Hungry for Vegies!

This week I've developed a hankering for vegetables - can't get enough of them! IKU Wholefoods, the iconic Organic Vegan diner at 612A Darling Street Rozelle seemed the answer to my prayers. They also have shops in: Glebe, Darlinghurst, Waverly, Neutral Bay, several City stores and Bondi Beach - full of fresh, wholesome, lush Vegan food.

Their Gluten-free Vegan Lasagne is second to none!
















Yum-oh!

Winter Stir-fry: Tofu, Leeks & Brussels Sprouts

It's getting close to the Winter Solstice - yes folks, the southern hemisphere's Longest Night of 2008 is coming up, this Saturday night, the 21st June. And so simple, warm, nourishing dishes are in order. Paul Pitchford, of Healing with Wholefoods recommends eating 'round' foods and uncomplicated flavours during the two weeks either side of the solstice, to stabilise and 'earth' us in the deepest heart of winter.

So here's my 'after work' dinner last night - a quick and easy stir-fry of round winter veggies. Not sure about the 'styling' in the finished dish, but it tasted good!




























Ingredients of Winter Stir-fry:
Tofu, Leeks, Beans & Brussels Sprouts.
Brussels Sprouts
Leeks
Tofu
Snake-Beans
1-2 tablespoons Rice-bran oil
3 tablespoons Chinese Rice Wine
1 dessert spoon Sesame oil
A splash or two of mild Green Tabasco sauce
zest of 1/2 a lime
juice of 1/2 a lime

Prepare the Brussels Sprouts by removing the tough outer leaves and slicing them in half. Add a little rice-bran oil to a hot frying pan and start frying the Brussels Sprouts, cut-surfaces down and with the lid on the pan to steam them in their own moisture. Let the Brussels Sprouts cook the longest as they are denser than the other vegies. After about 5 minutes, add the sliced leeks and tofu pieces and continue to stir-fry until the tofu is golden, the leeks silky and the Brussels Sprouts bright green and tender. Add the sliced beans about 2 minutes before serving, to keep them fresh and green. When almost done, add the sesame oil and rice wine, frying off the alcohol. Then finish with a few splashes of Green Tabasco sauce, lime zest and lime juice, stirring through before serving.

Yum-oh!

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Apple Pie for the Gluten-Free Gourmet

Yummy, scrummy, sweet & juicy, this is one is a winner.

Yesterday's winter rain made it a perfect day for baking, warm and cosy in the kitchen, the smells of crispy apples and tart limes melding with spicy cinnamon and the mellow caramel sweetness of the palm-sugar. Ah...

The recipe below uses a lovely gluten-free shortcrust pastry, but you can use your own favourite pastry recipe, or even use pre-made pastry sheets.






















Apple Pie Ingredients:
6 Granny Smith cooking apples
1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1 teaspoon mixed spice
2 tablespoons palm sugar
1/2 a lime, juiced and zested
melted butter to glaze
extra sugar to sprinkle on top
shortcrust pastry - see Gluten-Free recipe below, or use your own favourite pastry recipe.

Method:
Prepare the pastry - see recipe below - making both a top and bottom sheet. Grease a pie dish or individual ramekins with melted butter and press a rolled pastry sheet into the dish to line it.

Peel, core and slice the apples into a mixing bowl and sprinkle with the spices, the palm sugar and the lime juice and zest, stirring to coat. Tip the apples into the lined pie dish, piling them up a little, as they will melt down during cooking.

Cover the apples with the second pastry disc and pinch off the excess around the edges. Press all around the edges with a greased fork or a spoon handle, to seal and make a decorative edge. Slice an 'x' in the centre of the pie to let the steam out during cooking.

Brush the top of the pie with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Bake in a hot oven for 15 to 20 minutes until golden brown. Serve hot with creamy goats yoghurt.

Yum-oh!

Gluten-Free Shortcrust Pastry.

1 cup glutinous rice flour
2 cups brown-rice flour (or use white)
75g butter
1 egg

water

extra rice-flour for kneading

Method:

Sift the flours together and cut the cold butter into the mix in small chunks. Using your fingertips, rub the butter into the flours until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Take care not to over-rub, as the heat of your hands may melt the butter - any larger pieces left will incorporate later when the pastry dough is kneaded.

Stir in the lightly beaten eggs and add just enough water to make the dough come together in a ball. At this stage, the dough will still be quite crumbly, so kneading is essential. This may seem very strange if you are used to making conventional pastry where the golden rule is to handle lightly, but gluten-free pastry differs in that it actually benefits from being handled.

Lightly dust a cold surface with extra rice-flour & knead the dough for 1-2 minutes, adding as much extra flour as needed to prevent the dough sticking to the board. The pastry will change in texture, becoming much smoother and more pliable.

To roll out, divide the dough into two portions – one for the top and one for the bottom – and roll into two spheres. Lightly dust the surface and the rolling pin with rice-flour and roll out using smooth short strokes. When you are ready to place the pastry in the pie dish, use your rolling pin for pick-up and transfer.

Another method is to roll the dough between two sheets of baking paper for ease of handling.

Celestial Black-Turtle Beans

Always-better-the-next-day...

A warning to the fast-food enthusiast: this recipe is not fast!
In fact, it is the classic slow-food recipe, best left simmering gently on the back burner all afternoon. Perfect for the colder winter days and packed full of nourishment, these Celestial Black Turtle Beans create a warm feeling throughout the whole house as they bubble gently, releasing their goodness and aroma.

Based on a recipe by Celestina Swanson of Swansisters Fine Teas. http://www.swansisters.com/blog

Celestial Black Turtle Beans Ingredients:
2 cups black turtle beans
10 cm piece of wakame seaweed
1 onion finely chopped
3 anchovies (optional)
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cups pumpkin, chopped
1 small carrot, sliced (or optional: stamped into celestial star-shapes)
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon Mexican red chilli powder
2 tablespoons salt, added to taste
water, lots of water.

Method:
Soak beans over-night in fresh water with broken pieces of wakame seaweed. Beans cook faster, are more digestible and have a creamier texture when pre-soaked and the seaweed neutralises the enzyme that causes the gas that beans have a reputation for. Rinse the beans a couple of times during soaking and discard the purple soaking water.

When ready to cook, generously cover beans with fresh water and cook on low heat for 2-3 hours, adding extra water if necessary. When the beans begin to soften, add all other ingredients and continue to cook until creamy inside but still unbroken. The cumin especially improves the digestibility and enhances the flavour of the beans. Add more water as necessary as older beans tend to need longer cooking times and all beans vary in size.

This is the prefect recipe for a slow cooker, where you can 'set and forget' for a whole afternoon of simmering. And like many of these kinds of recipes, these beans are even better the next day.

When beans are ready to serve, garnish with fresh Avocado and Coriander Salsa and enjoy.












Avocado Salsa Ingredients:
1 avocado, diced
1 small red onion, sliced finely
1 small tomato, diced finely
1 cup fresh coriander, chopped roughly
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon of carob molasses or brown sugar

Gently scatter the avocado, onion and tomato together in a serving bowl. Combine garlic, lemon juice and carob molasses into a dressing and drizzle over the avocado mix. Serve immediately with the Celestial Black-Turtle Beans.

Yum-oh!

Rising Sun Miso Soup

Something Vital to Greet the Day.

The morning sun streaming in through the kitchen window was so glorious, I just HAD to photograph something... And it had to be something quick, as la luz del sol (the light of the sun) wasn't waiting around.

A quick look in the cupboard produced a bag of dried seaweed that I'd gotten at Alfalfa House, the Wholefoods Co-Op in Enmore.
A rustle through the fridge found a block of Earth Star Organic Tofu and a jar of Shiro Miso. Perfect: Japan - The Land Of The Rising Sun - is synonymous with Miso soup and this accompaniment forms an essential part of almost every Japanese meal, almost as ubiquitous as green tea. The picture of solar goodness would be completed with the pot of sunny yellow chrysanthemums I'd bought yesterday, when out shopping with Kaitlyn, from the Vietnamese grocer in Marrickville.





















Miso Soup Ingredients:
(Serves 1 - multiply accordingly)

1 tablespoon of miso paste
1 teaspoon powdered Dashi (Bonito flakes)
1 soup-bowl of boiling water
2 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked & sliced
a few pieces of dried seaweed, soaked
silken tofu, sliced in 'Rising Sun' circles
green shallots, finely sliced
a splash of tamari, to taste

Method:

Mix Miso & Dashi with a little water to make a smooth, runny paste in the bottom of each serving bowl. Assemble other ingredients in the bowl and top with boiling water.

Serve immediately, with Temaki-Nori Hand-roll.
(Recipe to follow in a future Blog...)


A Note about Miso:

Miso pastes are made from grains & pulses that have been fermented with a live pro-biotic culture that assists digestion. To preserve the health benefits of the live culture, miso paste should never be boiled.

Miso pastes range from the palest blond Shiro-Miso made from white rice, to the red Aka-Miso made from barley, through to a dark & chunky black-soybean Hatcho-Miso.

Eggs For Breakfast

And a Visit to the PhotoShop Beauty Parlour...

It’s the terrible irony of the food photographer in-the-making: I woke up all excited about exploring my new camera and lenses, but was so hungry I didn’t feel like I could wait hours fiddling around with ingredients. That’s what a food-stylist is for, hey. But the fresh organic eggs I had picked up from the market, along with the Organic Rye loaf from the local IGA agreed to collaborate: I could have my cake (or eggs-on-toast-for-breakfast in this case) and eat it too. Or so it seemed…

You will understand my disappointment then, when my eggs didn’t exactly turn out looking like Marie Claire… They did in fact look pretty awful, full of bubbles and pock-marks and a bit green around the gills from where I had improperly set the white-balance in my camera. Not something you'd want to take home to meet your mother.

I surmised that this happened because:

a) I’m not a regular maker or consumer of fried eggs on toast,
(I like Omelets better, or Fried Rice With Egg)
and
b) because I didn’t manage the temperature of the frying pan very well – still getting to know the stove in the new studio kitchen.

Suffice it to say, they looked like they didn’t egg-xactly get out of bed sunny-side up…

















I wept quietly into my cup of tea:
“I’ll never become a food photographer, what was I thinking??”

Nevertheless, it dawned slowly on me that perhaps the food one sees pictures of in magazines may arrive at the studio in a less-than perfectly groomed state. So I decided, after eating my poor benighted eggs – at least they tasted good: the free-range chickens had held up their end of the bargain – that a trip to the Photoshop Beauty Parlour might be just the trick for my two googies.

Ten minutes on the Cloning Tool, a bit of tweaking with the Colour-Balance and voila! Behold, gorgeous eggs, sunny-side up, smiling for the camera.

Pumpkin Soup

Visiting the Orange Grove Organic Markets in Rozelle, the Autumn pumpkins looked just so perfect, so seasonal... dusky skins and just the right rap-rap tone when we knocked our knuckles against their sides...


Pumpkin Soup Recipe:
(100% Vegetarian / Vegan)


1 onion
2 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons of Stones Green Ginger wine
1 pumpkin
water
salt & pepper
parsley


Chop onion coarsely and fry lightly in vegetable oil in a large saucepan. When onion begins to turn slightly golden and the bottom of the pot is browning slightly, add the Stones Green Ginger wine and stir to deglaze the flavours from the bottom of the pot, cooking until the wine is almost evaporated off.


Peel the pumpkin and chop into chunks, then add to the onions, with enough water to just cover. Bring to boil and then simmer until the pumpkin is tender. Blend with a stick-mixer until smooth.


Serve hot with crusty rye-bread. Garnish with chopped parsley and season with Maldon sea-salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.


Non-vegans could add a dollop of goat’s yogurt.


Enjoy. Yum-oh!

Zucchini Muffins with Date & Almond cream

The first weekend's Adventures in Food Photography.

Deciding what to make for the
inaugural photo-shoot with the new camera was quite a decision. In the end, I chose to go 'back in time', settling on some baking - making these yummy little afternoon-tea cup-cakes. They were first made for us by my friend Phillip's mum when we were about eight years old - she wouldn't tell us what was in them until after we ate them - picky eaters that we were, we couldn't believe something so delicious had vegetables in it!

In starting out on this project, the ethical considerations seem equally important as the aesthetic, so I decided that we should
"Go Green" from go to whoa, leaving Petroleum out of the equation as much as possible. Riding my bicycle to the shops seemed a good start - and cycling up the hill to the Norton Street Grocer in Leichhardt was a good way to ground my excitement over the possibilities of the project in the here and now. I had already had more than one restless night, dreaming of the wonders of the Olympus E510 and the lenses that I eventually settled on...


- one-pedal stroke at a time -
- one recipe at a time -

that could become
my new Mantra.



The ethic and aesthetic pleasures continue at the green-grocers - selecting the most vibrant looking zucchinis, the freshest organic eggs, picking up a selection of paper muffin-cases from the Italian catering store, before pedalling the ingredients back to the studio to whiz together...

So now I present to you:

Zucchini Muffins






















Zucchini Muffins Ingredients:
(Wheat-free / Gluten-free / Dairy free)
3 eggs
1 cup rice-bran oil
1/2 cup rapidura
(dehydrated sugar-cane juice; ordinary sugar will do)
3 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups grated zucchini
2 cups rice flour
1 cup sticky-rice flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons bicarbonate soda
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts


Method:

Beat eggs until foamy. Add rice-bran oil, rapidura sugar and vanilla and beat until thick and mousse-like.

Stir in the grated zucchini and fold in the sifted flours, baking powder, bicarbonate soda, cinnamon and walnuts.

Pour into muffin tins 2/3 full - they rise well - and bake at 250 degrees for approx 10 - 15 Min's, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Cool on a wire rack and ice with Date and Almond Cream.


Date and Almond Cream
(sugar-free & deliciously sweet)

1 cup raw blanched almonds
5 Turkish dates, seeds and skins removed
juice of 1 lime
water

Blend on high speed in food processor until smooth and creamy, adding just enough water to make a smooth paste. Ice the cakes with a palate knife, or decorate using a piping bag.

The Results:

I tried out a few different presentation styles, in paper cases / without paper-casing - not sure which one would make the best photo. And for sure I would put the CWA to shame with my dodgy piping technique... oh well, always good to have room for improvement!

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