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.

Just quickly - Shirley's Kitchen - er, yum

Had visitors the other night and they brought with them this divine fig and walnut log

...made by a friend of theirs in the South Island. Shirley Bradstock of Shirley's Kitchen.
Look them up, see where you can get some and go there. Go now!


Well, what are you waiting for!? Go when I tell you to...

Goodness of friends

Thanks Pete
The fish pie is in the post

Had a kahawai delivered from his stocks and what else can you do with that...

along with the Feijoa and Ginger chutney from the fallen feijoas

Grapes of abundance in Roto-vegas

Love these unexpected deliveries of home-grown goodness. No spray, she said (other than the neighbour who might visit them in the moonlight...) still - a good wash will fix that

Grape jelly underway as we speak...
Had to make a white one and a black - I'm already imagining the colour
Thanks Ann!

we need one of these Simon

Okay Simon and Kirsty here's a project that you'd like

and here's my challenge to you
DO IT AS WELL AS THESE PEOPLE!

Second Bite

Whip over to Melbourne and have a read about this awesome project.
This follows on the heels of some reading I was doing about the wastage of food we in the first world allow/cause - what you will. Supermarkets could easilty be blamed but then we also are precious about our choices. Did you know that huge torrents of food are rejected because of size, shape and colour? I must do some more research on this but I can already feel myself gettting angry.
Anyway here's a couple of places to look further if this is of interest to you.

Yay Brett's cook book's here

What a fantastic job you've done with this Brett!
I'm green with envy...

...and what a generous thing, to add a page from the other 11 Series 1-ers.

Thank you, it's going onto my recipe book shelf right now!

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!

Master Chef Series 2 coming up 20 February TV One

Sounds like the date is out... I read it in the Sunday Star Times.... and the publicity machine is going into action. Check the facebook page for news as it happens.

I read a bit from new judge dude Josh Emmet saying that the new lot of contestants are better than the last! Huh! Charming... not that I take offence easily and he could well be right. I trust none of them make Chicken and Raspberry Tarte Tatin...

Anyway I had fun while it lasted, and I was given a copy of the cook book in the process! What-ho... might have to try some of those recipes! Actually I'm looking forward to Brett's new book which should be along in a month or 2. Aww it's just because I might have a recipe in there... yes I know, I'm shallow. No surprise there then.

Charlie Royal

Love the name...

Charles hails from my neck-of-the-woods, Rotorua. He's a celebrity Maori chef dude.
Ann sent me a pack of his KawaKawa herb, which smells delicious. Might combine it with the next fresh snapper haul.

Go have a little look at his website. I think his range and his tours sound amazing. What a great concept, so pleased to see someone commercialising this Maori food idea with taste (get it? Taste... hahah) and sensitivity.

too little too late...

apologies are not my thing... do I owe anyone this blog? No. And I don't feel that I let myself down..... it's not that I'm doing nothing out here! Just have a look at that excavation in progress, and think about how that's my usual work space in there. Not this week though! Rising Damp - funny maybe, but don't laugh near me. There we were sitting in our lovely carpeted new office-in-the-garage and then one day last week, wet feet. And the next day, wetter feet. Yes the rain had been pelting down but 3 days later no difference. So that afternoon we shifted the entire office out - 4 work stations plus the carpet. Same afternoon we went fishing (Anniversary Day regatta) and broke down in the middle of the shipping lane. Amongst the regatta, the tugs and the 1m swell. Nothing a tow from the Coastguard wouldn't fix though.

Two days later Stew (Engineer man) brought in the heavy machinery and there we were with dirt and dust and mess and noise and the whole house shaking. Carpet piled up in the main bedroom. Two work stations in another. Me in the third. And Em working on the kitchen table.

Therefore no apologies owed and none given - but I had the weekend in Rotorua and the morning that I left Stew was preparing the latest harvest from the sea.

Not only had he been for a little bike ride Saturday morning, but also spent a half day fishing with clients the day before. No break-down that day!

Charlie (cat) has decided she loves fresh snapper. So have I.

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.

My rowing weekend at the Blue Lake Rotorua...

...featured a barbeque cook-off. Six teams, one barbeque, 10 minutes and 2 judges.
It was a wild night - a tropical cyclone raging outside, no facilities bar a bucket of hot soapy water, a trestle table and a small pantry of ingredients, 1 knife between 24 people and a bowl per team.

The creations were impressive, ranging from spicy thai chicken burgers and impressive yoghurt and mint sauces, to Blue blue beef burgers with plum chutney and blue cheese dressing (my team!)

 My team were of course dressed for the occasion in MasterChef aprons and chef's hats.

 Six burgers presented for the judges - where's Ray when you need a caustic comment about garnishes that you can't eat!?

 Some very serious effort going into the judges' deliberations.

Unfortunately too many glasses of The Wright Off cocktail we designed for the event meant that I can't remember who won - but it wasn't my team. They say we cheated... Hard to believe! I think they meant we were cheated.

Fishing tonight..

 Fishing last night - so I made sushi, such a simple thing and easy to eat with one hand while the rod is in the other...

 Caro contributed a home-made mince pie, home baked bread and we that with a bottle of Lindauer Summer (my new favourite sparkling...) while the sun set and the full moon rose.

 Bill Hohepa, you're a legend. We find he always knows what the conditions will be like. LOTS of tiddlers, we threw many more back than what were kept, but enough for lunch today.

How slack can a blogger be...?

can't quite believe the time that's flown by.
Must make a New Year's resolution, not to be so slack.

Ooops... fail!

Christmas - the most repeated food blog posting of all

Rather boring for the reader I'm sure - however in the absence of more interesting food experiences lately, here you go!
Christmas Eve lunch was my contribution, with a 3-course meal for the whole fang damily, 2 choices per course and 17 people.

Stew and I hung branches and candles 

 My Mum and Dad played our silly game and wore the crowns

 Here's my grandmother (97 this year) and nephew Harry - home from Yale for 2 weeks to the delight of everyone, especially his mother and grandmother

 Ann designed the menus for me - Rangiputa Fish cakes (below) or mussels in white wine sauce for the entree.

 Mains were barbecued turkey with cranberry relish, or fillet of beef. Simple sesame asparagus and a caesar salad on the table made the sides easy.

 Harry had everything that was going, plus a packet of chocolate biscuits from the pantry. While he thought we weren't looking.

 Dessert was a choice of mini pavlovas with champagne and mint strawberries, or my home made baklava. Most had both.

Stew was King of the barbeque!