cooking

Onion and Goat Cheese Tart

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

2016-01-23 17.44.36 smThere are dozens of variations on this tart available on the Internet. Here’s my version. This is best served at room temperature, outdoors on a hot day with a glass of white wine.

2 medium to large red onions

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tsp brown sugar

500 g chevre or other soft goat cheese

3 eggs

¼ – ½ c chopped fresh parsley

salt and pepper to taste

pastry for a single crust 10-inch tart (I use my favourite pie dough recipe for this)

 

Line the tart pan with pastry and allow to chill in the refrigerator as you prepare the filling.

Cut the onions into strips, and sauté on medium-low heat until they are well cooked and beginning to turn golden. Add the vinegar and brown sugar and continue to cook until most of the liquid has evaporated. Set aside to cool.

Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Add the cheese, parsley, salt and pepper and mix thoroughly.

Spread onions in the bottom of the tart and top with the cheese mixture.

Bake at 200˚C (400˚F) for about 40 minutes until firm and browning on top.

Cool on a rack and serve at room temperature.

Homemade and Home grown

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4265 smMy family loves food. We eat well. We eat a lot. But what I’ve come to realise is that we don’t just love food for its own sake. We don’t go out to restaurants, and we don’t wax lyrical about our favourite products from the grocery store.

For us, food is as much about how it gets to our table as it is about what it tastes like there. Food is a labour of love, a creative endeavour, a team effort. Food is inseparable from its origin.

Years ago, my son asked, “If we didn’t grow the ingredients ourselves, is it really homemade?” That is how deep our relationship to our food is.

I sometimes wonder if this is healthy—this obsession with food. But it really isn’t so much about the food as it is about the process and all the corollary benefits.

Producing our own food, we stay fit without paying for gym memberships, we have food security in the face of natural disasters, we learn to work together as a family, the children gain a sense of worth from helping to feed us all, we eat better, we reduce our impact on the earth…the list goes on and on.

Producing our own food is a way to nurture the family, a way to acknowledge our place in the natural world, a way to celebrate each day of the year and the gifts it brings.

Sauerkraut

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_4247 cropsmOur laundry room smells like a boys’ locker room next to a sulphurous hot spring…and I’m happy about that.

Sitting on the benchtop in the laundry is a large ceramic crock filled with fermenting cabbage—in six weeks the bacteria bubbling away in the crock will turn it into sauerkraut.

Making sauerkraut is incredibly simple—it’s nothing but shredded cabbage and salt. But it’s not a pretty process—fermentation is smelly, looks disgusting, and should never be attempted by the squeamish. The end result, however, is delicious.

Being a good Pennsylvania Dutch girl, I love sauerkraut. It’s great on burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches, and goes well with almost any potato dish.

But I’m thankful we can make two years worth of sauerkraut at once, because the smell of fermenting cabbage could put you off the finished product pretty fast. Once the fermentation is complete, I’ll bottle the lot in pint jars—the perfect amount for a meal—and give the laundry room a really good airing.

A Day Off

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

DSC_0020 smI don’t do anything on Christmas Day. I take the day off. Well, okay, I have to do the milking and the other animal care, but I do only the essential daily tasks.

Before Christmas, I make sure the garden is well-weeded, so I’m not tempted to pull any on the day. I make sure all the picking and processing of fruits and vegetables is caught up, so I don’t feel I have to make jam or sauerkraut. I make sure the laundry is all done the day before, so I don’t feel a need to do washing. As soon as I’m done with the morning chores, I put on a skirt, just to make it harder to do work.

I don’t even cook much. Christmas breakfast—sticky buns—are made the night before, and left to rise in the fridge overnight. All I do is throw them in the oven in the morning. Lunch on Christmas is leftovers from Christmas eve dinner—usually calzones. Christmas dinner is salad, cheese, and bread. Easy and summery.

So I take a day of rest, and I enjoy it a great deal. I read a book. I take an afternoon nap. I do a little sewing, I play games with the kids.

The problem is the next day.

My body is obviously made to be in motion. Sitting around all day is not good for it.

The morning of the 26th of December, I can barely get out of bed, my back is so stiff and sore. I hobble around groaning for the first hour of the day.

So I’m happy to be back at work on Boxing Day, weeding, harvesting, doing the laundry. Good thing Christmas comes only once a year!

Vegetable Dip

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100_4256 smChristmas day is a low-key affair at our house. We work like mad up through Christmas eve, preparing food, baking cookies, getting caught up on all the weeding, harvesting and processing of vegetables. Then Christmas day, there is nothing to do but enjoy the fruits of our labours.

To that end, I made a vegetable dip for our Christmas dinner, which will be a Mediterranean feast—bread, cheeses, olives, salad, and fresh vegetables.

Inspired by a variety of recipes, and by the lovely herbs in the garden, I made the dip up as I went. Taste testers declared it delicious, and we’re looking forward to enjoying it tomorrow with carrots, cauliflower, sugar snap peas, and broccoli from the garden.

1 (8oz/225g) pkg cream cheese, softened

2 small spring onions

small handful fresh flat leaf parsley

2 small stalks cutting celery (or ½ celery stick)

small sprig fresh savoury

½ tsp paprika

juice of 1 lemon

Beat cream cheese until fluffy. Chop herbs and onion very fine and stir into the cheese along with the paprika. Add enough lemon juice to make a dipping consistency.

 

Harvest time, Time to harvest

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

100_4237 smI picked peas today.

That was all.

Well, yes, I did a few other things, like laundry and cooking dinner and whatnot, but my day was pretty much given over to picking and processing peas.

Tomorrow I will do the same with currants and raspberries.

The next day we will pick cabbages and make saurkraut.

And it will be time to pick peas again.

When George Gershwin wrote the lyric, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy,” he obviously wasn’t thinking like a gardener. Oh, food is plentiful—more than plentiful—but getting that food to the table or stored away for leaner times doesn’t make for easy living.

Cilantro and Culantro

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4228 smCilantro is an acquired taste. This strong herb is used in Asian and Central American cooking, and is one of those things you either love or hate.

When I first tasted fresh cilantro (Coriandrum sativum), I will admit I didn’t like it.

It wasn’t until I had culantro—Eryngium foetidum, also known as Mexican coriander—that I really learned to like the flavour (Never mind that the scientific name means ‘foul-smelling thistle’).

In Panama, both are eaten, and though they are only distantly related plants, they serve the same culinary purposes, with similar flavours. Panamanians consider Eryngium foetidum the ‘real’ cilantro, and call it simply culantro. Coriandrum sativum is called culantro Chino (Chinese cilantro).

Culantro grew wild in our lawn in Panama, and we weren’t long in the country before we were eagerly searching it out to flavour our dinners. It was a disappointment to return to the U.S. and find we could only get culantro Chino—positively bland in comparison to the foul-smelling thistle we grew to love.

But we’ve since grown fond of Chinese cilantro, too. It grows year round here. In fact, it’s as much a weed here as culantro was in Panama, and I find it cropping up all over the place. It does a lovely job of providing a year round crop without any work on my part at all. I just need to be open-minded about leaving the ‘weeds’ where they sprout.

Backpack meals

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100_4233 smI picked up the food for a backpacking trip today. All I can say is BLECH, and HOLY COW THAT STUFF’S EXPENSIVE! And we don’t go for the “backpacker” food—we just buy the instant meals available in the grocery store.

To buy over-salted, over-sugared, freeze-dried, highly processed food when there is fresh produce pouring out of the garden is physically painful.

I suppose we should plan in advance. As vegetables come into season, we should dry enough for our trips, make up our own highly-processed, over-salted backpacking food. Once upon a time—before children—we did some of that.

But it’s actually a lot of work…to change a delicious vegetable into something we would only consider eating if it were the only option. I just can’t get excited about that.

So, we’ll probably just keep buying those icky instant meals. It’s backpacking, after all—you don’t do it for the food.

Rain!

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4212I didn’t dare believe it until it happened, but we got over a centimetre of rain today. Squally thunderstorms rolled in at lunchtime, curtailing my gardening and cutting power, but I don’t mind. A centimetre of rain will do lovely things for the garden and paddocks.

Dinner switched from the planned ricotta and pea tart to risi e bisi, which could be made on the gas stove without electricity.

This blog was written the old-fashioned way—on paper with one of my favourite pencils (and uploaded when the power came back on).

Now there’s nothing left to do by sit down with a glass of wine and a book to read by the light of the solar powered Christmas tree lights.