Dinner from the Garden - Kataifi Pastry Corn Fritters

The goody bag I received on the Christmas Bus Tour contained a packet of this Kataifi Pastry.  We were given a recipe to make some haloumi wrapped in the pastry.  I decided to be a little experimental and put it to use with these fritters....because I din't have any haloumi, and too lazy to visit shops!

To make the fritter mixture, I raided my vegie garden...

In a small food processor, finely chop 1 onion, 1 red chilli, 1 small red capsicum and a handful of fresh herbs.

In a bowl beat together 3 eggs, with a splash of soy sauce, about 1/2 a cup of wholemeal flour and half a teaspoon of baking powder.

TO the egg mixture, add the chopped herby onion mix and the kernals cut from a cob of corn.



Then, with your pastry, make small round rings, and place into a lightly oiled pan.




Put a spoonful of the fritter mix in the centre of the pastry ring



flip over when browned on one side, and cook until done




You end up with a fritter surrounded by nice crispy pastry strands.

Christmas Creations

I have been making a few different things in the lead up to Christmas.....




Easy Christmas Cupcakes - I made my stand-by vanilla cupcake recipe, and iced them in green and red icing, topped with stars I made by colouring some fondant icing, and cutting with cookie cutters





Iced Christmas Cake - I made the cake as per the recipe here at the 120 dollar food challenge blog and had my first go at icing a Christmas Cake.  We are yet to crack the cake open, but I was quite impressed with how it looks! (I did not use brandy or rum - I only had vodka)





Chilli Jam -  I used up some of the chillis that are growing quite prolifically in my garden and had my first attempt at bottling something! I used the recipe from Nigella Christmas, the only change I made was that I added some garlic to the recipe.

Garden Goodness Pasta Sauce

A nice simple dinner that begins with a walk around the garden to gather ingredients!!

In a saucepan with some olive oil, saute a chopped onion and fresh herbs from the garden (I used sage, parsley stalks, oregano, thyme and basil).

When the onion has softened, add some vegies from your garden - today, I added zucchini and silverbeet stalks at this stage.  I also added some firm tofu which I diced quite small.  After the vegies had softened and the tofu was nicely covered in herby goodness, I added a tablespoon of tomato paste, which I allowed to cook for a minute of two before adding a can of diced tomatoes. (if I had any I would have used tomatoes from the garden, but none are ready yet!!).  Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add a splash of Worcestershire sauce.  I use Spring Gully brand because it is VEGETARIAN (no anchovies!!).

A couple of minutes before you want to serve this, add the chopped silverbeet leaves and some more fresh basil & parsley.


boil up some pasta - I used small shells in this instance - the chunky sauce fills up the shells quite nicely! Serve the sauce with the pasta!


serve with a sprinkling of Parmesan and some more parsley if you like!

Janet likes to eat from a plate

whilst I like to eat from a bowl!

and dinner is always nicer with some fresh flowers on the table!

If I was making this dinner for just myself, I would have added a tin of 4 bean mix to the sauce! In fact I might just do this with the left overs!

baking - zucchini cake

Another way to use up excess Zucchini!!

I hadn't really considered using zucchini in something sweet, but I found this recipe on Taste.com.au (click to see the recipe), and decided to give it a try!  The result was a deliciously moist and fruity cake!  It was super simple to make, just mix everything together and bake!

a couple of notes -

• The 250g of zucchini mentioned turned out to be one large zucchini.  
• I am not a fan of raisins, so I just used 300g of sultanas instead of 150g of raisins & 150g of sultanas
• My loaf tin was longer than the one the recipe specified, and I found the cake was cooked after just under an hour.
• I needed a bit more icing, because I smoothed it over the sides instead of just letting it drip.

Pink Fried Rice

I have some lovely Bulls Blood Beetroot growing in the garden, so am using it up in as many ways as I can..... on this occasion I added it to my fried rice, resulting in pink fried rice!

To make the beetroot component, I simply chopped it into small cubes, and microwaved until soft, but not mushy in some soy sauce (a couple of teaspoons) and a squeeze of lemon juice.  This created beetroot in lovely pink sauce, which I stirred through my fried rice at the end!  (other things in my rice included zucchini, carrot garlic, onion, parsley stalks, peas, corn and tofu, oh, and some brown rice!)


(apologies for the kind of blurry photo...and it was pinker in real life :-) )


Janet had the same, minus the tofu and beetroot, plus some beef mince.

Zucchini and beetroot fritters - from the garden!!

 

How exciting is it to be able to make dinner that the majority of the ingredients were grown just outside in the garden??? Very very exciting indeed!

Our zucchini crop is doing quite well, and I had to thin out the beetroot in the patch, so the result was these fritters -

Ingredients
3 large zucchini
2 baby beetroot
1 onion
3 cloves of garlic
fresh herbs (I had parsley, basil, thyme, rosemary & oregano)
2 eggs
3 tablespoons cottage cheese
4-5 tablespoons SR flour

In a food processor grate zucchini & beetroot. Put into a large bowl.

Then with the chopper blade, whizz up the onion, garlic, and herbs.  Add the eggs and cottage cheese and whizz till combined.

Mix this through the grated vegies in the large bowl.  Add the flour a couple of spoonfulls at a time.  You may need more, you may need less.  When the mix looks like it is not overly runny, I usually make a test fritter - fry in a hot frying pan with a little oil and see if the mixture holds together.  If its a disaster, add a bit more flour and try again!

If your test fritter is ok, continue to fry heaped spoonfuls of mix until browned on both sides.  I take the cooked fritters and put into a preheated oven so they don't get cold while I am making the rest.

I served my fritters with some tomato salsa (tomatoes were from the garden also!) made with chopped tomatoes, a little olive oil, balsamic vinegar, black pepper and oregano.

Garden Salad - from the actual garden!!

I made a delicious salad - the majority of the ingredients were from our vegie garden!! This was very exciting for me!!!!

Basically, I tossed together lettuce, baby spinach and a mixture of herbs with some roasted beetroot (I put the beetroot into a parcel of aluminium foil with some herbs and a splash of water, and roasted until softened, then splashed the chopped cooked beetroot with a little raspberry vinegar), and some fetta cheese.  I mixed up a quick dressing using olive oil, raspberry vinegar, and some honey mustard, which I drizzled over the leaves.

It was great to be able to make use of some home-grown vegies!!!! Although it makes for quite n expensive salad, if you take into account the cost of setting up the garden in the first place - handyman, dirt delivery etc, but of course, the garden will be around for a long time!!! And hopefully will provide us with more than one salad :-)




Actually, a week later, I made another salad from the garden - this time a Green Garden Salad - I made up a pesto using macadamias, garlic, parmesan and basil & parsley, which I  added a tablespoon of to the usual salad dressing ingredients of olive oil and vinegar. I tossed this dressing over lettuce leaves and baby spinach from the garden to create a very tasty and simple salad.  Seem to have forgotten to make it smile for the camera before it was eaten however!!