Kitchen Garden Inspiration: Samudra

The house my husband and I rent has a gorgeous little courtyard at the back, and in one corner is a raised bedded area which I've been trying to convert into a kitchen garden. So far it's been quite a lot of hardwork with no reward. Strawberries were uprooted by two excited puppies and carrots were eaten by woodlice as soon as they peeked through the soil. My tomatoes had too few nutrients, my capsicum too many. In all, it's taken a long time for anything vaguely resembling success to appear in my garden. However, the past few months have been a little more kind to me, and some veggies are getting themselves established in pots and planters across this small patch of land.

As a result of my gardening endeavours, I've been keeping a close watch for inspirational veggie patches - well, any garden which is actually yielding really. So when we visited Samudra on a recent trip to Dunsborough, I stopped to take a few snaps of the kitchen garden, the fruit of which they harvest and serve up in the cafe. I highly recommend the cafe - they do fantastic vegetarian meals, tasty coffee and the seating spills out next to the garden, making it a beautiful location to grab some breakfast.

Most of the plants were kept shaded from the harsh Western Australian sun, apart from some tomatoes towards the back. Then in various planters were bushes of basil, courgette, heads of lettuce, spinach and kale. Clearly they have much more room to play with than I do, but it was interesting to see a very functional kitchen garden all laid out.

Maybe in a couple of weeks I'll be able to share something from my own kitchen garden... green fingers crossed!

I'm away for work at the moment, so I've let my weekly updates slide and I'll be playing 'catch-up' for a while when I get back. I'm spending 3 weeks away from home in total, spread across Hobart and Sydney, and while I'm enjoying seeing some new places here in Australia, I'm missing home quite a lot too! I've been lax in cooking for myself while I'm away, and what I have made is really not worth sharing. Instead I'll blog about some of the culinary highlights from my travels - so stay tuned!

#6: Gnocchi with bacon and rosemary

In an attempt to start pushing myself a bit harder with this 52 dishes challenge, I decided to try my hand at making gnocchi. Thus far the dishes I've made each week for this challenge haven't been much of a challenge, which I suppose seems somewhat perverse. Unlike many new years resolutions, this one is still going strong into February, and I'm glad of that, but I'd definitely like to start learning a few more new recipes and techniques. So, armed with a couple of potatoes and a recipe I found following a brief "easy gnocchi recipe" search, I headed into the world of gnocchi-making.

This recipe is strongly inspired by the Kitchen Konfidence 'Rustic Gnocchi with Sage Brown Butter Sauce', adapted to account for what I had in the fridge at the time (an abundance of bacon). I also opted to simply boil the potatoes at the beginning rather than roast them, given that I began cooking already hungry!

On the whole, these were great, particularly for a first attempt! The gnocchi were soft and light, which made a lovely change from the heavy, stodgy ones I seem to buy at the grocers. However, they weren't the very best looking of gnocchi, as I didn't take enough care when rolling them to make them uniform and smooth, plus some got a little squished as I turned them in the pan. I'd definitely try to do this more carefully next time. Finally, I made these gnocchi for lunch, and I'd likely increase these portions if cooking it for dinner.

Serves 2 (as lunch)

c.1 hour total, including initial boiling, cooling etc.

3 medium potatoes
1 egg
flour for dough and rolling (around 1 cup)
3 rashers of bacon
2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
olive oil, salt and pepper

1. Peel, chop and boil potatoes
2. Drain potatoes and mash them in a mixing bowl with some salt. Allow to cool.
3. While the potatoes cool, chop bacon and rosemary into small pieces and fry slowly in olive oil.
4. When cooled, beat one egg and enough flour into the mashed potatoes to make a smooth but sticky dough. This will be about half a cup of flour.
5. Taking small sections of the dough, roll them on a floured surface to make small dumplings. Note: you can then leave these here until you're ready to cook.
6. Place the gnocchi in a pan of boiling water.
7. As the gnocchi cook they will rise to the surface. Scoop them out as they do, and place them in the frying pan with the bacon and rosemary. Do this until all gnocchi are in the frying pan and coated with the oil-bacon-rosemary mix.

Serve with parmesan and a chick flick - this is pure comfort food!

#5: Baked beans on, well, anything.

And just like that January was over. Seriously, I feel like this year might fly by rather quickly. I've been particularly busy with work this past month, which might account for why time has been moving so fast for me: that's the real meaning of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, or at least, that's how I choose to interpret it during particularly busy periods in my life.

As a result dinners have been slightly lazy. If you thought last week's salad was lazy, wait until you read this recipe! This is the quite probably the easiest recipe in the world, and most of the ingredients (and definitely all of the essential ones) can always be found in my cupboards. It’s lazy, and fast, and requires the minimum of forethought. Perfect.

I eat these beans on toast, on a jacket potato, as a side to pork or chicken, or – as I discovered this week – as the tastiest filling in a beef burger. The recipe below makes enough for 2 or 4, depending on what you’re serving it with. Any leftovers keep perfectly well in the fridge for a day or two, and the flavour only improves. If I’m making these as a side to a meat dish I’ll typically make the beans up at some stage early in the cooking process, and then just reheat them before serving up – it sounds lazy, but giving them some time to sit makes the sauce a tad thicker and fuller.

Pictured below is a fuller version of this recipe, but this week's dish was a true pantry-basic, and I just used what was in the house. I used half as many beans as normal, and the result was just a slightly sloppier mixture, but just as tasty.

Serves 4, or 2 with a decent amount of leftovers.

10-15 minutes cooking

1 tin tomatoes (chopped)

1 tin beans (mixed or bortolli work best for me)

1 pinch cayenne pepper

Plenty of pepper and paprika

Dash of Worcestershire sauce.

Put in a pan and cook on a medium-low heat for 10-15 minutes (until beans are all soft and the sauce is thickening). Serve.