Ginormous farmer's market vegetable stew

I spent my Sunday listening to records and fiddling about the house. I love watching the needle touch down.

It was lovely until the neighbour decided to deafen me and everyone in Perth with her doof doof. Oh well, I played records all day yesterday too :)

This is today's farmer's markets haul. From bottom left clockwise: the best bananas in the world, 1/4 jap pumpkin, celery, kale, brazil nuts, bunya nuts (no idea of what to do with these yet!), parsnip, turnips and potato.

Almost all of the above turned into a gigantic stew!

BIG HONKING ROOT VEGETABLE STEW.

Serves 6 (big)

Ingredients:

400g turnips

700g potatoes

200g carrot

600g pumpkin

250g parsnip

250g celery (about 4 stalks), sliced

1 1/2 cups cooked kidney beans

500g brown onion, quartered

5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

2 tbsp whole peppercorns, crushed or cracked

1 thyme stem left whole

2cm long stem of rosemary left whole

3 bay leaves

2 heaped tsp wholegrain mustard

8 cups weak chicken style stock (or water)

125g short pasta (any shape!)

The method is very simple, as with all stew/soup type dealies.

First, I peeled things that needed peeling (I peel parsnips because we find the skin bitter, and I peeled the larger turnip but left the skin on the smaller one as per the Internet's reccomendations).

Chop everything into large chunks, try to keep the size uniform.

Put everything into a large stock pot, except the pasta shapes and cooked kidney beans. (As you can see, mine was ALMOST too small. [5L] I could have used a smaller potato or something!)

Give it a gentle stir, so as not to overflow the pot, unless yours is ginormous.

Bring pot to a boil, then turn down and simmer for half an hour.

(At this point I turned it off and left it for about an hour while I went to pick Nadine up from work, so if you don't need to leave it just check to see if the vegetables are cooked.)

The pumpkin will be falling apart - this is good. If you want your pumpkin chunks to stay whole, don't put them in at the beginning.

I found that it was too watery still, so I thickened it with a bit of cornflour. This is optional.

Bring back to a boil and add the pasta and beans. Cook until pasta is ready (about as long as the packet says!) Cooking the pasta in it also helps to thicken the gravy!

Serve and enjoy! I served ours with some sauteed kale and silverbeet, but feel free to go for bread or something.

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This was so hearty and flavourful. If you aren't into spicy, cut down the pepper to half. It was very peppery, just how I like it! The herbs were light enough for us to be able to taste each different vegetable, which was good. I liked how the pumpkin turned into mush and spread through the whole thing, making it soupy. 

For something that I just made up on the spot, I'm quite happy with the results! I think this is the first time I've had turnips cooked properly. Last time I tried they were pretty thick and raw haha. I like them. I'll probably buy more next week and do something different.

This would be awesome to chuck in a slow cooker to come home to after work! Unfortunately I don't have one. One day I will, when I have more storage!

Lentil and Chestnut Soup

When I saw a packet of fresh chestnuts at a fruit shop last week for half the price as usual, I had to buy some. I have never ever eaten a chestnut before! I have always wanted to. I looked up instructions on the web for how to roast chestnuts, and most instructions were pretty much the same - cut an x in the top of the nuts, spread them in a single layer with the x facing up on a baking tray, and cook at 190 degrees C for about 30 minutes or until they look a bit like this:

Oh, they smelled good. (I tried one raw and it was strange, but quite tasty, however apparently if you eat a lot of raw chestnuts they can give you a stomach ache).

Then comes the difficult and time consuming part, the part that makes me not to want to buy them ever again...the peeling. As you can see in the above picture, a couple of nuts came out whole but most of it is a mushy mess. That's because I didn't actually roast them long enough, and they were too hard to peel and therefore we had to squeeze out the flesh! My thumbs were bleeding.

But the soup I chose to make with them was completely worth it. I knew I had come across a few recipes on Allotment 2 Kitchen using chestnuts before so I went there first to see what I felt like.

I chose the Lentil and Chestnut Soup. I made a couple of substitutions - I used fresh chestnuts instead of tinned (I ended up with 200g of pulp from 500g nuts) and I had no fennel seeds so I chucked in some dried marjoram (it was the first thing I saw!) I also used a few sprigs of fresh thyme from my garden istead of dried. And I had a 1/4 green cabbage going brown in the fridge so I chucked that in too.

We served it alongside toasted sourdough, which was unecessary as this soup is very hearty and filling! I suppose I COULD have used smaller bowls...

It was really unlike anything we have ever tasted before. The chestnuts added a sweet, almost meaty taste to the soup, and I enjoyed every mouthful! It was a pretty good birthday dinner. :)

I probably will end up buying chestnuts again, as they come more into season. I'll just be prepared for hurt thumbs, or just cook them longer and cut bigger x's. Are there such thing as Australian grown chestnuts? I forgot to read the label at the fruit shop, I was too excited, haha.