Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes

Potatoes are the food for students and those with smaller budgets and everyone in between. They are pretty much almost always cheap (I picked up a 2kg bag of organic potatoes from Woollies for $2) particularly if you buy the unwashed ones. I usually prefer to buy potatoes with red or purple skin because of added health benefits compared to regular white potatoes which are a little bit more expensive but sometimes you can find them at a good price (my local fruit shop had purple skinned potatoes for $2.99/kg for weeks so that's what I was buying). Sweet potatoes are also excellent and often cheap - I just picked up one sweet potato that was as big as my head for 59c/kg. Potatoes won't make you fat, by the way. Silly myth.

Want to know a really easy cheap meal to make showcasing potatoes? Curry. Pretty much any kind of curry can have potatoes in it. This one is the Potato and Pea curry from Easy Vegan Cooking by Leah Leneman. All it is is potaotes (duh), frozen peas, onion, garlic, ginger, carrot, coconut milk and garam masala powder. We didn't have to go to the shops to buy anything for this meal (which made 4 large servings) because all the ingredients are basics that I always have. If you don't have garam masala just use curry powder. Or throw in some random Indian spices like coriander, cumin and chilli.

I need to buy a couple of plain white plates I think. Photographing yellow food isn't all that fun when it's on a yellow plate. Under yellow light.

I've finally figured out how to roast potatoes properly.

And the results are pretty damn delicious :)

Cut potatoes relatively small. Preheat oven to 210 degrees. Mix potatoes with about 1 tbsp of oil. Put in oven. Cook for about 45 minutes. Mmmm.

I had to perform that difficult procedure to make the 'White Beans and Lemon Potatoes with Olives and Tomatoes' from Vegan on the Cheap (pg 165). However, I change every recipe I cook from. I used about 3x as many olives, extra potatoes (because there were only a few left in the bag and the rest were squishy), kidney beans instead of white beans (and an extra cup at that), like 8 cloves of garlic left whole instead of 3 crushed, and fresh basil added at the end instead of parsley. Served it on twisty tricolour pasta. It was so delicious. Simplicity at it's best. Not many flavours compliment each other as well as olives and well, anything really.

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This was part of the meal plan I wrote for this week. Our budget is a little tight because of moving costs, and me not being able to work for a few days due to flooding (yay rain!) and I find a concrete plan makes things a lot easier to handle. And since I have a pantry, and the shops are a little further away than the top of our driveway, I can buy the whole weeks groceries at once. It helps that our local fruit shop is the cheapest fruit shop I've ever been to. And the produce lasts!

I'll be blogging a little more later about various other things we have been cooking. My camera cord was in a box somewhere so I have quite the backlog of pictures to go through :)

A little bit of a foodie update...

So I was craving dessert this week. I even bought ice cream.

I made an apple and pear tart/pie. I cooked up two medium apple and one medium pear (it was a different pear - got it from the farmer's market. Can't remember what it was called but it looked like an apple but pear shaped. It's skin was thick but cooked well) with some cinnamon, and put in my tart pan with a basic wholemeal pastry base. As you can see I went all out and made a proper lattice top! Pretty sure I did it the hard way. Is there an easy way?

It went perfectly with vanilla So Good ice cream and a bit of lindt 85% dark chocolate. I ate most of the rest cold for morning tea at work during the rest of the week.

Nadine hasn't been working much so she's been queen of the kitchen lately! This is a spinach and potato curry from appetite for reduction. Delicious. It is so fun to eat quinoa!

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Nadine has cooked a delicious looking dinner for me tonight! We are celebrating our third anniversary with Dvd's, a yummy dinner, and tomorrow we will spend the day bush walking and...car shopping. Guh!

I made a couple of recipes from the PPK :)

I stumbled upon this recipe for 'Chesapeake Tempeh Cakes' on the Post Punk Kitchen blog and had to try it. I'm always on the look out for ways to eat tempeh that isn't disgusting. This is definately one of them.

Look how disgusting tempeh looks! It's like congealed set vomit with lumpy bits, and not cooked properly that's kinda what it tastes like. This one was actually the cheapest one in the store - I got it at $4.75 for 125g. I chose it because it had chilli bits in it as you can see, and I thought that'd probably make it taste better again. Another thing wrong with tempeh is that it's so damn expensive. Last time I used a tofu-tempeh mixed block which was a good stepping stone (and cheaper at about the same price for twice as much), this time we were ready for the real stuff.

Man these cake things were good. As you can see from the top picture I served it with steamed mixed veges (carrot, home grown beans, farmer's market white radish, a very sweet yellow squash and some asparagus) and some steamed-then-grilled potatoes. Oh, and a chunk of extremely delicious organic avocado I couldn't resist picking up at the same store I got the tempeh from.

The little patties were very easy to form (I think they would make a good burger pattie or sausage if rolled into the right shape). I made mine smaller than the recipe did because I made 14 instead of 10. We had enough to eat for lunch today :) I also made heaps of the veges and reheated them today as well.

Yum. Pretty sure that I'll be using this recipe quite a bit as I start to be able to afford tempeh a little more often :)

This is another thing I made from the Post Punk Kitchen blog - Chickpea Picatta. It's a very simple dish of chickpeas (duh), garlic, onion, capers and white wine. I was so excited at finding a recipe with chickpeas that WASN'T a curry that I couldn't wait to make it and it didn't dissapoint. Though the greens I chose to serve it on (I bought some chicory at the farmer's market as I'd never had it before) were a little too bitter for the dish it was still really delicious overall. Nadine didn't mind the bitter though. I also decided to serve it on mashed potatoes as the recipe suggests - but since I don't like mashed potatoes I mashed in a parsnip with it, and it worked.

Unless you can find a really cheap vegan white wine to use in this recipe, it's not THAT cheap to make (well, compared to other recipes I make) but we just drank the rest of the bottle with dinner so there was no wastage! Well I had beer, someone else finished all the wine ;)

I cooked up a massive batch of chickpeas (they take so damn LONG) and have frozen the rest to use later. I'm using some tonight as a matter of fact, in a recipe from a cookbook I just bought myself, I am very excited about trying a recipe.

Minestrone with pesto

Minestrone :)

Minestrone
Serves at least 6

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of brown/green lentils, soaked for an hour or so in hot water
2.5 cups 'chicken' stock
1 cup red wine
oil for frying (Can use water)
1 large onion, chopped
1 med eggplant, cubed (I don't peel mine but you can if you want)
1 med carrot, chopped
1 big stalk of celery sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
800mL cooked tomatoes (about 2x400g cans or 1x800g can)
3 med potatoes, skin on, cubed smallish
1 med zucchini, chopped
handful fresh green beans, sliced
1/2 cup sprial pasta, or other small shape
Basil pesto for garnish

Method:

Fry onion, eggplant, carrot and celery in oil until starting to soften. Add garlic and stir. Add stock, wine, tomatoes, lentils (without soaking water - you can use this to make the stock) and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Put in potatoes, zucchini, pasta and green beans. (I added an extra cup of water here because the liquid had simmered down a bit). Turn heat back up and gently boil for about 15 minutes, or until potatoes, pasta and lentils are cooked. They should be by now!

Serve in bowls with a spoonful of pesto on top to stir in. Add as much as you like - we had quite large dollops. It was delicious!

The wine seems like a bit much at first, but by the end of the cooking time it had mellowed out quite a bit.

This would be good for omnivourous friends/family :) If I were giving it to my family I'd probably replace the eggplant with extra pasta or lentils, or just leave it out, and chop the celery up really tiny. But everybody has different tastes!

A few new dishes we have had this week

Sweet potato arancini (modified from a Women's weekly magazine recipe) and side salad of baby spinach, mixed olives, nasturtium flowers and leave with balsamic vinegar. Nasturtium leaves and flowers are my new discovery. I love them. My neighbour's nasturtium is running everywhere...and through my fence. Score. I may steal a few plants from school and put them in my garden and see if they grow. I have not much sun :(

Vegetable Biriyani (South Africa) from the Oxfam Shop Vegetarian Cookbook. Hearty, comforting, delicious, cheap.

I also made some Almond-Quinoa muffins from Veganomicon but the pictures sucked. But they are my new favourite muffins. I used leftover almond meal from making milk, dried a bit in the oven for about half an hour.

I've found a new love in chia seeds.

I bought a whole organic pumpkin and I'm going to cook up a storm with it this week. I am very excited :)