Grilled Eggplant and Zucchini with Rocket

I acquired a grill pan recently and grilling has fast become one of my favourite ways of preparing food. Grilled tofu especially is a treat.

This is a different grilled dish that I've also grown quite fond of. It is a lunch dish of grilled eggplant and zucchini with rocket. The juicy, oily flavour of the grilled vegetables is really complemented nicely by the bitterness of the rocket.

So here's how you do it.



Cut the eggplant in thin slices and the zucchini in long thin strips (slicing vertically along the zucchini). Leave for about 30 minutes in your marinade of choice (I use a marinade of white cooking wine, balsamico vinegar, olive oil, rosemary, thyme and basil).

Heat up your grill pan. Place your vegetables on the grill. Press down on them with a spatula to get the swanky grill lines. It doesn't matter how you place your vegetables, but I like to tilt the zucchini a little bit, so that you get these nice slanted lines.



Grill for a couple of minutes, flip and grill for an extra minute. If you want (though this creates a lot of smoke), you can throw in what is left of your marinade towards the end for a bit of extra flavour.

Serve with some rocket and salad leaves of your choice.

I used about half a zucchini and half an eggplant because I was only making it for myself. Grilling shrinks the slices quite a bit, though, so if you're preparing it for a couple of people, be prepared and use a couple of each.

Almond Shortbread

Hello!

I haven't posted in a while. My humble apologies. I have missed the world of blogging.

I moved recently and have sadly been without a good oven and, most importantly, without a camera. But all this has changed!

I recently came into possession of a camera and have gradually started to get to know my terrible oven. It is a cautious friendship still, but I have had some success with it now.

Anyway, my first piece of baking to come out presentable was some shortbread I made a couple of days ago. I had never had shortbread before and I was curious to see what the fuss was about.

I used a pretty simple recipe off the BBC website and added some chopped almonds.



They came out looking pretty photogenic and they were pretty tasty. I would like to make them more distinctive, though. I'm not sure if it was the recipe or the temperamental oven, but they weren't quite as amazingly tasty as I expected them to be.

I'll definitely be tinkering with shortbread again.

Happy New Year!

I apologise for a lack of promised Christmas postings. The whole Christmas to New Year period was an absolute shambles and I forgot to photograph my baking in all the drama...

I stayed with my Aunt for the week between the holidays, to get away from life at home for a bit. My little brother has Asperger's Syndrome - not a mental illness or necessarily negative, but definitely a disability in that it hinders his ability to function in society. This disorder has a strong genetic component, and is visible in both my parents. I sometimes feel like the only adult in the house. Everyone else seems to have ceased emotional development at the age of 12.

Nevermind, I'm back now and I have done more baking.

I love making the Australian classic, Vanilla Slice. Generally it is vanilla flavoured custard sandwhiched between two sheets of puff pastry, and topped with a passionfruit icing. My last attempt, all the way back in 2007, was relatively traditional. This time I decided to flavour the custard with a T2 tea called, appropriately enough, Vanilla Slice. It is a mixture of dried apple pieces, rosehip and vanilla beans. It's very nice, but a bit too sweet for me to drink hot.

I infused the custard with the tea, and added extra vanilla essence and some rosewater (I love the taste). Unfortunately the flavour didn't come through all that strongly - maybe I should make a concentrate next time. Anyone have any ideas?

The icing is made from home grown organic passionfruit. It is very tasty. Only two passionfruits have ripened so far, but the vine is covered with green fruit. I hope they don't ripen all at the same time and leave me buried in passionfruit...

I have to repeat my love of old Women's Weekly cookbooks here. They are really wonderful. The older they are, the easier they are to veganise. This recipe, for example, only needed butter and cream substitutions (dairy-free butter and silken tofu, respectively). Most recipes contain no more than one or two eggs, and many contain none at all.


The custard turned out a really pretty purple, which contrasted nicely with the bright yellow icing. The icing is so yummy, I'd eat it on its own.

Next week I'm returning to meal planning with Middle Eastern food. My informal New Year's resolution is to be less lazy, so I'll also try to do more blogging... wish me luck.

Christmas Baking

Today I had my first day off from work in ages (really a week, but I complain a lot) and I spent the whole time baking!

I've been planning my Christmas baking for ages; it's what I most look forward to at Christmas. I love all kinds of seasonal baking. I love all the traditional recipes and flavours that appear only once a year. If it weren't for baking and presents, I'd probably give up Christmas altogether. The religious significance is lost on me as I am, after all, an atheist. Getting together with family is obviously an important secular aspect of the holiday, but that is largely centred around food... so once again we come back to Christmas baking.

Food has the ability to bring people together, but it also has the ability to alienate and exclude. That is partly why I am so enthusiastic about veganising traditional Christmas recipes. The archetypal Australian Christmas lunch involves seafood and a smorgasboard of cold meats. Not very vegan friendly. At least this year I'll be able to grow fat on a range of Christmas sweets.

I made a stol, mini Christmas puddings, whisky mince pies, almond biscotti, chocolate fruit and nut clusters and macadamia biscuits. These are all going to be packed up into cute little gift boxes tomorrow.

One small mishap: I nearly dropped the biscotti, sending some onto the floor, and catching the 180 degrees Celcius baking tray with my bare hand... Luckily my hand is only incredibly painful, not actually seriously burnt. (Unfortunately, the worse the burn, the less the pain.) At least I can console myself with tasty foods.

I'll post all the recipes and photos individually in the coming days. After I clean up all the mess I made...

More veggies in my garden

Last Sunday I went on a nursery crawl with my mum and my aunt. This is generally a bad idea... I love growing my own food, my mum loves the idea of gardening (she doesn't have a lot of time to do it) and my aunt is an avid gardener in the English cottage style. Naturally we came back with quite a haul.

I decided that I would expand my veggie garden into the backyard, by way of a potted veggie patch. A potted one because planting anything in the soil would first require me to dig up a few square metres of tangled roots and hard soil... the remains of our first attempt at vegetable gardening. The whole area has been taken over by various native ground covers, parsley and a vine that covers the back verandah. This in itself is fine, as my mum planted each of these things, and they do make the place look nice and green. Not, however, great for veggie gardening.

So I came home with a variety of seedlings, from green beans to multi-coloured silverbeet. I endeavoured to finagle myself an apple tree but with no success. (My mum reasoned that I'm leaving in a few months, so I shouldn't get anything that is going to take a long time to fruit, or long-term care.)

I had a day off from work today, so I spent the morning planting. I am perhaps not a natural gardener, as I hate dirt and crawly things. But I managed. Unfortunately I ran out of potting mix so some of the poor little plants will have to wait another few days.


This is an heirloom Italian tomato, with three different types of lettuce around it, and some spinach in the background. I really hope the spinach survives. It is starting to wilt a bit already. I was a bit torn about buying it - it's the wrong season for planting, and it was quite root bound in the pot. We'll see.

I added some worm poo (we have a worm farm) to the pots of all these plants, and I've been giving them liquid fertiliser and lots of water. Hopefully that will be enough to give them a good start in life.


This is an eggplant. I've wanted to grow an eggplant for ages. The last one I bought died a few days after I planted it, because I planted it in the middle of the old veggie patch. I think it was strangled by all the other plants.


Finally, some green beans, cucumbers and zucchini. I may have to move these to allow them to climb up a trellis or spread out, but I'll think about that once they've passed the tricky baby stage.

Some of the pots look a little cramped - I'll probably have to repot some of the plants in a few weeks. But they are better off than in the tiny, root bound black pots they came in. Especially in this heat! It's difficult to tell from the photos, but it is boiling hot out there. I wore a hat, but I won't be surprised if I end up with sunburnt legs or arms.

I love summer, though. Everything fruits and the garden is filled with tasty, tasty colour. The passionfruit vine has been heavy with green baby fruit for weeks... looks like another good crop this year. A new tomato plant in the front garden has also produced a handful of bright red tomatoes. Even more excitingly, one of the chinotto plants that I had assumed to be nearly dead is growing a chinotto! There are even a few lemons growing on the lemon tree. (Don't they realise it's the wrong season for that? They already fruited in winter.)

I have a new job

For the last two years, I've worked casually at an Australian coffee franchise. I had to quit this job recently because, quite frankly, I got too expensive and they stopped giving me shifts. It's a sad reality that these types of businesses would rather hire 15 year olds with no skills than pay a few more dollars for someone who can actually make coffee.

I fear that many Australian businesses are starting to look like this. There seems to be an assumption that nobody in their right mind would want a career in retail. These jobs are only meant for students; they are a stop-gap between education and entering the 'real' workforce. It seems a strange contradiction - Australia has a shortage of blue-collar workers, and thanks to John Howard, fewer people have been able to afford university. I wonder if it's to do with the increasing numbers of American-style franchises and homogenised products.

It's not really an issue for me - I am just looking to earn some fast cash. But there are plenty of school leavers (many of them my now former classmates) who are going into retail or hospitality because they want a full-time career.

John Howard's now defunct Work Choices legislation would have taken this neoliberal restructuring to a whole new level. Work Choices is now dead - but will Prime Minister Rudd give us anything quantitatively different?

Has anyone here read Barbara Ehrenreich's fantastic "Nickel and Dimed"? An Australian journalist by the name of Elisabeth Wynhausen tried a similar thing in Australia, which is chronicled in "Dirt Cheap". I read this book about a year ago, but it seems particularly relevant now. Although it is not as good as Ehrenreich's, it still reveals some hard truths about the Australian job market. There are adults trying to earn a living on the 'flexible' schedule and award wages designed for students. Most businesses aren't interested in experience or stability; they just want cheap seasonal workers to stand at tills.

The workers disporportionally affected by this neoliberal restructing are semi-skilled and unskilled female workers, particularly immigrants. Wynhausen was often one of the few Caucasians in a particular workplace, and there was a conspicuous lack of men. I only hope that Kevin manages to get his act together and produce some decent workplace legislation.

Thankfully my skills (a TAFE Barista qualification and customer service experience) were valued by other employeers. I now have two new jobs. One will be a full-time job, once I've been trained more. This is at a tea house run by an Australian tea company with a cult following. The other is a casual job doing straight retail at an Australian confectionary retailer famed for its liquorice. So I'm going to be pretty busy!

My meal plan for this week mostly consists of 'left overs'. I'll be working 8 days in a row. Hopefully I'll have more time next week to restock my freezer - I'm running low on prepared lunches. I've become rather attached to meal planning. It makes me feel more organised; it's one less variable.




I want to expand the topics covered in this blog. I want to have posts that are wide-ranging, a little bit ranty and a bit incoherent at times. Is that alright with everybody?

I hate Chinese garlic

I hate Chinese garlic. I really do. It's the horrible papery white stuff that comes cheap from the supermarket. It manages to be simultaneously bland and offensive to the tastebuds at the same time.

I made broccoli with fried garlic slices for dinner tonight, but the garlic ruined it. It barely has any taste, so you have to use a lot of it, but then when you can actually taste it you realise that it tastes foul.

A couple of months ago I found some beautiful Australian-grown organic garlic. It was expensive, but it tasted so much better. And it actually had colour! No shrivelled white outer shell, but a smooth fresh jacket in shades of purple.

I miss that garlic. I haven't been able to find it again, and, in a fit of garlic-desperation, we bought this horrible stuff. Never again!