Rural life

Reprise: Summer Soup

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I usually blog about summer soup when we make it. It’s a major point in the garden calendar and deserves a mention at that time.

I’ve never said a word about it during the winter, but this is when it is most appreciated.

Yesterday we all got home late from work and school. It was dark and cold. We were tired and hungry. I was crashing into a miserable head cold I’d kept at bay all day by sheer force of will.

And there was the summer soup, waiting to welcome us home and usher us into summer, if only for a brief time. I heated up a jar of edible summer, and we sat down to eat within minutes of arriving home.

I took a spoonful and shut my eyes. Tomato, zucchini, green beans, corn and soy … all the flavours of summer soothed my raw throat and pounding head. The heat of sun-ripened jalapeños and Thai chilis warmed my sinuses and eased my congestion. For a short time my winter cold was forgotten in the glory of a summer’s day.

I harbour no illusions—summer soup won’t cure my cold, nor will it lessen its severity and duration. But it certainly can make my illness more bearable.

And so again I sing the praises of summer soup, and am thankful for the family effort that makes it possible to ease a cold and enjoy the summer sun in the heart of winter.

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Porcini

/ Robinne Weiss / 6 Comments

We had excellent porcini gathering this year—we discovered a new foraging location which is apparently overlooked by others. So we were faced with the delightful problem of what to do with so many mushrooms. We dried a lot, ate a lot fresh and still had more.

My husband found a recipe for pickled porcini. I was dubious and encouraged him to make a half-batch, just in case it was no good.

The process was strange—he sliced and salted the mushrooms, patted them dry, boiled them in vinegar, partially dehydrated them, and then packed them in a jar with a flavourful marinade to age.

They looked revolting.

Yesterday we tried them.

I’m not too proud to say I was wrong—totally wrong.

They are amazing—chewy, tangy, and bursting with intense mushroom flavour.

We cut them small and sprinkled them on a potato pesto pizza where they positively sparkled. I can’t wait to try them in all sorts of dishes, or simply slapped whole onto a cracker.

My only regret is that I convinced my husband to make a half-batch.

Music of the Night

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Photo: Marcelo Zurita (CC BY-SA 4.0)

One of the pleasures of the short days of autumn is doing morning chores in the dark.

I know that sounds weird. I don’t particularly enjoy tripping over the tools someone forgot on the lawn the day before, nor am I overly fond of the cold wind slicing through my jacket.

It’s the sights and sounds of early morning that I enjoy.

Yesterday morning was particularly spectacular. The sky overhead was clear and star-studded—shimmering glitter strewn across the blackest velvet.

But the stars to the south were blotted out, and lightning flashed and forked far out at sea. The storm itself was silent from my distance, but the surf roared with a storm’s fury.

By the time the sun rose, birdsong, barking dogs and the drone of tractors drowned out the sound of the waves. Sunshine masked the flash of lightning as the storm stalked along the coast. The day dawned serene and mundane.

Other wonders have been revealed to me on my morning chores over the years.

A bioluminescent worm in the chook paddock.

Shooting stars streaking from zenith to horizon.

A bioluminescent sea creature frozen in snow and deposited in the garden.

The aurora australis pulsing green in the southern sky.

Rats tiptoeing along the top wire of a fence (I know, rats, ick. But it was an amazing feat of balance).

Little owls cackling in the treetops and swooping silently overhead.

The graceful undulation of a fence during an earthquake.

The comforting warmth of a goat’s flank on a frosty morning.

The gentle caress of a nor’west gale before it turns violent.

The rhythmic heartbeat of the sea at rest.

The clarity of thought on a crisp dark morning, before the stress of the day intrudes.

Summer’s Final Farewell

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I moved the chickens into the vegetable garden last weekend—the final admission that summer is over.

I know it’s been over for weeks, but there have still been eggplants, peppers and tomatoes coming out of the tunnel houses. Before I moved the chooks, I harvested the last of those summer crops. We’ll savour them over the next week or so, and then it will be full-on winter from a culinary perspective, at least.

I’ve stocked up on barley to cook with our dry beans in bean-barley soup. Maybe I’ll add a bit of mushroom stock made from this autumn’s haul of porcini.

I’ve baked up some pumpkins so I have cooked pumpkin on hand for pie or galette later in the week. I’ll add frozen spring peas and summer corn to the galette, and garlic, stored in braids in the shed.

I’m eyeing up the secondary head of cabbage, sprouting from the remains of the summer crop. They’ll make tasty winter salads to complement warming meals.

i’ve planted out the winter crops, too—lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. They will provide us the late-winter vegetables we’ll crave come August.

So while I farewell summer, I welcome the culinary delights of winter. Not so varied, perhaps, as summer fare, but no less delicious.

Skink Snap

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Stepping out the door one day last week, I met with this lovely skink on the porch. It’s not unusual to see them on our property, but it is unusual for them to sit still for photographs. The cool morning must have made this one sluggish, because he happily waited while I snapped a few pictures. 

I’m always pleased to see skinks; native vertebrates are pretty rare out here in the middle of the Canterbury Plains. We’ve deliberately landscaped to protect and encourage skinks, as I’ve blogged about before. It’s nice to know our efforts have been successful. On sunny days the native plantings rustle with unseen skinks, and the rocks sport basking lizards. I’ve learned not to leave garden hoses lying on the ground, lest a lizard take up residence in the open end.

The common skinks in our yard aren’t in any danger of extinction (unlike many of our native lizards, which are), but it’s nice to know they thrive here. Seeing them makes me smile.

The Indispensable Hoe

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I was preparing the garden for my winter crops on Saturday when disaster struck. 

Okay, it wasn’t really a disaster, but it did effectively end my work for the day.

My hoe broke.

This has happened before. This particular hoe has been held together for years by duct tape after I cracked the handle on a particularly difficult clump of grass. Unfortunately, duct tape wasn’t going to fix this failure—this one was terminal, at least for the handle.

A few back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that this hoe has done about 6,300 hours of work for me over its lifetime. It has measured and prepared garden beds, dug furrows for seeds, removed weeds, cleared paths, and mixed concrete. And it’s done all this with almost no maintenance—some sharpening, some cleaning, a little duct tape.

It’s no wonder the hoe is one of the oldest garden tools. The first evidence of hoes comes from cave paintings made in about 5000 B.C. Although there are many variations in hoe design, the basic idea has changed little for thousands of years; it’s a tried and true design that does the job well.

So this week I’ll find a replacement for my expired hoe. It’s not a tool I can do without.

Vilma’s Eggplant–better late than never

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I’ve blogged about Vilma’s Eggplant in the past, but it’s worth repeating a recipe this good.

This year’s eggplants took a long time to get going, and it’s only now that summer is over that they’re really giving well. But it’s never too late for Vilma’s Marinated Eggplant. This stuff could make an eggplant lover out of anyone.

Vilma was the sister of our host mother during Peace Corps training in Costa Rica. She was loud and fiery-tempered, and regularly stayed with our host family when she was fighting with her partner.

When she was with us, she cooked—glorious Italian food she’d learned to make from her partner. Her food was a flavourful gift in a house where vegetables were usually boiled to death and served plain. 

One of the most wonderful things Vilma made was thinly sliced eggplant marinated in garlicky vinegar. She’d leave a jar of it in the fridge when she left, and we would savour it for a week on our sandwiches or with our mushy, flavourless boiled vegetables.

I foolishly never asked Vilma for the recipe, but a bit of trial and error was all it took to recreate Vilma’s marinated eggplant. 

This recipe mostly fills a quart-sized jar. It keeps for a long time in the fridge and makes a lovely addition to sandwiches. Serve it on crackers for party appetisers—it’s not the prettiest food, but after one bite, none of your guests will care.

2 small to medium eggplants
1 clove garlic, crushed
½ cup red wine vinegar
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Peel eggplants and slice very thin (1-2 mm). Steam until the slices are tender and limp (but not falling apart completely). Whisk all the other ingredients together in a small bowl, and toss them gently with the hot steamed eggplant. Refrigerate at least an hour before serving (the longer the better, as the eggplant will soak up more marinade).

Embracing Autumn

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Our summer has finally turned to autumn. Cooler temperatures and more rain mean the grass has begun to grow again, green shoots sprouting through rain-driven drifts of dead vegetation.

The tomatoes are browning, spent after summer’s excess, and while I mourn their loss, I welcome the fruits of autumn—pumpkin, wild boletes, black beans, apples and a return of leafy greens. I welcome warming soups and casseroles. I welcome the smell of baking pie, simmering beans, and sautéing mushrooms.

I welcome the reduced workload in the garden, too. There’s still plenty of harvesting to be done, and I’ll be clearing away dead plants throughout autumn and winter, but soon I’ll release the chickens into the garden to keep the weeds and pests in check until spring.

It’s time now to take stock. Plenty of summer soup, pickles and jam in the cupboard; strings of onions and garlic hanging in the kitchen; pesto, peas and corn in the freezer. Jars of popcorn and dry beans line the shelf, and a basket of apples sits in the kitchen. We will eat well this winter, food and effort stored in jars and freezer boxes to be released and enjoyed on dark, cold evenings. 

So I will savour the warmth and sun that remains, but embrace the cold to come.

Beach Hangout

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We nipped out to the beach after dinner on Saturday. We had a nice walk on our lovely, lonely bit of coastline.

But the beach was busy with youth hanging out (up to no good, probably). Some were alone, and some were in groups, strutting their stuff.

But these youth weren’t your usual crowd of city kids, they were juvenile spotted shags, Strictocarbo punctatus punctatus, also known as spotted cormorants, parekareka, and kawau tikitiki.

Shags were once heavily persecuted as pests. Fisherman believed they destroyed the fisheries, snapping up all the commercial fish and decimating their numbers. Research has shown, however, that their impact on fisheries is minimal. On the other hand, there is some evidence that, in our area at least, shag populations are hurt by commercial fishing. Spotted shag populations on the Banks Peninsula rose from 9,787 pairs in 1960 to 22,123 pairs in 1996 following a reduction in commercial fishing around the peninsula. Illegal shooting can also cause local population declines.

The spotted shag is a marine species, never venturing far from the sea and feeding in deep water up to 16 km from shore. They’re gregarious, breeding and roosting in colonies with up to 2000 birds. The groups of juveniles on our beach were small—a few dozen birds at most. These birds were probably born on cliffs around the Banks Paninsula, and when mature, they’ll head back to those cliffs to lay eggs and rear their young.

So they really were just hanging out on the beach, just like teenagers from Christchurch hang out on the beach on weekends, away from the adults, goofing off and getting takeaways.

Nifty Nigella

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Late summer is harvest time for all sorts of crops. Nigella might be the most unusual one I harvested this week.

Nigella sativa goes by many names: nigella, kalonji, black cumin, fennel flower, nutmeg seed, onion seed, and black caraway. Added to this mess of often misleading names is Nigella sativa’s ornamental cousin, Nigella damascena, also known as nigella (or love-in-a-mist). You could be forgiven for being confused.

Culinary nigella is a lovely aromatic seed that looks confusingly like onion seed. Its flavour has been described as oniony or oregano-like. I’m not sure how I would describe it—I suppose onion and oregano come close, but the truth is it has its own warm rich flavour. It is traditionally used in naan and string cheese. It’s also apparently great with lentils and other legumes.

Because we rarely harvest much nigella, we’ve only used it in naan, where it imparts a lovely savoury note to the bread. 

But this year, conditions must have been just right for nigella; it grew luxuriantly. Consequently, I have a huge quantity of seeds, so I expect we’ll be trying it out in all sorts of stews and curries. I’m looking forward to the addition to our spicing options.