Sweet potato and coconut soup

After a week in Orkney where every day lunch brought great soups and sandwiches, back in wintery Melbourne which in truth was not much wetter or colder than Orkney my thoughts turned to soup. I had sweet potatoes on hand and I remembered having a delicious sweet potato soup in Orkney, though I think it was carrot and sweet potato. 

A quick web search brought up a Donna Hay recipe that I could adapt to match the ingredients I had on hand. And this is the result. 

Ingredients 

1.5 k sweet potatoes

Olive oil

400 ml coconut milk

4 cups chicken stock

4 tsp chopped ginger

1 tsp Sambal oelek

3 cloves garlic crushed

Mode

Preheat oven to 220c

Cut sweet potatoes in half lengthwise 

Place on a baking tray

Dribble with olive oil 

Bake in oven for an hour until soft 

Meanwhile place all other ingredients in a saucepan and combine

Bring to boil and simmer

When sweet potatoes are cooked spoon out into blender

Add half of the coconut and stock mix to the sweet potato and blend until smooth

Add to the saucepan with the remaining coconut and stock mixture

Stir to combine and continue to cook until smooth.

Tuna, red pepper and sweet potato pie

Recently I spent a few days in Torquay and was pressed into service to cook a fish pie. So when I returned to Melbourne fish and pies were on my mind. What was at the shops? Fresh tuna, sweet potato and red pepper! Yum yum!! And there it was.

Ingredients 

350 gr tuna

Half red pepper

Half sweet potato 

1 clove garlic

1 tsp crushed ginger

1 tsp Sambal oelek 

2 sheets frozen puff pastry

Poppy seed

Mode

Preheat oven to 180c

Remove pastry to thaw

Chop sweet potato and microwave for 5 minutes

Roughly chop red pepper

Place one sheet of pastry on base of square baking dish

Add tuna

Place red pepper and sweet potato around the tuna

Crush ginger and garlic and add to the pie contents

Add Sambal oelek

Place second sheet of puff pastry on pie

Press to seal

Sprinkle poppyseeds 

Place in 180c oven for 45 minutes

"Elizabethan" vegetable tarte

A couple of days ago, I blogged about an Elizabethan pea tarte which I made for my current Futurelearn course. Whilst I liked the outcome, I have since reflected on what worked or didn't work and how it might be improved.  In this case, I chose to use a mixture of vegetables.  I put the vegetables (apart from the peas into the microwave at full pelt for one minute.  If you don't want to use a microwave you could steam them briefly.

I chose not to microwave the peas this time as I felt with the other recipe that modern frozen baby peas simply didn't need the extra cooking. So next time I make the pea tarte I won't do pre-cooking of the peas. I also chose this time to add the verjuice to the vegetables at the beginning and to have a closed pastry top and not to do two stages of cooking.  I found that this worked well and the vegetables probably stayed a bit moister.  But maybe this is my modern taste speaking.

Ingredients

Sweet potato
Cauliflower
Green peas frozen
Unsalted butter
Pepper
Cayenne
Cummin
Puff pastry
Verjuice



Mode

Preheat oven to 180c
If pastry frozen, remove to thaw
Slice sweet potato into fairly thin rounds
Break cauliflower into small flowerlets
Place cauliflower and sweet potato in souffle dishes
Sprinkle with pepper, cayenne and cummin
Place in microwave for one minute
Remove from microwave and add frozen peas
Add about 2 tsp sweet i.e. unsalted butter to each dish
Sprinkle verjuice into each dish
Cut the pastry into size for each dish

Place the pastry on the top of each souffle dish
Cook in the oven for 45 minutes

Sweet potato, chicken and endive

I'm still experimenting with various ways of baking chicken in lemon juice. There seems to a be an endless variety of possibilities. This time I used chicken fillets, and cooked them with endive, sweet potato, and green peas! I also steamed the endive before adding it to the second stage of cooking in the oven. Again, I served it with wholemeal basmati, but it would be fine alone if you want to reduce carbs, or you could serve it with pasta. The meatless option is on its way!

Ingredients

600 gr chicken fillets (without skins)
2 dsp seasalt flakes
2 cloves garlic
2 tsp sliced ginger
2 tsp ground turmeric
1 sweet potato
2 tbs lemon-infused olive oil
juice of two lemons (about 150 ml)
1 cup of frozen baby green peas
1 bunch of baby endive

Mode

Preheat oven to 210c
Chop the chicken and arrange in a baking dish
Slice the sweet potato in rounds and then halve them
Add the sweet pepper to the baking dish
Sprinkle with salt flakes
Peel and crush garlic and slice ginger
Add garlic, ginger, turmeric and oil to chicken and sweet potato
Mix thoroughly
Roast for 30 minutes
Meanwhile squeeze lemons
Roughly chop endive and steam lightly
Remove the chicken from the oven and pour over the lemon juice
Add the green peas and endive and stir to combine
Return to oven and roast for another 20 minutes.

Sweet potato and cauliflower for @shewgirl

When I recently returned to Australia, it was to discover that many of my online friends were participating in a #blogeverydayofjune project. I have been reading their blogposts and sometimes commenting and all the while reflecting on how slack I have become in my own blogging. So one of my aims this weekend was to do a few blogposts and in particular to finish off a few outstanding and half-written posts. This post is not one of those though it was triggered by my online community within some Twitter comments last night.

It has been a very long week here in Australia with the excitement of a new Prime Minister and all the lead-up to that. I also had a very busy week ending with all day Friday at Lilydale in a workshop on emergency management standard operating procedures. It was cold and pouring rain. When I finally got home after 7pm I wasn't in any mood to cook anything that was going to take time; nor did I even want to go to the supermarket on the way home to pick up anything.

A search of cupboards and fridge revealed that I wasn't going to starve (God forbid that that would ever happen!) and I started making a quick old vegetable stand-by. I think the origin of it was in an old Penguin Indian cookbook and related to cooking green peas with onion and turmeric. Over the years I have usually cooked the dish with green peas and often added potatoes. I often cook it with turmeric but sometimes with the first spicy ingredient that comes to hand, be this Malaysian curry powder, Vindaloo or whatever. Last night the potato shelf was bare, but I had a sweet potato and a cauliflower. And a jar of curry powder was the first spicy jar my hand reached for. So that was what I prepared to cook quickly before catching the end of the news and the start of the Geelong St Kilda match.

As I sat down to await the cooking, I reached for my iPod and found myself in the middle of a Twitter exchange that was about people wanting something quick for Friday dinner. After I mentioned my sweet potato and cauliflower, quick as a blink @shewgirl pointed out her expectations of a blog post so that she could check it out! So here it is @shewgirl! I think it has taken me longer to write this than it did to reach for the ingredients, chop, and cook!

Curried sweet potato & cauliflower

Ingredients
1 white onion
Olive oil
1 orange sweet potato
Quarter cauliflower
Curry powder
Water

Mode

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan which is large enough to contain all ingredients
When oil is hot, add sliced onion and stir until softened
Add to onions about a tablespoon of curry powder of your choice and stir
Slice the sweet potato and add to mix stirring again
Break the cauliflower into small flowerlets and add to mix and stir to combine
Add a cup of water to the saucepan
Place on the lid and cook until tender

Last night, I also unearthed some spicy sausages in the freezer and grilled them while the vegetables were cooking. I served them with Maggie Beer's plum sauce (ala Polyxena) and the vegetables. That was a yummy and very quick dinner. Unfortunately the AFL match was not so yummy :((