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.

But this would surely require a change in the current approach of local councils and planning authorities. For example, a vibrant urban food production system directed at household self-provisioning would require some relaxation of current water restrictions. Here in Melbourne, water restrictions serve as a restriction on water use, rather than a restriction on water consumption, and water use for household provisioning rather than commercial profit is severely restricted.

Melbourne resident Marika Wagner has set up Friends of the Vegie Patch, a lobby group asking the State government to allow more watering time for domestic vegie growers. The group had a local MP table a petition with three and half thousand signatures in State parliament, asking for revised restrictions for domestic growers.

Meanwhile, the Diggers Club, a mail-order heirloom seed business based on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, has made even more incendiary claims. The government, it says, ‘has taken away our rights to grow our own food’. In response they suggest a civil disobedience campaign. They invoke the spirit of their namesakes, the 17th century English revolutionaries led by Gerrard Wistanley. Those Diggers seized public land ‘when greedy landlords denied them the opportunity to grow food to give to the poor’.

They go on to rile against the injustice imposed on ‘many of the poorer members of our community, who rely on their gardens to put food on the table’.

Yet I’m not sure that it is the poor who rely on growing their own food. Sometimes I like to think there was a transition in Australian urban life, when households went from being ‘urban peasants’ to being caught up in an industrial-consumer complex whereby food increasingly came from the supermarket rather than the backyard, and the backyard became a site for swimming pools and ornament rather than productive activity.

And talking to people of my parent’s generation or reading their memoirs, I’m struck by the reliance on backyard chooks, local dairies, rabbits brought down from up the country, vegetable gardens and backyard fruit trees (plums in Melbourne, mango and pawpaw in Cairns, figs everywhere). George Seddon has suggested that the pre-War backyard functioned as a gesture towards functional self-sufficiency, not complete but not totally dependent on a web of urban services as we are today.

But this was not necessarily a working class phenomenon. As Andrea Gaynor points out in her informative history of domestic food production, Harvest of the Suburbs, maintaining a vegie patch meant secure tenure of good, productive land, expenditure on tools and other ‘inputs’, and an inclination toward a diet of fruit and vegetables rather than meat: each of which was in short supply in the urban working class.

By the 1940s, Robert Menzies was able to declare that ‘the best people in the world are those who by thrift and self-sacrifice…hope one day to sit down under their own vine and fig tree, owing nothing to anybody’.

The reference to the ‘vine and fig tree’ was biblical, taken from the Old Testament Book of Micah. In its original context, it was a call for the equitable distribution of property within a peaceful polity (it comes just after the ‘they will hammer their swords into ploughshare, their spears into sickles…there will be no more training for war’ line). Menzies ditches the anti-militarism of the biblical exhortation, and in his hands it becomes a call to individualism, an appeal to what Judith Brett has dubbed the ‘moral middle class’. And in the context of mid-century suburban Australia Gaynor suggests the biblical verse might have been better glossed by Menzies as each person sitting down under ‘his own passion fruit vine and lemon tree’.

Has the ‘community garden’ worked to undo this individualism? When I first moved into my current house over 15 years ago, I discovered a nearby urban farm and environmental park which also included allotment gardens. I was bowled over by the patchwork of rickety self-made fences, because I had not seen anything like it:

Today, if I catch the train from the city to my suburb I go past at least three other community gardens, and within a stone’s throw of a large public school that pioneered Stephanie Alexander’s kitchen garden scheme. These community projects allow those households which would otherwise be unable to maintain a garden some access to the pleasures of food production, but do they represent a genuinely co-operative endeavour? Instead they are often organized on the basis of individual allotments, what Gaynor refers to as transplanted patches of backyard that allow greater opportunities for people to ‘perform’ their independence in a public space.

Until recently, and counter to the model proposed by the ACF, local council regulations seemed to be closing in on these projects, and on ‘guerilla gardening’ initiatives in the inner suburbs more generally. One council report recommended the removal of all community gardens amid fears that toxic soils could make people ill and that the council would be held liable. But this past week, that same council (Yarra, which covers the inner eastern and northern suburbs of Melbourne), voted unanimously to support ‘creative gardening’.

By the by, one shift in suburban food production over the past forty years or so has been the decline of animal husbandry: again indicative of middle class values about how suburban land should be used.

But nearly ten years ago Belinda Probert pointed to another shift in the class refraction of domestic vegetable gardening. As the aspirant middle class, who now gain their higher salaries by way of more working time, become ‘time poor’ they have moved away from high-maintenance productive gardens to low-maintenance ‘hard’ landscaping. Current water restrictions and council planning guidelines might only exacerbate this trend to downgrade the productive garden, and suburban food production is more than ever in danger of becoming history.

(An earlier version of this post ran in Arena Magazine no 94, April-May 2008)

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.

So, while I was sitting in front of the toasty Glowburn this afternoon, supposedly writing, I decided that it would be wasteful to burn fossil fuel by firing up the gas cooktop or the electric oven to cook the stew I had planned for dinner. Why not use the wood heater? Would it get hot enough to actually cook a beef stew? Only one way to find out, and tonight I am child free and my intended dinner guest doesn’t mind waiting if it turns out to be a slow meal. So I decided to do it and, because I really should be writing something else, to blog the results of this experiment in fossil-fuel-free cooking.

4.00pm: Put pot on wood heater, add some olive oil and two quartered onions.

4.16pm: Pot and onions warm to the touch, and nice smells are emerging, but no real action. Add two garlic cloves, whole because I like how they melt. Here’s how it looks, dark blue pot is hard to see on mission brown stove.

4.30pm: Nice sizzling sounds from pot. Safe to add spices for toasting – a tablespoon of cumin seeds, about a teaspoon of ground coriander, a shake of cinnamon and a touch of garam masala.

4.37pm: Smells yum but wonder if strong food smells in your lounge room are a good thing. Decide you should only do this if your house is open plan. Of course also need a wood heater.

4.50pm: All seems warm and brown in the pot so have just added a kilo of diced steak and about two diced and salted medium eggplants (which I found in the bottom of the crisper and I say about two because I used three but there were grubs in some bits so I took the grubs out, along with the sections the grubs were chewing). Also have thrown in a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes from my freezer, two baby carrots and a few sprigs of oregano, and a cup of beef stock.

Now I’m just going to leave it alone.

5.44pm: Not much of an aroma, figure fire probably needs stoking, but when I take the lid off it’s simmering. Stoked fire up and will check back later.

6.15pm: Ask dinner guest to please bring red wine as nice smells of eggplant and beef require a shiraz or cabernet sauvignon. The wine will have incurred food miles, but my dinner guest is arriving by foot so he’s not otherwise adding to greenhouse.

6.18pm: Occurs to me that I will need something carbohydrate to accompany stew and that it would be cool to manage carbs without using Westinghouse. Couscous? Barley?

6.27pm: Decide on the latter as it’s all simmering away nicely and there’s enough liquid to cook the barley. Add about two thirds of a cup of the pearl variety plus an extra cup of stock and a cup of water to leaven the saltiness.

6.31pm: Pause for smug reflection on how all food in this meal has come from my pantry, freezer and garden and that I have not had to go to the shops for anything at all. Think am getting much better at shopping sensibly and saving food miles, dollars and time. Remember am supposed to be writing other article and smug feeling disappears.

6.39pm: Dinner guest arrives, early. Wine is welcome, as is dinner guest. Pot simmering fast but barley taking a while so refrain from adding logs to fire in the hope it all settles down a bit.

7pm: News time. Try not to let news about asylum seeker situation ruin dinner, hope for happy Sunday night stories soon. Oh, here’s some news about rising electricity prices in NSW. I don’t feel exactly happy, but do feel smug again.

7.05pm: Seems barley is just right, serving time! Chopped fresh coriander on top … btw, not a table-cloth, the rug. A Syrian camel rug, no less, but the story of how I got it is too long to narrate.

7.25pm: Bloody yum! Meat not as tender as I had hoped, but suspect it was the cut and recommend chuck or blade for future attempts, plus earlier introduction of barley. But the barley is divinely nutty and goes really well with the beef and spice flavours. Onya Glowburn – now all that’s left is to wash up, using the solar hot water system which finally works after the electrician figured out how to stop the cockatoos eating it.

Yours in extreme and nauseating virtuousness plus inelegant sufficiency, Dr Sister Outlaw.

And a hello to anyone who’s found there way here from The Canberra Times’ Food & Wine article today. If you’re new to blogs, you can use the sidebar over on the right there -> to check out some of the latest posts, or find your way around by looking up a particular ingredient or category of posts. The blogroll is a list of great food blogs from all over. The contributors tab up top lists all posts by each of the site’s writers and there’s a recipe index too. Don’t feel shy to leave a comment.

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.

Bless them all. The little one I bought this week, the big one about six months ago. We don’t bother to put them away. They just live on the hotplates and get used every day.

I found a couple of other treasures today -

CALL 19 10 10 Block mounted WWI US Food Administration Poster!!!!

CALL 19 10 10 Dr Oetker aluminium bundt pudding steamer !!!!

Other recent treasures include all our cutlery (threw what we had out, as the new stuff was much nicer) and most of our crockery.