My glut crop at the moment is lemons. It’s not quite the glut it was last year.  Last year at this time, this was what the bush lemon tree looked like, and we have four lemon trees of different varieties.

But at the end of the season last year, we pruned the tree fairly heavily – it was getting too tall and thorny to harvest effectively – and fed it with manure and mulch.  So this year we only have three trees bearing too many lemons.

These little lemon cheesecake tarts are a great party food – easy and cheap to make in bulk this time of year when lemons are in season, and they travel and keep well.   They cook so fast, you can make them in batches which means you don’t need industrial quantities of baking gear – just a couple of muffin trays and a couple of biscuit trays.  They are wonderful warm in a bowl with a little cream, but just as good cold eaten straight from the hand, which makes them perfect for parties and no washing up. I brought these out at the end of a Halloween celebration (southern hemisphere Halloween, early May) and they were a big hit.

The Recipe:

The Pastry

Turn the oven on to heat up.  You want a medium hot oven.

I use my Braun food processor to blend:

• 4 cups of wholemeal plain flour
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 250 grams (1 cup, or two sticks) butter

till it resembles breadcrumbs.  It takes literally seconds in the food processor.  If your food processor won’t do it, you can rub the butter in with your fingertips the old fashioned way.  Don’t overprocess it – little flakes of butter are fine.  The key to making good pastry is not overworking it.

Then add cool water, little bit by little, till the dough holds together in a ball.  It will take about a third of a cup. Again, don’t overwork it.

Roll the pastry out on a floured benchtop till it is ½cm or so thick, then cut rounds with a small bowl.

Lightly grease muffin tins with butter and line them with the pastry.  It will flute a little since the pastry is flat and the muffin tins cups, but that gives a nice shape to the finished tarts.  Prick the bottom of each with a fork.

Bake the pastry cases for around 10 minutes till they are firm.  Try to catch them just before they start colouring.  I don’t bother with beans or rice or anything to bake blind.  The pricking helps them not to rise, but if they do, it doesn’t matter. You should be able to tip the cases out and line them up on biscuit trays for filling.

The Filling:

While the cases are baking, you can make the filling. Using the trusty food processor again, blend together:

• 1½ cups of lemon juice
• 3 teaspoons of finely grated lemon zest
• 1½ cups of raw sugar (not brown sugar this time, or it makes the filling a caramel colour).
• 1½ teaspoons vanilla essence
• 6 eggs
• 250 grams (1 cup) Danish feta, or some other smooth, creamy, salty white cheese like goat’s cheese. (Australian feta doesn’t give you the same smooth texture.)

Baking:

Fill the pastry cases immediately before you put them back into the oven to bake.   If you fill too early, they soak in and the pastry is soggy. You will probably need to do it in a couple of batches, so halve the filling so you can fill the first and second batch of cases evenly. A jug makes filling easy, and you need a cloth to catch drips.  Don’t overfill – they do rise a little and if they overflow or drip, the filling sticks and burns.

Bake in a medium hot oven for 15 minutes or so, till the pastry is just starting to brown and the filling is nearly set.  Take them out of the oven and dust with icing sugar, using a sifter or sieve to get a nice fine even dusting.  Put back into the oven for a final five minutes.

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TEDx was awesome.  Awesome.

I’ve been a fan of TED videos for a long time, but being there at the Opera House for a whole day program was a different experience.  I think  a big part of it was an unexpected one.  I expected to find the whole “Grow It Local” aspect wonderful. But I didn’t expect so many blow-your-mind  ideas and performances that came from my left field – ideas I would never have thought to seek on my own.

Like space archeology.  Who would have thought that space junk could be so historically interesting?  Or Michael West‘s Welcome to Country – a welcome where I felt truly welcomed.  There was one word in it that was just so profound.  He spoke of us all, as Australians, sharing the 60,000 year plus history of the place. Us.

Or Veren Grigorov.  I’ve never actually listened to classical violin ever before and I get it. I get why people love it.  And Omar Musa with truly Shakespearean  rap poetry. And Greg Sheehan winning a debate for me, that I have had going with a friend of mine, about whether music and maths are inextricably related.  And Marita Cheng about girls and engineering – how cool is she!  And George Khut about turning biofeedback into art. And the Tasty Bits videos, specially the “First Tastes” one above, and “Hank and the Pink Balloon” below.

And the food.  Beyond just the idea of crowd farming, of catering for an event like this as local as local can be and as in-season as in-season can be, there was also the sheer quality of it.  The smooth creamy potato salad and wondering whether this was Milkwood’s nicolas.  The mandarins and grapes (who grew those grapes!).  The Brasserie Bread potato and rosemary sourdough that I’m going to have to try to replicate.  The Pepe Saya cultured butter.  

There’s another post somewhere, but it will take a week or so of mulling to emerge.  Meanwhile….

Ever since my kids were little, this has been my staple for taking to fetes and school race days, to birthday parties and picnics, even to mums’ gatherings where it is likely a bribe might be required at some stage.  It’s sugar cane,  a chewing variety, just with the tough outer layer peeled off and chopped into sections. It’s still tough and fibrous, but kids love to suck and chew the sweet juice then throw away the fibre left.

I have had the same cultivar of red sugar cane growing for over quarter of a century now.  It’s a beautiful plant, two metre tall deep purple canes growing in clumps and needing very little attention.  I can’t remember where it came from or what it was called, but I think it is probably Georgia Red, a variety specially bred for chewing.

In my subtropical climate it grows easily and I normally have several stands growing at any one time on the south side of garden beds.  I can cut a length of cane whenever I want some.  After a couple of years, a patch starts getting rambling. Old canes straggle and lie down and the patch needs serious cleaning up and thinning out. To create a new patch,  I cut metre long lengths of cane in late summer and plant them horizontally, just lightly covered.  In spring the cane shoots up from each bud.  There’s probably a more efficient way to get better yields, but this is no work and means I have a treat available on a moment’s notice.

It’s also pretty hardy. It needs water and it doesn’t like a heavy frost, and it needs some real heat to sprout (maybe use a glasshouse?), but it can cope with quite cool weather and if you are not out for maximum productivity the range can probably extend well into temperate regions.

Sugar cane eaten like this is actually quite healthy.  It’s a fun way rather than a fast way to eat sugar. It has a low GI, the chewing and fibre makes it good for teeth, it has a fair range of minerals and some really good phytonutrients that have lots of traditional medicinal properties now being researched.

Instantly available, no bake, highly popular, reasonably healthy – the perfect kid’s party food.

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My glut crop this week is chilis.   The chooks get bucketfuls. They like chilis.  Birds (all kinds) have no receptors for capsaicin, so they’re immune to chili heat.  An evolutionary strategy from chilis to get their seeds spread I guess.  There are some chilis in my garden from about November till well into winter, but this is about the peak of the season when I make Chili Jam , Pickled Chilis, Tamarillo and Chili Sauce, Kasundi, and Dried Chilis and Chili Powder so I’ve got something to add some spice to late winter and spring cooking.

But there’s a limit to my enthusiasm for preserving.  I find it easier most of the time to organise my gardening to have something fresh than it is to preserve, and better in all sorts of ways.  I never freeze or bottle vegetables or fruit these days.  Having a tiny freezer in my tiny fridge is part of it – fridges are electicity guzzlers. If I calculate in the cost of electricity or gas to bottle or freeze the saving starts to disappear rapidly.  But mostly it’s because I’ve learnt that they tend to stay in the freezer or on the shelf whilever there is a fresh alternative.  Even when my garden is a tribute to neglect, the way it is right now, there is always something fresh that I’ll go for in preference to the frozen or bottled produce.

Once I have some chili hot condiments for us and for gifting, and some dried and pickled chilis for adding some heat to cool-of-the-year dishes, I still have bushes full of chilis.  Chilis Rellenõs are a really good way to use lots of chilis in a party plate.  They are astonishingly not-hot for something made with whole chilis.  The oil in the frying and in the cheese filling mellows out the chili heat so that even people who are not red-hot spice lovers go back for seconds and thirds.

The Recipe

Makes two dozen Bishop’s Crown chilis.

Wear gloves, or really remember not to touch your eyes for hours, to deseed  your chilis.  Cut the top off each one and pull out the seeds. I use the blade of a thin knife to swivel round inside, then rinse the seeds out under running water.  Make the hole as small as you reasonably can, so the filling stays in.

The Filling:

Separate two eggs.  Keep the whites for the batter. (You may find it a little easier to whisk the whites if the eggs are a day or two old – very fresh eggs can be a little harder to whisk).

Blend the yolks with some cheese.  I use 80 grams of  feta and 4 dessertspoons of cottage cheese, but you can use whatever mixture of cheeses you like.  You are looking for a smooth filling the texture of cream cheese.  Add a cup of herbs and blend in. My first choice is lemon basil, mint and dill – all cool herbs.  But again, lots of substitutions are possible.

Use a teaspoon and your thumbs to fill the chilis.

The Batter:

Beat the egg whites with an egg beater until they form soft peaks. (This will really truly take a matter of seconds).

Sift two-thirds of a cup of plain flour or besan with a pinch of salt.  If you use wholemeal flour, discard the coarser bran you sift out.

Mix the sifted flour with two-thirds of a cup of milk to make a batter that’s just a little bit runny, then fold the batter into the beaten egg whites.

Frying:

Heat about 2 cm of oil with a high smoke point in a heavy bottomed fry pan.  (I use light olive oil for frying like this.)

Dip each filled chili in batter, coating it completely, then drop it into the hot oil.  They will take just a few minutes each to cook, and it’s best not to overcrowd the pan.  Use tongs to turn them so they brown on all sides, then drain on brown paper.

They’re at their best served hot, with a cold drink and some good conversation (or salsa music!)

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We have a magnificent, 20 year old pecan tree on the eastern side of our house, shading the verandah that runs along that side.  It is deciduous, and so in winter it loses all its leaves and the verandah is bathed in light, a glorious spot to sit and eat breakfast in the sun, or for a Sunday brunch party.  It’s quite late to leaf up again in Spring but just as the sun is getting belligerent in October it bursts into leaf.  For all the summer the verandah is cool and shady and you can sit and watch the myriad of birds that use it.

From New Year on, you can see the nuts developing.  But you have to be patient.  You have to wait until the husk opens and the nut is ready to fall of its own accord.  Early picked nuts never ripen. As we have discovered.

By about the beginning of March, the cockatoos start considering the nuts ripe enough for them and flocks arrive every day.  We bang pots and throw things and generally swear at them and if we are lucky, manage to scare them off enough to allow some nuts to ripen.  By early April, the brush turkeys start considering the nuts ripe enough and the tree is full of big black birds along with the big white ones. Finally, by mid April the husks start opening. We lay tarps under the tree and shake branches with a bamboo pole to get the nuts to drop.  Any that are not collected straight away are gone – brush turkeys, bush rats, even ducks love them.

Finally, by late April, we are harvesting pecans, after all this more than I can be bothered cracking.  I’ve spent most of last weekend cracking pecans for TEDx , and there’s a big basket waiting for me to get some enthusiasm for cracking again.  I’m thinking pesto and pilaff and fruit and nut bread and seedy biscuits and chocolate beetroot brownies and a spiced pecans recipe that I’ll post if I get around to making it.  Anyone have any favourite pecan recipes?

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This has been a very recurring staple in our household lately, one of my very favourite recipes for both dinner parties and just us at home.  It’s really fast and easy and cheap and healthy for weeknight dinners, but also good enough that it’s been our dinner party go-to recipe lately too. It’s easy to glam it up a bit and serve with crusty sourdough to make it special.

It’s becoming harder and harder to catch, or buy, sustainable seafood these days.  Luckily, squid is normally listed as sustainable in most guides.  Squid breed fast and die young and their natural predators are being fished out.  Squid are a really healthy seafood, a good source of omega 3 and, like many seafood, of a big range of minerals like copper, selenium, zinc and magnesium.  And it’s cheap.  My local supermarket has 500 gm packs of frozen, cleaned squid rings for $6.

The other main ingredient in this soup is King George Whiting, also listed as sustainable and also available frozen and very cheap.  Fresh sand whiting is so gorgeous, it would be criminal to do anything more to it than dust with flour and fry. King George Whiting, though, isn’t sand whiting, and especially if it is frozen, it isn’t a good frying fish.  So it is quite nice to find a way to turn King George Whiting into something gourmet.

The Recipe:

It’s a bit of a “make it up as you go” recipe because lots of substitutions are possible.  I tend to make a big pot even just for the two of us, and we take it for lunch or eat it for a few days in a row.

Step One: The Sofrito.

• In a big soup pot, add a swig of olive oil and saute a chopped onion and several cloves of garlic till they start to soften.
• Add a couple of chilis finely diced, more or less depending on how hot your chilis are and how spicy you like things.
• Add a good cupful of chopped tomatoes.

Step Two: The Vegetables

Add three or four cupfuls of roughly chopped vegetables.  You want

• at least one starchy vegetable like potato, sweet potato, or shelled beans
• at least one leafy green like silver beet or amaranth or baby spinach, but steer clear of strong cabbage flavours.
• a few of vegetables like capsicum, green beans, snow peas, celery, carrots, zucchini, squash.  Again, steer clear of broccoli or things in that family.

Saute a little bit, then add water to cover.

Step Three: The Aromatics

When you add the water, add kaffir lime leaves.  I like four or five of them, but adjust according to your taste.  Leave them whole and remove (if you can!) before serving, or just warn people to leave them.  If you don’t have kaffir lime leaves, just double up on the lemon or lime at the end.

Simmer the soup for fifteen minutes or so.

Then add another good half cup of chopped herbs.  I like lemon or lime basil and Vietnamese mint best, but you could swerve towards cilantro or coriander, or Thai basil, or towards dill or even fennel.

Step Four: The Fish and Fish Sauce

Add 500 grams of squid rings and (optionally) whatever you want in other seafood.  For everyday eating, I add about 300 grams of chopped King George Whiting, skin off.  To glam it up you can also add baby prawns or clams.  You can even add them frozen if you like.

Bring back to a simmer and simmer for 5 minutes or so, until the fish is cooked through.

Now taste and add fish sauce and lemon or lime juice to taste.  You can add quite a lot without it being too much.

Serve with a good sourdough.

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My glut crop this week is sweet corn – the last round of sweet corn for the year.  Sweet corn is one of the trickier crops for a home gardener.  What goes wrong?

It can fail to pollinate if there are too few plants in a block – the pollen from the flowers on one plant must fall onto the silks on a corn cob on a neighbouring plant for it to set seed.  Otherwise you get odd looking cobs with only a few kernels.  Warm dry weather at pollination time, and enough plants all bunched together to get a nice mist of pollen in the air is ideal.  But to have a serious block of corn plants close enough together to get good pollination takes a serious amount of soil nutrients (specially nitrogen) and water.  It is also a C4 plant, so one one of the few garden crops that can use all the sun you can give it.

The other problem with a serious block of corn plants is that you get a lot of sweet corn, all at once.  Luckily  corn on the cob is made for barbecues.

The Recipe:

Pick the corn as close as possible to eating time.  As soon as you pick it, it begins turning sugars into starch.

Soak the cobs, husk and all, in a sink or a bucket of water for a few minutes, just to get the husk wet all the way through.  Then put the cobs, in their husk, on a hot barbecue.  Cook, turning with tongs, for about 15 minutes till the outer layer of the husk is charred and the corn is hot all the way through.

Provide salt, pepper, butter, lime juice, and finely grated cheese for dressing.  My favourite dressing is Chili Lime Butter, below, and this is the only few weeks of the year when chilis, limes, and sweet corn are all in season together.

Chili Lime Butter

Blend together equal amounts of butter and olive oil.  Blend in chili, lime juice, lime zest, and salt to taste.  I like about one lime (juice and zest) and two medium chilis to each cup of butter-olive oil mix, but just keep adding and tasting till you get it to your taste.

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I’m going to TEDx in Sydney in three and a half weeks!! (She does a little dance).  The invitation email came a couple of days ago, and I’m still hugging myself excited.  The speaking line up is exciting, but for me, the big thing is being part of a 2200 crowd-sourced, Matt Moran catered dinner party and a whole Opera House full of ideas about real food.

What should I take?  I have to travel from the North Coast, so it has to be something that travels well and isn’t too heavy.  There will be lots of people closer by to bring fresh greens and herbs.  I’m wondering whether I will have enough macadamias ripe by then.  The olives should be just about ready.  I have tropical spices like ginger and turmeric.  The limes will be on. The pecans should be cured and ready.  Flying has such a huge carbon footprint, but then, do I have time to take the train?  Decisions….

]]> http://witcheskitchen.com.au/im-going-to-tedx-sydney-does-a-little-dance/feed/ 16 http://witcheskitchen.com.au/im-going-to-tedx-sydney-does-a-little-dance/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheWitchesKitchen/~3/nkS-j2Hc9Aw/ http://witcheskitchen.com.au/taking-your-vitamins/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:06:29 +0000 Linda http://witcheskitchen.com.au/?p=9874

Back in 2011, I wrote a post for Simple Green Frugal about  a study just published in a peer reviewed journal, that followed a sample of nearly 39,000 older American women all the way from 1986 till now, and came to the conclusion that “several commonly used dietary vitamin and mineral supplements may be associated with increased total mortality risk”. Increased.

This week I saw another study that raises the same questions -  two papers in peer reviewed journals about how the Omega 3 fatty acid DHA  in fish oils in fish help lower blood pressure, but DHA ethyl ester, the kind of Omega 3 DHA found in most fish oil pills,  not only doesn’t work but takes you backwards, using up the binding sites that real DHA would have used and blocking them.

Both studies are real, peer reviewed science. And yet there are hundreds and hundreds of studies that show the disease preventative effect of a whole range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytonutrients and major nutrients. It seems they only work when they are in real food.The original post back in 2011 led me on a bit of a research binge. A study of 161,808 participants over 8 years in the Women’s Health Initiative clinical trials ”provided convincing evidence that multivitamin use has little or no influence on the risk of common cancers, CVD [cardiovascular disease], or total mortality in postmenopausal women.” A study of 182,099 participants enrolled in the Multiethnic Cohort Study after 11 years of follow-up found “no associations were found between multivitamin use and mortality from all causes, cardiovascular diseases, or cancer”.  And there’s a batch of supporting studies of smaller groups.

So why do we spend such a fortune on multivitamins, fish oil capsules, and vitamin enriched food? Why do we go for the breakfast cereal with “added vitamins and minerals” over the plain old rolled oats? Why the bread with “added fibre”?  When all the solid evidence is that if you eat a good balanced diet of real food, supplements won’t do a thing, and if you don’t, they won’t do a thing either.

There’s good data that Australians spend something like A$4 billion  a year - $4 billion - on complementary and alternative medicines. Some of it is real medicine, prescribed by a naturopath or someone competent, to treat a condition and there’s plenty of evidence for the benefit of that. But the majority is vitamins and supplements people buy themselves, just to feel more secure.

At the same time, at least in Australia, the cost of living is a major political issue, with people stressing about the cost of food, and farmers squeezed by the big supermarkets by prices that leave them no margin for a long term view of landcare.  We won’t pay what it really costs to produce real food, when there’s good scientific evidence that it keeps you healthy, but we will pay scammy amounts of money for industrially made supplements and pills, when there’s good science that it doesn’t work.  Duh!

And maybe the two are, in an unhealthy way, related.  The more we worry that the food we are buying isn’t real, isn’t healthy whole food produced with care for people and the environment, the more we indulge in superstitious practices we just hope will somehow help.

If I could just get that $4 billion a year and invest it in the Murray Darling Basin Plan, and then in keeping the Liverpool Plains for growing muesli rather than coal seam gas, and then after that in protecting marine environments from fertilizer run off, maybe we would feel happier about the price of real food.

Edamame are green soy beans, and most Australians anyway only ever encounter them in a sushi bar. They’re easy to grow in a garden though, and to me, they work so well as a snack food because they have a distinct nuttiness to them. They remind me more of boiled peanuts than anything else.

Which raises all sorts of ideas about fusion-ing them into dishes from distinctly non-Japanese cuisines. This is one of the ways I like them. It’s kindof like sprinkling toasted nuts through a salad. It makes it into a satisfying meal rather than a side dish. It’s almost like your body recognises that there’s the full range of macro nutrients in there.

So edamame which is a Japanese idea, in fattoush which is an Arabic one. The joys of living in a multicultural society!

The Recipe:

Boil the edamame, in their shells, in heavily salted water for five minutes or so until they are tender, then shell them.  (They shell really easily once cooked).

While the edamame are cooking, toast some pita chips.  I use my sourdough pita, cut it into little triangles, sprinkle with olive oil, and put them on a tray in a hot oven for a few minutes till they are crisp.  You could also fry the pita chips.  Cut them into little triangles and fry in light olive oil, or some other oil with a fairly high smoke point,  for a few minutes, then drain on brown paper.  Or you could toast them under the griller. Whichever way you go, you want crisp little shards of bread.

While all this is happening, you can add another layer of multitasking and make the dressing.  This is just a very simple olive oil and lemon juice dressing: good fruity olive oil and fresh lemon juice, and a pinch of salt, in a jar and shake together.

Assembling:

By adding edamame, we’re already going non-traditional, so I don’t suppose it matters what else you add.  This one has:

• olives (green and black)
• tomatoes (fresh and sundried)
• feta
• labneh
• chopped parsley and mint
• cucumber
• lettuce
• cooked, shelled endamame
• pita chips

Lightly dress with the dressing – be careful not to drown it – and serve.  Or pack the pita chips and dressing separately so they stay crisp, pack the salad into a lunch box and make your workmates jealous.

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