Category Archives: cooking

Of Passata and Porcelain

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The summertime heat brings on the tomatoes, zucchini, chillis, aubergines and sweet basil. They love this hot weather, as long as they get the water that they need. This means I have to start making passata sauce. We are now harvesting more than we can eat each day. This is just the start. At the moment we have to harvest the tomatoes each day in the small numbers that are ripening. It has taken a week to build up sufficient quantity to fill the boiler. This is the first batch of passata. Soon it will build up to 2 batches a week. I will continue to make this sort of tomato sauce right through the summer and into the autumn.

Tonight I’m making a small batch to start with for our dinner, so I’m including a lot of zucchinis and aubergines as well. This will be a sort of variation on the ratatouille theme. All these vegetables grow together, they ripen together and they taste so good together.

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I bring it all to the boil and simmer it for a few minutes, just enough to soften the zucchinis and egg plant chunks, then scoop out a bowl full each for dinner. It’s summer on a plate!

After dinner, I add in all of the other chopped tomatoes and cook it down into a sauce. After it cools I put it all through the mouli sieve to remove all the seeds and skins, then reheat and seal in pre-heated jars to keep for the winter.

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The other thing that I like to do in this summer heat is to make porcelain from my collected stones. They are so hard that I need to put them through the rock crusher first thing to reduce them down to grit, then I can sieve the grit and re-process the larger pieces to get it all to pass through a 3 mm screen, then into the ball mill to be reduced to ultra fine grade.

 From this I can make glazes and/or more throwing body, as required.

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Cucumber Soup and Zucchini Fritters

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A real favourite of Nina’s at this time of year is cold cucumber soup. The cucumbers have responded to the heat and our regular watering and are starting to produce in excess of what we can eat fresh in salads.

Nina doesn’t have a recipe as such, it’s really just a way of thinking about using up cucumbers. It’s cooling and soothing and a little bit tangy, and you get to use up a lot of cucumbers.

You can use half a dozen small, or 3 large cucumbers. Peeled and seeded if they are older and larger, but all in as they come if they are young.

She starts with one of our red onions from the plait hanging in the kitchen, but you could also use a mild white one. You can add green spring onion tops finely chopped too if you like. Add as much as you like the taste of. (and never end a sentence with a preposition! )

A big bunch of cilantro or coriander leaves finely chopped. The first spring planting of coriander is bolting away to seed heads just now, but there is enough to pick from it and the new, young seedlings of the second planting are only just emerging.

Add a small bunch of mint leaves, finely chopped.Then add a couple of cloves of garlic, or six! depending on their relative strength and your taste expectations. I really love the stuff, so she puts in a lot. It tastes better, i.e. stronger flavour  if you smash it with the side of a knife or extrude it through a garlic press. The mashed fibres give off more flavour. I think that the fresh raw garlic really makes this soup. That and the coriander. The cucumbers are really there just to fill it out. Next, add some finely chopped chilli to taste and although I don’t use salt, if you want it, add it to the degree that you want your arteries hardened. Go for it!

Add the Juice of a lemon or preferably a lime – or two.

Put the whole lot in the blender with half a tin of coconut milk. If you don’t have a blender use a food processor, if you don’t have electricity, use a hand whisk! Add a couple of spoonfuls of plain greek yoghurt, if you don’t have greek yoghurt, add some Turkish – that’s close enough! Use what you have that seems right, taste as you go to check. Sometime we use sour cream, just to use it up if it’s open and that’s what you have in the fridge. You can use a blend of all three. Use what you have. Experiment! If you don’t have a fridge, eat it warm, but it’s not quite the same. Cold is better in this hot weather.

You can serve it with a little bit of olive oil on top and some paprika sprinkled on, or just plain.

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Janine mixes up and alters the recipe each time she makes it to keep it lively and interesting, sometimes adding chopped dill, parsley or tarragon leaves. Sometimes with only yoghurt and other times with just coconut milk. It works just the same.

It’s always different and always delicious. A perfect soup for a hot summers day. Nina has made this fantastic soup to cheer me up as I’ve managed to hurt myself during the day.

Zucchini Fritters

Take 3 or 4 zucchinis, depending on size, 1 potato for a little filling and binding starch and a small white onion. Grate them all into a big bowl, add a handful of flour and 2 eggs, some pepper and whatever herbs that you prefer. Today Nina adds Thai basil, parsley and a small amount of mint. Mix it all together in the bowl, then press off any excess juice. She pan frys them in a little olive oil. We have them with cucumbers in yoghurt and a few sliced fresh tomatoes. Delicious.

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The next morning, my finger is not red or throbbing, so I have done a good job of cleaning it. I’m confident that it will heal well now. No need to go to hospital. I just can’t use that hand to grip anything for a while.

An enforced day off. Something rare for me.

The First Ripe Tomato Before Xmas

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We have just picked our first ripe tomato before Xmas. This was never possible when we came to live here 40 years ago, but now, with global warming, we have been able to do it for the last 3 or 4 years in a row.

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We have a nice crop of red cabbage coming along just now, so it’s time to make a batch of pickled red cabbage. I slice it finely and remove all the coarse bits to be fed to the worms. Then place it in a big bowl and pour over some brine. This is the standard 1 cup of salt to 2 litres of water. This is a pretty saturated solution. It’s just about as much salt as cold water can dissolve. It’s left to stand over night with a weight on top to compress. It soon drops down and is submerged in the brine. In the morning I pour off the brine and rinse it once on cold water, then pack the cabbage into sterilised jars. I prepare a batch of pickling vinegar, by heating up standard white wine vinegar with all the usual spices and a spoon full of sugar. This is poured over the cabbage and the lids sealed down. It couldn’t be simpler.

I want the cabbage to remain crunchy for use in salads, so I don’t cook it. It’ll need to be kept in the fridge for safe keeping.

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Berry Jelly

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As we approach the summer solstice, the red berries are starting to ripen. We have to cover them with one of our large sheets of nylon bird netting. If we don’t cover the ripening fruit, the birds will take the lot in a couple of days.

We have made a few small picks over the last week, but now, the real crop is ripening. We go out early, before the heat of the sun builds up. We pull back the net half way and work over one side, then the other. In half an hour we fill half a dozen plastic tubs with luscious ripe red/black berries.

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We will do this every 2nd day for a week now and then once or twice more during the next week and they will all be all but gone before Xmas.
Back in the kitchen, Janine weighs the munificence of the canes. We have harvested 3 1/2 kilos this morning, and another 3 kilos the day before. It’s a great start to the day and the week.
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Bach in the cool of the house, we re-hydrate with a cup of last years preserved dark grape juice. It’s so thick and concentrated, it is 100% grape juice and nothing else, pasteurized and vacuum sealed. It’s really amazing stuff that bears no resemblance to anything that you can buy in a shop. The commercial grape juices that i have tried, taste like they are 80% water in comparison. This stuff is just so rich and thick and concentrated in comparison. So much so that it has to be mixed 50/50 with water, otherwise it is just too strong. It’s a great natural, flavourful thirst quencher.
While I go back to work down to the kiln factory finishing up the last of the work on the current job, that is due for delivery on Wednesday, Janine stays in the kitchen to make todays harvest into 3 gratifying indulgences.
First, a youngberry sorbet, which is made from the juice sieved from the berries, no pulp in there, she only adds a very small amount of gelatine and some orange juice and then it is churned in the freezer, until it sets.
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juice of 500g youngberries
juice of a couple of oranges
1 tbs of gelatine powder
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Second, she makes a youngberry jelly. This jelly is a desert jelly. It is made with the berry juice and gelatine and placed in the fridge until it sets.
First bring the whole fresh fruit to the boil and mash it all up with a potato masher as it is heating. This liberates the juice quicker. Pour through a sieve or cheese cloth to remove the pulp and pits. While still warm, pour the juice into a medium pottery bowl and add one tbs of dried gelatine and stir until dissolved. Leave to cool, stirring occasionally while cooling to keep the gelatine in suspension. Once cooled, place in the fridge to set.
Her third creation is youngberry jelly This is a fruit conserve jelly. The kind that you spread on toast at breakfast. This is really sensational. I think that this is the best thing that can be made from youngberries. Everything made with youngberries is good, but this is the best! The balance of concentrated fruit flavour, the natural fruit acid and the natural sweetness of the fruit is just amazing. It takes a bit of time, but it is all there, just for there making.
Fill two 5 litre boilers with fresh fruit. Bring the fruit to the boil and simmer for a short time, while mashing the fruit pulp to express the juice. When it has cooled, pour it through cheese cloth and let the liquid drain freely from the fruit for several hours, or overnight. Don’t squeeze of press the cloth to extract more juice, or the jelly will become cloudy. You can add a small amount of sugar to the clear juice and bring back to the boil. Most recipes say to add equal weight of sugar to that of the juice for this kind of jelly, but that makes it ridiculously sweet. However, it does ‘gell’ quicker. Janine only adds a 1/4 of that amount  of sugar and cooks it a little longer. This serves to concentrate it more and makes it all the more intense.
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Simmer this mixture to allow the fruit flavour to concentrate and intensify. Test by putting a small sample on a dish and place it in the fridge until it ‘sets’. If it doesn’t ‘set’ , cook it for longer. This standard jam making procedure. Once ready, bottle in sterilized jars straight from the oven and screw the lids down tight.
Technically, it will keep for a year, but it never lasts that long. This jelly making activity makes the kitchen and most of the house smell so delicious. The sweet, acidic fragrance wafts right through the house. It smells so amazingly good. We polish off the first jar in just two sittings.
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Janine also bottles the whole berries as simmered pulp, once sterilised it is bottled hot jars from the oven and keeps for ages. We made so much of this last year, we still have some left.
We are grateful for this largesse of our canes. They provide for us in this bountiful way each year in the early summer and I reciprocate in kind by diverting the underground seepage trench from the septic system over into their direction. These vines and the cherry trees below them are now well watered and well fed throughout the year by this artificially created underground spring of nutrient rich water. Totally natural, gravity fed and organic!
Best wishes Steve

The First Week of Summer

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The season cycles past us and spring has gone in a very busy flash of research, firings, workshops, more firings, exhibitions and kiln building. The garden took a back seat and now it’s time for catch-up. We managed to get some time in there, just enough to keep everything watered and growing. In the last week of spring I finally got the time to get in there and do a thorough weeding and cleaning out. We picked the last of the winter veggies, like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

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I managed to preserve the cauliflowers into Mustard pickles.

Take one large cauliflower. It doesn’t matter if it is a bit past its best and starting to ‘burst’. You only need the small florets, add a red and green capsicum and a cucumber, plus a couple of brown onions, all diced pop fine into small bite sized chunky pieces. Soak them in brine overnight of 1/2 cup of iodised salt in 2 litres of water.

The next day, bring this to a simmer and drain off the brine. Rinse and drain again.

Depending on how much you have to do, heat up approximately a litre of vinegar ,add two cups of sugar,  +1 Tb spoon of mustard powder, + 1/2 Tb spoon of curry powder and another of turmeric. Mix it all together well and bring it up to the boil. Once it’s heated, add in 1/2 a cup of flour and stir well until it thickens. Add in the drained vegetable pieces and bring back to the simmer fora minute or two.

Spoon into heated glass jars from the oven and seal with ‘pop’ top lids.

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Janine makes cauliflower soup with hers as well as a batch of broccoli soup, some of which she froze. The cabbage went into our own idiosyncratic version of Australian okonomiyaki and the beetroots got pickled and preserved in spiced vinegar.

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Although we have planted out all the summer veggies seeds and some seedlings now, it is still too soon to get much return. The tomatoes are flowering  and the earliest plants have set some small fruit. I was a bit late getting them in, so I can’t see us getting any ripe fruit before Xmas. However, now the hot weather is here, along with the regular Monday afternoon thunderstorm and its hail, we will just have to wait and see what fruit we can get. I hope that there isn’t another hailstorm tomorrow. We’ve had enough hail for the time being.

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Hit The Ground Running

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It’s always good to be home and re-united with my 4 girls.

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I have a lot to do. Jobs that have built up while I’ve been away. I hit the ground running. We have 3 weekend workshop booked in for wood firings over the next 3 weekends. We have a lot of bisque-ware ready to be glazed for the Southern Highlands Arts Trail Open Studio Weekends that are coming up, but we can’t get access to our wood kiln until we finish all the workshops.

The effort that we put in to preparation pays off, as all the weekends go smoothly and everyone leaves with something nice to make all the effort worthwhile. And we are lucky with the weather too. It blows a gale all week, and then it settles down and we have a glorious weekend of still, sunny days.

We fire the big wood kiln overnight through the weekend, taking shifts of 4 hours and overlapping each change of personal by 2 hours, so that there is always some continuity. The nights are cold and we huddle near the firebox for warmth. This is a downdraught ‘Bourry’ style firebox, so there isn’t very much to do most of the time.

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If we stoke with big pieces of hardwood. It might take up to one hour for those logs to burn down sufficiently to allow another stoke. The kiln climbs slowly in an even, steady, reducing atmosphere.

The next weekend we have a low temperature wood firing workshop. We have half a dozen small wood fired kilns that we use throughout the day. We have 10 participants, who each bring 5 or 6 pots to fire, depending on size. We get through them all in the day, along with half a dozen wheel-barrow loads of wood.

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When the day is over, we pack away all the little kilns, except for one. I leave it out and pack it with my glaze tests for all the new batches of glazes that have made up for the next big wood firing. It will have a lot of work in there for the  ArtsTrail Open Studios Weekends. I want to make sure that I haven’t made any mistakes or poor assumptions, when making-up these glazes.

I pack the kiln in the morning and start to fire straight away. I push it along, as I have other things to do this afternoon. This little beauty breaks all previous records and cruises up the cone 10 in just 2 1/2 hours in reduction. The results are really quite good. Everything is well melted. There is no flashing in such a short firing. Nor is there very intense reduction colour, but all the colours are there – only paler than I would expect from a longer wood firing. I’m finished by lunchtime and can get on with other things.

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I even surprise my self! I didn’t know that this sort of speed was possible for a stoneware firing, and with so little effort.

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The garden is producing well, with Nina in charge in my absence, she decides to have the evening baking and makes a couple of lovely dishes. A leek pie with a little bit of sour cream and a wholemeal crust, topped with some grated tasty cheese, which is amazing, followed with a berry pie with a baked sponge topping. Served with Edmonds custard. Yum! It’s an economical, warming, dinner on a cold evening. All this garden produce is a fitting reward for all the hours of weeding and watering. However, we don’t do it to save money, but to enjoy wholesome, unpolluted, fresh food.

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Over the years, we have made decisions that have allowed us to be in control of much of our lives, but nothing is perfect, nothing is finished and nothing lasts!

Enjoy the moment.

The Beautiful Simplicity of Baked Beans

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We have jars of dried beans in the pantry cupboard. Many different types. We also have dried tomatoes and dried mushrooms in there too, alongside jars of tomato passata saurse. I decide to take some of our storred summer produce to make the simplest of dishes, Baked Beans.

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I soak the dried beans overnight, then boil then for an hour or two until they are just cooked. I sweat off some onions and a whole knob of our home grown garlic in the best quality of local olive oil.  I add fresh thyme and marjoram from the garden, a whole knob of our garlic, along with some local bacon. I add in a couple of jars of preserved tomato puree along with a couple of chilli and capsicums. It all comes along nicely. When the herb and vegetable mix is well underway, I add in the pre-cooked bean mix back into the pot and let it all meld in together.

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I’m tending the dish, when My Lovely arrives and comes into the kitchen. She exclaims, how delicious the smell of the dish is as she comes in through the door. I’m pleased, I want it to be. There is a lot of work storred in all these summer-time ingredients. It ought to be good.

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If I was making a more traditional baked bean style dish, I’d probably blitz the whole lot. But this is not an issue to me. I’m happy to eat my more chunky version. If I were to do it again quite soon, I’d probably add in some duck breast and some pork sausage along with carrots and celery. But that would be a very different dish. Then I’d call it a French cassoulet.

This is just a simple beans and tomato meal with no frills. All grown, dried, preserved and cooked locally. What else can a simple post-modern peasant ask for. The natural rewards of hard work and forward planning.

It’s delicious, warming and very nutritious. whole pulses and tomatoes like this, combine to favour healthy gut bacteria and good health.

Funnily enough, I’m not thinking of my guts as I eat his beautiful meal. I’m just so pleased that it so filling and delicious.

Sure to Rise

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Janine spent some time in New Zealand when she was at school as an exchange student and it was in New Zealand that she learnt to spin wool and also got deeply interested in making pottery, something that has stayed with her for the rest of her life. Another thing that she learnt about in New Zealand was the Edmonds CookBook. She bought, or was given her first copy over there. She still uses it or refers to it often, mostly for cakes and puddings. It has been one of the constants in her life.

We recently got the latest version, when a relative visited New Zealand last year. I had tried to buy a copy by online direct from Edmonds, It was meant to be a surprise for Janine, but the online option didn’t seem to be available, so I sent an email requesting information on how to buy a copy and have it sent over here to Australia.

I filled out the contact info page and waited. Nothing happened for a day or two, then when I was out. A very nice lady from Edmonds rang directly from New Zealand to inform the bewildered Janine that she couldn’t buy one in New Zealand and  have it posted out to Australia, but rather, all she had to do was go down to the local ‘Dairy’ and buy a copy herself. The ‘Dairy’ in New Zealand is a bit like a small supermarket or local shop. They are everywhere in New Zealand, but not here in OZ.

Janine tried to explain that we don’t have a local ‘Dairy’ here. But the Edmonds Lady wouldn’t have it. She insisted that all Janine had to do was to ask. “They will have it!” “Everybody stocks it!” We don’t see Edmonds baking products for sale here in Australia. At least, not where we live anyway. Janine explained that we live in Australia and that the lady must have dialled ISDN to get through to us in Australia. She must know that we are located in Australia. She told her that we just can’t buy Edmonds Baking Products here. All to no avail. So the surprise was lost and we still didn’t have a new Edmonds cookery book. We laughed about it a lot though, and we do now have 4 editions of about 10 to 15 years apart.

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When Janine’s relatives turned up here with the intension of travelling on to New Zealand and back again, it was an opportunity not to be missed. We now have our new copy, along with the other 3 older editions. It’s quite interesting to look through them and see what has changed. In the 60’s edition, all the recipes are detailed on how to make the item from scratch. The biggest difference between the old copy and the new one is that now it is more likely to say something like, open a can or packet of this or that and add something to it. it’s an interesting record of changes in cooking habits over 50 years. Certainly the latest edition has very much more up-market descriptions of the recipes.

One particular recipe that is all the books is the sponge fruit pudding. The name changes a little, but the recipe remains pretty similar. It’s a lovely, warming, comfort food pudding for cold winter nights. Janine has developed her own particular variation, depending on what is in season or in the preserving cupboard. Tonight it’s preserved young berries that are going into the pud.

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This is Janine’s half-size recipe. Good for just two people. Double it if you want to feed more people

Take a 750 ml. jar of home made preserved youngberries. Pour into baking dish. Make a sponge topping as per your favourite Edmonds recipe, spoon it over the cooked fruit and bake until springy and golden. the recipe says from 35 to 45 mins at either 180 or 190oC, but My Sweet is cooking in the wood burning stove, so all the temps are a bit of a guess for us. She knows her stove now after 40 years and gets a wonderful result out of it. Cook until done!

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The Short Days of Winter

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We fill the short days of winter with lots of busy, necessary work. Pruning, preserving and cooking. We are both making marmalade at the moment, in our own respective ways, using the methods and recipes that we have each developed over the years. We have quite enough now to last us for the rest of the year.

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Even though the days are short and the weather is cold, the garden is still producing all our  meals. One or the other, sometimes both of us, go out to the garden at dusk and pick what is at its best and just bursting to be eaten. Food is plucked direct from the garden bed, into the basket and is cooked and on the table within the hour. It just couldn’t be fresher, or more rewarding. I have managed to scale and time the plantings through the summer and autumn, so that there is still enough green produce coming through now, even though everything has slowed down considerably.

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I collect more mushrooms from the recent fungal blooms. I give them a good scrub with the bristle brush and clean them up and make them presentable. There is always bits of grass and other organic ‘natural’, but unwanted ‘stuff’ stuck to them. I slice them and lay them out to dry.

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Once crisp, they are added into our stock of dried fungi in the glass jars on the kitchen dresser. We collect more of them as they appear and have fresh mushroom risottos, almost every night for a week. Each time with a different vegetable from the garden. Broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, capsicums and carrots.

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We have loads of golden berries coming on at the moment. Janine makes golden berry (gooseberry) and feijoa fruit mince and uses it to fill a fruit sponge, served with Edmonds custard. It makes a marvellous pudding. It is tangy, sweet and mouth-wateringly luscious and smooth. I have two helpings.

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We have spent the last three days pruning the stone fruit trees. Everything is dormant and deciduous at the moment. Except the earliest peaches, that have started to flower already. We work steadily and meticulously. Opening out the centre of the trees, restoring the ‘vase’ shape. Removing the water-shoots, thinning, shaping and pruning to an outward facing bud.

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After 3 days of muscle challenging constant work, we are tired, but very pleased with our selves. We have finished pruning our 100 or so trees and spent an equal amount of time dragging all the spent and removed branches down the back to the burn pile and stacking it all up ready to be burnt in a months time, when it has dried out enough to sustain a fire that will purge the pruned wood of any disease and fungal spores that might otherwise infect the orchard trees.

We celebrate with a lovely dinner of wild mushroom risotto, collected directly off the lawn outside the back door, and then a great fortifying breakfast of truffled, creamed eggs. It looks like this will be the last truffle for this season, so we make the most of it.

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Marrowbone Stock

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Winter days are full to the brim with hard work. We are cutting and splitting wood for the next firing in the wood fired kiln, or for the house. Otherwise, we are working in the garden, weeding or pruning, spreading compost or transplanting out seedlings. We like to keep busy to keep warm. When the weather is too bleak, we migrate inside to make pots or catch-up with bookwork and the never ending BAS statements and the other necessities of running a business. I have completed a kiln job and delivered pots to a gallery for an up-coming wood firing exhibition. So, all our days are full and so are the evenings.

These long winter evenings are a good time to make stock. The kitchen stove is lit almost every night to cook dinner. Best not to waste any of that heat in the stove. The wood fired stove heats the kitchen and makes it a cosy place to be on these chilly winter nights when the frost is settling outside. By working at the kitchen bench with my back to the fire, I get warmed too.

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I have bought a couple of beef bones from our local butcher. He slices then lengthways and then in half to expose all the marrow. I roast the bones first in the oven for an hour to give them that slightly caramelised flavour. Then into the stock pot and covered with water to boil all through the evening and into the night. For as long as the stove is hot. I also put on a boiler of mixed vegetable and herb stock to simmer alongside the bones. I add all the usual things from the winter garden. An onion, a knob of garlic some thyme and oregano, bay leaves, a few whole pepper corns, a 5star anise, some chilli and a couple of capsicums that are still lingering in a warm spot. Even a small wild cabbage. This is not a gourmet stock, made from all the best, most perfect ingredients like pristine onions, carrots and celery, for some posh restaurant. This is peasant food. Post modern peasant food, We are practising self-reliance, so this is a case of using what we have in the garden at the time, in true peasant fashion. Ever time I make a stock it is different, depending on what there is in the garden that needs to be used up now or it will be wasted.

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The next day I remove the bones from the boiler and scrape out all the marrow, if it hasn’t already dissolved out. I sieve the stock to remove any bone fragments and gristly bits along with the bits of onion, garlic and bay leaves etc. I also skim off as much fat as possible. I the evening, when we relight the stove for dinner, I sieve the vegetables out from the mirepoix, skim the stock again, and add the veggie liquid to the marrow stock. I also add a bottle of local red wine and let the whole lot simmer down from the initial 20 litres, down to a final 1 litre overnight.

I’ve learnt that I can trust the fire to linger on in the stove and keep the stock pot simmering for and extra hour or two, long after I’m asleep. The constantly reducing heat allows the stock to evaporate slowly and safely at no cost or effort.

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All the flavours are concentrated in this way and the resulting jelly-like stock is skimmed of any remaining fat and poured off into plastic containers and placed in the freezer for later use. A thin slice of this magic is just what is needed to add a little extra something to dinners in the coming months. Because the stock is so concentrated and jelly-like, it never really sets hard like water ice in the freezer. It always remains soft-ish and easy to slice even though it is frozen. A thin slice of this stuff is like a stock cube added to a sauce.

The big difference here between what I am making and what is in a stock cube is salt. This stock is made without salt. If salt is required in a dish, then it can be added at the time of final prep or after serving by each individual. Commercial stocks are all loaded to the hilt with far too much salt and in todays ‘convenience’ society, we all get way too much salt in our diet from pre-processed foods. Especially junk food.

We are attempting to live a wholesome life here without resorting to any pre-packs or processed items where ever possible. It takes some effort, but it’s a fun kind of effort.