Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Cabbages are cheap and healthy, and when I buy one I can cook with it for a family of four for three days! Usually I start with cabbage rolls, to use the larger leaves, and these can be done in a zillion ways! I have another  good  Vegan recipe here , but today for the filling I used stale bread. But first thing first: Wash the cabbage leaves (the bigger outer leaves, about 15, and steam or boil until soft but not too soft! In the meantime put one onion, one carrot, two celery sticks with leaves and a little parsley in the food processor and mince. Heat two tbsp of olive oil in a pan and sauté the vegetables, stirring often, for 10 minutes. Soak some old bread in water, doesn't matter what kind of bread, I had two white bread rolls and some seed sourdough, so I used those.  Squeeze the water out of the bread and crumble it into the pot with the cooking vegetables. Add a little vegetable stock if necessary and cook everything for about 15 minu...

This is not a quick recipe, but require slow cooking, so if you are in a rush just look at the pictures :-). There are several vegan Bolognese sauces around, mostly using soy or fake mince, and some with lentils, but I wanted to try one with cabbage, which is not a veggie I particularly like myself, but it is highly nutritious. It came out better that I hoped! Ingredients Half a cabbage 1 large carrot 2 sticks of celery with leaves 1 large onion 1 garlic clove A few Italian parsley leaves 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 1 glass wine (white or red) 1-2 tbsp tomato puree 1 l vegetable stock salt and pepper to taste more extra virgin olive oil to serve With a food processor finely chop the vegetables, then put in a pan with the olive oil and sauté for a few minutes. Then add the wine and stir well. Add the tomato puree, cover and cook slowly, stirring from time to time and adding the vegetable stock little by little. Simmer for one to two hours, the m...

Do you get tomatoes plants that die and leave you with green tomatoes hanging there not ripening? I do! What a pity, but even if some veggie are ugly I can still manage to make a soup out of them! I don't know why the yellow zucchini plant is three times more prolific than the green one! Still, I am not complaining, look at the colour! My favourite additions to soups are beans, it is just so much fun shelling them and look at the beautiful colours. Pity that they become all brown during cooking. And here is the minestrone. No recipe, just wash, chop and boil, add salt to taste and extra virgin olive oil at the end. So tasty and healthy! Some of the photos are mine, but the prettiest are Arantxa's! Photos and recipe by Alessandra Zecchini and Arantxa Zecchini Dowling  ©

This is a first. I like stuffed cabbage leaves but I always use this dark green curly cabbages (like Savoy) to make them, and I never used the round and firm white cabbages that are used to make coleslaw. But I happened to have a big white cabbage and the outer leaves were sort of green... I managed to remove 7 leaves before the cabbage become to compact to pull apart. Then I washed them and boiled them in salted water (which I later used to make vegetable broth for an Asian noodle soup - never waste!). I also boiled a few more cabbage leaves that got broken while I was trying to pull them away: they were going to be used in the filling. For the filling I used some cooked cabbage leaves, a couple of slices of vegetarian bacon, chopped parsley, breadcrumbs, smoked salt, chili flakes, coriander seeds and smoked garlic. I mushed everything with my hands and divided the filling between the 7 leaves, and then I rolled them up. I prepared a soffritto with a shal...

Lots of people know by now that I eat flowers, but still, some think of it as a bit of a freak thing to do. But if you have a few edible flowers in your garden (absolutely organic, no sprays allowed) they just make your dishes look so pretty, and they are not merely a decoration, they can have flavour and fragrance too! I used onion weed flowers, which have a mild garlic/oniony taste, and nasturtiums, which are probably the only flowers that the general public in New Zealand seem to consder edible (some claim to use them in salads, but in all these years here I have seen more trendy talk than action, and still far too much coleslaw). My first borage flowers and a few little violets added perhaps little taste, but they are eye catching with their blue hues, and welcome on my plate anytime. On a large plate I prepared a bed of baby spinach leaves and then I steamed some asparagus. To save time and gas I steamed the asparagus over the vegetable soup that I ...

Photo by Alessandra Zecchini© For this soup I used a packet of 3 parboiled cereals: rice, barley and spelt. The brand is Gallo – a mainstream Italian rice brand. Traditionally Gallo brand had rice only, so I was happy to discover this 3-cereals combo, which is easy to use. Ingredients 1 carrot ¼ green cabbage 1 leek 1 celery stalk, with leaves 100 g fresh or frozen borlotti beans a few parsley leaves, chopped 2 l water rock salt to taste black pepper 200 g Gallo brand mixed rice, barley and spelt 1 tbsp tomato puree Extra virgin olive oil Cut the vegetables and place in a large pot with the water. Bring to the boil, remove the scum that may form at the top, add salt and pepper and then simmer slowly, for 10 minutes. When the beans look cooked add the cereals (they are parboiled so they will take about 15 minutes, but cook them for at least 20 to get the flavour through). Add the tomato puree, and then remove from the heat. Serve hot or warm, drizzled with olive oil. It taste...