Autumn Zebra

As we all know, we're supposed to eat lots of different coloured vegetables all the time, etc. I don't like making more than one dish per meal, if possible. Today we had really easy nachoes - tinned beans in chilli sauce, wow, we're almost done already! Defrosted some ham and fried that with onion and garlic before adding the tinned beans, so that's most of dinner. Guacamole which I have made probably a couple of hundred times now, so that is easy. So, we get to have extra vegetables! Quartered mini capsicums that were on special at the supermarket ages ago and have somehow survived in the fridge all this time (the "baby" veges are always expensive, but as soon as they're a couple of days old, they put them on special, yay!), and yellow round beans and flat green beans from the farmer's market, fried over a high heat in some olive oil. Mixing them around every couple of seconds until they all have spots of browning, but are essentially only barely cook...

We eat a lot of strange food. I had this realisation a couple of weeks ago, when I suddenly saw our meal from an outside perspective. Along with making a lot of recipes from outside our culture, I also make a lot of stuff up. Here's a random side dish I made a while ago - chop parsnip into chip-sized pieces, and "sweet bread" (eg. this was raisin and malt loaf) into stamp or domino sized pieces and fry in butter, adding sesame seeds and a sprinkling of salt part way through. I pretty much like anything related to bread or fried/roasted food, so this is all good. With oil instead of butter, it would be healthy. If your definition of healthy includes a bit of butter now and then, then it's healthy already. I like taking pictures of the stuff I cook, because it is another interesting creative exercise of planning and putting things together, so I might post some more interesting recipes. Also, if you can afford it, you should get a titanium non-stick frying pan like...

Yesterday was soup day, because I made soup. Amazing how that works. I made lentil and root vegetable soup. It also had celery in it, ruining the root vegetable theme - but I categorised it as "seasoning" so the theme was saved, whew! The veges were carrots, an old wrinkled parsnip (it is not necessary that the parsnip be in this state, but in my case I am trying to reduce food wastage so I had to use it on the double! It was rehydrated in the soup, good as new, I'm sure...), yams, swede... I wasn't quite sure if that even grew underground initially, but it does... Wikipedia says that it is a cross between a cabbage and a turnip! So you can eat the leaves, although it is never sold with leaves here. Actually, if you want more ideas on how to eat a swede - I can seldom think of any good ideas but buy them anyway - wikipedia has some cooking notes. Hmmm, looks like a New Zealander has been at that article as it specifically mentions that they grow bigger in the South I...