An easy everyday lentil thingy

Took my mum to hear Ray McVinnie at Farro in Lunn Ave. He was preparing a dish of brown lentils and baked salmon which I now make all the time. It's very easy, salmon is ridiculously cheap and can go in the freezer for when you're late with dinner or have people for lunch.
Organic brown lentils: boil for 20 mins until al dente. Drain them then stir into a bunch of baby spinach, add chopped sundried tomatoes and a chunk of baked salmon broken into big pieces. Pepper. Lemon juice. Ray added flavoured sour cream but it''s not needed.
The heat of the lentils and salmon will wilt the greens. This is ever-so-yum, and left-overs make a great lunch for the next day too.
Thanks Ray!

Blue Cheese and Pear mini pikelets

Make some little pikelets (no, you do not need the recipe - all I'll say is, use Cream of Tartar and baking soda instead of baking powder.
Mash a nice little blue (100g for lots, less for fewer) into a light sour cream - about half and half. You could use ricotta if you prefer. Dice up some nice pear, drench with lemon juice and fold in. Now you can go mad with seasoning - not too much salt, but plenty pepper and I myself do always like a touch of sweet chilli. You could add some caramelised onion too - and a splash of whisky.
Pile that mixture onto the wee pikelets and there you have it.

Membrillo - Quince Paste

Why why why did I not share this at the time.... made it just before Easter when quinces were in the shops - they're not now though!
This traditional Italian/Spanish paste is nice nice nice - deliriously amazingly delectable with a strong cheese.

Take your so-ugly-they're-beautiful quinces and cover with water

Boil them until the skins crack. At this stage they're easy to peel, and you can take the skins off when they're cool enough, and remove the pips and cores.

Boil again until soft.

Now strain off the water, puree the fruit and add the same quantity of sugar - weight for weight.

Slowly bring back to the boil while stirring to make sure the sugar is all dissolved.

You need to let this cook now for ages - let's say an hour but it may be longer. Stir occasionally. It changes slowly from a light beige colour to a strong pinky red and gets very thick.

Once you think all the moisture has boiled away, pour it into a baking-paper lined tin. Some people now bake this on low heat for another hour to make sure it's going to set.
I was over it by then - ours is set just enough but gosh it's good... I wrapped it in several blocks in baking paper and it keeps in the fridge for ages. If you let it. I didn't.

Whakatane Picnic, Riverside

Easter time and a row along the Rangitaikei River near Thornton in the Bay of Plenty. We headed out with several boats and aimed for Edgecumbe.
Eight km's later, we arrived at a paddock and were greeted with...

What a spread! We added our Easter buns and then tucked in. One of the best fruit cakes I've ever eaten, no photo for you but here's the recipe:
1kg very moist fruit
soaked overnight in 2 cups fruit juice
The next morning, add 2 cups of flour and 2 tsp baking powder, stir and bake.
Yes, that is stunning in its simolicity. And in honourof simplicity, I will NOT answer any questions about temperature, size of tin, length of cooking time. Let's go with our instincts o this one - it's cooked when it smells divine, the oven needs to be moderately hot, and just use a tin you have!

A little bit of jelly goes a long way

and there's a jar of each going to Rotorua for Ann - the donor of the grapes.

Simmer your fruit, stalks and all, with a little water. Make sure it's well and truly cooked down. It just needs to simmer gently for around an hour. Get some muslin from the hardware or fabric shop and pour the fruit into 2 layers of it. Do have a bowl underneath or it all goes down the plughole.... Tie the muslin up, not squeezing the fruit but you need to contain it. Then find a way to suspend the bag over the bowl so it can hang there for several hours or overnight.
In the morning throw away the fruit (don't squeeze it first) and measure the juice into a pot. For every 600ml add something like 1- 1 1/2 cups sugar (slightly less for tart apples). Add the sugar before you heat the juice for better results. Bring to the boil while stirring to dissolve the sugar then boil it rapidly for about 10-15 minutes.

Do you know how to test for setting? Drop a small amount onto a cold saucer and push it with your finger - if it's ready little wrinkles will form. (On the jelly not your finger dummy..)

Now bottle it in sterilised jars. I usually have mine heating in the oven while I'm making the jelly.

(See sugar amounts and setting guides below)

Fruits with enough pectin to jell easily when cooked are blackberry, plum, gooseberry, apple, raspberry and grape. (Wild grapes jell better than tame ones). Pectin levels drop as fruit ripens so try to gather mid-ripe fruit. But don't let it stop you!
To achieve proper proportions of pectin and acidity and to add flavour to the jelly, different fruits can be mixed. Some good combinations are crab apple with grape, currant with raspberry, gooseberry with raspberry, tart apple with plum and tart apple with quince. You can add 1 tablespoon of orange, lime or lemon juice per cup of juice to make it jell better.

The amount of sugar you add does depend on the pectin level and the way to test is to add 2 tsp methylated spirits to 1 tsp juice. If low in pectin, the mixture will clump in little blobs. If medium, 2 or 3 blobs, and if high then you'll have one big jelly blob. The higher the pectin content, the more sugar you need.

Apple forest

Look what I did with some black and red food colouring and some beautiful little apples

Dinner tonight at Adie's with Grant doing his Italian meatballs and I get to take dessert. Get your false teeth ready girls!

For the toffee:1 1/2 cups sugar and 1/2 cup water, plus 1 tbsp vinegar. Simmer till sugar is dissolved, boil for about 8 minutes then add colouring. Roll the apples in it.

Eat and enjoy!

Too many tomatoes, too little time

A bumper crop, all ripe at once
Breakfast: take a plethora of toms, addd basil, feta, parmesan, basil, salt and pepper and a trickle of balsamic

 I love our grill - we use it for many things. The oven is too large to heat just for something like this.,

 Delicious! I think we might try to cut out a lot of white bread (sniff!) as I'm starting to believe the stuff I'm reading about wheat causing women to swell in the stomach area - to put it kindly.

Fortunately coffee and a pastry are only half an hour away... breakfast is usually a little larger than this.

Quickest chocolatiest pud....

I am suffering at the moment. All this training (8 sessions per week...) and by evening I'm starving...My favourite course is of course dessert. So tonight at 8pm after re-heated lasagne and fresh asparagus I needed carbohydrates. And I remembered a really quick dessert recipe for chocolate brownie. You may have this awesome recipe...

3/4 cup flour
1 cup sugar
100gm butter melted
2 eggs
1/4 cup cocoa
1 tsp baking powder
vanilla

....... plus I added walnuts and chocolate buttons. Microwave for 6 minutes in a high-powered microwave then turn out onto a platter and dust heavily with sifted icing sugar.
I could in fact eat a quarter of this but I decided to be good and cut it into 6. Made a real egg custard and poured that over in lieu of cream or ice-cream... and ate it all really quickly.

luxury in the suburbs

How many of you can match my breakfast this morning - WHITEBAIT fritters. NZ Whitebait fritters. Oh the indulgence!
My Mum gave me some - Dad must be forgiven for throwing it in the green bin... fortunately we were wise to his tricks and found it there amongst the poppy trimmings and with a blowfly circling. Once that was all brushed off we were in business.

Take your 257 whitebait...

Add them to a bowl with eggs and a little flour - a very little please!

Mix.....

Fry in butter in groups.

The egg sets around the fishies.

And once it's brown, you EAT them.

Do NOT believe those West Coasters who say that they only work with mint sauce.

Dinner Party Thursday at the Hobbs'

We've been entertaining on a Thursdays a lot lately ... it's the last day of the 'working' week for me and I often feel like I can cope with the cleaning up afterwards on my day at home.

Adie and Grant came along - fresh from haircutting services. Stew had corrective eye surgery that afternoon too so we were all pretty spruced up and ready to eat.

The Menu:
Homemade oat biscuits (super easy) with Miriam's Chicken Liver pate

My homemade dukkah served with fresh walnut bread and olive oil for dipping

Seafood chowder - wonderful with fresh clams, salmon and prawns and accompanied with a little ciabatta and lots of butter (that's for me).

A salad of spiced venison fillet, caught by Stew a few months back, with roasted kumara, baby spinach and roasted red capsicum. Unfortunately (as is often the case at our place) the food was consumed before a camera could be found...! But it was wonderful, very colourful, and I loved the dressing.

Simply coat venison or lamb fillet with toasted cumin, fennel, mustard seeds, lemon zest and ground pepper and marinate for an hour. Cut the kumara into wedges and roast - I use the electric frypan for this. Toast some pine nuts, roast a red pepper and slice, and make the dressing. When you're ready, cook the venison quickly over the bbq. Cover with foil and let it rest for 10 minutes then slice thinly. Pile all the ingredients into a large bowl and top with this dressing:

Dressing:

Half cup greek yoghurt, quarter cup lemon juice, a pinch of paprika and a few leaves of mint finely sliced.

Followed all this with a simple dessert course which is very unlike me - for one thing I'm not a blue cheese fan, and for another I like sweets. But this was very elegant and easy.

Blue cheese, pear and honey parcels with that walnut bread, toasted this time.

Peel and slice enough pears to give half per person. Slice and fan the halves on squares of baking paper.

Crumble about 50gm good blue cheese over the top. Top with a tablespoon of honey and a good dollop of thickened cream or runny cream.

Staple them up into parcels that won't leak and bake 20 minutes. Let them rest for a while if you like. Cut them apart and present on platters - one for each guest.

We had a bottle of First Knight Ambrosia from the Food Show, made in Gisborne. It was utterly divine with the pears - as you can see from the amount left in the bottle.

Experimental Meringues

so I'm experimenting with ideas for the October chef-fest and I wanted to try meringues with marshmallows inside them. Which I made tonight .., they are yummy as only meringues can be but maybe not quite worth the extra effort of enclosing the marshmallows. Yet! My cooking colleague Gary suggested freezing the marshmallows so I can get the meringues cooked while the marshmallows stay soft and creamy... I tried this and it was definitely better but still not quite right.

Roast Roots

in truth, Roasted Red Roots..... even if I didn't love this simple but impressive dish I'd cook it just so I could say its name.....

Peel and chop into similar sizes an assortment of the following:

Kumara

Red onions

Capsicum

Yams

Beetroot

Radishes

Pumpkin

Parsnip

Potatoes

then sprinkle oil and balsamic and lots of fresh herbs over, plus salt and pepper.

Roast for as long as it takes - I had 3 large pans of them plus 2 of scalloped potatoes so I gave them 2 hours.