Mixed Vegetable Fritters

I hardly ever cook deep-fried food but that's not because I don't like it. I'm just reluctant to use too much oil, scared of the hot temperatures and fires and everything. But seeing a recipe for fresh vegetable fritters in an otherwise healthy cookbook must have inspired me, and it's true that if you get the oil temperature hot enough the fritters don't absorb lots of oil. I cooked these in my wok and drained them on what I guess is a draining attachment and they were light and crisp and a great treat.

Ingredients

Selection of seasonal vegetables. (The cookbook also proposes another recipe, herb fritters, using parsley, basil, mint and sage instead of veggies, so feel free to try that too alongside veggies or on their own with a class of something cool as an apero).

The recipe uses 1 fennel bulb, 2 fresh artichokes, 2 small courgettes, a handful of cauliflower florets, as well as 

12 large pitted green olives and 

115g / 4 oz drained fresh mozzarella, cut into 2.5cm / 1 in dice. 

(I had no artichokes or mozzarella this time but did have eggplant so used that as well as the other veggies).

Olive oil (or if not, canola oil) for frying

salt, to taste

Lemon wedges or a sauce of your choice (homemade aioli could be a nice treat) 

Leafy herbs to garnish (optional)

Beer Batter

2 eggs, separated

2 Tbsp olive oil

175ml / 6 fl oz beer

115 g / 4 oz flour

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Method

First, start batter preparation: Beat egg yolks, then slowly add the oil, beer, and flour. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cover and set aside for one hour (I only set aside for a short time and it still worked fine. I had used quite a yeasty Belgian beer, not sure if that helped). Right before using, whisk egg whites and fold into batter.

While batter (minus eggwhite) is resting, prepare veggies:

Cut fennel into thin wedges. Cut artichokes into 8 wedges. Cut courgettes in half crosswise then lengthwise again into quarters.

Lightly cook separately in salted boiling water (or steam in rice cooker like I did) the fennel, artichokes, and cauliflower. Cook until just al dente. Drain well on clean dish towels. - Eggplants, which I used also, absorb a lot of water and frying is best when ingredients are drier.

Pour the oil into a large frying pan or wok to a depth of at least 1cm ½ inch (or fill pan ⅓ full if you have enough oil - afterwards the cooled oil can be filtered and stored in a jar for reusing later for more deep frying adventures). Heat oil until hot but not smoking.

Meanwhile, dip a few of the veggies, mozzarella cubes and olives into the batter, letting the excess drain off. Transfer to the hot oil and fry until golden brown on all sides (turn with long handled tongs or use a strainer). Remove fritters with a slotted spoon or strainer, letting the excess oil drain back into the pan. Transfer to paper towel to drain. I kept mine warm as I continued cooking by placing them on a paper towel lined tray in the oven. I was a bit shocked how much oil was absorbed by paper towels even after initial draining! Just as well deep-fried food is just a 'sometimes' treat for me.

Continue frying the fritters in batches, transferring to paper towels to drain.

Arrange fritters on a clean plate and garnish with lemon wedges and, if desired, fresh leafy herbs.

Moroccan Cooked Carrot Salad

Serves 4 (photo shows only a small amount of what it makes)

This is my attempt* to recreate a nice salad I bought from a Moroccan vendor at the market. He is lovely and makes lots of nice salads but they are sold in plastic containers. I had people over the other day so bought a swag of his salads and have kept the plastic containers to store leftovers in. Photo shows leftovers of the salad I made based on his. It's nice and lemony/vinegary. When I have time, I'll ask if he offers cooking lessons, but for the meantime, here's this one I thought I could do, made with delicious organic carrots from another farmers' market vendor.
*using a mix of a couple of recipes online with a couple of my own variations

INGREDIENTS
8-12 carrots, peeled/well scrubbed and thinly sliced
2 large garlic cloves
3 to 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (to taste)
Salt to taste
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 tsp. ground cumin (or, better: 1 tsp. cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground)
1⁄4 tsp. paprika
3 pinches cayenne
2 pinches ground cinnamon
2 to 3 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice (to taste)
1-2 Tbsp. cider vinegar (to taste)
¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley (I used coriander instead and it was nice too)

FOR THE GARNISH (optional)
black olives
2 hard boiled eggs, cut in wedges


PREPARATION
Place the carrots and whole garlic cloves in a steamer above 1 inch of boiling water, cover and steam 5 to 8 minutes, until tender. Remove from the heat, rinse with cold water, and drain on paper towels. I actually used my 'multicooker' with a tiny amount of water and didn't need to drain them.
Mix through with the rest of the ingredients. Taste and adjust salt and lemon juice and vinegar as desired. Transfer to a platter, and decorate with olives and hard-boiled eggs if desired. Serve at room temperature.

Tip
Advance preparation: You can make this several hours before serving. The dish, without the lemon juice/vinegar and parsley, will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. Reheat gently on top of the stove and add the lemon juice and parsley.

Mushroom and Chestnut Ragoût with Potato and Celeriac Mash

Mushrooms are big around here. Well, actually, they're fairly small, the main type grown is the Paris white, known in NZ as the button mushroom. This isn't Paris so I don't know how they got that name (though I'm sure I will once I finally visit the mushroom museum) but I do know that this town /area produces 90% of France's button mushrooms.  

And are there button mushrooms in this recipe? Only if you want there to be. The recipe calls for portobello and dried porcini mushrooms but I used a mix of varieties I don't even know the names of. I just buy them at the market from the mushroom lady. So feel free, as ever, to adapt this recipe to your tastes. I reduced the cream (it called for 5 T, I felt that was too much and I think it could be lovely without any, too). Also, I had no sherry so used balsamic vinegar which I added a tiny bit at a time, tasting until I got it right. The other thing I didn't have was sweet potatoes / kumara so I made a mash using potatoes and celeriac, an idea I'd got from my husband's guy friends who cooked delicious dishes for their New Year's Party - to my surprise as I think a bunch of mates from an agricultural college in NZ probably wouldn't be so gourmet - at least not cooking for each other at a party. But that's the French for you. And of course their mash had heaps of butter. So you could follow suit and go crazy with the butter if you hold back on the cream in the ragout. But the ragout is very rich so don't over-do both!

I'm not sure what you could replace chestnuts with if you can't find any. In Australia I found them for sale in cans. Chestnuts are lovely with their distinct sweet and savoury taste and firm and sort of buttery texture. Perhaps soaked cashews could work? Other ideas?

Mushroom and Chestnut Ragoût Potato and Celeriac Mash

Recipe comes from the 'Simmer' section (so DO, don't rush it!) of the cookbook 'New Vegetarian Kitchen' by Nicola Graimes (UK book).

Serves 4

40g / 1¼ oz dried porcini mushrooms

3 T olive oil

40g / 1½ oz butter

350g / 12 oz shallots, peeled and halved with the base intact, or quartered if large

500g / 1 lb 2 oz portobello mushrooms, thickly sliced

2 tsp dried thyme

125ml / 4fl oz / ½ cup dry sherry (or an alternative. I used 2+ T balsamic vinegar)

250g / 9 oz cooked chestnuts, thickly sliced

2 Tbsp light soy sauce

a few splashes of hot pepper sauce

2-5 Tbsp double cream

leaves from a few parsley sprigs, chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper

500 g potatoes, peeled and chopped into chunks

400 g celeriac, peeled and chopped into large chunks

(or replace potatoes and celeriac with 900g of kumara / sweet potato)

2 large garlic cloves

150 ml / 5 fl oz / scant ⅔ c milk

30 g / 1 oz butter

1 Soak the porcini mushrooms in 150 ml / 5 fl oz / scant ⅔ c boiled water for 20 mins until softened.

2 Heat the olive oil and butter in a large, heavy-based saucepan over a medium-low heat and cook the shallots for 12 minutes, stirring regularly, until softened and golden in places. Add the portobello mushrooms and cook for another 4-5 minutes until tender.

3 Strain the porcini mushrooms, reserving the soaking liquid, and add them to the pan, along with the thyme and sherry. Bring to the boil then reduce the heat to low and simmer until the liquid has reduced by half and there is no aroma of alcohol.

4 Add the prcini soaking liquid, chestnuts, soy sauce and hot pepper sauce and simmer for 10-15 minutes until reduced by half. Stir in the cream and heat through gently, then season with salt and pepper.

5 Meanwhile, make the mash. Cook the vegetables (potato and celeriac, or sweet potato) and garlic in boiling salted water for 10 minutes or until tender, then drain and return to the pan. Add the milk and butter, season well with salt and pepper and warm through (or better yet, warm milk and butter before adding - but this makes more dishes). Mash until smooth, then cover with a lid to keep warm.

6 Sprinkle the ragout with parsley and serve with the mash/puree

Dolsot Bibimbap

Bibimbap is one of my very favourite meals. I used to eat it just about every single day when I lived in Seoul. Eating out is the thing to do in Korea - often to socialise at lunchtime with co-workers, but for me, working weird shifts, I often ate alone, something unheard of for Koreans it seems. Although I loved the days when I had company, I would always enjoy eating out when I had something as delicious as this to indulge it. Back then, I never tried to make it at home because basically cooking, esp when garlic is involved, is not the best idea when you live in a one room apartment with the stove 2m from your bed. Anyway, when surrounded by reasonably priced and excellent restaurants, I'm happy to leave it to the pros.

If you get the chance, do visit South Korea. Not only does it have delicious food, but it is beautiful - even Seoul is surrounded by wooded hills. The culture has both modern and traditional elements tourists will enjoy.


This colourful dish can be made many ways - many restaurants have their own way of doing it with particular vegetable combinations. Dolsot bibimbap (the winter version) is served in a large stone bowl that I think is heated on a stove. I haven't found these wonderfully heavy bowls for sale here so I have made mine with some earthenware lidded pots I have which I preheat in the oven. Bibimbap is usually also topped with bulgogi (thinly-sliced beef) though of course I get mine without. I do usually go for the egg on top though. The egg in summer is usually fried while for the winter version of this dish, shown here, it would be cracked straight onto the hot rice, too cook as the sizzling bowl is brought to your name. Who doesn't love the excitement of sizzling dishes delivered to your table? You can make normal bibimbap and in the summer use more raw ingredients like beanspouts, lettuce and grated carrot but on cold days the crackling rice and warm vegetables of the dolsot version is just the thing.

What I love most about this dish is the morish spicy Gochujang sauce - a chile paste you can buy from Korean food stores - or, if you are lucky, the Asian food aisle of the supermarket. I had to visit 5 Asian shops before I found this last time - not because they didn't stock it, but because I was doing my shopping at the wrong time and they had all sold out!

Here is a picture of what I used to make it for a cold rainy day yesterday. The green packet is yummy salty seasoned Korean seaweed and the bottle is Asian seasame oil. Usually I would use carrots but thanks to our juicer we had run out. Parsnip made a sweet and earthy alternative to both carrot and the bracken fronds my favourite bibimpap restaurant used (which I haven't found here).

Dolsot Bibimbap

Get all your vegetables washed and chopped first of all, then you can just cook them, one after the other, in the same pan (less dishes to wash). All the vegetable toppings can be at room temperature but the rice must be fresh and hot.



I'm going to give you directions to make enough for 4 people but you can adjust quantities to suit.

Ingredients:

8 shiitake or other mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
1-2 bunches of spinach, trimmed and rinsed well.
1 parsnip and 1 small carrot / 2 med carrots jullienned
1 med / 3/4 large zucchini
8 small sheets Korean seaweed (seasoned laver) cut into strips with scissors
1-4 cloves garlic (depending how much you love it), thinly sliced

1 /18 ozpacket of firm tofu, dried in (paper) towels, sliced into 2cm strips
2 t tamari

spray vegetable oil for cooking
1 t or less of Asian seasame oil for seasoning (strong flavour)

4 cups of fresh cooked rice.

-I used brown rice as I love the flavour but I'm not the best at cooking it - it likes to spit and bubble over from my rice cooker (any tips appreciated) so I keep my eye on it, adding water gradually to avoid big boil-overs. About halfway through cooking I added a handful of black rice which apart from probably being nutritious and all, dyes the rice a wonderful purple colour! White Korean rice is very yummy too - I love the smell of it cooking, but today I'm giving you this especially healthy and nurturing version.



Method

1) put the rice on in the rice cooker. If you have earthenware bowls and want to make this dolsot version, preheat your oven now too - you can put the bowls in so they heat up with the oven.

2) heat a frying pan and spray with a little oil, add the tofu, season with the tamari and fry tofu till golden brown on each side. Remove and set aside, leaving pan on heat.

3) spray frying pan with oil and add zucchini. saute until soft but firm - about 2 minutes.

4) now add mushrooms to pan, spraying on both sides. When they are partially cooked, add the garlic. Don't cook too long - about 3 minutes, you want them soft and starting to brown but not all shrivelled.

5) remove the mushrooms, leaving most of the garlic slices if poss. Add just a splash of water then put the spinach in, letting it steam just long enough so the leaves are just wilted, about a minute or two. Transfer immediately to a colander, rinse with cold water and squeeze water from the spinach. (or with perfect timing and perfect sprinkle of water, the spinach may be just softened enough to skip this 'rescue' step). Combine garlicky spinach with a few drops of seasame oil - a little goes a long way.

6) add parsnip / carrot to frying pan with further dash of water - just enough to stop them sticking to the pan. Saute until limp, about 3 minutes. Sprinkle with salt and set aside.

7) when rice is cooked, transfer 1 cup of cooked rice into each bowl - remember to use good oven mits if removing hot bowls from the oven. Cover bowls and put back in oven to let the edges crisp up.

8) while the rice is in the oven, mix up the following paste:

Yangnyeom Gochujang

Makes about 1/2 cup

4 T Korean chile paste (gochujang)
2 T Asian seasame oil
1 T tamari / light soy sauce
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 T (toasted) seasame seeds
1 green onion, chopped
1 T Korean malt syrup (mool yut) or sugar - I leave this out and it's still great

Combine in a small bowl to serve with your bibimpap (let everyone add their own, so they can have it as spicy as they like). If you want to make this paste in advance (or you have left-over), it will keep in a well-sealed container in the fridge for about a week.

9) Test your rice bowls - when the edges are starting to stick and go crunchy, it's ready to add the toppings and serve.
Now stack the seaweed sheets and slice into three strips. We do this last to keep the seaweed crispy. Arrange the vegetables, including seaweed on top of the rice in each bowl, separating the colours for best visual appeal. If you especially enjoy seasame oil, you can drizzle a few drops on each bowl and if you want to add an egg, you can do this now. Serve with the yangnyeom gochujang and any side dishes you may like - last night we had seasoned roast pumpkin. Another day I'll share some other Korean side dish ideas.

10) When people have been served and added the amount of paste they wanted, they mix everything together in their bowl with a metal spoon. Yes, this is one Korean dish that is usually eaten with a spoon, not chopsticks!


"jal meokkesseumnida!"

Easy-As Pie

My favourite vegetables are technically fruit - tomatoes and eggplant. While I've been delighted by the cheapness and the year-long abundance of eggplants here in Perth, tomatoes are a different matter. Oh they're there all year - but even when it's the proper season for them - in the words of Nick Cave: "I think it's well understood, tomatoes, they just aint no good."

So ok, he was talking about people, not tomatoes, but if you know the song and its tone of lament, you'll get an idea about my feelings of disapointment in the tomatoes of today and my nostalgia for a time when they had taste. Like September. September we went to France and Luc's mum made tomato salad with large plump tomatoes from her garden. Yeah, that's RIGHT, WE remember, my taste-buds screamed, tomatoes used to taste like this! THIS is why you liked them - not their hard-to-cut smoothness, not their please-blanch-and-peel recipes nor their seeds nor their bitterness. It was TASTE, and taste is mostly why I love cooking and also red wine.

Half the reason I once moved to Chile was red wine, the other half was Pablo Neruda, a nobel prize-winning poet. And this is what he had to say about tomatoes:
Ode to Tomatoes

Sadly even with Perth's endless summer the tomatoes are mainly hard, pale and tasteless. But still I love them, I can't deny them, I'll always love them till the day that I die. So what to do? My garden having failed to produce any tomatoes (despite being quite good at growing tall tomato plants), I have settled for eating grape tomatoes if I want them fresh, or, as in this recipe, baking them to bring out the flavour - it really does WONDERS!

Sometimes I just cut them in half and stick them on a tray in the oven, but here I've made more substantial stuffed tomatoes. They are good with rice, wild rice and other grains too. Here I've used red quinoa - partly because it was there to be used, and partly because it's supposed to be a great protein source.





Stuffed Baked Tomatoes
1 large tomato per person
approx 1 T quinoa (prob still too much) per person
vegetable stock (liquid) enough to cover quinoa in pan/rice cooker
1 t per tomato of LSA mix (Linseed, Sunflower and Almond)
Scattering of your choice of fruit and nuts like:
-dates
-figs
-raisins
-currants
-pine nuts
-almonds
-walnuts
Sprinkling of spices like
-cinnamon
-sumac
-paprika
-allspice

Using steady hands and a knife you trust (small paring knives or those cheap $7 Victorinox ones are good) slice around the top of each tomato leaving a few cm uncut to act as a hinge for this tomato lid. Use a strong metal spoon to cut through the 'ribs' inside the tomato (the part anchoring all the seeds to the walls ). Scoop out the ribs and seeds so you are left with an empty bowl shell. (the insides can be stored and used later in a tomato sauce etc).
Put quinoa in a rice cooker, cover with liquid vegetable stock, turn on rice cooker and leave to do its thing. You'll know when quinoa is done because curly white tails appear and the quinoa won't be hard anymore). When the quinoa is cooked, mix in the fruit, nuts and spices (with a rice-cooker-safe tool of course!).

That's right, my tripod is not so smooth. I'll get a decent tripod one day, just you wait.

I also made one of Luc's favourites - Leek tart,


and a madeup invention, babaganoush pie. We had half an eggplant in the fridge so I roasted it in the oven till it turned black and the structure collapsed. This is a good thing. When you roast eggplant in the oven or over an open flame or BBQ, it becomes really soft (without having to fry in oil!) and best of all, it gets this delicious smoky flavour. All you do it when it's cooked is to peel the skin off (it comes off very nicely) and chop up the flesh into chunks and mix with some garlic, felafel spice mix and tahini and this will make a very nice small pie filling.

Green Curry attempt

I have yet to make a green curry that is really spot-on, you know, as mind-blowingly wonderful as you might get in Thailand, but I have put together some good-to-eat ones: some using store-bought curry pastes and some where I've made a paste from scratch. I'll give you both options. The one I made in this photo was a quick whip-up using a ready-made paste. The products in the photos are not necessarily the best (I haven't done a thorough trial for you), they were prob chosen for being either the cheapest or the only version of that ingredient available. The curry paste I chose because it doesn't contain shrimp paste.
NB: This meal is vegan.

This meal serves 3 (I tried for 2 but failed again. Just add more or less of stuff - I just like to have a good selection of veggies)

Ingredients:

Either use a pre-made green curry paste (about 1 T per person) or use the curry paste recipe at the end of the recipe.

Select from whatever veggies you have - or buy some - and aim for about 3-4 large chunks of each type of vegetable (or more if you're only using a couple of different types of vegetable). Good ideas:

-eggplant (if you can find them use Thai 'apple' and 'pea' eggplants, otherwise the long finger-shaped ones are good but the big egg-shaped ones will do too if chopped into small pieces)
-green beans / snow peas/ etc
-broccoli florets (the little tree-shaped bits)
-baby yellow squash, halved or quartered
-mushrooms, quartered
-bamboo shoots
-asparagus, cut in half
-beansprouts (crunchy, waterburst Mungbean sprouts)

1x 400g tin coconut milk per 3-4 people
1-2 T palm sugar / jaggery (you'll need to cut up the blocks). You can also leave it out altogether if you want.
Thai basil leaves - 4 per person? (normal basil is ok if you can't find the Thai sort - but Thai basil does have a distinct flavour).
tofu puffs (about 3-4 per person), chopped in half
light soy sauce to taste (optional)
fresh lime juice to taste (optional)



So, all you do is:

Get your rice on in a rice cooker (these are such good inventions!). Get out 2 bowls per person - one for the rice and one for the curry.

Heat a large saucepan, add the green curry paste. Remember to stir it and watch it as you don't want curry paste burning - for one thing the fumes can get really irritating and make you cough. When the paste has lost most of its green colour, start adding the coconut milk, a bit at a time so the paste absorbs it with each addition. Bring to the boil then turn down to simmer.

Add the vegetables in order of how long they take to cook (to avoid over-cooking and losing their great textures and flavours)- eggplant first, then when eggplant is mostly cooked, add squash, then mushrooms, broccoli, lower parts of asparagus. Season with palm sugar (if using), stir in the Thai basil leaves. If you want a thinner curry, stir in some more water. Simmer a couple of minutes only.

Add snow peas, asparagus tips, then tofu puffs. Don't add the beansprouts. If you want to add some light soy sauce and lime juice, do this now.

When the curry is just about ready, dish up a bowl of rice per person. In the other bowl, put a handful of beansprouts, then laddle the curry on top. Garnish with Thai basil and strips of fresh chilli if you like.



Homemade Green Curry Paste
(makes enough for about 4 portions of curry)

Ingredients:
(chopped here means roughly chopped because you're going to blend it anyway)

4 spring onions, / 2 shallots /1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves
Large handful of fresh coriander, including roots, chopped
3 lemongrass stalks, chopped
6 fresh long, thin green chillies (if you like it really hot, add a few birds-eye chillies too)
2.5cm/1" piece fresh root ginger, chopped
4 kaffir lime leaves, middle stem removed, chopped
1 " chopped piece galangal / 1 T minced - from a jar
2 t cumin seeds (powdered first if using blender)
2 t coriander seeds (powdered first if using blender)
1/4 t turmeric powder or, if you have it, 1/2 " piece fresh turmeric root
4 T light soy sauce
1 T lime juice
1 t sea salt
1 T sunflower oil
1-2 T water

Just whiz all the ingredients together in a blender. Add more water as needed to make a smooth paste. If you don't have a blender a mortar and pestle is even better but takes longer. Remember when using a mortar and pestle to add the hardest ingredients first, the softest last. Use coriander and cumin seeds instead of powder if you can.