The KitchenMaid

Really easy quinoa, bean and beetroot salad with balsamic dressing

Unless you’re careful, December can turn into a month of eating terribly – too many ‘treats’ and not enough of the good stuff. Here’s a salad to redress the balance (plus it looks appropriately festive).

RED QUINOA, BEETROOT AND BEAN SALAD

Did you know that quinoa (pronounced keen-WAH) is grown in New Zealand? For this recipe I’ve used wholegrain red quinoa, grown in the Rangitikei region by Kiwi Quinoa.* It’s got all the same nutritional benefits of ‘ordinary’ quinoa, which is high in protein and fibre, with a bolder flavour and a subtle crunchiness. Plus, of course, the colour is fabulous. Quinoa is a pseudo-cereal (it’s actually a seed, rather than a grain) so it’s fine for your gluten-free friends to eat.
This salad is also great for vegetarians, who can be a bit left out at this time of year. If beetroot in a tin gives you the horrors, use grated fresh beetroot instead. A creamy element, like avocado or feta, is another good addition.
Serves 4 generously.

For the salad:

  • ⅔ cup red quinoa
  • 1 ⅓ cups water
  • 1 x 450g tin baby beetroot, drained and quartered
  • 1 x 400g red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 large red capsicum, diced
  • A generous handful of fresh parsley and mint, finely sliced

For the dressing:

  • 1 small clove garlic, crushed to a paste with ½ tsp salt
  • 1 tsp wholegrain mustard
  • ½ tsp honey or brown sugar
  • 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
  • 4 Tbsp olive oil

Put the quinoa and water in a pot set over medium heat. Bring to a simmer, then cover and cook for 15 minutes, until the water has absorbed and you can see the quinoa ‘tails’. Tip into a bowl and allow to cool for five minutes.

Make the dressing: put the garlic, mustard, honey and vinegar in a small bowl or jar and whisk or shake until well mixed. Add the oil and whisk or shake again until emulsified. Taste for seasoning and sharpness – add more salt, oil or vinegar as required.

Stir the baby beetroot, kidney beans and capsicum into the quinoa. Pour over half the dressing and toss gently. Add the herbs and toss again. Pile onto a serving platter and drizzle over the rest of the dressing. 

Any leftovers can be stored in a lidded container in the fridge for up to three days. Allow to come to room temperature before serving.

* This is not an ad – I bought the quinoa (and everything else) used in this recipe.

Strawberry, radish and cucumber salad

This morning I’ve been for a run around the harbour and a quick dip in Oriental Bay on the way home. Spring has a bad reputation in Wellington (expressed best in this calendar), but today feels like one of those mythical ‘can’t beat it on a good day’ days that the city’s tourism campaigns are built on.

Spring, of course, means strawberries. Like living through a brutal Wellington spring day, growing good strawberries is mostly an exercise in hope triumphing over experience; some years are better than others. I’m stil optimistic that my homegrown crop will come good. If you’ve got a surfeit of strawberries from your own garden, try them in this exceedingly pretty and festive-looking salad (from the Spring section of Homecooked).

STRAWBERRY, RADISH AND CUCUMBER SALAD WITH MINT DRESSING

This is one of my favourite photos from Homecooked, not least because photographer Carolyn Robertson and I spent AGES trying to figure out all sorts of different ways to shoot it. Then we got over ourselves, I just threw the salad together and the photo more or less took itself (well, with Caro’s exceptional skills involved!)

For the dressing: 

  • 1 cup loosely packed fresh mint leaves, washed and dried 
  • ½ tsp honey 
  • 3½ tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice 
  • 3½ tbsp extra virgin olive oil 
  • ¼ tsp salt 

For the salad: 

  • 250g (1 punnet) strawberries, washed, hulled and sliced
  • 1 medium-sized telegraph cucumber, peeled, deseeded and sliced 
  • 1 cup sliced radishes (about a small bunch, depending on size) 
  • 150g feta, crumbled
  • small mint leaves, for garnishing 

Make the dressing first: put all the ingredients in a blender or small food processor and whiz until smooth. Taste for seasoning and set aside. 

Tumble the sliced strawberries, cucumber, radishes and crumbled feta into a serving bowl. Drizzle over the dressing and toss gently. Garnish with mint leaves and serve. 

Have you got any strawberry growing tips? Do share!

Who wants some old-fashioned self-saucing chocolate and raspberry pudding?

In the depths of winter, one dessert reigns supreme in my household. On a dark, wet night (or even a gloomy afternoon with a chill in the air), one of us will generally say to the other, ‘I think it’s a night for chocolate pudding’.

They’re usually right – not much compares to digging a spoon into a molten puddle of old-fashioned self-saucing chocolate pudding in times of woe and bad weather (even if you have to make it yourself). It’s even better eaten as breakfast the next day. Here’s how to treat your whanau to a nostalgic treat that pushes all the right buttons.

CHOCOLATE AND RASPBERRY SELF-SAUCING CHOCOLATE PUDDING

Serves 4-8

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 35 minutes

This makes a generous amount, but there’s really no point in making less. Some tips for beginners:

  1. Make sure you use a large ovenproof dish, because nothing kills the ‘we’re having self-saucing chocolate pudding’ vibe more than having to scrape burnt pudding off the bottom of the oven.
  2. To change it up, omit the raspberries and add 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon dried chilli flakes to the dry ingredients for a slightly Mexican-ish hint of spice.
  3. Add some roughly chopped dark chocolate to the batter – say, 125g? – and the finely grated zest of an orange to the batter.
  4. No raspberries? No problem. Leave them out, or subsitute some chopped prunes that you’ve soaked in rum or brandy.
  5. Need to make it dairy-free? Use a butter substitute and a plant-based milk.
  • 75g unsalted butter
  • 1 cup caster sugar
  • ½ cup cocoa
  • 1 ½ cups plain flour
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¾ cup milk 
  • 1 cup frozen raspberries
  • For the sauce:
  • ¾ cup lightly packed brown sugar
  • 4 Tablespoons cocoa
  • 2 ½ cups boiling water (or use 1 ½ cups boiling water, 1 cup freshly made coffee)

Heat the oven to 180C and lightly grease a large ovenproof dish.

Melt the butter in a large pot. Remove from the heat and add the sugar. Sift over the cocoa, flour, baking powder and salt, then stir in the milk and raspberries until well mixed. Scrape into the greased dish.

Sprinkle over the brown sugar and cocoa, then pour the boiling water over the top. Bake for 35 minutes, until the pudding has risen and feels springy to touch.

Let stand for five minutes before serving to allow the sauce to thicken. Serve with vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream (or both!). Leftovers can be eaten cold from the fridge or reheated in a low oven.

How to make Nuts & Bolts

In these trying times, it helps to have a reassuring snack at hand. If you want something to briefly take your mind off the woes of the world, I have the snack for you: Nuts & Bolts.

For the uninitiated, Nuts & Bolts are a highly addictive snack with just-about zero nutritional benefits. For me, they’re an important link to my childhood, when my great-aunt Makiri would make them as a special cocktail hour or holiday snack. Nostalgia is a great flavour enhancer, don’t you think?

Makiri was an amazing cook and I always imagined that she’d made up the recipe herself, but recent research has proved otherwise. Nuts & Bolts appear to have originated in the US in the 1930s and 40s, after a cereal company included a recipe for them on the back of the box. This sly content marketing has been used by brands for decades, but few recipes are as out-there as the re-purposing of breakfast cereal as a legitimate snack (rather than just eating them out of the box when no one’s looking).

Makiri’s Nuts & Bolts were intensely savoury, slightly spicy and impossible to stop eating. After much consultation with my cousin Dominic and a lot of trial and error, I’ve recreated a 2022 version of her recipe below. Nutri-Grain and Burger Rings appeared in the OG version, but I’ve also added chilli peas and spicy broad beans for extra kick (I like to think Makiri would approve).

Nuts & Bolts

Warning: once you start eating these it’s VERY hard to stop. This makes about six cups – I wouldn’t make more unless you’re serving snacks to a big crowd or you have impeccable self-control. If, like me, you haven’t eaten Burger Rings for 30 years or so, you’ll notice that they don’t taste like they used to. They’re included here for texture and nostalgia, more than anything else. Nutri-Grain (the brick-like cereal that has multi-sport athletes on the box) has actually changed for the better in the last decade, nutritionally speaking. Even so, please note that eating Nuts & Bolts is unlikely to improve your performance at your next sporting event.

For the dry ingredients:

  • 2 cups Nutri-Grain
  • 2 cups Burger Rings
  • 1 cup roasted nuts (cashews, almonds, peanuts are all good here)
  • 1 x 100g packet spicy broad beans (I use the Savour brand)
  • 1 x 100g packet chili peas (I use the Savour brand), optional

For the flavourings:

  • 125g butter
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tablespoon tomato sauce
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1 teaspoon curry powder
  • 1 teaspoon onion powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Heat the oven to 125℃. Line a large, shallow-sided oven tray with baking paper.

Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and stir to combine.

Put all the flavourings in a small pot set over medium heat. Stir until melted.

Pour the melted butter and flavourings into the bowl of dry ingredients, stirring well to make sure everything is well-coated. Tip the mixture out onto the prepared tray, spreading it out evenly.

Bake for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly before serving, or wait until completely cold and then transfer to an airtight container.

Nuts & Bolts – Aunty Pat’s version

When I was searching for Makiri’s original recipe my Aunty Pat (maker of Aunty Pat’s infamous Never-Fail Pavlova) shared her version of Nuts & Bolts with me. Aunty Pat reckons her recipe is better – and my in-house taste-testers definitely enjoyed it, but I prefer the baked version because it’s closer to what I remember. Please note the nuts are missing from this image because some naughty taste-tester picked them all out.

  • 300g Nutri-Grain
  • 350g roasted, unsalted nuts
  • 1 dessertspoon curry powder
  • 1 packet Creme of Chicken Soup
  • 1 packet French Onion Soup
  • 1 cup peanut oil

Put the Nutri-Grain and nuts in a bowl and stir well. Put all the other ingredients in a small bowl and stir until smooth. Pour this evenly over the Nutri-Grain and nuts, stirring until evenly mixed. Cover loosely and set aside for 4 hours, stirring occasionally. Transfer to an airtight container until ready to serve. Makes about 10 cups.

Is there a Nuts & Bolts story in your family recipe archive? I’d love to hear it!

Chocolate pikelets with spiced honey butter

You may well feel that life is too fraught at the moment to even consider making your own hot cross buns (you might feel like that all the time, in which case you have my sympathies). Even if you do like a bit of baking therapy, your plans might be stymied by a lack of yeast, or flour, or energy to do anything other than get through the day. I know the feeling. But in case you feel like making something, here’s an Easter-ish breakfast treat that uses basic ingredients, doesn’t require you to nurture a living thing and takes very little time to make.

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Chocolate pikelets with spiced honey butter

A note on substitutions for these straitened times: using butter gives these a better flavour, but using oil is fine if butter’s in short supply. Use any sugar (white, caster, brown) – but don’t pack brown sugar into the cup. Use any milk and any flour – omit the baking powder if you’ve only got self-raising, use a little less if you’re using wholemeal (and be aware the pikelets will be a bit sturdier). If you don’t have honey, use golden syrup in the butter (I had to do this for the photo – it was still delicious). 

Makes about 20 pikelets, serves 3-6 depending on greed, hunger, boredom etc

Preparation time: 10 mins

Cooking time: 10 minutes

  • 1 tablespoon melted butter or oil
  • ½ tsp sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • ½ tsp vanilla extract
  • ½ – ¾ cup milk
  • 3 Tbsp cocoa
  • 1 ½ tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • 1 cup plain flour

For the spiced butter:

  • ½ cup (125g) soft butter
  • 2-3 generous Tbsp honey 
  • 1-2 tsp cinnamon

Whisk together the butter, sugar, egg, vanilla and ½ cup milk. Sift over the dry ingredients and stir together until just combined (don’t over-mix or the pikelets will be tough). Add a litte more milk if the mixture is very thick.

Set a large heavy frying pan over medium heat. Grease with a little butter or oil.

Drop dessertspoons full of the mixture into the pan (hold the spoon vertically to make the pikelets round). Cook until bubbles appear and pop on the top, then gently flip over and cook for another couple of minutes. Remove to a plate lined with a teatowel or a cooling rack.

To make the spiced butter, beat the butter and honey together until smooth and fluffy. Beat in the cinnamon. 

To serve, pile the pikelets on a serving plate and accompany with the butter. Any leftover pikelets can be frozen and reheated in a toaster. Any leftover butter is great on hot cross buns or toast.

If you fancy a few more Easter cooking projects, you might like to try these Pretend Hot Cross Buns (gluten-free) or these Homemade Marshmallow Easter Eggs (also gluten-free and dairy-free).

Hope you have a happy Easter, wherever you are. Don’t go anywhere, will you?