Green Curry

Remember when I made curry paste?

Well, we finally used it in a curry. It was quite mild - probably due to the painstaking time I spent de-seeding the green chillies. It tasted very lime-y, which is good and tangy.



The curry had tofu sticks and carrots (bought), sweet potato, eggplants, cowpeas, eggplant, sweet potato shoots and hibiscus spinach (all from the garden). We served it on brown rice and topped it with some crunchy shallots. And from-scratch curry becomes an easy weeknight meal.

Garden Party

Since work has gotten busy again (evidenced by my paltry posting), the last thing I want to do is spend hours in the grocery store. I'm still happy to hang out in the kitchen for hours, but something about fighting the crowds under artificial lights as terrible music floats through the air just doesn't appeal to me! So while we are of course still shopping for things we need, we have been making serious use of the garden whenever we can.

Here's our garden looking particularly lush after 200 mm of rain.

I'm not sure if you can make out the mulched garden bed in the middle right-hand side. It used to have a big cherry tomato, some dying kale, and a fruitless watermelon. Andy decided to clear the bed, put some compost in and let it rest for a few weeks before we plant again. So we harvested all the cherry tomatoes and made spaghetti.

Cherry tomatoes, olive oil, basil and garlic. Yummm.

With some lentil balls, in the background.

Our eggplant bushes fruit prolifically, and the skinny fruits are delicious cooked on the BBQ in a mixture of soy sauce, chilli and brown sugar. On the side, some malabar spinach - a tropical vine that grows well in the humidity. (And some no-fu love loaf.)

 Our basil plants are another fast-grower, and we have made a few batches of pesto. Unlike last year, now that I have a grown-up-sized food processor, pesto is a snap.

It might seem from this post that we eat an awful lot of pasta. That is correct.

Pesto pasta with eggplants and olives.

We've also, though, taken to making bowls of whatever we can gather, plus what we have from the markets. In this peanut-lentil stew, we have eggplants, cowpeas (aka black-eyed peas, but when they are still green in the pod), and garlic chives from the garden, plus some sweet potatoes from the market and a tin of tomatoes. Served over rice, with a big squirt of sriracha, this was a delicious rainy-day meal.

The garden has also thrown up some curry-related delights. On Sunday I picked a big handful of green chillies, some lemon grass, and some lime leaves, and blended them up with dried spices to make 6 dinners' worth of curry paste - green and jalfrezi - to have throughout the next few weeks. I filled the jars just a little, with one meal's worth of curry paste, so that we can store them in the freezer until we're ready.

We haven't yet tried one of these in an actual curry, but I prefer them to store-bought because it means I don't have to go to the store!

Storming the Freezer

Last night a cyclone crossed the coast. For the first part of the week, it looked like it was coming pretty much straight at Townsville. I have lived here for nearly 7 years, and while I'm not a local nor a meteorologist, I have seen several cyclones heading straight for Townsville that end up going elsewhere when push comes to shove. So we got prepared by cleaning up the back yard but didn't get too worked up. Good thing, too, because it ended up heading 200kms south of us, and we saw less than 40mm of rain at our house.

One of the things we figured out during Cyclone Yasi, which is rarely given out in official advice, is to eat anything precious from the freezer, so that if the power goes out for a few days you don't have to throw it away. So this week we had a few freezer based dinners. We still have rather a lot in there, but now there is plenty of space for a new batch of ice cream...

We tried some Fry's vegan burgers, which were good but not worth full price. They were delicious with some cherry tomatoes, cooked down with olive oil and garlic.

Here we have tofu (from the freezer) marinated with teriyaki and chilli sauce, spring rolls (from the freezer), BBQ pineapple, and fried rice with capsicum (from the freezer) and eggplant, green beans, cherry tomatoes, sweet potato shoots and baby kale (all from the garden).

When our mulberry tree gets ripe fruit on it, we pick them and stick them in a container in the freezer, till we have enough for something yummy. This container spent an overnight with some oats to become a yummy breakfast.

And for lunch I brought a chickpea naan roll to work, inspired by Joey's link to Dan Lepard's recipe - but with a slightly different filling.

None of this made a massive dent in the freezer stash - we still have about 15 naan rolls, a few boxes of Fry's, a bag of frozen capsicum, 6 blocks of tofu, and other random things. But if any more cyclones form in the coming months, at least we've made a start!

Hey Buddy

Andy and I grow bananas, and so far we've had two plants with fruit on them. The first bunch of bananas took SO LONG before they were ready to pick - like 3 months or so. We cut off one hand at a time, rather than chopping down the whole bunch, so for 8 weeks or so we had fresh bananas from our back yard, rather than a glut all at once.

We have another bunch on a new plant, and it gave me a second opportunity to try eating the banana blossom. We did this with the first plant, but forgot to record anything about it. It's a weird looking part of the plant - a strange spear that looks nothing like a flower. The fruit forms underneath each petal, but after a while they stop producing. So we cut the flower off and eat it.

Start by peeling off the red petals. They are probably tough - I didn't actually try to eat them, but the whole internet says to get rid of them, and who am I to argue?

I tried to save two of these as fancy-pants serving bowls for our salad, but Andy tore them up and put them in the compost before I realised.

Underneath each petal are these little bunches of what would have become bananas (except that they don't, this far in - otherwise leave the flower in the tree!!). Supposedly you can eat these, if you separate out the stamen from the outer bit, but it sounds like a lot of work so we haven't tried yet.

This white thing is the part we eat. If you don't have a banana plant on hand, supposedly you can substitute cabbage in its place. Shred this as you do for cabbage.

Immediately put the banana blossom shreds into a bowl of water with lime juice. This is meant to keep it from browning. Mine went sort of gray anyways - the colour of a banana peel that's been cut, actually. It's not the most appetising appearance, but when it's covered with dressing it's not so bad.

I found this recipe and planned to sort of follow it, and then didn't really. Ours was an Asian-inspired salad based entirely on what we had in the pantry, fridge and garden, and it turned out really nice.

Tropical Vegan Banana Bud Salad

1 banana bud, shredded
1 yellow capsicum, cut into matchsticks
2 spring onions, chopped
1 green chilli, finely sliced
2 Tbsp. perennial coriander (aka culantro?), minced
3 Tbsp. vietnamese mint leaves, roughly chopped
1/4 c. crushed peanuts

Dressing:
1 Tbsp. hot water
1 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
juice from 1/2 a lime
2 cloves garlic, minced

In a small bowl, whisk together the ingredients for the dressing. In a large bowl, toss together all the salad ingredients. Pour over the dressing and let it sit for 20 minutes (or longer) before you eat it.

This salad mostly tastes like fresh Asian salad, because of the herbs and spring onions and so on. But the banana bud tastes a little bit like banana peel does, in a pleasant way. That isn't a great description, I know, but trust me. We served ours with some Vietnamese asparagus & mushrooms with rice noodles. 

Produce - Big and Little

Andy and I have big appetites, so we love our veggies in giant proportions. Our favourite winter veggie in the garden is kale. It's getting to the time of year now that they are full of caterpillars. Andy is still happy to eat them, but I get a little grossed out at the idea. And on the weekend Andy cooked one, and it ended up in my bowl. That put my off my pasta.

But caterpillars aside, we prefer our kale to come in mountains, rather than the tiddly bunches you get in supermarkets.

Kale mountain.

Kale with cauliflower, jacket potatoes and corn cooked on the BBQ, and a tomato and cucumber salad

And when choosing a sweet potato at the market last week, Andy chose this gigantor. That's 2.4 kilos, or 5 pounds, of a single sweet potato.

Sweet potato chips with black bean burgers (recipe from Celebrate Vegan)

But sometimes we don't have as much success. We tried to grow a row of carrots, and they were pretty puny.

Tiddly carrots. We roasted them with Aloo Palak Pie.

And our corn grew really quickly and looked great, but was very small. Tasty, but tiny.

Not done yet. 

BBQ corn with pumpkin, potatoes and carrot, and Chickpea Pumpkin Seed Burgers (recipe from Let them eat vegan!)

The corn and carrots do prove that sometimes the smallest produce are the sweetest and tenderest. But we still love giants.

Fragments of a tropical vegan

Hi! I am hopelessly overworked this semester! And trying to do things to keep my stress levels down, which also take time. Things like striking, to prevent some of the overworking in future years, maybe. Things like starting yoga classes again, for relaxation and adaptability. Things like gardening and running with Tika and reading novels and crocheting and spending time with Andy. Blogging isn't my top priority at the moment, but I do have some things to share. Rather than taking the mental effort to make some narrative sense out of them, I present to you some fragments.

Creamy Pumpkin Soup with Kale. We grew the pumpkin, the kale, and the coriander. We added garlic, white wine, and coconut cream, and ate with store-bought chappatis for an easy, quick dinner. 

A few weeks ago I saw Joey post about this vegan tuna salad recipe. I tried it out that weekend but used nori and wakame for the seaweeds. It was yummy, but didn't taste at all like tuna, in my opinion. Chickpea-based tuna salads are still the real winner! 

We have been eating PILES of passionfruit because our vine is ridiculous. We've also given stacks away. This cup-and-a-half went into the freezer to be enjoyed during the summer months. 

We eat flowers. It's a shame salad vegetables grow better here in winter, than in summer, but we are really starting to appreciate a good salad in the winter. This one has mizuna and rocket, a radish, nasturtiums, and cherry tomatoes from the garden, plus cucumber and capsicum from the markets. For dressing, I used Dreena Burton's recipe for hummus salad dressing, with a big handful of parsley from the garden. 

I've gotten a few new cookbooks recently, because they make me happy. This is a variation on a recipe from The Sexy Vegan's Happy Hour at Home. They are roasted green capsicums (because that is what we had most of) rolled up with hummus and rocket. Yummy and nice to have some little bites instead of a huge bowl of food every night.

Tika, Defender of Kale and Spring Onions.

Nacho, Disrupter of Academic Work.

Plastic-free produce

In Australia, green bags are pretty ubiquitous. They have been since I was a study abroad student here, way back in 2004, and this was something I thought was very cool and progressive. I still do! I especially love getting green bags (which are often not green, but that's just what they're called) for free at events and things. Very handy. We keep some in the car, in case we forget to bring our main stash with us when we go shopping. We still get plastic bags sometimes, and actually have an embarrassingly large stash of them under the kitchen sink. We use them in our rubbish bin (which is actually just a bucket), but that only uses up one per week. What to do with the bulk of them is a bit of a mystery - I suppose we'll keep them under the sink until we get so good at remembering (enough) green bags that we never get plastics and we run out.

There are lots of other roads that plastic takes into our house, though. I was flicking through Facebook a fortnight or so ago when I saw an ad for Plastic-Free July. I made a pledge - avoid the top four single-use plastic items for the whole month. Drinking straws is easy - we never eat takeaways and thus avoid places where straws are provided. Plastic bottles is also fairly straightforward - in a regular month, we don't often go anywhere to purchase drinks. We drink tap water at home and at work, and if we do go out for an adventure we bring a stainless steel bottle of water with us. Coffee cup lids are a little trickier, mainly because getting them is so automatic. But, when I go for coffee (actually, chai) with people, we have in almost 100% of the time. So I can do this one easily if I avoid the two or three coffee places at JCU that serve only in takeaway cups. The final item in the top 4 is plastic bags. My overly-long intro to this post talks about grocery bags. But what about other plastic bags?

Produce bags are more common in our grocery- and market-trips than plastic shopping bags. Until May, we had been using them daily as Andy's sandwich bags. He would even bring them home to re-use if they were clean enough. And we use them every now and then in places where we might otherwise use cling wrap. But for Andy's birthday I got him a most excellent sandwich container - plastic! but re-usable - that is big enough to fit our homemade bread. So we began accumulating produce bags, too.

From http://www.happyjackson.co.uk/shop/

I was inspired by a link from Plastic-Free July to a tutorial on re-usable produce bags. I looked at it, got the gist, and then made them on a Saturday morning. I used a piece of mesh fabric - mosquito-net style - that we had laying around. I didn't really measure the fabric, but cut it into different sizes.  Working slowly, with plenty of interruptions, it took me about 3 hours to make about 8 bags. I think I'd be quicker next time, now that I know what I'm doing.

I used yarn instead of ribbons for drawstrings, and I love the rainbow I've got to shop with.

We tried them out with stuff from the garden, because Andy was skeptical - he thought they would be annoying.

Yellow passion fruits, yum. 

But the next day we brought them to the markets. We couldn't use them for the first half of the markets. I was disappointed - first we bought things that we don't put in bags, like bananas, and there were heaps of stalls selling items pre-bagged. But in the second half of the market we got to use them, which was very exciting for me! (Simple pleasures?)

As I was making them, I thought about how multi-use these bags are. They are basically the same as a delicates bag that you might use in the washing machine. When I posted a picture of the bags on my Facebook page (have you liked it yet?) Cate and Melissa both talked about using them for toys and crayons and other things. Andy came up with a good use for them after our tomatoes were eaten by a mouse or rat.

Protecting ripening tomatoes from a hungry pest.

In the two weeks since making them, we have put them to use several times. They store fairly small, so I can keep some in my bag, and they weigh about 10 grams each so they don't add much to the cost of produce. They were worth making with the free ingredients I had on hand, but I think I would even go out of my way to get more material.

Banana Hammock

Just about 12 months ago, we planted our banana suckers (courtesy of Dee) into the ground. Today, we have fruit ripening on them. It was actually about two weeks ago that I noticed the bud. I had been on the lookout for a while, so was pretty excited when I saw it there.

It took a few days to turn red and droop downwards, and then it was only another day before we saw the baby bananas on the stalk. They form under a petal, and the stalk keeps growing down towards the ground.

Each day we get a new hand of bananas - we're up to 6 at the moment, and I'm expecting many more to come.

Once the bananas have all formed, we'll try cooking something with the banana flower, and then we wait for the fruit to ripen.

Let us eat vegan!

We have been loving our new cookbook, Let Them Eat Vegan! by Dreena Burton. We've enjoyed everything that we've tried so far, and have lots more recipes tagged to try. It's healthy, but in a gourmet way. The flavour combinations are sophisticated and the recipes centre on veggies, beans and whole grains - which really suits the sort of food we've been eating a lot this year, anyways.

Our first try from the cookbook was Jerk Chickpeas. I googled it afterwards, and found it all over the internet - my first choice of recipe was one that had been released as a teaser! But I can see why - they were easy to make, and very delicious. We made ours on the BBQ, rather than the oven, roasted some eggplants in them as well, and made them spicy. At the end of cooking, we mixed through some rocket from the garden, and put them in wraps.

White Bean Mashed Potatoes were a yummy and healthy side dish, but a bit more work than I prefer side dishes to be. Potatoes, pumpkin and cannellini beans mixed together were creamy and rich without being super fatty. We had them with eggplant parma, tahini-garlic gai lan, and roasted radishes.

Andy wasn't sold when I told him I would make Lemon-Infused Mediterranean Lentils. He doesn't like the idea of brown lentils just generally, even though when I do cook them, he generally likes them. The same happened with this dish - he liked them so much, he ate two HUGE bowls full. I didn't follow the recipe exactly - I added some zucchini and eggplant to the mix, and made it saucy, and it was fantastic served over rice. The saucy-stewy lentils were a great cold-weather meal, but the lemon juice and zest kept it from feeling stodgy.

Tonight's dinner was similarly "based on" with lots of changes, this time based on Yellow Sweet Potato Chickpea Pie with Basil. I used orange sweet potato and cannellini beans instead of chickpeas. This was much better than most of the quiche-type things we have made in the past, partially because it doesn't try to be a quiche at all. The slight sweetness from the sweet potato, the aniseedy basil, and the creamy beans all combined into something magical. Andy suggested (and I agree wholeheartedly) that these would be great at a party in mini form.

 This is my current go-to book for recipes when we've got veggies I can't decide what to do with. I'm very glad I got this book!