Catching up

WHERE has the time gone??  We have had a frantic couple of months, for reasons I won't go into for fear of boring you to tears.  Suffice to say very little time has been spent inside as the garden is absolutely humming  and bursting with the fullness of spring so keeping up with the lawns and weeding is a constant battle.

I haven't even had time to report on my wonderful trip to the Agrarian Kitchen back in August, which I promise to do very soon, maybe if we get more rainy days.  Yes, this spring is throwing everything at us:  it was 26 degrees on Saturday, pouring with rain and 12 degrees today.  When I was driving back from Robe last week it was hailing so hard it looked like there was snow on the road and I had to pull over:

No wonder there are so many people suffering from nasty colds and flu, including the poor 'usband who can expect divorce proceedings if he doesn't get rid of the shocking cough/chest infection that has been plaguing him for the last couple of months.  My sympathy is waning and let's face it, men are not always the best at looking after their health.  Despite several courses of antibiotics he has coughed his heart out for ages (often all night) and is only just getting better.  It is quite possibly genetic.  My poor mother in law is enduring a nasty bout of bronchial pneumonia and has required some nurturing.  When you are feeling rotten and can't face cooking the thing you really need is nourishment in a bowl.

RESTORATIVE CHICKEN SOUP - makes a big batch, you can use some and freeze some

Chicken soup is the perfect remedy:  loads of vegetables and a hit of protein that has not had the life cooked out of it, steaming hot and life affirming.  

1 nice free range chicken

1 onion, don't bother peeling, cut into eight wedges

1 tblsp olive oil

2 celery stalks with leaves (use one and the leaves for the stock, one for the finished dish)

2 big carrots (again, one for the stock, one for the finish)

1 bay leaf

1 teasp black peppercorns

good handful of parsley, stalks and leaves

Noodles optional, any will do but try Wiechs, from the Barossa Valley in SA....hands down the best for the job.

Preheat the oven to 200c.

Place the onion on a roasting tray.  Rinse the chicken and pat dry with paper towel.

Place the chicken on the onion and roast in the oven for 30 minutes until it is nicely brown on the top.  This will help the stock to be a beautiful golden colour.

While the chicken is cooking prepare the stock.

Into a stockpot put one chopped stalk of celery and its leaves, the carrot, bay leaf, peppercorns and the parsley, leaving a bit for garnish at the end.  Fill the pot about half full of water.

Take the chicken out of the oven and gently place it in the water.  Scrape the onions and any pan juices into the pot too.  Fill the pot with water until the chicken is covered.  Bring to the boil and simmer very gently for about 45 minutes (you can do this in the Simmer oven of the Aga, it may take a little longer).

While that is cooking neatly chop up the remaining celery and carrot.

Check the chicken after 45 minutes, you want it to be just cooked.  Take out the chicken and put it on a plate to cool.  Strain the stock and return it to the cleaned out stockpot.

Bring it to the boil and add the chopped vegetables and a good few handfuls of noodles (dried ones will take as long as the veg to cook, fresh ones can be put in at the last minute).  Give the soup a bit of a skim and keep doing this as it cooks.

Take all the meat off the chicken and remove the skin. Shred it and add to the soup just before serving.

Check for seasoning and scatter over some chopped parsley.

And give it to someone you love.

Italia

I have returned from a wonderful trip to Italy in one, admittedly slightly larger, piece.  It was so good to get home to find that someone had indeed done a rain dance and, nearly four inches later, the grass has greened up and the garden was flourishing.  It was a dust bowl when I left.  Winter is now upon us. The pin oak has lost all its leaves, but there are still crab apples 

and quinces and the veggie garden, which I had presumed to be dead, was flourishing:

So I've raked and raked, mowed, weeded and cut back and the garden is nearly back to normal, ready for winter. 

Modica

Now Italy.  What an amazing trip.  I have returned newly inspired to make and cook all sorts of things: ricotta, pasta, hazelnut paste for gelati, lemon granita in the summer (a good hangover cure, I have discovered), double sided pizza (more on that later), eggplant parmagiana, zucchini flowers, more olive oil, more garlic, the list is endless.  We ate and we ate and developed a shocking gin habit (they have no spirit measures, it is free pour all the way so our pre-prandial drinks were more like gin and ice with a splash of tonic) and found other liquid obsessions namely Aperol Spritz and double espresso coffees (which I obviously knew about, just never had quite so many).

Another tray of Aperol Spritz

After an overnight stay in Dubai:

Spice souk, Dubai

we had three days in Rome, touristing, shopping, walking for miles, drinking gin & ice on the balcony of our charming hotel and trying some great restaurants..

Pretty house across from the balcony

So civilised.

From Rome we flew down to Catania in Sicily where we joined the Sicilian Food Tour, hosted by the effervescent Carmel Ruggeri (and her extraordinarily large Sicilian family).  At risk of boring you to tears I will carry on with the food tour in the next instalment.  I have serious gelati we need to discuss..

When I got home, jetlagged and exhausted, into a cold, wet Western Victorian day all I felt like was a bowl of soup.  Since I was on an Italian roll, it had to be minestrone.

The key to a good minestrone is in the stock.  You really need to use good quality beef, chicken or vegetable stock.  A visit to the vegetable garden decides what to throw in the soup.  All I do is saute chopped onion, carrot and celery in some olive oil with a sliced clove of garlic for about five minutes.  I then added the chopped ends of some purple and yellow silverbeet (or swiss chard), some pumpkin cubes, anything goes really.  

Add stock and a good tablespoon of tomato paste (or more to taste) and simmer gently until the vegetables are just tender.  Another great thing to add is an end of parmesan cheese (never throw them out, they keep in the fridge for yonks and add great flavour). 

Add half a cup of some fine pasta (optional), a tin of drained cannelli beans and the shredded leaves of the silverbeet.  You could add some frozen peas if you fancied.   Simmer until the pasta is cooked.  Season to taste.  Chopped parsley on the top.

I usually serve this with a dollop of pesto and some shaved parmesan.  

Chef crush

I have a new chef crush.  Yes, move over Jamie, Bill, Hugh and Nigel.  Dan Barber is my new man and I have no idea what his cooking is like.  You need to get to know him.  With any luck this man will have a huge influence on the future of food, agriculture and sustainability.
Read this article
Watch this video
It will make you think twice about which fish you buy.

Organic farming is tough, we have seen many farmers come and go: on a large scale the farms are mostly too expensive to run.  We all so want it to succeed.  Tim always says that to be green you need to be in the black.  That is sadly why our food is grown the way it is today: it's cheaper and measurable to farm in monocultures but the cost is the depletion of resources, particularly the soil.  I'm not quite sure how Dan Barber intends to feed the world, but there is no doubt he is on the right track and you've got to love his vision.

In our own small way, we are trying to do the right thing.  We are regenerating the soil by using a specially developed calcium rich, molasses based liquid fertilizer.  The improved quality of the pasture has significantly reduced the use of herbicides or pesticides, the sheep are happier, fatten well and cut more wool.  And it is brilliant on the vegetable garden, I'm growing mega veg, even in my slightly clay soils, and the soil is improving all the time.  So we can at least be self sufficient to a point.

On the menu in the past week....

Pea and ham soup

which has also been going in the lunch box:

I saw some lovely sardines at the local fish shop on Monday and just had to get them for lunch.  They were topped with a mix of breadcrumbs, lemon zest and juice and parsley, then flashed in the hot oven of the Aga (220c) for about 10 minutes.

Brain food in a good way..

There was also a ripping fish pie:

FISH PIE  Serves 4

2 nice sized pieces of fish of your choice.  I used some lovely boar fish.

8 green prawns

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup water

1 bay leaf

2 slices of lemon

40g/ about a tablespoon butter

1 leek, rinsed and chopped into rings

150 ml white wine

1 tblsp flour

chopped spinach or sliverbeet, lightly steamed

parsley

Puff pastry

Put the milk, water, bay leaf and lemon slices in a saucepan and bring gently to the boil.  Chop the fish into chunks and add to the simmering milk with the prawns.  Cook for 2 minutes, then remove the fish with a slotted spoon and put on a plate.  Set aside the liquid in the saucepan, leaving the bay leaf and lemon to infuse.

In a sturdy pan melt the butter and cook the leek for about 5 minutes until it is soft.  Add the white wine and let it sizzle and cook down for a few minutes.  Add the flour and stir for a minute.  Strain the milk onto the leek mix and stir in with a whisk until smooth.  Stir until the sauce thickens and comes to the boil.  Simmer gently for a minute or two.  Add the fish, spinach or silverbeet and parsley and season to taste.  Put it into a pie dish and either cover with a sheet of puff pastry or do what Sophie did and make some pastry shapes instead.  Just brush the pastry with some beaten egg and put it in a hot oven till it is puffed and golden.

Leeks..

The garden is looking so pretty this spring....

the irises are having their finest moment and there are lots of foxgloves...

even the chives are looking lovely..

There is, though, not much on offer in the veggie garden.  Rhubarb, some lovely spinach, herbs and rainbow chard (sliverbeet) just about sums it up.  It is full of promise (broad beans, potatoes, celery, strawberries, raspberries) and lots of goodies that are just sprouting seedlings (sweetcorn, peas, beans, beetroot, zucchini).  I have been using up the leeks to make way for the tomatoes.

I LOVE leeks.  One of my favourite vegetables.  And like any other vegetable that enters the kitchen lately I have been roasting them, on their own cut up into pieces with a lick of olive oil  or alongside chicken, and with the cooler weather this week I even made some soup:

I just chopped up a few leeks, sauteed them in butter and added a couple of rashers of chopped bacon, cooked for five minutes before adding a chopped potato and enough chicken stock to cover.  Simmer for 15 minutes and puree with a stick blender.  Finish with some chives.

I made some wholemeal pikelets on the Aga.  You don't even need a frying pan, you just cook them directly on the hotplate using a special silicon mat.

WHOLEMEAL PIKELETS

125g wholemeal flour

2 teasp baking powder

1 tblsp castor sugar

1 egg

170ml milk or buttermilk

Sift flour and baking powder into a bowl, add sugar.  Stir in egg and milk and blend until smooth.

Heat a non-stick frying pan and add a teaspoon of butter.  Swirl it around and spoon tablespoons of the mixture onto the pan.

Cook until bubbles appear, then flip them over and give them 30 seconds more.

A great after school snack.

On a soup roll..

It is soup weather.  The last few days have been dull and grey and it was seven degrees when I went to tennis this morning.  Seven.  At ten a.m.  All we ask for is just a little bit of sunshine.

No wonder the roses look miserable, they are on their last legs.  The damp and often humid summer really knocked them around and the autumn roses have been disappointing.  At least the nerines are looking pretty.

Back to the soup.  Sorry to do soup again but due to the camera breakage I am a bit behind with my photos.  I always make pea and ham soup out of the remains of the Christmas ham.  I usually freeze it in a plastic bag and make it later, because a) it's too hot for soup and b) we are over ham after the Christmas flourish.  You can also buy ham hocks from the butcher for this.

Soak the split peas overnight or for several hours in cold water.

PEA 'N HAM SOUP

300g green split peas (if you use more you will get a thicker soup)

1 ham bone

1 large carrot, roughly chopped

1 onion, roughly chopped

1 parsnip, roughly chopped

2 sticks of celery, roughly chopped

1 bay leaf

1 tblsp brown sugar

Soak the peas as above.  The next day, combine the ham bone, strained peas, carrot, onion, parsnip, celery, bay leaf and brown sugar in a large pot.

As you can see the jambon is a bit big for the pot.

Cover with water  and simmer gently for about three hours.

Allow to cool enough to handle the ham.  Take it out and chop the ham into small pieces.  Roughly mash the vegetables and refrigerate or freeze.

A bit of chopped parsley and some crusty bread is all it needs.

The other thing I wanted to show you was the roast chicken requested by the boarding school refugee before he went back after the holidays:

We have a Weber rotisserie and it does the most amazing chicken, pork and lamb that you are likely to taste.  It was the last supper, as it were, so he also requested chocolate souffle:

Tired for Mother's Day

Last Friday after the May races I was feeling extremely delicate.  How old am I going to be before I realise that gin and tonics are not an adequate substitute for food?  It was a fantastic day as always, and beats any day at Flemington hands down.  I am going to gloss over the "incident" of a horse in the Grand Annual leaping a two metre high fence into a crowd of onlookers who were outside the track.  Enough has been said already.  It was a most unfortunate freak accident (not many horses can jump that high).

Friday, then, was a day for ugg boots, lighting the fire and a bit of cooking.  Every time I walk into the pantry I have to pass three of these:

which the hunter and gatherer husband bought home from a duck shoot over Easter.  Time for action, I thought to myself, and so I made some soup.  I often cook the pumpkin for soup in the oven, which is lovely, but due to my weak condition I decided to throw the onion and garlic in the roasting pan as well.   Worked a treat.

There are no specific measurements to this recipe, just use what you have and just cover with the stock.

Preheat the oven to 180c.  Peel, seed and chop the pumpkin.  I used about half of the above.  Place in a  large roasting tin and add a chopped onion (or a couple of leeks would be good too) and about 5 cloves of garlic, not peeled.

Season with s & p and drizzle with olive oil.  Put in the oven and bake for about 50 minutes.  At this point I went outside to do some gardening and forgot about the pumpkin.  It probably had about an hour and 15 minutes and was a little charred on the edges, but it didn't seem to matter.

Put it all in a large saucepan and squeeze the garlic from its skin.  Cover with chicken stock.  Heat gently so the stock is warm.  Whizz with stick blender or in a food processor.  Season with salt and pepper and a little nutmeg and some cream to finish.  I crumbled over some Meredith Dairy goat's cheese and chives from the garden.

Helped the hangover enormously.  We then went out on Friday and Saturday night so by Sunday I was beyond doing much at all.  I do not expect much on Mother's Day and the Little Princess bought me this charming treasure from the Mother's Day stall at school, (which I paid for).  She also wrote a very sweet card which makes it all worthwhile.

Look how well my cauliflowers and spinach are growing... I only put them in the other day

as well as the garlic and rocket..