Nourish Me: a useful gardener's recipe

Cooking in summer...yes, the produce is beautiful . The peaches of January make my heart sing. And yes, the garden keeps giving (and giving and giving). The heat brings on a particular kind of digging-my-heels-in mindset; the pressure to produce good home-cooked meals feels oppressive in an Australian heatwave.

Useful, simple recipes are the ones that call at this time of year. An oldie, this one, from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you want to learn how to cook vegetables to perfection, Madison is your woman.

I think of this as a gardener's stew, but of course the book it comes from is about making the most of farmer's market buys. Same thing, just that I am the farmer, and the market my veg patch. Despite what looks like a long recipe for a "simple" stew, this is about as intuitive as cooking gets. You are layering and cutting vegetables according to their density and cooking time. An hour or so of unattended burbling and you have a dinner that tastes as though you worked a lot harder. A summer win.

a useful gardener's stew

Start by pouring 3 tablespoons of olive oil into a deep, heavy casserole dish (which has a similarly heavy lid). Set the pot on the lowest flame. Peel, then slice 2 onions into thick wedges and add to the pot. Throw in 2 bay leaves, a palmful of thyme leaves and as much sage as you like (I like about 20 leaves-worth). Add 3 peeled and halved cloves of garlic next. You could add more garlic, but I've become a bit sensitive to the stuff in my middle age, thus play things on the safe side.

Now, you're going to add vegetables in layers, salting and peppering each layer as you go. First, approximately 12 small carrots; baby/Dutch ones can be left whole. Larger ones can cut into pieces about the size of their smaller brothers, and use less - enough so that you have the equivalent of 12 babies. Next, small waxy potatoes. Tiny ones should be left whole and bigger ones can be halved or even quartered. No quantity given here - just use your nouse/hunger as your guide. Next, pour over a 400g tin of tomatoes and their juices, OR 5 juicy tomatoes that you've very roughly chopped - it all depends, of course, on what stage of bounty your garden is at.

Next, chuck in about 250g of green beans, topped and cut into pieces the size of a wine cork. This recipe is a winner because beans that seem to have gone too far for ordinary boiling and cooking do well here. Less wastage FTW. Add about 450g of zucchini/squash/New Guinea Beans chopped into large pieces, then a few peeled and roughly chopped capsicum/peppers from a jar. Again, you could use fresh, but they are my nemesis in the garden, sadly. Lastly, add a few tablespoons of water or wine to the pot.

Now, bring to a boil. Put the lid on and turn right, right down for 45mins-1 hour. The vegetables will slowly stew, collapse just a little into a near-magical state of tenderness, a puddle of juices in the base of the pan that has the kind of depth most people think vegetables alone are incapable of achieving. At the 45 minute mark you could add some cooked chickpeas.

Serve with a knob of butter on top of each dish, and a large spoonful of pesto. Maybe bread to mop up the juices, maybe you prefer a spoon.