Holiday cooking is always special. And with the holidays falling during the summer here, it’s easy to create stunning meals without a trip to the grocery store.
For Christmas Day, I made homemade linguini, and my husband topped it with a delicious selection of garden vegetables—a fabulous, festive meal.
But Boxing Day’s dinner sort of blew Christmas Day out of the water.
It was a simple meal. Just three salads.
A potato salad made with purple potatoes, sparked up with celery, spring onion, parsley, and homemade pickles.
An Ottolenghi-inspired roasted cauliflower salad made with purple and white cauliflower and toasted walnuts. A dressing of vinegar, oil, maple syrup, cinnamon and allspice added complexity to the flavours, and fresh red currants added crunch and zing.
A fruit salad made with the many fruits gushing from the garden these days.
The overall effect was a riot of colour and flavour. Best of all, nearly everything came from the garden. Holiday meals don’t get much better than that.
One of my Christmas gifts from my daughter this year was a set of creative spice jar labels. She spent an hour or so on Christmas Day affixing the labels to all our spice jars.
I love the creativity of the names: imp skulls, essence of griffin, condiment for a pottle o’ chips, miniature grenades of flavour …
Today I was looking for cinnamon and allspice. It took ages to find the ‘fragrant soil’, and ‘cannonballs of spice’. LOL!
This year’s pre-Christmas tramp took us to the Lewis Pass area for four days of forests, mountains, and lots of water.
Day 1 was up the Nina Valley Track through beautiful beech forest. We bypassed Nina Hut, planning to camp below Devil’s Den Bivvy. Unfortunately, recent rain had rendered the area below Devil’s Den Biv into a swamp. There was no place to pitch a tent, so we carried on to the biv. Then we had to figure out how to bunk four people in a two-person hut. With three in the biv and one in a tent blocking access to the loo, we managed. It was … cosy.
Day 2, we left the biv in dense fog, hiking down to the Doubtful River on a track that has clearly seen no maintenance for a decade. At times it felt like bush bashing, and there was lots of windfall to clamber over, under and around.
Once at the Doubtful River, a cruisy 40-minute hike took us up to the confluence with the Doubtless River, and shortly thereafter, to the Doubtless Hut, where we had a spacious six bunks to ourselves. Well, almost to ourselves. As we were packing up to leave, we found a beautiful young female Wellington tree wētā in the hut.
On day 3 we climbed up to Lake Man Biv—another 2-person hut, thankfully with a little more camping space nearby. Lake Man Biv is hobbit-sized. The door is about three-quarters height, and the bunks were so short, even 160-centimetre (5-foot, two-inch) me couldn’t stretch out on them. But in spite of its size, the biv is perfectly appointed, with a small table for cooking (complete with a drawer full of cooking and cleaning supplies) a set of tiny shelves, a fold-down bench, and an empty ammo box for additional seating and mouse-proof storage. Cords along the ceiling provide clothes drying space, and there are even clothes pegs fashioned from beech tree branches. The overall effect is a tidy, fully-functional space, in spite of its size.
After dropping our gear at Lake Man Biv, we hiked up to Lake Man, an alpine lake where we found our summer solstice snow and had a lovely lunch in the sun, surrounded by awesome alpine vegetation and some cool bugs.
After a cosy night in Lake Man Biv, we hiked out via the Doubtful River. The hike ended with a couple of crossings of the thigh-deep Boyle River and a long river-valley slog—easy hiking, but not terribly exciting.
The trip wasn’t our most strenuous ever, but after having spent the better part of the last six weeks sick, first with Covid, then with a nasty, lingering not-Covid, I was seriously out of shape and thankful for the relatively easy hike.
It’s been too long since my last post. I have illness to thank again. And simple early summer busyness. The strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, black currants and red currants are all coming in now, and I’m wondering how on Earth I’m going to pick and process them all!
The big garden excitement here at the moment is the new greenhouse that my husband and I gave to each other for Christmas. Yes, we know it was a rather early Christmas gift, but by the time we get the thing set up and ready to go, it’ll be Christmas Day. I’m looking forward to having more garden space under cover for some tender perennial crops and better winter growing.
I’m off to pick berries now and consider what different jams I’m going to be making this weekend! I’ll leave you with a little bit of Christmas doggerel (because I can’t help myself–bad holiday poetry just spills out of my brain at this time of year).
Down here where kiwi birds roam Santa trades snowy rooftops for foam Of the incoming tide As the reindeer all ride A Sea-Doo till it’s time to go home.
Down here while the barbies heat up Santa sips pinos gris from a cup. With sand in his shorts He’ll play summertime sports Till the elves tell him it’s time to sup.
Down here where pavlova is king Santa enjoys his annual fling Wiggling tired bare feet In the summertime heat While we wait for the gifts that he’ll bring.
The base of the new greenhouse. Raised beds to lift plants above winter flooding and provide decent soil for growing. Hopefully we’ll get the top put together this weekend.
Robinne Weiss 