Fresh. Chunky. Homely. Unusual.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. Inspired both by a wandering through the artwork (not the cartoons) of Australia's much loved Michael Leunig, and the repeated suggestion from a friend to give other-handed drawing a go.

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The meatless meals recipe - Beetroot and Bean Salad

I won't lie, this dish can take a while to prepare with cooking beetroot and brown rice, double shelling broadbeans and toasting sesame seeds. I don't make it very often, unless I have a glut of homegrown broadbeans straight from the garden and I want to really savour and enjoy their seasonal freshness.

Serves 2

250g double shelled broadbeans or edamame (start with about 300g single shelled broadbeans or 900-1000g unshelled/full broadbeans to end up with this amount)
250g beetroot
brown rice for 2 (about 2/3 cup uncooked) Properly cooked brown rice takes a good 40 minutes, despite what is often written on it's packaging. It should NOT be crunchy. At all.
2 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
zest of half a lemon
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh chives
about 180g goats cheese


Cook the brown rice.
Boil beetroot until tender all the way through.
Run under cold water to cool.
Chop into medium sized cubes.
Mix all the ingredients together and serve atop the rice.

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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.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. Another painting inspired both by a wandering through the artwork (not the cartoons) of Australia's much loved Michael Leunig, and the repeated suggestion from a friend to give other-handed drawing a go.

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The meatless meals recipe - French Toast

Once upon a time, it may have been when I was first introduced to the heaven that is French Toast, I cooked this up for breakfast, oh, every morning for at least a week. Or two. Or more? I can attest that even for a skinny someone with a crazy metabolism, this such a breakfast regime will put weight on you.
Moderation is key. Not too often. Not too much.
Unfortunately.

2 slices bread
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon butter
honey or similar to top

In a flat bottomed container (large enough to lie a slice of bread flat), beat the egg and milk together to blend thoroughly.
Heat the frypan up and melt the butter.
When the pan is quite hot, quickly dip each slice of bread in the egg/milk mix long enough to thoroughly coat each side.  There should be just enough mix for two slices of bread.
Fry immediately in the pan until golden and a little crispy (it will still be soft but should not be soggy).

Top with honey or maple syrup to serve.

Tickles 1 tummy.

Cheesy. Easy. Homely. Quick.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. A nod to the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the three bears and the bowl of 'just right'.

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The meatless meals recipe - Super Easy Goldilocks Mac and Cheese

Once upon a time I used to make a roux to thicken the cheese sauce of my mac and cheese. Now, I am not fond of unnecessary steps or waiting about for my food and so at some point I tried 'cheating' using a judicious amount of cornflour to thicken the sauce. It's much quicker and no, I could not tell the difference.

After trialling many many variations, this is my version of 'just right' mac and cheese. The thickness of the sauce is 'just right'. The cheesiness is 'just right'. The amount of sauce for the quantity of pasta is 'just right'. And it's quick, which is just right for me.


200g uncooked pasta (macaroni!)
1 1/2 teaspoons butter
1 cup milk
1 1/4 cups grated tasty cheese (88g) For extra cheesyness, use 1 1/2 cups cheese (105g) but I think this is a bit strong
1 tablespoon cornflour
salt and pepper to taste


Cook pasta, drain and set aside.
Melt butter in a pan on low-medium heat.
Add most of the milk to the butter. Reserve some for mixing with the cornflour later.
Add cheese to the pot as well. Mix.
In a cup or small bowl, blend or whisk the cornflour and reserved milk.
When most of the cheese has melted, add the cornflour mix to the pot and whisk until thickened.
Take off the heat, add drained pasta into the cheese sauce and mix well.

Serve. Salt and pepper to taste.

The sauce takes 5 minutes to make. Mac and Cheese takes 5 minutes to eat.

 

 

For 2 

Fresh. Easy. Quick. Aromatic.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. An early spring garden of fresh new plants, entangled with spaghetti.

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The meatless meals recipe - Pasta Primavera - Pasta with Spring Vegetables in Herb Sauce

The taste of early spring in a bowl in the time it takes to cook your favourite pasta shape.

 

pasta (papadelle is my favourite for this) for 2, about 200g
parmesan to taste
salt to taste
3 cups mixed spring veg, chopped into bite size pieces - recommended are:
peas, broadbeans, asparagus, broccoli, snap peas, snowpeas

Herb sauce:

1 cup chopped fresh parsley (about 10g)
about 7g finely chopped fresh chives
1/2 cup whole mint leaves (about 4g)
at least 1/4 cup olive oil

Cook pasta.
Pre cook mixed veg. Blanch, boil or steam as suits you. I find steaming the veg on top of the pasta or pouring the drained pasta water over the veg to blanch them both work well to save on washing up, water, energy and general effort!
Put the ingredients for the herb sauce in a blender and blend smooth.
To serve, pile pasta into bowls, then top with sauce then veges and parmesan and salt to taste. Be aware that mixing the pasta and sauce before transferring to the serving bowls leaves most of the sauce and flavour behind sticking to the pot or bowl in which they were mixed.

Warming. Aromatic. Robust. Easy.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on Saunders Waterford 100% cotton archival paper. A design in the style of the heraldic crests (kamon) of Japan. This is the strength, the shield, the warrior which protects against and wards off colds.

Original painting for 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 for $AU150 shortly. To find out exactly when that is, get on the mailing list, yellow box top left.

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The meatless meals recipe

All throughout asia there exists ginger tea as a warming, cold fighting drink. It's so common and popular that you can buy boxes of little sachets of it, ready at the addition of boiling water. They are very convenient, and also so very, very sweet and usually somewhat lacking in the robustness of fresh ginger. Here's how to make the real thing. It's much, much better.

50g fresh ginger, sliced. It can be peeled or unpeeled. Peeled will minimise any scum formation. Unpeeled will have more biting gingery warmth. It's up to you.

3 tablespoons honey

5 cups water.

Put all the ingredients in a pot together and simmer gently for half an hour.

This makes 4 mugs of fresh ginger tea.

The ginger can be reused once. It will still have it's ginger flavour, but no 'kick'. It may also require less honey. 2 tablespoons instead of 3 usually does the trick.

Fun. Spiced. Homely. Robust.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Ready to have some fun? Relive some happy childhood memories?  Dump your diary in the bin, clear the kitchen table, sit down with a bunch of friends and have an innocent child-at-heart partytime. 

Remember -  play with your food!


Original artwork can be purchased in the Official Art Store. To be kept updated on available paintings, get on the mailing list, yellow box top left.

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The meatless meals recipe

This quote from a recipe tester says it all, "makes commercial gingerbread look like sweet sludge". 

This gingerbread has a real and robust flavour that you can actually taste. It's just as easy to make as any other gingerbread. The secret ingredient is glace ginger. 

1/2 cup golden syrup or similar
1/4 cup raw sugar
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon milk
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2  tablespoons finely chopped glace ginger (the secret ingredient)
1/2 teaspoon bicarb soda
pinch ofsalt
2 cups plain flour
several tablespoons water as needed

Heat the golden syrup almost to the boil, then add sugar, butter and milk. Mix well until sugar is dissolved and butter melted then remove from the heat source.
Mix the dry ingredients together, including the glace ginger.
Slowly add dry to wet ingredients, mixing carefully to avoid lumps.  A few tablespoons of water may be needed to make a dough that will hold together and can be handled easily.
Roll out to 3/4 cm thick.  Cut out fun shapes.  Decorate with currants, sultanas and candied citrus peel if you want.
Bake for 5-7 mins in 180C/350F oven.
Eat straight away or cool on a wire rack if you can resist.

Makes about a dozen 10cm tall gingerbread people.

Chunky. Thrifty. Homely. Filling.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on board. England is known for it's dreary grey days. The greyest and foggiest of these days are called pea soupers, when the fog is so settled and thick that you can barely see a few feet in front of you. This painting is an interpretation of a 'pea souper', with a nod to the lovely misty and ethereal tree paintings of Melbourne's Kathryn Ryan.

Original artwork for Autumn and Winter paintings can be purchased in the Official Art Store. To be kept updated on the availablity of Spring and Summer paintings, get on the mailing list, yellow box top left.

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The meatless meals recipe

This recipe is an inspired conglomeration of several pea soups I have known and enjoyed. The first was a family recipe for your bog standard Pea and Ham soup. Very flavouful, somewhat missed once I stopped eating meat. The second was another family recipe for a Pea and Mint soup which was interesting for it's enormous use of mint, but not outstanding in itself. And finally there was the Ainsley Harriet cup-o-soup version of Shropshire Minted Pea Soup from when I was working in London. Drinkable in a cup-o-soup kind of a way, it caught my attention with it's unusual spice and tang. Unfortunately this was due to the inclusion of the world famous Worstershire Sauce which contains anchovies and I stopped drinking this once I realised.  But then it was game on to create my own Pea soup which was flavourful like the Pea and Ham, super minty like the Pea and Mint, and tangy and spicy minus the anchovies like the Shropshire soup. Success below!


1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
a few cracks of pepper and salt
500g dried green split peas
7 cups weak stock
2-3 small bay leaves
up to 1 teaspoon hot paprika
1/4 - 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
2 cups roughly chopped fresh mint (this is about 36g of leaves or 4 cups unchopped) - err on the generous side

Saute the onion in butter until soft with a little pepper and salt.
Add stock, split peas, bay leaves, 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar, and two big pinches of hot paprika.
Simmer gently with the lid on until the peas are completely broken down. This means at least for one hour, and preferably, for two hours.
Taste test. Check for heat/spiciness and cautiously add more hot paprika to suit. It's heat will vary depending on it's age (less heat with age). Also check for tartness/tang. Depending on the balsamic vinegar and your tastes, you may want to add more to suit.
Finally, stir in all the roughly chopped mint.


Makes 4 rather hearty bowls.

Chunky. Satisfying. Homely. Thrifty.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on Crescent Museum RagMat board. This is museum quality board, 100% cotton, made to withstand time.

Abstract Expressionism. A very sixties style of painting. The typical working method is to stand before the canvas and start and let the ideas bubble up from the subconscious while painting to make themselves known. It's not unusual for the artist to only figure out what they painted well after the piece is finished.  This method has had a huge impact on many current artists. The paintings tend to be very abstract and are meant to invoke emotion in the viewer. That's my understanding anyway.

I went about trying abstract expressionism, holding the idea of ministrone soup in my mind while aiming for the particular style of layered large shapes. I was particularly taken by this image by Pamela Scott, available here. It was exactly what I wanted to achieve - a balance of large abstract colour shapes with a retro sensibility.

I have to admit that it was a hundred times harder than it looked. If you like the ministrone soup painting, snap it up, it's a true one off. I won't be working in this style again in a hurry.

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The meatless meals recipe

This ministrone is the genuine article. Though I'm sure there are as many variations on ministrone as there are Italian cooks. This version was originally from the Italian mother of a friend from the distant past.  I'm sure I've put my own twist on it in the intervening years, but I honestly don't remember what was original and what adjustments I may have made. I've cooked this so many times over the years so it's sure to have evolved. My suspicion is that the lambrusca instead of any red wine is my personal twist.

1 cup cooked or 1/3 cup dried cannellini beans
1 cup fresh or 1/3 cup dried whole green peas
7 cups stock
2 medium carrots, sliced
1 stick celery, sliced
1 largish onion, chopped
8 tomatoes rough chopped or around 600g tomatoe puree
optional 1/2 cup of any leafy green roughly chopped
optional 1/2 chilli, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 cup uncooked macaroni
optional and highly recommended 1 cup sweetish red wine (something like lambrusca is fabulous)

Warning. You will need a big pot.
For dried beans and peas, soak them overnight in the stock and then simmer for 1-2 hours with the celery, carrot and onion until the beans and peas are soft.
For cooked beans and fresh peas, just simmer these together with the stock, celery, carrot and onion for 40 minutes.
Then add the tomato, leafy greens, basil, oregano and chilli. Cook for 10 minutes.
Add the macaroni (and frozen peas here if you are cheating) and cook until the pasta is tender.
Add the red wine and heat through.

Serve with big chunks of crusty bread.
Feeds at least 6.

Leisurely. Versatile. Unusual. Hearty. 

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on paper. The paper is no ordinary paper, it is textured Hahnemuhle 300 gsm 100% alpha cellulose which is acid-free fibre of vegetable origin. A high quality paper, made to last for generations.

The symbol in this artwork is based on an ancient Chinese lotus charm. The buddah and the lotus are closely connected and I like that the hidden meaning of the charm, continuous harmony, is a suitable sentiment for the celebration of the end of winter and the beginning of a new year that this dish is traditionally served at.

From the charm website, "In Buddhism, the lotus represents purity and detachment from worldly cares because of the dignified manner in which it emerges from the muck of a pond.

Because the Buddha is often depicted as seated on a lotus, the lotus is considered a sacred Buddhist symbol (one of Eight Auspicious Symbols) representing purity and detachment from worldly cares.

The Chinese word for lotus is lianhua or hehua. Lian is also the pronunciation of the word for continuous and he is also the pronunciation for the word harmony so the lotus has the hidden meaning of "continuous harmony"."

Did you know that all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store?  If you want to get your mitts on the original, it is drying and awaiting it's professional photoshoot before being allowed in the shop.

To be kept updated on available paintings and other happenings of interest, put yourself on the mailing list, yellow box top left.

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The meatless meals recipe

On the first day of Chinese New Year (a variable date in January or Febuary) it is traditional to cook this vegetarian dish. Chinese New Year is meant to mark the end of winter, so as it's officially the first day of spring here in southern hemisphere Australia, this recipe is quite appropriate. 

Buddah's Delight goes by quite a few names and a vast array of ingredients. I'll get to that bit.  You may have heard of it as Monks Vegetables. Or maybe as Lo Han Zai or Zai Choi.

As I mentioned, the ingredients are widely varied. I find this dish is as much about sampling different textures together as it is about taste. All the textures are bound together by the flavoured sauce. The sauce varies a lot too. Many recipes use a fermented tofu product as the base of the sauce which some people find nauseating, myself included. It's also a bit tricky to find. Many recipes use a heavily soy sauce based sauce, which I found to be just plain salty and one dimensional. This version uses a modified soy sauce base with heaps more flavour added in and easy on the salt. You should be able to get all the ingredients at your supermarket too.

And the last note is that this dish tastes best if at least half of the ingredients are fresh. In other words, minimise the tofu, starch, lotus, noodles, lilybuds and waterchestnut and maximise the vegetables.

Sauce base:

4 cloves garlic, sliced

sesame oil

2 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons hoisin sauce

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 cup dry or medium dry sherry

1 1/2 - 2 cups stock (water from rehydrating the shitake mushrooms is good here)

Recommended ingredients:

bamboo shoots

shitake mushroom (fresh or rehydrated)

1 carrot, sliced

lotus root slices

chinese cabbage, shredded fine (2 handfuls or more)

snowpeas, whole

water chestnut

wood ear / black fungus mushroom (fresh or rehydrated, remove the hard bits, half a handful is enough, this expands a lot)

Additional ingredients:

bean sprouts

dried sticks of bean curd

glass noodles (half a handful is enough)

dried lilybuds

gingko nuts or peanuts or cashews

small cubes of fried tofu puffs

other mushroom

Get a big pot out for this. No, bigger.

Make the sauce base:

Fry the garlic on medium heat until golden in sesame oil.

Remove from heat and add sugar, salt, hoisin, soy sauce and sherry. 

Put back on the heat and simmer until the sugar dissolves.

Time to add your ingredients:

Choose your ingredient selection according to your tastes and what you have available to you. It's more about varied textures than a blend of flavoured ingredients.

Use one handful of each ingredient unless noted. 

Add ingredients one at a time, starting with the one that will take the longest to cook.

Braise each for a few minutes before adding the next until all of them are done.

Add stock as required.

Feeds 4-8 depending on the number of ingredients used. It's a bit of a banquet. Serve on a little rice.