Pretty!

Pretty colours!

Here's a sample from today's market. Early autumn produce - new season apples, plums, rainbow chard, a big fat leek, and more. Even bananas! These ladyfingers from Coff's Harbour were selling for only $7 a kilo, excellent value at the moment. This is actually a small collection I've put together for B1, who is back in Canberra at last but couldn't get to the market today. I've also got a couple of slices of very fine leg ham from Balzanelli - smallgoods people from Fyshwick. They specialise in Italian style pork products, from pork & fennel sausages to pancetta and coppa. They slice to order, so I have nice fat slices. Yum.

I didn't buy any tomatoes or beans or figs, because last week I picked a good kilo of beans and 2kg of tomatoes from my minuscule veggie garden. I can highly recommend these "purple king" beans to any neglectful gardener. All my peas and snowpeas died, but these beans just kept on going. I put in four seedlings on a wire obelisk, added a handful of fertiliser, a dash of snailbait. Helped along by plenty of rain, they are now producing about half to one kilo of beans a week. They're a pretty deep purple, but they turn green when they are cooked.

And while the figs on my tree aren't ripe yet, there are hundreds of them coming soon - if the birds don't get them first. So much as I love figs, I'm not paying $1.50 each at the market.

Feijoa time again

It's almost a month since I last posted. I don't have any major food news, since for a lot of that time I was sick - a nasty cold developed into an even nastier chest infection, for which I've been taking mega-antibiotics and using an inhaler of nasty tasting drugs. Bleah. What can I say? Tinned soups and spaghetti is pretty dull stuff, but at least I did get to eat my stewed quinces and apples - pretty good to perk up a tub of Le Rice. I like the caramel or vanilla flavours, heated up with the stewed fruit.

Meanwhile, the garden has delivered the last of the season's rhubarb, a bucket of feijoas and three mutantly huge butternut pumpkins. Well, stewed or roast rhubarb is lovely, and pumpkins make good mash, baked veg or soup. Or a sweet spicy pie filling, though not everyone agrees... But what is there to do with feijoas?

I've been eating the best of them for my lunchtime fruit, feeling very exotic as I stand in the kitchen at work peeling them and cutting them up onto a plate, along with a sliced persimmon. I prefer to leave them for a couple of days after collection, to soften a little before eating. The inside goes from greeny-white to cream, to pale beige, to deeper beige to brown as it ages. I find the cream stage is best, and I cut off anything past the palest of beige. I'm also not mad on the skins, so I usually peel them. But it is actually edible.

Last year I made a feijoa chutney, which I speculate was invented by someone who was very sick of feijoas. It was more like a Branston pickle, sharp, dark and malty, and I still have masses of it left. This year I decided to try a jam instead. And since feijoa isn't exactly my favourite fruit, I thought of zesting it up with some ginger for interest. This is my first attempt, based loosely on a recipe found on the net somewhere random. If I do this again next year, I'll add even more ginger.

Recipe: Feijoa and Ginger Jam
1.5 kg feijoas
2 lemons
150 g preserved ginger (glace or crystallised)
5 cups sugar

* Chop the ginger finely.
* Wash the lemons, halve and juice one half piece. Save the skin.
* Put the juice of half a lemon in a large bowl, with about 3 cups cold water.
* Peel and chop the feijoas quite small, dropping the pieces into the lemon water as you go.
* Transfer 375ml of the water to a large jam pan.
* Strain the feijoas and add them to the pan.
* Add the chopped ginger, the juice of the 1.5 remaining lemons, and the lemon rinds in large pieces.
* Bring to a simmer and cook for 15-20 minutes.
* Add the sugar and turn up the heat.
* Stir until dissolved, and then boil rapidly until set point is reached (10 minutes).
* Remove the lemon.
* Pour into sterilised jars, and seal.


Notes: To get 1.5kg of feijoas, you will need 2-3 kg of raw fruit, depending how bruised they are. They do say not to use bruised fruit for jam, to which I say - nonsense! Sure, don't use the actual bruised part, but just chop it off and use the good bit. Feijoas fall from the tree when they are ripe enough, and they often have a bruised portion if they land on hard surfaces like a concrete footpath. So here we see the upper one is brown and goopy - into the compost. Lower one, fine. Cut off bruised bit, at left.

Also, jam setting time is a little random. The lemons provide the pectin here, as well as a dash of flavour, but you could use jamsetta instead, and follow the packet directions.

I clean my jars very simply: wash them in the dishwasher and set aside in the cupboard until needed. Then pop them in a sink of very hot water and leave for 10 minutes. Then put them in a warm oven to dry off. Put their lids on when it's still hot.

Jam is really very forgiving; the sugar is a powerful preservative. Scare stories about bottling tend to be about preserving vegetables, with no sugar involved. Chemical sterilisation and very careful attention to detail is much more important there - and one reason among many why I don't actually do that. (Not often having a surplus of veg, and the existence of tins and supermarket freezer sections are other reasons.)

O hai, I can has weekend?

I haven't had many at-home weekends recently. I've been madly gadding about like a mad gadding thing. I've been to the Goulburn Blues Festival; Corinbank; a friend's birthday (staying away the night); visiting a friend in Sydney; and last weekend I was off to the global atheist convention in Melbourne. It's been fun, but exhausting - this sort of schedule doesn't mix well with full-time work. But yes! I have finally had a weekend at home! And I even have another whole free weekend before we have our Easter houseguests.

For a while I was feeling a bit guilty about not blogging, but I got over it. It's supposed to be some fun for me, not an obligation. I do keep thinking about it, so I don't think I'm over the whole blogging thing yet. Plummet decided to wake me up at 4.30 this morning, so I'm feeling a bit ordinary. But nevertheless I've had a good go in the kitchen, and am feeling quite proud of my production, and feel like telling the world.

Hello, world! Today I made roast tomatoes, stewed rhubarb with mixed berries, Thai red curry pork with veggies, and a spinach and cheese potato bake. The spinach and spring onions in the potato bake, as well as the rhubarb were from the garden, so that's extra gratifying. And yesterday I took a cake baked in the octopus shaped tin along to Skeptics in the Pub, where PZ Myers was speaking.

The curry was just from a paste, Mae Ploy brand. I used some lean pork, and added eggplant, green beans, red capiscum and bamboo shoots. And I used light coconut milk, not the proper rich coconut cream kind, so it's a bit thin. It's OK for an easy dinner, though it's a bit hotter than I intended! My previous tub of Thai red curry paste was Maesri brand, which I now know is milder.

The spinach bake is a trifecta of virtue: home grown veggies, using up some things that were on their last legs, and preparing for the work week in advance. Can you actually see my halo? *ting*

There's no recipe per se, but this is what I did.

* I mixed together a tub of low fat cottage cheese, some leftover fetta marinaded in olive oil & sumac, and 7 eggs. All of these were very close to their use-by dates.
* I ground in some pepper and chucked in some extra sumac, pine nuts, a handful of grated parmesan, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and three chopped spring onions from the garden.
* I picked lots of spinach from the garden, washed it and chopped it roughly. Microwaved it to wilt it, then wrung it out and chopped it up.
* I decided there wasn't enough spinach for me, so I defrosted about 250g of frozen spinach and added it in.
* Oiled a cake tin that seemed about the right size. (It's silicon, but I'm getting less trusting about the non-stick qualities of that where eggs are concerned.)
* Washed, peeled and finely sliced up four large potatoes (Dutch cream, they really are quite yellow).
* Layered it the cake pan - potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato.
* Took a picture part way through the layering.
* Baked it at 150C for half an hour, then added a bit more parmesan on top and baked it for a further twenty minutes.

And that's it - I made it up as I went along. I don't know yet exactly what it tastes like, since I haven't cut it open, but I'm sure it will be fine. It's hard to go wrong with spinach and cheese. And it will come in very handy this week. It can be reheated in wedges in the microwave, as cafes often do with their frittatas, or in a slow oven.

Summertime, salad time

Hot sunny days have been good for these little grape tomatoes. They are "honey grapes" that I got from Bunnings, and they are well named. They're amazing little bursts of sweet tomato goodness. I have them in a self-watering pot, which makes sense considering what a slack gardener I am. These and the Russian Brown have survived the heat well.

I'm also still getting plenty of rhubarb, and a bit of spinach, and lots of herbs, but not much else at the moment. My lettuces went to seed, and I didn't replant the hydroponic thing after removing them. My beans died in the heat, maybe because I didn't water them enough. Or was it snails that killed them? Or both. Whatever. There's a butternut pumpkin vine and some Kipfler potato plants, and a lot of figs coming on the small tree, but they aren't ready to harvest yet.


In this heat, salads are welcome. Here's one I made on the weekend - cured salmon, avocado, mixed greens, cucumber, and a simple dressing of good olive oil and lemon juice. So there's another use for that avocado. I would have added some grape tomatoes, but I ate them all after I took the picture. I'm now waiting for the green ones to ripen - and the plant has some flowers too, so there's even more to come.

It Aten't Dead

One week on and I still haven't killed it. Though the butter lettuce and rocket are looking alarmingly limp. Let us hope that today's feed and water picks them up.

This is a home hydroponics box from hydropantry, that I bought at the EPIC market last week. It is nifty. You put it in a frost-sheltered but sunny spot, and change the water once a week. Add 40ml of nutrient solution, and it's done until next week. You pick what you want from it as you go.

There are three kinds of lettuce in my planter, plus rocket, spring onions, curly parsley, continental parsley and coriander. We've used some of the red and cos lettuce already. It seems to be doing OK so far, just sitting on the table on the back deck. I think it's quite picturesque - adds a nice dash of green.

When you change the solution, you can put the old water on the garden. It's nice and clean, not smelly like the water from a week long neglected flower vase would be. Which makes sense when you think about it, since there's live roots hanging in there, not cut stems. I used the first batch of leftover water on my new cherry tree, which I am still excited about.

The garden is starting to look spring-like already. It's pretty in the sunshine, even if not exactly warm: the prunus is budding, and bulbs are sprouting among the hellebores and violets and cyclamens down the side that we've paved recently. And the wattle is starting to flower. Alice the wonder-gardener has pruned the trickier things for me and instructed me to feed the citrus. I'd better go do that while I remember.

Feijoas, Green Tomatoes and Cauliflower

I've been on a spree to use things up. The things I had were feijoas and green tomatoes from the garden, and an old cauliflower, bought to make roast cauli with almonds, to go with a chicken risotto. But I didn't get around to making it until this week, and the cauli had gone rather limp. I bought a small fresh half to make the roast veg, and relegated the older one to soup.

I was quite happy about this, as we'd had a lovely curried cauliflower soup while visiting friends in Melbourne. It was a novel idea to me: curried parsnip is a classic, but cauliflower? I couldn't quite remember the details, but we had a a brief email exchange and A reminded me that coconut was the missing element. I went on to make a soup inspired by hers, rather than the exact same soup.

I got the green tomatoes from my plants. They went all brown and crinkly one night, so we must have had a frost. The feijoas just fell out of the sky. Well, OK, the tree. But you find them on the ground.

Feijoas are very popular in New Zealand, and the trees grow quite well in Canberra. They're bushy and evergreen, and have pretty flowers with a central fireburst of red stamens. They do like a reasonable amount of water to set good fruit, so the one in my back garden closer to the water tank did much better than the one down the side.


The fruit is always green. It simply falls off the tree when it is ripe. If you try to pick it, then if it just falls off into your hand, it is ready. Or you can shake the tree. If the fruit falls onto cement it will get bruised, but a good mulch ground cover is enough to protect most of it.

I've been eating the larger better ones straight. They have a sharpish rather guava-like taste, and as with guavas you can eat the whole thing. I was intrigued to read that if you peel them and mash the pulp you can use it as a substitute for mashed banana in baking. I haven't tried this, and I won't until next season as I've either eaten them all or chutnied them. Unless someone gives me some, that is. There were some in the supermarket this week, but the prices are ludicrous. It's only worth it for homesick NZ expats.

When you cut a feijoa across the middle, the pulp inside is white to cream, with a four-quarter pattern of softer gel-like flesh around the seeds in the centre. It also browns with air exposure: the ones in the picture are just starting. If this centre is obviously brown, it is overripe. Bruised pieces will be brown generally, not just at this centre - these can be trimmed and the good bits used.

I managed to salvage 750g of usable fruit from a kilo of feijoas, and I turned it into a dark spicy chutney with some dried fruit, onion and green tomatoes. I got the idea for the recipe from a NZ morning TV show site, but it was one of those annoying ones with weird quantities. What on earth is a packet of currants, or ginger? I decided to just wing it. Chutney is pretty flexible - it's even easier than jam as you have no need to worry about pectin. It's just boiled down to the texture you want, and that's it.

Recipe 1: Curried Cauliflower Soup
1 medium-large cauliflower
1 medium onion
1 stick celery
1 tablespoon schmaltz
375 ml chicken stock
375 ml coconut milk
375 ml milk
2 tsp curry powder
pinch salt
* Chop onion and celery and fry gently for a couple of minutes in the schmaltz.
* Add chopped cauliflower and stir fry for another few minutes, until golden tints occur.
* Add the curry powder and fry another minute, making sure it does not catch.
* Add in all liquids, and bring back to boil.
* Cook until the cauliflower is just soft.
* Puree to your desired consistency, and add salt to taste.

Notes:
Schmaltz! I love that word. It's yiddish for chicken fat, and I had some from the top of the homemade stock. I actually used the stock to make the risotto, and used a tetrapack for the soup. If you have no schmaltz (or are a vegetarian), some nice fruity olive oil would be good.

I used a stick blender to puree it to a rough porridge texture. You could take it smoother if you like, with a blender. If you like the rougher texture, a potato masher will also work fine.

A's soup has a potato and a bayleaf, too. There's no reason you couldn't use some other vegetables. Parsnip might be good...


Recipe 2: Feijoa and Green Tomato Relish
750g feijoa
530g green tomato
230g onion
200g dates
150g currants
250g crystallised ginger
--
2 cups malt vinegar
1 kg sugar
2 tblsp treacle
--
1 stick cinnamon
2 tsp cassia
1 tsp cayenne
2 tsp garam masala
1 tblsp mustard seed
* Cut the feijoa, onion and green tomato into small dice.
* Chop the dates and ginger into smaller pieces
* Toss in a non-reactive saucepan and add the vinegar and spices.
* Simmer for 20 minutes, or until fruit is softened.
* Add the sugar and treacle, and boil moderately until the mixture is a loose jammy consistency.
* Discard cinnamon stick, and allow to cool slightly.
* Pour while still warm into well-cleaned hot jars.

Notes: The exact amounts are merely what I had once I'd cleaned and chopped the fruit & veg. Roughly similar quantities will be fine - chutney is so flexible. Swap in any dried fruits you prefer, use green apples instead of green tomatoes. Use cider vinegar for a lighter flavour.

I bought some crystallised ginger to do this, as the lot I was given by my Easter houseguests is so good that I am eating it as an after dinner sweet. I whizzed the ginger and dates in the food processor to chop them finely. You can leave the mixture part-cooked during the reducing stage, and heat it up again next day to finish. (Pan must be non-reactive - enamel or stainless steel - or the vinegar will attack it.) Ideally leave it for a week or two before eating, but if you have some nice bread and cheese waiting, well, what can you do?

Farewell my pantry

It was a good pantry. With a light in the top, and wide U-shaped shelves so you could still reach things at the back at the top. And now it looks like this. It's at the right, a mere empty frame where the new laundry door will slide in. There is no replacement coming up in the immediate future: I'll be living with shelves in the laundry until we re-do at least some of the kitchen.

It's not so easy to cook with all the ingredients in boxes on the floor. I managed a stirfry on the day the pantry went, and we've been eating the chilli. Tonight I've got ham steaks. I know I've said "never buy ham steaks", but these are different. Free range pork, from the wonderful Eco Meats at Belco Fresh Food market; they are all lean meat. I'm going fruity with them: panfried ham steak with fresh panfried pineapple, plus some "Ham Jam" spicy cherry relish. Add some spuds and a green salad and we're done. I'm actually cooking one steak for the two of us tonight, and a smaller thinner one for 'Ron. I'm going to brush it with Hoi Sin, and pretend it's BBQ pork, and slice it up into a laksa. I usually make laksa with a pre-made paste from the Asian grocer; but maybe one day I'll make a project of it and do my own.

I've also made the bright green pea dip "poicamole" from Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini. It's dead easy, and very nice as a dip or a sandwich spread. Note that 300g baby peas only need about 5 minutes to microwave from frozen, if you choose that over the steaming that she recommends.

Today's harvest was 2 figs, the 400g rhubarb, and two medium-small zucchini. It's not much, but at least I'm keeping up with it easily. Today I'm cooking up the rhubarb with four old pink lady apples, to make some breakfast stewed fruit.

I'm microwaving it rather than roasting. I have no tomatoes left over to roast this week, since I used them all in the chilli, and I prefer not to use the oven for a single small dish. It seems like a waste of electricity. The microwave is very energy efficient, and works well on most things that you'd usually steam or boil.

I just chucked the cleaned chopped apple & rhubarb in a glass bowl, with a scant 1/4 cup sugar and a drizzle of Bundaberg ginger beer syrup. Nuke it for 5 minutes, stir, test, keep nuking for 2 minute blocks until it's done. The hardest part was finding the box which had the sugar in it.

This is rather haphazard, and depending on the variety and freshness and fineness of chopping of the apples, you might not get both fruits cooked at once. But it's only for me and I don't care if the rhubarb turns into a sauce. Cooking is much less of a fine art than people often think - perfection is hard, but "reasonably edible" is almost guaranteed with a bit of common sense.

Hello to all my new fans!

Naturally my Canberra Times exposure yesterday will have caused me to catapult to fame, fortune, stardom and all that. I'm waiting for my book contract now, and the movie deals. I would like my role to be played by Cate Blanchett, thank you. Katherine Hepburn would have been even more ideal but she's sadly a bit dead. Diana Rigg would also be a good choice. Any minute now, right?

So hi and welcome to any new readers. As you can see from the archives, I've been doing this a while, mostly for my own amusement and my friends. I'm also trying to create a bit of a resource for my fellow Canberra region cooking enthusiasts. I am not the Canberra Cook; I write a blog titled The Canberra Cook.

There's an index of reviews and recipes down the left of the page somewhere. And a set of tags for topics. My alphabet series has stalled at M, but I promise to get back to it soon.

In my local news:
* The little fig tree has grown up enough to produce a modest crop. It's very nicely ripening 3-4 fruit a day. Just enough for me to eat for breakfast.

* The rosemary needs a big trim to get it off the pathway. Does anyone want some? Or have any suggestions for using up a lot of it, rather than just chucking the trimmings in the compost?

* And my pantry has gone. The bathroom renovation plans met reality on Tuesday; and reality won. All the pantry contents are now piled into a few boxes, three of which are the actually the containers from the worm farm that I failed to get going three times. They're all over the kitchen floor and bench.

So I'm going to be living without a pantry now until we get some kitchen updates done. Could be months, or even a couple of years. I hope not that long, but I haven't had a bath for seven years now, so who knows? We plan to get some make-do shelving into the laundry on the weekend, so stuff will get off the floor. Meanwhile I suppose I can chuck out all the outdated stuff that got lost up the back of the shelves.

Zucchini muffins... oops!

The zucchini plant is doing well, so it must be time for a zucchini muffin recipe. This one that I googled up sounds pretty good. Here's the ingredient list.

* 3 cups grated fresh zucchini
* 2/3 cup melted unsalted butter
* 1 1/3 cup sugar
* 2 eggs, beaten
* 2 teaspoons vanilla
* 2 teaspoons baking soda
* Pinch salt
* 3 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 teaspoons cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1 cup walnuts (optional)
* 1 cup raisins or dried cranberries (optional)


Look: 2/3 cup of butter, 1 & 1/3 cups sugar? Whoa! This is not your health food muffin. I decided to do it with only 1 cup of sugar, and different berries and nuts, but leave it otherwise untouched. Well, also self-raising flour, not that faffing about with baking soda. I used a cup of pecans, and a cup of dried raspberries that I found at Belco market. At $8 a punnet for the dried berries, and $4.50 for the pecans, this is also not your budget muffin.

By the way, for those new to US recipe style, 1 cup of butter is pretty close to a 250g packet. And they nearly always overdo the sugar. It took 4 medium zucchini to make the 3 cups. And although the original recipe says it makes more than 12, the author Elise must have small muffin pans. I got a nice even dozen.

So off I went on the routine. Mix dry stuff, mix wet stuff - including zucchini, it's very moist when grated. Combine, stuff into the silicone mini-brioche trays that I usually use for muffins. No, I have never made brioche. Then into the fan-forced oven at 175C for 20 minutes. Yes, my oven has been fixed! La la la... Ooh, look, Delicious magazine this month has a recipe for zucchini bread which is remarkably similar. How odd that they call it a savoury bread, when it has even more sugar than these muffins.

Wait, what? Oh Noes!!! This is the oops! I discovered the melted butter still sitting in the microwave. I accidentally baked them entirely without added fat. To my surprise, they are nevertheless quite edible, even when cold. The zucchini keeps them moist enough. I've added a thin smear of butter as I eat them, but it's still considerably less fat than in the recipe.

I find this especially amusing, because I was interviewed recently, and asked if I had any shameful kitchen secrets. No, really, I don't. I have grown up past apologising for my tastes. If I like pineapple on my pizza, or indeed anything unfashionable and daggy, that's my prerogative. De gustibus non est disputandum. And of course I sometimes make mistakes - don't we all? I'm not writing a fantasy blog here.

Now, what on earth am I going to do with 2/3 cup of melted & re-set butter??

Classic Chicken Cacciatore

Yay! Cooking again. I'm planning reheatable things, because of the constant business of evening rehearsals and events. Last week was a total no-show on the cooking, except for some roasting of tomatoes, another kilo of rhubarb from the garden, and a few old beetroots.

And they weren't even my beetroots - B1 gave them to me when she went off to Adelaide for a week. They did come in handy: sliced up and sprinkled with white balsamic, they made an excellent salad with some mixed leaves (mostly spinach), brown "kumatoes", and Dutch semi-hard goats cheese. Toss over an extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice dressing, serve with a bit of bread and butter and it's a good lunch. Is that cooking? Mmmm, I guess it wasn't a total non-event, then.

I was out to dinner last night, and the conversation turned to cooking skills, and the ability to look in a fridge and produce a meal from whatever's there. So this morning I felt obliged to live up to my words, and use some things up. Zucchini from the garden (and two from B1's, damn her), the roasted tomatoes, some olives, a cup or so of flat pink champagne, a few bits of salad... It sort of said "Italian" to me, and I started thinking chicken cacciatore.

With that in mind, I toddled off to market with B1, only to find that preparation for the show has shoved them off site and without electricity. No coffee! The horror! I grabbed a couple of necessities - new season apples, blackberries, tomatoes - and then headed for Belco. Beppe's coffee and berry pancakes restored my sanity, and I was able to buy all the things I thought I needed: mushrooms, fresh basil, and chicken. I had a bit of fun at the Market Gourmet chicken shop watching Dave helpfully joint a couple of chooks for me, in between training a new boy in important life lessons such as "Never get in the way of a man with a knife".

When I got home, I turned to the great Italian classic cookbook, Il Cucchiaio d'Argento, in a quest for authenticity. I was quite surprised to read the recipe. It was not what I thought it would be...

Recipe: Pollo Alla Cacciatora
1 chicken, jointed
25g butter
3 tblsp olive oil
1 onion
6 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stick, chopped
150ml water
1 flat leaf parsely sprig, chopped
salt & pepper

Brown chicken and onion in the oil and butter, stirring frequently.
Add tomato, carrot, celery and water.
Simmer 45 minutes, or until chicken is tender.
Add parsley, salt and pepper to taste before serving.

Notes: Well, how simple is that? Note the complete absence of olives, mushrooms, capsicum, zucchini, stock, wine, basil, oregano, bayleaves and even garlic! The book does say that this is the simplest version, and in some regions white wine or stock may be used, or sliced mushrooms added. But 90% of the recipes you find on the web include a lot more ingredients and a lot more fuss.

My version so far this time is quite simple. I've used a lot less fat, and the legs and thighs of the two chickens. I also used the roast tomatoes (not seeded, I can never be bothered with that) and 200g sliced flat mushrooms. The flat champagne went in instead of water, and I've added a couple of bayleaves. I have not used carrot or celery. I don't like carrots in this, and the bloke avoids celery if it's not very well disguised. I may add some fresh basil at the end, just because I have it and it is delicious. Maybe some olives, too. Authenticity, schmauthenticity.

The rest of the chickens is being used separately. I've frozen the breasts for later use in stirfries or grills, and popped the frames in a stockpot with the rest of the champers, plus water, bayleaves, an onion and a carrot to make stock. Also on the stove is a recipe-less ratatouille: onion, zucchini, mushroom, eggplant, tomato, bayleaf. I intend to add fresh basil later. I've left out the usual garlic, because I suspect that some antibiotics are giving me a heightened allium sensitivity. Bugger.

I also have some wallaby rump defrosting, which I intend to curry extremely simply by using a Charmaine Solomon rendang paste that took my fancy in the Food Lovers shop. Three things simmering away at once, and another started, that feels better!

About that Spag Bog

I like to use the term "Spag Bog", because I doubt very much that any self-respecting citizen of Bologna would recognise my variant. Or rather, variants. I am not sure if I've ever made the same spag bog twice. What a "spag bog" is, is a tomato and minced meat pasta sauce, with Italian herbs. All other facets may vary. It's not easy to go wrong. I've never made an inedible one, except when I forgot about one and burned it.

The one I made last week featured kangaroo, and three different colours of capsicum. I also had a couple of little zucchini from the garden. They were lovely, much crisper than the usual ones. Bayleaves also come from the garden.

Here's my "recipe". Such as it is. Which it isn't.

Recipe: Generic Spag Bog Sauce
* Minced meat {lean beef, kangaroo, pork & veal, turkey, chopped up leftover roast beef etc}
* Baconish meat (optional) {bacon, prosciutto, ham etc}
* Alliums {garlic, onion, shallot, spring onion etc}
* Oil {olive, bacon fat, sunflower etc}
* Veggies to be cooked soft {mushrooms, eggplant, zucchini, carrot, celery etc}
* Tomatoes {fresh, tinned, roasted, paste, puree, sugo etc}
* Herbs {oregano, basil, bayleaves etc}
* Spices {pepper, chilli etc}
* Liquids {stock, wine, brandy, water, tomato juice etc}
* Other flavour agents (optional) {salt, sugar, balsamic vinegar}
* Veggies to be cooked crispish (optional) {capsicum, zucchini etc}

Method:
Fry up the alliums in the oil.
Add any of the soft-cook vegetables that need browning.
Add the meat (and optional bacon) and keep stirring until browned.
Add tomatoes, liquids, herbs, spices.
Simmer for at least an hour, stirring occasionally.
Taste and adjust flavours if need be.
Add in the last minute veggies for crispness while the pasta boils.

The proportions are left entirely to your own sense of culinary aesthetics. If you like it heavy on meat and light on veggies, or vice versa, go for it. I have done this with as little as 250g meat for 8 servings. Grated eggplant and finely chopped mushrooms do quite a good meat masquerade, if you want a vegetarian version. A half teaspoon of brown sugar helps if your tomatoes are too insipid - which fresh non-premium supermarket ones can be.


PS: Don't forget about the wonderful handmade market coming up at the Albert Hall next weekend. I'll be at the coast, so I'll have to miss it. Dang.

PPS: Look at me posting on a Monday morning. This unemployment thing is looking good so far.

Baking up a storm

Or a minor downpour, perhaps. I made brownies, and a lemon polenta cake for a work morning tea.

It was this lemon polenta cake from the BBC Good Food site. And these brownies from Chocolate & Zucchini. I read C&Z regularly, and it was a recent post just as I was contemplating what to make. And with all the lemons needing using from the tree down the side, a lemon cake seemed like a great alternate choice. I decided to try for a gluten-free variety, just in case any of my audience needed it.

I won't give recipes, because basically I just did what the recipes said. Instead, here are my notes on how it went.

For the lemon cake, I poured over a lemon juice based syrup rather than limoncello - it was for work, not a home dessert. Other than that, it was down the line following the recipe. It was pretty good, but I think it needs work. It came out nicely moist, but it was also quite fragile, tending to crumble easily. The polenta remained a little bit grittier than I'd like - I used an instant one, but still. And I felt the lemon flavour was not strong enough for my taste. More zest, or perhaps a bit of lemon oil should do it. My tree is, I believe, a Meyer lemon. They are relatively mild and sweet, so perhaps using the bitier shop lemons would improve it, too.

The brownies were absolutely fabulous. I used a mix of roasted almonds and macadamias for the nuts. The one issue I had with the recipe is that they are supposed to be done when the top goes shiny and cracks. But this didn't happen in the given time, nor in the two ten minute extensions I gave it. I called a halt there, as underdone has got to be better than dried out. I was a bit worried that I might have overdone them, but they came out fudgy, rich, and very strongly chocolatey. Nom. I do think that a slightly larger pan would have been good: they are pretty thick. Cut them very small to serve!

Rhubarb and Berry Sago

I've been hacking about in the garden, planting inedible screening things like an oleander and a banksia rose, and I've brought in another kilo of rhubarb. It's really taken off this year, but it remains very green.

I've googled it, and most likely it's not a problem of soil or light; it's just a green variety. At least, one such green kind is frost hardy. I don't remember it saying that on the label, but plant labels are often a bit lacking. I was very cross a couple of years ago when I bought some creepers from Bunnings, and they died totally in the first frost. And yes, I did buy then from an outlet in Canberra. I learned my lesson; I stick with the specialist nurseries now.

So far I've cooked some of it straight, with just sugar, and I've put rosewater, vanilla and cochineal in another batch. And I've given some away - Belinda says saffron is nice with the rhubarb, but the colour is ridiculously awful. This time I've split it into two batches. One I cooked with lemon and sugar, and have stuck in the freezer for winter. The other one turned into a rhubarb and berry sago - the berries provided an amazingly bright colour.


Recipe: Rhubarb and raspberry sago
1/2 kg finely sliced red rhubarb
grated zest of 1/2 lemon
1/5 ltr late-picked white wine
1/2 vanilla bean split
1 and 1/2 tbspn sago
80 g caster sugar
1/2 kg frozen raspberries
1/4 cup water
Place rhubarb, water, lemon zest, sugar, vanilla and wine into a non-reactive pan
Bring to simmering point.
Add sago, reduce heat, place pot on a simmer mat and cook gently for 15 minutes, stirring from time to time.
Tip in frozen berries, cook for a further 5-10 minutes, stirring once or twice, until berries are just thawed and the mix just returns to the simmer.

Allow to cool before serving. The colour will intensify as it cools and the sago will continue to swell.

Notes: first, this isn't an original. The source is here, and it's by Stephanie Alexander.

I've followed it pretty closely - sago needs some precision, as a small amount makes a big difference. 1.5 Australian tablespoons is 30ml, or 2 tablespoons for the rest of the world. The only change I made was to have a few other berries in it. I didn't have half a kilo of frozen raspberries on hand. I had about 200gm and for the rest I used a pack of mixed frozen berries - not the one with the black currants.

It makes a pretty good low fat dessert - or possibly a slightly decadent breakfast, with yoghurt. I'm not 100% happy with it - it's very sharp and needs more sugar. And I say that as one with a taste for bitter and sour flavours. The rhubarb flavour is rather overwhelmed by the berries. Also, the sago texture is mostly lost - it acts as a thickener here, not a feature. It's not set, and the little granules aren't noticeable among the berries.

This may be a plus if you don't like rhubarb or sago, but I do. Which is why I looked for a rhubarb sago recipe in the first place. Oh well, I can try and invent my own next time.

Work and New Yearishness

I'm back at work, but not back "at" work. I'm enjoying working from home at the moment - I see no reason to waste time commuting when there's no-one there to talk to anyway. I've spent the morning clearing out the email, spam, software updates, and doing a general new yearish sort and tidy. After lunch I'll be ready to start on the actual coding bit.

Being at home also means that I can shove trays of maple syrup drizzled apricots and vanilla sugar sprinkled rhubarb into the oven at lunchtime. Both are from the garden - it's my first apricot crop, I got around 1.5 kg of very small but extremely tasty apricots. I've eaten a lot just plain, but I fancied roasting some. I've mostly used brown sugar with apricots, but maple syrup struck me as a fine idea. Breakfast tomorrow will be apricot yoghurt.

Dessert tonight would have been apricots with caramel gelato and honeycomb toffee shards, but I'm going back to my regular plan of desserts being for weekends and special occasions, now that the Xmas break is over. I'll have to save some apricots for the weekend. This is the only New Year thing I'm doing right now. For various reasons, mostly to do with work, I hereby decree that for resolution purposes, my new year will start in February.

Another of those weekend food reports

It's been pretty good. I did some shopping at Gungahlin on Friday, which left me with some useful ingredients. A few more ingredients arrived via the Bakeshoppe and Meatways in Kambah, which I am saving to write up when I get to the letter K. And yet more came in from the garden: I picked 1.5 kg of rhubarb, and a few late lemons.

A friend needed a bit of cheering up after some stressful times with illnesses in the family, so I made her dinner last night. For a scratch meal, it was pretty bloody good, if I do say so myself! We had veal, sage, prosciutto and wine wine ravioli, with proper parmigiano reggiano cheese, both from Fruitylicious. And a very simple roast tomato, capsicum, garlic and balsamic sauce - with no extra herbs, so as not to compete too much. We had a green mixed leaf salad with olive oil & balsamic dressing, and a dessert of Maggie Beer quince and bitter almond icecream, with stewed rhubarb and an orange, almond & spice biscotto from Cook & Grocer.

Tonight we're going over to a friend's place for dinner and I'm taking dessert. I seriously contemplated doing a pumpkin pie, since that's all over the blagosphere at the moment with US thanksgiving. But I eventually decided it was probably too weird a concept for Australians, and it's not ideal to experiment on people that I don't know very well. There were some rather fabulous sounding recipes about: bourbon-pecan-pumpkin cheesecake, anyone? It's on my "one-day" list.

Anyway, I finally decided to make a lemon meringue pie. And then I had an attack of the lazies and bought a pre-baked pastry shell from Woollies. It claims to be premium butter shortcrust. We'll see. The lemon filling doesn't quite fit in the tart shell, so I'm also trying some Pampas frozen pastry shells - a new line, you get 12 unbaked shells in little foil cases for about $4.50-ish. I'll report on the quality later. And maybe try to grab a picture.

Update: done. As for quality: the Woolworths pastry seemed quite good, really. It's more expensive than making your own, but handy when you have no time.

Recipes follow.
Recipe 1: Roast tomato, capsicum and garlic pasta sauce
4 large tomatoes
2 medium red capsicums
1 head of garlic
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
salt & pepper to taste
Roast the tomatoes, garlic and capsicums in a pie plate, in a low oven for 1 1/2 hours.
Allow to cool. Set garlic and capsicum aside.
Over the pie plate, skin tomatoes and discard hard stem end. Let the juices drip into the pie plate. Return tomatoes to plate and squash. Let sit for 5 minutes to dissolve pan drippings.
Skin capsicum and chop, discarding stem and seeds.
Remove 4-6 large cloves of garlic from the head, or cut the top off and squeeze out 2 tsp of roast garlic paste.
Put the garlic, capsicum, tomatoes and juices into a saucepan and simmer gently to reduce slightly to your preferred sauce consistency. Stir well to distribute the garlic.
Season to taste with pepper, balsamic vinegar and salt.

Notes: Serves 4 sparingly, but it's richly flavoured. If you are serving this with a plain pasta, rather than a flavoured ravioli, some herbs might be nice. I'm imagining some shredded fresh basil.

Recipe 2: Stewed Rhubarb
1.5kg chopped rhubarb
1/2 cup sugar
1 vanilla bean
2 tsp rosewater
Cochineal or red food colouring (optional)
Wash rhubarb well, rinse in a colander, but do not dry.
Put in saucepan with no extra water.
Pour over sugar and rosewater and stir well.
Add whole vanilla bean.
Bring to simmer slowly, and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring regularly, or until done.
Add colouring to improve pink colour if desired.

Notes: I actually did mine in a casserole dish in the oven (since it was on for the tomatoes anyway). It doesn't come out as whole as the roast variety, since it's so deeply filled, that it stews rather than roasts. My garden rhubarb was very green, so I added colouring for prettiness.

Recipe 3: Lemon Meringue Pie
1 20cm shortcrust pastry shell, prebaked
3 large lemons
1/2 cup caster sugar
another 1/2 cup caster sugar
2 tablespoons cornflour
25g butter
2 large eggs, separated
1/2 teaspoon white vinegar or cream of tartar
FILLING
=======
Zest and juice the lemons - you want about 175ml juice.
Top up the lemon juice with water to make 350ml.
Mix cornflour and 1/2 cup sugar in a saucepan, and gradually mix in the lemon/water mix, keeping back about 75ml. Add the lemon zest.
Heat up, stirring continuously, until the mixture thickens and boils.
Simmer for one minute further, stirring well.
Remove from heat and add butter. Stir until melted and well combined.
Add remaining lemon/water mix, and stir well.
Add the egg yolks, and stir well.
Set aside to cool.

MERINGUE
========
Whisk the egg whites until just stiff.
Slowly whisk in the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar, in about 6 batches.
Add the vinegar or cream of tartar, and whisk again

ASSEMBLY
========
Preheat the oven to 150C.
Spoon the cooled lemon filling into the tart shell.
Cover it with the meringue, being sure to seal it right up to the edges.
Fluff it up a bit by dabbing with the spatula to make lots of little peaks.
Bake for 45 minutes, until pale golden.
Cool before eating; serve lukewarm or cold.

Notes: The Woollies Select brand pastry shell was a bit smaller so I had some leftover filling. But this doesn't make a lot of meringue, so I used it all and had a few plain lemon tarts left in the Pampas brand mini shells. If you want to make your own pastry, 1 cup flour and 60g butter is about the right amount.

This is an old fashioned version of this classic pie, with a little meringue rather than the massive fluffy towers you get in cafe versions. You'd need a lot more eggwhites to do that. The filling is lighter than the modern lemon tart - these are usually made with a lot of egg yolks and cream, and no cornflour and water filler! I got the recipe from a book that I've had since 1982 or so: Philippa Davenport's 100 Great Dishes Made Easy. I think I bought it at Mary Martin's bookshop in Civic, anyone remember that? The only modification I've made to the original is to use more lemon juice. I like my lemon bitey.

In the garden

Since I just mentioned the potatoes the other day, I thought I might do an inventory. I live in a Canberra suburban house, but it's on a smaller block than usual. The house is quite large, too, so there's very little garden space. I can't have a big veggie garden; there's not enough sunny space. The backyard is more like a large courtyard, with low trees around the edges.

I like to grow mostly edible things, but I'm a very erratic and uneducated gardener. I think of it as natural selection weeding out the weak. Whatever grows with my random attention and neglect can stay. Mostly I plant perennials, and try to choose edible varieties for most of the border trees and shrubs. There's a patch along the side of the house that gets enough sun for a few summer veggies, but is too deeply shaded in winter for much to grow.

The edible inventory:
2 feijoa trees, inherited from previous owners.
1 lemon tree, inherited from previous owners.
1 bay tree, so far about 1.2m tall, and thriving.
1 kaffir lime, struggling in a large pot.
1 fig tree, so far about 2m tall. I got half a dozen figs this year.
1 dual graft apricot tree, about 3m so far. No fruit yet.
1 olive tree, 1.5m, in a pot. Has 6 olives...
1 miniature white peach, 1m, in a pot.
1 desert lime, 1m tall.
1 finger lime, 1m tall.
1 red currant bush.
1 blueberry bush in a pot.
1 teeny gojiberry bush, .5m, just planted.
A couple of rhubarb plants.
The newly planted rainbow chard, still alive after a week...
A berry of some sort, I forget what. Youngberry, maybe?
1 something or other shrub that I've forgotten what it is, except it's supposed to have edible berries. Peruvian guava? A native thingo? I planted both, and one died, but which?

Herbs: rosemary, thyme (unwell), oregano, some weird variety of mint that just growed, lemon & lime balsam, tarragon (now dying for winter but it springs back).

Then there's marginally edible things like roses, violets, lavender, native mint bush, and native tea bush (that's white correa, not ti-tree.) And some random native berries rambling around the front that never get enough water to set fruit.

They Came from Underground!

Look what came out of the ground! That's a teaspoon there, for size. I dug these up yesterday from my almost non-existent veggie garden. That's about half my crop. Let me tell you how I grew them. It was hard work, I tell you...

1. Find sprouting potatoes in the cupboard.
2. On a whim, chuck into a spare patch of garden and cover with dirt and mulch.
3. Ignore for 5 months. Water? Well, it did rain a few times.
4. When plants fall over and look like they're dying, scrabble around in the dirt under them and extract potatoes.

I can't believe how simple that was, and how satisfying. Next year I'm going to do it again, but I think I'll pay more attention to keeping them covered. Remember, teh green wunz r poyzon.

My garden is much too small and shady for serious veggie gardening, so mostly I just grow herbs. I've tried popping some rainbow chard in where the spuds were, but I'm not very optimistic about it surviving my random neglect. I fantasise about doing better, but I don't really have the time.

I've recently read Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and I recommend it highly. It's a fascinating account of a year that she and her family spent on a farm in Virginia, close to where Kingsolver grew up. They grew as much of their own food as possible, including meat, and bought everything else from local growers. It's full of fascinating anecdotes, and recipes, and odd tidbits of fact about agricultural practices, ancient and modern. I'm quite impressed by it - and it has helped increase my devotion to the farmers' market. Why waste scarce resources shipping food all round the world, when there's perfectly good seasonal eating right here, right now? In Australia, we probably don't have the quality of land to enable the one-hour transport limit that the Kingsolver family imposed on themselves, but I am becoming ever more fussy about buying Australian. And for stuff we can't get locally - well, go without, or choose fair trade if possible. I don't think we grow cocoa in Australia, but we do produce some good coffee. Spices are small and relatively cheap to ship; but I don't want expensive American cherries in the middle of winter.

I'll tell one potato related anecdote: early in the year, Barbara announced to a food-loving friend that "the potatoes are up!' She was met with puzzlement. "Exactly what part of a potato comes up?", asked the friend.

I wonder if we Australians have such a great disconnect. Does everyone still know that a potato is a part of a plant? It's an ordinary looking low plant, with leaves, flowers and a small tomato-like fruit (poison, do not eat fruit!). The potatoes grow underground, storing up starch to enable the plant to survive another year - until we heartlessly rob it of its labours and fling its corpse to the compost heap to rot. And meat is dead animals, and eggs come out of a chook's bum.