A world tour of our garden, in 3 meals.

Posted on 03/05/2015 by hotnsticky

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, a world tour of our garden, in 3 meals.

Gardening is a very enjoyable activity. It gets us out into the fresh air, it’s good exercise and It provides most of all we eat each day. As the autumn progresses towards winter, the cooler weather encourages us to seek out more warming cooked meals. We indulge ourselves in reflecting on the people and places that inhabit our collective memories. Our conversations trigger memories of these people and places. Fond recollections of some past events and friends remembered through pots and food. We don’t attempt to make Italian, Spanish, Japanese or any other type of national cuisine. We make Australian food. Real food, home-grown, eaten fresh where possible, but when preserved, we do it without any added chemicals or preservatives. Preserved in glass jars, not plastic. and all home cooked. We just take the influences that we recall and weave them into our dietary choices, them combine our thoughts with what we actually have available to us from the garden.

This is what happened yesterday, in between, potting, gardening, wood cutting, kiln building and building maintenence. There is time for everything, in its own time.

For breakfast I cooked eggs in passata with a few cloves of garlic warmed in good olive oil first. The passata I used on this occasion was made from little yellow, pear-shaped tomatoes that I preserved a couple of months ago, at the height of summer. The passata is heated up and the eggs cracked in and covered to gently simmer until the whites are firm. I served it up on a piece of rye sour dough toast.

I must say that it was just right for a cool, misty, foggy, morning breakfast. A little cracked pepper makes it perfect.

We don’t quite lick the plates, but there is certainly nothing left.

For lunch I made and hotch potch from the left over baked vegetables that Nona Nina made for last nights dinner. Brussel sprouts, parsnip, leeks, carrots, pumpkin, onions, zucchini and beetroot. We had that garnished with preserved spicy plum sauce from our summer orchard fruit.

These left-overs were added to some chorizo sausage, our garlic, olives and home-made dried tomatoes from the summer excess. A lovely way to use up everything that we have in different and interesting combinations. We haven’t bought any meat since Xmas as far as I can recall. We aren’t vegetarians, but we don’t eat a lot of meat. So this is our little indulgence, veggie hot-pot with chorizo. Hot, spicy and nicely warming.

For dinner we decided to have Gyoza. I had previously bought 500g of lean pork and asked the butcher to mince it for me. I divided it into 4 parts and froze 3 of them for later. The 125g of pork mince is just the right amount to make gyoza for two. We fry the pork with lots of garlic in olive oil and some finely diced garden veggies. Then Ninako fills the small parcels with the mixture and I simmer and steam them in a sauce made from the last of the small red and yellow tomatoes from the garden, a few beans and some chillies. When this is reduced down, it makes a delicious simmer sauce.

It all mellows out very nicely. 7 each is just the right number of gyoza dumplings for one hungry potter. This sauce, although not culturally authentic, is very well matched to what we are enjoying, and most importantly it is entirely ours, from our garden. This is our Australian ‘gyoza’ influenced local dumpling experience. I’ll have another go at it some time in the future, and I’m sure to enjoy that too. Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts. This meal certainly didn’t!

It’s such an indulgence to tour the world of our recollections with such wholesome and tasty food, and almost entirely from our own produce.

We are very lucky people and I am grateful.

I have arranged to donate one of my recent bowls from my Watters Gallery exhibition to the fund-raiser appeal for the Nepalese victims of the recent earthquake. The pot will be auctioned soon. Please see below;

I believe you will have heard about the recent devastating earthquake in Nepal.

With the help of Vicki Grima, The Journal of Australian Ceramics editor, I am organising a fundraising project called CLAY FOR NEPAL (#clayfornepal15) to raise funds for the Nepalese people affected.

The first part of the project is an AUCTION of ceramics from around the world.

In conjunction with the AUCTION, Adriana Christianson, has offered to help me organise a BUY NOW STORE offering more affordable items for immediate purchase.

Both events will be happening from Friday 15 to Sunday 17 May 2015.

AUCTION: www.stores.ebay.com.au/clayfornepal

BUY NOW STORE: www.clayfornepal.bigcartel.com

PREVIEW of available works for both events here

Thank you for your support,

Vipoo Srivilasa

contact :

AUCTION: vipoo@vipoo.com

BUY NOW STORE: mail@adrianachristianson.com

All funds collected, less any event expenses (eBay and Paypal fees), will be donated to Oxfam, Nepal Earthquake Relief Appeal.

Vipoo Srivilasa is authorised by Oxfam Australia to collect funds for the benefit of Oxfam.

Vipoo is a very nice and thoughtful bloke who has taken on this endeavour of his own volition. It’s a credit to him and I am proud to be associated with the enterprise. Janine and I have donated cash through the Red Cross, but this is a way that we can do more, by doing what we do best. Which is making beautiful, thoughtful, meaningful objects.

Best wishes

from

Stevbu and Ninako, gardeners of local produce and international flavours.

The Luxury of Frugal Simplicity

Posted on 24/02/2015 by hotnsticky

We’ve been making wine, making clay, making kilns, making pots, making preserves and in general making a living, in all the various and diverse ways that we have grown into during this big long experiment called life.

As the last few weeks of summer are slipping away, the days get shorter and the plants are adjusting accordingly. This last week, we have been harvesting the red grapes and the yellow quinces.

In the past we have tried making wine from our Isabella/fragolino grapes, but it was never very good, due to the fact that we are not at all skilled at making wine, but also because these grapes are not really suited to wine making, so we have taken to bottling the dark red grape juice. This is the very best way to appreciate these grapes. We have also grown both Cabinet Sauvignon and shiraz, which are much better for making wine, but they need a lot of work to protect them from mildew. I refuse to use anything poisonous, restricting myself to only organic treatments. So this meant regular applications of Bordeaux spray, which is copper carbonate and lime mixed together. This works, but has to be applied after every rain, as it is water based and washes off. Long term use can lead to a build-up in the soil, so I decided to let them find there own way to survive without spraying. They didn’t! So no shiraz grapes this wet year.

However, the Isabella/fragolino hybrid is totally immune to Phytophthora root rot and leafy mildew. So no sprays are needed, perfect! These grapes are only good for juice, but the juice is of excellent flavour and the way that we have developed to extract the juice brings out exceptional depth of colour and flavour. We have tried the more traditional crushing and pressing, but this only results in a clear/pale pink juice. Partial fermentation to make ‘summer wine’. A semi fermented blend of partially fermented sweet juice and a little alcohol from the fermentation, results in a pale pink, cloudy, rose style. This is very nicely spritzig and tangy on the tongue but we have developed a better way of improving it to what we believe is an outstanding level of density of flavour and colour.

The red colour of wine comes from the skins which contains, amongst other things, anthrocyanins. These complex chemicals are thought to be quite beneficial to your health. But simply pressing the juice out of their skins only results in a white juice or wine. Have you ever thought how clear champagne is made from pinot noir red grapes? The clear juice is quickly squeezed out of the red grapes and separated from their skins so that no contact colouration can occur. If the grape juice is left in contact with the skins, the alcohol that develops in the wine ‘must’ as it ferments starts to dissolve the red colour. Partial contact results in a ‘rose’ light red colour, but full fermentation on the skins produces a red wine. Wine makers have developed a technique called ‘plunging the cap’ which involves pushing the red skins down into the fermenting ‘must’ to encourage the contact and colour extraction. This is done several times a day, for a week or two, as long as the fermentation lasts.

As we are not making wine, but only juice. Miss Penfold Grange King decided to try heating the juice to sterilize it for bottling, but along the way found by accident that the colour improved as well. So now we don’t really crush the grapes in the normal way. We carefully pick all the ‘berries’ off the grape bunches and separate the stems and any unripe grapes, as these can give a sour acidic flavour to the juice. We also separate any living protein from the bunches as well. In industry this is called “MOG” material other than grapes, and a lot of it, slaters, spiders, caterpillars and especially snails, can pass through the system and separators, just like grapes, if they are the same size. However, It doesn’t seem to affect the finished wine from industrial scaled production wineries.

We take the time to carefully separate all of this by hand about 20 kilos at a time and then put the grapes in big boilers and heat them . initially to sterilize the juice for preservation, but we have found that a few minutes of simmering and some squashing using a potato masher, produces a very rich, red, dense grape juice of immense flavour and colour. It seems that anthrocyanins are also extracted by heat just as with alcohol. After the colour has been extracted by this heating, we drain off the skins and pips through a large kitchen sieve, pressing it a little by placing a stack of plates on top, then filling glass jars taken straight from the oven with ‘pop top’ lids simmered in hot water. As the bottles cool. the lids are sucked down and sealed making a loud ‘pop’ noise as they vacuum seal.

This juice keeps for up to a year in these sealed bottles. Miss Penfold Grange King has found lots of ways to cook with this preserved juice over the years. She makes jelly, by re-heating with some gelatine and a little lemon juice and even some zest occasionally. This year we have also made some summer wine from this improved and concentrated rich red grape juice. it’s absolutely fantastic. If you haven’t ever tried some of this stuff. it is an amazing way to preserve grape juice. Except, as summer wine it isn’t preserved at all, just drunk. we make a batch every few days to replace the last batch, keeping the ferment going, restarting the new batch off the lees of the last one. We make it in 4 litre glass fermenting jars. It’s an ongoing process that lasts as long as the grape crop.

Every year we try something a little different, some other way of dealing with what we have, always trying to find a better way to get the most out of our home grown produce. This year, amongst other things, we have experimented with preserving our quince crop by cooking them in this wonderfully rich, dense and colourful red grape juice which is brim full of flavour.

Quinces need to be cooked with a little bit of sugar. In the past I have used pure white and deadly as well as local honey, but this year we have decided to use the sweetness of our grape juice to provide the fructose to bring out the luscious red colour of the cooked quinces.

I bring the quartered and peeled quinces to the boil and then switch them off. Because they are so fresh, they don’t need to be cooked for too long, otherwise they will go all mushy. While the quinces are coming up to the boil. I bring all the quince peelings and cores and pips up to boil for a few minutes, and simmer for a while. The skins and pips are full of pectin, so boiling them dissolves this pectin. I drain off the pectin liquor into a smaller sauce pan and continue to reduce tha pectin sauce further.

I place the quinces in a baking tray with a few cloves, a 5 star anise, a cinnamon stick and the zest and juice of a lemon. I cut the spent lemon in the baking tray as well and pour the hot grape juice over them and place them in the oven on low to cook a little more. As soon as the pectin liquor is reduced to half, I pour it over the baking quinces and bake them for another half hour. It reduces to a jelly-like, rich, red, fragrant syrup.

Perfect with a little cream or icecream, or both.

Yum. You don’t know what you are missing if you haven’t tasted something like this.

We may not have much cash flow, but by gosh we eat well. We just couldn’t afford to pay to eat this quality and range of gourmet foods if we were working for money.

Best wishes from Miss Penfold Grange and her Maximillion dollar value Schubert

The luscious excess of the summer garden

Posted on 13/02/2015 by hotnsticky

The luscious excess of the summer garden

Breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus desert.

We have been experimenting with a few new ways of dealing with our excesses from the garden. We have our favourites that we love to cook every season with all the usual suspects as they front up in quantity. It’s just amazing how much I look forward to that first tomato of the season to get ripe enough to pick and eat, right there in the garden. It truly explodes in the mouth with sweet, acidity. Such a flavour. Then all those vitamins that I am obviously in need of, because I crave that first tomato so much. Just brushing the leaves of the tomato plants while weeding is nostalgic and gives me the Pablov’s Dog reaction. i can’t wait. I’m craving a fresh tomato after 6 months without having any. However, after a month of tomatoes with everything, I seem to have enough of the vitamins and minerals that tomatoes offer, and they lose some of their charm. They are still fantastically delicious, but there is no longer any urgency to eat them. They just become part of the menu landscape. In fact, so much so, that while I’m weeding and watering the plants, I try to avoid brushing the leaves, as the smell is no longer appetising, but slightly off-putting even. What is this reaction? How does it work? My body is telling me what I need to eat and when I’ve had enough. Time to move on, try something different.

The same can be said for zucchinis, capsicum and aubergines as well I suppose, but not with the same urgency.

After we have cooked and eaten all the usual favourite dishes a few times, we start to consider other ways of thinking about what we have and how we can be creative with it.

Breakfast of stewed fruit and yoghurt. Today its blood plums or fresh prunes.

It’s always interesting to see what other people have found to do with summer vegetables. The following recipe is from Andrew McConnel, from his page in the recently launched “The Saturday Paper” This is a new Australian newspaper launched by Morry Schwartz this time last year. We were foundation subscribers, as I have been to ’The Quatertly Essay’ and the ‘The Monthly’. I think that it’s important to support creative ventures, and anything that may help to subvert the dominant paradigm can’t be a bad thing. The recipe for Zucchini salad is from the 7th of Feb issue.

Zucchini Salad and ricotta

The lovely made some fresh ricotta and served it with a few thinly sliced zucchinis. This is a lovely fresh salad of thinly sliced raw zucchinis. Slice the zuchs and season with pepper (plus salt if you use it), then dress with some torn basil leaves and lemon zest, + its juice and some olive oil. Evenly spread the fresh warm ricotta over the top in little lumps and a few lightly roasted pine nuts.

After making the ricotta, there is a lot of whey still left over. This is good to feed to the chickens or a pig – if you happen to be fattening one up at the time, or to make a batch of scones?. Ms ‘one brick’ Einstein has a brilliant idea and decides to make a whey pudding by adding a little bit of vanilla bean paste, some sugar and a little gelatine to the warm whey. It sets in the fridge to a jelly that is surprisingly good as a breakfast or dessert option.

Lightly steamed capsicums and garlic served warm and topped with fresh ricotta

Sliced, fresh warm tomatoes picked straight from the garden 5 minutes earlier and served on a bed of oak leaf lettuce.

Mixed small tomatoes, finely sliced fresh red onion and grated zucchini salad, served with crispy toasted seeds,(sunflower and pumpkin) dressed with lemon juice. This salad will be going on our list of ‘must do more often’. Really nice mix of flavours and textures.

Served with cold potatoes cheese, fresh basil pesto and green leaves.

Zucchini fritters. Grate a few small young zucchinis and mix with a little flour and an egg, season with salt and pepper, some coriander leaves, parsley, a hint of chilli and finely chopped shallots. Fry in a little olive oil till golden on both sides.

Mixed summer veggie fritters. Grate zucchinis with mashed, steamed and cooled, waxy potatoes, sweet corn nibblets, sliced, steamed French beans, finely chopped capsicum, parsley and Thai basil. Mix with egg and flour and fry in a shallow pan with some extra virgin olive oil. Season to taste.

Baked capsicums stuffed with ricotta mixed with olive, garlic and dried tomato tepinade. roasted beetroot dip, grated zucchinis with lemon juice and pepper, sweet corn on the cob, fresh capsicum and cold potato with tomatoes and olives.

Lightly steamed french beans served with home-made spicy tomato passata. We also have beans like this served in yoghurt with garlic.

Baked, marinated ocean trout fragments with udon noodles and seasonal veggies. Marinate the fish in some soy, ginger, olive oil and lemon juice for a few hours. Steam, bake or Pan fry the fish in it’s marinade. Meanwhile, boil the udon buckwheat noodles and steam the fresh veggies, beans, broccoli, colli, zucchini chunks, whatever is at hand on the day. Toss the veggies through the drained noodles and serve with a few torn-up fresh Shiso leaves on the side and dress with a mix of mirin, sesame seed oil and meso.

Baked mediterranean vegetables with cumin, Roughly chop up what ever is in the garden by way of Mediterranean vegetables. Zucchinis, tomatoes, beans, aubergines, onion etc. pour a little olive oil into the baking dish and rub it through all the vegetables with your hands. sprinkle some cumin over it and bake in a moderate oven till tender. This is a Nigel Slater recipe that The Lovely has transposed to suit what we have. The cumin isn’t something that I would have thought of, but it works and is really nice. It’s no longer a ratatouille sort of dish, and is suddenly transported to another continent.

Ratatouille variations. Slice egg-plant, tomatoes, capsicums and onions liberally sprinkled with mashed garlic and plenty of torn basil leaves. Pour over a jar of home-made passata, sugo sauce and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour or so. Crush a few more cloves of fresh garlic and sprinkle over the top before serving. It’s tangy and gorgeous.

Serve with some chopped parsley and a little grated parmigiano.

Summer vegetable frittata. Brown some onions and garlic in olive oil, add in chopped tomato, aubergine, capsicum, french beans, zucchini and cold steamed potato slices. Pour over the whisked eggs and grate cheese on top. cook for a few minutes on the stove top and then transfer to the grill. Best to use a flat flan pan or very shallow fry pan for this dish. One with a metal handle that can go under the grill. Grill till the cheese turns golden.

Serve with chunky zucchini steamed with fresh mint leaves. It’s just another way of using up more of the buggers.

Serve with a grating of fresh pepper.

Almond friand cake embedded with slices of fresh pear and topped with local pecans

Poached pears with amaretto and served with greek yoghurt

Quinces poached in fresh pressed red grape juice.

Peel and core the quinces, place in a large baking pan cover with fresh pressed red grape juice and slow cook for at least 4 hours in a slow oven, untill they soften and turn red.

We are not fooling ourselves. There isn’t anything new here. This isn’t fancy food. It’s just simple honest Post Modern Peasant food picked from our garden and cooked within hours, if not minutes of harvest. A good percentage of it is even eaten raw in the garden while we are harvesting. Nothing could be fresher or more wholesome. Nearly everything on these plates is home-grown and home-made – even the plates.

Best wishes from two well-fed potters

Resistance is Fertile

Posted on 10/02/2015 by hotnsticky

The summer garden is being very productive and keeping us busy. The heat is back and the rain has largely stopped, so I had to water the garden today. I have been building kilns these last few weeks, more or less full-time, but there are always things to do in the garden and it’s a great entertainment and relaxing break from working on kilns to be able to just walk out of the workshop and spend half an hour with the vegetables as a break. I really enjoy this attempt of ours of the last 40 years to try to achieve some independence and self-reliance, but I still have to earn some money to pay all the rates, regos and insurances that are necessary to be able to live and work here. There are no free lunches in this garden. We know a lot of potters here, but non that makes a living solely from what they can make and sell. Everyone has a second income from part-time work, or a partner with an income who helps to support them. We have both worked part-time to support our artistic ‘habit’. Building kilns and running firing workshops from here are our current income support schemes for our self-reliance. Selling our work makes only a quarter of our income.

The Queen of Quince has started on the late summer preserving sessions. Potatoes, tomatoes, basil, beans, pears, apples, quince and red grapes are all coming on at the same time and have to be dealt with. I lend a hand where I can as an interesting relief from the kiln work. I usually try to keep January free of kiln orders, so that I can be 100% involved in the garden and kitchen at this busy, productive time of year. But this year, events transpired such that I have to work on a kiln to make a deadline that can’t be changed. Being adaptable and adjusting to change is a useful skill I’m told? Organic growing, nurturing, harvesting, preserving and cooking and eating our produce is the most rewarding thing that I can think of doing with my life. It is the reason that we have chosen to live out here in the bush with few services, but plenty of space, clean air and water to live out our self-reliant, creative, self-employed utopian dream. As it’s turned out, and much to my surprise, we have managed to ‘get away with it’.

I could have chosen to make something a lot more ‘commercial’ I suppose? And in a very much more efficient manner, but that just doesn’t seem to interest me. I’m not really very interested in ‘efficiency’. I rather like to spend a long time creating something really beautiful with my hands, whether its making a pot on the potters wheel, or weeding a garden bed, writing a real letter on beautiful paper by hand using an ink fountain pen, or at the current time in spending time hand carving and shaping a fire brick to fit in a specific position in the door of a kiln so that it makes a perfect door seal, with a ground face and precision interlock. Some of these firebricks are cut and shaped on 6 faces.

No-one really understands what goes into a hand-made object. It is no longer part of our Australian culture. It belongs to a time long past. However, I believe that it is important to keep skills alive. So I really do it for me. I’m completely selfish in this. Luckily, there are just enough people out there who are prepared to support me in persisting with this enterprise. The people who buy my kilns or come to my exhibitions have no idea of what they are looking at. “Oh yes, it’s pretty” doesn’t scratch the surface. It’s the back story to all of this that makes it special. No-one can see this in the object. It’s invisible, but the object wouldn’t exist at all without all the preparatory work and research. The research and prep are the two noughts on the price tag. Anyone can make a bowl. It’s the simplest of shapes. Nothing to it! I want to prospect, dig, crush and mill all my own materials for my pots, in just the same way that I want to grow all my own food. This isn’t a business, it’s a philosophy.

With the assistance of her friend Vicki, The Lovely has picked and juiced most of the apples, except for one tree.

The apple juice from these apples are destined to be made into cider vinegar. Tomatoes are picked every few days and reduced to sauce and vacuum sealed in ‘pop’ top glass jars for use later. The basil has been converted into pesto. The first of the pears are stewed and in the fridge for breakfast and desert fruits. We have had the first picking of the 2015 vendage and some is stored as preserved red grape juice while some of it has been left to ferment with it’s own wild yeast to be drunk as Summer Wine. Slightly spritzig, sweet, weak red wine. It’s something that we came across on road-side stalls in Europe some years ago, when travelling around in their late summer/early autumn and it’s so fantastic and relatively quick and easy to make, compared to real wine. Very refreshing and satisfying on a hot summers day.

We start by picking the low hanging fruit.

Then the higher hanging fruit

We have been supplying quinces and beans to a local restaurant in the last week as well.

Kipfler King has been planting little batches of potatoes as they start to shoot and this latest batch has come from a wire compost ring, behind the mower shed.

They are nearly all small kipflers, we steam them in bigger batches. Too much to eat at one sitting, then we cool the excess and place it in the fridge for a later time. This is not to save time or money. We do it because cold potatoes are better for you. Fresh steamed potatoes are digested straight away and go pretty quickly into your bloodstream. High GI. Once cooled however, the potato starch is converted to what is called ‘resistant’ starch or ‘butyrylated resistant starch’. It isn’t digested in the tummy or small intestine, but passes all the way to the lower intestine where it feeds the endemic gut flora that like to live there. It makes for a very fertile environment for this good gut bacteria. So, resistance is fertile, I read an article about this in New Scientist twenty years or so ago and reprised recently, I have practised it ever since. Having a healthy and fertile environment for the good gut bacteria is an excellent way to ward off colorectal cancer. I also remember reading that cooking the spuds a second time and then cooling them, converts even higher percentages of the starch into the resistant form. Providing lots of fibre where it’s needed. We don’t ever seem to get around to doing this second cooking and cooling. We already have enough to fill our days. I should change my habits, but I’m resistant.

The humble spud, not un-like revenge, is apparently, a dish best served cold.

Best wishes

from the highly resistant Steve and his Queen of Quince, the Kipfler King

Much ado about netting

Posted on 26/01/2015 by hotnsticky

We have netted all the stone-fruit trees in the orchard that still have fruit on them. We move the nets from the early trees that have finished fruiting and relocate them to the late season trees that are turning colour and ripening. Once all the early fruiting varieties are done, they no-longer need the netting. Some of these trees are getting quite old now and have gained some size. Our oldest trees are over 40 years old, however most are now 2nd generation plantings, still they need a support system that can cover trees up to 4 metres high. This means that we need to use the bigger nets that are 9 metres square.

We have figured out a way to build a frame simply out of 2 pieces of left-over polypipe tubing, tied together in the middle and spread out at right angles to form an arched support. We hammer in tomato stakes to secure the pipe to the ground and it become quite stable. The difficulty is in getting the netting over the frame. Janine ‘bowline’ King attaches a rope to one side and throws it over, then with me voicing encouragement, she hauls the netting over the frame. The polythene piping is quite smooth and slippery, so the netting travels freely over. We repeat the process for each tree with ripening fruit until we run out of nets.

The birds are so very resourceful. They have figured out that if they sit on the netting and bounce up and down on it , it will sag down until it touches some of the fruit. Then they peck at it through the netting.

This whole process of netting is fast and efficient, and we get it all done in an hour or so. There is still time in the afternoon to go to the garden and de-fuse the exploding zucchini crop. We lunch on steamed broccoli and cauliflower with a squeeze of lemon juice and a little fresh ground pepper.

As the garden is so prolific in this warm wet weather, we decide to make an egg plant parmigiana. We have lots of tomatoes and aubergines.

Tomatoes blanched and skinned, sliced and laid over the aubergines with a little olive oil, then sprinkled with torn basil leaves and crushed garlic, finally covered with a jar of our home made tomato, garlic, onion and capsicum sauce. Grate parmigiana on top and bake.

Another favourite at this time of year for a simple meal on a hot day is cold cucumber soup.

This isn’t really a recipe, more 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.

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.

Some mild onion like red or white, or even green spring onions finely chopped

A big bunch of cilantro or coriander leaves finely chopped.

A small bunch of mint leaves finely chopped.

A couple of cloves of garlic, smashed and de-papered.

Some finely chopped chilli to taste and although I don’t use salt, if you want it, add it to your our taste.

Juice of a lemon.

Put it all in the blender or food processor with half a tin of coconut milk and the same quantity of plain greek yoghurt, or just one of them, or some sour cream if that’s what you have in the fridge. You can use a blend of all three.

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

Janine mixes up 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.

Half Baked

Posted on 13/01/2015 by hotnsticky

Welcome to mid-summer.

Without doing anything about it, we find ourselves now at the high point of mid-summer. It was effortless. How did we get here? Time is flying by, the days are getting shorter, but not that noticeably and the fruit is ripening on the trees, even through all this rain. This is probably the apogee of the summer heat, although it’s not that hot this year. Our maximums are in the low to mid thirties.

The Earth Mother Garden Girl has been out early, picking vegetables and returns with a wheel barrow full. She comes in with a couple of boxes full of tomatoes, capsicums, aubergines, zucchinis, and more.

I’ve spent the day cutting and folding stainless steel kiln parts. I see the bounty of summer right there in boxes on the kitchen floor and decide to make the obvious choice, ratatouille. It’s that time of year!

I start by selecting out all the bird-damaged, rain-split, sun-burnt and otherwise affected and just plain over-ripe or undersized tomatoes. Paring them down and cutting them in half. I rub them with olive oil and dress them with a sprinkling of salt, then pop them into a low oven to dry a little for a while.

For the past few days, The lovely has been thinking about doing our tax. It’s a job that we always do in Jan. Well, we try to. It has to be in by March, along with our company returns. It’s not as big a deal as it used to be. Since the introduction of the GST and quarterly BAS statements, most of it is already done. But it’s still a job that no-one likes. So My Beautiful Abacus has managed to put it off now for 2 days and as a result of this extended procrastination, she has sorted out the office, cleaned out the spare room, tidied under our bed, re-arranged the pantry and de-cluttered the kitchen table, work bench and side board. Tax time is great! The house has never looked so tidy. I think the next job on the tax-list may well turn out to be cleaning the shower grouting. Procrastination can be good!

In the kitchen the smell of the half baked tomatoes is wafting out and about the house now. I split the zucchinis, capsicums and aubergines. These are our first two aubergines of the season. I lay them all in a baking dish with some olive oil, cover them with the half baked tomatoes and dress it all with a big handful of torn basil leaves fresh from the garden, while The Lovely crushes a few cloves of garlic and spreads it about all over the mix. I tear up a few anchovies and place little bits evenly about the pan. It isn’t pretty. It’s a big jumbled mass of veggies, but it smells fantastic already and I haven’t even cooked it yet.

In the oven for half an hour to soften the veggies let it all meld in together. It fills the house with that smell of “only in summer”.

For me, ratatouille and its many variations has to be the apotheosis of summer. Good olive oil and fresh summer vegetables from the garden – beautiful! As we only eat what we grow. We can’t have this dish at any other time of the year. Aubergines are very slow to get going here. They don’t start producing until mid-summer and then fruit well into the autumn. Zucchinis on the other hand are just about past their zenith and starting their slow decline as they straggle and spread all over the place. The tomatoes haven’t reached their peak as yet, but are bearing very well for us just now. We are just starting to get enough to think about bottling them. Passata may well come before tax?

My Beautiful Abacus packs away the tax files from the kitchen table into their relevant boxes and spring folders, then transforms into a Beautiful Maitre’D and Sommelier as I plate-up the fragrant dish and grate a little parmigiana on top and some more fresh basil leaves. It’s really wonderful, if I do say so myself. It’s a great pity that I can’t convey the smell sensations to you in words. You just have to be there – or do it yourself. Half baking the tomatoes really helps to concentrate the flavour. It takes a little longer, but it’s really worth it. Once they are in the oven, you can go back to not doing the tax for a little longer. Actually, it’s a great way to extend the working day without realising it.

Best wishes from the Half Baked Steve and his Beautiful Actuary

Of cabbages and King

Posted on 01/01/2015 by hotnsticky

“The time has come the walrus said to speak of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and Kings”

Well, I have both cabbages and a King here right now, so that’s what I’m going to speak about. We are finding ways to eat the flush of red cabbage that is coming on now. Our first idea was to make Japanese okonomiyaki-inspired cabbage pancakes, they are fabulous and a great way to get through a lot of cabbage.

We don’t have a recipe, we just use what we have at the time. The main ingredient is the cabbage, finely shredded, a small amount of pan-cake batter. i.e. one egg to one table spoon full of flour. We use organic wholemeal, but you will get a lighter result with white or corn flour. I usually add some of my marrow bone and veggie stock form the freezer, but you can use water or even milk to make the pancake batter mix. Sometimes I only add two eggs without using any flour, cracking them directly into the simmering cabbage mix. Some finely sliced spring onions or a few small shallots go well in the mix.

We cook the cabbage and onion in a little oil like a stir-fry, but sometimes with the lid on the frypan for a few minutes to get the whole thing to steam and then add the batter or eggs and stir it through. This binds it all together. When it firms up a little we flip it over and do the other side. Whenever I have had this in Japan it nearly always has some sort of bacon or cured pork added in rashes on one side or cubed chunks mixed through.

As bacon, or any other cured and preserved meat isn’t all that good for you, we keep it to a minimum. But it is a tasty addition when it’s added in there. The other things that we add as the fancy takes us are; a little bit of ginger pickled in cider vinegar with some salt and honey. Ginger turns slightly pink when pickled in vinegar. This is drained and finely chopped before adding it in, or some roughly chopped home-grown and dried tomatoes preserved in oil.

When the pancake is cooked through on both sides. We serve it with a few katsuobushi bonito flakes sprinkled on top. They shimmer and wobble around on top of the hot meal as if they are alive. It’s an uncanny feeling to see your food, there on the plate, moving about.

The first time that I saw bonito flakes on a pancake, when I bought my first okonomiyaki sitting on a train platform waiting for a train in the 80’s In Japan. I hadn’t ever seen anything like it before, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I was used to eating food that didn’t move around on my plate. Okonomiyaki is just so delicious that I instantly got used to it and have bought bonito flakes occasionally, when I see them for sale, ever since.

I Japan, they have a special kind of Okonomiyaki sauce. It more or less tastes like a mix of 3 parts of BBQ sauce to 1 part of Worcestershire sauce, or something a bit close to that, if you can imagine it. They also use a lot of mayonnaise as well. In fact an okonomiyaki pancake is usually decorated with lots of squiggly lines of brown and white sauce in delicate cross-hatch patterns.

These two decorative and tasty sauces seem to be essential in Japan, I have never been served an okonomiyaki without them, but for us they are optional here at home. We don’t buy BBQ sauce and only very rarely have mayonnaise, so we’ve got used to our own version of okonomiyaki inspired cabbage pancake. I did once try adding some Worcestershire sauce to some of our reduced tomato salsa, but it wasn’t the same. Presumably because we didn’t add enough salt, sugar and MSG!

I’m pretty sure that anyone who had lived in Japan for any length of time and was used to okonomiyaki just wouldn’t recognise what we cook as okonomiyaki. It doesn’t matter. To us, it’s just a great way to eat cabbage.

The second way of using a lot of cabbage is in a fresh red cabbage salad. Something that we picked up in the SE Asian restaurants of Cabramatta. The base of the salad is finely shredded cabbage, with other salad green leaves torn and tossed in as available in the season. There is no real recipe, just a fresh idea. I know that both of these aren’t really recipes, more like serving suggestions, but you can imagine.

Shred lots of fresh cabbage. It doesn’t have to be red cabbage, Chinese cabbage or Savoy works just as well. Add whatever other green salad leaves that you have growing in the garden, Lettuce, Mizuma, rocket, radicchio, red mustard leaves, etc.

Add some finely sliced Shallot or any other mild onion and some intensely flavoursome Shiso leaves. The green variety seem to have more essential oils than the red and is more aromatic, but the red one looks so terrific in the mix, especially if you are using green cabbage. Next add in plenty of very finely shredded mint leaves and some grated ginger.

The whole lot is tossed to mix it all up and is seasoned with a sprinkling of white wine vinegar. This gives it a very lively hit when it combines with the shredded ginger and finely chopped mint.

We pick the leaves in the morning and after washing them we put them in the fridge for an hour or two until lunchtime. It makes a cool, crunchy, fresh salad with lots of zing. It’s so good that we have to have seconds.

The other thing that the walrus said was about yellow-matter custard, but he didn’t give a recipe either.

Only a serving suggestion.

Goo Goo Ga-Choo!

fond regards

from the King and her Walrus

Perfect Timing

Posted on 30/11/2014 by hotnsticky

I’m only just home and we have hit the ground running.

It’s the end of spring, almost the beginning of summer and the garden is bearing fruit. Well, the orchards are. The vegetables are a little way behind, as all the small seedlings are annual and need time to grow on. Whereas all the orchard trees, being perennial, are well established. All those years of preparation; fertilising, mulching, pruning and irrigating have been worth it. It was mostly dry while we were away and has been very dry since our return, with only 8 mm. of rain in the last month. Not enough to swell up the fruit very much, but ideal warm to hot weather for ripening and no sign of mould or fungus anywhere. The Sherman peaches are small, but the crop is quite heavy.

The early peaches have started, as have the cherries. There was a time back in the seventies, when cherries were the earliest fruit, but now it is the earliest peaches. We have always chosen the very earliest varieties of each type of fruit tree variety for our orchards. However, over the decades, new and earlier varieties have become available, so when a tree fades away or dies of old age we replace it with another one. The earliest variety available at that time. This has moved the fruit harvest forward a month or two, especially when you consider the extra push from global warming.

We used to pick the very earliest young-berries just in time for Xmas day. Going around and picking the very earliest and ripest berry off each cane. Now, the full harvest is all over before Xmas. These are the same canes. We haven’t replaced them with new varieties. It just the effect that the increase in global temperatures are having on the fruit trees, vines and canes. So now we are picking the earliest peaches as well as mulberries, cherries and youngberries. It all has to be dealt with and it takes time. We can’t eat it all now. So we preserve most of it for later in the year. We don’t have any preserved peaches left from last year, so we can’t wait to taste that beautiful mix of sweetness and acid that the fresh fruit delivers.

Janine makes cherry jelly by boiling the fruit just covered with water and simmer for 10 mins. The fruit is mashed to extract flavour and colour, then sieved into a setting bowl and a table spoon of gelatine is stirred through and dissolved. You can add a little sugar if you have a sweet tooth. Lastly she adds a squeeze of lemon and allows it to set. Once cool, it goes into the fridge to chill for dinner.

We get stuck in and eat a lot of the cherry crop each day for breakfast, just standing under the tress, chewing and spitting, but there comes a time when the yield exceeds our appetite, so the The Lovely Garden Goddess, Miss King of the Kitchen, steps in and starts to cook up a treat or two. She starts by making a cherry jelly, followed by berry pie and berry pudding. I make a couple of jars of cherry brandy. We pick, peel and stew peaches for freezing and also pick and bottle youngberries. It’s all full-on busy. We picked over 3 kgs of youngberries this morning. Last year we picked 20kgs of berries in the season and bottled about 20 jars of them. There are just 2 jars left in the larder now. Perfect timing.

The Kitchen King up-dates her garden diary and preserving log.

I have a couple of kilns to build. So after the mornings fruit picking, I left Janine in the kitchen, making pies and went down to the kiln shed to finish work on a stainless steel kiln frame. This one has to be delivered before Xmas and another kiln frame has to be got off to the galvanisers as early as possible, so that it will be galvanised before the factory takes their Xmas/New Year maintenance shut down over January. I need to be working on that kiln early next year. Everything needs to be planned and given a suitable space within the framework of our self-reliant life choices. It is quite a full time job, just working in the gardens and orchards, but we also need to earn a living as well. Something has to pay for the up-keep of all this effort. Regrettably, sales of pots isn’t going to cover it. We live a fantasy life with-in the real world economy. But every now and then I have to do something that will earn enough money to pay the Council Rates, the insurance and car registration etc. etc. It’s a juggling act, keeping it all together.

I come back up to the house and the sweet, tangy smell of berry fruit sponge pudding wafts into my nostrils. I can’t wait for dinner!

Later in the evening I put on a couple of batches of beer, as we have almost run out of last summers bottling, with only half a dozen bottles left in the cellar. Perfect timing.

We can’t do everything, but we do what we can.

I love this time of year. I don’t get time to make any pots, because I’m making the time to preserve a lot of food for the rest of the year. This is a precious opportunity just too good to miss.

It’s how we have chosen to live our self-reliant life.

Best wishes from the perfectly timed, self-reliant King of the Kitchen and her juggler .

Welcome Home

Posted on 27/11/2014 by hotnsticky

After The Lovely Saint Nina (Betty/Buffy/Katherine) left me in Taiwan. She arrived back in Australia and was collected from the airport by our very good friend Len. It was a dark and stormy day. Huge thunder storms were raging and trees were down and many roads were blocked or closed by the intense down pours. The tunnel was flooded, so they took the longer, alternative route. This also had many problems and was detoured in parts by flooding or downed trees. As they approached our home in the storm on a narrow stretch of road, through the bush, a kangaroo jumped out onto the road directly in front of them and wrote off Len’s car. So Len the Unlucky and Betty, Buffy, Katherine the Forgetful, had to make their way home the last few kms in the rain to collect our car to get The Lovely’s luggage.

Len borrowed our car to get home and for the next two weeks while his car was being fixed. So Len now collects me from the airport, in my turn, in my car, so that I can drive myself home.

I’m home and its hot. Too hot for this time of year. I suddenly realise that although it was hot a lot of the time in Asia, the one thing that was missing was the smell of eucalypt oil.

I step out of the car and crunch into the dry gum leaf detritus/compost in the gutter, blown there by the strong westerly winds. I know that I’m home. The air is baking and the eucalypt oil smell welcomes me.

Annabelle Sloujetté has done a wonderful job of looking after our house and pottery. She is gone when I return, but I can see from the two tyre scorch marks in the lawn that she hasn’t been gone very long. The pottery is full to bursting with her new work and it’s very lively and an inspiration to walk into another persons studio, full of such exciting forms and decorations — even though it’s really my studio. It looks so different. Her work is so exuberant and joyful. The Blessed Saint Nina the Forgetful, Buffy/Betty/Katherine, has returned home before me a few weeks ago. But she isn’t here either. She is working up the hill, manning our display for the Southern Highlands Arts Festival ‘Open Studio’ Weekend at our friend Elizabeth’s studio.

I wander around in my ‘new again’ old home and garden. The cherries have flowered, set fruit, and the fruit is just now turning red. Almost ready to pick, they will be ready to pick in a couple of days. All this has happened in the time that I’ve been away. The air is hot and dry and it is perfect weather to ripen fruit. I walk around the garden and the stone fruit orchard. Everything was still pretty dormant when I left 10 weeks ago. It was really just the end of winter. Now, however, it is late spring and there is plenty to see. The single red poppies are out in force for the 11th of November and the nasturtiums are also adding a burst of colour in little clusters all around the garden. We don’t plant them any more, they just come up nowadays. We did plant a few seeds, many years ago, and since then they just keep on coming up everywhere. I don’t know how they migrate like they do, but they just seem to manage it somehow.

I planted a small area, down in the Pantry Field Garden, to English cottage garden flowers a couple of years ago. It was a surprise for The Lovely One. She loves flowers, so after I ploughed up the area for potatoes, I left half of the ground for English flowers as a present for her. I broadcast 2 packets of ‘English-Country-Garden’ flower seeds into the freshly dug ground and watered them and waited. Sure enough, there was a small show of some annuals that year, but there were also a lot of bi-annuals setting their roots down for a great show for this spring. After looking at all the other parts of the orchards and gardens, I make my way all the way down to the Pantry Field. I can see a burst of local colour. It worked and it looks good. A small gesture, but a pretty one. It only survives the predation of all the local herbivores by being enclosed in a wire mesh fence. Not too pretty, but essential in these circumstances, if the plants are to survive long enough to flower and set seed. I’d like to see this little patch of English country garden flowers self-sow and regenerate on its own in future.

There are mulberries ready to pick, plus strawberries, and the very early Sherman peaches have turned red. I taste one, Yes, they are already ready to eat, soft, sweet and deliciously warm in the sunshine. The juice squirts out and dribbles down my chin. I slobber and slurp the delicious sweet warm fruit and its juices. One isn’t enough. I take a second and then a third. My fingers are sticky with the juice. My lips and chin are warm and sticky. I need to go into the house and wash myself. Such are the simple natural pleasures of the fruiting season.

The Divine Saint Nina – The Forgetful turns up. She has been out visiting other studios. It’s lovely to see her again. I missed her. We have always traveled together up until this time. We planned to, but circumstances intervened.

We settle back into our natural routine. Janine opens a new jar of marmalade, it’s sensational. I’ve really missed that taste for some months now. I’m sure that there is some factor of absence at work here, making the taste buds grow fonder, but this jar is really nice, so flavoursome. That lovely tang of the sweetened citrus flavours, but there is something else too. I pick up the jar and examine the small hand-written label. It’s my writing, so it’s one of my batches. It tells me that on the 22nd of July, I used Seville orange, Chinnotto, Meyer lemon, — and the secret ingredient in this batch, which may be why it tastes so extra good, is the addition of prune brandy stirred through the mix, just before bottling. I’d forgotten about that.

We had made some prune brandy a couple of years before, just as I make cherry brandy most years. It’s a simple operation of pouring brandy over the fruit in a sterilised glass jar and screwing down the lid. You forget about it for a year or two in the back of the pantry cupboard and just leave it to sit and develop. I always include the pips, because the best part of the flavour comes from the tiny amount of cyanide that is in the pips. This is slowly dissolved in the alcohol and gives the brandy a fruit + almond flavour. Yes, almond flavour is the flavour of cyanide. Just in case you didn’t know. And it’s fantastic, as anyone who loves amaretto will attest. So what made this marmalade so good was that last-minute addition of that rich flavoursome brandy stirred through just before capping off. Wow. So good!

I struggle through the fruit-box-full of letters, parcels, junk mail and other postage that has accumulated over the couple of months. Then I start to deal with the hundreds and hundreds of emails, all queued up and waiting to be sorted, some answered, but mostly trashed. Still, they have to be looked at, so that I can decide which button to press. It’s late when I head off to bed. The Divine Miss N is long gone. I slide quietly under the covers, when suddenly, Buffy springs her trap. She flicks the sheet over my head. I know that resistance is futile and surrender to my fate.

Fond regards from Buffy and her fresh meat.

Bitter and twisted

Posted on 27/07/2014 by hotnsticky

Making marmalade on a sunny winters morning.

I’ve found the time to make some more marmalade. The citrus trees have fruit to be picked, so I make the time and manage 4 batches throughout the day. I use mainly Seville oranges, but I also like to experiment, we have tangelos, lemons, ruby grapefruit, nagami cumquats and Italian bitter chinotto.

The Sweet One has already made the tangelo/seville mix. She does everything so properly, measuring out the ingredients to a recipe. Her marmalade always works. She is so sweet, she even adds the correct amount of sugar. I tend to make mine with a little bit less sugar, as I find some marmalade far too sweet for my taste. I have reduced the sugar to 300 grams to 1kg of whole fruit. I juice the fruit and add it into the pan, and that is the only licquid that I use. Then I scrape out all the pith from inside and discard it to the compost. i havent weighed this pulp, so Im not too sure what the final balance of sugar to peel ends up being, but it works. Next I slice the peel finely, add it to the pan and lastly weight out 300g of sugar and toss it on top. I bake it in the bread maker, set to ‘jam’ setting. I know that it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that I’d normally do. I’m usually so hans-on. But it works so well. I don’t use the pips, nor do I soak the peel overnight. The machine does a perfect job of it in one hour, while I get on with other things.

This next batch, I decide to make a straight seville orange batch, then another one with seville orange, ruby grapefruit and lemon. Lastly I add some of the bitter Chinotto

The ruby grapefruits are on at the moment so we are having one each morning before breakfast to cleanse our pallets and freshen us up to start the day, beautiful glowing colour and sharp astringent sour/sweet pulp.

After we have had our ruby grapefruit for breakfast, which The Sweet One has peeled in one long twisted strip of peel. I see that it looks so great. I don’t want to waste it, so I decide to add it to the next batch of marmalade. I will mix it with Seville orange and Myer lemon, with the addition of the finely sliced up twisted grapefruit skin from breakfast and a bitter Italian chinotto.

In this way I can call this batch of marmalade ‘bitter and twisted’.

I like it.

With best wishes from The Sweet One and her bitter and twisted marmalade maker

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Category Archives: in the kitchen

A world tour of our garden, in 3 meals.

The Luxury of Frugal Simplicity

The luscious excess of the summer garden

Resistance is Fertile

Much ado about netting

Half Baked

Of cabbages and King

Perfect Timing

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Bitter and twisted