Sunday, February 16, 2025

Winter vegies Spring into Summer

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Peter Howard, ARR.News
Peter Howard, ARR.Newshttps://arr.news/lifestyle/peter-howard-am/
Peter Howard AM entertained us, for decades, as a Celeb Chef on TV, radio and through numerous columns. Lots of his content concentrated on the primary producers of Australia – he showed us what makes our food, wine and fish the best in the world. He not only did this at home but also around the world. He promoted Aussie Lamb in the USA with the AMLC for 6 years in the early 90s. Peter maintains his devotion for Aussie producers comes from his rural upbringing in Beaudesert where he learnt to respect our farmers. Now retired he still watches our rural activities with zest and appreciation.

It feels as though Spring has sprung into Summer already – hot and somewhat sticky too soon for us here in SE Queensland.

The vegies on sale have not noticed the emerging change or is it that seasons simply don’t occur anymore?

After the glorious dishes of Winter vegetables made into all sorts of warming and nutritious dishes, I ask myself how can I vary the habitual vegies to make them more suitable … different for the warmer weather?

BTW (and off the subject for a minute) if you are looking for other uses for mandarins, here’s one – freeze segments and use in a Negroni cocktail – juicy frozen segments are crunchy and sensual to bit into as you drink this famous cocktail. Look it up on in your search engine for the suitable recipe.

Now back to the vegies.

Caulifowers, cabbages, parsnips, swede turnips, white turnips, green beans – all vegies I associate with winter. Do you?

The cast ready for their transformation: red capsicum, beans, mushrooms, rosemary, salt, stock, parsnip, cauliflower, turnips. Photos: Peter Howard

Every time I make scrumptious Cauliflower Mornay, I tell myself that is the last time, but I love it and feel that I am really cooking when I make that silky creamy white sauce from the cooking liquid rendered from poaching the flowerets in half milk/half water (vegie stock if you can). The buttery roux is the overture to the emerging sauce that holds the cheese component. I have taken to adding a little grated Parmesan to the Cheddar cheese mix.

Perhaps it is this dish reminding me of crowded fun-filled family lunches with my Mum, Dad and my five siblings – food and cooking evokes such emotional sentiments.

So, what else can you do with cauliflower? Here they are abundant and inexpensive at my local fruit shop, Skippys Frootz. White and enticing – I have been making a Cauliflower and Parsnip soup – easy and made in the usual way, although I do add a peeled chopped potato for consistency. Use stock if possible – stock brings out the vibrancy in soup, and yes, I do remove the core from the peeled large parsnips. Perhaps you’d prefer not to remove the core from smaller parsnips, but you must peel them for sure and yep, I always take the core out as fiddly as it is.

Cauli salad is a fav here – flowerets plunged into boiling water (once called blanching until the sexy ‘plunged’ definition hit the TV chefs’ vocab) and cooked for a couple of minutes, strained and ‘cooled’ in cold icy water to stop the cooking (called ‘refreshed’ in the old days). I drain my flowerets on kitchen paper and then add them to sliced red onion, and thinly sliced (once called ‘julienne’) wombok and herbs like dill, parsley and maybe chives. The dressing made from olive oil and raspberry vinegar, salt and ground black pepper and a whisper of paprika is appropriate. Smoked paprika is good if you can get it. I like to add sliced fennel bulb into this mix. 

Invariably, I make my salad dressing in the base of the serving bowl – add the ingredients and toss as I build the salad. This dish can be an appetiser as well as add-on for barbecued proteins. The wombok (sometimes call Chinese cabbage) is an economical extender.

I loved roasted cauliflower as a vegetable and is simply the flowerets sprayed with oil and a kiss of salt and roasted in a medium oven; you can add halved trimmed brussel sprouts to the roasting cauli as well.

Cook in a deep roasted tray so you can toss the vegetables as they cook. When lightly browned, I tossed the tenderised pieces in a cumin-infused vegetable oil dressing and served them with these simmering rissoles.

Brussels are also good pan fried in butter and finished in the oven, but be aware that they cook quite quickly and if too ‘browned’ they will taste bitter. Once they are near cooked, they can be sprinkled with chopped parsley and breadcrumbs and browned – I have done this under the griller. BTW, I have eaten a cauliflower salad in a swanky restaurant decorated with deep fried brussel sprout outer leaves. Different.

If all else comes to it, cauliflower is so good on its own with a dipping sauce (sometimes called ‘canapes’ though not really – actually ‘crudites’. My Mum would call anything served before a meal ‘savouries’. A favourite of hers was the Jatz biscuits topped cheese and tomato or even the multi-couloured pickled green or red onion on a toothpick with a cube of cheese under … come on you can remember them? No? Too young! Normally they were served with drinks (read beer and sherry) before dinner or around the barbie as the snags and lamb chops cooked.

I like the smaller cute savoy cabbage/AKA sugar loaf best of the cabbages and stew the roughly chopped leaves (minus the thick core) in butter and a small amount of stock with sliced red apple and seasoned to your liking – say with fennel seeds. Do this with the lid on to stop evaporation. Through Winter I have done cabbage rolls with the outer leaves of the large round cabbage. Fiddly but well worth – my family does love them. Nutritional, full of fibre and taste – oh and economical too.

Parsnip are good for flavour – the very reason we eat after all – and today I made a ripper beef casserole with peeled and cored parsnips pieces, peeled white turnips, a couple of bay leaves and a large piece of rosemary; the parsnip falls apart to give a creamy consistency while the turnip pieces sparkle but do not disintegrate.

Both these root vegetables are good roasted with the usual suspects of roasted lamb, beef, chicken or duck. These vegetables excellent with roasted goose (yes, I know first find a goose – it’s difficult to say the least – you may have one of the hoof … lucky you). And somehow the swedes and turnips cut through the richness of the cooked bird.

If you take on roasting a goose, ensure you have a flavoursome citrusy filling (once called a ‘stuffing’) to ‘extend’ the goose meat content. The other way I like to use swedes and white turnips is to steam the slices to near done then strain and toss in butter with a sprinkle of sugar, salt and white pepper.

Green beans are supposed to be cold weather produce and like so many vegetables they are now available all year round at varying prices. The other day I found a packet of green stringless beans topped, tailed and washed in local supermarket from Mulgowie Farming Company – www.mulgowie.com.au – for recipes and more info.

I thought this was a wonderful idea from this company that has been providing us with excellent produce in supermarkets for ages. I met a Mulgowie farmer ages ago at the Brisbane Ekka when I was doing demo cooking with the brilliant Alison Alexander – we were using their corn on the cob minus all the silk and otter leaves.

I found red capsicums (now called red bell peppers in some places, like the USA, but here they are capsicums) in the bargain bench and mushrooms marked down too. Too good to miss and I made a ragout/stew. I pan fried the capsicum strips first and with a tad more butter, slipped in the mushroom slices before adding the green beans with a splash of chicken stock. I ‘stewed’ these until the green beans were limp and sprinkled in salt, cracked pepper and tarragon leaves and simmered a little further.

My neighbour was here for dinner when I served the stew with barbecued rib eye fillet steak and rosemary potatoes – he asked for more of the stew and why not – it was simple and simply delicious.

Two questions for you … one – are you happy the beans no longer have strings? It was a chore in the old days, top and tail the beans and string as you go along. Invariably Mum would diagonally slice them and boil them until done. And secondly,  how much does one cook the green beans? I mean I have had them in restaurants when they are posing as cooked but are essentially raw and while very green they don’t have the taste or texture that develops when they are cooked properly. ‘Plunged” is fine but cooking is necessary – the French definitely cook their green beans until well done and I admit when I cook green beans with garlic in butter, I always ‘plunge’ them first, strain and then cook in the garlic butter; I normally finish them, after some slow cooking in the pan, with optional almond flakes. Gosh they are good when seasoned to your liking.

The warm months will welcome salads and green beans can be a major ingredient in these soothing cold offerings or play a minor accompanying role – however, life without green beans is inconceivable; remember if you can’t find snake beans for your Thai dishes, you can use green string/stringless beans. Be aware they take less cooking than the tougher snake beans.

And if you can buy tasty green beans in bulk and cheaply, you can blanch (or is it plunge?), refresh and freeze in small amounts for ready use.

If all else fails, wash them and crunch into them raw for a nutrition texture-filled snack … so damn good.

We must always acknowledge the ginormous offerings our farmers make available for us through their hard work all year round – where would we be without our farmers?

Simply up that creek without a paddle. I have often said if you want to hug a tree, go for it, but I know a farmer would appreciate a “thank you” hug – go on.

Go ahead and hug a farmer.

Go on, you know you want to!

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