The KitchenMaid

Strawberry, radish and cucumber salad

This morning I’ve been for a run around the harbour and a quick dip in Oriental Bay on the way home. Spring has a bad reputation in Wellington (expressed best in this calendar), but today feels like one of those mythical ‘can’t beat it on a good day’ days that the city’s tourism campaigns are built on.

Spring, of course, means strawberries. Like living through a brutal Wellington spring day, growing good strawberries is mostly an exercise in hope triumphing over experience; some years are better than others. I’m stil optimistic that my homegrown crop will come good. If you’ve got a surfeit of strawberries from your own garden, try them in this exceedingly pretty and festive-looking salad (from the Spring section of Homecooked).

STRAWBERRY, RADISH AND CUCUMBER SALAD WITH MINT DRESSING

This is one of my favourite photos from Homecooked, not least because photographer Carolyn Robertson and I spent AGES trying to figure out all sorts of different ways to shoot it. Then we got over ourselves, I just threw the salad together and the photo more or less took itself (well, with Caro’s exceptional skills involved!)

For the dressing: 

  • 1 cup loosely packed fresh mint leaves, washed and dried 
  • ½ tsp honey 
  • 3½ tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice 
  • 3½ tbsp extra virgin olive oil 
  • ¼ tsp salt 

For the salad: 

  • 250g (1 punnet) strawberries, washed, hulled and sliced
  • 1 medium-sized telegraph cucumber, peeled, deseeded and sliced 
  • 1 cup sliced radishes (about a small bunch, depending on size) 
  • 150g feta, crumbled
  • small mint leaves, for garnishing 

Make the dressing first: put all the ingredients in a blender or small food processor and whiz until smooth. Taste for seasoning and set aside. 

Tumble the sliced strawberries, cucumber, radishes and crumbled feta into a serving bowl. Drizzle over the dressing and toss gently. Garnish with mint leaves and serve. 

Have you got any strawberry growing tips? Do share!

Common Household Biscuits & Slices Of New Zealand

Are you a ‘lickalda jamoffit’ kind of person? Or do you prefer a ‘picquanacium fuchsia’ to brighten up your morning tea break? Either way, I wager that you’ll be delighted by the new tea towel and poster edition of Common Household Biscuits & Slices of New Zealand.

This brilliant concept, which mixes scientific accuracy with subversive humour, caused quite a storm in a biscuit jar when it was first released as part of the beautiful children’s compendium, Annual 2, in 2017. Biscuit eaters across the nation (and from further afield) were gratified and grumpy in equal parts when they discovered that some of their most detested biscuits and slices had made the cut while their favourites had missed out.

For me, the icing on the, err, biscuits and slices is the Latin names found under each one. Illustrator Giselle Clarkson has used her Latin knowledge to come up with names like ‘Lestwee forgetum’ (the noble Anzac biscuit), ‘Custurdis betwixtus’ (the melting moment) and ‘Disappointus minora’ (the much-maligned sultana pasty).

You might not have done enough for a chocolatum rotunda, but you definitely deserve one of these tea towels or posters. And just think what good presents they’ll make…

The Common Household Biscuits & Slices of New Zealand tea towel and poster are available here.

Last Christmas…

Last week I wrote a ‘best of times, worst of times’ kind of essay on Christmas food (and much more besides) for Your Weekend magazine. I ran out of room to include this section, which looks back at last Christmas. How can it be a year ago?

Coconut Eton Mess with berries and pomegranate molasses

Christmas Day 2016, Wellington

My brother stands in the kitchen, taking the cork out of a bottle of champagne. My sister puts on her glasses to read a recipe on her phone. My husband rinses grit off a pound of West Coast whitebait while my nephew patiently teaches my daughter how to play Old Maid. My brother-in-law explains a complex psychological theory to me while I wrangle two kilos of pork loin into a roasting dish. I have been looking forward to this for months – Christmas under my own roof, with visitors from far away. Not even the discovery that our ancient car was stolen overnight bothers me. I have taken the advice of the kind woman on the insurance helpline who told me at 8am that “there’s nothing we can do about it today, just enjoy Christmas”.

Weeks earlier, I had not felt so good. I had just started a new job and was more unsettled by the Kaikoura earthquake than I wanted to admit. I needed a distraction and the Christmas menu fitted the bill perfectly.  I send emails to my siblings; my brother responds with a link to a Fanny Craddock clip on YouTube. My sister directs me to a Nigella Lawson recipe. I show my husband a photo. “Excellent choice,” he says. “But we’re having a ham too, right? And whitebait?”

In the end we have all of these things, plus new potatoes dug out of the garden on Christmas Eve. My brother makes a kind of Eton Mess with coconut yoghurt, cranberry-studded meringues and swirls of pomegranate molasses. My daughter makes us pose for family portraits with the hideous robotic toys she has been sent for Christmas. We laugh so much the neighbours must think we are mad. We want for nothing.

Later that night I crawl into bed, thinking about the person who stole our car. They broke into our neighbour’s car too, stealing his five-year-old’s brand new bike. I don’t care so much about our car, but I hope the bike has made someone happy.

 

Wherever you are this Christmas, I hope you have a happy and safe one with people you love.

A mea culpa (& a white chocolate tiramisu)

This is a story I may have told before, but bear with me. Once upon a time, when I worked at a regional newspaper, a very, very angry reader drove all the way out to the office with a plate of biscuits he’d made. This wasn’t a gesture of generosity, but of rage. He’d made the biscuits to a recipe that was published in the newspaper and he was disappointed by the results. He complained that they were inedible and that we must have left the sugar out by accident. I apologised profusely and said I’d check the recipe with its author.

When I did, she was bemused. “No,” she said, “there’s no mistake. They’re just not very sweet biscuits.”

This is NOT a tiramisu – it’s the raspberry and lemon posset that appears alongside it in the original publication. We ate the test tiramisu too fast to photograph it (it’s that good!)

This was no comfort to the angry man, who was nearing apoplexy. After he calmed down a bit he revealed that he’d made the biscuits for the nurses who were looking after his ill wife in hospital. These nurses had then complained that they weren’t very nice (I know!). So really, it wasn’t about the biscuits at all. In the end we parted on good terms and the rest of the newsroom got some unexpected morning tea. He was right, the biscuits weren’t that nice, but they were made to the exact recipe.

I’m bringing this up now because this week I made a mistake in a recipe printed in The Dominion Post, the Waikato Times and The Press. I left an instruction out and this has made some readers very cross. I picked it up quick enough for it to be amended online, but once a runaway horse has bolted the print stable it’s very hard to get it back.

So, if you are looking at my recipe for Black Doris plum and white chocolate tiramisu and thinking, ‘where does the melted chocolate go?’, I’m sorry. The full recipe is below – with the missing instruction in bold. I wish I could say that there was a good reason for the error but the truth is, I’m only human. I will be more careful next time. Thank you to the people who have gotten in touch (even the ones who sent some rather cross emails) – I hope the mistake doesn’t put you off making the tiramisu because it really is delectable.

BLACK DORIS PLUM AND WHITE CHOCOLATE TIRAMISU
Serves 6-8
Preparation time: 30 minutes (plus 6-12 hours’ chilling time)
Cooking time: nil
A classic tiramisu is a heady confection of coffee and dark chocolate – delicious, but a recipe for a terrible night’s sleep. This fruity version is slightly lighter but no less delectable. To make it alcohol-free, use extra syrup from the plums as the liquid. Look for the Italian sponge fingers, also known as savoiardi, in the “international foods” section of the supermarket, or try a Mediterranean foods store.
1 x 825g tin black doris plums in syrup
200g white chocolate
4 eggs, separated
4 tablespoons caster sugar
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
250g mascarpone
5 tablespoons limoncello
16-20 Italian sponge fingers
Set a sieve over a bowl. Pour in the plums and leave to drain for a few minutes. Reserve the syrup. Remove all the stones from the plums. Mash them slightly with a fork and set aside.
Break up 150g of the chocolate and put in a small bowl that will fit snugly into the top of a small saucepan. Put about three centimetres of water in the saucepan and set over medium heat. Don’t let the water boil. As soon as the chocolate has melted, remove it from the heat (being careful not to get any water in the chocolate). Set aside.
Put the egg yolks, caster sugar and lemon zest in a bowl. Whip until pale, thick and mousse-y (using electric beaters is easiest). Fold in the mascarpone and the melted white chocolate.
Wash and dry the beaters, ensuring there is no egg yolk mixture left on them. Put the egg whites in a separate bowl and whip until they form stiff peaks. Fold them very gently into the egg yolk mixture.
Pour the limoncello and five tablespoons of the reserved plum syrup into a shallow dish. Dip about eight to 10 sponge fingers into this liquid, then fit them into the bottom of a glass bowl (the sort that your mum makes trifle in).
Pour half the egg and mascarpone mixture on top, followed by half of the plums. Dip the remaining sponge fingers into the liquid and arrange neatly on top of the plums. Spread the remainder of the plums on top, followed by the remaining egg mixture.
Roughly chop the remaining 50g white chocolate and sprinkle over the top. Cover tightly and chill for at least six hours (preferably overnight) before serving.

Good Things: November 2015

“Guess what, Mum?” says the six-year-old, standing beside the bed at 6.30am with a book, a frisbee and a teddy. “It’s only six weeks until Christmas!”

I’m afraid she’s right, but I’m trying not to think about it. Instead, I’m going to focus on the nice things about November. If I concentrate hard, time will go slower, right?

I wanted to hate this book, I really did. I mean, it’s hard to love a cookbook – or indeed, any book – when the first pages are filled with young, bronzed people in their swimmers. But, all bias aside, it’s actually fantastic.

On the face of it, Bondi Harvest sounds like a PR dream. It’s the brainchild of two Bondi-based surfing mates, one of whom is a chef, the other a photographer and film maker, who decided to collaborate on some Youtube cooking videos, then a book. What makes you forgive the surfing palaver and the shots of people in bikinis is that the recipes are lovely, with a focus on fresh ingredients and gutsy flavours. I’m probably never going to frolic on the sands of Bondi while wearing a tiny bikini and drinking a green smoothie, but I am looking forward to making some of Guy Turland’s recipes.

Lots of people I know are still being struck down by unseasonal colds and other miseries – which makes Mother Earth’s new UMF Manuka Honey seem like a gift from the gods. Not all manuka honeys are created equal (and some are about as manuka’d as I am), but this one has been certified by the industry-supported Unique Manuka Factor Honey Association. The Mother Earth honeys come in two UMF strengths, UMF 5+ and UMF 10+, with the higher number indicating a higher degree of purity and quality. Importantly, they taste amazing, with those rich, earthy flavours associated with manuka honeys. Mother Earth’s UMF Manuka Honeys start from $17.99 for 250g. 

As a proud Good Bitch (and baker), I’m very excited to reveal the gorgeous products the Head Bitches have created to raise funds. There’s a pair of teatowels (one of which features a top-secret ginger crunch recipe) and a gorgeous calendar, plus you can still get your hands on one of the exclusive ‘Baking Bad’ t-shirts from earlier in the year. All these things have got Christmas giving written all over them. Go on, buy a set!

Speaking of charity, if you’re wanting to do your bit for Movember but can’t find it in you to grow a mo’ you can always grab my neighbour’s balls. Go on, he’d love you to grab a pair.

These salted caramel balls are insanely addictive, all-natural, and a not-for-profit fundraising venture dreamed up by my neighbour (of Wellington-based food company Go Native) to raise funds for Movember. They’re $2.99 a pack, and a dollar from each one sold goes to men’s health initiatives.

Last but by no means least, I’m very flattered to be in the running for Best Kids’ Food Blog in the 2015 Munch Food Awards. You can vote in this category – as well as name and shame the worst kids’ foods – here.

Have a great weekend everyone x