Pots and Pans: November 2010

Carottes Vichy

Vichy is a town in France known for it's mineral springs, style and to me as a great way to make carrots.

They are simply made by cooking the sliced carrots until soft, and then frying them and fresh parsely in butter. If you're feeling tempted, add about two teaspoons of sugar to the cooking water, and maybe a pinch while they're frying lightly.

This meal is of the quicker sort, and a good way to make sure that you eat enough carrots. It made a great addition to our lovely Sunday lunch of Trout from Woolies, brie, toasted sourdough
olive bread and a crude cucumber 'salad'.

As an aside, I would like to amke note of a real cucumber salad I made a while back. I soaked some freshly sliced cucumber in the brine of gerkhins, added some thinly sliced gerkhins, a splash of vinegar, small pinch of salt and a rather generous amount of black pepper. Letting it stand for a while means that the cucumber becomes slightly pickled.

Here's some useful info on carrots:
- It can increase tomatoe fruit if planted with tomatoes.
- If left to flower, it makes lovely white flowers, much like those of cow parsley and cariander, which attracts wasps that kill other pests.
- The leaves are edible.
- They come in white, yellow, red, and purple
- carrots are full of dietary fibre, minerals, vitamin A and antioxidants, but the beta-carotene can turn your skin slightly orange if you eat too many - apparently.
- Carrots don't really increase your ability to see in the dark: "The legend arose during the Battle of Britain when the RAF circulated a story about their pilots' carrot consumption as an attempt to cover up the discovery and effective use of radar technologies in engaging enemy planes, as well as the use of red light (which does not destroy night vision) in aircraft instruments.^[4]^[5] '

The map and badge picture are from Wikipedia, where you can learn more about Vichy; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy

And to learn more about Carrots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrots

Couscous with Dried Olives

I recently whipped up a quick couscous recipe which I ate for lunch - yum! I started mixing some soft couscous with a splash of balsamic vinegar, a glug of olive oil and two tablespoons of tomatoe paste. I cut up some dried olives that I got from the Tokai Piggy Market and wished for some fresh herbs, maybe basil.

Even fried aubergines and fried onions would have made a good addition

Garden Update

I m

ight have mentioned that we have a tiny herb garden on our balcony- which grows more and more overcrowded as time goes by...

Below are some tiny peppers that I planted from regular green and red pepper seeds gathered from peppers bought from the shop. My husband and my theory is that the seeds are genetically modified to last only a certain amount of harvests - there's not much chance of growing perfectly normal peppers from the seeds of peppers found in the shops.

Recently I had a brilliant thought > it tasted quiet brilliant too: frying red peppers with balsamic vinegar and chilli. They were extra sweet and super tasty. Other ideas are red peppers and red wine (haven't tried that yet) or roasting red peppers with baby tomatoes and whole cloves of garlic which makes a delciously sticky and tasty mess (according to my friend Charlene > I'm yet to try this as our oven is rather out of action lately).

Speaking of Charlene, I got her a Pineapple Sage for her birthday and recently got myself one too. They make beautiful cherise/red flowers and the leaves smell like pineapple even though they're a type of sage. The apparently come from around Mexico and the leaves are edible (in a fruit salad for example, although they don't taste like pineapple!).

I recently got a red/black basil from the same Charlene, and they are, as we discovered more hardy than the green type. She put some lovely nut shells in the pot on top of the soil. They seem so useful, being so sturdy and strong.

Below you can see that our latest coriander harvest is ready. What I like about coriander as a plant is that you can use the shrubby leaves, and the ones that get all long and straggely can also be used later on when they make those lovely white flowers and seeds!

I've never managed to keep coriander alive for long, as pruning it seems counter intuitive, although, I always end up replanting the seeds and never have a shortage of them as planting one seed can produce many times more seeds.

For fun, I plant beans now and again, but it's never really enough to use in a dish (when I have a garden I will plough through it and turn it into a mini-farm, perhaps then I will have enough beans to make a tasty chili). Below you can see the sugar bean pod. I just leave it on the plant until it's dry and then end up planting it again, most often. The colour of the pod is quite dramatic and interesting though - from far away it could double as a flower.

We bought a granadilla plant last year and at first it grew very well and then slowed to almost a complete holt after bearing two beautiful flowers and one small granadilla. I was pleased to see that it's starting to grow some new tiny leaves!