Posts tagged snapshot

Australian Garden Show 2013

Food For Thought 1 Comment
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I was very lucky to get double passes to this year’s Australian Garden show from Destination NSW and Sydney.com. Those who know me know that I’m not the most outdoorsy person, but as part of being obsessive about food, I’m trying to grow my own food.

And summer is approaching, shouldn’t we take advantage of this gorgeous growing weather?

At any rate, I’m trying my luck to see whether I’ve inherited any of my mother’s green thumb. She’s a horticulturalist, so you’d think that I would’ve learnt something after all these years. I remember the amazingly gratifying feeling of eating freshly grilled corn that was harvested from the garden earlier in the day. It gave me so much more appreciation for the food that I was eating.

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Lindeman’s had a beautiful tree of hanging garden pots. They were giving out little hanging pots to each person, and a 3 little plants – 1 herb and 2 flowers – for each to plant. You got to create your own little pot, then hang it on the tree with your name till you’re ready to bring it home. I had mint, a marigold and a pansy…but we all know that the mint is what I really want.

They also had plenty of stalls and displays to inspire – I particularly loved the ideas for planting in small spaces. I live in an apartment with no balcony, and so I’m hard pressed for window space, and I’ve currently got a little milk crate garden bed going.

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I got some excellent advice from the people selling these seeds on what I can and can’t grow – I can’t grow potatoes successfully in a milk crate for example – and I ended up getting beetroot and a micro greens mix. Microgreens are really just the young underdeveloped shoots of edible plants – this mix had sunflower seeds included – and they had it growing out of coffee cups. SO CUTE! Apparently it takes as little as 7 days for you to have your classy meal topping.

From a food perspective, I’ve just learnt so much. I think that it is so important – if you’re into your food – to not just strive to cook food well, but to also have the best produce to start off with. And if you’re a control freak like me, you’ll start wandering into gardening territory, just so that you can control the produce as well. Now just to wait till I get to harvest my food!!

Note: Tammi from Insatiable Munchies and her guest attended the Australian Gardening Festival as guests of Destination NSW and Sydney.com

What I ate: Pumpkin and Blue Cheese Gnocchi

what i ate 2 Comments

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It’s that time of the week again – when you want something delicious, but you don’t want to go through the hassle and production of spending the whole evening in the kitchen preparing dinner.

And let’s face it – everyone wouldn’t mind something new for their meals. Cooking in big batches gets rid of the need to be cooking all the time, but (I don’t know about you) I tend to have a short attention span when it comes to my meals, and after the second meal of the same thing I’m off looking for other things to feed myself with.

That being said, leftovers are a wonderful thing! I like them because you can always repurpose them in creative ways for your new meal, and you can clear a few little containers of food at one go. For this speedy meal I used:

  • Gnocchi (I made a large batch once and have a bag of them in my freezer. You can use bought gnocchi if you’d like)
  • Roast pumpkin (Leftover from the weekend)
  • Stilton Blue Cheese (I had a hunk just sitting in my fridge)
  • Cream
  • Truffle honey (a treat for me, any honey will do though)

And as with all my other What I Ate posts, there aren’t any quantities. Just get creative! I boiled the gnocchi until it floated to the top of the water, drained it, then in the pot I just emptied, I warmed the pumpkin up (there was oil from the roasting already). And since the pumpkin was roasted with thyme and garlic, there’s your flavour boost that’s already been incorporated into the ingredient. Then I add the hot gnocchi back into the pot, add a little bit of cream, crumbled some blue cheese on the top, and drizzled some honey over just before digging in.

It was creamy and comforting, and used up stuff I just had sitting in my fridge/freezer and pantry. Don’t have roast pumpkin handy? Well just about any roast root vegetables would do – I would use roast carrot, parsnips, capsicum…not so much potato though, because there are potatoes in the gnocchi. But it’s completely up for interpretation! Don’t like blue cheese? Add some cheddar and turn it into a gnocchi version of mac’n’cheese!

The variations are endless, and I’m no longer bored when I need to clear my fridge. Especially when I get into a cooking mood over the weekend and there are containers of random things everywhere.

What’s your favourite way of using up leftovers?

What I ate: Bean salad

what i ate 2 Comments

Bean salad

It’s been so crazy busy lately and I’ve got so many photos backed up to write about!!!!

I usually try to pick and choose the interesting or special places/recipes/dishes/etc to write about, cause I generally feel like the meals that I have at home – as it can be for many people – can get a little repetitive and boring. But after a suggestion from one of my closest friends – Fiona – I thought it might be worth a mention the stuff I throw together at home. Especially on leftover Sundays.

Today, it’s a bean salad. It’s a pretty loose and easy recipe, and great if you have stuff in your pantry that you’d like to clean out. Here’s what I used:

  • a tin of four bean mix (drained and rinsed lightly)
  • a tin of cannelloni beans (ditto)
  • tinned beetroot (finely diced)
  • finely diced chillies
  • sliced black olives
  • semi dried tomatoes
  • feta
  • tuna in springwater
  • finely diced onion
  • finely diced cucumber
  • lettuce

For the dressing I used the juice from the tin of beetroot, reduced with 1 bay leaf, then mixed with some white miso (I didn’t have mustard in the fridge), some balsamic vinegar, a squeeze of lemon, pinch of salt, and extra virgin olive oil.

I also had some bread rolls in the fridge – you know the kind that you finish baking at home? – and spread those with some homemade garlic butter (parsley, garlic, lemon juice and butter) and threw them into the oven.

I really liked that this salad was pretty much a pantry-ready salad, and cleared out a lot of bits and pieces in my fridge that needed eating. I didn’t feel over stuffed after, and it was incredibly moreish.

Leftover sundays are the best. =)

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Food For Thought 2 Comments

I just thought that I’d share what I’m having for dinner – homemade pizza piled high with salami, kransky, ham, onion, garlic, cheese, cheese, capsicum and olives.

Yum.