Autumn Harvest

The time has come to dig up the garden, and see if all that neglect that I poured upon it resulted in any rewards worth reaping.

That's the good thing about potatoes; so long as you keep them watered, but not too watered, it's pretty hard to get it wrong.

Of course, a bit of care and attention can mean that you get it really right, and you find yourself almost drowning in the things, but if you just give it a go, like I did, and you get a lovely haul like this, then you'd have to be happy. I was.One big bowl of potatoes that we didn't have to buy. Woo!Boiled up with fresh mint straight from the garden... ...and tossed with butter. Delicious, and satisfying, in so many ways.
And we got our first pumpkins. The week I picked these, and dug the potatoes, we didn't have to get potatoes, pumpkin or tomatoes from the market. Ka-Ching!
We're still eating the tomatoes we grew on the front deck, and still picking the wild ones from the back garden. Gotta love this pretending-to-be-a-gardener thing.

Harvest Season

There's been a lot of talk lately about how this summer never really happened, and to some extent this is just a bit of dissatisfied moaning, because as summers go, it might not have been great, but nor was it awful.

The general lack of ambient sunshine and the omnipresence of the wind did, however, have a marginally detrimental effect on the tomatoes we were so carefully nurturing on the front porch. In short, the tomatoes decided not to ripen.

Thankfully, Gramps and Gran from Wanganui came to the rescue with the solution: Pick the tomatoes as they get big enough, and then place them on a plate on a windowsill, put a ripe tomato or two in with them, and cover them in paper.
This was working pretty well, until a very small and "helpful" pair of hands decided he would pick a few more for us; as many as he could get his hands on, to be accurate.
So now we also have a few tomatoes ripening up that we might just have to call "cherry" tomatoes, even though they're meant to be beefsteak or somesuch.
The results, however, speak for themselves.
And like I've always said, homegrown just tastes so much better.

I also currently have five pumpkins growing out back, along with rhubarb, potatoes, and lettuces (the latter thanks to The Boss - Cheers, Boss!).

Even More Tomatoes

While we're on the topic of tomatoes and barbeques, the two go together like, well, tomatoes and barbeques.
Just slice them up, sprinkle with freshly ground salt and pepper, fresh grated parmesan, olive oil and fresh thyme leaves.
Pop them on the back of the barbeque and let them sit there and cook while the main event is taking place around them.

That's all there is to it. Enjoy.

Another Pumpkin Risotto

I've come a long way down the Risotto highway since I first had a crack at making one back in June. Since then I've learned that as long as you have patience, anything goes. Also, once you know the steps in your head, you can prep as you go, so you don't lose all that time getting everything ready beforehand. After all, once you put the rice in, you're pretty much committed for the coming 30 minutes or so anyway.

This one was, by unanimous agreement, my best ever. Better than the Bacon and Leek effort, and even better than the other Pumpkin and Ham one. Isaac wanted more, and more, and more, so it must have been good!

Pumpkin & Ham Risotto (MKII)

(Serves 4)

Finely chop 1 onion and 3 cloves of NZ garlic. Grate up 1/4 of a grey pumpkin. Add the veges to heated oil in a large pan and stir as the moisture evaporates. When the veges become a bit sticky add 3/4 Cup of Arborio Rice. Keep everything moving until the rice starts to turn translucent. Tip in a mixture of 2T Balsamic Vinegar and 1/2C Warm water. Keep stirring.
As the liquid is absorbed, start adding heated chicken or vege stock by the ladel, probably about 2 1/2 Cups in 1/4 Cup increments. Add another ladel of stock as each is absorbed and before the rice starts sticking to the pan.

During this time, chop up a whole tomato, 125g of deli ham, and grate 1/4 Cup of Parmesan cheese.

When the rice is so nearly done you can tell it only needs a couple more minutes, add the tomato and ham and stir through. Check the rice, and when done, remove from the heat and stir through the Parmesan and 3T of cream. Mix in and allow to stand for just a minute before dishing. Drizzle with a little extra virgin olive oil, freshly ground pepper and salt, and a wee grating of Parmesan.

What's the best thing about this meal?

Only one dirty pan.

Excellent.

Goatherd's Pie

I would in no way want to imply that goatherds are lazier than shepherds - some of my best friends are goatherds. But this particular dish is a lazy meal, and although it is very much the essence of Shepherd's Pie but is not in fact Shepherd's Pie, I have, in my great ignorance, dubbed this meal Goatherd's Pie. And if I was a Goatherd, I would be proud to have such a magnificent dish named after me.

Of course, lazy and easy are relative terms (No, I'm not suggesting that my relatives are either lazy or easy, thank you very much), and much of the ease of this pie came from the fact that I had cooked up a huge pot of mince the previous day. The other part of the laze/ease factor was in my just slicing and parboiling the potatoes over the top, instead of boiling and mashing as per a Shepherd's Pie.


We were very lucky in that Grandad J had come to stay and brought with him a veritable cornucopia of fruit and vege, some of which needed to be cooked up rather urgently. So on the first night of his stay we had pasta with mince and mushroom sauce done in the slow cooker, and I used what was leftover for this warming winter nosh-up.

Goatherd's Pie

In a bowl, blend up the following:

3 large tomatoes
15-20 cherry tomatoes
1 chopped onion
1 t dried Italian herbs

Place the following in the slow cooker on low for 7 hours:

600g Mince
Tomato and Onion mixture
200g chopped flat mushrooms
1 T soy sauce
Freshly Ground Salt & Pepper to taste
1/4 Cup of Tomato Sauce

(Alternatively, cook up in a pot on the stove over a very low heat for 2-3 hours, stirring frequently and adding water as necessary to keep the ingredients from sticking or drying out.)

Wash 3 or 4 small new potatoes and 1 kumera. Slice into roughly 1cm pieces and boil vigorously for 5 minutes. They should be soft enough to pass a knife through easily but still firm enough to hold thier shape. Drain and put aside.

When the meat is done, layer it in the bottom of a pie dish. Place the potato and kumera slices around the top of the dish like so:
Over the potato grate some cheese and sprinkle a good handful of breadcrumbs. Season with pepper and paprika and place in the oven for 30 mins to heat through (Possibly less if you have just cooked the meat as described - remember, I was using chilled leftovers!). When the meat is bubbling and the potato is definitely cooked through, switch the oven to grill for a further 5-10 mins until the cheese and breadcrumbs are nicely browned.
Serve up with your necessary 5+ a day of fresh greens, preferably whatever is in season and locally available.
Then, if you're pretty much anywhere in NZ right now, head outside and check that A) your roof hasn't blown off, and B) that your car hasn't been washed away by floodwaters. Good Luck.

A recipe for Risotto what I stoleded...

I discovered two new things last week: Risotto, and deseeding tomatoes.

The Risotto I will cover in detail just below. The concept of removing most of what makes the tomato a tomato struck me as strange, even slightly blasphemous, but I gave it a go anyway. I have resolved to try it in other things in the future, as it worked quite well in this particular instance. For the risotto, it added some flavour, colour and body to the dish without introducing a sudden excess of moisture that then would have had to be cooked off, and the acidity may have thoroughly altered the dynamic of the meal. For the record, I tried it in my stuffed sausages tonight, and it left them too dry, so its not for every meal. On the matter of "why-would-you-waste-so-much-of-the-tomato?", I figure the seeds just go into the compost, which goes into the garden eventually, and then up pop lovely wild tomatoes. Its like a storage vault, much like the flash one they just built in Norway, only closer and warmer.

It must be easy to make risotto if I can manage a reasonably passable one on my first try. I was surprised. When we were growing up, the only risottos I knew were those weird packet microwave ones, that are all dry and tasted like numbers. I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to willingly cook up something like that.

Then as time went by I kept seeing cooking shows where cooks were whipping up moist, delicious looking risottos that didn't take long and, it seems, were as flexible as your imagination. And I wondered, maybe there was something in it. Like rice, for example.

More time went by.

Then it happened. By the magic of the preplanned menu, we decided to make a risotto. Here's the trick: I used a recipe (!!) There's a prize for anyone who can identify the origin of this recipe, which I have modified slightly so as not to infringe any copyrights. I'll give you one clue: it's a New Zealand Chef.

Ham & Tomato Risotto

Heat 2T of olive oil in a large pan, preferably a cast iron one. Chop up an onion and a few cloves of garlic and soften this in the oil. Chop up 250g Ham and add this to the pan. Brown this lightly, before adding 1C of Arborio rice.

Cook this all together for about 3 minutes. Pour in 1/2C of Vegetable stock and simmer until absorbed. Add another 1/2C and repeat, until you have added 2 - 2 1/2C of stock to the pan. If you have homemade vege stock on hand, use this. If not, you can get some quite good real stocks from the supermarket, which is what we used this time.

Deseed and dice 3 tomatoes and grate 1/4C of Parmesan.

When the liquid has reduced down and the rice is cooked, add the tomatoes, parmesan, 1/4C of sour cream, and 1/4C of chopped fresh herbs (basil or similar - use less for stronger herbs like sage). Combine and season with freshly ground salt and pepper. Heat through and serve with freshly grated parmesan and a little drizzle of EV Olive Oil, plus freshly ground pepper if you like.


Just like that.

BTW, there's not really a prize, but have a guess anyway.

Top Secret Pizza Sauce

Right, here's the disclaimer:

Firstly, this recipe is so secret that even I don't know it.

Secondly, it may or may not be Pizza Sauce. It might be pasta sauce, it might be herby tomato concentrate, it might even be some form of as-yet-undiscovered alcoholic semi-beverage. I'll leave a bit in the sun for a while and see what happens.

What follows is not so much a recipe as a transpiration of events.

1. Discover that the really cheap tomatoes you got at the market on the weekend were priced thus for a reason, as you suspected at the time, and will need to be cooked up right away because you just can't see them going on a piece of toast, and you can't bear to throw them away.


2. Cobble together in your head everything you think you remember about making pizza or pasta sauce, but don't bother checking any recipe books or doing any research because its nowhere near as much fun that way.

3. Oil and season the tomatoes on an oven tray and put under a VERY HOT grill. Pull out and turn a couple of times as the skins crisp. Put out the small fire that starts when the baking paper touches said VERY HOT grill. Try to pick the ash off the cooked tomatoes.


4. Peel the skin off the tomatoes. This becomes a task for a knife and pair of tongs as, unsurprisingly, the tomatoes that have been under the VERY HOT grill are also, yes, VERY HOT.


5. Have a moment of hindsight, remembering that this was probably a job for a pot of boiling water and a bowl of cold water. Shrug, chalk it up to life experience, and justify actions by considering how much better roast tomatoes taste than boiled ones.

6. Search the house frantically looking for the sharpening steel, which was last seen on the weekend in the hands of the 16-month old kitchenhand, who obviously had some very important things to sharpen, like the couch and probably Daddy's boots. Fail to find said steel, which will later turn up in the tea-towel drawer.

7. Chop up an onion and put into a pot of RATHER HOT olive oil with some salt. Soften the onion, then try to answer the phone with a bottle of balsamic vinegar in one hand and accidentally over-vinegar the onion. Sadly, there is no way to get excess vinegar out of onion, so it becomes a feature of the dish rather than a suggestion.

8. Break up a head of garlic and place it on the bottom shelf of a VERY HOT oven, with the intention of lightly roasting them so as to squeeze the sweet stuff from the centre into the sauce. While this is cooking, continue to work on Yesterday's Blog Post, and forget all about the garlic until it has largely burnt to a hard crisp. Make a futile attempt to salvage what you can before giving up in despair.


9. Squeeze the peeled tomatoes through a sieve into the pot of onions and garlic, thus preventing the seeds and remaining skin from entering the sauce. Scrape off the bottom of the sieve with a sharp knife, and in the process spill a reasonable quantity of skin and seeds into the sauce. Make a futile attempt to salvage what you can before giving up in despair.


10. Add a large spoonful of sugar, a grind of salt and pepper, and a sprinkle of dried italian herbs. When this sprinkle turns out to be more of a shake, make a futile attempt to salvage what you can before giving up in despair. Just stir it all in and put it on the stove.

11. Allow to simmer very gently for about 4 hours. This seemed to come off without a hitch, probably because my lovely wife handled this part of the process while I was at work today.

12. Examine the final product. A bit acidy, a bit vinegary, not really pizza sauce, not pasta sauce, but maybe a good base for a stew or some other sort of tomato concentrate substitute. Feel at least a little satisfied that it wasn't a complete write-off, and don't think about how much electricity was wasted in the running of the VERY HOT grill and oven for three small tubs of uncertain nature.


13. Determine to get more sleep tonight, and to leave my next attempt at tomato sauce until the market is totally glutted with them in the late summer.

14. Decide that its not even worth putting up the photos of the debacle described above, as it would only add insult to injury. Instead, think how nice it would be to have a nice milo right about now. Act on this most wise of intuitions.

UPDATE - Do to an unprecedented response from the public (See 1 Comment below) I have rescinded my earlier decision and loaded the photos. Now you can decide for yourself whether the mixture above is edible or otherwise.