crush garlic | I am NOT an urban hippie

As I have stated on many an occasion one of the things we do regularly is cook up meals and lunches at the same time and tonight was no exception.

A quick meal of organic pasta with passata was tonights meal and tommorows lunchs.

It is staple for us with various combinations and permutations and allows me to cook up any excess vegies that happen to be in season and freezes and reheats well for lunches. At the moment we have a major excess of zucchini so I pile these in and they bulk out the meal. You need to use what is at hand no point in wasting it or buying something just to have the exact ingredients you need. Improvisation is the key to eating seasonally and having staples like passata gives you a lot of flexibility to go with it. It is again a skill to look at a pile of food and go I can make X with that and it will be solid but not necessarily blogable meal (or maybe it is 🙂 )

So tonight’s recipe was

500 grams of chicken mince (could be bacon, salami, sausages or any other type of meat, beans or none at all)
A lot of zucchini (in this case about 5 large zucchini)
Large onion
5 cloves of garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
Chilli to taste
Bottle of passata or a couple of jars/tins of tomato’s
2 table spoons of homemade pesto
Teaspoon of sugar.

Dice onion and brown, add meat and brown, crush garlic and add for a minute or two. Add the zucchini or other season vegetables and passata some water, salt and pepper to taste, chilli and sugar and cook for about 20 minutes giving it a good stir regularly

At the same time boil a lot of pasta. I did a full 750 gram bag of organic whole grain pasta tonight.

Once cooked down and vegies are soft. Turn off heat and add homemade basil pesto and stir through. As I said freezes well and makes a great and cheap lunch

Serve with a nice green side salad.

I like doing a good bit of foraging and colleting stuff. One of my pet hates is seeing stuff that could be used for something being thrown away and ending up in land fill and then seeing people purchase something new that takes yet more from a world that can ill afford it. Mind you I have been banned from hard rubbish days for the time being until I use up what I have already rescued.

I have been looking for some additional pallets to put up some shelves in the back shed and happened to notice a good batch of them at favourite haunt. I use pallets all the time and keep a good stock to allow me to make things like the warm bed I made recemtly for my seedlings, so I grabbed them and will build the shelves and post on that and other projects shortly.

Also managed to get a hold of a nice big bag of nettles to make soup. For those of you who have never had nettles give it a try. It tastes fantastic is cheap and very very good for you. Be careful obviously that you know where you nettles come from just to make sure that they have not been sprayed.

Using these sorts of things in simple meals makes a big difference. We waste so much spraying out so called weeds to plant other plants and as I have said a frugal life has to become the norm in the 1^st world as it is in the 3^rd world. At the end of the day we all live in one world.

As for the nettles if I can get some more I am going to make pesto with some local hazelnuts I have

Recipe for Nettle Soup

Big bag of young nettles
1 large onion
6 -8 garlic cloves to taste
3 potatoes (I used Dutch creams)
olive oil
salt and pepper
2 liters of stock (chicken or vegetable)
cream to taste when serving (optional)

Dice onions and potatoes and crush garlic sauté in olive oil for a few minutes.

Strip the leaves of the nettles (warning they bite) I use scissors to remove the leaves and wash in cold water if there is any dirt on them

Add to the pan with the other vegetables and wilt then add 2 liters of stock and cook for 20 minutes or so till potatoes is soft. Cool and puree with a stick blender. Reheat and serve with cream and cracked black pepper.

The soup will freeze well but don’t add the cream till you warm it up