Getting an Early Start

We always tell ourselves that October is the time to start planting stuff. Accordingly, we put off doing anything about the garden until Labour weekend, by which time life is getting busy again, and so we put it off further.

In other words, we procrastinate, and nothing gets done. We've managed to keep a few pumpkins and potatoes going in the past, and our little crops of tomatoes on the doorstep have been OK, and the herbs - which are just glorified weeds, let's not forget - seem to thrive despite being neglected for weeks at a time.

But in terms of really having a proper vege garden that will yield a significant harvest, in the past we simply haven't done the work to make it happen.

Last weekend, that all changed.
We took a drive to the hardware store and the garden centre, then came home and cleared out one overgrown corner of our little front yard to put our planter down.
After getting it relatively level, we spread a layer of ash, in what may have been a misguided attempt to keep the weeds down.
Then we put down some plastic sheeting, punctured to permit some drainage, and assembled the 4'x4' planter box over top of it.

Now, I'm not saying that you should follow our lead here. We may have done ourselves all sorts of damage, like not permitting the soil to breathe and wotnot, but our main concern was for the weeds. The weeds up the back are the bane of my potato patch, and I don't want them invading this plot too.
Next, we got in some awfully cheap labour to do the grunt work.
Potting mix, about 8 bags, including a bag of strawberry mix, turn this from a wooden square into a miniature garden.
Then we got to planting: Strawberries, Lettuces, Beans, Peas, Tomatoes, Silverbeet, Cauliflower and Broccoli, several of each.
Into the potting mix, with a nice dousing of water and plenty of sunshine.
Finally, a bit of mesh to keep the local wildlife out - particularly our cat (I'd post a picture of said feline but I'm sorry, this just isn't that kind of blog). The mesh is attached to pieces of wire which are stapled into the timber, allowing access to the garden to weed and prune and harvest.

Since it's still winter and there may yet be frost, we also rigged a sheet of clear plastic which will double as a frost cover overnight and as a mini glasshouse of sorts on cooler days.

So there it is, August and we have our vege garden planted out. And the best thing is that a week later, the seedlings are not only alive but actually getting bigger. I hold out great hopes.
So after a big day's work like that (I could be honest and say that it was spread over 2 days, but that would completely dissolve the mystique surrounding our achievements), the hard workers deserve a cold, relaxing brew.
And sausages. There must be lovely lamb sausages.
Which are then made into burgers. What a perfect way to end the day.

(In case you're curious, Sausage Burgers contain sausage, lettuce, beetroot, cheese, sour cream, and sauce. Just like your mum used to make them. )

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.

To My Valued American Readers

It has been brought to my attention that there are some very worrying things going on in the USA as regards the production of organic produce and small scale farming.

Please go and read this post by Moose, which is a brief sum up of the law being pushed through the US legislature right now which will basically destroy the rights of anyone who wants to grow their own food, AT ALL.

This is serious stuff, and being rammed through without any publicity or consultation. Moose has some good links, please have a read and take action to spread the word.

Come on Obama, how can you let this happen?

Don't let Monsanto bully you all into their machine. Every person has a right to grow food for themselves, and the fines of $1,000,000 per offence per day for growing food without pesticides or fertilizers is just insane.

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!).

Garden Update

I've made a lot of noise about growing your own garden, and how easy it is for everyone to get something green sprouting in whatever little space they have. My own efforts have, admittedly, been a bit hit-and-miss over the past few years, apart from fresh herbs and making compost. But since herbs are really just weeds with a useful side that's not saying terribly much, and you can't eat compost.

So when I started this blog, I decided I should really make a proper go of it myself, and got out planting.

Well, we've had successes and failures. The strawberry plant didn't fruit this year, to our untold sadness. We grew one beautiful broccoli, but were so proud of it that we didn't realise it was ready to eat, and it went to seed on the doorstep.

But I put a whole lot of pumpkin seeds down in a bunch of compost, and fed it all with lots of worm castings, and waited.
Then when the season turned, the garden suddenly came to life. Amongst the things growing up around the weeds were more pumpkin plants than I could count. My ulterior motive with growing the pumpkin plants was a lazy one really: I hoped that they would spread out and strangle all the weeds. It seems to be working.
Then these started to appear.
And then a few of these. Yesterday I counted 11 fruits growing in the pumpkin patch, as well as a few errant tomatoes that may or may not survive the strangling effects of the pumpkins.
Dessert Chef's potted tomato plants have also been shooting up, and with judicious applications of stakes, worm castings, water, compost, and a careful trim, they might be the big success story of the summer.
They've also popped out a bunch of these
And even a few of these.
And the random potatoes I planted in the back yard near the pumpkins have been our first proper harvest. Straight from the garden, we cooked these up the other night, and they were just beautiful. So much more flavour than the ones from the shop, or even from the market. You could almost taste the compost and the worm wees.

Hmm, maybe that's not what I'm really trying to say.

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that it looks like our efforts have not been in vain. There's also rhubarb growing, and onions, though I have to say I'm not sure what to do with those.

We'll see. I've put down more potatoes, and now I've got a better idea of what I need to do to get ready for the next planting season.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

A Walk in the Garden

After all the politics, it's time to get back to what really matters: Good food, good people, good times.

I've put a lot of my time on this blog into talking about how important it is to get out there and grow your own food, on whatever scale you can manage. So can I walk the talk? Well, it's only early spring, but I have lots of leafy stuff in the ground, at least. Whether or not these will yield remains to be seen, but I have high hopes.
Here we have pumpkins that sprouted in the compost and which I transplanted into the ground, along with a few self-sown tomato sprouts that came up from the compost too. I guess I'll learn how well Pumpkins and Tomatoes play together.
You might remember several months ago when I got all keen and planted a whole lot of pumpkin seeds on the top of our section in the hopes of a bumper spring crop. Well, since then I have learned that pumpkins don't grow during the winter. But guess what? They have now decided to crop up like mad. I'm going to have to do a whole lot more weeding to give these all room to grow.
Here are some of the tomatoes we planted on the doorstep (full credit to Dessert Chef for nurturing these little guys from seeds to the handsome chaps they are becoming).
And one lone broccoli survived the cats, the frost, the wind and the moths and has actually started to look like a broccoli (if you look really close).

Check here for before pictures of the tomatoes and broccoli above.

I also blogged about planting some potatoes which I had sprouted on the kitchen windowsill.
Here's one of them, the smaller one no less. Encouraged by this, I've put a couple more in the ground and have more sprouting as well. At this rate, I'm going to run out of room!
But it's good to know that I have the best help that love can buy:

I never thought I'd say it

This post is so important that it's skipping the queue and pushing in at the front.

It contains the following mind-blowing revelation: Asparagus is delicious.

I'm not talking about the chewy muck that comes in cans, or even the finger-thick monstrosities that you can buy at the supermarket when it's in season, which requires more energy to chew and digest than you'll ever get out of it in the process (yes, that's a completely unscientific exaggeration which I won't even try to back up - it's just an ingrained prejudice). The good stuff - which you can currently find at farmers' markets for anywhere from $1.50 to $2.00 a bunch - is the crisp new baby tips. These are so sweet and crunchy they deserve to be gobbled up by anyone who has the good sense to lay their hands on them.
As to how to cook them, it couldn't be easier. The truth is that you pretty much only want to get them warm. Any more than that and they'll just go soggy and chewy like their bigger brothers and sisters.

Most nights we cook up a little steamer of carrots and broccoli. I steam the carrot for 10 minutes, adding the broccoli after 5 minutes. For the asparagus, just break off the bottom 1/4 of the stalks and pop them in the steamer when you take it off the heat, and let the steamer sit while you dish your plates. After that 2-3 minutes, the asparagus will be warm and moist and still crunchy and sweet. I drizzle a teeny bit of extra virgin olive oil on them too, and eat it all up straight away before it gets cold.
I can't believe I just did a plug for asparagus. Is that a sign of some degenerative disease? Seriously, this is lovely stuff, just coming into season, cheap and plentiful at the markets right now, and you would be doing yourself a big favour by getting it into you (without even starting on all the good stuff that must be in it - it's green all over, for goodness' sake!).

Sweet Mash

Following on from yesterday's steak post, I wanted to push the veggie side too. I also posted an edit regarding the gravy, noting the Tomato Paste that I add to the pan during deglazing to give the gravy its body and colour.

The other winner on the plate was the Sweet Mash, which will go brilliantly with just about anything, and is another way of getting more veggies on your plate.

Sweet Mash

(Serves 4)

Peel and cube 2 Potatoes, 1 Kumera and either 1/8 of a large grey Pumpkin or a whole Butternut Pumpkin. Boil rapidly in salted water until soft. Mash up with a fork, adding a little milk and butter to make the mash creamy and frothy. Beautiful stuff.

Where's the Food?

I didn't get to post yesterday, mainly because our house is a shambles due to the ripping up of carpet and flooring in the kitchen and dining room. The process of putting the new stuff down has, for some reason, not happened as quickly as it came up. Why do you think that is?

We also watched a doco which deserves a mention, but I'll come back to that or I'll be here all night.

On the writing front, things are looking good. For a start, waiter has elucidated to me why it's so hard to write both a blog and a book at the same time. Here it is in a nutshell, for anyone who is trying to do just that and can't figure out why the two don't seem to go together:

Quite simply, blogging didn’t prepare me for the emotional ferocity of writing a book. It didn’t prepare me for the claustrophobia and fear, the exhausting concentration coupled with tedium, and the isolation compounded by occasionally crying like a little girl. (How embarrassing!) Psychologically speaking, writing a book is like getting into a knife fight with yourself in a phone booth.

As for my own projects, yesterday I officially passed the 3/4 mark in revising my novel. I'm presently up to the start of Chapter 35, on page 926 of 1229. I didn't even see the critical page 908 go by. But I'm seeing lots of scrawled pencil marks on the coming pages, so I might have a bit of slog ahead.

After 9 years of inception (detailed here), the first four proof copies of Urban Driftwood have been printed and shipped by Lulu.com. Very excited about that.

In other news, Freshly Ground has made an appearance on the Cooking Gadgets website, mainly by dint of me pushing them into it. Yip, those are really my hands.

Over at Culinate, it would seem I'm not the only one encouraging folk to really get the most out of a chicken.

On the Zero Waste topic, Barbara at winosandfoodies has some tips on not letting food go to waste, while Treehugger reports that a staggering 50% of all food produced worldwide is wasted, and that the same goes for water. Aside from water lost in irrigation systems and through leaking taps:

To produce the $48 billion in food that is wasted each year in the United States took ten trillion gallons of water.

That's a lot of water. It's hard to fathom how there can be a global food shortage if there's so much food and water being wasted across the planet. I've made this point before, and it's something we all need to take a bit more seriously.

And it seems that there are a lot of people out there taking this very seriously. As well as reducing, reusing and recycling, there is a growing trend (particularly in the States but I'd love to hear about any local efforts) towards the Urban Homstead. It seems that no matter how small a bit of land you have, be it rural or suburban or even urban, you can grow! The Dervaes in California are a shining example of just how successful growing in limited spaces can be.

The family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence. Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden.

That's impressive.

So I really have no excuse not to have stuff on the grow out the back and down the front. Which brings me back to my original question: Where's the food?
Righto. It's Spring, its getting warmer, and this weekend, these bad boys (being sprouting potatoes) will be nestling down in a lovely pile of compost somewhere in the vicinity of the pumpkin seeds that I rather eagerly but probably quite prematurely planted way back in May. I still have faith that they'll sprout. Pumpkins seem to crop up everywhere I use compost whether I want them or not!

Sticky Sweet Pumpkin

I'm always looking for ways to make veges more interesting. Sometimes I find recipes, sometimes I just make stuff up. This is one of those things. I figure if I can write a book I can write a recipe. It just requires some suspension of disbelief on the reader's/eater's part. Anyhoo, from memory these were yummy.

Sticky Sweet Pumpkin

(Serves 4)

Slice 1/4 of a big grey pumpkin into wedges, deseed and peel. Compost the seeds so that when you plant your spring garden you'll get little pumpkin seedlings springing up everywhere. At first these will be a boon as you replant them, then after a while they become annoying and you just have to compost them again. Oh well.

Roughly chop 3-4 cloves of garlic and place in a bowl with 2T of brown sugar, freshly ground salt and pepper, freshly grated nutmeg, 1T of olive oil and 1T of balsamic vinegar. Place the pumpkin in an oiled oven dish and brush the garlic mixture over the top.
Roast at 200C for about 50 mins.

Ham and Vegetable Fritattas

Can you spell Vege Overload? This dish could just as easily be a vegetarian option simply by omitting the Ham. This is a great way to sneak a bunch of veges onto the kids' plates, and also a fantastic way of enjoying really fresh produce. Strange, you might say, it wouldn't seem that putting veges in a fry pan covered in egg would do anything for them, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Ham and Vegetable Fritattas (serves 4)

Cube and boil a kumara and two potatoes in lightly salted water.

Slice a handful of mushrooms, one red onion, 5 cloves of garlic, 1/4 of a capsicum, and 3 or 4 leaves of silverbeet. Cut a few florets of brocolli and cauli. Cut 3 slices of ham into small pieces (if you're not set on the vege rush).
When the potato and kumera are just cooked, drain through a colander, reserving the cooking water. Allow to cool slightly (so that the heat of the veges doesn't start cooking the egg prematurely). Return the water to the pot and put the pot back on the heat, bringing the water to the boil. Put the brocolli and cauli in a colander and place in the boiling water, blanching for about 4 minutes. This will heat the florets but leave them crunchy and full of flavour.

In a small non-stick frying pan, heat 1T of olive oil.

For each fritatta:
In a small bowl, add a portion of everything you now have ready, including a scattering of ham if you're using it, and 1-2 eggs (I always think I need to do 2, and it always ends up being too much for the pan, greedy boy!). Mix well. When the oil is hot (but not smoking) scrape in the fritatta mixture. Allow the egg to set on the bottom, then keep the fritatta moving by jiggling the pan frequently. When the upper side of the fritatta is semi-solid, flip the fritatta. If you're not confident that you can do this without destroying the meal (as I so often do), slide the fritatta out onto a plate, then place the frying pan upside-down over the uncooked side, hold it all carefully with a tea towel or two, and flip it over. Brown on the underside and dish with a bit of pepper and your favourite sauce or relish.
Repeat until you have cooked enough for everyone, or else some people might get a bit titchy at being forgotten.

Spicy Slow-Cooked Lamb Chops

This, our second use of the Slow-Cooker, was a weeknight meal. Once again, I just followed my instincts rather than actually doing any real legwork prior to cooking, and it all came out marvelously. The beauty of it is that virtually none of the work was done in the 5-6pm bracket. I got the meat out of the freezer the night before, prepped the marinade, and got the veges ready. Then in the morning before I left for work (6am), I coated the chops in the marinade and left them to sit. C then put the meat in the cooker at lunchtime and popped the veges in with about 2 hours to go, so come 5.30, all I had to do was steam up some greens.

I know that the grand idea here is to be able to put a meal on at about 6am and have it ready with no extra attention being paid to it until its ready about 12 hours later, but its early days yet. Soup and stew are all on the menu for coming weeks, so I'll see how those go when we get there.

Spicy Slow-Cooked Lamb Chops

In a bowl, mix up the following:


3 finely sliced or crushed cloves of garlic;
1 small dried chilli;
Zest of 1 lemon;
1 t of fennel seeds;
1 grating of nutmeg;
freshly ground salt and pepper;
1 T of brown sugar;
1 T of balsamic vinegar;
a handful of washed, chopped fresh mint.

Toss about 800g of lamb chops in this marinade and leave for 6-12 hours.


Peel and chop 2 onions, 1/4 of a large pumpkin, 6-8 potatoes, and 2 kumera. Place in a bowl and toss with freshly ground salt and pepper. Leave to sit with the meat.

When you are ready to start cooking, chop an onion and place it in the bottom of the slow cooker dish. Place the meat on top of the onion, add about 1 C of vege or beef stock, and turn the Cooker on High for one hour. Turn down to low and leave for a further 3 hours. Add the veges and leave for a further 2 - 3 hours.

Alternatively, place everything in the Slow-Cooker and turn on low. As long as its been cooking for at least 7 hours, it'll be lovely by the time you're ready to eat. Following the method above, the veges still had their firmness, but by leaving them in for the duration they will be falling apart by the time you dish, which is also nice.


Serve with steamed greens and a drizzle of the cooking juices as gravy. Lovely Winter Nosh!

Checking out the Local

My hand was forced on Saturday morning. Due to an unprecedented amount of pressure being placed on our usually cruisy weekend, I had to brave the cold (and the sheer fact of being out of the house before 10am!) and whip around the local farmer's market in Porirua. I know it was barely last week that I stated how unlikely that was to happen, and along comes the universe to prove me wrong.

There was no time for photos, and since I was on my own I didn't even have the bonus of Isaac's buggy to load up with the good stuff to be found there. Accordingly, since I had to carry it all on my shoulders in reusable bags, I hurried through the stalls, snapping up bargains and checking prices and quality, before doing a second circuit to make sure I had covered everything on my shopping list.

Overall, there were less stalls and so a little bit less in the way of variety and value, but what we must have saved in petrol by not having to drive over the hill to the Hutt certainly made up for that. It would be worth making it out of bed to get down there again in the future, and since I managed it on the coldest Saturday morning that we've had so far this year, I can probably make it happen in the future, too.

Pumpkin update: Still no news. Suspect we may have more luck when it gets warmer.

Seedlings update: Broccoli and spinach were doing well until the rain turned our lawn into a pond, and our cat decided that she couldn't swim through that, so she dug up the planter boxes to, well, you know. Salvaged what we could, but its probably back to square one there.

Roast Pumpkin Soup

This meal is all about economy, and rides on the back of the Roast Chicken Amazing Multiple Meal Deal. Since the oven's already going, there's no point wasting all that good energy on just one meal. This recipe tends to make two big lunch servings, which I usually take to work with a bit of toast bread. I also reserve the breasts for a second meal, which makes a chicken go an awfully long way. It also makes an extra half-litre of stock that you can put aside for something else in the future, instead of resorting to powdered ingredients.

Since I stuck with a regular cordon bleu treatment for the chook (salt and pepper on the outside, one skewered lemon and 4 peeled garlic cloves stuffed in the cavity), I could spend some time seasoning the veges nicely. I went with freshly ground salt & pepper, lemon zest, paprika, finely chopped rosemary and grated garlic. This adds something special to both the roast and the soup.

Roast Pumpkin Soup

Chop up and roast a whole pumpkin as part of a roast dinner. I know that I will only need to serve about a quarter of it for dinner, which leaves the rest for soup. Boil up a stock from the chicken back and neck after it has roasted, along with all the scraps from prepping the veges, plus an extra onion and maybe a potato. Generally there's enough in the way of peelings and stuff to make about a litre of stock.

Simmer this away on the back of the stove while watching Sunday night TV, then strain it into a bowl and pop it in the fridge for 1/2 an hour to allow some of the fat to separate off the liquid.

Scrape the pumpkin off its skin and chop up whatever leftover veges you have - usually some potato, kumera, and onion, and place them all in another bowl. Add about 400ml of stock and puree up with a hand blender, until it reaches a thick and smooth consistency with some chunky bits.


Today I was home on "looking-after-the-sick-family-sick-leave", and had some for lunch, with a big dollop of sour cream. Delicious, and just what I felt like on a cold and rainy day.

Tonight I'll be Making the Most of the Roast again, using the breasts from last night's chook to make a coconut and banana curry. I'll let you know how it turns out!

Almost a Vegetarian Night

There are many good reasons why we should all try to make one or two meals a week vego. Aside from any ethical or moral reasons, which I can't really declaim about since I'm a well-publicised eater of meat, it makes sense both in terms of our physical and financial health to put less meat and more veges on the table.

As well as our new tradition of getting to the market every week, and the extra veges that's putting on our plate every night as a result, we also decided that we would try to cook at least one vegetarian meal every week, just like we do at least one leftover meal out of a big roast or lasagne or whatever. Last week we made nachoes with a tin of chilli beans and a tin of baked beans, which was really good.


The next day, I was glad that I work in a large, open space.

Tonight, we had wedges on the menu again, just because they are easy and yummy. I decided that this would be a good opportunity for a vegetarian meal, even though C had planned on us having them with fried bacon and onion, which I completely forgot about. So all was moving nicely towards our having a vege meal this week, when I remembered that I had forgotten to take my lunch to work today. And once a piece of lasagne has thawed from the freezer, it really has to be eaten.

So tonight we ate vegetarian wedges, with a pile of steaming brocolli, cauli and carrots, a big serving of garlicky cabbage, and sour cream and sweet chilli sauce.

With a side of lasagne.

We tried. That's all anyone can ask, surely.

Making the Most of the Roast

Sunday was Roast Lamb Day again, having found another lovely joint for $12.00 at the supermarket. It replaced Roast Chicken on the menu, but that all worked out.

Without labouring the point, Sunday's lamb was much the same as last weekend's Lemon-Tossed Lamb Roast, with a few changes.

I tossed the Lamb with lemon and lime zest, salt and pepper and 2T of honey. Otherwise it was much the same. It came out crispy on the outside and succulent on the inside, and it went down awfully well. Uncle K, who was treated to the now infamous Sugar-Free Stew a few weeks ago, joined us for Sunday Roast and it was good.

What I really want to cover is what we did with the Leftovers.

In our menu we had planned on getting two nights' meals out of the roast, like we usually do with a chicken. For Monday night we picked up a packet of roti breads so we could have...

Roast Lamb and Vege Wraps

Chop up the leftover lamb and roast veges into roughly 1cm cubes and fry quickly in a hot pan. Butter the Rotis very lightly and fry quickly in another hot pan.
In a third pan, fry a hunk of cabbage, some sliced garlic and a sliced courgette in some butter.

Lay the hot roti on a plate and dish a spoonful of the Lamb and Vege into the top quarter of the roti, followed by a spoonful of cabbage and courgette. Fold up the bottom, then each side, and press down. Dish up a pile of fresh steamed veges, sit down on the couch and enjoy. Of course, sauces are an option too. Normally I would go with an aioli or sweet chilli sauce, but since everything was so moist anyway I just went naked, which was superb.



It was quick and easy, and what's even better is that by the time we'd dished up enough for the two of us, there was still enough for another meal of the same. So one lamb roast for $12.00 ended up making 7 adult servings, for an average cost of less than $2.00 per person. That's what we like.

Next post: Will my attempts to make a pizza sauce meet with success or failure?

Winter is here

Oh yes. Jack Frost has been about, and the wind is now blowing cold from the north as well as the south.

After a week that has ranged from the mildly annoying to the downright depressing, it's finally the weekend again. We missed our trip to the market last week due to being in the South Island, but we braved the cold and the wind to get down there this morning. The sun came out and it was a clear crisp day at the riverbank with bargains to be found. We spent about $30, and the vege crisper, fruitbowl, and the cupboard where the onions, potatoes and kumaras live are all overflowing.

A quick word about garlic. Without any suggestion of xenophobia, I really have to recommend that you (assuming you're in NZ - if not, replace "NZ" with "local" just to make the same points) buy NZ garlic if you can find it. Most of what we get in the stores is grown overseas, particularly in China, and you'll see it in those jammed plastic mesh bags in the supermarket for bargain prices. NZ garlic is more expensive than the mass imported stuff you can get, but it has a much shorter drive to the market. Besides the reduced carbon footprint of buying local produce and the way that local stuff tends to taste better, we have stringent quality controls in place in NZ to regulate the quality of the soil that our food is grown in. But my main issue with the chinese garlic we have here is that by the time is gets to us, most of it is going green in the middle, and these bits have to be cut out, and the cloves are usually a bit rubbery. For the sake of knowing that you're eating a quality product that you can use completely and has been grown in good soil without having been shipped across an ocean to reach you, look out for NZ garlic.

Beef Stew with Lime, Chilli and Kumara

Cube about 400g of stewing steak (to serve 2 adults, 1 toddler and to leave enough for one lunch)

Finely slice a small head of garlic
Deseed and finely slice one small red chilli (You can up this amount if you are a chilli fiend - I went on the awfully mild side because my lovely wife is a chilliphobe and I thought I should be careful not to burn Isaac's mouth or else he might never eat chilli anything again!)
Grate the zest from half a lime. Combine all the above in a metal bowl. Add the juice of half a lime, a big swig of soy sauce, some freshly ground pepper, a splash of olive oil, and a T of brown sugar. Put aside to marinade for at least half an hour.

Heat some oil (I use Rice Bran Oil for my basic cooking) in a heavy pan and start frying up the fat you've removed from the meat. This is just to get the flavour of the meat into the onion base. While you can eat this cooked fat, I don't recommend it. It might seem crunchy and nice at first, but it doesn't go down quite the same as crackling.

Preheat the oven to 210c.

Normally I would make a base for the stew of onions and carrots, but our visit to the market today convinced me to deviate from this plan ever so slightly. We got some lovely carrots with the tops still on, which I couldn't bear to chop up, and we got some really cheap tomatoes, some of which were on the way out.

Roughly chop one large onion and four overripe tomatoes. Remove the beef fat from the pan, cook the onions and tomatoes until softened (about 7 minutes) and then place in an oven dish that has a lid. Add a little extra oil to loosen up the pan, get the oil very hot, then add the meat. As liquid runs off the meat into the pan, drain through a sieve back into the metal bowl, and tap any solid flavour in the sieve back into the pan. Repeat this until the meat is able to brown nicely, probably about 3 times. Into the metal bowl with the juices, add a cup of hot water and half an Oxo Beef Stock Cube. If you have a cup of beef stock, this will do the trick as well. Stand this by.

When the meat is brown all over and just starting to crisp, remove from the pan into the oven dish with the onions. Heat the pan again and add about 1/4 Cup of Red Wine. Use a spatula to stir up all the residual flavours from the pan, then add the stock mixture. Allow this to reduce. Mix up 1t of cornflour in 1/2 a Cup of cold water and add gradually. You may not need to put all the cornflour mixture in, just judge it as you go. Continue to reduce the gravy, allowing it to thicken, until its about the consistency of cream.

Peel and chop a kumara into bite-size pieces. Pour the gravy into the oven dish and add in the kumara. Combine all and place in the oven, covered. Cook at 210c for 25mins, then reduce to 190c for a further 1 1/2 hrs.

Meanwhile, get your dumplings ready. This comes pretty much straight from the Edmonds CookBook, so if you don't have this fine kitchen manual, I strongly suggest you find a copy. Sift 1.25C of Flour, 1t Baking Powder, a pinch of salt and the other half of the Oxo Cube into a bowl. Add a shake of dried mixed herbs and 50g of butter, cubed. If you have a pastry blender, this is an easy way to crumble up the ingredients. If not, just rub it through your fingers until it feels like a light crumble. Then add milk or water a little at a time until the dough forms into a sticky mass.

The stew should cook for 2 hours, and the dumplings should go in for the last half hour. Get the stew out of the oven. If it seems a little dry, add a splash of hot water over the top. Spoon the dumpling dough over the stew in balls, replace the lid and return to the oven for the final half hour.


For the veges tonight, I sliced the carrots lengthwise so that they still felt all rural what with their tops on and all. I steamed them for about 10 minutes and put the fresh green beans into the steamer for the last 2 minutes. Crunchy fresh veges with tender beef and chewy dumplings! With the fire going and the rain walking down the windows, it was a great night to be inside.