Potato, tomato and onion pie

 How do you define a pie?  Because frankly, this dish is very possibly not one.  But look, shut up okay, it's full of potato and what more do you want? So it's kind of a casserole, layered like a lasagne, but in a pie dish, and crunchy on top.  It's classic peasant/student fare, and given the December Austerity Measures this should free up enough coin to subsidise the high quality cooking chocolate I need for all my Christmassy treats and not at all for gnawing on after dinner.


Ingredients:

• 2 potatoes
• 3 tomatoes
• 1 onion
• 1 teaspoon wholeseed mustard
• slice of butter
• olive oil 
• salt and pepper  

Brush a pie dish with olive oil and turn the oven on to 180 C. Melt the butter with the mustard and add salt and pepper.  Then finely slice everything.

Line the pie dish first with a layer of potatoes, then onion, then tomato.  Add half the mustardy butter mixture.  Repeat. 

Top with potato and brush the top with olive oil.  Sprinkle with salt if you know what's good for you.

Cover with foil and put in the oven.  After 30 minutes remove the foil and turn the oven up to 190.  Remove after another 30 minutes.


Consume.

Tomato and basil soup

 Some foods are so ubiquitous in their processed form that it's all too easy to get away with not making them.  Tomato soup is just such a food.  But if you always opt for the comforting tin you're missing out, because homemade tomato soup is so quick it takes about the same time, and is wonderfully delicious.  It's still insanely cheap if you're down your last pennies, and has a tangy robustness that a tin just can't give you.  And since today is the last day of Winter, it is absolutely the day for soup!


Ingredients:

• tomatoes
• powdered stock
• basil leaves
• shallot
• garlic clove
• cracked pepper

Chop up your garlic and shallot.  Don't be too precious about it, you're going to blend the crap out of them in a bit.  Put the kettle on to boil. Fry the garlic and shallot in a bit of olive oil on a medium heat.  Quarter your tomatoes and throw them in and fry for a minute or two, stirring them so they don't burn.  Add three cups of boiling water and a three teaspoons of stock powder, and six or seven basil leaves.  Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Take your barmix blender and whizz the soup until it's all smooth. That's it.  You just made tomato soup and the News hasn't even got to the weather yet.

Tomato sugo

Last weekend Leith and I did a good deed.  We drove to Stawell to help out moving some furniture and boxes around, and then we were rewarded by Leith's mum in the traditional manner: with food.  We visited a farmers' market on Sunday and got ourselves a box of saucing tomatoes!  We also got a whole lot of fresh herbs from her garden.  So on Monday night, I made sauce.

I didn't have a recipe, and I read a whole bunch online, each different to the last: leave the skins on vs blanche and peel them; add sugar, don't add sugar; add onion, don't add onion; puree, don't puree etc  So I ended up deciding to just make my own sauce however the hell I wanted.  In fact, I made three kinds, because I needed three pots to fit all the tomatoes.

Ingredients:

• Tomatoes
• garlic cloves (1 clove to approx every 500g of tomatoes)
• a splash of oil
• salt and pepper
• tablespoon of caster sugar
•  a decent splash of water
• a slug of olive oil

Optional extras:

• finely chopped onion
• basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, any other herbs you like
• olives
• anchovies
• chilli
• anything you want!

I made three kinds: one that was tomato with garlic and four herbs; one tomato, garlic, basil and chilli; and one tomato with garlic, basil, olives and anchovies.  I didn't remove any skins because I couldn't be bothered, and also, it just seemed so wasteful.

Wash your tomatoes to remove any dirt.  Chop them into quarters, taking care to remove any impurities.  Put them in the largest pot you have, or three!  Add about a centimeter of water to each pot, add a slug of olive oil and the smashed garlic.  This will stop the tomatoes from burning on the base of the pots, but don't add too much as the tomatoes will leech water once they start cooking, and the sauce will be too runny.  Put the pots on a medium to low heat, and cook covered for about 40 minutes.  Stir occassionally, and let the tomatoes break down.  Add a tablespoon of sugar or so to each pot and stir in.

Once the tomatoes have started to break down considerably, add a generous sprinkle of good quality salt and cracked pepper.  Add your herbs and whatever else you are including (although I didn't add the olives until after I'd pureed).  Continue to simmer for 15 mins or so until there is a reasonably balance of liquid and tomato chunks.  Remove from the heat and pulse a few times with a bar mix until it has the consistency you want.  I pureed mine so that it was mostly smooth, but included a few little lumps still.  Two of my pots were just right, but put the third back on the heat for 10 mins to thicken a little more.

Pour into serving sized bottles and keep in the fridge or freezer, depending on when you think you might use them.  This is what it looks like if you drop one of the containers - the largest one - of delicious tomato sugo.

Leith used one right away to make us pasta!  He used some of the amazing things we came home with, including a giant golden zucchini and a homemade calabrese salami.   Here's what he made:

Ingredients:

• 250g wholemeal pasta spirals
• 1 jar of tomato and herb sugo
• golden zucchini
• salami chunks
• finely chopped onion
• parmasen cheese to garnish
• olive oil

Slice the zucchini into fat steaks, sprinkle them with salt and pepper and brush them with olive oil.  Then cook them on a grill until they blacken and go all squishy.  In the meantime, cook your pasta in just a little salted water.

Saute the onion in the olive oil until golden.  Add the salami and fry until all the delicious porky juices start flowing.  Add your sugo and simmer until heated through.  Leith here demonstrates his technique of keeping the wooden spoon clear of the pan, so it doesn't absorb all the flavours.  A worthy tip, if you believe in such things - I have to confess that I never do it!

Add the pasta and mix through, then finally, add the grilled zucchini and mix gently again.  Garnish with the parmasen, and voila!  Delicious pasta full of yumminess.

Slow roasted tomatoes

I have been a pretty bad blogger lately.  I could tell you about lingering flues and essays and a seemingly endless number of birthdays and all manner of things that you don't care about, but suffice it to say I have been very negligent of this blog.  I didn't even post about the Parkville Ladies' and Gentlemen's Club.  I do want you to know that I made all those things, and they were all devoured.  Unfortunately I made most of them after midnight on work nights and completely forgot to take photos.

But never fear, I have a plan.  A plan to make up for it.  It involves a flurry of cooking this weekend, all of which I pledge to put up here.  And it starts with these: Slow roasted tomatoes.

Ingredients

• Vine ripened tomatoes, or any big juicy firm red variety 
• Good quality olive oil
• Balsamic vinegar
• Sea salt
• Cracked pepper 

Let's start by saying that this recipe is easy. Stupidly easy. All it requires is that you are about the house, because you want these suckers to cook for a loooooong time.  The longer and slower they cook, the more the flavours concentrate.  You can't really get this recipe wrong, but you can certainly get it right.  The most assured way to kick arse is to use really good quality ingredients.  Since all the flavours are concentrating during the slow roasting, this is one recipe where stand out ingredients will make a big difference.  So try to get extra virgin, cold press oil, a good vinegar, and good quality salt.  Let's face it, these things are all awesome to have around anyway.  The vinegar is the best bit.  It caramelises during the roasting and adds an extra sticky sweetness to the tomatoes.

So, heat your oven to 120 C.  Chop your tomatoes into quarters and place them in a large mixing bowl.  Pour a generous drizzle of oil and vinegar over them, and then add liberal quantities of salt and pepper.  Toss them in the bowl.  My preferred way to do this is to lift the bowl with both hands and swoosh it out quickly, away from my body and flicked upwards - the tomatoes will flip over themselves and coat themselves evenly in the mixture without bruising, and minimising the amount of oil used.  This is also a really good way to oil potatoes before roasting.

Place the tomatoes in lined pans and put them in the oven.  Leave them there for four or five hours. Done. Easy. Delicious. High five.

Use this little morsels in pasta sauces, risotto, on antipasto platters, in sandwiches.  I had some with Persian fetta on a fresh bagel for breakfast, and it was divine.  To store them, seal them in an air tight container and put them in the fridge.

Mammoth Prawn Pasta

    Prawns (larger and fresher the better)

-            Chopped/torn Basil (fresh)

G     Garlic

-           Tomatoes

-           Olive oil

-           Fresh spaghetti

-           Cracked pepper

Marinate the prawnies overnight in some beautiful olive oil, cracked pepper, little lemon juice (optional, if you haven't got time – it’s delish without marinating them too).

In boiling water, blanche the tomatoes + peel.
Fry garlic in olive oil.
Dice into bite size pieces.
Put prawnies in with garlic and oil for a short while until cooked. Gently stir in diced tomato and leave in until tomato is heated (not long or tomatoes go soggy).
When heated, take off heat + stir in basil (keep some to garnish).
Garnish with basil

A bit of murray salt is an essential accompaniment. Fresh fetta is an optional extra you can sprinkle on at the end.