Scottish morning rolls

This recipe is taken from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters. It is absolutely the best bread book I've encountered (though I've not encountered them all) and I am very glad to own it. Ask your library to buy it!

Overnight sponge
2.5g dried yeast
130g warm water
50g wholemeal flour
100g white flour

Dissolve yeast in water, then add everything else and mix. Put in large bowl, cover with plastic and leave on the bench for 12-18 hours.

Final dough
285g overnight sponge
350g white flour
100g wholemeal flour
5g salt
270g water
15g butter/lard/olive oil

Mix everything into a soft dough. Knead 6-10 minutes. Leave to rise for 1 hour. Divide into 12 pieces. Roll each one into a ball and then dip it into a bowl of flour. Then put each one on a baking tray (12 to a tray). I greased and added lunch paper (cheaper than labelled baking paper and seems to do the same job) but next time I'll see what happens or doesn't happen if I skip the paper.

Cook at 230 celsius for 5 minutes, then 210 for another 10 or so.

Long rise oat bread

The long soak and ferment oat bread is a fantastic success, the best bread I have made in a long long time. This is what I did:

Long rise oat bread
soak 1 C rolled oats in 1 C water and a splash of whey or lemon juice or yoghurt (this is to neutralise the phytates) overnight.

Next day, dissolve 1 T treacle in 1/2 C milk (I did this in a small saucepan over the stove). Then put the oat mixture, the milk mixture, 3 C flour (I used some white and some fineground wholemeal), 1 t salt and 1/4 dried yeast together in a large bowl. Mix everything together and then cover the bowl with a plate or plastic film and put somewhere warm overnight.

Next day, grease a loaf tin (standard issue NZ small baking loaf tin will be fine) and pour/scrape the mixture in. It will be quite wet. Cover with plastic and leave on the bench for two hours.

Cook for 30-35 minutes at 230 degrees celsius.

The oat bread is adapted from a recipe in Browne, Leach and Titchborne, The New Zealand Bread Book. Next up I am going to adapt their wholemeal baps recipe to a long rise method. Instead of 4 t surebake yeast, I'll be using 1/4 t dried yeast. This next recipe has no milk in it. I was a little unsure about leaving dough with milk in it overnight in the warm, although it has all turned out beautifully.

Two nights in a row...

St Patrick's Night, out without children. Tonight, out for writers' group without husband or children. Went to a bar after writers' group and yackity yacked some more. I feel like a kid who got Christmas and then a birthday straight afterwards. All this adult company.

In other news, I'm playing around with turning a standard modern fast bake bread recipe into a slow soak and ferment version. I'm using this oat bread recipe as my base. I had a phase last year of making this oat bread quite often. It is a Browne/Leach/Titchborne book and one thing I really like is the simplicity of their instructions. I do much prefer to make bread using cup and spoon measures. Measuring 60gm of water and 270gm of flour is just irritating and given my current kitchen tools, difficult. This afternoon I measured the cup of oats and the cup of (cold) water into a bowl with a splash of whey to soak overnight. Tomorrow afternoon I will heat the golden syrup and milk and add all the ingredients (using just 1/4 tsp of plain dried yeast) together and leave it in the cupboard overnight. Then two hours proving on Friday morning before cooking it.

I haven't been near the garden it seems, apart from a few stints of caterpillar squashing. The neglect is showing but the price of working in the garden with Brighid is that anything I plant will be pulled out, so just not worth it. Our chooks are still laying an egg each every day. Favourite Handyman put more wood chip in their run and I can see we may get access to quite a bit of untreated wood chip. Time soon then to dig up the lawn paths on each side of the old chook run garden and lay them with wood chip. Another job is to harvest the comfrey again and make more comfrey brew. I need to use my current brew to feed the brassicas around the garden, especially those which are only a month old or less. Much of the rest of the work is weeding, especially along one fence where the convulvulus from the neighbours is taking hold.

My decluttering is progressing. Two plastic bags of outgrown childrens' clothes went to a work colleague in the afternoon and I finally gave my maternity togs to the sallies. Finally. These togs which I bought new and wore only twice and which have for more than two years hung round the house, mostly the lounge being useless, are the emblem of my ridiculous clutter habit. So I have, I like to think, broken through an important barrier. I put out four bags of rubbish for landfill this morning. Not so very long ago at all this would have seemed a terrible failure. I kept almost everything and prided myself on having half of a bag most weeks for landfill. But the house was growing inside but not in the walls. We no longer had anywhere to sit. Flotsam and jetsam dominated my days and my nights. The cans didn't get recycled anyway, just squashed with the old cars. It will probably ease off a bit now all the lounge wallpaper is gone, but there is much clutter to be disposed off still and for a while yet, lots of bags are symbols of victory over chaos.

cauliflower mousse

Dad gave us a beautiful cauliflower from his garden earlier this week. We also had stale bread (due to my low carb project) and a small glut of eggs. So I pulled out my Amrita recipe book (Wellingtonions may remember the restaurant which produced the book) and found cauliflower mousse.

They did: eggs, cauliflower, onion, bread crumbs, cheese, milk, optional sunflower seeds

I did: eggs, cauliflower, onion, bread crumbs, cheese, kefir, brazil nuts, garlic, rosemary, thyme, marjoram and oragano.

We are drowning in kefir. I have it all out of whack because I am not a smoothy maker and I think I've lost the rubber seal for the smoothie attachment on my food processor so the children have not had any more kefir than a few teaspoons on their porridge. We have had kefir cheese and Favourite Handyman likes it and I drink kefir twice most days but it is hot here and the stuff is growing so fast that the milk is getting expensive. I was pleased to oblige when one friend rang today and explained that her husband had put the kefir in the fridge (I gave her a big jar of grains two days ago) and killed it and could she have some more.

So kefir instead of milk in the mousse and all the herbs and garlic because the original sounded rather plain. Brazil nuts because I am trying to up my selenium levels and it can't harm the rest of the family to get a bit more selenium.

It tasted very nice. For anyone fancying making the recipe, you saute the onions, garlic and then drop in the herbs for the second half of the sauteeing time. You cut up the cauli into small pieces and then put in a pot, bring to the boil and then strain water off. Grate the cheese (any old cheddar though I expect if you had fancy stronger hard cheeses they would be nice as well). Whizz up the bread into crumbs. I used grainy bread. Chop up the brazil nuts quite finely. Mix everything except the milk/kefir and the eggs together. Then beat the milk/kefir and the egg yolks together and mix in to the rest. Finally beat the egg whites until fluffy and then fold in. Put in a greased casserole and bake for about an hour at 180 degrees celsius.

I've been reading about brassicas being especially good for us human beings. I've also decided that I need to get to like cauliflower more and eat it more as it does grow in winter.

I served the mousse with sliced carrots and red peppers and a dollop of hummous. If I had been a less frazzled person at ten-to-six, I would have added something dark green as well. But frazzled I was and frazzled at ten-to-six is not the slightest bit uncommon.

other people's gardens and weird scones

The NZ Gardener website has recently posted a lovely collection of kiwi vege gardens. I enjoyed looking at them.

An update on my weird scone experiments. The buttermilk biscuits recipe from Sally Fallon was very salty, difficult to mix through because of the way she had the buttermilk (I used kefir) being absorbed by the flour long before the butter, baking soda and salt was added. I don't recommend it. I have also come to the conclusion that scones are supposed to be fast food. I am prepared to take ages to make bread, but not scones. So below I am copying (method slightly adapted to my shortcuts) the Edmonds Cookbook recipe for wholemeal yoghurt scones, which I will be using again. This is the one I used yesterday except I substituted kefir for the yoghurt, I also spilt the sugar, so ours were sweeter than strict adherence to the recipe would produce.

2 C wholemeal flour
1 t baking soda
3 t baking powder
50g butter
1 t sugar
1/2 C natural unsweetened yoghurt

Mix flour, soda and baking powder in a bowl. Cut butter into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in sugar and yoghurt. Mix to a soft dough. Lightly dust an oven tray with flour. Gently press scone mixture into a rectangle (directly on to the oven tray works fine and saves the need for messing up the bench or board further) which will divide into 8-12 scones. Cut them up and move away from each other to give space. Bake at 220 degrees celsius or until pale golden.

chicken soup and bean dip

When I was about 24, I got bells palsy. I had recently finished my Masters thesis, moved back to Christchurch and ditched the boyfriend. It was a lot of fun to go back to Dunedin for a weekend to present a paper at a postgraduate history conference and catch up with friends. On the Friday night we had a huge night on the town and I dragged myself to the conference just a few hours of sleep later to present some thoughts on women and booze. In Central Otago on the goldfields 100 years previously. Saturday night was more sedate and on Sunday I noticed with some alarm that one side of my face didn't move when I told it to. Well well well.

Once I had a diagnosis, I had to wait a week until I was well enough to travel back to Christchurch. During that week my lovely friend Asma came round each day and looked after me. And she made me chicken soup and that was when I understood that chicken soup was divine medicine. My previous encounters with chicken soup were of the maggi packet mix variety so it was no surprise that I had no previous chicken soup love. I remember that Asma put egg in it, that it tasted great and can't remember much else.

So two days ago when my son had a scary asthma attack, I wanted to make him chicken soup. With lots of garlic and ginger. My chicken stocks until today have always been made with the bones of roast chicken but this time I shelled out for a whole raw chicken. I cut the breasts and some of the leg meat off roughly and put that meat aside for a chicken stirfry tomorrow night. I then broke up the carcass and put it in a pot with two bay leaves from my own bay tree,`some carrots, some onions and water to cover the lot. I simmered that for just over an hour and then in another pot I sauteed garlic, ginger and shiitake mushroom (which I had soaked overnight) and then added chopped savoy cabbage and the stock liquid and the shiitake mushroom soaking liquid. When that was all boiling nicely, I added udon noodles, the shredded meat which I had separated from the bones while the cabbage et al was cooking and two raw eggs. Five minutes more cooking, lots of pepper, a little salt and we all had lovely chicken soup for lunch. And again for dinner. I will do this again. It's also a nice change from always starting a chicken with a roast. Because yes I am in the three meals from each bird brigade.

We eat a lot of hummous in our house. This is my standard recipe: 2 cans (390g each) of chickpeas, thrown in the food processor with 2-3 cloves of garlic, 2 tablespoons tahini, juice of 2 lemons, some fresh parsley and/or basil, pinch of salt. Whizz round for a while and then add some olive oil (I just stream it in - I'd guess it is 1-2 tablespoons' worth) and whizz that in also. Done.

I was feeling like widening my repertoire on the dip/spread front but hadn't come across anything I fancied making or eating or that used affordable ingredients. Until our coffee group went out on our Mothers' Work Do evening last Thursday and the lovely Nell, proprietor of the best eating and drinking establishment in our town, told me what was in her bean dip. So I had a go today and I'm pleased with the results. The colour isn't incredibly appealing but the taste is worth it. This is it:
1 can chickpeas (390g)
1 can red kidney beans (390g)
juice of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lime
2-3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon cumin seeds (I dry roasted mine and then ground them in the mortar and pestle)
2 tablespoons tahini

whizz all that together and then add a stream of olive oil (1-2 tablespoons worth) and whizz a bit more. Done.

kefir learning

An update on my growing things inside menagerie. I have been googling and have found some information on kefir from a very enthusiastic man called Dom. I've joined a yahoo group of making kefir as well. Now I need to read at least some of the messages.

Today I drank some of the kefir drink which you strain off the grains and I liked it. A very pleasant way to substitute for expensive probiotics from the health food shop. My grains seem to be growing and I've transferred them to a larger jar and added more milk. That's three days I've kept them alive for now.

I used the chicken stock to make risotto for dinner. When we were a gluten free, egg free household, we had risotto every week. I still like it, but I love having more options on the dinner front. I used the first zucchinis of this season in the risotto. From my own garden of course. This year I have an heirloom kind called costata romanesco which has a ribbed outer. I do apologise that that sounds like a description of the fancier kind of condoms. My zucchinis were very nice and I look forward to many more this season. From my one plant. The others died.

I've just finished making up the baked beans recipe and have put it in the slow cooker to cook overnight. I had to adapt it a bit for the slow cooker and for the unhelpful measures in the recipe. It is the first time I have cooked from my Sally Fallon book, Nourishing Traditions and I have a couple of niggles. A "small can of tomato paste" is not a helpful measure in an internationally marketed book. Not that it mattered too much as we had no tomato paste of any kind in the house and I snaffled a jar of pasta sauce from the charity Christmas giving bag to use instead. I used some apple cider vinegar and presumed rather hopefully that it would not matter that it is three years old. My other niggle is that a cup is not the easiest way to measure sticky liquids like maple syrup and molasses. By standing on chairs and searching behind the old kitchen chippy chimney, I managed to find our maple syrup and molasses. I hope this recipe is yummy, as it could be the answer to using up more things which have collected in my cupboard. The odd ingredients retirement home needs an overhaul.

I bought a gingerbread man cutter because I have this probably overblown, optimistic idea that Fionn and I will make gingerbread men and send up to his whanau (extended family) up north for that day.

I sneaked a bit of weeding in before it started to rain this morning. Christy I am sorry that your garden is dry. I am feeling like we can't possibly live in the same country - there has been absolutely no need to water here and our garden produce is a long way behind yours. My raspberry plant is still only ten centimetres high. But I did find an actual fruit as differentiated from merely some flowers on one tomato plant this morning. So there is hope.

flowers and tomatoes

I did finish weeding the watercress out and I dug that end of the old chook run over, removing the dead zucchini along the way. I've now planted the rest of the tomato plants in the new space. They may be too late going in, but I think it's worth trying.

Last night I had admired some beautiful flowers in my friend's garden and this afternoon she brought some bulbs (in plant and flower) around for me. Very very lovely. They are now living in the corner of the potato patch, which is a space where we can see and admire them often. I don't know their name yet.

Although one zucchini has died the other, planted out the front quite a while ago, is doing wonderfully and I think we will be eating zucchini by the end of this week.

I planted out the rest of my sunflower seedlings this evening. They are out the front in my yellow garden. The yellow garden is all weeds at the back (too much to attempt at once and that is still our dumping ground for large tree clippings and rose prunings) and is also sporting a riot of orange nasturtiums. I must put them in a salad soon. The pumpkins are also in the yellow garden and they are doing rather averagely. My explanation so far is that they need deep compost and do not have it. Underneath the thinnish layer of horse manure and pea straw which has been settling down and baking compost all winter, the soil is not very rich and is mostly taken up with large tree roots.

Today is Westland Anniversary Day so we were all home which is how I got to escape alone into the garden. I do appreciate it. I also made bread and turned traffic light peppers (red/yellow/green peppers in a plastic pack - yes green God I have sinned) and baked beans into something that looked exactly like that but made me feel like we weren't having beans on toast for the millionth time. I still had some garlic butter mix left over from the garlic bread I made up last night and that went on the toast with the traffic light beans most satisfactorily.

No cooked beans or gingerbread so far nor is it particularly likely. I am reading a book Margaret Mahy which I'm enjoying and being inspired re: children's literature. Favourite Handyman has spent much of the day reading The Faraway Tree to Fionn. Ah, Enid Blyton. My childhood friend. Great to see my son making friends with her as well.

Onion weed

I gathered an armful of onion weed this morning and cleaned and prepared it (like spring onions, chop off roots and about half of the green part, rest to be used) and put it in the roasting tray with some huge winter carrots from my Dad's garden and some celery from my garden. I drizzled them with oil and let it cook at 150 celsius for about 60 minutes. The roasting tray was quite full and the veges wet from being cleaned so they half steamed and half roasted. Then I whizzed the mix up in the food processor and wondered what I might do with it next.

Next I played round with broccoli pesto after seeing a recipe online which I didn't actually follow because I have banned myself from the computer for all but 20 minutes in the evening. But mine was similar except I used parsley for the non-broccoli green.

Tonight I cooked pasta and then sauteed some anchovies in a pan and added the onion weed/celery/carrots mixture and a bit of tomato sauce. I mixed that with the cooked pasta and then topped each plate with the broccoli pesto. It tasted nice. Not likely to win any awards and certainly not restaurant fare on aesthetics, but "Thank you Mummy, I like this" from the boy who was very doubtful throughout the cooking part did very nicely for applause.

We got our first egg on Saturday and then two yesterday and two today. The run is too wet for them though - increased vulnerability to disease. So we will stake the run into the ground and add plastic to keep it dry. We are now talking about building the glasshouse this summer and making that their winter home while I plant winter veges into the current run spot. Then swap over in summer so the glasshouse can grow tomatoes.

I gave my Dad two sub arctic oregon tomato seedlings which I had grown on Saturday. Mum and Dad were over to watch Fionn's final in the rugby league. Hoki dared to beat us once this season and they paid for that on Saturday. Those little 5 and 6 year old boys and girls in Fionn's team thrashed Hoki soundly. I never thought I'd be a sporting girl, but Saturday was full on excitement. Well well well.

Back to gardening. I also gave Dad some of my pumpkin and zucchini seeds. The climate in his garden is quite different to here and it will be interesting to compare results. My neighbour was talking about the article on heirloom tomato varieties and health benefits in the weekend but didn't know where she could buy seeds or plants. I lent her my Kings Seeds catalogue. Spreading the word on genuine food diversity one friend at a time.

Yesterday was the local Lions fertiliser fundraiser. I joined the queue for sheep manure, blood and bone and powedered sheep manure. I didn't want superphosphate, but happy to put the other things on my garden.

rich risotto

Tonight's risotto was very flavoursome. Possibly the richest rice broth I've made. I think these were the successful steps.
1. chicken stock with lots and lots of carrots. My Dad gave me some huge carrots from his garden recently and I used one raw chicken carcass ($1.49 from the supermarket), lots of carrots, bay leaves, black peppers, two onions and a head of garlic. Cooked in the slow cooker for about 20 hours.
2. I used lots of roasted garlic in with the broccoli and peas for the vegetable part of the risotto.
3. At almost the end of cooking, I added most of a packet of feta cheese and lots of black pepper.

sugar and stealing

Today I wrote about the sugar on the floor.

After school Fionn and I went out stealing. Grass. It must be Spring. The council mowed the large verge at the end of our street and we took big and little wheelbarrows and the rake down there and filled them. When we got back home we added it to the beautiful wormy home made compost which we had strewn over the punga raised bed. Should enrich the soil for the garlic and yams and the climbing rose.

I still love the chooks.

I made carrot and ginger and kumara soup for dinner. I used beef stock from the freezer for the liquid, bacon pieces and borlotti beans for the protein and I added a few handfuls of dried seaweed - wakame I think it's called. It was good. I should use it more often.

Don't even wash the pot

Great scheme. I threw the rooster in the slow cooker for the day (with lemon thyme, oil, paprika), added yams at lunchtime and then pulled the bird and yams out at dinnertime. Stripped the carcass of meat and put the carcass back in the slow cooker (which still held the cooking juices) with carrots, onions with skin on, celery, black peppercorns, parsley and bay leaves.

I'll have another look at it in the morning.

The latest NZ Gardener magazine arrived today. Weed of the month is creeping buttercup and it likes poorly drained soils. We have loads and heaps and more loads of creeping buttercup in our garden and lawn. But our rainfall is so massive, especially lately. I don't know that the soil is really compacted or clay heavy, just that it has to deal with so much rain. The tests in gardening books about waiting for an hour to watch water drain don't mention about round here where sometimes it takes days and days (and more days) to get an entire hour free of rain.

Sprouts are good though. Sprouts lift my food growing soul wherever in the world oron the calendar I am.

I've made some weight loss goals. This is unusual behaviour for me. Maybe I'll post more another time.

that winter feeling

Nothing terrible, just endless sausages. I can see a week or so of food planning online (i.e. here) could help lift the fog of sameness. I held off doing a large-ish organic beans and pulses order because a friend had offered to get some last week. She brought me back some borlotti beans which soaked all of today and are now on low in the slow cooker for the night. I have in mind to add chilli and pumpkin to them tomorrow morning and hopefully it is all yummy by night time and then the last of my kale can go in.

I've pulled the last home slaughtered rooster out of the freezer to defrost. That can slow cook all of Wednesday. This time I'll keep the cooking juices for stock.

I've put radish and alfalfa seeds in a jar to soak tonight and have more yoghurt in the yoghurt thermos. I made parsley hummous this morning and that helps fill the lunchboxes. The apple crumble I made this afternoon went down well tonight and there are small portions in containers for the children's lunches tomorrow.

I'm keen to play round with soda bread this week and I want to make the recipe I spotted again today for roasted garlic and pea puree. If it turns out as good as it looks in my recipe book, then it could be another lunch box hit.

anchovy experiment

It's raining and lunarly non-sowing time.

Lately I've noticed newspapers running recipe columns of budget fare. Only they don't generally strike me as budget type meals at all. Nice bean dish but then big slabs of fresh fish on top. Nice bean dish but then chorizo sausages (the expensive 'real' kind) with it. They never strike my could-come-in-under-$6 per-meal radar.

Which in a perhaps illogical way got me thinking about anchovies. Someone was on the radio this morning putting anchovies in with some flash nice bit of meat which was a concept Nigella Lawson introduced me to (through her book, I don't have fabulous connections). Only expensive meat plus expensive anchovies always seemed too much for part time profligate but part time skinflint me.

So this afternoon I'm having a bob both ways. Cheap meat and anchovies. The glamorous cooks always stress really good anchovies. I have no idea. Here in small town you can't always even buy any anchovies so I just buy what I can get.

In the oven now (not thinking food in time to use the slow cooker):
sausages (pork and pineapple which is an unfortunate type I suspect but too late now)
onion
garlic
sun dried tomatoes
mushrooms
pumpkin
rosemary
anchovies
tin of chopped tomatoes

I shall report further tonight.

Egg-less chocolate cake and black bean soup

Egg-less chocolate cake
The chocolate cake recipe is an adaptation from one in the New Zealand Food Allergy Cookbook. I added the jam and linseeds because I thought the jam would be yummy and the linseeds, of which we have many in the fridge being used too slowly, might fit in as well.

1 C sugar
250g melted butter
1-3 t of ground cloves/mixed spice/ground cinnamon
3 T cocoa powder
1 C warm water
1 t baking soda
2 C plain flour
1 dessertspoon of jam
1 dessertspoon of ground linseeds

Mix sugar, spices and cocoa. Dissolve baking soda in the water and add to the spice mixture. Sift the flour and add to the wet mixture. Mix the linseeds and jam together and then add to the cake mixture. Mix well and then tip into a greased round cake tin, about 20-22cm. Cook at 180 degrees celsius for about 45 minutes.

We had friends over for dinner last night and served the cake with yoghurt for pudding. I have no idea how long it keeps for as ours got eaten very quickly.

Black Bean Soup
This comes from Nigella Lawson's How to Eat. I love this book, both her writing and her lovely hedonistic joy in food. Serves eight, makes great leftovers.
450 g dried black turtle beans
2 bay leaves
200ml extra virgin olive oil
2 large red peppers, seeded and chopped
2 shallots, chopped
2 onions, chopped
8 cloves garlic, chopped
1 T ground cumin
2 T ground dried oregano
zest of 1 lime, plus more limes for serving
0.5 T sugar
1 T salt
2 T dry sherry
1 red onion, diced, to serve
coriander, chopped
250 ml sour cream to serve

No need to soak the beans, cover with 2 litres of water, add bay leaves and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 1.5-2 hours until soft but not squishy, adding more water if necessary to keep well covered. (Could do this bit in the pressure cooker - I did last time but forget for how long)

Heat olive oil in a large frying pan and saute the peppers, shallots and onions until the onions are translucent - about 15 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, oregano and lime zest and cook for a further 5 minutes. Put in a blender and puree until smooth.

When the beans are almost tender, add the pureed mixture, sugar, salt and sherry. Serve with bowls of sour cream,`limes, red onion and coriander so that people can add as they wish. Tabasco goes down well also.

Things I have found out: we love sour cream with this. We never seem to have coriander at the right time which is a shame as it is lovely. Good without though or with parsley instead. I always put lime zest in, but not always on the table due to cost. All onions is fine if you don't have shallots. I don't always bother with red onions on the table. Next time I'm going to try it without bothering to puree the red pepper mixture. Given that I don't seem to have a kitchen fairy, a meal which involves the pressure cooker, the frypan AND the food processor is a little overkill on the dirty dishes front. This is very filling. You could fit in dessert if it is a special meal, but not a main course as well. Definitely main course soup imo.

The food cupboard

I signed off my using up the cupboard project the other day because I'd had enough of it.

But since then I've noticed on several occasions that the exercise is having lasting impact. Though I am loving not trying to think of a use for the amaranth any more. I am much more aware of the full extent of what is in my cupboards and am using the range of ingredients better.

I made focaccia yesterday. What a hit! Favourite Handyman said it was the best foccaccia he had ever eaten and I think it tastes like the focaccia at Carluccio's which I used to eat when we went into London central. Which is a pretty high compliment to myself. The recipe is from Annabel Langbein's Savour Italy, which my parents sent to me for Christmas in 2001, the year we spent Christmas in Bologna, Italy. It seemed very much a kiwi take on Italian food at the time and kind of crazy to have a kiwi recipe book in the middle of Italy, but now I'm back in NZ and the holiday is just a memory, this book is just perfect.

Potato focaccia dough and toppings
250g potatoes, peeled and chopped or 1 packed C Mashed potato
1.5 C warm water
1.5 t dried yeast
0.25 C extra virgin olive oil
4.5-5 C high grade flour, extra to knead
2 t salt
a little olive oil to knead

Boil potatoes in lightly salted water until tender. Drain thoroughly, dry over heat in pan to evaporate any excess water. Mash until fine. Leave to cool for a few minutes.

Place warm water in large mixing bowl and sprinkle yeast over top. Stand for two minutes, mix in mashed potato and oil.

Sir in flour and salt, mixing until the dough just starts to come away from the sides of the bowl. The dough will be quite sticky. Using lightly oiled hands, knead for 10 minutes, adding more flour if the dough is too sticky.

Put dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and leave in a warm place for about 1 hour, un til doubled in bulk. Turn out onto a l,ightly floured board (surely everyone else just uses the benchtop like me though?) and divide into three.

I divided into just two and then, making one half at a time (the other half which had been left to rise much longer was still great but we don't have a big enough oven to do both lots at once), I flattened the dough into a rectangle on an oiled baking tray and rested for 10 minutes. Then I pressed it out to cover most of the tray, covered with a clean cloth and stood in a warm place 30 minutes.

Heat oven to 200 degrees celsius. Dimple the top of the dough with your fingers. The chopped up bits of food which I added (using up some long neglected olives and tomatoes) were:

version 1: green olives, red pepper, sun dried tomatoes, basil, oregano, then drizzled with oil and sprinkled with salt.

version 2: I pre-roasted in the oven some pumpkin, carrots and onion together with rosemary and oregano. Then I put that (cooled) on top of the dough together with olives, sun dried tomatoes and basil. Drizzled with oil and sprinkled with salt.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden. Remove from tray and cool on a rack.

Today I have used Hoisin sauce for the first time ever. It's in the slow cooker together with pork strips, kumara, onions, ginger, garlic and pineapple. I have no idea how it will turn out, particularly as I cobbled the recipe out of guidelines from other things. Alison Holst's slow cooker book is always suggesting prebrowning things. Which I never do. The point of the slow cooker is to make life easy, and having frying pans to be washed by 9 o'clock in the morning does not feel 'easy'. So I ignore her. I know she is a kiwi icon (is she on a stamp yet?), but I don't trust her advice too much these days. Bad advice on cooking chickpeas (just 3 hours in the slow cooker?!) and too much inclusion of premixed packet stuff. And merchandise. Brand Holst.

One more food comment today before I deal to the unholy and no doubt growing-unwelcome-bacteria food mess on the dining room floor before the baby wakes up.

Happy blog birthday Joanna. Joanna's blog was one of the first foodie blogs I took a shine to on the internet last year when I started venturing into blogland. I think it is my favourite foodie blog of all the ones I have encountered which aren't by people I already knew outside of blogland. Thank you for all you share with us Joanna. Thanks also for the links to your key posts. I'd never heard of Skordalia before and now I'm keen to try making it. Rich sauces with no egg in them but plenty of superfood garlic are very welcome to my repertoire.

peasant food, tobacco and beer

Rice pudding was successful. I ate lots of it. 1/2 C short grain rice, 3 C milk, 2-3 T sugar, 1 t vanilla, pinches of nutmeg and cinnamon. Put on low for 3-4 hours in the (greased) slow cooker.

I've been looking through my Spanish recipe book. I have the great pleasure of owning Culinaria Spain, a story of Spanish food, customs and recipes region by region.

As I often do, I've been reading up on traditional food growing and preparation practices and recalling what I saw and learnt during our time travelling in Spain. I've been thinking this time particularly about meat and bean use in peasant cooking. The gorgeous Fabada which I remember so fondly from the Asturias is now made with big chunks of meat and while it was once so for the wealthy, one piece of preserved pig goes a long way to flavour a bean stew in more modest homes.

Now I'm thinking about a kind of modest self sufficiency where the animal protein might come from one slaughtered pig per annum, together with the eggs of three chooks, the meat of 2-3 roosters and the occasional haul of fish. How much meat would that be per week on average? I don't have the data to help me work it out but I'd hazard 1-2 times per week. I've read some graphic accounts of traditional pig slaughter and they all observe that no part of the pig is wasted.

I've still got leftovers from yesterday's/tonight's vegetarian soup. Even though everyone ate up well on it again this evening. I've played around successfully with bacon bones, pork bones and chorizo providing flavours for predominantly bean and veg meals since we've been back in New Zealand. Next trip to Blackball Salami, I'm going to buy some black and white puddings and see what I can create with them. Meat as flavour, not as filler, is my project. Or one of a trillion projects.

We've been discussing the tobacco, Favourite Handyman and I. Looks like we have sufficient harvest to last nearly all year. Massive sigh of financial relief. I am thrilled. Now we're both talking about having a go at home brewed beer.

So on the list for new seed for Spring:

hops

cannelini beans

chickpeas

early and late potatoes

pumpkins for eating. The amount of pumpkin seeds sitting lost and unloved in our cupboards tells me clearly not to bother with growing for edible seed again.

Using up the cupboard day eight

Guess how many odd and previously unloved ingredients I used today?

xanthan gum
buckwheat flour
potato flour
dates
cannelini beans
sage

I made orange and date muffins from theNZ Food Allergy Cookbook. They turned out well and I was pleased to empty one packet of dates. Though in the past it appeared that I was so pleased that I was hardly eating the first packet of dates that I went ahead and bought more. So there are still dates to use up. nI had never used the xanthan gum before, despite paying about NZ$8 for a small packet. All specialty gluten free items atract price increases of about 400% it seems.

1 whole orange, chopped with pips removed (I used 3 mandarins)
3/4 C orange juice
125g dairy free margarine, melted (I used butter as dairy isn't a problem here)
1.5 C plain flour or equal quantities of buckwheat, barley, rice or potato flours (I used 1/2 C each of buckwheat flour, potato flour and wholemeal flour)
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
3/4 C sugar
1 t xanthan gum
3/4 C pitted dates, chopped.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celsius. Lightly grease (I cheat and use paper muffin cups inside the muffin tray) a 12 muffin tin.
Process orange and juice in a food processor until well chopped.
Add margarine/butter and mix.
Sift dry ingredients and add dates.
Combine the liquid ingredients and dry ingredients carefully.
Spoon into muffin tins and bake for about 15 minutes.

Cannelini beans aren't especially unloved in our house, but until now we haven't eaten them much. Tonight I took a can of cannelini beans and heated it up with a leaf of sage (which I virtually never use - we have it in the herb garden), chopped garlic, rosemary, kale and bacon pieces (the ends which I buy in packets at half the per kilo price of sliced bacon). Favourite Handyman and I liked it a lot. The cannelini beans picked up the bacon flavour beautifully and it reminded us of the Fabada stew which we adored when we travelled through the north of Spain. I'll be mucking round with cannelini beans and cured pig products like bacon and black and white puddings again this winter. Perhaps I can make a NZ version of Fabada. The kale worked well with it also.

Kings Seeds sell cannelini bean seeds so that will be on my summer growing list. Won't be getting too ahead of myself on expectations after the tiny borlotti bean harvest this season recently finished though.

Using up the cupboard day 7

Languishing ingredients targeted today: yeast, treacle, flour

I have five days to use up two containers of yeast if I am to keep within the best before dates. Even if I don't keep within them, I think the signs are clear that I need to be making some bread.

I was very pleased with today's effort: oat bread. It comes from the New Zealand Bread Book by Browne, Leach and Tichborne.

1 C rolled oats
1 T treacle
1/2 C boiling milk
1 C boiling water
1 C white flour
1 t salt
1 T Surebake dried yeast
1.5-2 C white flour

Place rolled oats and treacle in a small bowl. Add the boiling milk and water. Stir to mix. Leave to cool for ten minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the fijrst measure of flour with the salt and yeast. Stir to mix. Add the very warm oat mixture and beat until well mixed. Leave to rest for 3 minutes. Add 1.5 C of the second measure of flour and add enough extra flour to make a soft dough. Knead for 7-10 minutes or until dough is elastic. Return to bowl and cover. leave to rest for 15 minutes.

Knead the dough for 1 minute. Shape to fit a round bread pot or loaf tin. Brush the surface of the dough with a little metled butter or cooking oil. Cover loosely with plastic. Leave in a warm place to double in size. Bake in hot oven, 220-230 degrees celsius, for 30-35 minutes.

I am shaving dollars off our shopping bill and using our cupboard ingredients much more efficiently, perhaps even wisely. But I seem to be in the kitchen most of the day. Which is not quite the same zen for me as being in the garden all day. When the rain stops, the cupboards may find themselves resting for a while.

I did escape the kitchen and go buy loads of sausages by our favourite country pub this afternoon. The stopping at the pub part was the best.

This morning I had intended to cook chickpeas in the slow cooker as I've managed to break my pressure cooker. But a discussion with Melanie about this gave me the idea that I should preboil the chickpeas first. I'd never heard this advocated for chickpeas before, only red kidney beans, but thought I'd include it. Only once I'd filled the stock pot and boiled it, I didn't fancy dirtying another pot (the crockpot) and I also realised I'd begun to cook such a very large amount, nearly 1 kg of dried chickpeas, that it wouldn't fit in my otherwise good-sized slow cooker. Now I have eight containers of chickpeas in the freezer. What a good girl I think I am.

Using up the cupboard meal 1

It's worse really. I neglected to notice three kinds of expensive premixed gf flour plus some ryemeal during my initial audit. This doesn't count the flours I have been using of late.

So last night's dinner of marrow and lentil concoction in the slow cooker turned out nice. Like a bulky soup. I made far too much of course and so I greased a casserole dish and then scooped the remains of the meal into that to store in the fridge. Tonight I think I'll make a pie crust for the top and reheat it in the oven. Will pile lots of dark green leaves from the garden in first. To go with the soupy concoction (marrow and lentil chowder?), I made gf cheese scones. Which were a hit.

Marrow and lentil chowder.
1 marrow, peeled, split lengthwise into quarters, seeds removed and then sliced
red lentils, I just poured straight from the packet. I'd estimate a cup.
1 kumara (sweet potato), peeled and sliced thinly
1 onion, finely sliced.
3 garlic cloves, chopped.
1cm piece of ginger, chopped.
2 sticks of celery, chopped
curry powder, coriander seeds, whatever gentle curry flavours you have and want to use
thyme and bay leaves
2 tins of tomatoes.
Extra water if it doesn't look enough for the lentils to expand into.

Bung it all into the slow cooker and cook on slow most of the day. I added sultanas afterwards, simply because I found some when I had thought we didn't own any for weeks. Favourite Handyman and Fionn both complimented me on dinner which was too lovely not to mention.

Cheese scones
2 cups Horleys gf baking mix
2 tsps baking powder
75 g grated cheese
1.25 cups milk

sift first 2 ingredients, then mix in cheese. Then mix in milk. Knead for a minute and then shape into a rectangle and cut into 12 small scones. Put on lightly floured tray in oven for 10 minutes at 215 degrees celsius.

Today I want to make some bread, low gluten rather no gluten I expect. I am pretty sure we have sufficient ingredients for several loaves, spinning out the bread until Wednesday. I am trying to get back to shopping for groceries only once a week. Multiple shops make it very difficult to know exactly how much we are spending on food per week.

I have some ambitious (for me) goals for this using up the cupboard project. I want to work out what we really eat, and want to eat, and find useful and make up a meta list of ingredients which I can choose from when I write the shopping list for the week. I presume I am not the only person in the world prone to throwing unusual items into the shopping trolley because they'd be nice for a change and then leaving them to languish and die in the back of the cupboard or fridge.

Being an incorrigible drama queen, I have visions of the global food shortage getting really dire for the wealthy world as well as Haiti and Africa (and and and, sadly), so these skills I am developing should keep us in good stead for coping. I want us to cope well enough that we can donate to the Sallies' food bank or similar organisation cos there are going to be some hungry people in our small town soon, if not already.

Getting some chooks is looking even more of a good idea than last summer (is that possible? I was obsessed!). We need to find the time to make a house for the chooks though. Given that on Friday I managed to break the garage door closed, leaving the car and my wallet inside, chook houses remain a while down the maintenance/building projects list. There is a side door to the garage, and FH had to undo the three rows' deep stack of firewood to get through it in order to open the garage door. It was one way of saving money and zilching petrol use...