Baby Tomatoes

Unusual veggies are always fun. It’s fun buying them and growing them, but even browsing seed catalogues of them is entertaining. My latest interesting veggie purchase was baby tomatoes about the size of almonds. So cute! Market stalls with cute tomatoes and coloured potatoes always seem to draw the biggest crowds, second only to free samples.

I sauteed the baby tomatoes with asparagus and ate them with pasta and fetta cheese, which is a lovely quick spring meal. These tomatoes came from a stall at the Entertainment Quarter Market. I hope you’re enjoying visiting spring fairs too!

EQ Village Markets

Lang Road
Moore Park
NSW 2021

The Lone Eater

So my parents (with whom I live) are going walking for two weeks in Kakadu, leaving me on my sweet little lonesome. This means that for two weeks I’m going to be cooking for myself and myself alone most of the time, which could be something of a problem. You see, everything I make ends up being huge. Remember Arwen’s post about that recipe book of meals for fifty? Yeah, don’t need that, practically everything I cook would feed fifty by itself, or at best only need to be doubled.

Now, I could just cook a few giant meals, and then refrigerate/freeze them and alternate nights eating them, but that could get super boring since it’d take me all of the two weeks to eat 3 dishes. Alternatively, I could end up getting bored of cooking every night since this is a whole lot of effort and find myself subsisting on mi goreng and dying of malnutrition on the 13th day. However, I thought that perhaps I could make this an opportunity to expand my recipe base.

So this is my challenge for you- recipes for one that are perfect for the lazy cook. To make it interesting, I’ll suggest a list of veges and herbs I have growing that are ready to be eaten (there are others that aren’t) and see what you come up with. It’s best if they’re things you personally cook on a regular basis, the recipes you know essentially by heart. If you have to think about it too long, it’s not lazy enough

Vegetables- Zucchinis, carrots, lettuce, green capsicums (tiny ones), lemons, oranges.

Herbs- basil, mint, bay, rosemary, garlic chives, lemongrass, marjoram, thyme, kaffir lime, parsely (although I don’t like it much).

Points for low on meat (since I’m cheap), points for using the suggested plants, double points if I don’t have to go down to the shops (so using things you’d expect me to have round the house like pasta, rice, eggs, basic sauces etc).

With any luck, there’ll be a bunch of lazy recipes at the end that everyone can use, so don’t forget to check back through the comments and see what’s there!

Food science and flavour

A friend of mine is a food scientist. Most of his work relates to food safety and nutrition, but obviously these aren’t the only factors you have to consider in food production, taste is important too. He was telling us some entertaining stories over dinner the other night and I’d like to share them with you. Have no fear, this won’t put you off food, you can even read it while eating. I was amazed to find out how the strangest things can affect how things taste.

His first story was about asparagus. We all know that the stuff in tins tastes really different from fresh asparagus, but I was surprised to hear that some people actually prefer the tinned variety. Even more interestingly the tin itself could be part of the taste experience. Cans for storing food are coated with lacquer inside these days, but this hasn’t always been the case. In an unlacquered tin, small amounts of metal can leach into the food and apparently this imparts some flavour, at least in the case of asparagus. When lacquered tins were first introduced tinned asparagus sales went down. Apparently it didn’t taste as good any more. In response food manufacturers now leave a strip of unlacquered metal inside the can to impart that special tinned asparagus taste!

The second food science story was about chocolate paddlepops. My friend used to have the enviable job of overseeing icecream production, and yes that does include tasting the freshly churned product. In the icecream making process temperature control, churning speed and so on are very important. If you get something wrong the product becomes crystalline and the texture is not as good. Rather than being wasted this crystallised icecream can be returned to an earlier stage of the manufacturing process and is known as ‘rework’. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s like turning leftovers into fried rice, we do it in our own kitchens all the time. The difficulty with incorporating rework into a new mix is that since flavours may have been added already they can affect the current batch before the flavourings are added. For this reason rework is usually added to foods with strong flavours, such as chocolate, which will mask others. Chocolate paddlepops at the time were the best selling line for the company, and usually contained 30-40 % rework. A new manager, shocked at this, decided that a popular line shouldn’t be compromised by adding rework and cut it out. Sales plummeted. Why? Presumably the rework adds complexity to the chocolate flavour we all love, without it the icecream just wouldn’t taste the same.

In the spirit of rework, take a look at the Love Food Hate Waste campaign running in the UK. There are some fun ideas there, and some of them are useful too. This website was how I learnt that a bowl of powdered bicarbonate of soda can remove odours from your fridge. This is very handy in a sharehouse!