Nourish Me

A slow, gentle build

To a digestive tract out of practice, beans should be added back with care. A scorching summer made bean-rich meals redundant this year. Little in my garden survived the appalling heat. The tomatoes, though, they loved it, dropping shocking amounts of sad leaves yet still managing to produce what I can proudly refer to as a crop. Imagine being undeterred by consecutive 46 degree days? That’s a plant built for survival. Bush beans however, shriveled before the first breath of real heat hit. By the time the hot winds arrived, they’d long since keeled over and expired. Can’t blame them. I knew how they felt.

Yes. A slow, gentle build toward wind-resistance is what’s required, particularly with the prospect of a new bag of chickpeas and another of tiny black lentils to cook in the cooler months ahead. Well-soaked, well-tended, soft legumes make for an easier digestive ride in autumn, so something light, say, a soup, is ideal. Deborah Madison’s gorgeous recipe is somewhat like a Japanese minestrone, should such a beast exist – aduki beans (highly prized for their digestibility) miso, mirin and sesame oil, all simmered in a European way with bay leaves and carrots and celery. Herbal, healing and satisfying in the way that bean-y things often are, but light on the tastebuds and, thankfully, forgiving on the body.

Millet and sesame balls – small as marbles - add something to the presentation, much as a garlicky crouton might to its Italian friend. In their place, I’d welcome some proper soba noodles as a Japanese nod to the pasta in minestrone. Snapped into lengths, cooked and stirred through at the final stage, they would add some of that bulk and textural interest that blokes seem to require in order to accept that yes, a bowl of soup is the entire evening meal.

Or is that just my blokes?

Aduki and celery leaf soup feeds 4-6
From Deborah Madison's soup book. You’ll want an entire head of celery here, as you’re attempting to balance the sweetness of aduki with the assertive, herbal flavour of celery leaves. A mixture of the darker outer and pale inner leaves is ideal, but flat-leaf parsley is a good substitute if yours look neither edible nor enticing. Soak the beans before you do anything – even a short soak will help them swell nicely. Even better the next day.    

1 cup of aduki beans, soaked for a couple of hours, then drained
Toasted sesame oil
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
2 stalks of celery, diced
2 bay leaves
2 tablespoons of mirin
2 long, thick slices of ginger
Sea salt
Handful of celery or parsley leaves
2 tablespoons of white miso

Warm 1 tablespoon of oil in a wide saucepan. Add the onion, carrot, celery stalks and bay leaves and cook over a low heat, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. Add the mirin, let it slowly evaporate then add the beans, ginger and 1½ litres (6 cups) of water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a burble and cover. Simmer in this way for 1 hour.

Lift the lid, add a little salt, pop the lid back on and simmer until the beans crush easily.

Discard the bay and ginger. Take a few ladles of beans and puree them with the miso. Return the puree to the soup, throw in the celery leaves and warm through. Serve with a few millet and sesame balls (below) bobbing about in each bowl, adding extra drops of sesame oil if you like the flavour.      

Millet and sesame balls
These can (and probably, for sanity’s sake, should) be made well in advance.

1/3 cup of millet
Sea salt
4 tablespoons of sesame seeds
Tahini (optional)

Toast the millet in a dry frying pan over a high heat, tossing constantly. The moment you hear the millet ‘pop’, remove from the heat and rinse well. Drain (a tricky business - millet is teeny tiny) and place in a small saucepan. Pour over 1 cup of water, add a little salt and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until the liquid is absorbed.

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan and cool on a plate. When the millet is cooked, beat in the toasted seeds and, using wet hands, form the mixture into marble-sized balls, adding a little tahini if yours won’t adhere.

 

Laurie of the unendingly inspiring Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska is this month's host of Susan's well-loved event, My Legume Love Affair.

Entries close on the 31st of March.

Three

I missed the first anniversary - bamboozled by the marvellous, challenging technology I'd stumbled across and unsure what on earth the whole thing was actually about - and quietly skipped over the second, but I'm not missing out on the third. Today, Nourish Me is three.

Three is a substantial, weighty sort of number and there's a similarly substantial body of work that's been built slowly over the last three years. I can now look back through the archive with pride. Always rather hopeless at self-promotion, I even managed to bravely tell the rough-edged gentleman who mans my favourite stall at the market that I have a 'website' last week. Progress, indeed.

And Photography - oh, light! - how I love you. I sleep better each night just knowing that I've three very different cameras - two filled with actual film - with which to play. Three is a grand little number.

The act of thinking aloud about food has given shape to what was a formless obsession bordering on madness. Left to my own devices, I may just have turned feral. I've learned many things, cooked many more, met people who wanted to talk about food (and beyond) and it's even (how exciting!) given me paid work. More significantly, and this is key, I've reconnected with the very thing that I was afraid of for years - making pictures. It's a space and a reason to focus on food and I want to thank every single person who has ever stopped in to chat, to read, even just to look. Thank you.

To which end, in an act of recently awakened shameless self-promotion, I'd like to draw your attention to a little shop of sorts that I've set up which you can also access through the lefthand column of this blog.The good people at Redbubble have a safe and secure system where you can buy greeting cards and prints of some of my work. If nothing there takes your fancy, but you have something else of mine in mind, please don't hesitate to contact me - lucindadodds[at]yahoo[dot]com[dot]au - and I'll be more than happy to pop it up.

Crabapple Jelly

12th March

The windows in Edward’s recently vacated room, I love. A wide central pane of glass sits above a deep ledge of dark wood, flanked on either side by large, long windows that push outward with a satisfying whoomp. Fresh air consequently flows through the often stale front half of the house. Reading MFK Fisher’s Gastronomical Me at the desk beneath it, recalling the ‘short but violently active cannings’ that punctuated her childhood summers, I realise that it is mid-way through March and I’ve done nothing about the fruit trees. The crabapple is heaving. Soft rain distracts me long enough to lose my place and push the book away in order to enjoy a rare, quiet patter. The music the damp magpies make, singing joyfully across the street, is a rare sort of lovely itself.



13th of March    

The crabapples really do need dealing with. Maggie Beer is, naturally, a crabapple champion providing a whole three recipes yet they barely rate even a mention in Grigson’s much-lauded Fruit Book. This surprises me a great deal, though, on second thought, I’m not surprised one bit. Strangely, I find both Grigson classics unusable. Day-Lewis offers a jelly introduced in her typically poetic way which seals the jelly-making deal. ‘A sprig of lemon peel at the summit of each jar is a kind of elegant closure’. Suddenly I wish the lemons hadn’t been starved of juice by whatever insect infected her branches before we arrived. I start a mental list, fantasizing about an orchard of quinces, orange trees and the vicious but stunning Meyer lemon from our last place. Crabapples join that list now and I wonder what a medlar tastes like. Think I want one of those for my imaginary orchard, too. 

14th March

Proper rain. Puddles and pools and grey sky as far as the eye can see. Undeterred, I don a waterproof jacket, roll up my pants and shove a hat on my head to pick 1 ½ kilos of crabapples quick as a flash. As Shula wisely counseled, anything less than jelly is a waste. Ganga’s version adds pomegranate and rosebuds to the mix and, in their absence, I decide to sub in pomegranate molasses and rosewater. It will smell delicious.     

15th March

Sunday. A good sleep means I’m up early, baking bread. Actually, it was the promise of a bowl of pink juice to play with that stirred me. And pink it is; the palest shade of barely-there. Measuring, stirring, skimming. A useful way to spend a wet weekend. An hour later, ladling amber-coloured liquid through a funnel into sparklingly clean jars, I try not to think about just how much sugar was used. Tasting is the only answer to this dilemma.

It is delicious.

Crabapple Jelly

Your quantity of fruit may be small or huge, so giving a precise quantity of fruit matters little. Your haul will be what it will be. You will need quite a lot of sugar though, so bear that in mind and shop accordingly. When you see a line of jars glowing prettily, all will be worth it, I promise. Give some away, I say. No need to be greedy.

Wash the fruit well and drain. Discard any leaves, but keep the stalks on if you like. Bruises and windfalls should not be thrown out, though any bug-eaten fruit should. Put into a large saucepan or stock pot and pour over enough water to just cover. Bring to a boil and simmer slowly until the fruit is softened to a pulp. Cool before straining the juice through a muslin-lined sieve (or two) which you suspend over a large bowl (or two). Leave to drip, drip, drip overnight and do not, under any circumstance, be tempted to force or squeeze the fruit through. Slow and steady will set you right.

Next day measure the juice you’ve collected. For every 600ml (1 pint) you will need 450g (1 lb) of sugar, 1 teaspoon of pomegranate molasses and another of rosewater. Mix together and bring to a good boil. Skim off the grey-ish foam that rises to the rolling surface. Place a saucer in the freezer for set-testing. After 10 minutes, take a teaspoon of the mixture and place it on the cold saucer. Pop it back into the freezer for a couple of minutes. If the liquid wrinkles when you gently push it, the jelly is set. If not, keep going and checking until it does. 

Sterilise your jars and their lids while all of this is happening.

When ready, ladle through a funnel into the prepped jars and seal immediately. 

 

A seasonal treat for Maninas' event, Eating with the Seasons. 

Crabapples

A bright blue day. Old gardens always seem to have the best fruit trees.

Jelly, I think, though I'm open to any other creative suggestions. 

Thanks for the timely reminder, Zoe. 

Rambling

There is something immensely satisfying about the photograph Nigel Slater chose to place at the very beginning of The Kitchen Diaries. A stack of dog-eared journals, frayed ribbon markers poking out, clippings neatly tucked between pages. Satisfying and reassuring. Proof, as if it were needed, that notating the food in one’s life is hardly a silly business. I’m old fashioned in a sense, romantically attached to the hand-written. To books. To words. To the sound of a 4B pencil scrawling quickly across paper and the thin, elegant strokes a favourite pen makes – these are sensual things that make the act of writing a joy. As worthy of savouring as a pot of soup simmering on the first proper autumn evening of the year or a bag of organic blood plums so beautiful, so sweetly scented, that your previously held prejudice is, at last, banished.

When I began this blog – a word that still, after all this time, jars just a little – my intention was to make ‘health’ food sexy. Along the way I’ve learned that other things, other ways of eating and cooking contribute to a happier, healthier me. I wanted to be a nutritionist, but when push came to (inevitable) shove, lacked the science brain required. A hangover perhaps of years spent looking at and making pictures. Of reading other people’s words, curled on couches, jammed into crowded buses and trains, and, at one stage, even walking down the street. Always head down and always, always, thinking of cooking.

Autumn, she is here. A simple gratin of butternut squash - two lovely squat ones - enriched with ginger and a pile of golden, slowly-stewed onions for a Saturday night spent firmly In. Topped with crumbs of homemade bread, gratings of parmesan and crushed fennel seeds. All it needs is a salad; one using last week’s pears. Ripened to wrinkled juiciness on the sunny windowsill in his studio, they are just right by Saturday afternoon. Mizuna leaves – spiky, bitey – and snowpea sprouts tossed with a blob of very good goat’s cheese.

No wine tonight. No need. 

Cooking weather has finally begun its return and that, for me, is celebration enough. Here's to cooler days and the tantalising prospect of rain falling without evaporating on contact with our parched, scorched earth.