Vegetables for Lunch

Most weeks, the youngster and I visit my good friend Lon. She has the most amazing vegetable garden, and we are extremely lucky to be able to enjoy the tasty things she grows, and the fresh eggs from her chickens.

Yesterday there was plenty of green things ready for picking, plus lots of eggs. The kids got eggy toast for lunch, while we investigated things to do with a pile of green vegetables. There was rainbow silverbeet (swiss chard), sprouting broccoli, English spinach and green spring onions. There was also some fresh pineapple that the kids had been snacking on. The finished result was two delicious vegetarian main dishes that certainly got us well toward our 2 & 5 a day!

Japanese Braised Silverbeet with Egg and Sesame

This first dish combines the earthy flavour of silverbeet with the sweet and salty flavour of miso paste. I love the rainbow variety of silverbeet with its brilliant red and yellow stalks. Silverbeet is so easy to grow, you can even grow it in a tub in the tiniest garden and be rewarded with masses of fresh crisp leaves.

Japanese Braised Silverbeet with Egg and Sesame

Serves 2-3

1 bunch silverbeet (swiss chard)
2-3 green spring onions
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp miso paste
2 tsp mirin
2 tsp cooking sake
1 tsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tsp sesame oil
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Remove the stalks from the silver beet and chop into 1cm pieces. Tear the leaves into rough pieces. Slice the green sprin onions into 1cm lengths on a diagonal.

Heat a wok or frying pan over a medium-high heat and add the vegetable oil. When the oil starts to shimmer, add the silverbeet stalks, onions and miso paste. Stir constantly to break up the miso paste and prevent the vegetables from burning. Add a splash of water if necessary. Once the stalks have started to soften, add the silverbeet leaves. Once the leaves have wilted, add sake, mirin, sesame oil and sesame seeds. To finish, pour over the beaten egg and stir through. Remove from the heat when the eggs have just cooked.

Spicy Pineapple and Broccoli Noodles

This second dish bears a similarity to Singapore noodles. Feel free to use a hot curry powder, or add extra chilli.

Spicy Pineapple and Broccoli Noodles

Serves 2-3

100g bean thread noodles (cellophane or glass noodles)
2-3 green spring onions
2 cups chopped fresh pineapple
1 bunch sprouting broccoli (or 1 bunch broccolini), chopped into 5cm lengths
2 handfuls english or baby spinach
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp mild curry powder
1 tbsp fresh chopped mint

Soak the noodles in boiling water until they are softened, and drain.

Heat a frying pan or wok over a medium high heat. Add the vegetable oil. When the oil starts to shimmer, add the onions, broccoli and pineapple and cook for 3-4 minutes until the broccoli stems have started to soften. Add the curry powder and stir through. Add the remaining ingredients and cook until the spinach has wilted. Serve immediately.

Chinese Winter Cooking

Another home grown item I acquired this week was a large daikon radish. This recipe slow cooks the daikon with beef, soy, sugar and spices, which mellows the flavour. I served this with steamed rice and some broccoli.

Cantonese Braised Beef with Daikon

I'm posting a link to the recipe here. I followed it almost exactly, with the only exception being to subsitiute the char hou sauce with hoisin sauce, and to speed things up in the pressure cooker. The smell from the ginger, cinnamon and star anise was amazing. Lots of freshly ground white pepper gives it a warm spiciness.

Chinese Root Vegetable Cake and Week of the Carrot

Due to some poor ordering over the last two weeks, I have an overabundance of carrots in my fridge. They're delicious sweet little carrots, so I don't want them to go to waste. My challenge this week is to try and cook as many meals as possible that use some carrot, preferably in new and interesting ways!

Grilled Vegetable Cake

For no reason this morning the words "turnip cake" popped into my head and I had no idea what they even meant. Some googling reminded me of a tasty Chinese dim sum made from grated and steamed daikon radish. I've been reading a lot of japanese cooking blogs this week, so maybe my subconscious mind came up with the idea while I was asleep last night. Such is the nature of inspiration!

I don't have any daikon, so here's a very unorthodox version using up the root vegetables in the fridge - a turnip from 500m², part of a large parsnip, a pink radish and a couple of small carrots. The pink radish was grated almost to a paste on the microplane, and the rest very finely grated on the box grater. Then some finely diced Chinese sausage, green spring onions and chopped dried shittake mushrooms (rehydrated) were added. The last step was some rice, tapioca and potato flours (you could use plain rice flour, but I had only a little bit so I had to improvise) mixed with water (including the mushroom soaking water) and a pinch of salt and white pepper to bind it all together. Then into the pressure cooker to steam for 20 minutes. Don't ask me for measurements, I don't know, but my guess is that there was 250ml water and about ¾ cup of flours. Initially I was going to cook this in a small rectangular baking dish, but it *just* didn't fit the pressure cooker, so it ended up in a Pyrex bowl - it was thicker than I would have liked, so I just added 5 minutes to the cooking time.

I lose the challenge because of a dirty plate.
This is the finished cake.

It's very nice if you slice it and grill it in a non-stick frying pan until it's crispy on the outside, then served with a splash of soy or chilli sauce. Oh, and it's vegan if you leave out the sausage!

BBQ Pork Wonton Noodle Soup

I have a new pressure cooker! They have a bit of a reputation because older models had a tendency to explode, covering kitchens in pea soup. New ones have multiple safety features - you simply can't open them if they're under pressure, and the valves let the pressure release safely. The science of a pressure cooker is based on the principle that water boils at a higher temperature when it's under pressure. So you can gently simmer your food at 150 degrees or more without the water boiling. So tough foods like meat on the bone, dried legumes and root vegetables cook in a fraction of the time. 


I see the pressure cooker as the opposite of a slow cooker. In a slow cooker, you throw everything in, turn it on and go enjoy your day, knowing that dinner will be ready when you get home. A pressure cooker gets used when you realise that you wanted to cook curry for dinner but got home late and only have 45 minutes to get dinner cooked. It requires your attention but rewards you with super fast results. Both are handy if you're busy, so it's no wonder they've had a revival.


Heston Blumenthal recommends using a pressure cooker to make stock. The higher temperature means that you extract more flavour from the ingredients, without losing flavour and volume from evaporation. Best of all, it takes less than an hour to make a pot of rich stock, so it's not only better, but much easier!


I've never had much success making my own stock. It always seemed to be insipid and watery - not tasty like the commercial made stuff. So I was very keen to try making stock in the pressure cooker. I'd saved a fresh chicken carcass and some chicken wings just for this purpose. Because I wanted to make an asian soup, I added carrot, celery, onion, peppercorns, star anise and some dried shittake mushroom. After it reached full pressure it cooked for approximately 1 hour, and the result was a beautiful, fragrant golden stock with plenty of gelatin - success!


The only thing left to do was season it up with some soy, shaoshing wine and fresh ginger, and turn it into a fabulously warming soup with some home made pork wontons. 


Next challenge - to make some brown meat stock - french onion soup perhaps?