Heart-warming vegie soup

Sometimes life can be a little rough, with unforeseen accidents, petty politics at work or unexpected real live genuine betrayals that would have The Bold and the Beautiful scriptwriters slow-clapping in appreciation.

Usually the overwhelming instinct is to head for some greasy hot food, ice-cream or a bucket-sized glass of vino. For me, it’s chocolate and a lot of it, even if it is homemade raw chocolate, full of antioxidants and minerals, and infused with orange essential oil, which has antidepressant and anti-inflammatory properties. And therein lies the key. Indulge in your go-to comfort foods, but also seek out foods that nourish. Find something delicious that will promote healing and happiness for both the body and the mind.

This hearty, delicious soup ticks those boxes and best of all, it’s easy and you can use pretty much whichever vegies you have handy. For me this week that included organic supermarket carrots, a spring onion out of the backyard, a jar of my preserved summer tomatoes, and a bunch of Tuscan kale from my community garden plot.

Egg shells around baby plants stop slugs and snails

Kale is super easy to grow from seed, either planted direct or in pots and transplanted as 10-cm high seedlings. It’s also absurdly good for you, with plenty of vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fatty acid and antioxidants. Give it a sunny spot with good soil, let it grow to a decent size over the next couple of months, then pick the small, tender leaves for salads or the larger leaves for casseroles and soups. Chop it finely and cook it a little longer than you would spinach. 

Kale will grow throughout the year. Happily, it prefers cooler climates like Canberra, where our winter frosts knock out the pesky white cabbage butterfly caterpillars and replace the kale’s often bitter, sulphurous summer taste with a fresh sweetness. The best way to deal with the destructive caterpillars organically is to put a finely-woven net around the plant to prevent the butterflies from landing and laying their tiny bright yellow eggs. Some garden experts suggest ‘planting’ fake butterflies around the plants so the real butterflies think the territory is already taken and leave. My margarine container-lid impostors had the opposite effect, attracting large numbers of lovelorn butterflies.

My happy kale plants in my community garden plot.

If you don’t protect your plants it’s best to inspect them daily for the eggs, which you can simply brush off the plant, and the caterpillars, which you can either squish or relocate to a distant park. Otherwise, they can do some serious damage and add some surprise protein to your green smoothie. Kale can also attract aphids but keep it strong and healthy with regular feeds and watering and it will be able to better resist them.

The lentils and sautéed vegies

Back to the soup - I also include a generous serve of lentils, which keep you full, improve digestion, support a healthy heart, help combat cancer, promote weight loss, and have good doses of iron, folate and potassium. Finally, I use fresh turmeric, which is just as full of vitaminy goodness but also anti-inflammatory and enhances brain chemicals that manage happiness, pleasure and pain.

So here it is, my hearty vegie soup.

Add a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil to a large saucepan on the stove over a medium heat. Toss in some diced onion, kale, carrots, celery, parsley, a bay leaf and any other herbs and vegies you’ve got in the fridge or garden plus some finely grated turmeric. Sauté for several minutes until the vegies soften slightly.

Rinse a cup of dried orange lentils very well and add to the pan, along with your preserved or canned tomatoes. Stir well then add a few cups of your favourite stock. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and leave to simmer for the next 45 minutes or until the lentils have broken down and the soup has a lovely rich colour.

Season with salt and pepper and serve. A slosh of organic apple cider vinegar (white vinegar works fine) in each bowl will complement the richness of the soup perfectly.

 

Chai-poached quince with a difference

I recently popped over to Piallago – aka Canberra’s avenue of garden nurseries – for a spot of plant shopping. One of the nicest things about Piallago is that several apple orchards are interspersed between the nurseries. These orchards only open their doors to the public during harvest season which means you know you’re buying the freshest of fresh fruit, rather than supermarket apples that may have been in cold storage for 14 months. There’s also something really lovely about buying produce while surrounded by the trees it came from.

What I was there for, however, was not apples but their cousin, quinces. Quinces are pretty much inedible raw but once cooked have a lovely floral taste and aroma, almost like the smell of roses. They can be used in sweet or savoury dishes, or for an amazing quince jelly. The easiest way to cook them is simply to poach them in sugar, water and spice.

Most recipes recommend you use a full cup of sugar for every three quinces. I try to keep my sugar intake to a minimum so I decided to more than halve the sugar content and instead amp up the spices. And so was born my chai-poached quince.

Chai-poached quince

Peel and chop four medium to large quinces. Remove their core, which stays inedible when cooked. Put the quince pieces in a bowl of water as you go so they don’t discolour.

In a large saucepan combine half a cup of organic coconut palm sugar (any other sugar will work too!), one litre of water, a cinnamon stick, a few star anise, three or four peppercorns, and around eight cloves. Simmer for five minutes, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Add the quince, put the lid on and simmer on the lowest possible temperature for around 40 minutes, or until the quince is tender.

Remove the quince and place it in a bowl or storage container. Do not throw out the liquid, which is full of those amazing spices as well as the quince aroma. Instead, simmer the liquid in the saucepan with the lid off for another hour or so until it has halved in volume. If you’re not planning to eat the quince straight away, pour half the liquid over the quince and stick it in the fridge. Continue to simmer the rest of the liquid for another 30 minutes or so and it will reduce down to a spectacularly rich nectar. Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn or evaporate completely!

So that was where I got to yesterday. This morning, I put some of the quince back in the saucepan with that gorgeous nectar and reheated it. I served it with a dollop of coconut cream and a sprinkle of pepitas, sunflower seeds, nutmeg and some freshly grated vanilla bean. The sugar content was perfect – in fact, I might even reduce it a bit further next time. 

Tip: For the creamiest of coconut cream, stick a can of Ayam premium coconut cream in the fridge for several hours and it will be ready to dollop.

Didn’t-realise-I-was-hipster-until-I-invented Avocado Seed Dukkah

I am so excited about this recipe that I just had to share it with you. A couple of weeks ago, I read an article extolling the virtues of eating avocado seeds. They’re apparently the most nutritious part of an avocado – high in antioxidants, potassium and fibre, and can lower cholesterol.

Avocado - it's not just the creamy flesh that's edible

Dried, ground avocado seed

So I started drying the avocado seeds from my daily avocado salad on my window sill. Yesterday, I put them in a bag, smashed them with a heavy mallet then blended them until coarsely chopped. They spent the afternoon drying on a metal tray in a sunny spot. They rapidly turned from a creamy colour to a vibrant ochre, and their bitter tasted receded until they simply tasted like, well, avocado. I thought I’d simply scatter the seed over salads during the week but wasn’t sure what else they’d be good for

As I lazed on the outdoor couch beside them, reading a magazine, an idea started to form. An avocado seed dukkah, with the macadamia nuts I happened to have in the fridge. Ooh, and why not a couple of kaffir lime leaves from the tree beside the outdoor couch?

Macadamia nuts, ready to roast

Macadamia nuts are an Australian native nut that is one of my favourites, with an addictive buttery flavour and gentle crunch. They’re rich in monounsaturated fats, antioxidants, fibre, vitamins and minerals.

Kaffir limes are mostly grown for their leaves, which are popular in Asian cooking. The fruit are small and lumpy but the zest and the small amount of juice are also useful in a green curry. 

The trees need a lot of sun and aren’t meant to grow in Canberra because of our killer frosts. I just wrap my tree in a blanket when the night time temperature forecasts is below -2 degrees, and it’s now around eight years old so I must be doing something right. Like all citrus, kaffir limes like a good feed in autumn and spring – but never fertilise them while they’re flowering, as this causes citrus to drop their flowers, which means no fruit.

My kaffir lime, enjoying some winter sun

Grinding the spices

Back to the dukkah. I roasted a cup of macadamias in a 180 degree oven for 10 minutes, then put in them in the food processor with several roughly chopped lime leaves, blended until well coarsely chopped and put the mix in a large bowl. The heat from the macadamias helped draw the oils from the leaves, infusing their flavour into the nuts.

I heated a dry fry pan over a medium heat, then toasted my half cup of ground avocado seed and a half cup of sesame seeds for a couple of minutes then added the seeds to the bowl. 

Lastly, I toasted two tablespoons each of cumin and coriander seeds and a tablespoon of fennel seeds, for about two minutes, then roughly ground them in my mortar and pestle and emptied them into the bowl. I added two teaspoons of Murray River pink salt flakes, a teaspoon of freshly ground pepper and mixed well.

 

The pink salt flakes, ready to stir into the dukkah

And it was magnificent. The mild avocado and zesty lime flavours perfectly complemented the more traditional dukkah ingredients, while the macadamia gave just the right amount of crunch.

To serve, I heated some olives with a little olive oil and a shredded lime leaf in the oven for a few minutes, and added them to the serving platter (aka chopping board) along with a generous bowl of dukkah, a less generous bowl of good extra virgin olive oil and a slab of freshly made sourdough from great Canberra bakery, Autolyse. I tore off chunks of the sourdough, dipped it in the oil and then into the dukkah. Truly a lunch of hipster champions!

Dukkah, warm olives, olive oil and sourdough - perfect.

There’s still a few cups of dukkah left over. It will be perfect sprinkled over salads or roasted vegies, stirred through avocado guacamole, used as a crust for just about any pan-fried or oven-roasted protein, and for at least a couple more lazy weekend lunches.

Finding comfort in the pumpkin patch

I was planning to pop up to my community garden on the weekend, to have a play and get dirt under the nails while planting  out my little broccoli babies. But the weather disagreed – it was cold with gale force winds and an apparent temperature of just three degrees Celsius. What a day like that calls for is some serious comfort food.

 
Fortunately some of the best vegies for comfort food grow during summer, and pumpkin is at the top of the pile. Roast pumpkin, pumpkin soup, pumpkin scones, sweet pumpkin pie – I even make a spectacularly caramelly pumpkin ice cream. Pumpkin is not just versatile but easy to grow and use.

Healthy pumpkin plants need a few essential ingredients – a sunny, sheltered position, rich soil with lots of composty goodness, and space. Pumpkin plants need a few good metres around them, as they grow really big, and will also suffer from powdery mildew on the leaves if they don’t get enough sun or air. Sow your seeds direct in late spring or early summer, about 2cm deep, and you should see seedlings emerge in a week or two.

My community garden plot, where pumpkins and other vines grew happily around the corn last summer.

Unfortunately, my poor little pumpkin seedlings were eaten by slaters the minute they emerged. Next year, I’ll be sowing seeds in pots and growing the seedlings to a more resilient size before planting them. As luck would have it, a pumpkin plant self-sowed itself in my community garden plot in mid-Summer, producing two good-sized pumpkins before it was time to clear out the patch in late April. Pumpkins are best picked in April or May, before the first real frosts hit. Leave 10cm of stem attached and put the pumpkin in a sunny place for a few days to help it store better and longer.

Pumpkin soup

Leave a long stalk to help preserve your pumpkin.

Basic recipe: Cube half a kilo of pumpkin and either boil or steam in a large saucepan until soft. Roughly dice an onion, crush a few cloves of garlic and gently sauté them with olive oil in a pan over a medium heat until soft and translucent. Add to the pumpkin along with a litre of vegetable or chicken-flavoured stock. Using a stick blender, blend the saucepan’s contents until you have a soupy consistency. Bring to the boil, season to taste and serve with a dollop of coconut cream or natural yoghurt and a sprinkling of chives, coriander, nutmeg, or raw or roasted pepitas.

Variations: Roast your pumpkin first for a rich, super creamy flavour (recipe below), or try adding any vegies of choice – steamed potato, parsnips, broccoli, and zucchini all work really well. While you’re at it, why not chuck in some spice! Simple dry fry a few teaspoons spices – try a cumin, fennel and paprika combo, or your favourite curry powder.

Roast pumpkin salad

Turn the oven right up to around 200-220 degrees Celsius. Cube your pumpkin, leaving the skin on, and place it in a bowl with a drizzle of olive oil and that magical spice trilogy of paprika, cumin and turmeric, the merest pinch of cayenne pepper, and a good shake of salt. Chuck in some potatoes and sweet potato in while you’re at it. Toss to coat the vegies in the oil and spices and roast for around 30 minutes. At this high temperature the pumpkin will caramelise as it cooks, giving both fantastic flavour and texture. Serve toasty hot as part of any roast dinner.

If you can manage to save some of the pumpkin for lunch the next day, it will make a wonderful addition to any salad. Simply toss together with some shredded lettuce, cabbage and/or baby spinach, cubed or sliced avocado and scatter some fresh or roasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and sunflower seeds over the top. The crunch of the pepitas, the creaminess of the avocado, the divinely caramel pumpkin and freshness of the greens just all work perfectly. 

Roast pumpkin salad with iceberg lettuce, red cabbage, avocado and toasted pepitas and sunflower seeds.

Roast pepitas

Toss your pepitas and sunflower seeds in a little olive oil, roast in a 140 degree oven for 10-15 minutes, then stir through the same spices you’d use with your pumpkin. Serve hot as pre-dinner snack – they’re seriously moreish!