Easy is good, because I am not diligent in the garden (or many other places, if you really want to know). I am prone to fits and starts and sometimes ignore things. I’m not always cooking so I don’t get to things in time. In the garden, this forgetfulness can have spectacular results.

These Hollow Crown parsnips looked so pretty in the vege patch that I was loth to dig them up, but maybe I shoulda done it sooner, because they got a bit … large (that’s a full size 1940s sink they are sitting on). Notice the rather ladylike limbs on the top one? I did wonder if these were really mandrakes (or ladydrakes), but luckily they did not scream when cooked. Parsnips get a bad rap, as this story about Don Burke ripping Donna Hay a new one for daring to promote them reveals. He is wrong. Parsnips are delicious. Which doesn’t explain why I ignored them so comprehensively they grew legs.

But then my marrows got into a similar state, as you can see with this cucumber, modelled by my lovely assistant Aaron, who adores cucumbers but is not sure about this one.

I’ve blogged about the advantages of overgrown zucchinis before, but I love baby beets and slender parsnips, roasted with brown sugar and balsamic, so there’s really no accounting for letting things go to this extent.

Yet this neglect has had benign – nay, wonderful – results. OK, if you ever saw a parsnip the size and shape of the ones above in a shop, you would never buy it, and neither you should. It would be tough, woody of heart and bitter of taste, because it would have endured long periods in transit and storage. But when taken straight from the earth (with a giant fork and a lot of grunting), even massive parsnips are sweet, juicy and yielding. I casseroled some with a jointed chook, a cup of white wine, preserved lemon and a bit of sage and tarragon and the result was a sauce that looked like I’d added a cup of cream to it. I nearly died of pleasure eating it. I also made them into a vegan soup with vege stock and white wine – they smelled apple sweet. 

Same goes for the beetroot, which were so overgrown they stood up out of the ground but united heaven and earth when cooked into a soup with coriander and served with a dollop of tart yoghurt. But again, you wouldn’t buy beetroot like that in a shop. You’d surmise it would be past its peak of perfection, but you would be wrong.

It’s made me think a lot about how aesthetic notions of shop-ready produce lead to waste. What do the farmers do with the produce that does not meet Coles-Woollies specifications because it is too big, too small or looks like mandrake? I suppose some goes to canneries, but precious little would be returned to the earth via compost.

Growing to order can also afflict home gardeners, to their cost. If we only eat when vegetables reach a defined size, we miss the early tenderness of baby vegetables and shorten the eating season. If you cut the head off a cabbage or silverbeet or lettuce you kill it, but if you harvest outside leaves as you need them it will bear for months and months - over the course of a year a bunch of kale will become a palm tree. Peas and beans produce longer if harvested constantly, so it makes even more sense to pick early and often. If you leave things in the ground there is always something to salvage when you are hungry. And although most gardening books would tell you beetroots and parsnips take a lot of space, the fact is I’ve gotten almost six months of eating from stuffing a couple of dozen plants into a square metre of garden, and have not tired of either food. You see, even the instructions on seed packets guide you to producing shop-ready vegetables.

My slack gardening habits have led me to an epiphany. It’s time to break free from supermarket values. Don’t follow the directions on the seed packet but overplant and eat as you thin – the plants left over will fatten in the extra space and be there when you want them. Eat the leaf the caterpillar has chomped on, grow the artichokes to see their beauty, let the beets and parsnips stay in the ground until you are good and ready for them and save your harvesting energy for turning summer peaches into bellinis or racing the autumn frosts to tuck the tender things into the really deep freeze.

Recently returned to a single state, I have resolved that I simply have to devote as much attention to cooking nice things for myself as I do when cooking for other people, or I will become lardy and unhealthy. As we know, being lardy and unhealthy is inimical to dating but, more importantly, leads to permanent ill-health and it’s hard enough to meet a bloke in Katoomba without confining yourself to the hospital grounds.

But enough about non-dating in the Blue Mountains. This post is about how virtuous I am for cooking even though I didn’t really feel like it, how I managed to work dukkah into the meal without overdosing on the stuff, and how it’s important to just get going and do stuff for yourself, because the results are really special. And it doesn’t take much effort, or cost much.

This week, I made a VERY yummy celeriac and parsnip soup, which was dead easy. You just take a celeriac – a funny lumpy vegetable that manages to be like celery, potato, cauliflower and ginseng all at once – and chop the tops and bottoms off it. Then you quarter it, eight it, peel off the skin and chuck it in the pot with two quartered onions, two or three cloves of garlic, some water, some dry white wine, two peeled parsnips, a bay leaf and some thyme. Cook it until the veges are soft (about 20 minutes) and then blend it to bejeesus, add some soy milk or stock to get it to the consistency you want and warm it through with some salt, pepper and a vege stock cube if it’s not savoury enough. Serve it with some crumbly parmesan on the top and drink the rest of the wine while you eat.

But the nicest dinner of the week incorporated green veges AND enabled me to eat dukkah. I just love simple pasta dishes like grated zucchini or pumpkin tossed through spaghetti. Tonight, I fried an onion with some small pieces of sweet potato, garlic and a finely sliced piece of preserved lemon (my most specialist secret ingredient). When that was rocking I shredded a small bunch of silverbeet into the frypan, tossing until the colour brightened. I mixed it up with some fetta, a bit of butter, a smidge of cream and a small handful of coriander leaves. Then I mixed it into hot, fairly wet pasta (so the pasta water made a kind of sauce) and sprinkled dukkah over the top.

It came out lemony, with plenty of bite in the silver beet and the salt of the feta and nuttiness of the dukkah hanging perfectly off the sweet potato. I even had enough left overs to ensure that I don’t have to buy lunch tomorrow, which is good in these global financial crisis-ridden times.

I am really interested to hear about other people’s eating vices so invite PDP readers and writers to share their sins against fine dining. However, to ensure we honour the goals of this blog, perhaps it’s best to temper stories of vice with tales of how we have managed to redeem ourselves by cooking clever and artful food, even when we is by ourselves. So, c’mon contributors and commenters, share.

Kathryn Elliot of Limes & Lycopene is running another Pantry Challenge, inviting readers to rustle up something tasty from a list of staple ingredients.

I wasn’t able to participate last time , and was happy to see the launch of round two until I noticed she’d taken vinegar off the list! No vinegar! And no lemon juice! But I decided to do it anyway, and to do it without buying anything for the meal.

A meal from the pantry can be something knocked up in a few minutes, but that’s not the only way to make something quickly. In this case, I prepared a couple of elements in the morning and assembled it all in just a few minutes at night.

Here’s the ingredients list, with the ones I used in bold:

Mograbieh Dinner Salad

1. Olive oil
2. Tinned tomatoes
3. Tinned legumes or beans
4. Soy sauce
5. Frozen vegetables
6. Flour
7. Pasta or rice
8. Tinned fish
9. Eggs
10. Bread
11. Olives
12. Meat from the freezer
13. Fresh onions
14. One spice or spice mix
15. One dried herb or herb mix

Notes

I used a good plain olive oil, red onions and frozen edamame (soy beans). In the “pasta or rice” category, I used mograbieh. It’s also sold as “Israeli couscous”, but the grains are much bigger than couscous. Although it looks a bit like a grain, it’s a wheat-and-water pasta. When I lived in the inner west of Sydney I’d sometimes buy fresh mograbieh (with a few chickpeas in the packet) in Lakemba. The advice was to sweat a finely sliced onion, turn the mograbieh in the oil and add hot stock, bring to a boil and then cover and simmer for a bit less than 15 minutes. When it’s for a salad such as this, you might want to drain (and maybe even rinse) the mograbieh to stop it being too unctuous. I didn’t use frozen meat, but only because I had some fresh meat in the fridge. Defrosted meat would be fine.

If you’re only allowed one spice blend, go straight to the “top of the shop”, ras el hanout. The name indicates that it’s the most superior blend by the big boss of the particular establishment you’re buying it from. I can remember reading in Christine Manfield’s 1995 Paramount Cooking that it was divine but unavailable in Australia. It’s now available at lots of places, including online from Herbie’s Spices in Sydney. The one I used was from Peter Watson, bought at a Portuguese deli here in Canberra, and comprising bay leaves, thyme, black peppercorns, nutmeg, ground cloves, cinnamon, coriander seeds, mace, cardamom, ginger, cumin seeds, allspice, turmeric, aniseed and cayenne. If you can’t find it, or can’t be stuffed looking, you could follow Manfield’s substitution suggestion of “a mild, yellow, spicy curry powder”.

Ingredients

Quantities are for three adults or two adults and two smallish kids.

2 Tbsp olive oil plus extra
2-3 onions, red if you have them on hand
3 free range chicken thighs
ras el hanout or a sweet and spicy yellow curry powder
1 cup mograbieh/Israeli cous cous
375 g packet of frozen edamame
1/2 cup black olives

Method

Generously rub ras el hanout into chicken thighs and leave them on a rack or in one of those tupperware thingies with the plastic rack inside. Don’t be stingy with the ras el hanout because this is the only seasoning in the dish and it’s got a lot of weight to carry. Leaving the chicken for five minutes is good, overnight is great. If you don’t want meat, it can also be used with tempeh or drained and pressed firm tofu. The process (and a brilliant recipe) is at Lucy’s Nourish Me. I find the fresh local tofu I get (from Shanghai Yulin at Choku Bai Jo or the EPIC Farmer’s Market) doesn’t need draining, but tofu from the supermarket or Asian grocery probably will.

Slice two or three purple onions thinly and cook them very slowly in some olive oil until they are “the colour of amber and soft enough to crush between thumb and finger“. (I ♥ Nigel Slater bad.) Of course if it’s a work night, you can just add a pinch of brown sugar and use a slightly higher heat. You’ll have fried onions rather than caramelised ones, but you’ll have dinner on the table before 9 pm which I find aids digestion and also domestic harmony. If you have time on the weekend, make a big batch and you can use them in things all through the week – in pastas, on sandwiches and pizzas, on top of grains and so on. There’s a recipe from Skye Gyngell’s A Year in My Kitchen, although you might want to read these cautionary words first ( I had the same problems that Joanna describes when I made them.)

Add measured mograbieh into a saucepan with a pinch of salt and a cup and a half of boiling water from the kettle. Cook hard for about 10 – 12 minutes, rinse and drain well.

Cook the edamame in boiling water for about 6 – 7 minutes and drain. If you’ve bought edamame in the pod, shell it and make a mental note to buy the podded sort next time.

Combine the mograbieh and edamame in a serving bowl. I like a low, wide one best. You can leave the dish in the fridge until dinner if that suits. When you’re ready, cook the chicken under the grill or in a cast iron pan in a little olive oil, rest it and slice thinly. Combine the mograbieh, edamame, caramelised onions and chicken. If there isn’t enough oil from the onions, add a little more then grind over some black pepper and serve.

If you’re not doing a “pantry challenge” in the formal sense, just making dinner out of what’s at home, you can get a bit more elaborate.

I added all the shooting tops of a coriander plant I don’t want to go to seed yet – you can use whichever of your leafy green herbs is bolting. I also added some thinly sliced radish and blanched asparagus; pretty much any veg you have in the crisper will do, but make sure the pieces are small enough to make sense with the rest of the ingredients. This time I forgot the olives, but next time will use the small semi-dried black ones we get from nearby Homeleigh Grove.

The caramelised onions mean this salad doesn’t need a dressing, particularly if you’ve remembered the olives. But I mixed a clove of garlic, a pinch of salt and the juice and rind of half a lemon into about half a cup of thick yoghurt anyway. If I’d had a ripe pomegranate, I would have sprinkled some juicy seeds over the top.

If you belong to that group of the countless thousands of the no longer young who have bought a ramshackle fixer-upper in an isolated and very beautiful French village, you can pop down to your local pharmacy where they will identify your foraged mushrooms for you. Probably with moustache-twirling and the whole bit, I imagine, but that may be merely the cumulative effect of my recent reading. I’m just about to finish Stephanie’s Seasons (scroll down to the out-of-print titles), which is a kind of a proto-food blog- it’s Stephanie Alexander’s culinary journal for 1992 which includes her month’s holiday in Provence. Also recently, I borrowed Mary Moody’s The Long Table from the library. I recommend The Long Table if, like me, you went to Uni with one of the author’s kids and will be charmed by the many entertaining pictures of her childhood. Otherwise I’d go for Stephanie.

Anyhow, who needs moustache-twirling French pharmacists when you’ve got the internet? (Although I suspect one would come in handy for the discreet supply of amphetamines which is, I’m convinced, the real reason French Women Don’t Get Fat.)

Just tapping in “identify edible mushroom Australia” took me to this very helpful (pdf) guide from the Western Australian Agriculture Department which provided exactly the excuse I wanted not to eat these beautiful looking mushies. I’m happy to eat wild mushrooms gathered by someone knowledgeable – last year for instance, the bloke who runs Li Shen exotic mushrooms very briefly had some foraged saffron milk caps at the Farmer’s market that were fan-bloody-tastic. But we’ve had death caps grow in our yard before and I don’t crave excitement like I used to. (Commenter dylwah, a dear old friend and exalted mushroom identification guru, may testify to my youthful enthusiams.)

I figured that what Owy had found was some Agaricus xanthodermus or “yellow stainers”, because the stem discoloured yellow a little when it was cut. Of course I’m not sure now whether they would have been fine, and after reading the magnificent UK site Wild Mushrooms Online maybe they were – I didn’t notice the distinctive off smell they talk about, but I was ignorant of the test of popping them in a bag to concentrate the aroma that is suggested there.

I have been doing some more prosaic foraging, though. My (as of today, and happy birthday darling!) 6 year old locked us out of the house yesterday, so I did some gardening while we waited for my sister to rescue us. We grow “wild” rocket, which tolerates our cold winters beautifully and has overtaken what was once lawn near the bed where it was first planted. Now that it’s established on it’s own, the hundreds of tiny self seeding plants in the veggie bed need to come out so they don’t crowd out the new things we’ve planted there. This is what they call “micro herbs” up the big end of town, and a couple of hundred of them makes a great salad.

Spring “officially” starts in Australia on 1 September, apparently because the colonial soldiers were so desperately hot in their woollen jackets they couldn’t bear to wait until the vernal equinox, when it was properly Spring, to be allowed to wear their hot weather uniforms. It’s never really seemed right to me, so I’ve always waited until the equinox on 22 September to begin the new season.

Early Spring’s not that fancy if you pretend it’s three weeks earlier than it actually is. As Cath wrote at the beginning of the month at The Canberra Cook, even the real early spring was still pretty grim pickins if you were growing your own food. Because I mostly shop at Choku Bai Jo, I mostly eat fairly local and fairly seasonal food. I haven’t eaten a tomato (except for some cherry tomatoes) for months and months and months. But we’re inching closer, and now the Spring foods I’ve been missing are starting to appear.

All of a sudden the shops are full of asparagus and strawberries. The early bearing Camarosa strawberries that CBJ has for $3.50 aside, all the strawberries I’ve had have been pretty pale imitations of a ripe strawberry. Not to mention harbingers of the endtimes, which are fast approaching {⇐ Evidence}

We planted some asparagus crowns last year, and looky! Unfortunately that picture shows our entire asparagus crop for this year, thanks to the chickens. But what a spear!

I don’t much like that skinny asparagus that some people fancy, as I find they can be stringy. So when I saw nice big bunches of fat asparagus at 3 for $5 last week, I pounced.

Asparagus and Sorrel Tart

I used my standby Nigella Lawson pastry, and a modified quiche-type filling because it is really not that long until we’ll be in our bathers. If your bathers still fit or for any other reason that pleases you, use cream instead of the evaporated milk.

The case needs to be baked blind so that the base doesn’t puff up or turn into a big soggy mess. Preheat the oven to 200° and cook the pastry case with a weighted piece of foil or baking paper. You can buy ceramic or metal pie weights, or use dried beans, rice, etc. You can re-use the beans but they end up with a coating of butter and you should reserve them for this purpose. After 15 minutes, take the paper and weights off, and cook for five more minutes. Turn the oven down to 170° to cook the tart.

Rich Shortcrust Pastry – from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat

 
Purchase a freezer large enough to take the entire bowl and blade of your food processor. Do not overfill the freezer. Put 120 g cold diced butter and 240 g plain flour in the processor bowl, and put the lot in the freezer for ten minutes. Put a little glass of iced water in the fridge with a dash of lemon juice and a pinch of salt.

Process the butter and flour until it looks like slightly damp uneven sand. Leave it on running low, and drop a big fat egg yolk through the feeder tube. When it’s incorporated, add the cold water very slowly until just before the mix forms a big cohesive lump. Yes, just before that bit. What a helpful instruction, hey? What you have to do if you’re new to making pastry is get it wrong once, and after that it’s a doddle. Then you whack it on the bench, form it into a fat disc, wrap in a plastic bag and pop it in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

When you take it out, roll it out on a floured board and line your pie tin (you can use a dish with a removable bottom or a pie dish, whatever’s handy). This will make enough for a 20 – 23 cm pie with some pastry left over, which you can freeze. Then put the whole thing, pastry and dish, in a plastic bag and put in the freezer for at least half a hour. It will go straight into the oven from the freezer to bake blind.

Vegetables and Filling

 
You can use your own veggies of choice here, of course. I used asparagus, sorrel and some broad beans I had hanging about.

Firstly I broke off the asparagus ends and trimmed the last third (you can see them up in the header). You need a good strong peeler or a small knife. I bought this one from the local Vietnamese grocer because it was called a “barbarian blade”. I think you’ll agree that is an excellent reason to make a purchase, and it also turned out to be a totally bitchin’ peeler.

My three bunches of fat asaparagus came to about 375 grams after trimming and peeling. I used to think it was a bit of a wank to trim asparagus, but then I worked out (derr) that it allows the asparagus to cook evenly. I blanched the spears in some lightly salted boiling water, shocked them in some ice water, and then wandered off to do other things. From here, you can chargrill, roast, stir fry or pick up and eat asparagus. For a tart, you can either chop in short sections, about 2 cm or so, or chop each spear in thirds. Smaller pieces make for prettier slices, but I still like longer bits.

Sorrel can be tricky to get, but it’s just delicious. Eating it raw can be a bit astringent, but melt it (and it really does melt) in some butter and it turns into a beautiful dun coloured, sharp and intense citrussy puddle. It’s sold bagged at CBJ, and each $2 bag has about 100 grams or so. I used one.

I also had some podded broad beans, just a large handful that were left over from dinner the night before.

You can make a rich creamy eggy custard, in which case you get to call dinner a quiche, or you can very thoroughly mix 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks with about 375 ml (one and a half cups) of light evaporated milk (NOT condensed milk). The quantity will vary depending on the size of your dish and the volume of your fillings. Don’t be stingy.

To assemble and cook

 
Lay the cooled veggies and sorrel puree in the pastry case. Pour over the not-custard and sprinkle over about 70 grams of finely grated Gruyere cheese. Or whatever cheese you like. Try and get it nice and full, but not overflowing. That’s bad. Bake at about 180° for about 30 minutes. Leave it to cool, and eat it just warm. It’s very good with strips of roasted red capsicum in a sharp dressing.

This recipe is going viral. I found Dupleix’s original recipe here, via this wee Scottish blog (love the header), and another one on a Brazilian blog, the Technicolor Kitchen. In this incarnation it’s called Crash-hot potatoes.

But wait- there’s more! there’s an international dispute surrounding this recipe, no less. Did Dupleix steal Florentine chef Michael Chiarello’s Potatoes Da Delfina? No, it seems. Jill spills the beans here to blogger Trish at Light Sweet Crude. (H/T to Zoe.)

Get enough small, round floury potatoes to cover the base of a roasting pan or pyrex dish. You could use chats, new or whatever name your greengrocer gives to little’uns. If you don’t have this type of potato I suppose there is no law against cutting up bigger ones, it just won’t look as posh. Get the oven going berserk – 220 celsius or even hotter.

Boil the potatoes until they’re cooked, but not terribly soft. Drain them and tip them into the roasting pan so they’re kind of jostling together. You only want one layer.

Press a potato masher down on each potato so it bursts slightly. Don’t mash them – just break them a little. They should all be crowded together and touching each other.

Drizzle all of them with some EVOO, then sprinkle coarse sea or rock salt and fresh rosemary over the lot. How much EVOO is up to you. I like lots, but YMMV.

Incinerate in the hot oven for maybe fifteen-twenty minutes until the broken tops of the potatoes are golden brown and crusty and the interiors have done with any unfinished cooking business. You’re after soft, fluffy spuds with a salty baked crust. Too easy.

Rachel of Thus Bakes Zarathustra is presently sojourning with a bunch of Yankee pointyheads in pursuit of her PhD. Writing at TBZ’s previous incarnation she said:

… The thing is the next day I came home from the library starving and sick of books, and there was a bowl of carrot and avocado salad in the fridge and this cake, and I ate it and I felt a rush of righteous maturity akin to flossing my teeth or getting a pap smear.

We all need that feeling sometimes, don’t we?

F’rinstance Another Outspoken Female blogs her annual spring detox, and Kathryn Elliot of Limes & Lycopene is preparing to blog a whole month of Righteous Maturity in August.

Owy spent the weekend in Melbourne, catching up with an old friend after attending the Australian Truffle Grower’s Information Day on Friday. It seems he gave the catching up part a red-hot go as he has returned home very weary and a tiny bit broken. It would be silly to not take advantage of a few kid-free days, but I’m worn out myself from a few days of early rising – 4:12 this morning being the earliest start. It’s amazing how you notice that :12 in the cold and dark of the morning. His turn tomorrow! Yay!

The kids have also been living it up with me flying solo – our regular Happy Hour on Friday afternoon, with my mates Byrd and Jude, and six little boys and a couple of bottles of champagne between us. Stay at home parents are vastly more in need of happy hour than office workers, in my opinion, and it’s become a regular event here. Byrd turned up with a big parcel of hot chips, and I already had some marinated chicken wings in the oven. Because they rock, the kids also gobbled up some carrot and cucumber “stars” – peeled with a julienne peeler and sliced into coins. This process might seem fiddly, but it renders the otherwise horrific edible. Then we had a disco dancing competition to Kool and the Gang. It’s a lot more fun than it might sound.

On Saturday we went to my best friend Katie’s 40th birthday party at a lovely little pub in the Southern Highlands, and the kids got a lolly bag. We spent five hours in the car, including waiting out a huge traffic jam on the freeway after a semi trailer full of pig carcasses had crashed. Fortunately Sage is not one of those kids who realises that “chicken” is chicken, and bursts into tears before embarking on a life of veganism. We passed some particularly handsome cows near Moss Vale and he said how much he liked them. I asked why, and he said “Because they have milk and meat!” Maybe we let him watch the domestic chooks get dispatched too early?

Today (Sunday) involved my nephew’s 5th birthday (big lollybag) and the 6th birthday of Sage’s fiancée, Nyssa (lollybag). Tonight my plan for dinner was to include as many different ingredients as could to combat the ways in which we’d each punished ourselves. Lucky I used to be a dirty hippy once, and I know how to make this shit. Versions change according to what’s to hand; these were tonight’s versions:

chunks of kent pumpkin , baked until a bit sweet and squishy.

bok choy cut in long slim wedges, steeped in boiling water and well drained.

grated beetroot salad – combine the juice of half an orange with two teaspoons of egg mayonnaise and a tablespoon of yoghurt in a jar and shake like crazy. Thin with buttermilk if too thick, but go easy because you want a very light hand with the dressing. Grate three beetroot into a bowl and mix – by hand is best. Top with toasted sesame seeds and thyme.

grated carrot salad – you should make this before the beetroot, btw, because carrot can be disguised as beetroot much more easily than the reverse. I would normally use coriander, but had none, so I used what parsley I could scavenge from the garden, lemon juice and black cumin seeds. Green onions sliced into horses’ ears are very good too, but the leek and garlic already had that angle covered.

quite a plain tomato and red lentil dahl with a moderate amount of coconut milk – one cup of rinsed red lentils cooked in one litre of water with one cup of canned coconut milk, a fat pinch of tumeric, a piece of cassia bark, four bashed green cardamom pods and half a can of tomatoes. Normally I’d add some dried chilli too, but I was going gentle.

a dahl topping made from leek and spices – heat some mustard oil in a frying pan, and slowly cook a cleaned and sliced leek with some curry leaves (I used frozen as I’ve none fresh). Add garlic after a little while, and after a bit push the leek to the side of the pan, heat a splash more oil in the middle and then add about a tablespoon of brown mustard seeds. When they pop, remove the pan from the heat and stir in ground spices – I used one lid of coriander seeds to half a lid of cumin and half a lid of fennel seeds. I don’t know how big your lids are, so you’ll have to be guided by your instincts there. Normally this would go on top of the dahl (and be made with ghee, and a lot more of it) but I was hoping Jethro would eat some.

tahini sauce with umeboshi -this sauce sends me into ten kinds of happy nostalgia. I first had it when I did some Vipassana mediation retreats where we were eating a vegan and macrobiotic diet cooked by a marvellous Dutch/Indonesia ex-Sufi kundalini yoga teacher called Nirvair Kaur who helped me a lot, and it just screams RIGHTEOUS MATURITY to me. It’s also very tasty. Umeboshi may seem a complete wank, and it is hard to find. But it’s not horribly expensive and keeps for a million years. If I didn’t have any, I’d use apple cider vinegar – mix three tablespoons of tahini with half a tablespoon of umeboshi paste, the juice of half a lemon and a glug of tamari and half a teaspoon of maple syrup. Thin with hot water.

gomashio – toast a quarter of a cup of sea salt in a frypan until it “sparkles” (Thank you Sean Moran for that tip). Add a tablespoon of sesame seeds and shake the pan over the heat until you can smell them toasting. Grind in a mortar and pestle, but not too much – don’t let it get dry and powdery. You can store leftovers in a jar in the fridge for a bit.

brown rice – we almost always have brown rice. It’s nuttier and more densely textured, and piss easy to cook in the rice cooker.

Owen and I ate enthusiastically but moderately. Sage wanted a wrap, then wanted rice again, and ended up eating bok choy and brown rice wrapped in a corn Mountain Bread. Fine by me. Jethro turned his nose up at dahl, proudly waved his tiny knife and fork for a considerable period, purposefully handed his pumpkin to Owen and then put lots of carrot salad in his glass of water. We didn’t offer him any beetroot. Situation normal.

Would you believe they then proceeded, lust undiminished, to the kitchen table and then broke it too? Well, they did. What propelled this concupiscent wreckery to the realms of share house legend was that they had resorted to busting tables only because the entire household – four flatmates and one weekend guest – had scored on the same evening. At a bar called, “The Private Bin”, about which I shall make no further comment. Tallullah, while a resident, had got home too late that night to enjoy the privileges of her own bed. (So you see why I did that with her name, now, huhn?)

That was nearly fifteen years ago, and Tallullah’s cooking has come a million miles from the two minute noodles and sliced up oranges she used to serve for dinner. Last week we had a very tasty lasagne – she told me she’d been working on improving her cheesiness, and the cheesiness level was excellent, intense and creamy but still light. She’d also made a beautiful salad of chunks of avocado, tomato, and cucumber with butter lettuce. Tallullah’s known me for a long time too, so she waggled a bottle of “Fat Free French Dressing” at me and said “You don’t want this, do you?”

No.

We eat a mound of salad almost every day, and I love to make dressings. Also I love vinegars and oils, and usually have a few of each on the go. “Usually” is a fib, of course, but I am afraid to tell you just what’s in the cupboard in case you mock me.

What Tallullah had was some so-called “Light” olive oil, some Cornwell’s white vinegar, a slightly crusty jar of Dijon mustard, salt, garlic, lemon and a small jar. The dressing took two minutes to make and was frickin’ delicious. Just outstanding. To improve it, all you need do is improve the quality of the oil and vinegar. But perhaps not too much. The step away from the bottle of “Fat Free” is the most significant step you’ll take in taste terms; after that the cost of ingredients rises far more sharply than the curve of improved taste.

Vinaigrette for Lovers

Ingredients

3 tablespoons AOOO*
1 tablespoon any kind of vinegar you’ve got, even if it’s for bluebottle stings or cleaning the loo
half a teaspoon of prepared mustard (or a pinch of mustard powder)
a squeeze of lemon juice (but no seeds!), and maybe some zest if that seems reasonable at the time
a pinch of salt

Method

Put the vinegar, mustard, lemon, salt and oil in a jar and shake side-to-side until thick and glossy. It will take a bit longer if you don’t use the mustard. Probably about 30 seconds longer, if that.

To Serve

Place jar on table next to bowl of salad. Removing the lid is a nice touch if you have guests.
 

And in a similar vein – on my regular trawl of favourite food blogs I find fantastic posts by stickyfingers on why you shouldn’t pay $90 for a baked chook, and the Purple Goddess on how not to eat stupidly.

* Any Old Olive Oil