Lebanese Style Chopped Salad with Sumac (and how to turn it into Fattoush)

 

Who wouldn't love living here? We've been at our new house just a few months, and already the neighbours are handing food over the fence. On a recent Saturday afternoon I was knee-deep in dirt, happily digging out couch grass. I still had bed hair. And then my reverie was interrupted by a deep 'yo!'. I looked up and saw a great hand waggling a loaf of pita at me; the pita was wrapped around a dozen kefta skewers. 'My mum said your kids like these,' said the unidentifiable eyes barely skimming the fence.

When one's neighbours have eight adult sons, all married with children, and most who come to eat at mum's at least one night a week, one tends to lose track of who has come to visit and whose eyes might be attached to the kefta-holding-hand. But the eyes grinned at me; so I smoothed down my bed hair to no effect, grinned back, and whisked the kefta out of his hands while they were still hot. They were fragrant with cinnamon and parsley, flecked with tomato, warm and juicy, and delicious. Lucky kids. They wolfed them down in seconds.

My fussy daughter – there's always one – has now added Fatima's kefta to the list of meats she will eat. This list consists, in its entirety, of plain sausages 'if they're the ones I like' (the organic GF ones from our local butcher meet her standard, thank god, but nothing too greasy or too thick or too thin or too spicy or too dry); bacon 'if it's not too crispy and not too soft, just a little bit please, and only from that farm' (yes, she can taste if the bacon is from a particular farm which will make her useful in the food industry in fifteen years' time, but makes it expensive to keep her now); sausage rolls 'but only Viv's' (Viv lives 70 miles away, somewhat inconvenient); and Fatima's kefta.

Given she also loathes eggs and fish and is not convinced about chicken (she only likes the skin, and only when roasted), and we have soy and shellfish allergies in the house (good grief!) I have latched onto kefta as a refreshing change from expensive sausages, very expensive bacon, chickpeas, and lentils. But my neighbours offers them only sporadically, and I don't know them well enough to beg for more, so I've been trying to make my own.

So far, I'm told, the results have been 'too bland, not like Fatima's'. I pointed out to my seven year old that Fatima has probably been making kefta once a week for forty years, which would mean she's practiced some 2,000 times; I've made it twice in two months. My daughter has to give me a few more goes to get it right before she can criticise. And bland? Huh.

My kefta isn't bad, but I agree that it's nowhere near Fatima's. I'll keep practicing. In the meantime, I can report that I've come up with the perfect salad to go with it, and now is the time to make it, what with those very end of season capsicums, cucumbers and tomatoes. The vegetables are chopped small and dressed with lemon juice and sumac. Juicy, sour, fragrant: it goes down a treat. Although my seven year old would prefer it had no green capsicum.

Lebanese Style Chopped Salad with Sumac (and how to turn it into Fattoush) - 2 green capsicums (bell peppers) - 4 Lebanese cucumbers - 2 tomatoes - 2 spring onions - generous bunch of mint - a bunch of Italian flat-leaf parsley (a good 10 stalks) - 2 tbs olive oil - the juice of a lemon - 3 tsp sumac - sea salt Sprinkle a good pinch of sea salt in the base of a salad bowl, then squeeze in the lemon. The juice will dissolve the salt. Add the olive oil. If the cucumbers are Lebanese, chop them. If they're home grown and the seeds have grown a bit large, deseed them. And if you're substituting English cucumbers, peel and deseed them before chopping. Phew. Chop the other vegetables into small even dice, about a centimetre square. Throw them into the bowl. Chop the herbs coarsely; make sure you still have nice bits of mint and parsley identifiable. Throw them into the bowl, too. Sprinkle in the sumac, then toss gently but well. Serve immediately, while everything is still crunchy. You can turn this into fattoush merely by adding some stale pita bread, cut into small wedges, at the last minute. If you like your bread crisp, brush it with olive oil, sprinkle it with sumac, and toast it in a moderate oven for one to two minutes. Break it up, sprinkle it over the salad, and eat immediately. (Garden: parsley, mint. A friend of a friend's garden – thanks Jen and Raheem! – tomatoes, cucumbers. A neighbour's tree: lemons. Local veg box: green capsicum (bell peppers). Grampians: olive oil. Northern Victoria: salt. Imported, but it's small and flavourful: sumac.)

Slow Cooked Tomato Sauce

When I think of preserving tomatoes, I always come back to the idea of sauce. I imagine an extended Italian family gathered together to cook down tomatoes, tell stories, sing songs and crack bad jokes, the older women wearing frumpy aprons, the young men a little flirtatious, a little cheeky, and everything a bit like the saccharine sugo scene in Looking For Alibrandi . But that’s not my reality, nor, I suspect, that of many Italian sauce-makers). I’m not Italian, I don’t have a big vat bubbling away with tomatoes or family and friends who seem interested in making an event of sauce making, and I’m not even sure I want it. I’m happy with just me and the kids fooling around in our kitchen, making small batches of sauce when we feel like it.

So I don’t make big batches. Instead, I preserve whole tomatoes; then, if I feel like a slow cooked tomato sauce later in the year, I use the bottled tomatoes to make a batch. But I do buy 15kg boxes of tomatoes for preserving. A 15kg box of tomatoes yields 24 Fowlers Vacola #20 jars of plum tomatoes, plus 2 to 2 ½ kilos of tomatoes left over. It’s not enough to bother bottling and running the processor again, but it’s a good amount to make sauce in a frying pan. Two kilos of fresh tomatoes cooks down to about a litre of sauce – enough for two meals in our family: one for dinner, and one in the freezer for some time next week.

Note: You will need to use a food mill or do some serious work with a sieve for this recipe.

Slow Cooked Tomato Sauce - 2 to 2 ½ kg ripe Roma tomatoes (the sauce is all about the tomatoes, so ensure they are ripe to begin with – and Roma, or sauce, tomatoes make the best sauce, surprise surprise, because they have lots of flesh and very little juice or seeds) - 1 red onion - olive oil - rosemary (or if you prefer, thyme or basil) - salt Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a wide deep frying pan over low heat. Peel the onion and halve it lengthwise. Slice it into very thin half moons. Drop the onion in the pan and sprinkle it with a good pinch of salt. Cook it for a few minutes, or until it softens, but do not let it colour. Take a sprig of rosemary a couple of inches long. Strip the needles from the stem and chop them very finely. Add them to the pan. Quarter the tomatoes – no need to peel or core – and throw them in the pan. Cook over a gentle heat, stirring from time to time to ensure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan. The tomatoes will collapse and the skins will loosen. Keep cooking for two to two and a half hours, or until most of the moisture has disappeared. Remove from the heat. Scrape the tomato mixture into a food mill and press through. (Or rub it through a sieve, much harder work!) You will be left with a rich red sauce; discard the skins. Test the sauce. If it is thick enough, well and good; otherwise, return it to the pan and cook down until it is the consistency you long for. Half a batch is enough for a packet of pasta for our family – but if you like your pasta to swim in the sauce, use the entire batch! Serve with grated parmesan. Notes: Of course, you can also make this sauce with two or three Fowlers Vacola #20 bottles of whole tomatoes. Because the tomatoes have been processed, you can reduce the cooking time: first check the thickness at 1 hour, and then cook until it's as you like it. This sauce is also good as a pizza topper, and it freezes well. It is not, however, suitable for preserving via the Fowlers Vacola system as the addition of onions can lower the acidity to a point where little nasty microbes are able to breed. If you want to see how real Italian Australians make sauce, click here. 34 boxes of tomatoes? Eight hours of boiling? Very impressive – but not my cup of tea! And I see that a neighbour and fellow blogger just posted on her never-to-be repeated childhood experience of sauce; now she opts for small batches, too. (Backyard: rosemary. Grampians: olive oil. Local veg box: onion. Northern Victoria: tomatoes, salt.)

Bottled Tomatoes

Yet another post about bottling! Preserving is clearly on my mind, and this is the time, in early autumn, when tomatoes are cheap and plentiful. But why would a busy girl bottle?

All eating, in fact all decisions, are a question of values. We all have lots of values jostling for primacy; our decisions bear out which values are foremost. And with food, the value equation is sometimes very difficult to calculate. Organic? Not organic? Local? Imported? Cheap? Expensive? Fair trade? Sustainable? Delicious? – well, duh!

For me, deciding which type of canned tomato to use requires lots of value juggling. My preference would be for cheap, local, organic, sustainable canned tomatoes delivered to my door. In an ideal world, they’d be bottled in glass, which I would then return to the distributor for re-use. But this does not exist, at least not in my neighbourhood.

Mostly, then, we have bought Italian organic canned tomatoes. I cringe at the air miles, but I also cringe at Australian canned tomatoes: the open irrigation channels that water tomato crops in the desert; the sprays used; and the flavour. So often Australian canned tomatoes are watery and tasteless, and an unappetising pink. People, ripe Roma tomatoes are deep red! So I’ve used Italian organic tomatoes. Then an Italian friend came over, glanced at a can, and muttered something about the Albanians. ‘What?’ I asked. She told me all about the illegal immigrants who work in the Italian tomato fields in slave-like conditions and said she’d never buy tomatoes from Italy. She is a wise and gentle woman and I trust her. But sheesh!

I looked at other options. In years past I’ve bottled organic Victorian tomatoes, but now I’m feeding a family of five plus lots of guests the cost is prohibitive. $15 a kilo for organic tomatoes which then need to be processed vs $3 a kilo for Italian imported canned tomatoes that require no further work?! I’m not doing that anymore.

I decided ‘organic’ had to go. I bought Victorian grown conventional tomatoes from my Italian greengrocer. At $12 per ruby-red 15 kilo box, they satisfy my values of local, cheap and delicious. Then my daughters and I canned them, which satisfied a whole bunch of other values: educational, as I teach my kids how to do useful stuff; familial, as we work together to produce something nourishing for the family; and aesthetic, as a dark cupboard glinting with row upon row of bottled tomatoes is a sight to behold. My neighbours walked in and admired, with the result that I’ll make a batch for them – so now a communal value is also being satisfied.

The last value is perhaps the simplest: a busy girl might preserve because she enjoys it. There is nothing quite like the deep satisfaction that comes from doing good work. We live in such an age of leisure that it’s taken me a long time to recognise that working at something I love, especially when it’s easy and productive and repetitious, is much more fun than being idle. When I’ve finished a batch of preserves or jam, I float on air. I gloat, wandering in and out of the kitchen to look and look again. I leave things on my tiny bench for an extra day just so anyone who walks in the house notices; then I am casually off-hand about preserving – but inside, a little child is jigging about singing ‘Look what I can do!’. It’s satisfying in a way almost nothing else is.

So those are all the reasons why I bottle; maybe one or two of those reasons might inspire you to bottle, too! So let’s get down to the nuts and bolts. In the past, I used Fowlers Vacola’s suggested method, which is to can whole tomatoes in water. They were okay but not great. This year I’ve followed the suggestion of Food in Jars: to place whole peeled tomatoes in the jars with some serious squishing action, which results in tomatoes canned in their own juice. Beautiful to behold, they are also absolutely delicious. So all kudos to Food in Jars for the method. I provide instructions below for Australians using Fowlers Vacola jars; if you use Mason jars or want to see descriptive photos, click here.

For the most part, I use a Fowlers Vacola #20 jar for tomatoes. I can’t tell you how many individual tomatoes per jar because the tomatoes in the boxes I get vary enormously in size and weight, but it’s about 600g of tomatoes. Eight #20 jars fit in the Simple Natural Preserving Kit; so five kilos of tomatoes makes eight jars plus a few over for lunch or the next round. I buy 15 kilo boxes, then fill and process 24 jars over two days (ie three runs through the kit); the remaining two or so kilos of tomatoes I turn into a slow cooked tomato sauce.

Bottled Tomatoes - ripe Roma tomatoes, red inside and out. Roma, because they have an excellent flesh to juice ratio. Note that preserving them will not make them ripe. You do need to source properly ripened tomatoes. - commercially made lemon juice (you need lemon juice to acidify the tomatoes, thus rendering them safe; use a commercial product to ensure the acidity is consistent, unlike the acidity of backyard lemons) Soak the rubber rings in hot water for 15 minutes. Wash the jars and lids in hot soapy water. Fit the rings onto the wet jars, being careful that there are no bends or kinks in the rings. Place 2 tsp lemon juice into each #20 jar; 1 tbs lemon juice into each #31 jar; check the Fowlers Vacola instruction book for all other jar sizes. Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Ready a bowl of cold water beside the stove. Using the tip of a small paring knife, core the tomatoes in one deft twist of the knife. Slice a cross in the base of each tomato. Drop five or six tomatoes at a time into the boiling water and leave for one to two minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drop into the cold water. Get a four-year-old to fish out the wet tomatoes and slide the skin off in one easy motion. She can also pack the jars. Drop tomatoes into the jars, jiggling a little to get a firm pack. You may need to use either your four-year-old’s little hand or a wooden spoon to pack the tomatoes firmly. Squish them a bit as you pack so that the juices ooze out. Keep packing and squishing until you have a jar full of tomatoes and juice. Ease out any air bubbles with a packing stick. Leave a 12mm headspace. Wipe the rim free of any pulp or juice, place the lid on the jar and fit the clip. When eight jars are ready, load up your preserving kit and process for an hour. My preserving kit comes to the boil quite early. I turn it off at the forty minute mark for ten minutes, then turn it on again until the time is up. The water stays stinking hot during that time, and that way you get an hour at the correct temperature without it boiling away. As soon as the hour is up, remove the jars and place them on a wooden board or a pile of old newspapers. Leave them to cool for eighteen hours. Remove the clips. Label each jar clearly with the date and batch number, and hide away in the hall cupboard or somewhere else cool and dark. They will keep for several years, but are best eaten within twelve months. These tomatoes are terrific in stews and casseroles, or cooked down into pasta sauce. Yum! (Victoria: tomatoes. No idea (‘local and imported ingredients’, sigh): lemon juice.)

Bottled Figs with Red Wine and Spices, and a whole lot more besides!

The one problem with water bath processing is that it involves a whole lot of water and power. Often, a person who has a small home garden may find it hard to justify using a water bath; when you seem to have enough produce for only one bottle, there's no point getting out the preserving machine.

Then again, getting out the machine can motivate you to look around and see what else is available, even in a little garden.

Take this week. A friend dropped by with two quinces. They were windfalls she had found on the footpath, and she thought I might know how to use them. True. But by the time I cut out the wormholes, there wasn't really enough to bake or make marmalade or paste. Perhaps there was enough for one or two bottles of poached quinces, not enough to justify a water bath.

But then I noticed a dozen fat figs on the tree going begging, also not enough for jam or paste, but too many to eat in one go.

And our pear tree had a few pears on it, very ripe.

And our little espaliered apple trees were starting to drop their several fruits.

And our veggie box had delivered a big bag of black grapes last week, but my fussy kids hadn't eaten them.

And there were some roma tomatoes sitting in the fruit basket, and they're good for canning.

And my four-year-old is going through a chopping stage, and wants to spend all day cooking.

So this is what we did.

I made a honey syrup for the quinces and lightly poached them. Then we packed them across two jars; they came two thirds of the way up the sides. We topped them up with apples from the garden, aiming for a casual layered look.

My daughter halved all the figs while I warmed a little leftover red wine with some sugar and spices. We barely poached the figs in the fragrant syrup, then packed them in a jar.

According to the Fowlers Vacola book, preserved grapes are 'excellent'. I have my doubts, but I'll try anything once, so my daughter carefully halved all the black grapes and we bottled them in water with a tablespoon of blackberry honey.

We peeled and cored the pears, and packed them with a tablespoon of sugar and a cinnamon stick.

Finally, my daughter quartered and packed the tomatoes.

A bit over an hour and six jars later, we had enough to justify running the processor and my daughter was beaming. And so was I. Now we have five desserts ready for winter, plus a bottle of tomatoes, to add to our stash in the hall cupboard.

As everything was very simple I won't record the recipes except, perhaps, for the figs.

Bottled Figs in Red Wine and Spices For each Fowlers #20 jar: - 12-15 fat black figs - 3 tbs red wine - 3 tbs white sugar - 1 stick cinnamon - 6 cloves Gently warm the wine, sugar and spices with 150ml water in a medium sized saucepan, shaking until the sugar has dissolved. Cut off the fig stalks, and halve each fig. Place the figs in the saucepan, and cook for 4 or 5 minutes, gently shaking from time to time. Allow to cool. Pour much of the liquid into a #20 Fowlers jar, holding back the figs with a slotted spoon. Now gently pack the figs into the liquid, using a packing stick to release any air bubbles. Seal and process according to instructions. Note: This doesn't look like a lot of liquid. However, as the figs soften they will release ample liquid, which should be sufficient to cover them in the bottle. If you do find yourself a bit short, however, just top up with a little cold water. You might also like to add a long strip of orange peel, or perhaps a few drops of orange flower water, to each jar. PS – I'm sure a real food blogger would manage a nice photo. The figs are ugly and the glare from the glass is terrible. But trust me, they're good! (Backyard: black figs. Healesville: wine. Not so local: sugar, spice.)

Gazpacho

 

Alison, Alison where have you been?

I’ve been... unpacking a house, looking after three girls over a long summer break, processing apricots, plums and tomatoes, and not writing anything down. Nothing very exciting, really, just life as we know it. We moved house two months ago, and have no veggie garden to speak of yet – just a few plants of fat hen (hooray) and a lawn full of dandelions (which, when combined with fennel tops and grapefruit, make a fantastic green smoothie for breakfast). But we haven’t managed to put in any veggies. So I’ve also been looking at my garden and sighing, then fanning myself in this goddamn heat and wondering what to cook.

Now, as the queen of frugality, I buy dollar packs of tomatoes at the local greengrocer. You know the ones out front, where the bottom tomatoes are a bit squishy and you have to cut out one or two brown bits? Well, I’ll let you in on a secret: those ugly buglies are full of flavour. And the other day I had a few green peppers from the weekly veggie box, and some cucumbers from a friend. As the sweat ran down my brow, from the depths of memory surfaced the tang of gazpacho. Cool, cool soup, beading droplets of condensation on a bowl. Just the thing for yet another hot day.

Gazpacho was traditionally a bread soup. I can’t eat bread, so with great arrogance I just left it out. Nobody missed it. What resulted, then, was effectively a whizzed salad dressed with white wine vinegar – what’s not to like?! My oldest daughter et it, sighed, and announced this was now her favourite soup. It has displaced lentil soup in all its forms. And so on the strength of her recommendation, I give it now to you.

Gazpacho - 1 kg very ripe tomatoes - 2 green capsicums (aka bell peppers) - 1 tiny (or half a normal sized) red onion - 2 cloves garlic - 2 tbs white wine vinegar - slightly less than half a cup decentish olive oil - sea salt, to taste - 1 mighty English cucumber (although I'm sure little Lebanese would be more authentic) Peel, seed and chop the tomatoes. You can peel the tomatoes by cutting a cross in the base of each tomato, submerging it in boiling water for a minute, removing it with a slotted spoon, and taking the peel off. This is the boring bit; get a child to help you. Squeeze out the juice and seeds. You can drink the juice if you want; but for the soup, you only need the flesh of the tomatoes. Deseed one of the capsicums and chop it small. Peel and chop the onion. Peel and smash the garlic. Place the tomatoes, chopped capsicum, onion, garlic, vinegar, olive oil and salt in a blender. Blend the heck out of it until all is beautifully combined. Add a little water if it seems too thick. Pour it into a large bowl or soup tureen, cover, and place in the fridge. Leave for at least three hours to chill properly, and for the flavours to get to know each other. When you are almost ready to eat, peel and deseed the cucumber. I just slice the cucumber in half lengthwise then run a metal spoon down the inside of the cuke; all the seeds pop out. Chop it small. Deseed the second capsicum and chop it small too. Serve the soup. Adorn each bowlful with a generous sprinkling of the chopped cucumber and capsicum. Pass the pepper. (Home grown, if not by me (thanks, Nathan!): cucumber. Local: tomatoes, capsicum, onion, garlic, olive oil. Northern Victoria: salt. Greece: white wine vinegar.)

Orange and Saffron Scented Vegetables

So much of vegetarian cooking is about seeing an interesting meat dish, then working out if it could be done otherwise. But every now and then I have a vegetarian recipe, and I find myself thinking about adding a little flesh.

Deborah Madison provides a delicious recipe for what she cheerfully describes as a 'failed fisherman's soup'. Her recipe was inspired by a bouillabaisse which did, indeed, contain fish. And while her version is wonderful, a few mussels make it perfect.

Mussels or not, the bouillabaisse is accompanied by a garlicky mayonnaise. Madison suggests making rouille, that is, spicy garlic mayonnaise flecked with cayenne. However, the little people in my household don't like hot flavours, so I made plain old aioli – garlic mayonnaise – instead.

Orange and Saffron Scented Vegetables aka Not Bouillabaisse - 1 kg potatoes - 1 leek, chopped finely - 1 onion, cut into wedges ½ inch thick - 2 cloves garlic - 3 pinches saffron threads - the zest of half an orange, finely chopped - 2 bay leaves - 1 cup white wine - 1 large or 2 small bulbs fennel, halved lengthwise, then sliced into wedges joined at the root - a handful of white mushrooms, quartered - 1 can chopped tomatoes - 10 stems flat-leaf parsley, chopped - 1-2 tbs fennel tops, finely chopped - 15 black olives, pitted - olive oil Boil the kettle. While it is heating, peel the potatoes and halve them lengthwise. Slice the lengths into quarters or sixths, depending on their size. Pour the water into a pot, add the potatoes, and boil for five minutes. Drain. Warm some olive oil in a wide skillet. Add the leek and the onion, along with a dash of salt. Sauté for a few minutes, then add the garlic, saffron, orange zest and bay leaves. Cook for a few minutes more, pushing it around with a wooden spoon to ensure the garlic doesn't catch and burn. When the leek and onion are beginning to soften, add the wine. Bring to a simmer, and let it reduce slightly. Add the potatoes, the fennel, the mushrooms, the can of chopped tomatoes, half the parsley and the olives. Cover, reduce heat, and leave to stew for half an hour or until you can slip the point of a knife into the base of the fennel. Stir in the rest of the parsley and the fennel tops. Remove from the heat, and serve with a bowl of aioli on the side. Best eaten tepid rather than hot. Note: Near the end, you can throw in half a kilo of cleaned mussels. Clap on the lid, raise the heat, and let them steam for five minutes. Remove the lid, and, if many mussels remain closed, push them around with your spoon, replace the lid, and steam for another three minutes. Check again, and discard any that are still closed. Strew the parsley and fennel tops over the dish, and serve immediately. The mussels will have released a briny liquid into the stew, so go easy on the salt. Tweaked from a recipe by Deborah Madison in The Savory Way. (Local: potatoes, leek, onion, garlic, orange, bay leaf, wine, fennel, mushrooms, parsley, mussels if used. Not local: saffron, tomatoes (unless you canned your own last summer), olives, salt.)

Nice Salad, Flowers Optional

In her marvellous book The Savory Way, Deborah Madison includes broad suggestions for 'Celebration Salad with Blossom Confetti'. As the mother of three girls, all of whom adore bright colours and flowers, I have used this idea countless times to make them eat. My experience is that a girl who turns up her nose at a perfect green salad, delicately dressed, cannot resist the same green salad when it's scattered with ribbons of flower confetti. The girl who screams every time she sees a potato will quietly eat if it's garnished with a few bright strips of nasturtiums.

If the nasturtiums aren't flowering, I might use whole borage flowers – the tiny blue stars taste ever so faintly of cucumber – or perhaps rocket flowers for a bit of zing. Violets are beautiful; red pineapple sage adds a slightly tropical fragrance; tiny marjoram, basil and thyme flowers each have their own flavour and are delightful to look at. You can eat most if not all herb flowers, as well as calendulas and rose petals. Cut larger petals into strips, so they do not catch on one's tongue; and use a sharp pair of scissors or a good knife to slice them cleanly. Eat smaller flowers whole.

As well as paying attention to petals, I look for interesting leaves. Soft green mignonette, freckled lettuces, red oak leaf: all make a pretty salad base, especially if they are complemented by tiny little rainbow chard or beet leaves. Use chard or beet leaves no longer than two inches in length, before they become tough.

On a hot night last week, we ate salad for dinner. I used to shop to make a classic salade niçoise; but one day it occurred to me to use whatever fresh ingredients I had in the garden. Now my salad changes month in month out. Later in the summer I will use the more traditional generous handful of green beans instead of cucumber, blanched for a minute or two; and yellow and red cherry tomatoes off our vines.

The quantity of tuna makes it filling enough for our family of five – three of whom are quite little – to consider it dinner, especially if it's accompanied by a thick piece of sourdough brushed with olive oil and char grilled. If your household is smaller, use less tuna and fewer eggs.

We call this Nice Salad, because some days it's salade niçoise and other days, it's just nice. Flowers are, of course, optional.

Nice Salad - a fancy lettuce - a handful of tiny beet leaves and/or rainbow chard leaves, if you have them - 8 to 10 new potatoes (those tiny little golf balls, fewer if your potatoes are large) - 2 to 6 eggs (depending how hungry everyone is and how many people there are) - a cucumber, preferably a sweet Lebanese cucumber, but an English one will do - 425g tin tuna (packed in oil because it tastes approximately a thousand times better) - 2 or 3 tomatoes - a dozen black olives and in this house this means Kalamata (optional) - 5 or 6 nasturtium flowers, as bright and fresh as possible (optional) - a lemon (or some wine vinegar or even tarragon vinegar if you have it) - olive oil, salt, pepper Bring a pot of water to the boil, and cook the potatoes until they are done. Add the eggs for the last six minutes. Drain, and halve the potatoes. Place the eggs in a bowl of cold water, then peel and quarter them.* Separate, wash and spin the salad leaves. Arrange on a large platter. Tumble the potatoes over the lettuce. If your cucumber is English, peel it, halve it, slice out the seeds, cut each half into three or four lengths and chop them into pieces. If your cucumber is Lebanese, halve it lengthwise, quarter it lengthwise, and chop it into pieces. Scatter over the lettuce. Cut the tomatoes into sixths or so – you want manageable wedges – and add them to the salad. Flake the tuna out of the can and onto the salad. Arrange the eggs over the top. Press on the olives with the base of a heavy glass and remove the pip. Tear each olive into four or so pieces, and tuck them in. Drizzle the lot with olive oil and a generous squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of tarragon or other light vinegar. Season if you wish, although I find the tuna and olives are enough seasoning for me. Shake your nasturtium flowers to dislodge any ants. Snip the petals from all but one of the flowers. Holding the petals over the salad, snip them into pretty ribbons which will float down onto the salad. Place the last flower artfully in the centre, and serve. *If, like us, your eggs are from the backyard and too fresh to peel without losing great chunks, poach them instead and gently lay the poached eggs on top of the salad – and throw in another couple of eggs because people will eat more when they're so delicious. A nice problem to have! The idea of eating flower blossoms came from The Savory Way, an indispensable book for anyone learning to cook good food. Madison has a deep appreciation for vegetables, herbs, oils, vinegars and other flavours, and uses them to create wonderful dishes which are intelligent and delicious. She writes thoughtfully about ingredients, and in careful detail about technique. This book was my training ground – I worked my way from cover to cover, and have drawn from it ever since. The photograph shows a version of this salad as requested and assembled by my four year old: lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, cucumber, tuna, and nasturtium and borage flowers. (Local: salad leaves, potatoes, eggs, cucumber, tomatoes, nasturtium flowers, olive oil, lemon. Not local: tuna, olives.)

Penne with Broccoli and Tomato

 

There's a Romanesco broccoli in my box. It has tight lime-green spirals and I know it will taste terrific in this pasta sauce.

The sauce has olives in it. I cured local olives, which make lovely nibbles, but they aren't strong enough for pasta. And the other local olives I have found so far have been soft and bland compared to the olives from overseas. "No like it," say the little ones. So I use international olives because, at this point of my life, the benefit of having my children love and eat this dish far outweighs the value of buying local.

Penne with Broccoli and Tomato - 1 head of broccoli. Romanesco is especially delicious here, but regular broccoli is good, too. - 5 fresh tomatoes, or a jar of home-preserved tomatoes, or a can of tomatoes - 2 cloves garlic, bashed with the flat side of a knife then chopped - a handful of black olives - 5 or so stalks flat-leaf parsley, chopped - olive oil - half a packet of penne - Parmesan or other hard cheese, grated Put a large pot of water up to boil. If you are using fresh tomatoes, plunge them into boiling water then peel, seed and chop them. Gently heat a slosh of olive oil in a wide frying pan. Add the garlic and cook gently until just beginning to colour, then add the tomatoes (whether fresh or from a can). Leave to simmer gently. Plunge the broccoli into the boiling water. Cook for 3 or 4 minutes, until it is just tender, then remove with a slotted spoon and add to the tomato mixture. Bring the water back to the boil, salt well and add the pasta. Cook according to the packet directions. While it is cooking, pit the olives by pressing gently on them with the base of a glass. Tear them in half and throw them into the tomato broccoli mixture. Break up the broccoli with the back of a spoon until it is crumbled through the tomato sauce. Add ¼ cup of the pasta cooking water to the sauce, and stir in the parsley. Drain the pasta and add to the broccoli tomato sauce. Stir to combine, and check for seasoning. Serve with plenty of grated cheese. (Local: broccoli, fresh tomatoes, garlic, parsley, olive oil. Victorian: pasta from Victorian wheat. Definitely not local: olives, parmesan. Photo shows a regular broccoli, when I made the sauce another day.)