No Dig Potatoes (and how to turn them into Gnocchi)

When I read Peter Cundall’s description of how to turn your lawn into potatoes I had to try it. In his book The Practical Australian Gardener he says, “you’ll not only enjoy the most superb potatoes you’ve ever eaten, but you’ll never want to mow the lawn again”. How could I resist a set of instructions like that? Not having a lawn of my own I actually turned my housemate’s lawn into potatoes. He was a very indulgent landlord to let me rearrange his garden.

The potatoes were a particularly interesting gardening project because of the element of suspense. You can’t see the potatoes developing, so you don’t know how they’re going until you dig them up. That’s the most exciting part. You might have noticed that I’ve posted a few potato recipes lately and now you know why. I harvested the potato crop a couple of weeks ago when I moved. In fact, I harvested them by torchlight under my umbrella, so I haven’t got any photos of that stage of the process. I’ve got some photos of the earlier stages for you though.

These are the seed potatoes I bought. They’re Nicolas. They’re described on the box as “marvellous mashers”. What a beautiful piece of alliteration. Jackie French always emphasises the importance of buying certified disease free seed potatoes rather than using ones from the supermarket. Considering that she recommends growing most other things using seeds from ordinary fruit this is a notable exception. I suppose she has good reason for it. In any case the potatoes weren’t terribly expensive and were quite successful.

I started my potato patch without trying to destroy the grass. I simply dumped a bag of mushroom compost on top and laid out my potatoes. Over these I put some pea straw and a bag of cow manure. As we spread the mushroom compost my housemate said “oh, smells like mushroom”. He wasn’t as happy with the smell of the cow manure.

Waiting a few weeks until they emerged was a bit nerve racking. Were they going to come up?

Finally I saw some cracks developing in the manure. It was like Han Solo cracking his way out of his metal casing. A few days later my new babies popped up their heads.

As they grew I built up the mulch around their stems to make sure no light reached the tubers.

By the end of summer the plants had reached the top of their wire cage. They started to die off. I hoped that this was a sign the tubers were ready and not that my plants were dying from the heat.

When harvest time came I rummaged through the mulch. I was relieved and excited to feel the first tuber. They hadn’t grown right up the stem in the mulch, but there was a wonderful density of new potatoes down in the well composted base layers. It was a great harvest but I’m not sure precisely what the yield was. I’ve been jealously eyeing the 5kg and 10kg bags of potatoes at the greengrocer to try to figure it out. I’ve decided that my harvest was bigger than the 5kg bag, but probably not as big as the 10kg bag. It’s a lot more potatoes than I usually eat though. I’ve never eaten so many potatoes in so few weeks before.

I’ve already posted about my two cheeses potato bake and my patatas bravas. We had mashed potatoes too of course. Most excitingly I had my first try at making gluten free gnocchi. I’m often annoyed that something based on potato should be off the menu for me because of a small amount of flour in it. I hadn’t tried homemade gnocchi though because I was worried they’d be too fiddly.

Making your own gnocchi is certainly time consuming, but it’s very rewarding and it isn’t technically difficult. I have a method for you below, but unfortunately no quantities. If it’s any comfort to you it’s easy to tell when you’ve added enough flour because your mashed potato will start to form a dough.

Gluten Free Gnocchi Ingredients
potatoes (around 1 kg)
an egg
rice flour (less than 1 cup)

Method
1. Peel and boil the potatoes. Drain them and mash them without adding extra liquid.
2. Stir a lightly beaten egg through the potato. I used my Kenwood mixer for this stage and the next one.
3. Add rice flour gradually, maybe 1/4 cup or a tablespoon at a time. Mix after each addition and feel the dough. When it stops feeling like mashed potato and starts to feel like sticky dough you are done. You should be able to squeeze the dough into a smooth ball.
4. Roll handfuls of the gnocchi mixture into long sausage shapes on a board. Then slice these into dumplings.
5. You need a pot of boiling water to cook the gnocchi. Drop in a bunch at a time, but not too many or they’ll stick together. You’ll know they’re cooked when they float to the top (which happens very fast – in 2 minutes or so). Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and cook the next batch.
6. Serve with a nice sauce. I used a simple tomato and basil sauce. You could also try a cream based cheesy one.

The gnocchi were probably my most successful potato meal. The rice flour didn’t have any adverse effects on the texture which was a relief. It is nice when something gluten free tastes as good as the real thing and gnocchi is a good example of this.

Woodfired Pizza and Kebab

I’ve been becoming increasingly concerned that this blog is getting a little vegetarian. I thought I should try to restore the balance a bit…

That’s an iskender kebab from Woodfired Pizza and Kebab in Chatswood. It’s made up of cut up Lebanese bread, sliced tomatoes, yoghurt, tomato sauce, a bit of parsley, lots and lots of döner meat and the grease that flows out of it. The incurable carnivores out there can be reassured that the tomatoes and parsley really are the sum total of the vegetable matter contained in this meal.

Woodfired Pizza and Kebab does all the staples of Turkish fast food, with an accent on the explicitly mentioned pizzas and kebabs. Piglet – who is sadly restricted to the gluten-free – always chooses an option from their range of baked potatoes. Even though the potatoes are chosen for their guten-free properties, they are no poor relations to the rest of the menu. There’s a large selection of delicious (and optionally meaty) fillings and all the potatoes are topped off with melted cheese and cream – and served with salad, for those with any remaining vego sensibilities.

They have very delicious ayran, a sort of yoghurt drink. It’s definitely worth having ayran whenever the opportunity arises.

There’s a nice little sit-in eating area with tables and chairs decked out with Persian-patterned covers. In winter Piglet puts herself in the best spot, next to the outside wall of the woodfired pizza oven. She’ll often lean right up against the wall to soak in the warmth.

Since Woodfired Pizza and Kebab is essentially a take-away place with a sit-in area, the prices are quite reasonable.

Woodfired Pizza and Kebab
325 Penshurt St
North Willoughby

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	5 snorts
Taste	4 snorts
Service	3 snorts
Atmosphere	4 snorts

Two Cheeses Potato Bake

Helen from Grab Your Fork recently drew my attention to an article about food blogging from the Times (UK). It suggested the appeal of blogs over recipe books is their personal touch. There was a cute quote from a blogger who said reading a blog recipe was like getting a tip from someone whose taste you trust.

The personal touch certainly enhances blog reading for me. Some posts make me think “yep, been there” and others are fascinatingly far from the way I think. One post that clicked was Not Quite Nigella’s recent description of the “doof doof” cars at a fish and chips place. It took me back to year 9 drama classes. One boy had a great routine where he mimed cruising around in his hot-rod saying “oonce oonce”. The drama teacher got sick of it long before we did. A post that left me puzzled was Lemonpi’s recent tribute to her shoes. The photos of the cake were works of art that left me drooling, but I’ve never felt that kind of dedication to footwear.

I’d love to know whether these moments that click (or don’t) are related to life experience or personality types. I’ve been reading about the Myers-Brigg personality typing system (short test here, leave your type in the comments, I’m curious). The theory gives some idea of how different types relate to each other. One type could find another so similar they’re almost boring or so far away they’re puzzling. In between the small differences are fascinating. I wonder if it’s these little differences that make the personal side of blogging so appealing.

One recipe I’ve recently tried to personalise is a creamy potato bake. My mum used to make one with milk and onions and cheese on top. Of course for me this will always be the traditional method, even though I’ve discovered that many people base theirs on cream. I wanted a creamy result but with a lower fat content, so I decided to use ricotta. Ricotta is meant to be a good food for vegetarians because it has a relatively high protein content for reasonably low fat. After reading that I always feel virtuous when I cook with ricotta. This isn’t so much of recipe as a method. You just layer up the ingredients and bake it.

Ingredients
potatoes
an onion
ricotta (small tub, 250g or so)
an egg
milk
grated cheddar

Method
1. Make alternating layers of potato slices, onion and dots of ricotta.
2. Break the egg into a measuring cup, whisk with a fork and top up to 1 cup with milk. Pour this mixture over the potato layers.
3. Bake until the potato is tender. This takes an hour or so.
4. Sprinkle with grated cheddar cheese and return to the oven until it has melted.

Making the layers is not too fussy. It doesn’t matter if they overlap.

I couldn’t resist having melted cheese on top even though there was cheese inside. That’s why it’s two cheeses potato bake.

Plant based diet? Patatas bravas anyone?

I went to an excellent lecture this week called Eating the Earth: how should we eat to ensure a sustainable future? Stuart White from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS introduced the session. He explained how all food has to use resources in its production. This means it has embodied water and fuel, not to mention some foods having embodied inequality or cruelty. He emphasised the importance of looking at your food as part of a larger system with inputs and outputs. If a system is to be sustainable these inputs and outputs need to be carefully managed. He said food is a very evocative area of sustainability because it is so personal. Our individual food choices can make a big difference to sustainability. The issue is small enough to be approachable, although public policy certainly has a role to play. Food is a great example of how we can think globally and act locally.

The next speaker was Rosemary Stanton, a famous Australian nutritionist in public health (biography here). She spoke about how we can make a difference to our personal food footprints. She also encouraged us to become political activists to change government policy. Maybe it’s time to carry through those letter writing intentions. I’ll give you a list of some of her suggestions below.

Finally Dana Cordell from the Global Phosphorous Research Initiative talked about the importance of phosphate in soils. It is a fertiliser that all plants need to grow and can be added to the soil as manure, but more usually comes from rock phosphate. It turns out that rock phosphate, like oil, is a resource in the hands of few countries and which will probably reach a peak in the near future. She spoke about phosphate recycling in Sweden and the need for a link between the food and sanitation industries (not too pretty, but probably true). I found the discussion on phosphate particularly interesting because I had never heard about this issue before.

While the phosphate discussion was interesting, the information on making sustainable food choices has more immediacy. Recycling phosphate is a matter for public policy, but we have a lot of power over our personal footprints. Here is a list of the suggestions from the lecture on how to reduce your food footprint.

-eat seasonally
-eat a plant based diet (aiming to be vegetarian some days each week)
-when choosing meat favour smaller animals and free range or grass fed animals
-eat less processed food (the funniest example was the 25000 kj needed to make 1L of low kj softdrink)
-eat local organic food (not the imported stuff)
-consider food miles by eating more locally produced food (while considering that crops must be grown in appropriate settings, e.g. imported rice is probably better than Australian)
-write to your local member, or minister on an issue you feel strongly about (such as container deposits for recycling or traffic light nutrition labelling)

Now writing this list is a lot easier than acting on it, and that is what I must do. Acting as locally as possible I started with dinner. I made a yummy vegetarian dish, patatas bravas. This often features in Spanish tapas and is basically baked potatoes and a spicy tomato sauce.

Ingredients for the potatoes
Potatoes (enough for two people)
1 tab olive oil
2 tsp paprika

Ingredients for the sauce
1 brown onion
1 hot chilli
1 tab olive oil
1 red capsicum
2 tomatoes
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp dried basil

Method
1. Chop the potatoes and boil for 5-10 minutes until tender.
2. Toss the potatoes in olive oil and paprika. Put in a hot oven to crisp up.
3. Meanwhile prepare the spicy sauce. Soften an onion and a chilli in a little olive oil. Add paprika and basil. Next add diced capsicum and tomatoes and cook until tender.
4. Serve the potatoes with the spicy tomato sauce. We also had hard-boiled eggs and olives on the side.

These roast potatoes would make a great side dish for other meals too.

The spicy tomato sauce and roasted potatoes made a very satisfying vegetarian meal. It was my first try at Spanish cooking but it was so yummy I’ll definitely have to try some more Spanish dishes.