chunks and place it in the food processor with all of your ingredients except for the oil. Whiz everything together until it's a smooth paste. Pour the olive oil in with the processor still whizzing and, once everything is combined, you've got yourself a giant, pink mush ready for dipping.

October 8, 2007: Creamy cabbage

On our recent visit to Williamstown, I gamely invested in a new cookbook. I say 'gamely' because, unlike many food bloggers, I'm trying not to amass too large a collection of cookbooks. (I'm a rebel in a long family line of hoarders and feel guilty about owning anything that I don't actually make use of.) Besides, you may have noticed that the new dishes we prepare at home are more often inspired by other food bloggers than by anything printed on paper. So it's a high compliment that the anonymously authored vegie food took my fancy as I idly flicked through it in a gift shop.

Even more improbable than my impulse purchase of this book (no dessert recipes - can you imagine?!) was my first choice of recipe, a side dish of cabbage. While I've never hated cabbage as such, it's never really excited me either. But it seemed just the right combination of subtle flavour, fresh texture and nutrient richness to prepare alongside our two pies from TOFWD. This creamy cabbage was even tastier than I hoped - the gentle cooking toned down a texture that can be rubbery when raw, and the flavour was very savoury and buttery. Michael and I enjoyed this so much that we ate the leftovers with simple old toast the night after.

Creamy cabbage

1 tablespoon oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
2 leeks, sliced thinly
500g cabbage, sliced thinly
juice of half a lemon
5 tablespoons cream or creme fraiche
2 tablespoons parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

In a large frypan, heat the oil and butter, then add the mustard seeds and cook until they pop. Add the leeks and cook them until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the cabbage, turn the heat down to low, and cook for a further 4 minutes until it, too, has softened.

Season the mix with salt and pepper, add the lemon juice and cream, then cook for a minute more. Finally, add the parsley and serve.