Quick meals

It’s been a hell of a week. Work has been, is being, full on, with mini-crises along the way. And as a result coming home at night, relatively, late, it’s dark, almost wintry, not much thought gone into dinner. Suddenly a Christmas present from a couple of years ago has come into its own … Simon & Alison Holst’s 100 favourite 20 minute dishes. I’ve used it once or twice before, but this week their penne with bacon & mushroom sauce, and their green chicken curry have both proved popular. The good thing, perhaps, they’re not recipes that need to be closely followed. Omit this, replace that … the recipes serve as basic guides. Not fancy food, admittedly, but tasty, healthy. And I thought my side dish of sliced fresh tomatoes (the very last from the garden), drizzled with extra virgin olive oil & dressed with fresh basil (off the kitchen bench, still), chilled in the fridge before serving & at the last minute sprinkled with toasted pine nuts, added a refreshing touch to the pasta.

 

Still, I’ll be glad when this week’s over & more thought can go into meals again.

Walnuts & chocolate

At the centre of one of the lawns in the Sounds is a walnut tree. It’s been there, oh, forever, and is a real feature of the garden. Beautifully bare & silver-barked in winter, freshly green in spring but, at this time of the year, autumn, with leaves browning & nuts falling on the grass, it comes into its own. In days gone by the possums used to get most of the nuts but nowadays, thanks to years of effective poisoning, those pests are under control & we can rake up a couple of cartons of walnuts without difficulty. So, back home, what to do with fresh walnuts? Walnut & chocolate a great pairing, and in this recipe the chopped walnuts mix into the icing. And it’s a lovely dark, moist cake.

 

Sanyati chocolate cake

 

(The recipe came from a VSA newsletter, and Sanyati’s a place in Zimbabwe where there was a volunteer who made this … though apparently it’s actually a southern USA recipe.)

 

In a large bowl mix 2 cups flour, 2 cups sugar, ½ tspn salt.

In a pot, bring to the boil 1 cup butter, 4 tbspns cocoa, 1 cup water. Add this hot mix to the dry ingredients and mix well.

Add ½ cup milk, 2 eggs, 1 tspn baking soda, 1 tspn vanilla, ½ tspn vinegar.

Grease a tin (the recipe says square-ish but I went round, the only cake tin I have, which may have caused a longer baking time), and bake for 20 – 40 mins at 350 – 400 F. The cake mix is very liquid so DON’T use a loose bottom tin unless you want a smoke-filled kitchen and a charred oven … learn from my stupid mistake!

 

For the icing, bring to the boil in a pot ½ cup butter, 4 tbspns cocoa, 6 tbspns milk. Remove from heat & add 1 tspn vanilla, 1 cup chopped walnuts & enough icing sugar to make it spreadable. And sweet! It’s a good idea to taste before icing to ensure the bitterness of cocoa doesn’t dominate.

Autumn tidy-up

Wasn’t this blog supposed to have been about eating seasonally, eating from the garden, at least in part? That seems to have slipped off the radar a little of late, as we slide towards winter & the garden becomes less & less productive. Pulled out the tomatoes and last two courgette plants on the weekend, along with the last couple of gone-to-seed lettuces. Silver beet & carrots still holding their own, though the masses of silver beet that had me producing spanakopita on a regular basis last year haven’t been a feature this year. Leeks still look like chives, and only one of the cauliflowers I put in, oh, months ago, has even begun to heart up. There’ll be less & less from the garden in the months ahead, sadly, but at least there’ll continue to be fresh herbs. Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme, oddly enough.

What to eat after being burgled

Home from the Sounds, and immediately I knew something was wrong. What was my briefcase doing on the garden path? And why was the bedroom window ajar?? Burglars!!! And as soon as we walked in through the front door it was obvious the new-this-year flatscreen telly had gone. But what else? And, if you’re going to take things, why didn’t you take that old stereo!!!

 

In the event, we were lucky, insofar as there’s anything lucky about being burgled. It had been a professional job, clearly, not too messy … but extra lucky perhaps in that we’d had new carpet laid just before going away so everything basically was packed away in cartons. Making life difficult for the b*st*rds. And, making it difficult for themselves, they swiped the wrong remote, taking the one for the DVD by mistake. Hah! That gave me some small satisfaction.

 

But, once the initial shock wore off, and the police informed, the question of dinner. Comfort food required obviously, and alcohol, so what better than spaghetti bolognaise with a bottle of red wine? It just works. And at least took the edge off.

 

Though am still seriously hacked off.

Sounds Eating II

There’s one outstanding feature of eating in the Sounds that I mustn’t forget. Fish. If you catch it, which, I confess, we didn’t … but my father left some fresh blue cod for us, so we didn’t need to. And it was delicious. Dipped in egg lightly beaten with a splash of water, rolled in breadcrumbs, and fried. Purists will probably turn up their noses, but it always seems pretty good to me. Crisp crust, tender flesh, not over-cooked. And a squeeze of home-grown lemon. Served with roasted potato chunks & something green. Perhaps this epitomises making the best of local produce?

Sounds Eating

It is wonderful being in the Sounds again. Was reminded today of lines from some dimly (and perhaps erroneously) recalled home-thoughts-from-abroad poem …

          the peace and calm of Tahuahua

          seagulls, gannets

bombing the bay for breakfast

It’s the tranquillity, the sense of getting away from it all that I love. No road access here, only boat, and at this time of year not so many boats around … and, thank goodness, none of those dreadfully intrusive jet-skis. So it’s just us, the ever-changing sea, the garden, the bush, the birds … a couple of weka, a solitary kereru, flocks of waxeye in the fig tree, a kotare on a power line, lots of bird song from the bush. Bliss. Although – unusually – this time no sight of tui.

 

It’s also, of course, a place full of family memories. Over 80 years since my grandparents built the house, and we forever bless their foresight. But family memories, family food. Good plain food, perhaps. Today, with the weather suddenly turning cooler, a southerly bringing a chill to the air, we ate lunch indoors. Corn fritters. Now, in Wellington, when we have this for lunch, we give our corn fritters a modern take. But in the Sounds, I reach for the 1968 edition of the GHB cookbook …

1 cup flour

2 tspn baking powder

¼ tspn salt

1 egg

about ½ cup milk

Sift dry ingredients. Beat the egg and add about half the milk. Mix with the dry ingredients and add enough additional milk to make a batter that just pours. Beat well.

 

There’s the basic batter. Add a drained can of sweet corn (and, today, a small amount of finely chopped red pepper). Corn fritters, easy. And served with crisply grilled Pestell’s manuka-smoked bacon … from the Rai Valley, if it’s true to label, so yes, a local product, and one I always look forward to buying in the Picton supermarket. Thank goodness for something local!

Cheese scones

A series of perfect autumn days here in the Sounds … mild, calm, sunny. Days that demand lunch on the lawn behind the hedge, and appropriate food. Pumpkin soup and cheese scones fit the bill. And the most fantastically light scones, thanks to this recipe, courtesy of Richard Till of Kiwi Kitchen fame … Marg’s cheese scones, he calls them, and adds that they’re “the stuff of legends”. Quite right, too. Thanks, Marg.

 

4 ½ cups flour

4 tspn cream of tartar

2 tspn baking soda

2 cups grated tasty cheese

300 ml cream

330 ml can lemonade

 

Preheat oven to 220 C. Sift dry ingredients together. Stir in grated cheese (remembering that how tightly you pack the cups depends on how cheese-y you like your scones). Pour in cream & lemonade, and just combine. Pat out into a rectangle and cut into smaller squares. Bake for 20 minutes, or till golden.

Picton Sausages

“They’re not the same,” I heard myself saying. Family tradition has it that the first night in the Sounds, we have sausages, Picton sausages. Made by the local butcher, they were always something to look forward to. No idea what the secret was, but they were just so much better than other sausages … it wasn’t just the taste but also the visuals … the way they burst out of the skin, the way the skin browned. We eat with our eyes, don’t they say? Still, things change … the owner wanted to develop the site, so the butcher closed, and now Picton (like so many communities) has no butcher. So, still sausages on the first night, but supermarket sausages, the same you could buy in Auckland or Invercargill no doubt. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Heller’s pork sausages, but THEY’RE NOT THE SAME. Apart from anything else, perhaps, they don’t give that special sense of having arrived somewhere new, somewhere different. And I’ve lamented the lack of the local in our food before.

 

But, when I heard myself saying “They’re not the same,” I suddenly wondered if I’m becoming one of those grumpy older people who’re always objecting to change. My campaign to save the unsliced Vogel’s loaf being another example? Well, I don’t think I have a knee-jerk reaction to change … here, I’d argue, I’m marking the loss of things that add interest & variety to eating … maybe that’s too pretentious? But preserving choice, isn’t that worthwhile?

Desserts

After posting that entry about Logan Brown’s chocolate mousse the other day, I started thinking about the importance of desserts to a meal. They have such influence on one’s final impression … a great dessert excuses an average meal, an average dessert mars an otherwise great meal. We saw that on a recent episode of Top Chef … restaurant wars, and the team with the crappy desserts lost, even though their other dishes were better than those of the opposing team. Odd that people who want to be chefs don’t realise the importance of desserts … maybe they don’t eat out enough? But anyway, for the rest of us, I guess the lesson is to get those desserts right.

Logan Brown

Chocolate. I don’t say enough about chocolate, so … A delicious chocolate dessert at lunch yesterday at Logan Brown, the restaurant in the neo-classical banking chamber of a former bank on Cuba Street, the lunch a treat after several days of packing up the house in preparation for the laying of new carpet, and, indeed, a celebration of the carpet being laid. (Lunch was to have been preceded by taking in the Monet exhibition at Te Papa, but the queues, the queues … suppose it is still holidays for many people … I’ll take my chances and try another time.) But anyway, the lunch … we ate from the limited choice bistro menu, all good, and while I loved the crisp pork belly main, that was up-staged by the chocolate mousse topped with a broken piece of honeycomb … basically hokey pokey, as it’s more commonly called in these parts … with three thin slices of pomegranate poached pear & a spoonful of cream on the side. Washed down with a surprising red wine, Clearview ‘Sea Red’ 2007. Splendid.