Food

Fabulous Fennel

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4031 smThere’s not a lot coming out of the garden at the moment. The summer crops are pretty well finished (though we’re still scrounging the odd pepper or eggplant from the tunnel house), and the winter crops barely had a chance, with the hot dry weather we’ve had until last week. But among the few crops that are available right now is fennel.

This little-used vegetable is versatile and delicious in the kitchen, and attractive and useful in the garden. Leaves, seeds, and bulb are all edible.

Fennel grows year-round here, though the cooler months are when we appreciate it most. I plant it in both spring and autumn, but it seeds in readily, and we eat as many volunteer fennel as we do planted ones.

Fennel has a mild anise flavour that goes well with many other vegetables. When raw, the flavour is refreshing and numbing.

Raw fennel, sliced thin, makes a crisp and refreshing addition to salads. Or it can make a salad all on its own.

It can be braised and eaten as a side dish, or chopped and added to stews or casseroles. It goes particularly well with potatoes in a cheesy gratin, and makes a delightful risotto.

Fennel leaves can be added to salads and stews, even if the bulbs aren’t ready to harvest.

The ground seeds make a zesty addition to burgers, chai, and cookies, too! Or just crunch a few between your teeth after a meal to sweeten your breath.

In the garden, fennel’s big yellow flower heads attract all sorts of beneficial insects that help keep pests in check, and when the plants get too big and rangy, I can feed them to the goats, who love fennel as much as I do.

Corn Chips

/ Robinne Weiss / 4 Comments

2016-05-29 17.58.56Usually, when I want tortilla chips, I first make tortillas, then cut them into wedges, brush them with oil and bake them. It makes absolutely divine chips, but it’s rather labour intensive.

Last night my husband made a vat of chilli for dinner, and I gave in to my craving for chips. Instead of the usual tortilla chips, I made these simple corn chips. They take almost no time to mix up, and are quite good, though fragile. There wasn’t a single crumb left by the time the meal was over.

1 cup cornmeal

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 T dry milk powder

½ cup water

¼ cup vegetable oil

Combine the dry ingredients. Add the water and oil, and mix well.

Grease two large baking sheets. Divide the dough in two, and roll each half out quite thin (about 2mm) directly onto the sheet. The dough will be very oily, but you may need to dust your rolling pin with flour to keep it from sticking. Cut into triangles.

Bake on fan bake for 12-15 minutes at 175°C. Remove from the pan when they are browned, and cool completely on a wire rack.

If you’re a fan of flavoured chips, you might add paprika, smoked paprika, chilli powder, or finely grated parmesan cheese to these chips.

Don’t try to use these in nachos—because they are baked, they turn to mush when smothered in toppings.

Pumpkin Pie for Breakfast?

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

2016-05-29 07.08.49 smI made a variation on my standard pancake recipe this morning—pumpkin pancakes.

They were good—moist and heavier than plain pancakes. A bit like eating pumpkin pie for breakfast. Mmmmm! This recipe makes a huge stack of pancakes—enjoy!

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup cornmeal

3/8 cup sugar

3 ½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp cloves

½ tsp ginger

3 eggs

2 cups cooked, pureed pumpkin flesh

2 cups milk

6 Tbsp butter, melted

Combine flours, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a medium bowl. Whisk together eggs, pumpkin, milk and melted butter in a large bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, and stir just until combined. You may need to add more milk to get the right consistency if your pumpkin is particularly dry (mine was, and I added another ¼ cup).

Fry on a preheated griddle or frying pan, as for normal pancakes.

 

A Five-Alarm Waffle

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-05-15 07.33.29We love waffles at our house, but I make them only occasionally. There are two reasons for this—I don’t get to eat breakfast with everyone else when I make waffles, as I’m stuck tending the iron, and waffles have a tendency to set off the smoke alarms.

A well-seasoned waffle iron is…frankly, disgusting. It’s covered in a perfect layer of burnt butter. Unfortunately, that butter smokes every time you use the iron.

Even if I turn the extractor fan on, the smoke alarms go off.

So I’ve learned I can only make waffles on days it will be warm enough to open all the windows at 6.30 am. A good breeze blowing through clears the smoke and prevents the alarms from going off.

That usually means waffles only in summer, but since it’s been unusually warm, I decided to make pumpkin spice waffles on Sunday.

The morning was warm, so I opened the windows and turned on the extractor fan.

But the air was so still, the smoke hung indoors.

My son wasn’t yet out of bed when the alarms went off…

Well, no one was late for breakfast, at least.

Here’s a double recipe, so you’ll have waffles left over for breakfasts all week.

2 cups all purpose flour

1 ½ cups whole wheat flour

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground nutmeg

¼ tsp ground cloves

2 cups cooked, mashed pumpkin

4 large eggs, separated

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

2 ½ cups milk

200g butter, melted

Combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, egg yolks, and brown sugar. Add the milk and whisk until the sugar dissolves. Gradually whisk in the butter.

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry and mix just until all the flour is moistened.

In a medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Fold the egg whites into the batter.

This batter is thick, and you will need to spread it with a spatula to get it evenly spread in the waffle iron.

Try them with warm applesauce!

Saturday Stories: 2016 World Pea Shelling Championship

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_4237 smAaaannnnnd they’re off!

The contestants are off to a quick start! Jill takes the early lead, with three pods shelled, to Carla’s two. Kelly seems to have pulled a difficult one for her first—bad luck there, as she’s fallen behind.

For those of you who might be new to competitive pea shelling, these ladies are using Greenfeast peas—the only variety allowed in international competition. To attain the skill required to compete on this level, these women have been training eight to ten hours a day for the past six months. They’ve worked hard, and it all comes down to this moment.

And their intense training has paid off. These ladies know what they’re doing! And now Kelly has caught up to Carla. They’re running neck and neck for second place. Jill is still out in front, just finishing her sixty-third pod. But, OH! She’s dropped one! That’ll cost her!

Jill has suffered a number of setbacks this season. A touch of arthritis kept her out of the Iowa Open this year. Let’s see if she can come back from that fumble.

Oh! She might not get the chance! Kelly’s racing up from behind! She’s passed Carla, passed Jill. She’s going for the finish! Ninety-nine, one hundred!

Kelly! Champion of the World Pea Shelling Competition!

When in doubt, eat cake

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-05-13 18.03.48 smI had an incredible week of writing this week. New book, lots of ideas flowing, and about 18, 000 words on paper (of course, that’s a figure of speech these days—all those words are just ones and zeros in my computer, actually).

And so I came to Friday and realised that I am just written out. Or maybe this new book is crowding out any other thoughts, because I sit down at the computer, and all I can think about is my next plot point.

So I baked a cake this afternoon, thinking that a little break from writing would refresh me and open up some ideas for today’s blog.

But it didn’t.

So here I am, with a cake sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me to finish today’s blog. I can have a piece as soon as I’m done…

 

Chick Pea Salad

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

2016-05-08 17.32.36 smWho would have thought we’d still be eating tomatoes and eggplant in mid-May?

But since we are, my husband made baba ghanoush on Sunday, and we had a lovely Mediterranean meal of baba ghanoush, freshly baked bread, homemade goat cheeses, and chick pea salad.

I looked at a number of chick pea salad recipes on-line, then ignored them all and used what we had in the garden. The result was quite lovely.

1 cup dry chick peas

1 sweet red pepper, chopped

2-3 medium tomatoes, chopped

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

12 large black olives

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

salt and black pepper to taste

Cook the chick peas until tender, and allow to cool. Drain. Mix the chick peas, tomato, pepper, parsley and olives in a bowl. In a small bowl, whisk oil, vinegars, salt and pepper. Toss the salad with the oil and vinegar.

This salad holds up reasonably well to refrigeration (I just ate the last of it for lunch today, two days later, and it was still good), but is best eaten at room temperature on the first day.

A Scourge of Snickerdoodle Scent

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

2016-05-05 19.47.42 smWell, I made Snickerdoodle cookies the other day, and it wasn’t until I thought to write a blog post about them that I discovered I could also buy Snickerdoodle scented shampoo, thus having that “just been baking” smell all day.

BLECH!

I love snickerdoodles, which, lets face it, are just sugar cookies rolled in cinnamon, but snickerdoodle shampoo?

Modern commercialisation has a way of turning even the best things into something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Next, there will be snickerdoodle scented hand lotion, snickerdoodle scented pillows, a snickerdoodle scented Barbie who comes with an apron and oven mitts.

How about just baking some cookies, eh? That’s a great way to fill your house with snickerdoodle aromas.

Crazy Corner Farm

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-04-17 11.13.55 sm“So, what do you grow here at Crazy Corner Farm, eh?” asked the man who delivered 500 bricks earlier this week.

I laughed.

“Well, it’s basically a subsistence farm. A little milk and cheese. A lot of vegetables.”

It was a good enough answer, and appropriate to the situation. But other things came to mind.

What do we grow here at Crazy Corner Farm?

A lifestyle. A lifestyle of hard work rewarded by the fruits and vegetables of our labour.

Kids. Kids who know where their food comes from. Kids who understand the work that goes into a simple block of cheese. Kids who can tell a bee from a syrphid fly, use a machete and an axe safely, and design and plant a garden.

Creativity. Creativity in food, garden, crafts, DIY problem-solving, circus arts…everything. By providing the space, materials, and encouragement to let it flourish.

Stories. Or, as my husband said it, “Organic hand-picked words available in convenient poem, economic story, and family-size novel packs.”

So, we grow a lot here on our tiny farm. More than you might guess at first glance.

Pumpkin Ricotta Lasagne

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

2016-04-20 18.18.45 smYesterday I made a large batch of ricotta, and then wanted to use some of it in dinner. I also had in the fridge some leftover pumpkin galette filling from dinner a few days ago. And over the weekend, I had made some pepper oil to use with pasta.

What came out of it all was a pumpkin ricotta lasagne that was an absolute hit.

I can’t even begin to give you a recipe. It would start with, “Make too much pumpkin galette filling on Saturday, pepper oil on Sunday, and a vat of goat milk ricotta on Wednesday…”

But the final assembly followed this recipe, and yielded a beautiful white and orange striped dish that kept its form well when cut. It would have been perfect for a dinner party, served with a leafy green salad. Perfect, because we didn’t even eat half of it—it’s much denser than a normal lasagne, and would have easily fed five more people.