Crumble

When in Namibia, we used to travel occasionally from ever-sunny Ombalantu to the capital, Windhoek. It was, I guess, seven, eight hours of driving along basically straight, flat, featureless road. But Windhoek was the bright lights, and always fun to be there. We used to stay with an hospitable Kiwi couple and I remember one night, Julie whipped up an apple crumble for dessert. I was SO impressed. What a gift, I thought, what a sign of a perfect guest. And it was that night that I learned the desirability of having a few recipes up your sleeve when staying with friends.

 I was reminded of that when we returned from the Sunday market with a couple of bundles of rhubarb stalks in our bag. And deciding to make rhubarb crumble for dessert. Five stalks of rhubarb chopped into short lengths and one peeled apple sliced, gently simmered in a pot for maybe 15 minutes with ½ cup sugar and ¼ cup water. Maybe a bit of cinnamon, a dash of vanilla essence.

Then, transfer to a shallow baking dish and top with … well, this is probably my favourite topping … Combine:

½ cup soft brown sugar

½ cup flour

½ cup coconut

¼ cup melted butter

1 tspn cinnamon

And bake in a moderate oven for maybe 30 minutes. So the top browns and the liquid bubbles. Divine when it starts to caramelize! And served with whipped cream.

Sweet treats

A little etymological puzzle is this: Why are sweetbreads meat, and sweetmeats confectionery? My Shorter Oxford Dictionary did not provide an answer. But anyway, in search of a sweet treat I made these sweetmeats. An Alison Holst recipe – Cherry Truffles.

200 gms wine biscuits, crushed

1 ½ cups dessicated coconut

 12 – 20 glacé cherries (someone had given me a packet of the green ones, so great to get rid of them at last)

100 gms melted butter

200 gms sweetened condensed milk

¼ cup sherry or brandy or kirsch

extra coconut for coating

Crush biscuits to a fine powder in food processor, and mix with coconut and chopped cherries in a large bowl. Melt the butter, remove from heat and stir in condensed milk. Add alcohol of choice, then pour into crumbs mix. Roll into small balls and coat with extra coconut. (I found it easier to roll into a ball between the palms of my hands, and sprinkle the coconut for coating there; rolling on a plate, the ball lost shape). Refrigerate. And eat. We took a dozen around to a friend’s house when we went for coffee on Sunday … they disappeared VERY quickly!  

Roasted pumpkin and feta frittata

Another pumpkin recipe I’d clipped from a magazine (about 8 years ago!) and kept for just such an occasion as this – having a surfeit of the vegetable – was this one. It just had to be good … salty feta, sweet roasted pumpkin, the crunch of pumpkin seeds … all things I like. And it was good, very good. Not only that, but it looked like a little work of art. Just as well I trusted the recipe … I doubted it at one stage … maybe I was using too large a frying pan? But, no, 27 cm or whatever it was proved just right.

So … preheat the oven to 200 C. Cut 500 gms peeled, seeded pumpkin into 3 cm chunks and put in a roasting pan. Add 3 tbspn olive oil, salt & freshly ground black pepper. Mix well. Roast until well-cooked and browned (30 – 40 minutes). Remove from the oven and put to one side. Leave oven on.

Meanwhile, you’ve been getting things ready for the next stage … toast 2 tbspn pumpkin seeds in a dry pan until they’ve ‘popped’. Heat 3 tbspn olive oil in the pan at a moderate heat, and add 1 large, finely chopped onion, 3 cloves crushed garlic, and 2 tbspn chopped coriander stalks (or the processed coriander in a jar or tube, which is what I used). Fry gently without browning until the onion’s soft. Add this mix to the reserved pumpkin, add 200 gms crumbled feta and mix through carefully, i.e. trying not to break up the pumpkin. (The recipe didn’t actually say what to do with the pumpkin seeds, but I added them in here).

Wipe the pan clean with a paper towel and return to the heat, adding another 3 tbspns olive oil. When this is hot, add 6 lightly beaten eggs and cook for 30 seconds. Remove from heat, sprinkle pumpkin mix over evenly, shake the pan and put into oven. (I suppose you could also sprinkle the pumpkin seeds over the top at this stage, as an alternative?) Cook until completely set – about 20 minutes. Remove from oven, run a knife around the edge of the pan, and invert the pan onto a large plate to remove the frittata. Serve with salad and chutney, most impressive.

I think, finally, this was a Ray McVinnie recipe. Possibly Martin Bosley, but probably not.

Pumpkin lasagna

A surfeit of pumpkin upon returning from the Sunday market. Funny, really, as now it’s spring and I associate pumpkin with autumn. But enjoy it anytime, so hauled out hoarded recipes to see what could be done. Pumpkin lasagna, as a beginning.

about 1 kg pumpkin

2 tbpsns butter

3 eggs

1 cup toasted pine nuts, or sunflower seeds

1 cup grated tasty cheddar cheese

100g feta, or grated parmesan

400g lasagna sheets

Chop the seeded pumpkin into chunks (and remove the skin, depending on the variety). Put in a pot with a couple of inches of water and cook over high heat for about 10 minutes, until proddable with a fork. Drain and mash (removing skins if those left on). Add butter & eggs and mix well. Season lightly. In a greased dish, create layers of lasagna, pumpkin mix, nuts & tasty cheese. Finish by crumbling feta over the top. Bake at 180 C for 30 minutes, and serve with a crunchy green salad.

I wondered if dry pasta might not work better than sheets of fresh pasta in this dish. Something to experiment with in future, perhaps. And I had worried that this dish might be excessively cheesy, but it wasn’t.

Oyster stuffing

Eating alone, what do people do? Can you just sit there by yourself and eat? Me, if there’s no-one to talk to, I have to read. So, down the Sounds by myself, I browsed one of (what I assume were) my grand-mother’s cookbooks, The Lily Wallace New American Cookbook, 1947. Didn’t stumble across anything I’d want to cook, but some things that struck me as DEEPLY bizarre. Oyster stuffing, for instance. It requires 25 oysters! And what on earth would you stuff it into??? Some sort of surf ‘n’ turf combination? Which I’ve always thought vile, anyway. No, it’s baffling. And leads to three possible conclusions. 1. Cooking styles have changed enormously in the last sixty years. 2. Americans are different from the rest of us. 3. Don’t eat alone.

Simple things

The chance to get away for a few days, and when a glance at the long-range forecast promised a series of sunny, clear days I decided to head to the Sounds again. And it was brilliant. Stunning days, with the garden alive with bird song, and transiting from winter to spring. Those old-fashioned overly-pink rhododendrons just finishing, the more interesting ones not yet out. A camellia, a couple of azalea also in flower. And the fruit trees. Have never seen the pink flowers of the quince trees before … this isn’t a time of year I normally get to the Sounds. Next year, I think, I should test whether the quinces are indeed ornamental fruit (as I’ve always been told) or whether they can be used.

Anyway, by myself, and the food simple. Lunch in the sun on the verandah, for instance. Poached eggs on buttered toast. A crisp Braeburn apple, not one of those over-sweet varieties. A glass of water, chill from the tap. And Whitaker’s chocolate. Which, incidentally, seems to be enjoying a surge of popularity among consumers, following Cadbury’s ill-advised venture into using palm oil.  From which practice they’ve now retreated … so consumer backlash can work, even if it didn’t with my Vogel’s bread!

As a little aside about Whitaker’s chocolate. There was talk once of erecting a giant peanut slab in Porirua, like the Ohakune carrot. But the powers that be decided that something brown and full of nuts wasn’t the image they wanted!

(I suppose you need to know there used to be a psychiatric hospital in Porirua.)

First day of spring

The first day of spring, though August has been so benign this year it does feel as though we’ve been enjoying spring for several weeks already. No doubt fuelling the delusions of the nutters who want to rename seasons ‘sprummer’ and such like. Sounds more like a German cider than a season. But anyway … thoughts turn to the garden, and planting, but too soon to dig in the pea straw and sow for summer harvesting. That’s for next month. In the meantime just enjoying the weather, the slow slide into summer – a PROPER season name! And marking the arrival of spring by hosting our book group again. No time to think of anything simple and Scottish (our book this time was the immensely readable The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday), just a question of raiding the supermarket shelves for quick and tasty nibbles. From whence also came a bunch of buttermilk-pale daffs, for a seasonal note in the room. I did, though, brush both sides of some triangles of pitta bread with garlic-infused olive oil and crisp them in the oven, about 15 minutes at 150 C … they went down a treat, and made it look like a less store-bought selection of dips and things. I’m all for deceptive appearances!!