Minced and meaty: Going köfte all the way.

I was musing afore on the topic of replacing sausages with home made minced product.

Since then I've been experimenting keenly  with   köfte.

Köfte is the Turkish version of kofta -- the universal  meatball or meatloaf.

The  number and range  of traditional and regional köfte blends  is amazing.

See sample list here.

I have been surprized by how easy it is to pull these little morsels together  by  following a few simple rules.

• I pound the spices and garlic and spring onions and herbs together in a mortar and pestle.
• I then add the ground meat and pound that with the spice mix.
• I make sure I blend the mix with my hands so that everything touches together evenly.
• I let the mix 'rest' so that the flavours diffuse.
• I form the köftes into shape, using my hands and a little water. This is like throwing pottery because you need to build structure into the meat mix. I prefer a cigar shape. 
• I cook: either fry, grill or bake. 

Manipulating the mix around a hard boiled egg to make a "Scotch egg" köfte  is  a lot of fun. Experimenting with blends is a rewarding hobby. For now I'm not adding 'fill' in the form of bread crumbs, flour and the like but I do like köfte with bulgur/cracked wheat.

I don't eat wheat on a daily basis as I try to keep my carbohydrate intake down. Occasionally, I may partake  but my usual approach is to replace grains with sweet potato, cauliflower or nuts.

Bulgur, however, has such a high fibre content among its carb quotient  that using a little of it makes it kosher. So I may keep it on hand for ocasional use.

For now, I'm exploring how much stuff I can add to minced meat and still mould the köftes into substantial shapes without adding fill.

But with İçli Köfte (Stuffed Bulgur with Meat)    you create a bulgur shell and fill it with a meat mix. As a long time Middle eastern cook I can say that, "yes, I've made these. And they are delicious ."      

 And köftes with or without bulgur added are great  cold. So there -- you cover  the whole preserved meat option without adding nitrates to the mix.

Then, as a option,  are köfte based tagines. Easy dish. You can also cook an egg among the bubbling meatballs in their self flavoring tomato sauce.

In fact nothing says "Moorish" better than köfte.

Sausages compared to köftes.

• You should be able to make köfte more cheaply than buying high end sausages.
• With köfte -- because you make em -- you know what's in them.
• You can customize your flavours with köfte. You can play with your shapes and additives.
• Generally, a sausage requires more fat in its mix than köftes' do.
• You can add many different types of vegetables and nuts to  köfte besides the spices.
• You can bake köfte and the shapes won't burst.
• It is much easier to clean up after making köfte than the mess you get with snag production.
• However, you need to use fine mince with köfte as chunky mince won't hold together as it does encased in a sausage skin.
• Köftes taste much better cold than do previously cooked sausages. Either snags shrivel up when cold or wallow in their fat content.
• Köftes can be prepared 'fresh' very quickly.
• Köfte exposes  the ubiquitous take away hamburger  for the culinary sham that it is. (Sausages would be better than hamburgers as a 'to-go' option.) 

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Minced. Ground. Loose. Fun with dead flesh...

I suspect that I have had a moment, a special moment.    

I have been consuming sausages from my local butcher. They are made to a good recipe but he doesn't always sell them 'fresh' . So I'm giving up on snags -- my preferred breakfast fare.

Snags and sauerkraut everyday early.

I could make my own -- and have done so in the past -- but really, sausage making works best as  a team effort akin to  the communalism inherent with bottling tomatoes, wine or Grappa.

On your ownsome it's tedious.

So I'm off the snags...and instead have turned my creative juices to the potentials of ground meat. Yes I know sausages are made from minced meat  but when you don't use a casing the meat ain't a snag.

In Arab countries -- because of the Moslem tradition -- casings aren't traditionally used and you have this wonderful "meat ball" and "meat flat" tradition instead.

Think: kokta.

The meat is often mixed with other ingredients such as rice, bulgur, vegetables, or eggs to form a smooth paste. Koftas are sometimes made with fish or vegetables rather than red meat, especially in India. They can be grilled, fried, steamed, poached, baked or marinated, and may be served with a rich spicy sauce. Variations occur in North Africa, the Mediterranean, Balkans and South Asia. In Pakistan, koftas are made of beef and chicken. According to a 2005 study done by a private food company, there were 291 different kinds of kofta in Turkey including the Inegol Koftesi, where it is very popular. In Arab countries, kufta is usually shaped into cigar-shaped cylinders.

But then mince is often cooked and served "loose" as in meat pie fillings and in sauces such as Bolognaise.

Grind it up. Add spices. Onions. Garlic. Wine. Tomatoes. Capers. Olives. Whatever. The permutations seem endless. 

So therein my special moment arrived.

What a gastronomical hobby it would be, thought I, to really start working with  minced meat. A sausage casing does contain the meat so that it stews in its own  juices. This is why you don't prick sausages. However, braising ground meat with culinary additions offers a different coming together of  flavours just as combining meat into shapes -- meat balls, patties and loafs -- also changes  the medley.

If you don't relate to that go try some really good kofta or a Lebanese pizza (traditionally flavoured with Pomegranate juice)or some meaty moussaka...

Of course, minced meat is supposed to be cheap. Not so much the case today but still it isn't expensive . You can also combine minces -- beef with lamb; chicken with pork.... Indeed the only thing you need to be aware if when using ground meat is contamination as  the increased surface area of the  raw ground flesh makes the meat more prone to bug infiltration.

So "fresh" matters more so than with standard meat cuts. That's also why so much mince meat is sold with preservatives added.

But cook it and it will keep longer.

So you see my drift?  I'm not talking hamburgers. I'm meditating on the gastronomic  possibilities of  mincing dead animals. 

                

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Chokoes are us.

I am beginning to get obsessed with chokoes as they are so easy to grow and have many edible attributes -- leaves, fruit and roots. Cooking them is one issue. Growing another.

Then there is the un-respected art of using choko vines for shading and design.In that regard my trellis rocks and is so chocko friendly the beans are, for the moment, taking second place in my outback love life.

And what outback dunny is complete without choko decoration?

Not that I can nowadays go 'our back' but there was a certain quirky charm in the tradition of disguising the habit under greenery.

Such a versatile vegetable.

From New Orleans Lance Hill writes that he is seeking choko stock from local heirlooms that are naturally resistant to anthracnose . (Is that an issue here?) He goes on,

 "Here we only eat the fruit—no one ever thought to eat the leaves or shoots. The second phase of my project is to create an international on-line recipe site to increase the uses of mirlitons, but food habits are deeply entrenched. The Cajuns of Southwest Louisiana do eat them raw like celery sticks. They pickle them as well.Truly it is a remarkable and thoroughly disrespected vegetable....Anyway, keep me posted on Chokos. I am interested in all lore, growing methods, plant pests and diseases, and recipes and textile uses."

I'm harvesting fruits at egg size and have planted 8 vines to keep me (and the chooks) supplied. At that size you can indeed eat them like celery sticks or radishes.

Since I have so many vines it is interesting to compare one with the other. They are all exciting to monitor although some are more  exciting than others. In way of structural layout overhead on a trellis beats growing the vines  up a wall. It is much easier to locate the fruits from below when they are above you as they hang down nicely in profile , silhouetted against the sky.

The setup is more aesthetic that way too. While the choko flower is a bit passe, the way the fruiting and flowering tendrils project themselves into the air is delightful filigree.

Tonight I did a quick run around and harvested at walnut size...

Then cooked them.

...sauteed in bacon, shallots and garlic with a cream, Basil and Parmesan sauce. Not bad tucker. No peeling. Not much of anything in way of preparation chores.

Any big ones that escape my early harvest are thrown into the pen as chook food.

I'm going to be drowned in chokoes I'm sure as new fruits form daily. But they are so versatile at table if you think outside the box.

But when Googling your options remember that the  humble choko is also known as chuchu, sayote, tayota, chayote, chocho, chow-chow, christophene, mirliton, vegetable pear, or pear squash. And since they emanate from the Mexico territory their cuisine traditions lend themselves to things like crunchy  salsas. However, no Sunday lamb roast is complete without chokoes being included in the roasting pan,.  Chokoes -- as mirlitons -- are also integrated into French cuisine via their ready consumption by Louisiana Cajuns and Creoles.

Here's a few recipes to wet the appetite: chayote recipes  -- that map the amazing versatility of the abused veg with some really tasty and exotic selections. Also here's an extensive list of choko recipe links that seem almost exhaustive: chayote recipes. 

Or for the Asiatic tastebud prone this is an easy winner: Pop’s Thai Friend’s Thai Chayote Squash Recipe as does the Vietnamese styled Sach ko char xu.

Bon appetit.

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Kill it and marinade it because acid rules my world.

Ah, what a lunch I have had. Yesterday I obtained some fresh caught squid on the Bribie Island road which I sixty-second parboiled and  then marinaded in a garlic, olive oil and herb  mix. I had also bought some olives from a local olive grove -- Coolana Olives -- who grow an excellent Kalamata, despite their sub tropical locale. (Who woulda thought?) Compared to all my other supply options: great price too.(Next time I'm purchasing bulk...)

These I had been marinading for a week.

So that's my  quest: marinade anything that  is dead.

That said my chooks love the squid bits I don't eat. Crazy, crazy feeding frenzy. Land sharks.

There's art to marinading (useful comment at this link: note support for yogurt marinades) and it isn't a simple spontaneous potpourri business. Once you start playing around with salad dressings -- albeit with determination to keep it simple -- you get hooked on the flavour rush. Since I like eating the bitter greens -- chicories, dandelion, rocket and endives -- you need a boutique  salad dressing to package the taste.

So I keep asking myself,"what else can I drown in olive oil?"

I guess the core thrust is doing things with, by adding things to, extra virgin olive oil. 

Hello.My name is Dave and I'm an olive oil addict.

In his interesting book on food, culture and genotype -- Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity --  Gary Nabhan shares his experience of eating on the Greek Island of Crete which has the highest per capita olive oil consumption in the world. Figures vary but we're talking about an average intake of between 25 - 35 kilograms per year. In day to day terms, that's the individual consumption of around 80 grams per day!

Nabham, who is from a Lebanese background, balked at the intake after a week of food drowning in the stuff. I think he pushes a barrow I don't fully accept, but, to give you an idea about this olive oil island, in one interview he said:

So, even though there’s great benefits of the Mediterranean diet to some extent for everyone, if we really tried to consume as much olive oil as the people in Crete or Lebanon do, most Americans would fall short of even being able to absorb that much olive oil without metabolic effects... I was surprised when I went to Crete of seeing about a cup of olive oil in the bottom of what we’d call a Greek salad. Here in the United States we might get two teaspoons of olive oil in a Greek salad and be able to tolerate that.

But me, I'd adapt in a week.

Apart from the olive oil component to marinades and dressings, the other key ingredient is this acid component. After years cooking Middle Eastern food I had relied on lemon juice to acidify my mixes. Since Moslems don't drink alcohol, they aren't going to have a  supply of vinegar on hand. Thus the reliance on lemons. But I have now swung back to using vinegar - especially white wine vinegars -- for my dressings and marinades.  The problem with lemons is that you need to keep yourself in fresh supply and that is often inconvenient or expensive. So when seeking lemony taste I rely now on using Preserved Lemons. Of course, these are a marinade/pickle too so I've got preserving them on my to do list.

But add a preserved lemon in a  marinade and you are citrusified. Preserved lemons are also Tagine essentials.

So acid has gotta  rule my world. 

Swim me in olive oil.Drown me in its virgin depths

Way back when -- back in 1969 -- when I was working in  a bank (one of my many career moves often as not within each year) I used to eat lunch in a Greek Taverna on Lonsdale Street Melbourne:  that city's Greek Town. 

(More  Greek then  than now).

I frequented this  premises often enough to consume my way through its whole menu at least twice. It was very traditional  Greek  fare of the kind you won't find today a la carte: always beans ('legumes' for the aficionado)  and vegetables with some meats...swimming, drowned,  in olive oil.

Great stuff. Value for dollar, sit down fare before the Takeaway mentality set in. 

I kept coming back even though each plate full was awash with the swill of olive oil. It was almost an olive oil soup.

But as the seventies kicked in 'fat' and 'oil' became ingredient non grata  and we were encouraged to ration how much oil we added to a dish and put into our mouths.

The ruling wisdom was -- and stil is -- to cut down on your fat intake as the  'science of nutrition' asserted itself and ruled the dinner table.

It is however very ironic that  the 'diet' which is credited by research to be  the most 'healthful' on the planet is the Greek cuisine from the island of Crete.

...and in the traditional Cretan diet, olive oil consumption is a whopping 25 kilograms per person per year. In such a diet fat accounts for up to 40% of the energy (calories)  consumed.

In Australia current consumption of olive oil  is still  less than  2 kilograms per head per annum.

I'm not saying that olive oil is a miracle food -- but the research suggests that  it  is misunderstood tucker or at least uncelebrated.

I always cook with olive oil -- with extra virgin olive oil in fact. Recently however, my dose of 'olive oil taken in moderation' has increased and I've become an olive oil chef.

Instead of frying you need to sweat stuff in olive oil and sweating is an art worth learning. While it may seem easy to burn the solid ingredients, dial back the heat --  you want to stew your stuff so that  flavours marry. 

It's slow food -- a very long way from cooking chips.

Cooking using oil from olives isn't a tool -- like using water or heat --  but an ingredient in its own right.

To partake of this option -- do this:

1. Pour at least one third to half a cup of olive oil into a pan and gently heat.
2. Add sliced or chopped garlic and sweat.
3. Throw in diced carrots, sliced celery, chopped capsicum or cabbage.
4. Sweat. Stirring occasionally. (This is just like Asiatic stir frying but at much lower temperatures).
5. Sweat. Don't burn. Don't boil. Think sauna: naked vegetables perspiring until they go limp.
6. Add a herb of your choice, salt and pepper. Stir.
7. Eat. 

You can add a meat en route if you want but not one that requires a lot of cooking -- eg: use anchovies, ham, bacon, or finely diced pork or chicken.

Drowning in olive oil like this is not the end of the nutritional universe. But you do need to be 'heavy handed' when slurping the oil.

Think drowning.

Without adding grains -- or meat or eggs or fish -- stewing vegetables in olive oil like this can deliver a meal in its own right that offers enough calories (and certainly enough taste) for sustenance. Add legumes or eggs or cheese or yogurt -- as the Cretans do -- and you're in compleat nutrition --all-major-foodgroups --mode.

And it's low carb. 

Does wonders for the blood sugar.

The Salad Garden: eating thereof

Since I eat a garden salad every day I have made it a habit to make up my salad dressings ahead. I use old caper and anchovy jars that are maybe no more than 150 ml in volume and throw in -- aside from the requisite 2:1 (give or take) virgin olive oil:vinegar mix -- whatever takes my fancy: capers, garlic, spices, kalamata olives, etcetera. Makes the salad simply a business of picking the greens and tossing.

By hand? 

By hand. 

Bugger this sterility fetish for using cutlery  to toss! 

The vinegar in your salad is your Dettol.

My addiction to salads while so very Mediterranean is also buoyed up by the work of Joy Larkom whose The Salad Garden is  a standard reference on the business of growing and cutting  salad vegetables so that they 'come again'. It's all about salading it simply and freshly without making up concoctions.

Only medleys.

So my favorite salad is salad de jour  -- what happens. What's on hand. What's there. What can be picked...and eaten pronto.

When you consider that so much of the salad tradition has relied on the harvesting of weeds -- it always has to be about going for a walk and picking what is green and fresh (but not poisonous).

"We have said how necessary it is that in the composure of a sallet, every plant should come in to bear its part, without being overpower'd by some herb of a stronger taste, so as to endanger the native sapor and virtue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the notes in music, in which there should be nothing harsh or grating: And though admitting some discords (to distinguish and illustrate the rest) striking in all the more sprightly, and sometimes gentler notes, reconcile all dissonances, and melt them into an agreeable composition."--John Evelyn, ‘Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets’ (1699)

And since we are name dropping  food writers  with something to say: No one better than Elizabeth David:

“I don't altogether agree that a plain green salad ever becomes a bore - not, that is, if it's made with fresh, well-drained crisp greenstuff and a properly seasoned dressing of good-quality olive oil and a sound wine vinegar. But I do agree that all this talk about 'tossed salads' is a bore; it seems to me that a salad and its dressing are things we should take more or less for granted at a meal, like bread and salt; and not carry on about them.” -- Elizabeth David (1913-1992) ‘The Spectator’, 1961

Yes. Oh yes. That's the ticket.

After years of being fed and schooled by the cuisine preferences of the Middle East -- and there 'salads' -- Salatat -- aren't by default, green -- I defer to the complication that vinegar is a fermented  substance  so the oh so simple mix of oil and vinegar is not so easily replicated by the regional reliance on lemon juice. The Islamic proscription against alcohol comes at a culinary price. There, salads have morphed into 'cold vegetable dishes' that enrich the Mezze table. 

But they aren't green salads...despite their niceness.

So the real business of making a salad -- once the weeds have been collected -- is the oil and the vinegar coating. Aside from all the extra virgin olive oil  thingey -- I have to confess that I am an absolute white wine vinegar aficionado. I have yet to find a red wine vinegar that zings a green weed. Drown it, red wine vinegar  will. But zing it? No. 

I guess its about how you make chlorophyll work for you.

Catalan Fish Stew -- Zarzuela

I love the Catalan way of preparing food. If you follow the spirit of a dish like this -- traditional fish stew -- there is plenty of leeway to invent and adjust your ingredients.

The main point to it  is the marriage of the sausages, fish herbs, spices and...almonds. Use whatever fish you have.I've even substituted white with red wine!

No matter: it works.

Ingredients

6 tbsp olive oil
1 large Spanish onion, chopped
2 fennel bulbs, chopped
150g/5oz chorizo (or other spicy sausage), diced
1 red chilli, finely chopped
1 tsp fennel seeds, ground
2 cloves new season garlic, crushed
½tsp sweet paprika powder
1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp saffron strands (optional)
3 fresh bay leaves
1 tin plum tomatoes
100ml/3½ fl oz fish stock or water
150ml/5 fl oz white wine
500g/1 lb 2oz mussels, cleaned (or prawns or...just go with the fish fillets )
650g/1 lb 7 oz firm white fish (I use even cheap frozen supermarket fish ), filleted, dredged in flour and fried in olive oil
100g/3½ oz toasted almonds, ground

To serve

1 lemon, cut into wedges
steamed potatoes and spring greens

Preparation method

Heat the olive oil in a large pan and sauté the onions, fennel, diced chorizo, chilli, ground fennel seeds and garlic for a few minutes.
Add the paprika, thyme, saffron, bay leaves and tomatoes and cook until reduced to a thickish sauce.
Add the fish stock (or water) and white wine and bring to a simmer.
Add the cooked mussels and cook until they are all open. Discard any that have not opened.
Put the fish pieces into the stew and stir in the almonds.
Heat for a minute or two and serve with seasonal greens, steamed potatoes and wedges of lemon.

The business of baking sourdough bread

Sourdough bread that you bake yourself ruins your capacity to unconditionally eat most other breadstuff.

I currently use a three stage rise method. That may seem a complicated to-do but once routine sets in, it's a habit.

1. I take my yeast creature -- my starter  -- from the refrigerator usually on a evening. Just imagine some flour mud -- as it's a living mix of air born yeasts, flour and water,  10 months old (I'm looking forward to growing old with it). And having separated out 1.25 kilograms of bakers flour I increase the starter's volume by adding flour and whey to the jar it lives in. You don't have to use whey but I have whey left over from yogurt making and whey is very much a food resource . Waste not whey / want not.
   
   

   Researchers at Lund University in Sweden discovered that whey appears to stimulate insulin release. Writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,^[6] they also discovered that whey supplements can help regulate and reduce spikes in blood sugar levels among people with type 2 diabetes by increasing insulin secretion....Commercial whey protein shakes are often consumed after workouts by people who are trying to gain muscle mass.

   The whey also enriches the biochemistry of the starter and  encourages the lactobacillus culture.
2. I let the mix yeast up in the refrigerator over night. The following morning I add more flour and whey (or flour and water) to the starter and leave it for another few hours in the fridge.I guess I should point out that I  add diastatic malt to my flours as is it unlocks the potential of Australian white flours.Also salt, of course. For my working volumes -- 1.25 kgm -- I add 2 teaspoons of diastatic malt.
3. After the second feed -- and yes I guess it's like breast feeding a baby -- I mix the starter flour blend with the remaining flour and knead it into dough. To do this I need to add more water or whey if I have any in reserve.as a rule of thumb,  I add 500 mls of water to the mix to get a soft dough.I then leave the dough to rise -- usually in the oven as there are no draughts within and I have the option of turning the oven light on if I want to increase the ambient temperature. If my dough mix was, in my opinion, too stiff or dry (and adding extra water during  a working knead is not a good idea) I  place a bowl of boiled water at the bottom of the oven to increase humidity. I let the dough rise for at least another 4 hours.
4. By this time  I am 24 hours into the business of making the bread but the only hard work was kneading the dough (and cleaning up the mess! ). I can skip the second feed if I want to shortcut the process, but starters need to be spoiled and feed teased to give their scrumptious all.
5. I bake at my highest oven temperature for 30 minutes. I then turn the loaves out of their bread baking trays, reduce oven temp  to 200 C and bake the bread for another 20 minutes. I like the crust slightly charred and exploded.

Note:Whey and sourdough
if you have any whey (and I'm not talking whey 'protein' supplement powders)it's useful as a means to increase the sourness of sourdough thus reducing the potential impact consumption of the bread will have on your meal's GI response. Think about the synergistic contribution of yogurt in that regard. And souring the bread more can be a gastronomical  preference. Whey is also an active ingredient in many traditional sourdoughs as it enriches the culture medium. Whey gives the bread a firm, crisp, but shallow, crust -- almost like a skin that is chewy in its own right.

Green tea and yogurt made in teapot heaven

I know what I like. And when I am ruled by my taste buds I like what I can put in my mouth.

I've been a green tea dinker for years. I've never taken to it as a hot beverage as I much prefer black leaf tea when drinking hot water.  But when steeped on cold water and chilled, it has become an addiction.

Of course when you get into teas per se and green teas especially you can spend a lot of money purchasing your tipples form specialty tea shops. The imported options in green  teas -- especially from Japan -- our pure gastronomy.

I used to indulge in a  few of the scented blends -- with apricot flowers or somesuch -- mainly because among these were leaves that took kindly to being steeped cold.

Chilled green tea

In normal everyday consumption I drank Madura Black teas.

That's my preferred tea ceremony relies on simple technology -- no teapot, just the convex tea strainer with handle.

but I soon gravitated to Madura Green Teas -- initially Green tea with Jasmine. The 'herbal addition' takes the edge of the tannins.

I was in for a surprize when I tried their Green Tea with Papaya leaf. Papaya leaf has this health benefit pedigree -- but don't let that fool you. Steeped cold this is an extraordinary tea to suck on.There are some exciting flavour to be explored the palette.

The trick is to use green tea teabags, remove the ticket and string from each bag and throw a number of bags them into a jug of cold water before chilling in the refrigerator . Steeping takes a few hours. Do not use hot water!

But as so often happens, Madura , despite the fact that it is an Australian based tea plantation, is not always readily available at the local supermarket and in frustration this week I had to purchase an option -- Nerada Green Tea with lemon myrtle.

Lemon myrtle is a flowering plant in the family Myrtaceae, genus Backhousia. It is endemic to subtropical rainforests of central and south-eastern Queensland, Australia, with a natural distribution from Mackay to Brisbane.

This is a very plain and uninteresting tea.  The Nerada plantation is in the Cairns hinterland and their teas don't have the Nerada kick. Their green tea is very weak and has a lacklustre  flavour which is not sparked up by the Lemon Myrtle.

I was very disappointed.

Lassi and Lemon Myrtle and green tea

But since I'm on a yogurt craze at the moment -- now making my own Greek style yogurt -- I thought I'd make up some lassi. I really love lassi and since I make my own yogurt I can afford to make more lassi as lassi is volume dense in yogurt. Water and yogurt can be  a bit boring in itself -- so I've often used green tea to give the drink some body: 2 parts yogurt to approx 1 part green tea, give or take. The Indians often add lemon juice (and salt) to make savory lassis, and the lemon juice is a great addition.

But what really came to the fore in the green tea/yogurt blend was the lemon myrtle.

Lemon myrtle with  green tea and yogurt is a match made in a magical storm in a teapot .

I am delighted to now learn that Madura also makes a  green tea with lemon myrtle (although finding it on the supermarket shelves seems unlikely). Failing that I could always add my own lemon myrtle to my own lassi blend ... or stick with Nerada.

Making the most of new culinary challenges:Green Tea Salad

With the onset of the need for a DiaDiet -- one preferably low in carbohydrate and minus starchy elements -- the world of recipes options is different.

But nonetheless exciting..

I drink a lot of green tea because I like it. I simply steep green tea bags (with Jasmine petals or pawpaw leaf) on cold water and keep jugs of brew in the refrigerator. That's the trick: use hot tea and you'll promote bitter flavours in a brew drunk chilled..

Here's a recipe I found today which ticks a few boxes:If I had some coconut I'd be making it now.

Green Tea Salad

• 2 tablespoons Green Leaf Tea
• 1 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, shredded
• 1/4 seeded and minced jalapeno chilli
• 2 thinly sliced and fried garlic cloves
• 2 tablespoons shredded and toasted coconut
• 3 tablespoons toasted and chopped peanuts
• 1 tablespoon toasted sesame seed
• 1 cup shredded lettuce
• 1/4 cup chopped tomato
• 2 lemon wedges for dressing

Method

1. Combine the green tea leaves, fish sauce, lemon juice, soy sauce, ginger, jalapeno and garlic in a small bowl.
2. Allow the mixture to stand for 15 to 20 minutes.
3. Mix in coconut, peanuts and sesame seeds.
4. Toss the lettuce and chopped tomato together.
5. When you are ready to serve, combine all the ingredients in a medium size bowl, toss and arrange on two plates.
6. Serve with lemon wedges on the side.