Food

Eating Out

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

We almost never eat out. It’s a 45 minute drive to anywhere other than a fish and chips shop, and with so much food coming out of the garden, we feel obligated to eat as much of it as possible every day. It’s also hard to eat out because we eat so well at home. Restaurant salads are never as fresh as ours. Eating out, we’re tempted by out-of-season foods, which are always disappointing. And there’s always so much waste at a restaurant (at home, any extras can be fed to the chickens or the goats)

So it was an unusual day today. We dropped the kids at summer camp, and since we were so close already, we had lunch in Akaroa before a swim at Le Bons Bay. We trolled the street (there’s really only one) looking for a good spot. Lots of fish in Akaroa—salmon, mussels, and various other edible sea creatures. There is surprisingly little vegetarian food on offer. What’s available are the standard Kiwi vegetarian options—frittata with kumara and feta cheese, pizza, panini with brie and a few vegetables, plain tomato pasta, and what we ended up with—cheese toasties and hot chips (that’s a toasted cheese sandwich with French fries for you Americans).

We don’t have a toastie maker at home—the clamshell like device that grills a sandwich on both sides at the same time, and makes a very different sort of sandwich than toasted cheese sandwiches on a griddle. We also never deep-fat fry our potatoes, so a toastie with chips is something of an exotic treat for us. Today’s toasties weren’t the best I’ve had, but they were gooey on the inside and crisp on the outside, and the chips were hot and salty. A nice treat.

Of course, we were required to eat extra zucchini at dinner because of it…

Vampires Beware!

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Garlic1smI harvested the garlic a few days ago. The only blessing in the drought we’re experiencing is that the garlic has dried down enough and should store well this year. It’s been curing in the sun, and today I braided it into ropes that will hang in the shed until we need them.

My favourite garlicky dish is Skordalia—Greek garlic sauce. Easy to make, and excellent as a dip for fresh vegetables! We made it last year with purple potatoes, and the vivid colour was a huge hit. Here is the skordalia recipe from Greek Cooking for the Gods, by Eva Zane.

6 cloves of garlic, minced

2 cups mashed potatoes

½ tsp salt

1 cup olive oil

½ cup cider vinegar

Place the garlic, potatoes, and salt in a blender on high speed until smooth. Slowly add the oil, alternating with vinegar, and blend until smooth. Chill for several hours before serving.

Zucchini!

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Zucchini4cropsmThe question of what to do with too much zucchini is one that has plagued humankind for millennia. The modern zucchini’s ancestors came from Central and South America, and were part of the local diet as far back as 5500 B.C. (I wonder how you say, “Zucchini, again?” in ancient Mayan?)

Europeans knew a good thing when they saw it, and within 50 years of European invasion of Central America, zucchinis (well, their ancestors, anyway) were being cultivated in Europe. The vegetable we grow today as zucchini was developed in Italy in the 19th century (hence the Italian name we use for it), and it has been overwhelming home gardeners all over the world ever since.

The good news about zucchini is that you really can’t eat too much. It is low in calories (only 18 per half cup), and is full of nutrients like beta-carotene, folic acid, and vitamins C and E. Of course, there really is only so much zucchini one can eat, and because I plant several varieties, we reach the point of zucchini saturation pretty quickly. The overflow goes to the goats, who eat it happily for a while, and then they, too, get tired of it. Eventually, some zucchinis are forgotten in the garden, and grow into giants. My biggest last year was nearly a metre long. I thought that was pretty impressive, until I learned that the longest zucchini ever grown measured 2.39 metres (7 ft 10.3 in)! Now there’s something to aspire to this year!

In the meantime, it’s zucchini for dinner again tonight!

Strawberries

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

DSC_0003smI have always had an insatiable appetite for strawberries. At some point as a kid, I took over my mother’s strawberry patch—weeding, picking, selling, and eating large quantities of berries every spring. Here at Crazy Corner Farm, I also have a large strawberry patch. The original idea was that strawberries would be my cash crop—I’d sell lots of berries and support my gardening habit that way. It worked fine for a while…until I realised that, actually, we could consume every one of our berries without any problem at all, even when I was bringing in several kilograms every two days. I still sell some, and I give away plenty (they make spectacular Christmas gifts—who doesn’t want a punnet of strawberries?), but mostly we eat them.

The hardy, large-fruited strawberry we know today took many years to develop. Wild strawberries were cultivated in Europe as early as the 1300s, but it wasn’t until two New World species (Fragaria virginiana and Fragaria chiloensis) were imported to Europe that modern varieties were bred. The French accidentally pollinated the Chilean strawberry with the Virginia strawberry, and voila! They got a berry that was large, like the Chilean one, and hardy, like the Virginia one. Well, actually, it wasn’t that easy. After the French did it accidentally, the English spent many years crossing and recrossing these two species to develop a large, hardy strawberry. When these plants were shipped to America, most didn’t survive the colder North American winters, so more crosses had to be made.

Even then, strawberries wouldn’t grow everywhere and had incomplete flowers (only male or female parts), so they needed different varieties to cross pollinate them. It wasn’t until 1851 that James Wilson, from New York, developed a variety that was productive in almost any soil, and had perfect flowers, so it could be grown by itself. The commercial strawberry industry was born.

Since then, hundreds of varieties have been produced, some by professionals, many by amateur breeders who just loved strawberries.

I initially planted several different varieties in my strawberry patch. Those original plants are long dead, but have cross bred and sent out runners, so that today I have an intriguing mix of varieties. I can still identify some—Yolo and Strawberry Sundae are distinctive and easy to pick out. Many plants, though, have a mix of characteristics, and some even produce berries more like their wild ancestors. Every year, I nurture the ones I like and selectively weed out the ones that aren’t so great. Amateur strawberry growers all over the world do the same, I’m sure, giving us a wonderful range of sweet, tart, large, small, white-fleshed, red-fleshed, pointy and round berries. So many different types, I want to eat them all!

Best pie ever

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

DSC_0011cropWe had an overabundance of blackcurrants this year, and in looking for interesting (and easy) things to do with them, I found some lovely pie recipes. I mixed and matched them, and came up with this divine concoction. So flavourful, you only need a little slice…so good you’ll want a big one!

I’ve been making it the day after making quiche for dinner—I make twice as much pastry dough as I need for the quiche, and put half in the fridge. With pre-prepared dough, the pie can then be assembled in minutes.

4 cups blackcurrants (fresh or frozen, thawed)

½ cup granulated sugar

2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour

Pastry for 9-inch pie

Wash and drain blackcurrants and remove stems. Mix with sugar and flour. Pour into the pie shell and top with pastry or streusel topping (see below).

Bake at 200°C (400°F) for 30 minutes, then reduce the heat to 180°C (350°F) and bake for another 25-30 minutes. Cool completely, and serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Streusel:

5 Tbsp. melted butter

2/3 cup quick-cooking rolled oats (traditionally chopped nuts, but ‘easy’ is the whole idea here)

½ cup packed brown sugar

2/3 cup whole wheat flour

1 tsp. cinnamon

Mix ingredients with a fork until it resembles coarse crumbs.

 

 

Tastes Better Outside

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Outdoor table settingsmLocation, location, location! True for real estate and for food. Where you eat is every bit as important as what you eat. Some of my best meals have been based on the where, not the what:

  • Lunch of stale crackers and peanut butter, eaten at about 1100 metres on a ridge in Fiordland, New Zealand on the summer solstice.
  • A spicy breakfast salteña, eaten on the streets of La Paz, Bolivia (and subsequently vomited in a public park in La Paz…but it was a great meal!)
  • Breakfast of one banana, bought from a local subsistence farmer on a day-long hike to a friend’s house in Panama.
  • Leftover burgers and strawberries, accompanied by warm beer on a remote beach on the Banks Peninsula, New Zealand.
  • Cold Pop Tarts on a large boulder in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

It’s no accident that all these amazing meals occurred outdoors. I can’t think of a better dining room than one without walls or a roof! Doesn’t matter what I’m eating, it will taste better eaten in fresh air.

Where have your best meals occurred?

Team Cooking

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
Doing a little team cooking dance.

Doing a little team cooking dance.

Ian and I met studying guanacos at the Detroit Zoo, but we became friends over food. I lived in a dorm, he lived in a house, and he treated me to home cooked meals when we met to work on the latest research project for our Animal Behavior class. It wasn’t long before we were cooking those meals together, and cooking together has been an important part of our relationship for over 23 years now. We intuit each other’s cooking style after so many years, and as with good ballroom dancers, we understand, for each dish, who “leads”. Like seasoned dancers performing a well-rehearsed number, we work in harmony, joyfully, anticipating what comes next, so that even tricky moves look effortless to bystanders.

So I suppose it isn’t surprising that, about a month ago, the kids decided they wanted to make dinner once a week. They know what a fun and fulfilling task it can be, and they want to be part of it.

Unfortunately pre-teen siblings who are often nervous around things like hot ovens and stovetops don’t work together quite so smoothly. Indeed, after the first week, when they ended up cross and irritated with one another making the simplest one-pot meal, we suggested they cook two dishes—that way each one of them can be “in charge” of one dish, and while the other will help them cook it, they’re in charge of decisions about the dish and how it is made.

And I suppose this is exactly what Ian and I have come to in the kitchen, though not by design. We each have our specialties. Ian bakes bread, and though I help, and am perfectly capable of making fine bread myself, he is in charge of bread. I bake desserts, and when Ian takes on a dessert himself, he defers to my judgement if he gets into difficulty. I make cheese, he makes beer. I make omelettes, he makes frittata. Yet we rarely do any of these things alone—the other is usually there, cleaning or cutting vegetables, washing dishes, testing spicing.

It works for the kids, as it does for us. Though they often need a helping hand from Mum or Dad, and though they may argue about what they’re going to cook, once they’ve divided the meal, they manage to work together reasonably well…for 10 and 12 year old siblings. They are already developing their “own” skills, becoming the “expert” in chopping carrots, or cracking eggs. And they’re learning how to accept each other’s expertise. What a huge lesson! To learn that someone (even your little sister) might know more than you do! And to learn to accept, seek, and value someone else’s skills and expertise.

So, while the kids’ Friday night dinners often end with a shocking mess in the kitchen, and sometimes the smell of something burnt hard to the bottom of a pan, they’re great training for all sorts of situations in life.

365 Days of Food

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Food.

It feeds us physically and emotionally. It is an integral part of our celebrations, and is the scaffold on which our days are built. As a gardener, food is even more; it is a hobby, a lifestyle, a way of seeing the world and my place in it.

Over the next year, I will blog daily about food. Not a daily recount of what we ate, nor a recipe a day for a year (though there will be some of both), but an exploration of the role food plays in our lives–a look at life, the universe and everything reflected in the bottom of a stock pot.

So pull up a chair and fill your plate. There’s always room for one more at our table.