Archives for posts with tag: tarragon

True love and tarragon

November 12, 2014 //

Artemisia dracunculus. The name conjures up mythical realms. Kingdoms filled with swirling mists, ancient turreted castles perched atop snowy peaks, emerald-green enchanted forests, fire-breathing flame-wreathed dragons. Worlds worthy of the Game of Thrones.

The plant however with its delicate blade-like green leaves does more than just conjure up mythical fantasies, it works magic in the harsh reality of the modern day kitchen.

If you are not already a lover of tarragon then now is the time to enchant yourself and dash out and buy a plant – or at the very least buy a plastic bag of tarragon from the herb section of your supermarket. Well if you can find it, that is.

You’ll never regret planting tarragon in your garden – every spring it reliably reappears pushing new green shoots up through the soil regardless of whether you have watered or not. And then until fairly late into winter you’ll have a steady supply of flavour on your doorstep.

Ever since I first had a tarragon plant I’ve had dreams of making a dish using the four fines herbes but have never had much luck growing chervil, nor parsley for that matter. I think chervil requires just a little more care than I am ever able to give a plant. Although as I write this I wonder if we have any chervil seeds and if I should quickly go out into the garden and plant them.

I haven’t actually used tarragon in a very classic way. For example I’ve never in my life made a Béarnaise sauce. For many years the only way I used tarragon was stuffed into the cavity of a chicken done the Nico Ladenis way – with honey and black pepper. I believed that recipe alone was the reason to have a never-ending supply of tarragon.

But I do keep wondering how else I can put my bountiful supply to good use. I’ve made Heidi Swanson’s tarragon oil a couple of times, most recently as part of a trio of potions for Scarlet Bennett’s creative challenge. Tarragon oil is a versatile and essential addition to any grocery cupboard. Make yourself a batch – you won’t be sorry. Lately I’ve been a bit obsessed with pairing tarragon with lovage as in green eggs and frittata. I’ve made tarragon tempura – and lovage tempura too. Tarragon leaves brighten up a jug of iced water and the stalks make a good tea. I’m sipping some as I write.

On Sunday I served antipasti from Super Sconto to our Allaboutwriting ‘Secret of Story’ participants. I bought some bocconcini and I thought I’d mix them with baby tomatoes in a salad but I really needed some basil, or pesto which I didn’t have. I hate buying basil and pesto but our basil is nowhere near pickable yet. I stood staring out at the vegetable garden and the tiny basil plants wondering what else we had in the garden that could add a little Italian flavour – origanum and rosemary certainly could. I could make a nice olive oil dressing of course. But I had my heart set on pesto. Mmmm. Could I make a tarragon pesto, I wondered?

I grabbed the scissors and in no time at all I was whipping up a batch of tarragon pesto. Inspired by the Nico Ladenis chicken recipe, not so very Italian after all…

Tarragon pesto with honey and black pepper

Ingredients

100g tarragon leaves (stripped from their stalks)
250 ml olive oil
135 grams flaked almonds
30 grams honey
4 smallish cloves fresh garlic (5 grams)
5 grams coarsely grated black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt

Method

Blend the whole lot together but don’t over-process.

Use the tarragon pesto:

to enliven a tomato and mozzarella salad
as a pasta sauce
as a filling in an omelet
over baked potatoes
mix with mayonnaise and serve with cold chicken
stirred into a soup
with sliced cheese, cold meat and rocket for lunch

Next up I’ll be making tarkhun, tarragon cake, potica, tarragon ice cream and tarragon jelly. Pity it is already dark or I’d be out in the garden harvesting leaves.

Tags Artemisia dracunculus, Heidi Swanson, Nico Ladenis, Scarlet Bennett, Super Sconto, tarragon, tarragon bocconcini tomato salad, tarragon pesto

Categories Creative Challenge, Urban garden eating

Green Eggs and Halva Brownies

By Trish U

October 26, 2014 //

Some months ago I slipped into a second hand bookshop while waiting for Richard who was in the barber. I think at the time we were in the midst of our food waste challenge so I was cooking strictly from the pantry and vegetable garden and was determined not to buy any food. There were however no rules in place regarding the buying of cookery books. In the time it took for Richard to have a very speedy grooming I managed to find and buy three cook books all of which were of the ‘cooking from the garden’ variety. I was delighted with them. Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes by Jeanne Kelley, Plum Gorgeous by Romney Steele and I’m afraid I just can’t remember what number three was, let alone find it. It might be buried under the mountains of paperwork waiting to be tamed into a tax return. Now there’s an incentive to get that done.

This morning when I was looking for inspiration for my weekend ritual of making something for Scarlet’s creative challenge while at the same time treating my family to a little surprise, I reached for Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes and idly flipped through it with no real expectations. I knew I had to make two things: a nice healthy (carb free) breakfast for Richard preferably using things from the garden, maybe a variation on last week’s frittata, and something muffin-like and way more indulgent for the kids using only ingredients we had on hand.

Two recipes jumped out at me: ‘Bittersweet One Pot Brownies’ and a Swiss chard encased baked egg recipe. ‘Perfect’, I thought,’those recipes are just crying out to be made – with some modification.’

And into the garden I went. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the lovage growing so abundantly in its corner and its companion, the French tarragon. They did work rather well together last week. And then there were the spring onions in desperate need of picking.

That was the healthy/low carb diet option taken care of. Now I just needed to come up with something creative for the brownie. I rummaged around in the cupboard and found half a packet of blanched almonds and a jar of instant espresso powder bought for one of Nigella’s recipes. A nice start but what else? There was some left-over halva from last week. ‘Could that work in a Brownie?’ I wondered.

And so I ended up with Green Eggs and Halva, Almond, Mocha Brownies and a happy little family.

Green Eggs

Ingredients

olive oil and or butter for frying
4 Swiss chard leaves
6 large spring onions finely sliced (include some of the green part)
two stalks of lovage including the leaves, finely chopped
a very generous handful of tarragon, finely chopped
a heaped teaspoon of tomato jam
salt and pepper
feta cheese
4 extra large free range eggs

Method

Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Butter four small ramekins.
Cut the stalk out of the Swiss chard (keeping the leaves whole) and chop the stalk finely
Fry the Swiss chard stalk, spring onions and lovage very gently in a generous amount of olive oil and butter until very soft.
While frying the spring onion mixture lie the Swiss chard leaves on top of the mixture in the pan one at a time until just wilted. Set aside.
Add the tarragon, salt, pepper and the tomato jam to the spring onion mix stirring until nicely mixed together.
Line the ramekins with the Swiss chard leaves.
Crumble a little feta into each ramekin, add a couple of spoons of the spring onion mix, crack an egg into each ramekin, spoon in some more of the spring onion mix and top with the remaining crumbled feta.
Place on a baking tray and bake for 12 minutes or until the egg is just set.
Turn out onto a plate and serve with a little fresh chopped chilli.

Halva, Almond, Mocha Brownies

Ingredients

140 grams butter
245 grams dark chocolate, broken into chunks
170 grams sugar
3 extra large free range eggs
seeds of half a vanilla pod
115 g cake flour
10 ml instant espresso powder
50 g chopped roasted almonds ( I roasted them in the oven in the baking tray for ten minutes while mixing the batter)
100 g sesame halva cut into 1cm cubes

Method

Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease a 15 x 27 cm baking pan and line the base with baking paper.
Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heavy pot over a very low heat stirring constantly. Remove from the heat.
Stir in the sugar.
Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
Fold in the flour and espresso powder, and then gently fold in the almonds and halva.
Pour into the pan and bake for about 20 minutes. Be careful not to overcook – you want the brownies to be moist inside.
Remove from the oven and cool in the pan. Cut into squares.

Tags baked eggs, Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes, Green Eggs, halva almond mocha brownies, Jeanne Kelley, lovage, Swiss chard, tarragon

Categories Recipe Books, Urban garden eating

Sunday breakfast: with and without carbs

By Trish U

October 19, 2014 //

Without Scarlet Bennett and her Creative Challenge 52 Exploring Eating would be neglected. Without my fellow team members across the world in Australia I would not have the motivation to dash into the kitchen at least once a week and whip up something I might not otherwise have even considered.

For this week’s challenge I decided to make halva muffins inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi’s sesame halva and walnut cake. This is a cake that bears no comparison, a cake so exquisite that you want to eat it everyday, it’s a cake that makes you forget that chocolate cake even exists. You would be right in wondering why anyone would even consider making something merely inspired by it, just make the real thing for goodness sake.

But I did try something inspired by it. I made two types of muffins one of which was inspired not only by Yottam’s cake but by my recent alternative milk tart experiments. There lies madness you might say. The woman has gone crazy. Version one: halva and dark chocolate. Version two: halva, rose extract and cardamom. In fact I inadvertently made three types since I managed to get mixed up when I was assembling the layers. I was horrified when I realised what I’d done. I’d put chocolate into some of the rose and cardamom muffins. This was sure to be a disaster. I hate chocolate with cardamom AND I hate chocolate with rose. And worse surely that was just one too many different flavours?

The minute the tray came out of the oven I tentatively tasted one of the version three muffins. Not bad. Rather nice in fact. Well I liked it but the kids were sure to hate them. Never mind, there were still plenty of the other two more restrained versions. I’d just have to eat the version three muffins myself.

The entire family was still in bed. It was only 6.15 am. I went to my computer to send Scarlet pictures of the fruits of my labours and while I was doing that I started to feel bad about making sweet, fattening baked things for breakfast. Richard is trying to lose weight. All baked goods have been eliminated from his diet. What could I do that would make him feel catered to, too?

I dashed back to the kitchen and threw together a perfect paleo breakfast for Richard – mini baked fritatta flavoured with tarragon and lovage from the garden. I worried slightly about mixing those two herbs which grow so happily next to each other in the garden but thought what the hell, tarragon is perfect with eggs and I’m on a mission to find ways of using the lovage.

Maria appeared in the kitchen. ‘You’re up early. Have you been making something for breakfast or have you made another of your weird potions?’ she asked.

‘You’re in luck,’ I said, and pointed to versions one and two. ‘You’ll hate the others. They were a mistake.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ she asked. I replied that if there is one thing I’ve learnt about my children it’s that they don’t like my more unusual creations and that it was fine, I’d eat those muffins.

Being a self-respecting teenager Maria defiantly grabbed a version three muffin. I had a brief flashback to a four year leaving a plate of biscuits each one with a perfect half-moon missing for the guests to eat. At least there weren’t any guests coming for breakfast.

‘Actually,’ said Maria, ‘it’s quite nice.’ And she popped the last of the muffin into her mouth. ‘Can I have another?’

Jamie was in complete agreement. The ‘failure’ was by far the best, he declared. Richard often says, ‘Failure is where the treasure is,’ and in this instance (if in no other) I have to acknowledge he’s right. That’s the recipe I’ll make again and the recipe you’ll find below. A happy mistake. Then Richard appeared. ‘Mmm, those look good. What’s in them?’ he said pointing to the frittata. I did what I usually do when I’m scared to admit what the ingredients really are and said ‘Try them, guess, you tell me’. The tarragon and lovage frittata were declared delicious so I encourage you to throw caution to the wind and mix unexpected flavours. Within reason.

Halva, chocolate, cardamom and rose muffins

Ingredients

100g butter, melted
165 g demerara sugar – you can use ordinary brown sugar of course, I just wanted to use what I had
2 extra large free range eggs
200 ml Greek yoghurt
4 teaspoons rose extract – I always use Kuhestan Damask Rose Extract from Magoebaskloof, Limpopo
120g cake flour
120g wholwheat flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
1.5 teaspoon cinnamon
seeds from 12 green cardamom pods crushed fine in a pestle and mortar
pinch salt
120 g halva – cut half of it into 24 small cubes and roughly crumble the balance
80 g dark chocolate cut into 24 small pieces
Topping: mix together 30 g finely crumbled halva, 25 g rolled oats and 1/2 teaspoon ground cinamon

Method

Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Mix the melted butter, sugar, eggs, yoghurt and the rose essence together in a bowl.
In another bowl stir together all the dry ingredients and gently mix in the 60 g of crumbled halva.
Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and combine until just mixed.
Line 12 half cup (125 ml) muffin tins and divide half the batter into them.
Scatter the halva and chocolate cubes over the batter and then top with the remaining batter.
Sprinkle with the topping mix and bake for 20 minutes.

I based the muffin recipe on Ruby Tandoh’s raisin cinnamon muffins from The Guardian.

Baked mini frittata

Ingredients

olive oil for greasing
3 rashers bacon chopped
24 cherry tomatoes
1 young lovage stalk with its leaves, finely chopped
80 g mixed cheese cut into cubes – I used a mix of goats milk haloumi and feta
30 g shredded Swiss chard
6 extra large free range eggs beaten well with black pepper and salt to taste
a couple of sprigs of tarragon, finely chopped

Method

Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Put a few drops of olive oil into 12 (80 ml) muffin tins, add two tomatoes to each and divide the bacon and lovage between the twelve tins.
Place in the oven and roast for 15 minutes, stirring once or twice.
Divide the cheese and Swiss chard between the 12 cups.
Pour the egg and tarragon over the cheese, chard and tomato/bacon/lovage mix.
Bake for ten minutes until the egg has puffed up and is cooked through.