Holiday Kai: Blackberry Crumble

You've gotta love wild blackberries. Of course, the Thames-Coromandel District Council regards them as a noxious weed, due to the thorny plant's invasive nature, but it seems a bit ridiculous to make them illegal.

"That plant produces vast amounts of edible berries that people can gather and eat for free. Ban them!"

Ah, but enough with the cynicism. Let's just bear in mind that if bureaucracy has its way, the simple pleasure of ripping your hands and legs to shreds as you tread gingerly through wiry patches of sprawling blackberries may be drawing to a close, so get out there and make the most of it.

Well, maybe next season.
I'm very lucky, in that there is a huge blackberry patch on my Dad's farm, which he is making an effort to look after and keep harvestable (read: careful pruning to leave paths through the creepers that won't leave you in need of a transfusion by the time you've filled your ice-cream container). When we were up there last month, we made the most of the end of the season, by stocking up on lovely, sweet berries to use in a crumble.
Ice-cream containers full of blackberries remind me of being a kid. Nomnomnom.
Anyway, my Nana made the crumble using her old recipe that never fails. Start with your blackberries, about a litre (for want of a better measure),
and one apple, stewed down to sauce.
Mix the apple, berries and 1/2 - 1 Cup of sugar, to taste.
Make sure your little campfire is hot, and burning down to lovely embers.
Add the crumble, which is a mixture of butter, self-raising flour and more sugar. (I wish I could be more accurate, but whatever I made my notes on about this at the time is nowhere to be found now)
Carefully place the pie dish in a Camp Oven, and make sure it's tight.
Spread out a nice bed of coals, put the Camp Oven in the centre of the embers, and pile them up around the base of the oven.
Shovel hot coals over the top of the Oven, covering the lid completely. Leave to cook for about 20 minutes.
Dust off the ashes and remove from the fire. Carefully remove the lid and extract the pie dish.
With the help of a torch, dish up the crumble and try to get photos. Indulge while it's hot, then stoke up the fire and enjoy the bush in the cool of the evening.

(It's OK Dan, you'll be on holiday again one day.)

Kaimoana Part 2: The Gatherers

We've talked about the hunters; now, it's time to talk about the gatherers. Before we became part of this economic machine that processes all of our food into one convenient location, conveniently stripped of the bulk of its nutritional value in the name of - ironically - adding value, our ancestors used to raise crops, and hunt, and gather their food.
Every couple of years, when we're up in that part of the country, we like to carry on the traditions that our hapu have maintained for generations, and we trudge along the tidal flats with our buckets and our sunnies to gather kaimoana.
I'm not even going to raise the question of whether anyone thinks that digging shellfish from the sand is any less humane than stalking and shooting a wild deer (see my previous post), or if the ethics of farming mussels might impinge on the quality of the ones you can pull of the rocks in the wild.

Dang, I just raised it, didn't I? Strangely, I doubt that people feel anywhere near as strongly about something that can't actually run away...

Moving on, then. Everyone gets their feet wet. Everyone gets their hands dirty. Jandals float away and are chased after. Little kids sit in warm pools in the sun, which get inexplicably warmer...
A healthy haul of cockles makes its way into a bucket, and the weary gatherers slop back through the returning tide towards cars parked on the beach, while the kids run back and forth, gathering seashells.
Rule One when cooking up a big load of shellfish: Have a really good fire going, and make sure your water is really boiling and will keep boiling. Then the cockles will pop open, ready for eating, in just a few short minutes.
Serve up with garlic mayonnaise and a nice crisp white wine. We had ours with our big meal of fish and chips (campfire styles). It's pretty hard to beat shellfish taken straight from the sea the very same day.

Stay Tuned for Part 3; where I wrap it all together with salad and wine, and deal with the impossible task of cooking chips (fries) with neither a deep fryer nor a proper oven.

(And then, there will even be dessert)

Kaimoana Part 1: The Hunters

We take a break from my usual schedule (What? I have schedule? Lies, I say, all lies!) to get y'all up-to-date with my holiday photos.

From a purely foody perspective, of course. I have my standards, too.

Firstly, however, a brief discussion, which I would love to hear a few more opinions on (go nuts in the comments). I'll point out here that just as I'm not a farmer but hold views on farming, I'm also not a fisher or a hunter, but I have views on both of those past-times.

For a long time, I thought that the idea of stalking and shooting animals or hanging on the end of a rod-and-reel to bring in a meal was not only cruel and inhumane, it was also a phenomenal waste of energy in a world where you can just go to the shop to buy meat. I still doubt that I would have it in me to pull the trigger for the sake of a meal unless it was a last resort to save myself and my family from starvation, but on the other hand, knowing what I know now about the rearing and processing of much of our meat (particularly pork and chicken), I am much more accepting of the fact and philosophy of hunting now than I used to be. While I believe there is a face of hunting which is represented by those who stalk and bring down animals for their value as trophies rather than as food, which is a practice I find abhorrent and always will, the hunters that I know are all well-adjusted and environmentally-aware individuals.

When there is more at stake when you go to collect your winter's supply of meat than how close you can find a park to the front of the supermarket, you learn a respect for both the animal being hunted and the world that has raised it. If the meat that has been brought down in a hunt is not wasted, and if a family can be fed without recourse to pen-raised bacon and battery chicken, then there has to be some value in that.

As I said, I'm not a hunter, so my perspective is purely a contemplative, philosophical one. I like the taste of game meat, which is so much more intense than most farm-reared beef and lamb.

When we were in Canada I was lucky enough to try moose which Uncle C had shot, and I really enjoyed it. He treated us to the photos of the hunt too, so there was a certain grisly, primal reality to the meal, facing the unavoidable truth that here was an animal that had been killed, skinned, gutted, and butchered, before being frozen and eventually making it onto the table for us to eat. That's a reality that the eating public are encouraged to forget about when they buy their bulk family packs of beef mince and BBQ steaks from the supermarket.

On the topic of fishing then, let me produce Exhibit A:
Somewhere in the far reaches of the Coromandel Peninsula there lies a beautiful bay, where the bellbirds greet the morning and the population of Kereru and Kiwi are both in an upward climb.

In a place like this, the idea of sitting on a rock in the failing sun and feeling for the tug of a fish on a line doesn't seem so inane, it seems like a bleeding good idea. I still didn't go fishing, mind you, but I had two brothers-in-law to do so instead.

One of them must have thought about this quandary in some depth, because it was no longer enough for Uncle B to wait at the end of a fishing line for the fish to come to him. Uncle B decided that it was time to level the playing field and give the fish (and the sea) as much of a chance of having a go at him as he was going to have at them. Either that, or he just decided he could handle the cold of the Pacific, and was sick of not being able to see what he was doing.

Unfortunately, within a day or two of arriving, the fancy rubber bungies for his speargun snapped, so he was forced to improvise.
Meet the Iron Eel, MK 1. One sharpened nail tied onto a stripped Nikau stalk, with a bent barb at the back. Look out, fish, we're going Robinson Crusoe on yer... fins.
Nature won that round. Iron Eel, Meet Rock.
Thus, the Iron Eel MK 2. Yes, that's a steak knife attached with copper line to a piece of hardwood harvested from the bush the same day. And yes, that's a beautiful clear Coromandel sky in the background.
Sadly, the MK 2 never had a chance to fly (or swim?) because replacement bungies arrived for the speargun.
Uncle B also had a rather macabre device known as a Hawaiian Sling (or something), which was surprisingly effective.
The fish might not have won that particular round, but Uncle B sure did spend a few cold hours under the waves trying to bring home dinner. It didn't help that, when planning out our menu for the week, we decided to end our stay on a night of fish and chips for dinner, which meant that Uncle B was burdened with the responsibility of bringing in enough fish to feed fifteen people (we had freezers, which made life easier. But that's still a lot of time in the water).
Suffice to say that he managed it, as well as a couple that Uncle C brought in on his fishing line, and on the day we had just enough to feed everyone, with a couple of fillets to go back and have for seconds. Uncle C and LBS crumbed the fillets the old-fashioned way.
I was in charge of cooking them on the BBQ. After Uncle B spent all that time freezing his b*tt off bringing it in, you can imagine how nervous I was. That's not a meal you want to mess up.

So where does that leave me as far as fishing goes? Well, like hunting, I think it's time well spent if it's done for the right reasons, especially if I'm not the one doing it, and I get to enjoy the bounty of the hunt. I'd love to hear how other people feel about this topic too.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The Gatherers, and Part 3: Te Kai, where I get the challenge (not being a fisherman, after all) of cooking chips, using no more than a campfire. Ah, the challenges of life.

(Translation: Kaimoana is the Maori word for Seafood; literally, Food of the Sea)

Wanganui Road Trip

What would the holidays be without a road trip?

Well, a nice boat trip can be just as good if not better, but we had a road trip instead.

Just before Christmas we took Isaac up to visit his Great-Gramps and Gran in Wanganui. We must have missed all the traffic, because it was a quick trip up the country. We stayed in Foxton on the Friday night, with Isaac's Nana Beth.

Great-Gramps is one of my revered cooking mentors, and Gran has been responsible for pointing out all sorts of interesting and helpful little things in the kitchen over the past few years. I was very much looking forward to having dinner with them on Saturday, and I was not to be disappointed.
Beef fillet, wrapped in bacon and smothered in butter.
I'm not going to mention how healthy this may or may not have been, but it was delicious.
I can't pass on the secrets of cooking this fine dish, as Great-Gramps and I were very busy drinking gin and wine respectively, and immersing ourselves in a very engaging discussion about politics and the environment. I haven't had so much fun in a long while. Ah yes, there were mushrooms involved, too.
I know I've already used this shot, but to be fair it was Gran who had prepared these raspberries and strawberries for us for dessert,
with a delicious amaretto cream to match. They were also good enough to make us breakfast on Sunday morning, with hot coffee, to give us the strength for the drive home.

We stopped again on the way down in Foxton, and had lunch with Dessert Chef's whanau, before making it home at a leisurely pace.

Yip. Road trips aren't what they were when I was 18 anymore.

*sigh*

Seasoning the BBQ in the BBQ Season

Summer is the season of the barbeque, as we all know. Barbeques are a classic kiwi tradition, as I'm sure they are in much of the rest of the world. Yes, for some reason we seem to think this is a unique condition.

I have a few curious observations to make about barbeques and the culture that surrounds them, which I'd like to share. Please be aware, some gentle male sensibilities may be offended (the rest of us are permitted to laugh ourselves silly, if we so desire).

For starters, I have yet to understand why barbeque tools seem to come in such ridiculous sizes. Personally, I use the little paring knife and a pair of tongs from the kitchen when I barbeque. We concluded that the reason for barbeque tools being so stupidly big is so that men can stand around the barbeque with their beers in one hand and compare the sizes of their tools.

Which I'm sure is also not a uniquely kiwi practice.

While we're on the subject of men and their misplaced sense of entitlement to the role of barbeque chef, may I ask what it is about having the appropriate chromosomes that makes so many males think that suddenly, despite not having stepped in front of any piece of cooking equipment more technical than a toaster for ten months of the year, they can suddenly claim dominion over the outdoor gas (or charcoal) grill? They then proceed to stand over said grill, drink beer, talk sh!t, burn the sausages, reduce the steak to hunks of leather, drink more beer, talk more sh!t, and complain about where the salad is and why the bread isn't buttered already.

Gents, I hang my head in embarrasment for you. The barbeque's a glorified frying pan, that's all, and if you can't drive a frypan, then you have no right to ruin everyone else's food by declaring yourself its master. "BBQ FLAVOUR" is not a substitute for basic culinary competence. Get into the kitchen, make the salad and butter the bread, and let the cooks do the cooking.

Full credit to all those men who can and do cook; you have every right to be out there, drinking beer and talking sh!t to your hearts' content (so long as you made the salad and buttered the bread before you started!).

The other thing that men seem incapable of doing more often than not is cleaning the barbeque after it's been used. The excuse for this is also BBQ FLAVOUR, that indefinable taste which seems to be not so much a matter of ingredients and technique but rather one of cultivation; as in, strains of bacteria. Perhaps there is some primal urge among men to bulk up their immune systems by allowing all manner of germs and micro-organisms to breed on "their" cooking grills, and the obligatory overcooking of any meat that comes within range is therefore more a matter of survival than anything else. That special flavour can only be achieved by allowing the petrie dish to fester and then cooking that flavour off onto the meat, which must then be virtually incinerated to ensure it is safe to eat. All of this men know instinctively, and is perhaps why they can't actually cook on a barbeque despite what all the advertising tries to tell us.

Please note, I write the above lines in the full knowledge that my own barbeque is sitting outside uncleaned since last I used it, but I assure you it will get a thorough scrub before it is used next.

Do I have anything useful to say, or am I just taking great pleasure in deriding my fellow man? (Ah, the joy of picking on people who aren't here to defend themselves...)

In fact, I do. This comes back to the cleaning of the barbeque. There is the small matter of the last of the soapy taste that you can't quite get rid of, and who wants to cook on that?
Here's the solution:Chop up a large onion and a handful of fresh herbs and garlic, mix it up with some rice bran oil and freshly ground pepper and salt, get the barbeque really hot and season it with the onion-herb mixture. Cook this stuff right down, constantly shifting it around the grill. Some of it will stick, and thats OK. Scoop the rest off, and you have a seasoned barbeque, with no soapy residue whatsoever. Real Barbeque Flavour, without the heirloom cultures.
A couple of weeks ago Liz E. Bear's Mum brought a pile of steak around, dressed in fresh sage and rosemary from their garden, and I didn't want to waste it. So I proceeded to RESEASON the grill with the herbs before cooking the steak, letting them wilt and adding a little more oil and salt, so that there was a lovely herbed oil sizzling away on the barbeque for the steak to go onto. I then removed the herbs and put the steak on to cook, placing the wilted herbs back on top of them to infuse the meat as it cooked.
Blimmin' delicious it was. And if you want to know how to cook the perfect steak, go read this too.

Hooray for real Barbeque Flavour!

P.S. To anyone out there who may feel offended by what I've said here, tough. Pun intended.

EDIT: Go on, read the comments. You know you want to. Heeheehee.

And the time has gone... where?

Here we are in December already. Tomorrow's my last day of work for the year, next week is Christmas, then 2008 rolls over into 2009 and we start all over again.

It's time to wrap it up and decide where we've come in the past 12 months.

I have no complaints to mention (barring the political, but this is not the time), and I'm awfully grateful for that. I know that a lot of people have had a much worse year than we have, and we have done our best to support friends and even strangers through these hard times. Financially we've been pretty well insulated from the worst of things, so for that too we're very thankful.

As a family we came a long way. Isaac is now almost 2, and what a year of changes and lessons that has been. It can be characterised primarily by the number of things that have been altered in our house to accommodate him: A fence was built, we replaced one pane of glass with safety glass after a smashing incident, latches have been put on windows and doors, and Daddy now has to be careful to tidy up all the cr@p he used to leave around the yard.

I started a blog, to my own surprise, and to my even greater surprise, the novelty hasn't worn off and I'm even still posting here. This is the first time that I've really appreciated the internet as more than just an online dictionary and encyclopedia. This year I have discovered that out there in Webland there is a community. Hi, y'all.

Writing Freshly Ground has made me more aware of the issues out there surrounding food, and given me a voice to raise my views with more than just the guests of a given evening. It has also allowed me to share all the recipes I've been making up over the years, and what with the photos and all it gives the false impression that I might even be able to cook. But I won't let that get around.

I've also hit a fair few landmarks with my writing work, which only happens in and around work-work and family life, but I try to prioritise it as much as possible. I have completed a third draft of my novel and started the long and arduous process of sounding out an (increasingly less stable) publishing industry to try to get said novel read by an agent. This is more work than it sounds. But once again, I have discovered the online community of writers, agents, editors, and publishers, who are more than willing to share a wealth of information with the rest of the community about what they should or should not be doing. It has been one h~ll of an eye-opening journey. I won't say that it has been discouraging thus far, but it is at the very least massively daunting. One thing is clear: there's no point even starting into it with subpar writing, so lots of revision is underway. It's amazing how much more critical you can be of your own work when you think someone with an opinion that can make or break you might be reading it. Give me that big red pen...

Also, Urban Driftwood was finally completed and made available in print form. I have some plans to release it as a PDF in the new year, so watch this space if you haven't laid your hands on a hard copy yet.

Putting politics aside, I had a great twelve months, and I'm looking forward to more good times to come. The garden is going crazy, and hopefully by next planting season I'll have more of a clue about how to manage the little space we have to get some really sustainable crops ticking over, so that we can rely even more on ourselves and less on the carbon footprint of stores and markets. I keep thinking about building a chicken run, but I really have to clean up the yard before I can even consider that seriously. A big shout out to Obi for slapping up the shelves in the garage this week - that's the first step! Next we need to put some up in the tin shed.

Which brings me to next year. Over the summer we have some jobs to do, like painting the roof and fixing the drive, but what do I see in the next twelve months for me, and for us? Well, I'm already racing along a fairly complex trajectory of paid work, writing work, and stuff around home, so I'm not going to sign myself up for too much more just yet. If 1 going on 2 was hard work, just imagine what 2 going on 3 will be like! And with any luck, sometime soon we might be lucky enough to have another little bundle of joy in the house. Which is of course something that is not really in our hands.

We're also looking forward to at least one wedding in the new year, and a visit from LBS and Uncle Carlo in March. We don't really need to plan on getting busy and racing through another year; it's just going to happen.

Freshly Ground will continue in sporadic bursts over the next two weeks, around Christmas and New Years and maybe a little excursion to the South Island or something, but come January things will be back in full swing.

So take care everyone, have a safe and happy holiday, and either keep warm or wear sunscreen, depending on what part of the world you happen to be in.

Impromptu Indulgences

On a bit of a spur of the moment, we took a ferry to Picton on Friday night and spent the the weekend on Obi and Nan's boat. The weather came to the party on Saturday and after the morning's frost we had a beautiful day on the water. We motored across Queen Charlotte Sound from Waikawa and anchored up in Kaipakirikiri Bay, where Isaac showed Mum and Obi how to row the dinghy. We had soup and toast for lunch and as the sun disappeared we slipped back to Waikawa and relaxed.

Cheese and crackers and mussels came out for a late afternoon snack, and when no-one could be bothered cooking a proper dinner, we improvised. We grilled up a packet of Gluten Free Smokey Bacon Sausages and began stuffing them with cheese. Mmmm. Then someone had the bright idea that sausage stuffed with creamy blue cheese and mussel might be nice, and I had to try it.

So. Good.

Smokey Sausage stuffed with Blue Cheese and Mussels

Slice a cooked sausage into one-inch long segments, and slice these lengthwise to about 3/4 deep. Slice off a thin hunk of Creamy Blue Cheese (or Cambozola, or something Blue) and squeeze it into the sausage. Slice a Mussel in half and push it into the cheese. Give a few moments for the heat of the sausage to soften the cheese, and eat.

Just to get back to the healthy stuff, we had a double lamb roast last night. Check back here for full coverage in a day or two.