Libby's Menu

LIBBY'S MENU
This is another Melbourne based August menu for the YamDaisy Cafe. The YamDaisy cafe is structured to have only 4 dishes on the menu each day. They use seasonal, local ingredients and are made from scratch on the premises. Until a YamDaisy Cafe exists (it is still in the planning stage!) Guests are giving a menu that would suit the cafe and inspire you all!

I am going to spread this menu over a couple of posts to make it easier to read and to give it more attention. But here are all the dishes:
SOUP: Minestrone with Bread and Cheese
MAIN 1: Spetsofai with Rice
MAIN 2: Cauliflower with White Sauce served with Roasted Potatoes and Parsnips and Steamed Green Beans
FRUIT DESSERT: Apple Crumble and Creamy Yoghurt


First, pictured, is Minestrone. Classic Soup! It is one of those soups that has its own style - suiting the tastes of the people it is cooked for.
This means each YamDaisy Cafe (and surely they will all have it on the menu fairly often!) can develop its own style of Minestrone. Cooking it in large quantities, as the cafe would, means that brewing up the beans and adding in the vegetables takes on mythic qualities!
Minestrone is probably the favourite soup in our small household. I make enough to last a few days, but because we don't like pasta that has been sitting in soup too long, we cook the pasta separately. The beans vary according to what I have available: I soak and pressure cook beans, but tinned beans can work well. Today they were meant to be chickpeas, but they took longer to cook than expected and they hadn't managed to get into the first bowls! The veggies were what looked good at the veggie shop today.
I start by frying onions then garlic then carrots. No celery today so the next that went in was oregano and potato, then the stock and when the potato was partly cooked, in went chopped green beans.
After a few minutes I put in the contents of a tin of chopped tomatoes and the chopped mushrooms, corn, capsicum, and broccoli and cabbage. And the cooked beans with some of the liquor I cook them with. They just need a few minutes more.
Taste and adjust the seasoning as necessary.

Meanwhile I cook the pasta, drain it and place it in the soup bowls, I ladle over the thick delicious soup. It really is a meal in a bowl.
Libby's family like it almost thick enough to be a stew and they like to have hard cheese grated on top.

SPETSOFAI AND RICE
What? I asked. I had never heard of Spetsofai.
Libby explained that it is a Greek dish, basically sausages and peppers. When I went searching for more information I found this lovely link
http://kalofagas.blogspot.com/2008/04/spetsofai.html and yum! what a great meal to have! A simple pilaf would accompany it.

Part One of Libby's Menu - now you can go to Part 2