Tangy. Moreish. Thrifty. Easy.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Hot and sour soup is all about achieving a balance of these two flavours. This piece is also all about the concept of balance, of getting multiple variables just right for your individual taste. A hair or balance spring represents this idea and I'm sure that you can figure out what the lemon and fire denote.

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

Hot and sour soup is a staple on Chinese restaurant menus around here and I love it. However, it is not very filling, being little more than a tasty broth. For a hungry person this is bad. Apparently it is often flavoured with blood. For a vegetarian or anyone squeamish this is super bad. Due to both of these issues I devised, long ago in my student days, this cheap, quick, filling and animal friendly version that I could make at home in a gigantic pot and live on for days. I hope you like it as much as I do.

6 cups water

a coriander plant (at least 15g including leaves, stalks and clean roots)

3cm / 10g fresh ginger, sliced

2 teaspoons salt

1 carrot, chopped or sliced

8 closed cup button mushrooms, halved or quartered
about 180g tofu, cubed
2 teaspoons fresh grated ginger
1 tablespoon cornflour
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
about 230g bamboo shoots
approx 125g dry asian noodles
3 spring onions, chopped
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar, to taste
1 1/2 teaspoons white pepper powder, to taste

Put the water, coriander, salt, carrot and ginger slices in a large pot and simmer, lid on, for 20 minutes.
Remove ginger and coriander roots.
Add mushroom, tofu, bamboo shoots, grated ginger and simmer until mushrooms are cooked.
Add your choice of noodles and keep simmering until these are cooked.
In a mug or similar, mix cornflour, soy sauce and sesame oil until all the lumps are gone.
Add this to the soup. Stir until it thickens.
Add spring onions.
Add the pepper and vinegar a little at a time, until the dish suits your taste. I recommend adding the vinegar first until it is pleasantly sour, and then adding the pepper until the heat is right for you.


This feeds 3.

Tangy. Unusual. Hearty. Easy.

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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.

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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.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. This is one of those artworks where straightaway I had a really strong idea of what I wanted to do. Trying to get that idea to actually freaking work was really, really hard. I now know all sorts of ways not to try and take a print from a halved cabbage. Sometimes it's best to keep pushing at an idea until it resolves. Sometimes it's best to let it go and simmer in the unconscious for a while. After spending an entire day trying to take a print from a cabbage and sketching out variation upon variation on my idea, I decided to let it sit. In the meantime, it dawned on me where the idea was stemming from, and knowing this, the image resolved itself.  So a shoutout to cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void for the inspiration for this rather abstract line based piece and no cabbage print in sight after all.

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

Cabbage rolls are a common and very popular dish throughout eastern europe. This recipe is  adapted from a cabbage rolls recipe I used to make quite often, until I became fed up with the finicky rolling process. So now I make unrolls. Basically the same ingredients. Very similar method. No effort required. And way more flavour than you would expect from cabbage.

After a bit of sleuthing I believe this recipe to be of Turkish origin. I'm pretty sure I copied the ingredients list on the grounds the recipe 'looked interesting' from a library book I borrowed at least 10 years ago. I didn't note the details of this book at the time. The recipe has gone through quite a few changes to end up in this form - it's now vegetarian, the rice flavourings have been added and it's been adjusted to work as 'unrolls'. However the spice combinations which work so well are exactly as I found them, and I would like to be able to give credit to the author of that book I borrowed all that time ago. Consider it done if I do manage to track that book down.

2 teaspoons butter

1/2 onion, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 1/4 cups frozen vege mince OR 3/4 cup dried TVP plus 3/4 cup water OR 1 1/2 cups cooked lentils

1 1/2 cups stock

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1/4 teaspoon thyme

3 pinches clove powder

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder

2 big pinches ground black pepper

1 bay leaf

2 tablespoons raisens or sultanas or currants

2 tablespoons / 45g slivered almonds

225g cabbage, finely sliced

440g tomato, chopped or pureed (perfect for excess tomatoes bottled in Autumn)

2 cups rice

4 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander - about 24g

zest and juice of 1/2 a lemon

Fry the onion and garlic in butter until golden.

Add mince/tvp/lentils, any extra water as directed and the stock. Then add the oregano, thyme, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, bay leaf, raisens/sultanas/currants and almonds.

Stir well and simmer with the lid off until the liquid is gone, around 20 minutes.

Add tomato and cabbage and simmer for another 30 minutes (or more) until cabbage is nicely soft.

Meanwhile, cook the rice as you usually do. Drain and rinse if necessary.

Mix the coriander and lemon zest only (not juice) through the rice just before serving.

Serve the sauce on the rice and drizzle everything with the lemon juice.

Heartily feeds 4.

Easy. Versatile. Tangy. Moreish.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. Here we have a pickled eggplant. Figuratively. Thanks to Joe Sorren for his wonderfully quirky, gentle characters in somewhat surreal and intimate moments. And his lush colours and brushwork. I'm quite a fan.

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

This recipe originated with some family friends of my husband. He insisted on making it for me to show me how good it was and that it should go in the recipe book. I was skeptical. Pickled eggplant did not sound like something I wanted to try, let alone let into my collection of kick arse recipes. Well I was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that friends who came to stay ate an entire half a jar in one sitting. And that was before we'd tweaked it into shape!

1 large eggplant

2 tablespoons salt

3/4 cup white wine vinegar (quite tart) or apple cider vinegar (quite mild) according to your taste preferences.

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon salt

up to 500ml olive oil

3-6 garlic cloves (optional)

1 cup fresh basil leaves (optional)

a couple of dried chillies (optional)

Cut the eggplant into pencil sized strips and put into a bowl with 2 tablespoons of salt. Place a small plate on top with a weight.

Leave for 12 hours or overnight.

Tip off the juice and then rinse off the eggplant, otherwise it ends up extremely salty.

Cover with vinegar and water. Weight the eggplant down again and leave for another 12 hours.

Drain and pat the eggplant dry.

Sprinkle with just one teaspoon of salt.

Put in a sterilized jar and layer with your chosen flavourings such as garlic, basil and chilli. Fill the jar with the olive oil and squeeze on the lid.

Keep in the fridge and try not to nibble at it for at least several weeks. The flavours really develop over time. It's super good after 3 months.

Makes one 500ml jar of pickled deliciousness.
Goes well on sandwiches or in salads.

Tangy. Chunky. Light. Satisfying.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on canvas. A French dish calls for a bit of a fleur de lis flourish and elegantly simple whitewashed shabby chic to show off the fresh vegetables, don't you think?

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

Another bastardised staple, this time of French origin. Ratatoille is a bugger to spell but well easy to cook.

oil for sauting

1/2 onion, chopped into chunks

3 tomatoes, roughly chopped

3/4 (about 15cm) zucchini, chopped

1/2 eggplant (150g), cubed

1/2 cup, or more if you like, cooked kidney beans

3 tablespoons wine or balsamic vinegar

3 tablespoons water

1 teaspoon seeded mustard

1/2 teaspoon salt

lots and lots of cracked black pepper to taste

optional 1/2 teaspoon honey per serve if you find the vinegar flavour too strong

The veges work best when chopped into large bite size chunks.

Heat the oil and saute the onion.

When the onion is softened, add everything else.

Cook slowly for 20 minutes or more at a simmer or less. Make sure the eggplant is nice and soft before serving.

Looks like a lot but it's actually quite light and serves just 2.

Easy. Refreshing. Versatile. Tangy.

If you've ever been put off beetroot by the 'I can only taste vinegar' pickled stuff in jars or tins from the stupidmarket, this recipes's for you. Thanks to Sue for insisting we have this recipe. I don't think she had any idea it would end up in a book, but then, neither did we at the time. As the story goes, when Sue heard that we were harvesting our first beets, she flew into throes of excitement and began babbling about 'favourite recipe', 'really easy', 'comfort food' and 'reminds me of home' with lots of ooohs and aahs inbetween. So we tried it with some of our freshly pulled beetroot. And we say, 'yum'.

washed fresh beetroot (as many as you like)

balsamic vinegar

salt

pepper

Trim the leaves and tail off the beetroot.

Boil in a pot of water until you are able to push a fork to the centre of the beetroot. The time will vary depending on the size of the beets. It may take 20 minutes, it may take an hour.

When done, drain and rinse in cold water to cool them down so you are able to handle them.

Rub the skin off (you may want gloves for this step to avoid red stained hands). This step is really, really easy, as the skin pretty much falls off.

Cut the beets into slices and lay on a plate or platter.

Sprinkle with salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar.

Cover and leave in the fridge overnight and then enjoy as an accompaniment to whatever takes your fancy. We Aussies love adding these to burgers (rest of world shudders in horror!). Ah, go on, try it.

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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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