quickie - real food

Not AWOL just busy. Fingers required to type words, lots of them. I have been cooking. Simple things. Delightful things. Here’s part of the week or two that was, in food.

1. Soup under Lucy’s guidance. How nice when a friend says “I can’t come for dinner tonight but I can help you cook instead”. The SE and I have been having this informal winter thing. Friends that are in the neighbourhood on certain chilly evenings have been assured a glass of wine or some warming chai, dips, nibbles and a hearty bowl of soup. If they stay long enough the SE mother’s solstice cake comes out. Friends, wine and food. A random assortment each time. What could be better?

Lucy’s soup involved onion, garlic, coriander, cumin, little green (puy) lentils, and ribbons of cavolo nero. Finished of with fresh coriander and a squeeze of lemon – it was a winner.

2. Baked vegetables. Not rocket science, just comforting, especially when they go all crispy. Potatoes are mandatory; I like them cut quite small so there is maximum crunchiness. Depending on what is in the house there has been some sweet potatoes, pumpkin, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts – all roasted after a toss with olive oil, salt and pepper. A little fresh rosemary if its not raining (because as nice as the herb is, even a short dash to the garden in the cold and wet is no fun).

3. Pasta of the month (or two) is onion, garlic and masses of cavolo nero, we just can’t get enough of this wintry green. Often with tuna, sometimes preserved lemon and olives. Stirred through gluten-free pasta and we’ve happy campers indeed.

4. More marinated tofu and salad (yes the SE been eating meat again).

5. Vegetable tagine/tajine in the real thing – the vessel itself soaked for 24 hours, dried for another hour, oiled then in a very slow oven. A slow bake. Onion, leek, fennel and Japanese eggplants are my favourite base, flavoured with lashings of homemade harissa. Pumpkin and chickpeas replaced the fish from my earlier endeavours. The drizzle of tahini when serving makes all the difference.

6. Brown rice. With tagines and curries. The latter made from Sri Lankan spice powder, added garam marsala, extra chillies and garlic. Lots of tamarind water for tang. Vegetables – something green and leafy, potato and chickpeas.

No photos, no recipes, just food. Hope this inspires a vegetarian twist in your menu this week.

nut loaf that some would call a roast

It’s been years since I made a nut roast but I will never forget my first experience of one. Living in London in my early 20’s, I was fortunate enough to have two Christmases. The first was at my boyfriend’s house before everyone took off to their families for the big day. It involved a roast turkey (which being vego I avoided), paper hats, lots of alcohol and a fair few waifs and strays, mostly of the melancholic Welsh variety. On the 25th I hopped on the tube to South London with the friend who I’d been staying with, for an all girl, mostly lesbian, vegetarian Christmas. There was paper hats, lots of alcohol, a rousing game of Trivial Pursuits – and nut roast. How quaint, I remember thinking.

Living in London through the next year I quickly discovered a nut roast is the way that the British vegetarians mark a celebration. Or at least they did in that part of the twentieth century. I bought the tradition back to Melbourne to some of the vegetarian shared houses I lived in. But folks, it’s been a while and although I embraced this culinary challenge (spurred on by Lucy) it has involved a lot of digging in my memory banks to dredge up a recipe. I know there have been many variations. I have used the same recipes to even make more labour intensive nut or tofu balls, rather than the roast which is essentially a loaf. On that point, I don’t believe the dish has in any way represented faux meat, rather it is a “roast” in the sense that it is a hearty baked dish for a cold climate, one that is shared with friends and family, often in celebration. But technically speaking it is a savoury loaf of the vegetarian variety.



My nut roasts have tended to include ground almonds and other nuts and cooked brown rice or tofu. Using only nuts tends to make a very rich loaf. Adding rice can cut that richness but sometime makes it heavier and more crunchy. Tofu reduces both the richness and weight. For this venture I decided to combine all three. For flavour I have always used sautéed onion and garlic and a generous splash of tamari (a less harshly flavoured, Japanese version of soy). A dash of roasted sesame oil is a great way of adding the essence of the seeds without the bulk. Lucy’s version, though cheesy, appealed to me by including mushrooms – so since I was heading back to the drawing board on this recipe, I added some fresh shitake mushrooms for the first time and they were a definite winner.



Ok quantities, don’t laugh – I actually did some weighing and measuring for this one but I’m going to throw my notes out. After all, every loaf tin or container I have cooked this in over the years has varied in size – so I am going with a radical suggestion regarding the amounts needed of three of the main ingredients – to do them by eye!

Nut Loaf with Shitake Mushrooms

Approx 300g, raw nuts, I used almonds and cashews, ground in a food processor. (Pulse the nuts til you get a coarse, breadcrumb like consistency. If you over do it you will end up with nut paste)
1/2 – 1 block, firm tofu, squeeze out the excess water, crumbled
1/2 – 1 cup, cooked brown rice
1 – 2 tabs, vegetable oil
1 onion, diced
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
100 – 150 g, fresh shitake mushrooms, diced
2 (possibly more) eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon, tamari
Roasted sesame oil or raw sesame seed

Cook the brown rice in advance using the absorption method. Leftover rice is fine.

Heat your oven to 180c. If you want to eat some roast vegetables with the loaf, it is a good idea to prepare them first and get them underway. I roasted a lovely acorn squash and some parsnip, which was perfect.

Sauté the onion and garlic slowly in the vegetable oil and allow to cool. Do the same with the mushrooms.

Now here comes the radical bit – get your loaf tin and half fill it with nuts before grinding them. This give you a base amount of nuts and the other dry ingredients to use. Use about half the amount each of tofu and cooked brown rice. If you want a less rich loaf, only 1/3 fill the tin with nuts and try equal quantities of rice and tofu.

Mix the ground nuts, rice, and crumbled tofu in a large bowl. Add the cooked onion, garlic and shitake mushrooms. In a separate bowl, beat your eggs with the tamari. Slowly mix the eggs into the other ingredients – you want the mixture to hold together without being too eggy. Try rolling it into a ball and see how smooth it looks.

Press the mixture into your loaf tin lined with baking paper and either sprinkle sesame seeds or splash the top with a little sesame oil.

Depending on the size of your tin and the wetness of the ingredients it will take about 40 minutes. Start checking from 30 minutes.

Serve with a sauce or gravy of your choosing. In the past I often put together a very speedy and simple mixture of miso paste and tahini, whipped together with warm water until it was the consistency of gravy. This time I went whole hog and made a slow cooked tomato sauce, with finely chopped onion, lots of garlic, wine, salt and pepper. It really gave the loaf a bit of a lift.




This post has risen to Johanna’s challenge ”a neb at nut roast". Entries close April 18.

seasonal eating

This is the point in winter when eating seasonally can become a little tiresome. While nature is gathering energy for the abundance of spring we are left with hardier plant foods – root vegetables, dense fruits like apples and traditionally a store cupboard of dry goods like beans, nuts and grains.

Of course living in the middle of a big city I don’t strictly need to adhere to such a diet. There are grapes and cherries flown in from across the world. I could swap the leathery silverbeet for greenhouse grown tender greens. Fresh tomatoes appear all year round, even if they are tasteless.

You see my choices are equally about taste as they are a tentative foray into the world of ecological consciousness. There is a nuttiness in the pumpkin roasted at this time of year. My belly feels satisfied with a serve of potato when it is cold outside. Parsnips are tender and sweet when freshly picked.

But as much as I like these foods, with a smaller amount of fresh vegetables on the menu for these weeks – familiarity begins to breed if not contempt, just a lack of excitement for things culinary.

This season’s most cooked vegetables revolve around sweet potato, carrots, pumpkin, potato, parsnips, and beetroot. There is a head of cabbage or cauliflower thrown in. More silverbeet than I would usually cook with, other than times that I have grown it. The organic stall has stockpiled enough onions, they hope, to last these months and kept them at a good price even though technically they are out of season. Life without onions or garlic tends to get very dull.

The upside is that in order to avoid boredom, though the ingredients tend to remain constant, it encourages me to use old vegetables in new ways.

This week the last serve of a large pumpkin needed to be eaten. It was the end of the shopping week and the challenge was to make a tasty dinner with only onions and pumpkin as the fresh ingredients. It could have been a curry with tofu, a pumpkin soup with a dash of spice or with beans and pasta to be a cousin of minestrone. Instead it became an even more distant relative of kedgeree.

I sautéed a large amount of diced onion for a long time til it was soft, then added small cubes of pumpkin plus garlic, chilli, a little fresh turmeric and some mild curry powder hiding in the spice drawer. While this slowly cooked in a lidded frypan I put on a pot of basmati rice and another with eggs to boil. When the rice was cooked I stirred it through the vegetables, adding a little butter and salt to carry the flavours. This was finished with a generous amount of parsley from the garden (a de facto green vegetable at this time of year), a large tin of red salmon and topped with the boiled eggs.

I was surprised how well it all came together. The little cubes of pumpkin lent sweetness but didn’t dominate. The salmon worked surprisingly well as a substitute for smoked fish. The combination might alarm a food-combining fascist but the protein and starch made our bellies satisfied.

Sure, I’m looking forward to the fridge brimming with variety but in the meantime I don’t mind having more rice, quinoa, beans and lentils. Salads will return soon enough.