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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. Inspired by the flatness of poster art and the childlike fun of the artwork of Australia's much loved Michael Leunig. I like the idea of the eating paddock to plate, or in this case, garden to pie. Look how fresh this Spring pie is. The plants are still growing!!

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The meatless meals recipe - Spring Pot Pie

It's not as much work as it seems! Don't be put off by the long recipe. This is really a straightforward pot pie where the actual vegetable filling can be flexible. Most of the flavour is in the stock which then makes a thick filling sauce and a pea sauce for topping. This is one of those recipes good for using up all sorts of odds and ends from the garden or left over in the fridge.

For 4 individual pot pies when served with mash

Stock

6 peppercorns
4 bay leaves
8-10 large fresh sage leaves, finely chopped (about 2 teaspoons) Dried sage is far stronger than fresh so use far far less if substituting
2" fresh rosemary
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon salt
Liquid volume should total 1L:
1 tablespoon / 20ml olive oil
1 tablespoon / 20ml lemon juice
1 tablespoon / 20ml white wine vinegar
1 cup dry white wine
690ml water

Pie Filling

1 small-medium parsnip
2 cups finely shredded silverbeet or cabbage
1 leek or medium-large onion, chopped or sliced
240g cooked beans
1 small turnip or swede, chopped
1 1/2 medium carrots, sliced or diced

Thick Stock Sauce

1 cup stock liquid (after cooking)
1 tablespoon cornflour

Pea Sauce

2 cups peas
2 tablespoons fresh mint
2 tablespoons fresh parsley
2/3 cup / 180ml stock liquid (after cooking)


500g shortcrust or puff pastry for pie lining and lid


Put stock ingredients in a pot with a lid on.
Simmer gently for 15 minutes.
Add pie filling ingredients to the pot.
Simmer gently for another 15 minutes. Keep the lid on.
Test that veg are done and keep simmering if necessary.
Grease pie dishes with olive oil.
Line with pastry.
Strain pie filling ingredients. KEEP THE STOCK LIQUID. Remove bay leaves and rosemary stalk.
Fill pies.
Using 1 cup of stock liquid, make a thick stock sauce by whisking in 1 tablespoon of cornflour to thicken.
Pour equal amounts of the thick stock sauce into each pie.
Put pastry lids on the pies.
Bake in the oven for 30 minutes at 180c to cook the pastry.
Make the pea sauce by putting cooked peas, mint, parsley and stock into a blender and whizzing until smooth.

Serve pot pies with pea sauce and mashed potato.

Zesty. Fresh. Hearty. Moreish.

***

Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Celebrating the squiggliness of linguini and the zing and pop of fresh summer ingredients. An oodley botannical inspired ode.

Interior photo by rogue-designs

Original art for you. Yes, YOU!

Did you know you can download images of the paintings for your own personal (not commercial) use? Computer wallpaper, Facebook profile picture, yes you can. Find your favourite painting on Flickr, go to actions, view all sizes, download the size you want to your device, set it as your wallpaper or profile. And tell your friends where it came from :)


Original artwork can be purchased in the Official Art Store. This particular piece is currently drying and will be available shortly for $AU150. To find out exactly when that is, get on the mailing list, yellow box top left. Or email me (fi at wherefishsing.com) to let me know you're interested.

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The meatless meals recipe

If you grow zucchinis you know that the biggest 'problem' with them is finding enough homes for the sheer quantity of zucchinis that appear. They are nothing if not prolific. And so summer can become a quest for ways to make use of all these zucchinis. I'm not going to add to the cornicopia of recipes out there for soups and baked goodies that manage to inventively squirral away filler zucchini. No, this one celebrates them and makes them a centrepiece, and uses them up promptly at the same time.

Per serve:

100g pasta (linguini!)
300g zucchini (about 1 large or 1 1/2 medium) cut into thin flexible fingers or matchsticks
2 or more tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 or more tablespoons water
juice and zest of 1/4 of a large lemon
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives
1 tablespoon finely chopped mint
cracked black pepper to taste

Fry zucchini fingers in 1 tablespoon of olive oil and all the salt.
When appealingly browned (and probably beginning to stick) add water to ensure they are steamed all the way through. Keep cooking until all the water is gone to ensure the zucchini are lusciously soft. Add more water and keep cooking if necessary.
Meanwhile, cook pasta and drain.
Toss the pasta with the other tablespoon of olive oil to coat it well.
Combine the pasta, cooked zucchini, chives and mint. Add the lemon juice, zest and balsamic and mix everything together well.
Add pepper to taste.

Remember, this amount is per person.

Chunky. Filling. Easy. Hearty.

***

Food painting artwork is 30 x 30cm oil on linen. Inspired by the colourful and happy landscapes of Ton Schulten, a Dutch artist whom I discovered by accident (always the way, really) while browsing through a gallery shop, probably the Tate Modern in London though I'm not sure. Anyway, I spied a very small diary about the size of my hand and it was filled, filled, with bright happy colourful landscapes. I bought it and now a lot of those pages are in my inspiration scrapbook. This is not a 'scrapbook' in the fancy designed memorial sense of 'scrapbooking', but a magpie collection of scraps of paper with images that grab me all glued haphazardly into one book.

The connection between Ton's landscape style and this roast vege salad is the chunks of colour he uses and of the veges in the bowl, and the bare yet not barren fields of winter that these mostly root veges have come from.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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Another meatless meals recipe

1 carrot

1 parsnip

200g broccoli or cauliflower

200-250g pumpkin

3 medium potatoes

1 medium onion

90-100g haloumi cheese, cubed or sliced

4 tablespoons hommous - recipe for homemade hommous coming!

around 75g brazil nuts, roughly sliced

around 65g rocket

Preheat your oven to 200 C.

Chop all your veges (carrot, parsnip, broccoli, cauliflower, pumpkin, potato, onion) into pieces no larger than one inch cubes.

Roast on a lightly oiled tray for 45-60 minutes until the veg are nicely cooked. Go easy on any additional salt as haloumi is salty enough. In the end you probably won't need any more.

Remember to turn the veg from time to time. The roasting time will vary from oven to oven and depend on the size of the veg pieces too.

Divide the roasted veg across two bowls and top with haloumi, hommous, rocket and brazil nuts.

This makes a rather big meal for 2.

Thrifty. Creamy. Hearty. Easy.

***

Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Inspired by a Twitter comment by the design minded @reese on the innocent quality of blind contour drawing. What's that? It's a drawing practice where you keep your eye on the subject and your pencil moving and you never look at what's appearing on the page. It improves hand-eye coordination and confidence.

I hooked on the idea of using that innocent quality of simple lines and shapes on the completely weird brussel sprout plant. And so we ended up with high brow oil painting meets low brow pencil cartooning. I'm liking this hybrid. For the unaware, the brussel sprout plant is the alien of the vegetable world. When harvested, they look like this (the leaves have been cut off those spikey stalks):

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

***

The meatless meals recipe

In the spirit of finding tasty, easy and hearty things to do with the blander winter veg, I challenged myself to ‘do something’ with brussels sprouts that wasn’t just a side dish. You would not believe how many different incarnations this concept went through before landing here. The original idea was to use chestnuts as they go so well with brussels. 

But. 

After shelling, about half of our chestnuts were rotten and they can be such a time consuming pain in the behind to prepare, that they were dumped. I know when I’m cold and hungry the last thing I want to do is sit down and peel an ingredient for half an hour before I can even get started on making the meal. I am quite sure I am not alone in this sentiment. What we have here is the exact opposite. Quick to prepare and made of humble ingredients. Filling and tasty.

Bingo. 

Oh, and it’s not actually a casserole as it never gets near the oven. Casserole just sounded tastier than stew, which rhymes with ‘ew’. Point taken?

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion, roughly diced

1 ½ green apples, chopped fine but rough

2 cups stock, possibly three

¼ cup split peas

¼ cup lentils

¼ cup rice

1 cup cooked mixed beans

125g mushrooms, chopped

350g brussel sprouts (in quarters) or cabbage (finely sliced)

½ teaspoon dried sage

300ml cream

375g potato in bite size pieces

Saute onion in butter until golden.

Add apple and a little stock, put the lid on the pot and cook the apple until it’s mashable.

Mash into a rough sauce.

Then add everything else and simmer, lid off, until all the ingredients are done. This will be around 30 minutes. Keep an eye on the amount of liquid and add extra stock to prevent sticking if necessary.

Serves 4. 

A generous amount of cracked black pepper works well on top.

Hearty. Thrifty. Leisurely. Easy.

***

Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Thanks to cold snowy nights and the possibly true or possibly fictitious history of shepherds pie being the dish of shepherds (as in tending a flock of sheep or indeed eating them!) when coming down from the mountains into the village. Also well and truly inspired by Chagall's 'I and the Village' shown below, thanks to the sheep, village and mountains shared by both the shepherds pie myth and the painting.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

Middle of winter. Lashings of mashed potato. Hearty filling beans. Veg and herbs all simmered together in beer until meltable. How good does this sound?

To cook this recipe you will need a lidded casserole dish that can hold more than 1.2L or 2 pints of liquid, or be prepared to clean the bottom of your oven of all the burnt on overflow.

Filling:
2 onions, diced
1 carrot, diced
1/2 cup diced celeriac or 2 stalks celery, sliced
1 tablespoon butter
2 teaspoons dried rosemary
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup dried lentils or split peas (not the little red ones as they just turn into mush)
1/2 cup grains, ie rice (barley is not ideal as it doesn't always cook in time)
2 tablespoons plain flour
2 teaspoons sugar

These liquids need to total 1L:
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
around 330ml beer
stock

Topping:
800g potato
milk and butter to taste for mash

Melt the butter and sweat (lid on) the onion, carrot and celery/celeriac with the salt for around 10 minutes until these are all soft.
Take off the heat and add all the other filling ingredients and stir well.
Then add the liquids and stir well.
Bake in the oven for 1 hour at 160C with the lid on.
Meanwhile, boil, drain and mash the potato, adding milk and butter as you like.
Add the potato topping to the filling.
Place back in the oven minus the lid for another 30 minutes.

Serves 4. 

Tangy. Unusual. Hearty. Easy.

***

Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Persian fairy tales are wonderful. Actually, that's probably true of most fairy tales. I digress. How captivating is a giant benevolent peacock so old that it knows the knowledge of all the Ages, which purifies the land and waters and acts as mediator and messenger between the earth and sky? It gets better. This Simurgh roosts in Saena, "the Tree of Life, which stands in the middle of the world sea Vourukhasa. The plant is potent medicine, is called all-healing, and the seeds of all plants are deposited on it. When the Simurgh takes flight, the leaves of the Tree of Life shake making all the seeds of every plant fall out. These seeds floated around the world on the winds of Vayu-Vata and the rains of Tishtrya, in cosmology taking root to become every type of plant that ever lived, and curing all the illnesses of mankind." (From Wikipedia) Just wow.

So this painting is inspired by this magical Persian take on cosmology. In this version, all the greenery of this recipe is visible on the Tree of Life and the overall style is strongly influenced by the Persian folk art of this creation myth.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

***

The meatless meals recipe

OMG a winter stew that I actually like! In creating and testing recipes for winter I discovered that I'm really really truly not a fan of stew. I think I find an entire bowl of sloppy winter vegetables just a bit boring. Which come to think of it is rather odd as I LOVE thick chunky soups. Go figure. Anyway, where I was heading is that I tried stews from cultures all over the world. From the many that were translated into vege versions, this is the only one which made me sit up and go 'wow, that worked'. With all the flavour from the truckload of herbs in this dish, it is anything but dull.

3 tablespoons oil

1 large onion, diced

1 teaspoon turmeric

750g potatoes, in bite size cubes

Greens:

2 cups finely chopped fresh spinach or similar

1 cup finely chopped spring onion, all parts

1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsley - leaves and small stalks (did you know that the stalks hold the flavour in parsley?)

1/4 cup finely chopped coriander

1 tablespoon dried fenugreek leaves

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh chives

juice of 3 limes

1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

2 cups stock

240g cooked kidney beans

Saute the onion in the oil in a very big pot until a deep golden colour.

Add turmeric and fry for a minute or two.

Add potato and mix well. 

Fry until potatoes are browned.

Add greens and fry, stirring, until greens deepen in colour and darken.

Add stock, kidney beans, lime juice and cinnamon. 

Simmer, covered, for 30 mins or until potatoes are well cooked.
Do. Not. Boil.

Check seasoning for salt, pepper and lime juice.

Serves 3. Yes that's an odd quantity.

Hearty. Easy. Thrifty. Filling.

***

Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic and oil pen on canvas. As the bay leaf is the key to this dish, it is also the subject of the artwork. If you have a bay tree you'll know that the leaves are so much richer, glossier and have far more character to their flavour than their dried equivalent. I wanted to try and capture the simplicity and depth of both the look and taste of the fresh bay leaf. A bit of pop fun seemed to be the best way to do this.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

***

The meatless meals recipe

This recipe is actually a two for one deal! There's the base recipe and a delicious variation. Both are incredibly simple and I quote, 'bloody delicious'. The bay leaves are essential.

+++

More vegetarian cookbook goodies

Need help with conversions? Download this handy dandy pdf of cooking conversion charts for every cooking measuring system I could find. It should make your life easier.

Want to check out more vegetarian dinner recipes? They're all in the Table of Contents.

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1 tablespoon oil
2 big (green cooking) apples, cored and sliced
1 onion, sliced
1/2 cup red split peas
1/2 cup barley
2 large/4 small tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon sugar
4 -5 cups stock
salt to taste

Fry the onion and apple pieces in oil until the apple is quite soft.
Add all the other ingredients bar the salt.  Cook gently with the pan LID ON until the barley is soft and plump.  This will take at least an hour.  Watch that the soup does not catch on the bottom of the pan.  Add more stock or water if necessary.
Salt to taste.
Makes 4-5 bowls of very thick soup.  Some may insist that this is a stew.  I don't care what it's called.  It's one of my favorites.

Hearty. Chunky. Satisfying. Warming. 

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30 cm acrylic on canvas. The Ukrainian folk art of egg decorating, known as Pysanky, interpreted as a bowl of soup.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

***

The meatless meals recipe

As you may well be aware, Borscht is a Slavic recipe that celebrates beetroot. What's there to get excited about when it comes to beets? Well, the Oracle at Delphi (of Greek mythology, not of software companies) claimed that beetroot was second only in mystical potency to horseradish, and that it was worth its weight in silver. Beetroot contains betaine, which in other forms is used to help treat depression, and trytophan, which is that woohoo-feel-good chemical in chocolate. If these aren't enough, in many cultures there is the belief that if a man and a woman eat from the same beetroot they will fall in love... A pretty good outcome from a Meatless Monday? This recipe is my adaptation of the Borscht in The New Covent Garden Soup Company's Book of Soups.

500g raw washed beets, grated

500g red cabbage, finely shredded

360g potato, diced small

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

3 tomatoes, pureed or diced fine

125g butter

1.2L strong stock

1 medium onion, grated

1 carrot, grated

salt and pepper to taste

1 tablespoon raw sugar

Put the beetroot, cabbage and potato in a large pan with the tomato, vinegar, HALF the butter and all the stock.

Simmer for one hour.

In another pan, melt the remaining butter and saute the carrot and onion until golden.

Add to the beets.

Cover and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Season with salt and pepper to taste and add the sugar.

Makes 6 very red bowls.

+++

More vegetarian cookbook goodies

Need help with conversions? Download this handy dandy pdf of cooking conversion charts for every cooking measuring system I could find. It should make your life easier.

Want to check out more vegetarian dinner recipes? They're all in the Table of Contents.

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Hearty. Filling. Chunky. Thick.

A super duper easy and filling meal for Meatless Monday! Join the movement to cut out meat one day a week for the benefit of your own health and to help our planet too. And I add, your hip pocket.

Everyone has their favourite soup, and for a long time, mine was cream of mushroom. I'd never had mushroom soup any other way. But by the time it came to me cooking my own cream of mushroom soup, I was over it. These things happen. But I love mushrooms, and so I was determined to find another way. Only a few trials later, I hit the mushroom soup jackpot. This recipe is very hearty. In fact, you could easily call it a stew.

1 tablespoon or more of butter

1 onion, diced

500g mushrooms, sliced very thick

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon dried rosemary

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 cup or 125ml dry sherry

2 fist sized potatoes, diced small

1/2 cup or 100g pearl barley

5 cups or 1.25L weak vegetable stock (be careful here, it is easy to overdo the salt. Remember there is already half a teaspoon of salt in the soup. Err on the side of caution as more salt can be added at the end if necessary)

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley stalks

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh parsley leaves

Melt the butter in a pot on a medium to high heat.

Add the onion, mushrooms, salt, rosemary and garlic.

Fry together, straining off any liquid into the stock. The aim is to get as much flavour as possible into the mushrooms at this point, so fry for as long as it takes to get them golden brown.

Throw in the sherry, stand back and stir. It should hiss a lot.

When all the sherry has evaporated, add in all the other ingredients, saving the parsley leaves until later.

Simmer gently with the lid on for 30-40 minutes until the barley is tender.

Stir in the parsley leaves and serve.

Makes 4-5 bowls.

+++

More vegetarian cookbook goodies

Need help with conversions? Download this handy dandy pdf of cooking conversion charts for every cooking measuring system I could find. It should make your life easier.

Want to check out more vegetarian dinner recipes? They're all in the Table of Contents.

+++

Tangy. Hearty. Warming. Chunky.

Food painting artwork

30x30cm gouache on canvas. Inspired by the Campbells tomato soup cans of the very famous Andy Warhol.

When I was little and went to the football with my dad, we always seemed to end up taking a thermos of tomato soup with us. It was revolting tinned stuff that I wouldn't usually enjoy eating but after sitting in the cold for an entire afternoon, it was just wonderful. This tomato soup recipe is just as hearty and delicious and doesn't require the eater to be damp and hungry for it to taste great. And it's an easy way to use up some of those gazillion tomatoes that have grown over summer.

1/2 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion, diced small

3 bay leaves

3 whole cloves

2 teaspoons dried tarragon

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon sugar

4 cups or 1L medium to strong vegetable stock

1kg fresh tomatoes, diced small

1-2 cups cooked, tinned or fresh (but not dried) beans such as borlotti, haricot, cannellini etc

black pepper to taste

All the ingredients need to be finely chopped as there is no pureeing. This is a chunky soup.

Melt the butter and oil together.

Saute the onion in the oil and butter until soft.

Add all the other ingredients.

Simmer very gently for an hour with the pot lid on.

Remove the bay leaves (and cloves if you can find them).

Serve with cracked black pepper.

Makes 4-6 bowls.