Pumpkin soup for quick recovery

Firstly, my apologies for the lack of updates over the last few days. My wife and I have been down with the flu, which our housemate brought in. So we've been sleeping and resting as much as possible to get better sooner!

sacrificing Health, for our health!

Important for fast recovery of any disease is good food. Most people who are not feeling well want something comforting (usually warm) and easy to consume. What their body wants is similar, but it probably wants good nutrition and something easily digestible. Soups fit this criteria well.

Porky before the chopping began

So today, I decided to make our pumpkin soup. As I wrote previously, we have so much pumpkin that we'd need to have at least one every day to finish them all off by spring (which is when they will probably start to go bad—they store for up to three to four months in ideal conditions).

I chose Porky and Health, two that were most damaged. (See this post for why this happened.) I usually only need one pumpkin to make a soup, but I felt I wanted to try making more so that we can keep drinking this over more days and get better sooner. Porky was 1.5kg. Health was 2.6kg, almost double in size. Larger pumpkins have the benefit (usually) of having less seeds compared to edible parts.

a hole in the bad bit of Porky

my knife skills need a bit of work

 I noticed from many days ago that the rotten, soft bit on Porky had a hole in the middle. Several other bad bits had this hole. I was concerned that an insect might have gone in, but thankfully, I found out today that it was in fact not a sign of some insect entering the pumpkin. It's still a mystery what actually creates this hole. Click on the picture on the left to zoom in.

halved, with seeds showing

Peeling the pumpkin is actually quite tiring. I sharped my knife at the start, but it wasn't good enough and half way through I could feel it was blunt already.

seeds and fleshy bits

 After peeling them and chopping them in half, I removed the stringing, dark-coloured bits, including the seeds. I've learnt not to put pumpkin seeds into my bokashi—they sprout even when it's been fermented with EM bacteria and buried 30 cm deep! I was left with two very substantial, solid, and fresh-looking bits of pumpkin to chop into small pieces. What fun it is to cut them into pieces.

peeled, halved, and seeds gone

 Baking the pumpkins before blending it into a soup makes it sweeter, I reckon. It dehydrates the pumpkin, but also caramelises the sugars. My wife did some quick research online and suggested that I drizzle olive oil all over it and add a few cloves of garlic. Add a bit of salt and pepper (not too much of the latter, because it's going to be blended into my soup). I don't think we baked the pumpkins in the post-PhD thesis soup that I made, which I talked about in my very first post on this blog.

chopped Porky, before baking

Porky, baked and caramelised; yum!

 I baked it at about 180°C (our oven temperature is definitely higher than it says, so it's always a guess what temperature it really is), for about 30 mins. When I baked it the second time round (two trays, Health), it took a bit longer and I turned up the temperature at the end to get more caramelisation.

There was no chicken soup left from our previous cooking as a soup base, so we used a bouillon cube instead. Yes, I know it's sort of cheating. But the main flavour definitely didn't come from the cube. It was all this pumpkin … about three kilos of it, plus the garlic cloves (about 10 in total), onions (two small ones, also baked to start with), and a few celery stalks chopped into 2cm slices. I also put in one carrot, which was cooked up in a mixture of cold water and the baked pumpkins, for about 15 mins, until soft.

3 kg of pumpkin almost fills our Le Creuset pot

In retrospect, ten cloves of garlic was a bit too overpowering in this soup. The celery added little flavour but left some stringy bits in the soup, which our blender failed to break. So next time no celery, or at least chop it into smaller chunks before adding.

remaining ingredients added: onion, celery, carrots

 Once the carrots were soft, I blended everything until reaching a smooth consistency. I had to transfer the soup to a larger container, as you can see in the photos. You can also tell that the volume increased a lot after the blending: this is because I added a lot of water to the mixture. Gluggy pumpkin soup is not really a soup, but more like a paste. Furthermore, it's very difficult to blend the large chunks when there's not enough water content. Even after adding about 2–3L of water, the stringy celery bits, as I mentioned above, did not get blended.

To serve this soup (for 2 people), we took out about 6 ladles of this mixture and added some more flavours. Two large scoops of sour cream made the soup smoother and creamier. My wife also adde some mixed herbs to give it a better flavour. For some protein, I put on some sliced pieces of lamb—leftovers from last night's dinner. I didn't need to heat the lamb. It got warmed up by the soup. Garnish with some coriander. And that's it, a small, light dinner. Oh, I forgot to mention: two small bread rolls, which I burnt in the oven. Hehe.

the final dish: rosat pumpkin and vegetable soup, topped with slices of roast lamb

I wish I had a white bowl for the final photo. The soup was actually more orange in colour than the bowl, which is more of a yellow colour.

Curing, sorting, and storing butternut pumpkins

It's been weeks since we harvested all our pumpkins and brought them back home. Well, twelve days to be precise. Today, I finally brought them indoors.

pumpkins lying around beside the house

The harvesting process that I read on most sites online sounded simple. I thought I followed the general advice but I did something terribly wrong. I tried to cure them on a table in the middle of our backyard, far from any tall trees or buildings, during a rather cold frosty period. I assumed the pumpkins would be resilient and forgot to follow the instructions very clearly, which suggested a curing temperature of 26–29°C (according to the 2010 Ohio Vegetable Production Guide—see p. 230 for suggestions on harvesting and storing 'summer squash', which includes our Walthum Butternut pumpkins). That document even suggests a range for humidity. In most households it's not possible to control the humidity, but I could have at least tried to get close to that temperature range by placing it in the warmest room in the house (i.e., our bedroom) rather than freezing them outside, and letting them get all frosted. My poor punchkins …

pumpkins sorted: right = no damage
middle = some damage
left = considerabel damage

As a result of my carelessness, quite a few of them have started to go bad on the surface. I'm going to try and cook one of the damaged ones soon to check how they are under the skin. It's a bit sad that the tender patches seem to get bigger even when brought indoors, although it happens quite slowly.

Actually, the real reason why I finally mustered the energy to bring the pumpkins in was because it started raining today. I knew that would only do more damage to them … even though I completely forgot the correct curing temperatures, I did remember the importance of keeping the surface dry.

I read the above document again tonight, and at least they will now be stored in the correct temperature range (10–15°C). The house heating is usually set to 16°C at night, and 18°C during the day, but the storage room (where I've put the pumpkins) are at ground level and the room also has the ducted heating vent mostly shut. So I'm guessing it's around 10–15°C in there. Will check it one day with my mobile phone (my only portable thermometer) just to be sure.

hiding under the chairs in our storage room

I'll be eating the pumpkins in the order of most damaged to the least, to ensure we waste as few as possible. And I've learnt my lesson. Canberra is too cold to cure pumpkins outdoors … by the time they're usually harvested, frost has already set in, so it's best to just cure them indoors where they're certain to remain dry and warm. I'll remember that for next year's harvest!

Oatmeal with banana and raspberry heart for breakfast

I made my wife a special breakfast today. A bowl of love, for my most loved one.

bananas, raspberries, and honey on porridge

Simple porridge topped with small slices of banana, raspberries from the freezer, and honey. Making oatmeal is so simple these days if you buy the type that is specifically cooked in a microwave oven.

Nothing in this dish was grown by us. So it's not really 'garden soup' content. But at least it's reasonably healthy, delicious, and importantly, pretty. I doubt I'll ever grown bananas or oats here in Canberra, but raspberries are possible; our friend at our community garden has one plant doing pretty well.

simple way to make my wife smile

I wanted my wife to enjoy it hot so I gave it to her without getting a photo first. I think it actually looked better than the photos I posted today, in terms of the heart shape, which is a good thing.

It's rewarding to decorate your breakfast … and thought it takes time, I think it's a good use of time especially if you want to slow down and make the most of the day. Rushing the making and eating of breakfast in order to get to work on time is really no fun. Luckily for me, I had no work today.

Do any of you readers enjoy fancifying your breakfast once in a while? Got any ideas, photos, or blogs that showcase interesting breakfasts? Please share them in the comments below!

Pumpkin harvest weighs more than me!

our 2.9 kg King Kong standing
next to our friend's
slightly smaller baby

Today I weighed all the pumpkins we brought home the other day. I couldn't believe we managed to grow 56.7 kg of pumpkins this year! Produced by eight plants, oven a five-month growing period. For a first attempt at growing pumpkins, I couldn't be more proud of our achievements. It will give us lots of food this winter.

two of our eight
pumpkin seed sprouts

Shops are selling butternut cheaper now, as low as $2 per kg. That would be $113. But organic prices are higher, up to $4/kg. That's $226 worth of food we have produced, in just a quarter of our patch (20 square metres).

eight pumpkin plants take over
a quarter (20 sq. m.) of our patch

What made them grow so crazily was the good soil. Watering, weeding, and even pollinating … that's all important. But in the end, it's the soil, I believe, that made them so healthy and produce such heavy, large pumpkins. The largest one was King Kong, at 2.9kg, which we gave to our friend. I really think the names do work … names associated with large sizes has quite consistently resulted in large pumpkins!

I think it's amazing how the eight seeds we planted all sprouted, grew like mad, and produced so much food for us. It's magical. Much more magical than an iPad.

I'll be updating our Butternut Pumpkins 2012 list soon, with the precise weight of each pumpkin. I've typed it up on my computer, just haven't had the time to update that table.

I want to figure out a way of more regularly updating how much produce we're harvesting each week. Right now I have a table on my computer but I'll probably post this up online on an online spreadsheet. Yep, that's one of the most fun part of growing your own food: showing it off in terms of number! I'll get around to doing this some time during winter, when the harvesting slows down a bit.

A viola pops out after waiting six months

Back on the 30th of April this year (about three weeks ago), a viola plant suddenly appeared on our patch! 

viola happily grows on our plot — isn't it pretty?

This viola plant is actually growing in a location where we had tomatoes. I had just removed all the dying tomato plants a few weeks before we discovered this viola. The interesting thing is that we had tried, without success, to sprout dozens if not hundreds of viola seeds back in October or November last year, in a nearby spot about half a meter away from where we found this plant. 

put hay around your plants and hopefully
you won't accidentally step on them

We should have known that October is really not the right time to plant cold-climate flowers like pansies and violas. But I think it's amazing that one of the seeds has managed to lay dorment on our patch for about 6 months before deciding to pop up! I'm quite sure it's from our seeds, because I remember collecting seeds of this particular black / dark purple variety at Floriade, probably one year ago (around October 2010) if not last year (October 2011).

It gives me much pleasure to have an edible flower growing alongside our veggies. As you can see in the second photo, we've put some hay around it to mark it clearly as well as give it a better chance in the coming frosty days.

I want to grow some other edible flowers in future, especially nasturtiums. We haven't got seeds yet, but seeing this viola pop up has made me want to scatter more viola seeds around our patch... this is the right time to plant them. 

Baked veggies and chicken maryland

A delicious dinner made by my wife: baked chicken and roasted veggies with rice

The other day (7 May 2012, to be exact) my DW cooked me a lovely dinner before rushing off to eat hers outside with her friend. As you can see, it was really yummy. No matter how many times I tell her it was delicious, she doesn't seem to believe me! She didn't get to eat it because the second maryland piece was consumed by my housemate.

Main ingredients were balsamic vinegar, some soy sauce, honey, and wine (just a bit of white wine, from memory). It was probably also seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper.

The two maryland pieces were baked in a Pyrex container, which was placed inside a sealed oven bag. It was the first time we cooked in this way. I think it worked well as a method of keeping the chicken moist and preventing the top skin from charring too much.

Oven was probably set to around 180°C, and the chicken cooked for about 20–30 minutes. 

The veggies were pumpkin and dutch cream potatoes, both from our patch. Seasoned with dried mixed (Italian?) herbs, olive oil, salt & pepper. The veggies were baked with garlic (not peeled). The organic garlic we use is so different to the Chinese fumigated garlic that I used to buy many years ago. When baked, certain types of garlic (such as Monaro purple) becomes this mild garlicy creamy paste wrapped inside a skim... it's fun just popping a clove in my mouth and sucking out all the goodness out of it. Hehehe!

The chicken and veggies were served with medium grain rice and garnished with parsley (also from our patch). I hope the next time my wife cooks this dish (or improvises a similar dish, which is more likely), she will be home to eat it with me.

Potatoes galore: Time for some gratin

The final figures are in: We harvested in total approximately 24.82 kg of Dutch Cream potatoes this season! Woohoo!!

We used 13 certified seed potatoes from a bag that we got from our local Bunnings shop. On average, we basically harvested 1.9 kg from each seed potato. The harvest is impressive considering that I did not properly mound soil over the potatoes throughout the season to promote lots of potatoes to form near the top. I initially thought that some new potatoes would grow beneath the seed; that never happened.

Apart from the great taste of Dutch Cream potatoes compared to other varieties, I chose it because, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, one organic gardener in Tasmania found it to be the most productive (see their blog post here). They planted about 20 tubers in late September and late October 2007, which resulted in a harvest of 14.5 and 30 kg, respectively. That gives approximately 0.7 to 1.5 kg of harvest per seed potato. Our 1.9 kg per seed must have taken a lot of nutrients out of the soil we had!

fresh from the oven, taken out with our Marimekko jordgubbar gloves—everything seems to be Scandinavian tonight!

not enough anchovies on this layer

pour on the delicious but fattening
double-cream and onion mixture

With so many potatoes, we'll probably be making lots of gratin in the coming months. Today was our first time to make one with our Dutch Cream, and while it was delicious there are several areas I can certainly improve on. :) It was our first time to create the famous Swedish gratin, Janssons frestelse, using a recipe in Signe Johansen's Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking (see her blog).

The recipe called for thin-sliced potatoes (5mm thick), but our Swedish housemate told that another way was to cut them into match-sticks of the same thickness, both so that it cooks more evenly and also so that it turns more golden at the top. Will try that next time. But partly why some of the potatoes were still hard was because we used too much potatoes in relation to everything else (the recipe called for four large potatoes, not four gigantic 500g organic fresh potatoes, which is what I used!).

breadcrumbs (panko) rather than crispbread as a topping

Some pieces of potato were a bit hard today, because we took it out the oven earlier than the recipe recommended (40 mins, instead of 45–50 mins), and because there was just so much potato in the container. Next time we should set a lower temperature (165°C) and cook it for slightly longer (about an hour). Next time, we'll also use Abba-branded anchovies rather than the standard kind (Italian?) that we used today. Our Swedish housemate told us where we could buy this: at Deli Cravings at the Belconnen Fresh Food Market.

oven baked chicken pieces marinated with Johnny Walker,
salt & pepper, white wine vinegar, a bit of chicken stock powder
and salt on the skin, and a few large scoops of marmalade

We like to cook more than one dish using the oven whenever we bake something, because it means less wasted energy. The other dish tonight was baked chicken pieces (cut off from a whole chicken, which we used to make a ginseng chicken soup), served with brown rice. No photo of the complete dish this time because the rice and chicken was completed almost an hour before the gratin. :P

Harvesting punchkins och potatis!

For the past many weeks, I've told my wife it's time to harvest: "The pumpkins / potatoes are ready!" or "The frost is coming, we better do it soon...". But we managed to delay our mass-harvest until now, almost mid-May! If you consider that we planted in our dutch cream potatoes back on the 5th November 2011, and the pumpkins on 29th October 2011, the growing season has been quite extended this year. The potatoes and pumpkins have been in the soil for 186 and 192 days, respectively, when usually they get harvested much sooner, I think.

Potatoes can of course be kept in the soil for longer (some people have even told us to store them in the ground and just dig them out when we need, but that would risk rotting them if there is any heavy rain). Walthum butternut pumpkins, on the other hand, were supposed to have been ready by late March—I believe the seed packet said harvest in about 150 days. I'll have to check that another day.

our punchkins! you'll notice that we named them :)

I haven't weighed the harvest yet, but it took many many trips to bring all the pumpkins into the car, and then out the car into the backyard. I estimate we have about 30 pumpkins, each one weighing on average 2kg. That's around 60kg! Once I've weighed them all, I'll post the 'data' on the Butternut Pumpkins 2012 page. :)

Many other people at our community garden planted butternut pumpkins this year. However, everyone got very different results. The patch that me and my wife looked after probably had the greatest number of plants: 8 in total! This is why we had more than 30 pumpkins popping out: on average, around 4 pumpkins per plant. Some told us that they only got around two small pumpkins. Perhaps a corollary of this almost double the harvest is the extended planting season. Most other gardeners had harvested their pumpkins two or more weeks ago, including one guy (Keith) who planted in his pumpkins in around January. In summary: longer growing time = bigger pumpkins, generally speaking. (There are of course other factors too, as I talk about below.)

my DW holding up two long dutch cream potatoes

Before I planted my potatoes, I read on this website one family's experiences growing several different varieties of potatoes, and at different times of the year, in Tasmania. It made me realise that the variety and timing of planting out potatoes, as well as the weather conditions that year, all contribute to the harvest. Anyway, their preference in terms of output was Dutch Cream. For example, the author of that blog found that twenty tubers of Dutch Cream resulted in a 14.5 kg harvest when planted out in September, and 30kg (more than double) when planted out in October. We planted 13 seed potatoes (bought from Bunnings), so I guess I was expecting anywhere between 9.4 to 19.5 kg at the most. I estimate that todays' bag of potatoes weighed about 10–15 kg. Add the 12.8 kg that I have already taken out of the soil, and that is a massive 22–27 kg of potatoes that we got. We couldn't have asked for more, really!

me digging for potatoes

This means that there is probably more than enough potatoes to feed me, my wife, and my housemate, over the next 4 or 5 cold winter months. As a main source of carbohydrate, I prefer rice (jasmine, medium grain, or brown), but because we have so many potatoes, we'll probably have them quite regularly. However, potatoes have a higher GI-index, so it's still not ideal as our main source of carbohydrate.

Who should we give credit for our beautiful and plentiful harvest of pumpkins and potatoes this year? I give most credit to the gardener who managed our patch for the last 6 or so years: Tony. We never met him, but fellow gardeners have told me that he was very skilled. Our garden convenor advised me that the soil was very fertile. I was initially unconvinced because some patches appear to have a high clay composition, but the health and quantity of our produce gives credence to the claim.

soaked broad beans over a few nights
in a dilute Seasol® solution

I feel a bit bad that our pumpkins and potatoes have depleted much of the good nutrients that Tony put into the soil. That's what organic gardening is all about: feeding the soil. For the potato patch, I'm putting in two buckets of bokashi matter (a topic for a separate post!), while in the pumpkin patch we put in broad beans today (see photo). I hope it will fix some nitrogen before we put our solarium plants next season: tomatoes, potatoes, capsicums, eggplants, etc. We'll also do barley as a green manure crop later in winter, too, because some research (back in 1979) suggests that it's good for tomatoes (see this COGS webpage).

broad beans planted neatly in rows (40–50cm row space, 30cm plant space)

Tomorrow, it's back to the patch to pop in the bokashi matter and do a bit more weeding! Goodnight for now. (Oh my goodness, it's way past bedtime!)

Pizzas and tomatoes

Watching MasterChef tonight (a recorded episode: I think it was last Sunday), I saw many happy cooks. These people loved what they did, and enjoyed time with their families. One of the contestants was a financial planner from Cairns. The video showed him baking a pizza in a stone over in his backyard (there was a pool in the background). His bread made Matt Preston and Georgey very happy.

While I have not experienced the luxury of owning a stone oven in my backyard, I do hope to one day learn the art of making beautiful bread and pastries. I've had some successes with making my own pizza dough, using high-protein bread flour. The instructions are on the back and are really simple to follow. It's always fun watching the dough rise. It comes to life, really. And when you knead and fold the stuff, you can almost feel the yeast breathing.

So today's photo is of one such food adventure we had back on the 15th March 2012. Life was very busy back then. That's why we used dough balls that I had pre-made and put in the freezer. It's very handy to have and I should always have a few balls in the freezer to make a quick pizza. The dough needs to be moved down to the fridge to defrost slowly overnight, so it does require some planning. But the result is always better than any pizza delivery service you can get.

Apart from rolling out the pastry, it takes only 10–15 mins to cook, at around 220°C. Pizza delivery usually takes an hour or so, costs triple if not more, and gives you little control over the exact ingredients that go into the pizza, including the base of course.

A main ingredient was our very own semi-dried tomatoes (1 hour, at around 100°C). My wife used beefsteak tomatoes and included minced garlic, olive oil, and salt. We dried tomatoes in this way to preserve the plentiful harvest from our 10+ plants at the patch. In future posts, I'll describe the drying process in a bit more detail, as well as the variety of tomatoes that we grew this year (and in previous years).

home-baked pizza made with semi-dried beefsteak tomatoes (harvested from our patch)

Hot pot with home-grown greens

On Saturdays, my wife and I usually do quite a bit of work on our patch. Not this week. We arrived at our garden late, around midday, and hardly got any 'work' done. It was an exciting day: we were going to have lunch with our two lovely friends, a couple living nearby who, like us, are relative newbies at the community garden.

hot pot filled with our veggies, tofu, and enoki mushrooms 

komatsuna growing
well too

mibuna getting really
dense on our patch

Being so late to arrive at our patch, we madly harvested our leafy greens: mibuna, komatsuna, lettuce, bok choi, as well as some radish. Mibuna is a thin, long Japanese green that tastes a bit like the Chinese bok choi. Komatsuna leaves are a bit wider, and less dark in colour. I can't really distinguish between their taste right now, rather I differentiate them by the shape of their stalks and leaves. They're all quite similar to me in taste, but not appearance.

veggies all cleaned and ready to cook

our greens: kale (from our friends),
mibuna (long, on the right), and
komatsuna (another Japanese green)

It took about one hour to prepare the meal, and we were all really hungry by then (around 1:30pm). I was so hungry that as I waited for the ingredients to cook on the stove, I managed to unconsciously pick up (with my chopsticks) a large piece of bok choi leaf in front of me, and bite right into it. It took a few seconds for me to notice it was cold, hard, and kind of bitter and ... uncooked! Haha! It actually tasted okay, but it's still better to soak it in a good stock and cook it slightly before eating ;)

stock alone with sliced radishes,
which is actually our green manure!

The stock sauces were made by Yokpok. Two compartments each with a slightly different taste (one was mostly soy, the other was miso). We each got a golden 'net' to 'fish' out our food. Apart from the tofu and enoki, we had protein in the form of raw egg (only the boys were daring enough to use it as a dipping sauce) and thin cuts of lamb and beef. And oh yes, I almost forgot we had 'noodles' in this hot pot too (konyaku, which is not strictly a noodle).

prickly pears are filled with
seeds, but can be surprisingly sweet

After our massive lunch, I got to try prickly pear for the first time. They're the fruit from cacti plants that have invade the perimeter of our community garden. I didn't know anything could be edible from them. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that the fruit was so colourful (once you carefully remove all spikes and the outer layer). Some of them are really sweet and nice, but others are less flavourful. The colours don't seem to suggest the sweetness of the fruit. My jaws got a bit tired out from all the 'chewing', that is, carefully biting into the flesh but not into the seeds, which are hard and have to be swallowed whole.

What a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon... two couples enjoying a hot pot filled mostly with produce that we grew together in our community garden over the last six months. It's the satisfying feeling of growing your own stuff and eating it super-fresh—within hours of harvesting it. It's at times like this, when I eat food that I've grown, that I feel proud to be alive, to be human.

Thank you for inviting us over and sharing your food with us. :) We look forward to catching up again soon.

Photo competition with our pancakes

Well, there's been a two-day hiatus. This will probably happen again in future... even though I'll try hard to set aside at least 20 mins to post one good-quality photo each day.

Last Friday, I made my wife a hot breakfast as promised. She liked it very much I think. I'm usually very lazy in the mornings, and almost exclusively feed on the most repetitive thing every day: oats, cereals, spoon-sliced bananas, soaked with lite soy milk. It's been like that for as long as I can remember (well, about 5 years, since I left the luxury of catered breakfasts at Ursies).

stack o pancakes

 These pancakes were made with Pancake Parlour batter, which I can get from supermarkets. It brings back old memories of living at Ursies, because my international student friends (including my wife) often went there to celebrate birthdays. I fondly remember the atmosphere, even if I often felt too poor to buy anything significant. The pancakes were always lovely. ;)

contestant #1: me!

contestant #2: wifey!

 To make it extra special, I panfried some halloumi cheese, an egg, and a piece of bacon. We recently acquired a Canadian maple syrup, which is perfect to go with the pancakes.

It was funny that both my wife and I, without planning it in advance, began arranging our food neatly on our plates before we started eating it. Starting this blog has made us quite eager to get nice photos, as you can see! So we joked that this was a photo competition... mine is on the left, and my wife's is on the right. She rightfully complains that she was disadvantaged due to the shape of her plate and the fact that she had cut her pancake in half (whereas mine is folded). Haha!

Usually my wife beats me on presentation. But maybe not this time ;)

Chickpea patties and improvised curry

Tonight I got to help out with cooking and preparing dinner. Yay!!

tonight's dinner: chickpea patties and improvised veggie curry

my darling fries the chopped onions

Yokpok (my wife) chopped and cooked onions. In fact, she did most of the cooking, and I was merely the sous chef: washing and cleaning veggies (especially when there are worms and other potentially 'scary' bits!).

She's been getting more excited about food since I started cooking with her and since we set this blog up. I'm so happy that I can help out more with cooking. It's so much more fun when we cook together, even though I enjoyed every meal that she served me over the last four years of my studies.

Tonight's dinner used many ingredients from our patch:

snow peas from our patch

• rocket leaves (from the green manure patch!!)
• dutch cream potatoes
• snow peas (we dropped the seeds in February and they just popped right up in March!)
• eggplants (generously given from fellow gardener)

Other ingredients we could have used include coriander (we used almost two bunches, bought from supermarket), and the onions (which we'll have plenty of by end of this year). It's not likely we'll ever grow our own chickpeas or make our own Indian spices mix … but that's okay. We're not supers. Our goal is to grow and produce what we can. It's still an improvement over what I used to do five years ago, when I bought virtually every cooking ingredient from supermarkets (except the spring onion—I did have a few plants on my dim windowsill).

1. Chickpea patty

The first dish was a veggie patty, inspired by "The Ultimate Veggie Burger" recipe on the 101 Cookbooks blog. It has plenty of chickpeas, our main source of protein tonight. My wife has made it before, and it always tasted nice. In my opinion, tonight's version was the best, so I'm glad I documented it with photos and this blog post!

The process of cooking the patties is so interesting to look back at: the colour and surface texture changes from a soft, mushy light colour [left]… to a lightly browned crust that tells you it's ready to be served [right]. 

One reason why it tasted so good was because it was moist on the inside. It's not difficult to fail if you follow the above recipe. We used canned chickpeas, which saves a lot of time.

cooked and plated patties

Yokpok was worried I popped in too much coriander, especially because I didn't chop it that finely. There were stalky bits inside, and I reckon the amount of coriander we actually put in was triple the amount in the original recipe (1/3 cups became 1 cup). But it turned out just fine. In fact, I liked it with more coriander.

According to my wife, it has to be served with tomato sauce. I forgot to grab the mustard today but it would have worked too. The original recipe calls for avocado, and I think the creamy texture adds a wonderful dimension to the patties.

2. Improvised veggie curry

The second dish was also vegetarian, a curry made with expensive jarred spices (one jar Madras, one jar Butter Chicken) that we bought at Floriade last year. We don't usually eat vegetarian meals so it's interesting that both dishes didn't have meat!

I liked this dish a lot, but Yokpok thought it was too bitter. She finds it slightly bitter, which is due to the almost excessive amounts of rocket I added without tasting (with her permission, I should add! :P). Unlike the coriander, however, cooking it doesn't remove its strong characteristic flavour... and rocket is not a typical thing to add to a curry. She didn't like it, but I thought it was quite nice and 'interesting'—in a good way, that is. I know we'll probably never make it again, hehehehe....