My son’s school (as I have mentioned quite a few times already) is the Demonstration School for the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation program in the ACT. The program is now being rolled out across Australia, funded by the Federal Departement of Health and Ageing. There’s a demonstration school in each State or territory, which gets established first, gets extra funding and then has a role encouraging and guiding more local schools to particpate.

The motto of the Program is “Growing, Harvesting, Preparing, Sharing”. But before you get to that point, you have to do all the stuff in that post header up there. It’s an absolutely massive undertaking; one I don’t think I really understood at the time, 18 months ago, when a bunch of kindergarten parents got the Principal on board, whipped up an application and crossed our fingers. The $100,000 that a Demonstration School is awarded sounds like a substantial amount of money, doesn’t it? $40,000 is for staff costs for the part time kitchen and garden specialist teachers for the first two years the program runs. Which leaves $60,000 to build a kitchen with 4 workstations, an covered outdoor area and a productive organic veggie garden. Then you have to find the money to pay the ongoing staff costs.

There’s lots of great information on the foundation site about why you’d want to participate in the program, the program goals, and the benefits for schools, children and communities. But this post is about what it’s like for community and parent volunteers trying to get this off the ground. It’s strictly my personal account and unconnected to the school, the foundation or anyone else.

————-

We found out our application was successful in December 2008, and we had a meeting during the Summer holidays inviting lots of community groups and members. We got off to a good start by dividing up the tasks into a few main areas, with a co-ordinator for each -

• Project Management
• Kitchen
• Garden
• Marketing/Information
• School and community connections
• Donations and Sponsorship

As the need was identified, we added Volunteers and Equity as separate areas.

I originally started off in the Marketing/Information role. I did a bunch of useful stuff like setting up a wiki and and a blog and trying to attract some community attention by writing an article for the The Canberra Times‘ Food & Wine section.

Part of the idea of the wiki was that we could document as we went along, so that we had a resource available for other schools implementing the program. But we were using free software that never really quite worked for some people and it fell into disuse. In my work life, my boss and I have tried (and failed) to get people to blog enough times to not take a lack of engagement personally. Despite the fact that it wasn’t that useful in the end, it does function as an accessible repository for all our application and planning documentation.

Left, the old “community room”, right, the kitchen shot from the dining room, which is three steps up. The door at the far left of the old pic is in the middle of the new pic.

I ended up taking over the Sponsorship role when another person couldn’t continue in it. Unfortunately I wasn’t very effective at all, due to a combination of lack of time, always having a rambunctious three year old with me and having no relevant skills or experience. I’m good at the talking to producers and making connections part of things, but not the more formal (and bigger $) sponsorship stuff. We’ve done some stuff I think is really great, like mostly stocking the kitchen from donations from school families (and scavenging at the tip and op shops). We wanted the kids to see that things didn’t have to be in pristine matching sets, or brand new, that cooking just happened with what you have. Despite some wins like this, I would suggest that where possible, you get volunteers playing to their strengths (and not trying to persuade anyone of anything while a toddler is holding their leg).

From the time we started trying to drum up some enthusiasm in the school, there were some people in the school community who were not pleased that the school was participating in the program and unhappy about the way things had unfolded.

The school’s initial application was rejected for insufficient kitchen and garden space, and the application period was extended. In that fortnight, a new group of parents got involved and wrote the successful application. But because all our kids were in kindy, we didn’t know some important context; for example, that parents had fought hard to create the school’s (excellent) performing arts program and were afraid it would be swallowed by the resource demands of a new, sexy program when the funding for staff ran out after the first two years.

Other threads of discontent centered around a view that there’d been a lack of consultation in the application process (true; but I don’t know how we could have conducted a meaningful consultation in that two weeks) and a concern that the school already struggled to attract enough volunteers to run the Canteen, etc. (For those non-primary parents out there, our school is unusual in having a 5 day a week Canteen; most are part time and some have shut.) Some just couldn’t see the point or relevance of the program and thought the curriculum was already overloaded.

One useful thing we did to address these feelings was co-host with the P&C a meeting inviting people to come and raise their concerns. People who couldn’t attend the meeting were invited to give us a few words on a issue they wanted considered. We made it clear that although our application had been accepted by the Department of Health and Ageing and the Foundation, nothing had been signed off. If there was sufficient opposition, we were prepared to pull the plug. There wasn’t a huge attendance, but we (in fact, mainly the Principal) covered all the matters that were causing concern or distress. It helped clarify for those of us pushing for the program that communication within the school community was vital, and reassured us that there were strategies in place to deal with the problems and difficulties as they arose.

A further event that worked well was a Harvest Festival held in late Autumn last year, inviting the broader community for lunch and a seminar about the four year old revitalisation project of the outdoor areas of the school, and how the kitchen garden continued that work. By this stage we’d got it together to feed everyone when we wanted people to turn up, and it was gratifying to see people tucking into to their frittata, soupe au pistou and home-made breads and observe the excitement building. We started to get some ideas about other ways to use the kitchen as a community resource, such as having the baker of the magnificent bread run a workshop to fundraise, inviting the new-ish Somali families at the school to teach a class, running a session on jam-making with the summer fruit glut and the like.

From a sad piece of failing lawn, to de-cooched green manure, and finally a giant veggie monster growing corn, melons, tomatoes, beans, edible flowers, pumpkins, etc, etc. Our awesome gardener, Rik Allan, tends to use heritage varieties because aside from being open-pollinated, they look cool and pique the kids’ interest.

We were successful in getting an ACT Government grant which meant we could employ the garden specialist to begin developing the garden while the kitchen was being built. It would be very hard to start as the kitchen teacher with no produce, particularly as the focus is on using what the kids have grown. Other grant applications were unsuccesful. Win some, lose some.

Those of us heavily involved have been relentless prosleytisers. The garden is at the front of the school, on a fairly busy road (for Canberra) across from the local shops. The visibility helps – a bunch of kids who’d broken into the garden and snapped a couple of trees one night were scared off by a guy in a flat over the road who roused on them and called the cops. He was visited the next day by our Principal bearing a gift of eggs from the school chickens to thank him. I was painting the kitchen one Saturday afternoon with a couple of others and a family who’d just moved to the area wandered in and asked us if they could look around, and what was going on; they stayed in the garden for about an hour. More than 250 people came through when the garden and kitchen were open as part of the Open Garden scheme.

There have been regular meetings and working bees and also times when the garden needs to be watered and cared for over the long holidays, or shorter periods when the garden teacher is away.  Like all community based and community building endeavours, you can’t build a school kitchen garden without substantial committments of time, not least from the school’s Principal.  In fact, I’ve left an crucially important thing out … fyrst catche ye Principal; you simply can not do it without their enthusiastic support.

Most people seem to be appreciating what they’re seeing, and I think once kitchen classes start next term and kids go home wanting to make dinner for their family more people will see what we’ve been on about. The kitchen and garden were launched a few weeks ago on 25 March, and there were a couple of hundred people there to celebrate with us; people from the Foundation and the Health Department, CIT (the local trade education body) and the restaurant community, parents and community members.

In her speech at the launch on 25 March, my friend Chris spoke on behalf of the community and touched on how hard the application process had been. The point was picked up by Stephanie Alexander in her speech who said she was glad to hear it said; it’s true and it’s supposed to be hard.  Because pulling it off, and keeping it going are really hard things to do.

But it’s worth it – in her speech, Stephanie Alexander read out a letter from a mother of a child in the program in country Victoria who has become a red hot veggie gardener.  Afterwards, in the kitchen, one of our teachers told her that since the school had become involved in the program, seven children in her class had started veggie gardens at home. That’s an amazing figure; roughly a third of the class.

There’s a report on the launch from the Foundation, and lots more garden pictures at the school’s site.

I have also long had the desire to create a bit more of a shorter form of blogging, in part stepping back to the Kottke style of linking and making small and valuable comment. It is something that isn’t really done here in the Australian food blogging community and I think it might be interesting to my readers.

I think so too – quite often things I think are worth mentioning slip me by entirely because I get so caught up in the lack of time to write a considered or detailed post. Cath from The Canberra Cook has an occasional series called Internet Salmagundi, which is a link post, but not exclusively food-related. (A salmagundi is a dish of minced meat with eggs, anchovies, vinegar and seasoning, or a medley or miscellany)

So I’m going to experiment with a Friday afternoon link post of food and cookery-related writing that’s intrigued, delighted or appalled me in the last little while. This week, a delight and an invitation:

The delight is a piece by one of the granddaddies of Australian blogging, Tim Dunlop. A blog round-up article by Tim in the Fairfax press in late 2003 or early 2004 was what got me first reading blogs; in those days you could give a round-up of the Australian blogsophere in a column;) He’s blogged for The Australian in the past, and now writes Johnny’s in the Basement, Crikey’s music blog. Tim has always talked about cooking and his enjoyment of it, and my recent twittergasm about the arrival of my new knife (from Japan, in a friend’s luggage) has finally fired him up to to write Music to Sharpen Knives by. You need to register to comment, but the registration counts for all Crikey blogs.

The invitation has been extended by Neil, of At My Table, who I was fortunate to meet at last weekend’s conference. Neil has written very movingly on his blog about his beloved daughter M, who has autism. April 2 is World Autism Day, and Neil is planning to make a contribution:

At My Table will be taking part in the day by cooking a dish of one single colour, to represent the diets of some of those, especially children, on the autistic spectrum whom only eat food that is of one particular colour, something of a nightmare for parents concerned with good nutrition.

If anyone else could manage the difficult task of a one coloured dish and would like to blog it, I would be happy to link to your post. It would be a tremendous show of support for parents, who, quite frankly, often run out of ideas. You can find my contact details in the right-side column.

I’m thinking orange; probably some kind of pumpkin, sweet potato, tomato, carrot tagine. Or maybe some gnocchi.

I had offered to host my niece’s birthday party a month ago, after my family had celebrated my sister’s birthday at a garden centre cafe. While the garden centre’s cafe was perfectly fine, as we discussed Hannah’s forthcoming birthday, most of us still had memories of the over-priced outing that was my mother’s birthday a few months earlier: $45 for an average high-tea amongst some very pretty decor. The decor, while lovely, certainly wasn’t worth $15 dollars more than the usual price of a high-tea in these parts.

I’m not certain why my family has this high-tea obsession. Something to do with coming from England and wanting to play at being the Ladies we’re not, I suppose. Or perhaps it’s an excuse to eat way too many cakes, the sandwiches merely being a face-saving preliminary. Yes, the latter is more likely. Anyway, it seems the older members of this family have had a corrupting influence on the youngest member, since Hannah now associates all birthday celebrations with fancy, miniature cakes, delicate sandwiches and champagne-flutes of sparkling apple juice. When I volunteered to host her family party–her mother’s side of her family, anyway–Hannah put her own twist on the occasion and requested tiaras and sparkles. And since I’m a total push-over when it comes to my niece, I was determined to throw the best princess-themed party I could.

For the necessary preliminaries, before the sweet and cake consumption could begin, I fashioned two kinds of sandwiches with two variations to accommodate less sophisticated palates:

In addition to the sandwiches, I assembled–what I like to believe is my own invention–the salad skewer, consisting of Hannah’s favourite salad vegetables:

It only occurred to me afterward that I could have added carrots to the skewers (if they would go on) and call them Traffic Light Kebabs or something equally cheesy. Speaking of which, Hannah’s mother provided cheese and biscuits and Cheezles to round out the savoury course of the high-tea. Along with the savouries, the adults sipped sparkling wine, while Hannah had us all toasting along with every second sip of her sparkling apple juice.

While we changed the empty savoury plates for those filled with sweet things, I took orders for tea and coffee and Sippa straws from everyone.

Once we were settled again, we tucked into caramel and chocolate tarts made by my other sister, Hannah’s Auntie V, and some marshmallows and strawberries on toothpicks. For this course, my contribution was in the princess theme:

Of course, we all had to kiss the frogs to see if they would, in a puff of smoke, turn into handsome princes. Alas and alack! No such magic occurred, so we consoled ourselves by taking a digestive break and playing some games. Everyone got a present in the new-fangled-self-esteem-building version of pass the parcel: small stationery items from Smiggle. And then we all laughed uproariously as Hannah kept steering the cow she was riding in a game on Wii into trees and fences.

Finally, it was time for the birthday cake.

I didn’t take photos during its construction, but I snapped key moments in the decoration process:

In spite of my trepidation about decorating the cake, I’m very pleased to report that Hannah loved it along with the rest of the party. Her joy was infectious and I think we all had our best high-tea ever!

Kids these days just aren’t hungry enough. Wedges of fruitcake, ginger beer, fresh butter and eggs, jam sandwiches, sausages – none of these stir the reader the way they used to in the heyday of The Famous Five.

I think one of the successes of Harry Potter is the nostalgic updating of boarding school type food treats.

My children are cooking these holidays. They’ve been told that if they want to eat something, they’re going to have to cook it themselves. I used to cook sweets and puddings and pies and slices. As a child, I made jam and toffee and fudge and ices.

We’ve had a couple of experiments, some choc chip cookies, sorbet and shepherds’ pie and they’re bored. They can buy better and they’re prepared to wait me out.

I believe this trend has been reflected in modern children’s literature. Harry Potter is the only series I’ve read recently that gave me a full feeling in my stomach. Where are the endless dishes of mushrooms and cider from The Hobbit? The picnics and fry-ups from The Wind in the Willows? The tea parties of Alice and Wonderland?

This post originally appeared at andragy.

In sleepy Bermagui – the last unspoilt fishing village on the south coast – for the past six years Francesca and Alberto Cementon have made the most sublime range of gelati we have encountered outside Italy. (We still remember, don’t we, a kind of creamed rice gelato we sampled on the Piazza del Campidoglio, which set an aspiration standard for tradition and innovation). Go out of your way to visit the Bermagui Gelati Clinic – you can see from the snap below that it used to be the Veterinary Clinic, but the professional tone is appropriate. It’s between the Bottle Shop and Mitre 10. Here you will find an extraordinary range of gelato experiences, all freshly made on the premises.
 

“What’s new today?” “Try the Chilli Chocolate with Lemon”. Or the Kumquat. Or the Cucumber and Yoghurt. Or Red Grape, Plum, Peach, Rockmelon, and many others, all made when the fruit is in season. They are spectacular, as are the standard range of heavy duty Chocolate, Cassata, and more traditional flavours. Our latest treat was to dip into the passionfruit gelato (seen here being teased from the machine by Maestro Alberto) before it had crystallised! It’s a destination experience. And the coffee is the best in town as well, as you would expect…

If you try to eat seasonally, particularly if you grow some of your own food, Autumn is the best time of year. I live in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses, four of which have veggie gardens, and it’s quite common to see someone or other ambling across the road with a handful (or a box) of excess produce. It was our turn last week, when our neighbour Kev dropped in with two lovely early butternut pumpkins from his patch. I’m hoping for some figs, as our tree is tiny. It’s one of three in this street and the next grown from a cutting from No. 8′s magnificent tree.

One of the best arrivals with the cooler weather is lemons. Meyer lemons seem to be the most commonly grown variety locally because they tolerate cold fairly well, but I spotted the first fresh thin-skinned Eurekas of the year at Choku Bai Jo last week. While they’re very common and often cold-stored to sell over the summer, freshness really brings out their appetising sharpness. I love their colour too which is more “lemony” than intensely yellow.

 

The other ingredient I had around and was keen to use plenty of is biodynamic garlic. We’ve been buying organic and/or byodynamic garlic for quite a while now, so the prices for a home delivery of a kilo of Patrice Newell’s Garlic wasn’t as frightening as it might be if you’re used to the (irradiated, Chinese) supermarket stuff. It’s excellent garlic, with a pungent, intense flavour that the imported crap can’t approach (that’s it in the picture in my last post).

I had no idea that all garlic harvested in Australia is harvested in November. The site suggests that from May it can start sprouting. I’ve always understood – although I can’t remember from where – that sprouting garlic was worthless. But I’ve also heard that you can cut out the sprouting germ, and I know you can plant some. Our garlic arrived at the end of January, and I’m a bit pissed off sad to see that some has started to sprout already, but perhaps my storage method – open in the box it came in, in a dry warm room – wasn’t quite so good as I thought. What’s left is now hanging in one of those orange mesh bags in the kitchen. If you haven’t snapped some up yet, there’ll be no more available until the next harvest, but you can register your details at their site.

Thinking lemony-garlicky brought me to braising, and chicken, and I ended up adapting this recipe a little. This is how good it looks before it’s even made it to the oven -

Ingredients

1 organic and free range chicken, jointed (or buy pieces if you fancy)
4 medium waxy yellow potatoes
3 merguez or other lovely spicy sausages (mine were from Meat Guru in Civic)
1 Eureka lemon, cut lengthways in eighths
1/2 a preserved lemon, flesh removed, skin julienned
half a dozen sprigs of lemon thyme (which we grow, but thyme is fine. Rosemary would work too, but use much less.)
a bunch of sorrel (*optional As is everything else, of course, this being the food blog of a suburban mother with no culinary enforcement squad.)
2 heads of garlic, cloves separated and peeled

Method

Heat the oven to about 180. I say “about” because my oven is crap, so do what your oven tells you.
Peel the potatoes and cut each crosswise into about three or four fat slices. Brown them in a little olive oil and remove from the pan, then add a smidgen more oil and brown the seasoned chicken pieces. Brown the sausages and cut into chunks of a similar size to the potatoes.

Put the potatoes, chicken and sausage chunks in a casserole with a cover. If you used something other than the casserole to brown everything, deglaze it with some vermouth and scrape all the yummies in. If you used the casserole itself, splash in some vermouth and/or white wine (not too much). Tuck the garlic cloves and lemon pieces in here and there and strew over the herbs and preserved lemon.

Cook covered for about an hour, then toss in a bunch of very finely chopped sorrel. You might need to add a splash more vermouth (or you could use stock). I won’t tell if you put a knob of butter in to enrich the sauce, although it’s not necessary. Cook it for another half an hour or so, but keep an eye on it, and remove the cover at the end if the juices need a little thickening up.

You won’t need any starchy base for this, as it already has potatoes, although I cooked some mograbieh in chicken stock for the carb-hungry kids. You will need a big green salad, preferably one with some bitterness and substance to the leaves. You could also try some wilted greens, such as the last of your rainbow chard. Which is a bit sad, but delicious.

Don’t skimp on the garlic, either – it becomes a vegetable here, sweet, mellow and warming not at all harsh and bitey. It might appear from the recipe to be a too-intensely lemony dish, but the flavours are complex and layered rather than a full-frontal single-note lemon assault. Not to forget that the highly flavoured sausages need something capable of standing up to their punch. It’s delicious, but doesn’t reheat as well as I’d hoped. This means you should have seconds if you feel like it.

I made this again recently, and while I was tempted to try it with chick peas (one can = 1/2 cup soaked and cooked) I bought some Dutch Cream potatoes at the Epic market on Saturday and wasn’t able to ignore them. I’d run out of vermouth, and had no dry white wine, so I used white wine vinegar to deglaze the pan, and that was fine. I considered caramelising the cut surfaces of the lemon wedges, but I decided that was stupid overkill.

I’d taken the lemon thyme out, in case you were wondering, because it looked brown and sad. And no need to mention the state of that casserole dish, thank you very much. I already know.

In my (reasonably broad) experience of men, each likes to have their Signature Dish, a culinary piece that they’ve stumbled upon or invented (or mother used to make) and have tweaked to make it utterly Theirs. It is carried with them through the years, brought out to impress the chicks, and then served to the family proudly over the years and passed down from father to son etc etc… ok, maybe that last bit’s an exaggeration, but most of it rings true, no?

Best Beloved is a enthusiastic but slightly nervous cook. He travels widely in the foodie universe, but never without a guidebook. This following dish is one of the very few things he will cook without a recipe; it is a family favourite, and went nameless until I decided to blog it, upon which Bumblebee decided that it should be called Mount Yum. Before this, it was always know as ‘your/my chicken/nut dish’.

To celebrate the fact that it is made without a recipe on the bench, I will not be providing ingredient quantities. You need to think about how much each person can eat and provide enough of everything to divide between the number of people eating. There’s no right or wrong; substitutions are not only welcome, but encouraged. There are endless possibilities. Best Beloved rarely strays from his favourite combination, but the other day we had no pine nuts and I persuaded him to use slivered almonds rather than popping down to the shop. Lo! It worked! (Sigh.)

Please excuse the crockery, we’re waiting for it all to break. If BB had known I was doing this before he started, he would have brought out his collection of 60s Poole pottery!

Ingredients

• Breast of chicken, cut into chunks. You could also substitute firm tofu for the chicken.
• Rice (Jasmine is juicier, Basmati works well, brown would be nice)
• A green vegetable able to be wilted (we use baby spinach)
• Avocado
• Pine nuts (or a kind of nut)
• Yogurt, plain
• Lemon juice (or lime)
• Garlic, crushed
• Fresh coriander (or basil)

Method

Marinate the chicken chunks in the juice of the lemon/lime along with a handful of shredded coriander and a crushed clove or two of garlic. Leave for at least one hour, all day is good if you think of it in time.

Cook your rice whichever way you do. We use a very cheap but effective rice cooker. Do everything else while the rice is cooking, which is about 15 minutes?

Mash the avocado, get out the greens, chop a heap of coriander and set aside.

Stir fry the chicken in batches, marinade and all, until brown and juicy. Set aside and keep warm. Have a small pot of water heating to boil while you do this.

After you’ve taken the chicken out, add the nuts to the wok/frypan and roast them slightly in the pan juices/leavings. Set aside.

Wilt the green veg in the boiling water: doesn’t take long, just use tongs and dip the leaves in and out. Set aside in a warm bowl.

By now your rice should be cooked. This is when you build the mountain…

Each plate gets:

• a bed of rice (size of bed can vary between stomach capacities)
• a blanket of greens
• a splodge of mashed avocado

• a serve of chicken pieces/tofu chunks (Best Beloved likes his meat, so there’s probably more than necessary shown here)

• a scattering of nuts
• a thick topping of plain thick yoghurt

And:

Mount Yum!

Enjoy demolishing it.

Zucchini Muffins look so damned good the boy recanted his anti-zucchini stance and tucked in. They are also easy. Take a giant marrow or a few small ones and grate until you have 400 grammes worth. Then add: 1 cup white flour, 1 cup of polenta or some polenta and wholemeal, 1 tsp of baking soda, 1 tsp sugar, a pinch of salt, 1 lightly beaten egg and 60g of butter you’ve melted in the microwave. You can add flavourings such as a big handful of grated parmesan; a small handful of shredded herbs; six semi-sundried tomatoes sliced up; a big chunk of crumbled feta; ham, bacon, salami or smoked salmon in chunks; a handful of lightly toasted pine nuts or walnuts. Or any combo. Mix it all together until it just comes together into a lumpy mess and put big spoonfuls, lumps and all, into a lightly greased muffin pan. Bake at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes in a shiny new electric fan-forced oven, if, like me, you have one (I truly love my oven), but any one will do.

But everyone knows about muffins. If you want to get people raising their eyebrows, cook Zucchini Loaf! I’ve made this for more than 20 years and it produces a smooth yet textured cake that keeps very well. Take three eggs and beat them with one cup of sunflower oil (a moulinex or bamix works best – this idea comes from a moulinex cookbook). Eventually the eggs and oil will thicken and go almost white, at which point you add 3 tsp vanilla extract and one cup of caster sugar.

Assemble the dry ingredients: 1 and one half cups white flour, 1 and one half cups wholemeal flour, 1 and one half teaspoons of baking powder, three teaspoons of mixed spice and a shake or two extra of nutmeg, 1 teaspoon salt. Then grate enough zucchini to fill two cups (pack it down hard and include the rind – it will look stunning) and add a cup of sultanas, walnuts or raisins.

Mix it all up and chuck it into two loaf tins. Bake at 160 for about 45 minutes to an hour. Eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, preferably with butter.

Stuffed Zucchinis are very good indeed. Slice a marrow lengthways and hollow it out so it looks like a boat (keep the pulp, but not the seeds). Then take about a cup of carbs, like cooked rice, lentils, barley or couscous. Add some flavourings, like sundried tomatoes, cheeses (especially feta), herbs, nuts, half a cup or so of cooked mince, salami or bacon (if that’s your thing), capsicum, cooked onion and bulk it out with the zucchini flesh, then loosely pack into the boat. Stick the whole shebang in a baking tray and add a good slosh of white wine, stock or even water. Cover and bake at about 180 for about 25 minutes, then remove the covering and brown it off. Cheese and parmesan on the top make a crispy crust.

And, finally, the best summer soup recipe EVAH! Especially if you’ve grown it yourself. This soup tastes like it is filled with cream, but has nothing of the sort in it. It comes from my friend Rachel, who has raised her three kids on little more than Centrelink payments and is extraordinarily good at budgeting, as well as cooking. (As she told me,  at this time of year zucchini, tomatoes and even basil are cheap, so you can go to town on this one without going broke).

Rachel’s zucchini, tomato and basil soup (utterly vegan)
olive oil
2 sticks of celery, sliced fine
2 carrots, chopped fine
1 kilo zucchini, sliced
1 kilo tomato, diced
1 litre of water
1 bunch of basil
1 tsp sugar, 1 good pinch of salt

Pour a good whack of olive oil into the bottom of a big saucepan and fry the celery, carrots and onion gently, with the lid on. Then add the zucchini, tomato, and fry gently, again with the lid on. Add 1 litre of water. Cook for about 20 minutes. Add sugar and salt. Turn the heat off, take a bunch of basil and rip all the leaves off it. Cover the soup with the basil leaves. Then you can either get our your food wand and puree the lot, or tip it into a food processor and hit the high notes. Warm it gently again before serving, just to bring out the fragrance in the basil (though you can eat it cold). You will end up with a lovely orangey khaki blend, that tastes like summer. It is especially good for kids, because it’s all vegetable but they don’t suspect a thing. It can be turned into pasta sauce, eaten with rice, served gloopy for a substantial meal or watered down to a more refined soup.

I don’t have a picture, because it’s not always possible to photograph heaven.