Vegetables Archives - Page 3 of 19 - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: Vegetables

22
Nov
2023

Ham Slaw Baked Potato

Hello friends and welcome to a midweek quickie. Today we are talking leftovers, specifically what to do with leftover Ham Slaw. I recently, please don’t laugh at this, but I only very recently learned that you could “bake” potatoes in the microwave! Combine the two and you get a super yummy ham slaw baked potato. AKA Work from home heaven!

Since then though, I have been making up for lost time and about once a week when I am on a working-from-home day and have suitable leftovers, I have been baking up a potato and having it with my leftovers for lunch. The Ham Slaw was AMAZING!

And how does it taste?

There is something I find so comforting about a baked potato. And at 6 minutes cooking time, you can bake your potato, walk your dogs and eat all in your lunch hour! The ham slaw is a pretty robust salad so will last in the fridge for a day or two so if you make a bit more than you need, you can have lunches for a few days. I had this as a work from home lunch but there’s nothing to stop you re-heating your potato in the office microwave either!

Ham slaw, a baked potato hack and two Taylor Swift gifs? What more could you want in a mid-week quickie! Hope your week is going well.

25
Sep
2023

Beauty Bean Salad and a Herb S(w)izzle

categories: 1970's recipes, Beans, Drinks, Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty, Non - Alcoholic, Salad, Vegetables

Hello Yogis and retro food lovers. Today we are revisiting “Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty” by Swami Saravati. Today we are focussing on the beauty side with a Beauty Bean Salad. There is no indication as to what the Herb S(w)izzle is good for. Let’s say hydration and move on. As with last time, before we get to the recipes, let’s take a moment to marvel at the cover of this book.

This is probably one of my all favourite covers of any book I own. The swami looks young and gorgeous, she has perfect skin, is lithe and limber and is rocking an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow flowered bikini. Seeing that cover and how great she looks, who wouldn’t want to get her recipes? I will add that nowadays doing the camel pose over over glass containers probably breaks all sorts of OHS laws but back in the freewheeling days of 1971…you could do what you wanted! Just on that, and how good she looks? There was no photoshop back in 1971. She actually looked like that!

Hmm…maybe I need to cook a few more recipes from this book

Beauty Bean Salad

This was really tasty! And it also looked very pretty with the different shades of green and then pops of purple from the red onion. I ate this for dinner one night and made enough to have for lunch the following day. One of the great things about this salad is that the ingredients are all fairly robust so will not wilt overnight. Good thing really because after I had taken the photos from the night, I realised I had left out a key ingredient.

I used green beans, edamame and sugar snap beans for my fresh ingredients. However, the recipe also calls for some dried beans. I had a can of chickpeas in the cupboard so when I had these for lunch, I threw in some chickpeas.

The chickpeas changed this from a side salad to a more filling meal. I’m not sure if the Swami would entirely agree with this but if you wanted to bulk this out even more, some feta or goat’s cheese or a can of tuna or some grilled salmon would be great with this!

Beauty Bean Salad – The Recipe

I used lemon juice and olive oil as my dressing and dill as my herb.

I find it really interesting to see the differences between night light and daylight and the passage of time on the color of this salad.

The Herb S(w)izzle

This drink is actually called a Herb Sizzle. There is nothing sizzled in it so in my head it is the Herb Swizzle as you have to stir the ingredients together! Whatever you call it, it is a fancy and very tasty apple juice! I used Rosemary as my herb but you could use your favourite herb instead.

The Herb S(w)izzle Recipe

This was really refreshing and went very nicely with the salad!

It was really fun revisiting Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty. I also still want to go to the Swami’s Yoga Retreat! Sadly Swami herself passed away in 2009. I have a candleholder very much like the one by her left knee on the book cover. So let’s light a candle and raise a Herb Swizzle toast to the Swami and her legacy of eating our way to love and beauty!

Candle Have a great week!

24
Jul
2023

The Return of the Australian Vegetable Cookbook

categories: 1970's recipes, Australian Vegetable Cookbook, Blue Cheese, Cornwall, Leeks, Lettuce

Hello friends, today I am revisiting a book I first wrote about in 2012 – The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. I am taste-testing two recipes from that book – a Cornish Leek Pie and a Roquefort Wedge Salad. The book contains a lovely line drawing and a brief history of each vegetable. So, without further preamble let’s get to the recipes!

Cornish Leek Pie

I was dubious as to how authentic the Cornish Leek Pie would be. However, I found a few references to a Leeky / Likky Pie which dates from 1865 and is remarkably similar!

I layered boiled leeks and bacon into a pie dish and covered with pastry. Now, I made a mistake here as the recipe quite clearly says to season the layers with salt and pepper. I thought the bacon would be salty enough which turned out to be true so I didn’t add salt. But I totally forgot about the pepper. But by the time I remembered the pepper, the pie was already in the oven.

Then, the recipe itself got weird. After cooking for a while, I needed to make a hole in the pastry top and pour in a mixture of cream and parsley. I have never added ingredients to a pie in this way before! But it did allow me to add the missing pepper in with the cream and parsley. I thought it would be really hard to cut a hole in the pastry once it was baked so I did this before it went into the oven.

The recipe which I have linked above adds eggs and cream to the bacon and leek mix which I think would be a lot more sensible. This would have thickened up on cooking to form a quiche-like filling. As it was the cream did nothing except make everything a bit wet! It also kept bubbling up out of the hole in the pastry and made a bit of a mess.

There was nothing wrong with the cornish leek pie. It was just not something I would make, in the format given in the Australian Vegetable Cookbook. Full marks for the illustrations though! They are beautiful!

Cornish Leek Pie – The Recipe

Roquefort Lettuce Wedges

The night after I made the Cornish Leek Pie I made the Roquefort Lettuce Wedge from the same book.

The roquefort dressing was sooo good! But overall this dish lacked something. I served it on a gorgeous plate I bought when I was in Darwin earlier this year to try to fancy it up a bit. Plate 10/10. Dish…kind of meh…I would defintely make this again, However, I would add some bacon or croutons or some chives to the salad (or all three) just to make it a bit more interesting!

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and, to be honest I was disappointed with my revisiting of The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. There was nothing wrong with either recipe but they were also not amazing. One or two more ingredients to each one might have brought a bit more flavour or texture or just some va va voom to the dish.

Whether this was due to bad recipe choices on my behalf or a comment on the state of vegetable dishes in the 1970s remains to be determined. There are still a number of recipes I have flagged as “to be cooked”. so I may well have another crack at it in the future. Just not for a little while!

Roquefort Lettuce Wedge – The Recipe

I hope your cooking adventures this week fare a little better! Have a great week!

13
Jun
2023

Broken Hill CheeseSlaw

categories: Australasia, Carrot, Salad

G’Day Food Lovers! People say that necessity is the mother of invention. In my case, it was the mother of trying out a bizarre little recipe called Broken Hill CheeseSlaw. Let me show you the finished dish before we get to the hows and whys!

Let’s start at the very beginning. One of my favourite sandwiches is chicken schnitzel and coleslaw. Or, as we in Australia call it, a chicken schnitty. Now, we don’t eat schnitty’s all that often because the fussiest eater in the world does not like crumbed food. 🙄

However, we did have schnitzel…well to be utterly honest it was Donna Hay’s Chicken Katsu the other night ( and lo and behold he actually enjoyed it). And there was a little bit of chicken leftover…actually no. I specifically katsu’ed an extra bit of chicken so I could have a schnitty and slaw sanger the next day!

Now, you may notice a distinct lack of sandwich in the above photo.

Here’s why

This is Frankie. We were dogsitting Frankie on Katsu night and Frankie was not happy about being dogsat. She howled the whole of the first night she was with us. And most of the second (which was katsu night). The only way I could get Frankie to stop howling was to pet her and cuddle her.

So, on day three which was the day I wanted my schnitty sandwich, I realised I had no bread in the house. And I wasn’t going out to buy any. My neighbours were already sleep deprived, as was I. from the nighttime howling. I felt that if there was also daytime howling interrupting people’s work we would become public enemies #1. It was already lunchtime and I was hungry! There was no time to wait for a delivery.

“I’ll make a bowl.” I thought. “Then I won’t need bread”. About then I realised I also had no cabbage for the slaw. Enter Broken Hill Cheeseslaw!

Broken Hill CheeseSlaw

Broken Hill CheeseSlaw (more than a food, it’s a way of life) is a mix of grated carrots, mayo and cheese which has been on the menu in Broken Hill (aka The Silver City) since the 1930’s. How or why the good people of Broken Hill decided to ditch the cabbage and embrace the cheese in their slaw is lost to time. Although there is a semi-viable theory here. However, it is still very much still a thing and even got its own dictionary entry in 2019!

Broken Hill CheeseSlaw – Tasting Notes

The cheeseslaw was somewhat surprisingly not terrible. Many times if you buy a schnitty and coleslaw sandwich you get the option of some cheese to be melted on top. And you know, one of my mottoes in life is if you ever get the option of cheese melted on top of anything, take it! I did feel like the cheeseslaw missed a little bit of bang – some spring onion, some pickled jalapeno etc would have cut through some of the fattiness of the cheese and mayo combo which the carrot did not do. I added some pickled onions I had in the fridge and some edamame from the freezer to my bowl to bring in that bite and also some greenery.

As a whole, my schnitty / katsu cheeseslaw bowl was totally delish! And something I will intentionally make again!!!

Broken Hill CheeseSlaw – The Golden Grater

So friends, there is an annual contest in Broken Hill for the best cheeseslaw – both traditional and contemporary. I’m already thinking – a Philly Cheesesteak / Cheeseslaw combo might be awesome!

If you have an idea for cheeseslaw, let me know and I will make the 820 km drive to represent you and me (and Frankie) in the competition for this year’s Golden Grater!

The Recipe – Broken Hill CheeseSlaw

Have a great week!

26
Mar
2023

Let’s Get Lit – March 2003

categories: 20 Years Ago Today, Bread, Pasta, Sangria, Seafood, Soup, Tomatoes, Wine

Hello friends and welcome to March 2003! Avril Lavigne was topping the charts with I’m With You, Bringing Down the House was #1 at the box office and U.S. troops invaded Iraq looking to seek and destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. No wonder, when reflecting on the events of twenty years ago, we here at Retro Foods for Modern Times felt we might need to get a little boozy! This was the theme for our menu which came from the March 2003 issue of Delicious Magazine!

March 2003 – The Menu

Sangria

As if we could have a boozy menu without a starting drink! I love Sangria which despite being Spanish in origin always reminds me of our 2017 trip to Portugal where we would have a pre-dinner sangria most days!

Happy times! Here’s the one from Delicious!

Sangria Recipe:

Beer Bread with Pastrami and Relish

Due to time constraints, I didn’t make this but doesn’t it look amazing?

Spaghettini Alle Vongole

OMG, this was so good. And also when I really wished I had made the beer bread so I could mop up all the delicious sauce left in the bowl. I had never eaten Spaghettini Alle Vongole before and although this took a bit of effort to cook, it was worth it!

Spaghettini Alle Vongole Recipe:

Citrus Salad with Cointreau Cream

To finish out the meal, we have a Citrus Salad with Cointreau Cream. For an alternative dessert, but one that still uses Cointreau, you could sub in last week’s White Lady which also came from this magazine!

My Nigella Moment – Salmorejo

For first-time readers, this refers to the moment at the end of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows when she sneaks back to the fridge to have another bite of something delicious. In the context of these Twenty Years Ago posts, it is something contained in the magazine that does not fit with the overall menu theme but I’m sneaking it in either because I made it and it was really good, or I just didn’t have time to make it but it was the most appetising thing in the mag!

This was a difficult one. I was torn between two recipes that really appealed to me. One was a pink grapefruit tart. However, as we already had a dessert containing grapefruit I decided to go with the other recipe from March 2003 which caught my eye – salmorejo.

Salmorejo is a cousin of gazpacho. Gazpacho is one of those things that I thought I would hate. Cold tomato soup? Yeccchhh!!! That is until I tried it. And from then on it was love! I will note that even though I am a garlic lover, 4 cloves of garlic was too much for this! Two would, I think have been plenty!

It looked exactly as it did in the picture too!

Salmorejo Recipe

Delicious Magazine certainly delivered on our ask for a boozy menu. We had red wine and brandy in the sangria, beer in the bread, white wine in the spaghetti and Cointreau in the dessert!

Let me know if you would like to contribute a theme to my list. I’m happy to take on any challenge!