Food

Sorrel Salad

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I love sorrel, with its succulent texture and bright sour flavour, but I don’t often think to use it. I occasionally use it to fill out early spring salads, when the lettuces aren’t quite big enough to make a full salad, and that’s generally about it. 

But last night I wanted a salad to go with quiche. The spring lettuces are long since bolted, and the fall lettuces are still baby seedlings, so I turned to sorrel, this time to make the bulk of the salad.

I got inspiration from a few different sorrel salad recipes, but then simply used what I had on hand. The result was a spectacular salad—one I will definitely make again.

Here’s my ‘recipe’, for what it’s worth:

1 handful sorrel leaves, chopped into thin strips (maybe 2 cups, chopped)
1/4 cup walnut pieces, toasted in a 190C oven until aromatic and beginning to darken
6 small olives, chopped (I used my own olives, and they are quite small. If you’re using big commercial ones, you probably don’t need more than 2 or 3)
6 cherry tomatoes, cut in quarters (I would have used a lot more tomatoes, but this was all I had)
1 Tbs olive oil
1 Tbs balsamic vinegar
1 small clove of garlic, crushed
dash of salt

Whisk together the oil, vinegar, crushed garlic and salt in a small bowl.

Place all the other ingredients in a bowl, and toss with the dressing. If you want a little less knock-your-socks-off fresh garlic flavour, strain the garlic out of the dressing first.

Holiday Traditions

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At this time of year, I love chatting with others about their holiday traditions. Every family’s traditions are unique—a combination of family history, ancestry, and geography all mashed together with individual preferences.

Trifle has mostly replaced cookies as my Christmas baking of choice.

And they evolve over time. The Christmas traditions I grew up with are not the ones I practise today. They took a dramatic shift twenty years ago when we moved to New Zealand from Minnesota—northern hemisphere traditions make no seasonal sense here, where Christmas and the summer school holidays coincide.

So my husband and I adapted. Like most Kiwis, our holidays involve travel—we have a tradition of a family backpacking trip the week before Christmas. I always carry a little stuffed reindeer, strapped to the top of my pack, as our holiday hike mascot. We pack Christmas cookies, and usually include one ‘fancy’ camp meal (especially if the tramp extends over Christmas Day).

Our Christmas tree isn’t a pine tree—a cut tree would last about three minutes in the summer heat and wind. Instead, we make our ‘tree’ each year out of whatever materials we have on hand. Making, then decorating the tree is usually a whole-family event.

The LEGO tree of 2019 was one of my favourites, with a motor powering moving parts.

Our big Christmas meal (if we’re not on the trail) is on Christmas Eve—calzones full of vegetables from the garden. We make extras, and enjoy the leftovers for lunch on Christmas Day.

The big day is meant to be a day of relaxation for everyone, so Christmas breakfast sticky buns are made the night before, and rise in the fridge overnight, to be popped into the oven in the morning. After a lunch of leftover calzones, dinner is a big salad accompanied by cheese and bread. Simple as. No slaving in the kitchen on a beautiful summer day.

Boxing Day is beach day for us—along with most of the population of New Zealand—a day to relax with the family and celebrate summertime.

It’s a long way from the hot cocoa, turkey dinners, and carolling of Christmases in my youth, but our traditions do what all good holiday traditions do—they provide opportunities to spend time with family while enjoying seasonal delights.

So happy holidays to you all, and may you enjoy your own traditions, whatever they are! Add a comment with your own traditions!

The (not quite) Perfect Icing, Part 2

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I took another step on my quest for the perfect carrot cake icing on Sunday. This variation on cream cheese icing is made into a fluffy confection with the addition of quite a lot of cream, slowly beaten into the already fluffy cream cheese. 

I had my doubts. I’m not overly fond of a straight whipped cream topping. Would the cream cheese flavour come through enough? Would there be enough tart zing to it to offset the sweet?

The answer was no. 

Don’t get me wrong, this icing is GOOD! There’s enough cream cheesy goodness to give it body and depth of flavour. And the addition of cream means it gets away with having half as much sugar as other cream cheese frostings. The texture is divine—smooth and creamy, with a lightness you don’t often get in a cream cheese frosting. It’s delightful on the lemon and blackberry cupcakes I used it on. 

But is it the perfect carrot cake icing? Not quite.

So, the first icing was great on flavour, lousy on texture. This one is amazing for texture, not right for flavour. I can work with that. Trial number three will be a fusion of the two, hoping for that perfect balance.

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. 😉

Meanwhile, I do recommend frosting #2. I think it would be spectacular on chocolate cake, and absolutely stunning rolled up in a bûche de Noël. Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a go:

170 g cream cheese
3/4 cup icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar), sifted
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup heavy cream

Beat the cream cheese until fluffy. Add the sugar and vanilla and beat until smooth. With the mixer on low, slowly pour in the cream. Then turn the mixer on high and beat until stiff peaks form.

Because of the quantity of cream in this frosting, I recommend storing cakes with this frosting in the fridge.

Baking One for the Team

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I’ve recently sent out my next book, Demonic Summoning for the Modern Gardener, to beta readers. It’s a more fleshed out tale than my husband read and commented on last month. A few weeks ago, I mentioned on the blog that my husband had requested more carrot cake in the story. In my rewrite after his comments, I made chasing the perfect carrot cake a sort of running gag/tiny subplot through the book.

Then I decided I should include the perfect carrot cake recipe in the back of the book.

I had already developed the perfect carrot cake recipe, so that was easy to include. But the frosting … I’ve made some very good carrot cake frostings, but I can’t say I’ve hit on the perfect frosting. Everyone agrees, of course, that carrot cake must be frosted with a cream cheese frosting, but there’s a lot of variation among cream cheese frostings. I’ve had them too sweet, too grainy, too dense …

No better excuse for baking!

So last night I whipped up a carrot cake and tested out a new variation on cream cheese frosting. This one has no butter—just cream cheese as the fat. It also contains lemon zest and lemon juice for a bit of added tartness. Lots of potential to be awesome!

Flavour-wise, it’s good … the texture, not so much. It’s too gummy. Not fluffy enough. Definitely not the perfect frosting.

But never fear, we’ll suffer through this almost perfect cake (have I mentioned that I’ve had two pieces of it already, and it’s been only 12 hours?), and then I’ll make another!

Because I couldn’t let my readers down with sub-standard carrot cake, now could I?

If you have a favourite cream cheese frosting, let me know—maybe I’ll try it out. How many cakes do you think it will take to reach peak frosting?

Cardamom Coconut Pound Cake

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I love cardamom, but I don’t use it very often. Inspired by the book, A Whisper of Cardamom by Eleanor Ford, which I checked out of the library last week, I decided to use it more frequently.

I’ve made Coffee Cardamom pound cake before (from Sweet by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh), and that was my first thought. But I didn’t have the instant coffee the recipe calls for, and anyway, coffee wasn’t what I wanted. I considered chocolate cake with cardamom, which would be good, but wasn’t really what I wanted either. 

What about coconut? Maybe with a spark of lemon to brighten the flavours? I decided to give it a go. Starting with a vanilla pound cake recipe, which I only loosely followed, I added lemon zest, cardamom, coconut, and a lemon glaze. The result was quite lovely. Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a go.

2 1/2 cups wholemeal (whole wheat) flour
1 cup all purpose flour
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground cardamom
250 g (1 cup) butter
1 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
1 cup yogurt
2 tsp vanilla
grated zest of one lemon
1 cup coconut

For the glaze:
1/4 cup lemon juice
3/8 cup granulated sugar

Combine the flours, salt and cardamom in a medium bowl.

Cream together the butter, sugars and baking powder in a large bowl until light and fluffy (about 5 minutes). Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat well after each addition. Add the flour mixture alternately with the yogurt. Stir in the vanilla, lemon zest and coconut.

Bake in a greased bundt pan at 180℃ (350℉) for 55 minutes to an hour. Remove the cake from the oven and let sit in the pan for 5 minutes before turning it out onto a rack. 

To make the glaze, combine lemon juice and sugar in a small, microwave-safe bowl. Microwave on high for about 30 seconds, and then stir until the sugar is dissolved. Brush the glaze onto the warm cake until it’s all absorbed.

The New Year Begins in Darkness

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Frost on the winter garden.

Seven o’clock in the morning and it is still dark outside. Indeed, it is darker now than it was at two, when the moon hung high in the sky, bright enough to cast shadows.

It has been an unusually dry start to winter, so here at the winter solstice the darkness feels less oppressive than it sometimes does. There will be sunshine today, at least briefly.

More importantly, there will be summer’s bounty to eat, even in the darkness. 

Just a few years ago, shortly after we’d moved into the new place, I blogged about eating the last of the black currants on the winter solstice. This year on the solstice, the cupboard and freezer still groan with summer fruits and vegetables—a testament to how far the garden has come in a short time.

And because it has been dry, I’ve spent more time in the garden in May and June than I normally would. Summer’s dead plants have been cleared away, the fruit trees and berry bushes have been pruned, and the view of the garden on a frosty morning is one of tidy rest, of anticipation.

I am already thinking about spring. The autumn-planted broad beans are lush—sitting quietly in these short, cold days, but ready to burst into growth as the days grow longer in the coming weeks. I can already smell the musty scent of their September blossoms.

In the kitchen, every meal is a gift from the summer garden, from the summer me, who spent long hours picking and processing vegetables. It is hard not to feel guilty for how easy it is to prepare dinner in winter—heat a jar of vegetable soup, toss a jar of pasta sauce over noodles, thaw some frozen corn and peas … But maybe the guilt is not because I barely have to work for a meal in winter, but because I didn’t appreciate summer’s bounty enough when it was fresh. 

Here in the dark of winter, vegetable soup is a blessing, frozen sweet corn is ambrosia, and homemade tomato sauce is a more potent antidepressant than Prozac. 

Plant tags ready for spring.

And so, there is joy and pleasure, there is the flavour of sunshine, even in the darkness.

And next week, the days will be a little longer. Next week I will take stock of my seeds and begin planning next summer’s crops. Next week we will celebrate Matariki, the start of a new year.

Winging it–Quince and walnut rolls

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Sometimes, you try something new in the kitchen (like using an entire quart jar of black currants in a recipe for cupcakes), and it’s edible, but not something you particularly want to repeat. Then there are times you make something up and it just works.

On Saturday I made a cake that used all the eggs in the house and most of the butter. It didn’t leave me much to work with for Sunday breakfast. (This blog is not about Saturday’s cake, but it was amazing—the Brown Sugar-Spice Cake from King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking book—it’s what you’d get if gingerbread and pound cake had a baby together, and it was raised by carrot cake.)

So I figured I’d make a yeasted bread for Sunday breakfast. My initial thought was cinnamon rolls, which we do for Christmas breakfast every year. But I wanted something different—cinnamon rolls are for Christmas, not everyday. 

I started off by looking at recipes for various traditional fortified breads, but all of them either had eggs or lots of butter in them. 

So I decided to wing it.

Saturday evening, I combined two cups of warm milk, some yeast, about two tablespoons of butter, some salt, a spoonful of honey and enough flour (half wholemeal (whole wheat) and half high grade (bread flour)) to make up a nice bread dough. It rose beautifully, and after two hours, I rolled it out into a large rectangle. I spread it with about three quarters of a cup of quince paste, then sprinkled on some cinnamon and a generous handful of chopped walnuts. Then I rolled it into a log and cut the log into twelve thick slices, which I arranged, cut side down, in a greased 9 x 13-inch baking tin. 

I popped the pan in the fridge overnight, and the rolls were beautifully risen by 5 this morning. I gave them 30 minutes in a 210℃ oven, pulling them out when they were nicely browned.

While they were still warm, I drizzled a simple glaze over them—1/2 cup icing sugar (confectioners sugar), about 1/2 tsp vanilla, and enough milk to make a thick, pourable consistency.

It’s really too bad I didn’t actually measure most of the ingredients, because the result was excellent. In fact, I think it’s worth running out of eggs and low on butter purely to have an excuse to make these rolls. Maybe next time I’ll measure my ingredients so I can give you all a recipe—it’s definitely one worth sharing.

In the meantime, if you’re adventuresome and would like to give my loose winging-it recipe a go, I highly recommend it. If you can’t get quince paste, I reckon apple butter or a thick apple sauce would work nicely, too, though it’s hard to beat quince for flavour. 

Good luck, and happy experimenting!

Gardening for the Future

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As my regular readers all know, I spend a lot of time in the garden. I also spend a lot of time thinking about gardens, looking at gardens, planning gardens …

The bare paddock: former forest, future garden

I am fortunate to be part of a local group of keen vegetable gardeners. Of course, we don’t just grow vegetables—everyone has perennial food crops like fruit trees and berry bushes, and ornamental plants as well. All of us take pleasure in planting and maintaining our gardens, as well as relaxing in and enjoying them. Some of us are in the early stages of establishing our gardens, and others have spent decades cultivating one place. But we’re all focused on the future.

I’m reminded of the quote I copied years ago from the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann:

“Gardens are fashioned for many purposes with many different tools, but all are collaborations with natural forces. Rarely do their makers claim to be restoring or rebuilding anything from the past; and they are never in full control of the results. Instead, using the best tools they have and all the knowledge that they can gather, they work to create future environments.

If there is a lesson it is that to think like the original inhabitants of these lands we should not set our sights on rebuilding an environment from the past but concentrate on shaping a world to live in for the future.”

I look at the 3000 square metres of land my husband and I own. For thousands of years, this land was covered in forest and periodically scoured by the Waimakariri River, which deposited around 300 metres of rock and clay here on top of the bedrock. When Māori arrived in the region, they burnt the forest to flush out moa and other game birds. European settlers later brought in sheep and cows and planted European pasture grasses. From the mid 1800s to 2019, our little block of land was used to pasture sheep, and later, dairy cows. When it was subdivided to develop as residential housing, the topsoil was scraped off, leaving bare, highly compacted clay studded with rocks. Even weeds grew poorly (in places where we have done nothing to improve the soil, there are still bare patches, where nothing has been able to grow in the past 5 years).

Flaxes provide food for native birds, currents provide food for us.

There was no restoring or remaking what was once here, but when we bought the land, we envisioned a place rich in native plants that might attract native lizards, birds and insects. We envisioned a place full of plants that would provide food—an orchard, berry crops, nuts, herbs and vegetables. We envisioned a place that was beautiful, and bright with flowers. 

A volunteer lancewood.

We cannot erase the fact that the soil here has been sorely abused for nearly two hundred years. We can’t erase the fact that we sit over an old river bed full of rock and clay. Not everything we plant flourishes, and other plants have done so well, they’ve become weeds. Some insects and birds have returned, but glaring absences remain, and non-native pests still dominate.

But like all gardeners, we look to the future, our imaginations filling the gaps in what we see today. We do our best to collaborate with the natural forces at work here in order to shape a little pocket of plenty for ourselves and others.

Autumnal Beauty

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Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, most of our native trees are evergreen, so we don’t have the same spectacular autumnal colours I remember growing up in North America. There are, of course, plenty of European non-native trees planted in parks and gardens, so we do get some autumnal colour, but here in Canterbury, where summers are dry, the overwhelming landscape colour in autumn is green, as cooler temperatures and increased rainfall lead to a flush of grass growth.

In the vegetable garden, however, there’s plenty of colour. Much of it is subtle, but it speaks of autumn nonetheless.

Winter squashes offer deep green, heathery grey, and orange, first in the garden, and then in the laundry room where they adorn every available surface at the moment. They’ll also offer beautiful orange in dinners throughout the coming year as we work our way through them.

Dry beans also provide colourful beauty at this time of year. Trays of drying beans on the porch make me smile: Blue Shackamaxon’s glossy black, Bird’s Egg’s speckled spheres, and Cherokee Cornfield’s riotous mix of colourful varieties.

Then there’s the flint corn. This year, I planted Strawberry Popcorn, which produces deep red kernels, and Glass Gem, with its glittering multihued kernels. Husking corn is like opening a box of crayons.

In the greenhouses, summer still reigns, offering red tomatoes, multicoloured peppers, and purple eggplants.

On top of the colourful vegetables, there are plenty of autumnal flowers in bloom: dahlias, heliopsis, and chrysanthemums provide bright splashes of yellow, orange, pinks and reds. They also attract colourful butterflies like yellow admirals, red admirals and monarchs.

So while we may not have the colourful autumn leaves, there is plenty of brightness to enjoy, even as the days grow short and dark. 

Ginger Scones

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Ginger cream scones are a classic, but I rarely have cream on hand. So Sunday morning, with a hankering for ginger scones, I made up a new recipe.

Taking inspiration from an excellent ginger muffin recipe, I included oats in the scones. A touch of vanilla rounded out the flavours for a thoroughly delicious breakfast. In fact they were so good, they all vanished before I thought to take a photo of them. (the photo here is of some previous scones I made–honestly they look just like the ginger scones.)

Here’s what I did, in case you’d like to try it too.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup quick cooking rolled oats
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbs brown sugar (next time I’ll use just 1 1/2 Tbs—this was a bit too sweet for my taste)
2 tsp baking powder
100 g cold butter
1/2 cup crystallised ginger, finely chopped
1 egg
1/2 cup + 1 Tbs milk
1 tsp vanilla

Combine the flour, oats, salt, sugar and baking powder in a large bowl. Cut the butter in with a pastry knife until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Stir in the crystallised ginger.

Whisk together the egg, milk and vanilla in a small bowl, and then combine with the flour mixture. Knead gently a few times until the dough comes together in a ball. On a floured surface, pat the dough into a disk about 1.5 cm thick.

Bake at 210℃ for about 15 minutes until nicely browned.