Food

A Seasonal Celebration of Food

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The traditional Christmas celebrations and decorations involving twinkling lights, snowflakes, snowmen, warm drinks and roaring fires make no sense here in Aotearoa New Zealand. But there’s plenty to celebrate at this time of year.

I always know it’s time to start thinking about the holidays when the strawberries and gooseberries ripen. I know it’s time to decorate when I can stroll through the garden, grazing on peas, gooseberries, raspberries, boysenberries and strawberries. When I can fill a colander with red and black currants. When the supermarket fruit begins to look old and nasty by comparison to what’s tumbling off the bushes at home. When it’s hard not to pick too much lettuce for the day’s salad.

Food is an important part of holiday celebrations, and for me half the celebration is the ability to eat my way through the garden. Finally in December, picking vegetables for dinner doesn’t feel like scrounging for whatever’s left from the winter crops. At some point during the month, the question of ‘what is there to cook for dinner’ shifts to ‘what needs to be eaten today’ (or processed and preserved). Jam making is my Christmas ‘baking’. Fresh berries replace the traditional bowl of mixed nuts put out for munching. Fruit ice creams and cordials are our figgy pudding and wassail. 

As we make our way toward the summer solstice, the long days provide plenty of daylight for picking and processing fruit. And because it’s the Christmas season, those long days (and nights) in the garden and kitchen feel more like a celebration than a chore.

Is there holiday stress because of the increase in garden work? You bet—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in the car, bucket between my knees, shelling peas on the way to the beach so I can get the work done and still have time for fun stuff. And keeping up with the weeds is a struggle while many of the vegetables are still small. Then there’s the inevitable broken tap or pierced irrigation line you find the first time you need to water (which usually happens this month). And the constant struggle with the thieving birds, who want to partake of the garden’s bounty, too.

We may not have snow, but the kānuka flowers are a spectacular substitute.

But overall, the holiday season is a time to celebrate the garden’s summer bounty. It’s a time of fresh fruit and vegetables, and long days outdoors. Next week marks the end of my work year, with schools letting out for summer, and this weekend will be my first jam-making weekend of the season. Let the celebrations begin!

Baking Disaster

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A rainy weekend, an empty cookie jar … why not try out a new cookie recipe? 

In general, I love the recipes in King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking book. So I thought I’d try a new one—a cookie recipe called All Oats All the Time. 

It’s an intriguing recipe with ground oats and nuts instead of flour. It’s also pretty low in fat, for a cookie.

My first warning was the texture of the dough. It was quite wet. I re-read the recipe to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any ingredients—nope, everything was in there. Still I hesitated—should I add a little flour?

No. King Arthur recipes are good ones—this would be fine. I carried on, dropping teaspoons of dough onto my greased cookie sheets. 

Five minutes in the oven, and I knew I had a problem. The cookies had spread into one another. Not horribly, but creating the thin edge, thick centre combination characteristic of a dough that’s simply too wet.

Okay, fine. They wouldn’t look nice, but they’d be okay.

I pulled them out of the oven before those thin edges burned. The recipe said to let them cool five minutes on the pan before removing them. Once again I hesitated. Would those thin edges lift off after five minutes?

Once again, I went with the recipe. 

After five minutes, those cookies were virtually cemented to the pans, and they’d turned super crisp, so the moment you managed to wedge the spatula under one, it shattered.

I experienced a moment of despair, thinking I was going to spend an hour chipping inedible cookies off the pans, and then scrubbing the pans until all that baked-on gunk was gone. But then I thought of cheesecake crust, and how these crumbly cookies would make a lovely crust, or maybe a fruit crisp topping. And once I no longer cared if the cookies crumbled, it was a snap to scrape them off the pans. The pans came clean easily after a short soaking. 

On Monday, I picked up the ingredients for cheesecake and made little cheesecake cupcakes using my crumbled cookies in a crust, with a little sprinkling of crumbled cookie on top. The results are pretty darned good—certainly better than the original cookie alone.

I’ve still got a fair bit of crushed cookie left—it has gone into the freezer for use in some other interesting way.

So maybe the cookies weren’t such a disaster after all.

Butter, Butter … and more butter

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I checked out a cookbook from the library last week called Butter, Butter, by Petra Galler. I was sold on it before I even opened the book—the subtitle is ‘Sometimes more is more.’ The photography is dark and sensual, with lots of dripping honey, and hands smeared with berries and icing. Who could resist?

Indeed, I’ll be looking for this book next time I’m in the bookstore—it’s one I’d like to have on hand permanently, not just for a few weeks.

I want to try everything in this book. Petra is a Jewish New Zealander, and her recipes combine traditional Jewish dishes with modern Kiwi flavours in a way I find intriguing.

Yesterday I tried her recipe for Mandelbrot, a twice-baked cookie similar to biscotti, but higher in fat, so it has a more delicate texture. 

As you would expect from a book titled Butter, Butter, these cookies are rich—full of butter, eggs, nuts, and chocolate. Although they take some time to make, they’re not difficult, and the end result is beautiful and delicious.

I haven’t had a chance to make anything else from this book yet, but next on my to-bake list is Tahini Shortbread with Salted Chocolate Ganache, then Almond Butter Brownies, then Miso and Roasted White Chocolate Cookies, and then … Seriously, I need to go purchase a copy of this book. You do too. Here’s the Mandelbrot recipe, but don’t stop there. Buy the book. And a few blocks of butter …

390 g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp flaky salt
1 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
245 g butter, melted and cooled
200 g caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla paste
1/4 tsp almond extract
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 orange
3 eggs
180 g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
100 g walnuts, roasted and roughly chopped

For dusting:
30 g caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

In a medium bowl, combine all the dry ingredients, mixing well.

Place the butter, sugar, vanilla, almond extract and zests in a large bowl and whisk with a mixer until combined. Add the eggs one at a time and mix until thick and pale; about 2-3 minutes.

Working by hand, gently fold the dry ingredients into the wet until just combined. Add the chocolate and walnuts, and mix well. Cover the bowl and refrigerate 1-2 hours until firm.

Preheat the oven to 175℃ fan-bake. Grease a large baking sheet.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide into two pieces. Form each piece into a log about 33 cm long and 5 cm wide. Place on the prepared tray and bake for 25 minutes.

Allow to cool for 10-15 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 130℃ fan-bake. Then cut the logs diagonally into 2 cm thick slices. Sprinkle both cut sides with the cinnamon/sugar mix, and bake them, cut side up for 20 minutes. Flip the slices over, then bake another 20 minutes. 

Allow to cool completely on the pan.

Fruity Experiments

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The freezer is packed with early summer fruits—raspberries, gooseberries, red currants, and black currants. Seriously, if we don’t make a good effort to eat it, we’ll still have fruit left when summer rolls around again.

Black currant scones before baking–colour unusual, but okay…

So I’ve been experimenting with new and interesting ways to incorporate fruit into baked goods.

Two weeks ago I made a cookie bar that is supposed to be filled with chocolate fudge. I filled it with black currant puree instead, making a wonderful tart-sweet flavour bomb.

There was thawed black currant puree left over from the bars, so for Sunday breakfast I took my favourite lemon barley scone recipe (which I’ll have to blog about someday …) and substituted black currant puree for the liquid ingredients. The results were … mixed.

The flavour was good, but of course I love black currant, so I expected that. The colour, on the other hand, was more of a conversation piece than a bonus—dingy purple. The scones didn’t rise as well as they usually do either, and the texture was heavier than I would have liked.

So I’d say the scone experiment was inconclusive and needs more testing.

Black currant scones after baking–colour a bit disturbing…

I also made raspberry crisp and lemon pound cake studded with red currants over the past two weeks, and these were resounding successes. They, too, require replication.

And there’s plenty more fruit for additional studies! I don’t think it will be too much of a hardship to work our way through the frozen fruit.

Do I have to eat it?

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Nance is a small yellow fruit popular in Panama. When my husband and I first arrived there, chicha de nance (a drink made from crushed nance fruit) was something we could barely choke down out of politeness to our hosts. The flesh of nance fruits is oily, gritty, acidic, and has a funky cheesy flavour. If you think too much about it, chicha de nance is reminiscent of watery vomit.

So you’ll understand why we didn’t like it.

But during nance season (and for several months afterwards, because people store it in bottles of water—yeah, don’t even think about what grows in those bottles) it’s impossible to avoid nance. Everyone you visit serves chicha de nance. Neighbours give you bottles filled with nance fruit.

You learn to drink it without grimacing. Before long you’re drinking it without even thinking about vomit. It’s a slippery slope from there, and next thing you know, you’re looking forward to nance season and wondering if you can trade some eggs for a bottle of nance from your neighbour.

I’m thinking about nance today as I contemplate the feijoas dripping from our tiny feijoa bushes. This is the plants’ first year producing fruit and I am amazed and a little terrified at their productivity.

I’m terrified because I hate feijoas. I don’t even like the smell. Simply walking past the fruit bowl when there are a few ripe feijoas in there makes me wrinkle my nose in disgust. I find it hard to breathe around them. Eating one makes me shudder—I swallow quickly to avoid tasting it too much.

Fortunately for me this year, my husband has been keeping up with the feijoas—he loves them. But those feijoa bushes are only going to get bigger. Next year I will have no excuses—I’ll have to eat them. 

So I’m thinking about nance. If I could learn to love a fruit that tastes and feels like vomit, surely I can learn to love feijoas, right?

They say a child needs to try a food up to 15 times before they’ll eat it. That’s a lot of feijoas …

Lazy Lemon Cake

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Sometimes you want cake, but don’t want to work for it.

A head cold this past week has left me craving cake, but without the energy to do much baking. Consoling myself with cookbooks from the library, I came across a recipe for Greek Lemon-Yoghurt Loaf Cake that was so easy, I couldn’t resist. Nothing else really caught my eye in the Great British Bake Off cookbook this came from, but I think this one is a keeper.

Here’s the recipe, in case you’re feeling lazy …

150 g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
50 g ground almonds
200 g caster sugar
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
3 medium eggs (I used 2 large)
125 ml Greek-style yoghurt
125 ml mild light olive oil (I used a mix of canola and extra-virgin olive oil, because I didn’t have light olive oil)

for the glaze:
125 g icing sugar, sifted
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
1 – 1 1/2 tbsp Greek-style yoghurt

Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and almonds into a mixing bowl (tip in any almonds remaining in the sieve). Stir in the sugar and lemon zest.

Combine the eggs, yoghurt and oil in a measuring jug and beat well with a fork. Pour into the flour mixture and stir until well combined.

Pour into a greased loaf pan lined with a strip of baking paper. Bake at 180℃ for 55-65 minutes until golden brown. When the cake is ready, cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then run a knife around the edges of the pan and lift the cake out by the lining paper and allow to cool on a rack.

Make the glaze by sifting the icing sugar into a bowl. Mix in the lemon zest and then add just enough yoghurt to make a smooth, shiny glaze with the consistency of double cream. While the cake is still hot, spoon the glaze over the top.

I have lots of ideas for variations on this cake—using a blackcurrant glaze, replacing half the flour with barley flour, stirring in frozen blackcurrants … it’s a recipe that invites you to make it again and again. 

Autumnal Assessment

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April is upon us, and it’s time to assess how the garden year went.

In a word, it was disappointing. 

It started off bad, with my seedlings in fungal-infected seed raising mix. That problem was made worse when I contracted Covid and couldn’t move those seedlings into better mix quickly, so they languished for a while. Many were planted out late or small.

And the problems continued once plants were in the garden. Flooding last winter sucked the nitrogen out of the soil in about half the garden, leaving my pumpkins, corn, peppers and eggplants all looking anaemic. To be fair, I harvested pumpkins—enough to enjoy fresh, but not my usual quantity that lasts us all year. We also ate sweet corn, but had none extra to freeze. The peppers and eggplants were so slow to grow this year that they’re only now ripening fruits—just in time to be killed off by winter temperatures.

The tomatoes and peas grew well this year, but were decimated by birds.

The cucumbers and melons were slammed by phytophthora during an early summer wet period—most died, and those that survived grew slowly. The only cucumbers that grew well turned out inedibly bitter, and I tore the plants out of the ground.

On the positive side, the potatoes were great—died off a little earlier than I expected, but produced plenty of tubers, with little trouble in the way of pests and disease. 

The perennial fruits did well overall, too, and the freezer is stuffed with berries for the winter. Even the 3-year-old fruit trees gave us crops this year (small ones, but the trees are still tiny themselves).

So, as usual, there were wins and losses, and now I’m looking forward to how to increase the wins for next year. I spent the past several weekends digging a drainage ditch and soak pit to draw flood water off the garden this winter. Hopefully that will help retain the nutrients I’m hauling to the garden in the form of manure each week. My husband and I have also been discussing improving our bird defences before next spring—permanently netting an area of the garden for the most bird-ravaged crops. I’ve also identified some new varieties of bean that are doing better in the new garden than my standards from the old garden, and I’ll adjust next year’s planting to allow more space for the more vigorous varieties. 

That’s the best part of gardening, really. You always get another chance to do it better. So I head into autumn a little disappointed in last year’s garden, but with high hopes for what next year will bring.

Cheese and Quince Tart

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Our quince tree gave its first harvest ever this year, which is exciting. I picked them today, and my husband went looking for some new (to us) recipes that use quince.

He came across Tarta de Queso y Membrillo con Almíbar de Cardamomo—Cheese and Quince Tart with Cardamom Syrup. How could I resist? 

It’s been a while since I followed a recipe in Spanish, so there was an added level of adventure for me making this recipe. I don’t think I ever bought or used azúcar flor (icing sugar) when we lived in Panama, so I had to look that one up.

Even in your native language, this is not a tart you whip out quickly—nothing using quince is, and this has lots of different things to prepare—but it is delicious! It’s essentially cheesecake with caramelised quince in a pie crust. What’s not to like?

I modified the recipe slightly—here’s my version, in English.

Cheese layer:
1 package cream cheese
1/2 cup unsweetened yogurt
2 Tbs honey
1 egg
1 Tbs fresh lemon juice

Quince layer:
3 large or 6 small quince
1/4 cup brown sugar
25 g butter
1 Tbs cinnamon

Enough pie dough for 1 crust (see my pie dough recipe here)

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Cardamom syrup:
3/4 cup icing sugar
3 Tbs fresh lemon juice
3 cardamom pods

Make your pie crust and refrigerate until needed.

Mix the ingredients for the cheese layer with a handheld mixer until well combined. Set aside.

Peel, core, and thinly slice the quince (you should have 7-8 cups of fruit). Place the quince, butter and brown sugar in a large skillet and cook on low heat for about 10 minutes, until the quince has softened. Stir in the cinnamon.

Roll out the pie dough and line a pie or tart pan with it. Pour the cheese mixture evenly over the bottom of the crust. Layer the caramelised quince on top, and sprinkle with chopped walnuts.

Bake at 190℃ for 40-45 minutes.

While the pie is baking, make the sugar syrup. Place the icing sugar, lemon juice and cardamom pods in a small saucepan and boil gently for 8 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool. Drizzle over the pie when serving.

The recipe I used said to serve the tart warm, which is how we ate it this evening. But I’m looking forward to a second piece tomorrow, because I think it’ll be even better cold. 

Next time I make this (because there will no doubt be a next time), I’ll crush the cardamom pods so that the syrup is more strongly flavoured. I also think it would be even more spectacular with a cup of ugni berries (Chilean guava) tossed into the quince mixture.

If you don’t have quince, this tart would be lovely made with apple or pear, too.

Crazy Cake #2, 2023

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My husband’s birthday cake request this year was simple—make something I’d never made before.

Little did I know how difficult that would be—let’s face it, I’ve made a lot of cakes. I pored over my cookbooks and googled ‘unusual cakes’. So many of the cakes I came across were simply variations on a theme. An ordinary butter cake, but with unusual ingredients—rose water and pistachios, beetroot and sour cream, tomato soup. 

I considered some of those cakes—they would certainly be different from my usual cakes. But to really comply with his request, I felt I had to do something outside my comfort zone.

So I went for a chocolate mousse cake—there is no flour in this cake, nor are there ground nuts to replace the flour. 

No.

This cake is a chocolate souffle with chocolate mousse on top, garnished with cocoa nibs and ganache. Eggs, chocolate, and sugar constitute the bulk of the cake (and honestly, there’s not much sugar—it’s mostly eggs and chocolate).

It’s not the prettiest cake I’ve made, by a long shot, and I would definitely do it differently next time to avoid some of the unnecessary faffing around in the recipe. 

It is rich. If you like chocolate—I mean really like chocolate—it’s definitely a cake for you. I’m not certain it’s my kind of cake, though. It’s more fluffy candy bar than cake, and while I like chocolate cake, this is a bit much for me. I like a bit of flour, some nuts—something to cut the chocolate a bit, something to give a cake a little more substance.

That said, I am happily doing my part to get rid of this cake, and I’m glad I gave it a go. Next year, though, if he makes the same request, I’m going for the zillion-layer apple spice cake in which each layer is about 5 mm thick and the filling is essentially apple butter. 

Harvest Days

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My hands smell like onions. My fingernails are stained purple. The walls and cabinetry in the kitchen are festooned with colourful splatters and drips. The floor is sticky underfoot.

It must be harvest time.

The garden gushes vegetables in late summer, and the shorter days warn that it’s time to start preserving the bounty before it’s gone.

One of my favourite ways to save summer’s vegetables is in summer soup (which I’ve blogged about nearly every year since 2015). Because soup uses a bit of everything, there’s no need to have vast quantities of any one vegetable. And it doesn’t matter if, say, the sweet peppers bombed or there’s an overabundance of sweet corn. Soup accepts what you’ve got and returns lovely meals all packaged and ready to go on those winter evenings when you come home late from work. It is both forgiving and giving.

So it’s worth a long day in the kitchen to make and bottle (can) a big vat of the stuff.

And while you’re at it, it’s super easy to toss carrot peels, corn cobs, celery tops, and other ‘waste’ from soup making into a large pot to simmer for stock. Run the stock through the canner after the soup, and you’ve got delicious summer flavouring for winter risottos and stews.

So I may have spent fourteen hours in the kitchen on Saturday, but at the end of the day, I had fourteen quarts of soup and six quarts of stock (and another four quarts of pickled onions, because you know, if you’re going to spend all day in the kitchen, you may as well make the most of it.

In the coming weeks, I’ll bring in the pumpkins and potatoes, freeze sweet corn, and string hot peppers for drying. The kitchen will be messy, and I’ll have too much to get done.

But when it’s all over, I’ll be able to relax, at least for a while, until the winter crops need to be weeded …