dinner from the garden

My garden continues to grow, albeit very slowly since winter has started. Silverbeet and spinach seem to be in constant and generous supply however, so it is an ongoing challenge to come up with new ways to build it into dinner.

Last week = spaghetti with spinach and roasted red pepper - an adulterated version (I add chicken and lots of toasted pumpkin seeds) of the recipe available here at the Sanitarium website. This is a really nice recipe, it is quite a runny sauce though so sometimes I process another handful of toasted seeds with the spinach to add more texture to the sauce and it makes a consistency more like pesto.

Tonight = silverbeet and potato torte, a Stephanie Alexander recipe featured in her kitchen garden cook book, the recipe is here. (It is intended for use by children so the instructions are fairly long winded...) This torte uses an olive oil and cold water pastry, so is very healthy as far as pastry goes. It is a very short dough and crisps up well in the oven. Instead of mozzarella I used crumbled feta. We ate it with some tomato kasundi. It really needs a little something on the side.

I planted some garlic and shallots today, apparently they are supposed to go in on the shortest day of the year, which is not far away thank goodness. Some mesclun seeds were also scattered into a pot, which has been covered with a sheet of glass so it will hopefully warm up enough for them to sprout to life. Great excitement in the broccoli patch, a tiny flower has finally appeared on two of the plants.