How to cook from the garden

A pre-dinner harvest of zucchini, cauliflower, cucumber, green beans, silverbeet, first leek of the season, spring onion, purple sprouting broccoli, basil and kaffir lime leaves. For how I cooked them, see the photo below.

It's midsummer now and my garden is producing an ample sufficiency of lettuce, potatoes, cauliflowers, broccoli, green beans, silverbeet, potatoes, cucumbers, sweet corn and zucchini, plus the first cherry tomatoes and new carrots.

Now is the time to stop thinking 'What would I like for dinner tonight?' and start thinking 'What would the garden like to offer me for dinner tonight?' It's a big switch to go from making shopping lists with certain menus in mind to walking into the garden at dinner preparation time every day and developing a menu from what is there. But it's a very enjoyable switch once one gets the hang of it. It's so much more satisfying to stroll through a garden running through a repertoire of dishes in one's mind than to trudge along the supermarket aisles not seeing anything really fresh and tasty.

It's also easy to do if you follow these three shortcuts to cooking from the garden. You need recipes to deal with the three main categories of choices you have to make when it comes to selecting what to cook and how to cook it. I call these choices 'A little bit of everything', 'Too much of a good thing' and 'With frills on'.

A little bit of everything dishes are the ones you make when no one vegetable is producing well enough to be the main ingredient in a dish - or you just feel like having a diverse dish. Stirfries and salads are classic dishes in this category, as are mixed vegetable pies, flans and frittatas. There are no hard and fast ingredient lists, and you can mix and match whatever you have that goes well together.

Too much of a good thing dishes are the ones you make when there is a surplus of one vegetable, or a vegetable you especially like, and you make it the main feature in a dish. Cauliflower cheese is a good example of such a dish. Likewise a salad based on just-cooked cauliflowerets, a couple of sliced spring onions, and heaps of finely chopped herbs (chives, parsley, dill) in a cider vinegar and light olive oil vinaigrette dressing (tip the warm cauliflower into the dressing and herbs in the salad bowl, mix well and let it marinate in the fridge until needed) is another one - and one that is better suited to summer. Fritters made of one key vegetable (e.g. zucchini, potato, eggplant) are also a good way to turn an 'over-performing' vegetable into a treat.

With frills on are the dishes you make that add some strong extra tastes to a side dish vegetable which might otherwise be a bit dull. Roasting sliced potatoes with fresh rosemary sprigs and sliced garlic is an example of this, as is roasting cauliflower sprigs with sage leaves and a handful of olives.

Good books to consult for inspiration for cooking from the garden are the Kiwi classics The Cook's Garden series, by Mary Browne, Helen Leach, and Nancy Tichbourne, and A Vegetable Cookbook by Digby Law. Also wonderful for stretching one's knowledge and skills is Cooking from the Garden, by the American master gardener Rosalind Creasy.

The A Little Bit of Everything dish here is the stirfry of cauli, broccoli, green beans, leek, zucchini and silverbeet, garnished with spring onion.

Too Much of a Good Thing is represented by the cucumber salad with cherry tomato garnish. (The dressing is a delicious mix of toasted sesame oil, white vinegar, sugar, soy sauce and Tabasco sauce, and the salad is chilled.)

With Frills On is the tofu dish, which is first fried with garlic, then briefly simmered in a sauce of coconut cream, tomato paste, chilli sauce and kaffir lime leaves. For serving the kaffir lime leaves are removed and lots of chopped basil (or coriander) is stirred through the dish.