Balcony Garden: Harvest Monday #27

One of my favourite recipe blogs is The Stone Soup, a blog packed with super easy, Miss Piggy friendly, recipes that don't take all night to cook. The blog owner, Jules, is a food scientist who wholeheartedly advocates minimalist cooking and doesn't shun the use use of time saving store bought pastes and tinned/frozen veggies to help bang out a nutritional meal in mere minutes. Best of all each recipe comes with a bunch of variations to make it vegetarian or meaty...or just slightly different - whatever your pleasure.

I have a few of The Stone Soup eBooks and I didn't hesitate to lay down my money and buy a copy of her new "real life book" 5 ingredients 10 minutes when it was released in February (it was about $20 including shipping for the UK). The first recipe to catch my eye was her red curry of TINNED potatoes and cashews. Before you judge the tinned potato situation - her partner is an Irishman and he loves this curry. If it's good enough for the Irish it's good enough for me.

I think I was particularly drawn to this recipe as it called for a good handful of basil...and basil is something I have growing in spades (well, in pots actually) out on the balcony. I've made a couple of batches of pesto so far but a gal can only eat so much pesto and I really need to find some other uses for all my basil.

This recipe could not be simpler...bung everything into the pot and cook. If you've dabbled with Jamie's 15 minute meals you may be a bit skeptical about this books claim to have you cook a meal in just 10 minutes but I did it pretty much that time. If you take out the fact that I added carrots to the mix and faffed about taking photos that is.

In true cutting corners fashion I also used this nifty prepacked rice...cooked in 90 seconds! I'm in love! I normally don't buy the evil Colesworth store brand though - but they were all out of Sunrice so homebrand it is. Boo.

And there we have it...dinner in 10 minutes (or near enough). It tasted delicious and we've already got another tin of tatters waiting in the pantry for round two.

You can view more Harvest Monday posts on Daphne's Dandelions blog.