We Australians love a cookbook. Check out the bestseller lists and they will usually be dominated by cooking and lifestyle books. We have a lazy habit in our household of buying cookbooks but never really cooking from them. However, there are a few notable exceptions. Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion is our go-to and the recipes never fail us. Recently, we learned from a chef friend that Stephanie buys our lettuce from her local grocer every week. It’s her favourite lettuce! Well. That news made our year. We donate that same lettuce to our son’s school because they take part in Stephanie’s Kitchen Garden program. The kids were so excited to hear that Stephanie herself eats the same lettuce they do.
Other cookbooks we find ourselves returning to again and again are those by Julia Busuttil Nishimura and Meg Tanaka from CIBI. These inspiring cooks have been big supporters of our farm for many years and they’ve both recently released new cookbooks focused around simple, seasonal, delicious recipes that can be enjoyed every week. Meg and Julia are champions of eating seasonally and both have featured Ramarro Farm produce in their books. What a buzz! We feel so proud seeing our produce in these beautiful books and grateful that so many great Australian cooks are believers in what we do – soil grown, chemical free vegetables with enough flavour to be the heart of a meal not just a side dish.
Julia’s new book Simple Pleasures and Meg’s Osozai are fantastic books to source inspiration for what to cook with your veg boxes. Whether it’s a crunchy radicchio salad in winter, a greens pie, fried zucchini flowers, broccoli and bean salad or Japanese tomato caprese. We’re about to harvest our first fennel crop here on the farm and so we’re very much looking forward to making Julia’s casareccce with caramelised fennel and sausage. Divine!
The farm is humming with activity and looking absolutely spring-beautiful! Broadbeans are coming soon to veg boxes as well as fennel. Kohlrabi is tasting great. We love to eat it raw as a crudité with dips or in a coleslaw. Our soft herbs are so fragrant. We’re especially enjoying French tarragon and lovage right now. Zucchini flowers have hit their stride and you’ll see them on restaurant menus all over town as well as in retail stores. We love them but we don’t always have time to stuff and fry them, so sometimes we prepare a super quick and easy warm salad (pictured below). First we chop the baby zucchini attached to the flowers and fry them in olive oil until they brown up, then we add some crushed garlic cooking for only a minute or so as garlic can burn easily, then we add some strained cannellini beans or chickpeas to the pan. Once all is warmed through, we toss in some lovage or parsley, add roughly torn zucchini flowers and serve on Greek yoghurt.
For your week of good cooking every day our veg boxes currently include: kohlrabi, zucchini, radishes, lettuce, salad mix, French tarragon, zucchini flowers, purple kohlrabi and rhubarb*.
Until next time … eat well!
Lisa, Oliver and the Ramarro Farm team
* veg box items may change due to availability