August 2005 Archives

Bread is very important to me. I love it fresh, I love it stale and ready for toasting, l love it with cheese, I love it in particular - fresh or toasted - with good salty butter. I love the way it mops up your plate after you've had a particularly tasty tomato pasta dish. I love the yeasty smell from the breadmaker as it cooks yet another loaf of homemade bread. I love making my own Brown Soda Bread and, most importantly, eating it. In short, I can't fathom a life without bread. That was why it was so important, after I moved to Christchurch - before the coming of the breadmaker - to find a local source of decent bread. The only time I ever use slice pan or a sliced loaf from the supermarket is when I'm temping and need something quick and easy to make my sandwiches for lunch. But it's not something that I'd chose as part of my normal daily life.

Part of Eating Locally is very supporting the small shops and producers of the area, something which I'll do as a matter of course - as long as their product is up to scratch. And for a while there, the bread that I was getting from a few bakeries around Christchurch wasn't much better than the "luxury" bread that you'd pick up at the supermarket. That was, however, before I discovered Ma and Pa's Bakery. They have a shop at in the Christchurch suburb of Richmond but, even more convenient for me, they have a city centre outlet just off Cathedral Square, on my way to the library. They make a variety of different breads and, even when well stocked, it's a habit of mine to walk past - just in case there's one that I might need. We've eaten our way through much of their stock at this stage - their nutty and sour Californian Sourdough, the very different Pain au Levain, a dense Rye Loaf, the wholewheat and wholegrain Wild West Grain Loaf, an intensely savoury Parmesan and Red Onion Focaccia, a delicious nigella seed-scattered Turkish Flatbread and, most importantly, their Maori Rewana Bread. A sourdough with a potato starter, the Rewana Bread is a solid loaf which is very happy to be eaten with one of my chunky Vegetable Soups. It's also a great basis for cheese-on-toast and lasts very well so that there's never a scrap thrown away.

Another café/bread shop that I've recently discovered is Vic's Café and Bake on Victoria Street. Vic's puts great emphasis on making all its food with vegetables from an organic supplier and it uses organic free-range eggs for its sumptuous brunch range of French Toast, pancakes and Eggs Benedict. The café is a great place to spend some time in the afternoon with a coffee and something sweetly delicious - and there are many decisions to be made about what loaf of bread should accompany you home. So far I've only managed to try their award-winning Wholegrain Bread. The loaf is packed with linseed, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, polenta, oats and rye and is a nutritious meal in itself. Match that with some cheese from the local range stocked by Canterbury Cheesemongers around the corner and you've a fantastic locally sourced meal. Is it time for lunch yet?

There are so many things that you can't go near when you're trying to Eat Local. I had written this piece about Spanakopita ever before I started this challenge but, pressed for choice on Saturday night, it was something I happily turned to. I had spinach and onions from Canterbury, feta from Karikaas, ricotta from Zany Zeus (North Island but still New Zealand!), nutmeg, couscous for the accompanying salad and local free-range eggs from Piko, our brilliant local wholefoods/organic shop but I must admit failure with the pastry, which was Australian. If I had been a bit more organised ahead of time I could have made my own but still, it didn't turn out too badly!

When I was in college in University College Cork, one of our greatest treats was to go out for dinner to the Quay Co-Op. As well as a wholefood and organic shop, rather like Piko, it was also our local vegetarian restaurant. Although none of us were in any way inclined towards giving up meat, we all loved the food (good and filling), the prices (very reasonable) and the fact that they welcomed you bringing your own wine. I think there was a ridiculously cheap corkage of about £2 (this was way back in pre-Eurofication times) and we took full advantage of it for birthdays and other celebrations. I can even remember a party of us turning up with a bottle of wine apiece on Holy Thursday to do our pre-Good Friday drinking in comfort.

One of the dishes we most loved was their Spanakopita - a Greek dish of spinach and cheeses, enclosed in a delicate filo pastry case. One member of the group, who particularly had a weakness for this particular dish, prevailed on the chef on night to give her the recipe. It was something we often cooked for parties or get-togethers while we were in college and, especially as I have a spinach-loving boyfriend, I have regularly made it since then.

Sometimes it can be difficult to get your hands on filo pastry - and not so easy to manage - so, among other things, I have adapted the recipe to use a puff pastry crust. When made with puff pastry it really is a most obliging recipe, always happy to be made well before it is needed and sit around to be cooked at the last minute. I'm sure it wouldn't even mind being frozen for a while and cooked direct from the freezer, although I have not yet lived with a freezer big enough to take a whole Spanakopita. Besides, if the Boyfriend sees that I'm making it, there's no way that I would be allowed to save it for too long.

A word about feta cheese before I move on to the recipe. I always cut it into small cubes and fold it through the spinach and cheese mixture at the end as I like getting little pieces of it scattered throughout the dish but you can blend it more thoroughly, if you like. Also, always taste your feta before adding it. The cheese I used in Ireland was much saltier than the feta I find here so you may need extra salt to compensate. Don't forget to season the spinach and cheese mixture well. It is too late to be thinking of adding seasoning when it is cooked. In the summertime I normally serve this with a salad of diced vine ripened tomatoes and red onions, tossed with balsamic vinegar, and either Tabbouleh or some variation on Couscous Salad.

I've just discovered the Eat Local Challenge posted by Jen on her life begins at 30 blog. She invited fellow food bloggers to make the commitment to eat locally produced food during August. In her own words:

"For the month of August, I would like to invite all bloggers to join me in taking a challenge to eat food local to where you live. You will be able to build your challenge parameters yourself, and set reachable goals for the month. Ths goal of this time is to eat as much local food as possible, and to really pay attention to where your food comes from."

Typical that I should discover this as the month ends but it did put me thinking.

In Ireland, my main source of food was the local Tesco. I'd go there a couple of times a week, without a list normally, and pick whatever caught my eye or was on special. Since moving to Dublin, I've never lived more than 10 minutes walk from the supermarket so there was never much pressure if I forgot something or I decided to make a dish for which I didn't have the ingredients. I just ran up the road and collected the necessary - and several other things which I didn't need but which came to hand at the time!

I rarely went to the butchers, there were no nearby greengrocers and, since I didn't really eat much fish at the time, I didn't need a fishmongers. As my favourite meal normally involves bread and cheese - but the bread has to be good and the cheese fabulous - I did need a cheesemongers. Some of my nicest meals involved something savoury that I picked up from Sheridan's Cheesemongers around the corner paired with a baguette from the gorgeous La Maison des Gourmets. I did make an effort to eat Irish cheese (Cashel Blue, I miss you) but you could hardly call a baguette, even if produced in Ireland, a local food.

Govinda's in Dublin - a vegetarian restaurant run by the Hare Krishnas - has a great reputation and was one of those places that I always intended to go for dinner. Somehow I never managed to make it there but, when I was searching for a yoga class in Christchurch lately, I discovered that they run them in the Christchurch branch of Govinda's. not only that but, for $15 you get an hour's yoga plus your dinner. How could such an offer be turned down? Last week I tried the class and I think I'll be returning every week for the food, as well as for the yoga. After working hard for an hour, the delicious meal is truly well deserved.

Over the last two weeks we have been served a dal-type soup with mustard seeds and then a plate of rice, curry, fritters, chutney and salad. All vegetarian, of course, but - more importantly! - tasty and filling as well. But the real highlights have been the deserts. Last week we got a glorious Apple Crumble which I, the crumble connoisseur, could not fault and this week an amazing Pumpkin Pie appeared. The lads at my table were very pleased to see it coming out, telling me that it's apparently the best Pumpkin Pie in all of Christchurch. Pumpkin Soup is no longer a novelty to me but this pie was a surprise - I had only heard of Pumpkin Pie for American Thanksgiving. Curious, I tasted it and it wasn't long before that special little slice disappeared. It was an open pie, with a smooth, velvety, cinnamon-scented filling. The texture was more akin to a mouse than a pie but no delicious for that. Well worth stretching for!

As it is winter at this side of the world - although the temperatures seem to have taken a turn for the better lately - I've been cooking lots of soups. I love making anything that just takes 20 minutes of chopping and frying, and then is happy to sit simmering on the cooker for an hour or longer, until it's done. As a result of my interest in dried peas, beans and lentils, there's always a cupboard full of various legumes to be incorporated into soup and one of the best soups around can be made with dried green split peas.

If you have time to soak them, this cuts down on the cooking time but, as long as you have time to let it bubble away by itself, you need not worry about this. I've been working from a recipe by Clare Connery for Ham and Pea Soup and good it is too. Best served on a cold, miserable wintery day with some well-buttered slices of Brown Soda Bread on the side.

When my mother and aunt were about we made this for dinner one night, using a smoked ham hock instead of the ham bone. The following night we fished the hock out of the remnants, stripped the meat from it and made toasted ham and cheese sandwiches to accompany our mugs of second day soup. Delicious!

Australian cook Bill Granger is the darling of the Sydney restaurant scene. He open his first café, Bill's, twelve years ago and hasn't looked back since. Earlier this month he opened his third Sydney restaurant and he has just visited Christchurch to launch his fourth cookbook, Simply Bill. Not bad for an untrained cook who, until he opened Bill's, had no experience in a commercial kitchen.

Bill's Open Kitchen is his third cookbook. In it, Granger veers towards fusion cookery with plenty of Asian and Mediterranean flavours but, fortunately, not in the same dish - although he has a nice take on mixing old traditions (afternoon tea) with modern flavourings (Orange and Cardamom Biscuits).

As befits a man who also does all the cooking at home (he and his partner had three small girls at the time) Granger also has plenty of ideas for fast and not inordinately difficult food. A professed fan of casual and easy dining, his Tagliatelle with Chicken and Green Beans and Spicy Omelette Sandwiches all look like tasty and quick options for the harassed and short-of-time cook.

The images and presentation are wonderful if, at times, a little bit too staged but there are good recipes and useful tips in Bill's Open Kitchen.

Beer drinkers, as wine drinkers, are pretty well catered for in New Zealand. There are plenty of microbreweries and brew pubs about - Brew Moon, the Dux de Lux and the Twisted Hop are amongst some Canterbury favourites - but even the big breweries have pretty decent beers. One of the biggies is Speight's Brewery. Known as "The Pride of the South", it is based in Dunedin and produces a very tasty dark beer called, in an obvious move, Old Dark.

Normally, given my preference for wine I don't get to taste too many new beers but, as Bealey's Speight's Ale House opened around the corner from us in Christchurch recently, it seemed churlish to ignore their obvious speciality. Especially so when I discovered that they have a limited edition Chocolate Ale (Dunedin is also the home of Cadbury) on sale at the moment. I demanded a pint and spent the next hour drinking it - it's certainly not something that will go down fast.

Despite a few initial doubts, it was a fine flavoured, although sweet, drink. It had a true dark chocolate taste with a cherryish aftertaste. Immediately it reminded me of the Black Forest chocolates that were my childhood favourites from the Christmas box of Cadbury's Roses. That was, of course, before Cadburys decided to replace them and the yummy marzipan ones with some of those manky praline-centred things. The information on the bar suggested pairing the Chocolate Ale with rich chocolate deserts but it is a perfect after-dinner drink on its own. Maybe there should be an Irish version - Chocolate Guinness, anybody?

I've always been a lover of peas, beans and lentils - things that are cheap and can be turned into something delicious without too much effort. But, in Ireland, a hectic schedule prevented me from really getting involved with these in their dried form. Instead I had to content myself with their tinned equivalents which, although not hugely expensive, do prevent you from using them with too much abandon. Since coming to New Zealand, however, and discovering that dried peas, beans and lentils are readily available through the Bin Inn chain and also through the self-serve bins in all supermarkets, I've been putting them to good use.

In Dublin I had cooked dried chickpeas a couple of times with great - almost too much - success. When soaked overnight in too small a bowl, chickpeas have a tendency to start taking over the kitchen. And they don't stop expanding then, so make sure you have a big saucepan for the cooking. The problem, besides me cooking too big a bag on my first attempt, was that we didn't have a freezer in our Dublin flat so we had chickpeas in everything for a few days - stews, soups, couscous - and I even made a big bowl of hummus. At least we're blessed with a large fridge-freezer in New Zealand so I can cook and freeze to my heart's content. For a little work in the morning, you've got a supply of pulses for the next few weeks and they are delicious added to stews, soups and the like when you want to, as opposed to when you have to.

To cook pulses you do have to do a small bit of forward planning as most of them need to be soaked the night before you intend to cook them. Lentils, whether brown, split or Du Puy, are the few exceptions to this rule. Proper soaking, rinsing and cooking also help to prevent gas or wind, thus avoiding the truth of the old rhyme (taught to us as children by our father, much to our mother's annoyance!):

"Beans, beans,
They warm your heart.
The more you eat,
The more you fart."

Now this cookbook is right up my alley. The combination of the words comfort, food, eating and pleasure - especially in winter - talk far more to me that those hated phrases low fat, slimline and reduced calories. Which isn't to say that comfort food is going to have a drastic effect on your waistline, although it might! It's just that the whole idea of comfort food which, by nature, involves things hated by the health police such as full fat milk, real butter and clotted cream, is especially evocative in the winter. With cold and rain outside (here in New Zealand), now is the perfect time to stay indoors, browse through cookery books and decide what tasty treat to cook for dinner tonight. You Northern Hemispherians will have some time to wait but there's no harm in getting ready in advance for dismal, dreary weather.

Maxine Clark being Scottish, there's an emphasis on porridge, scones and shortbread but she doesn't sell herself short and there's also plenty of foods from other cultures like Gooey Butterscotch Nut Muffins (America), Lamb Shanks and Apricots with Minted Sesame Couscous (Morocco) and Spanish spices make their way into Cod and Bean Stew with Saffron and Paprika. She also has a good way of giving a twist to a traditional recipe, adding a buttery caramel to the apples for a Deep Dish Apple Pie.

Divided into chapters such as At the Table, On The Sofa, Breakfast in Bed and On the Tray, Clark also makes the case for a more leisurely, contemplative lifestyle, one which involves your breakfast arriving on your lap as you wake up, the tinkle of the tea trolley at mid-afternoon, a unhurried dinner and curling up on the couch in the evening. If only life were so good! Comfort Food: Eating for Pleasure is more a state of mind than anything else and you may find yourself comforted by the mere reading of this book, as well as unable to resist a trip to the kitchen to put some of its recipes into action.

I think that my interest in the Mexican combination of chocolate and chilli may have been originally sparked from watching the film adaptation of Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate in college. The fire of chilli and the dark richness of chocolate seems, to me, to be a rather good combination. The Chocolate and Chilli Biscotti I picked up recently to accompany my flat white (coffee) at the Underground Coffee Company Café in Christchurch was a good example of this and put my mind musing over other ways I could use chocolate and chilli together.

My interest was heightened while browsing at Aji last week. I came across discs of Ibarra Mexican Chocolate - a type of sweetened chocolate laced with cinnamon which is said to be perfect for making hot chocolate or a spicy Mexican mole sauce to serve over turkey. The owner of the shop said that she encourages people add a pinch of Aji's Kashmiri Chilli Powder while making hot chocolate. I didn't need a second telling and took that as well plus, as I had had a run of bad quality of cinnamon lately, some of their Triple A grade cinnamon. As we were going down to stay at a bach near Dunedin for the weekend - and an essential part of bach living are regular hot chocolates - the chocolate and spices were packed with the rest of the food, ready for experimentation.

I wouldn't rave about Ibarra Mexican Chocolate for eating purposes - it's rather sweet and grainy - but, for hot chocolate, it does a wonderful job especially when combined with the chilli and cinnamon. We sat on the deck outside the bach, the Boyfriend trying to catch fish with a hand-line while I, wrapped up in a rug, read one of my stack of books, sipping away on the surprisingly intense blend. Sweet, but with a hint of a kick, it really warms you from the inside out. I used about a ¼ teaspoon of chilli powder for the two of us and that was enough to make the tastebuds tingle. I would suggest adding the chilli a pinch at a time, tasting as you go, as each chilli powder will differ in the amount of heat it delivers. If you can't source the Ibarra Mexican Chocolate, you could try using some bars of good quality dark chocolate.

New Zealand baker Dean Brettschneider was one of the people that I encountered at the recent Savour New Zealand in Christchurch. Together with Lauraine Jacobs, a Cuisine food editor, he has recently published Taste, the third in a series of quality books on baking. At Savour New Zealand, when not signing stacks of Taste and his other books, he gave an eagerly anticipated class called Kneading the Dough in which he made a loaf of my favourite sourdough bread.

With sourdough, you don't use yeast from a packet or jar. Instead you just use the natural yeasts from the air, making a starter that ferments over time to raise the dough. I was particularly interested in this bread as the Boyfriend had tried a series of sourdough experiments in Dublin with not a huge amount of success. Getting one useable loaf of bread out of about ten can't be seen as a good statistic in anyone's books!

Dean emphasised the simplicity of sourdough during his class and, when I talked to him afterwards, I asked him if he saw his role as taking the mystique out of breadmaking. "There's people that do create that mystique. All the hidden secrets. What is it? Just flour, water and salt," he says. "The books are about giving people the confidence, giving them photographs, giving them explanations. Some good information that works. I try to unlock the secrets. Nothing is complicated. It is simple. It's about the little things."

In the notes that accompanied the class, he stated that his baking philosophy was "back to the future", a statement that he enlarged on later. "It's going back to the past for the style of product," said Dean, "but we're using futuristic knowledge and modern ingredients to bring it forward."

Pies truly are a New Zealand classic. Maybe it's because of the British influence and their Pork Pies, although colonisation of Ireland didn't leave us with any such culinary heritage. As I mentioned the other day, pies are eaten by Kiwis on long road trips - the guarantee of a good pie will encourage people to take major detours - and they are apparently the traditional accompaniment to a rugby match. The national pie is bacon and egg and, every summer, magazines and newspapers compete to give the perfect recipe for this picnic standard. Apparently a good Bacon and Egg Pie is dependent on you not breaking the egg yokes as you add them to the sliced bacon in the pastry case. Hmm...another recipe to try out at some stage in the future!

When I was small I remember my mother regularly making a deliciously savoury Lamb's Kidney Pie encased in shortcrust pastry. It was never steak and kidney, for some reason, not that I ever minded. For me the Kidney Pie, with bacon and sometimes mushrooms, was the height of culinary sophistication although, if I took a piece of it for lunch at school, I was bound to get someone going "urgh...kidney...disgusting!" I think I put them off their lunches more often than they managed to put me off mine.

But, back to my pie-fest for the Boyfriend's birthday dinner, the Beef and Chorizo Pie was topped with a thick homemade scone-like pastry so I decided that the pastry for the Chicken and Mushroom Pie should just be plain (bought) puff pastry. I must admit to not being particularly precise about how the pastry fitted across the top of the pies as, for me, the nicest part of a pie is where the gravy bubbles up around the pastry.

A search online for Nigel Slater plus Chicken Pie brought up this recipe for Deep-dish Chicken Pie which I adjusted to my own needs. The filling is fabulous, much richer by being made from stock than it would have been from milk (although I couldn't resist adding a little cream). Thickened a little, it would make a great filling for a Chicken Lasagne or you could use it as a pasta sauce or on top of rice or...

In a world full of cookbooks, Sybil Kapoor's Taste: A New Way to Cook is truly innovative. Kapoor writes from a far more scientific perspective than most food writers, explaining in great detail about the elementary tastes of sour, salt, umani (savoury), bitter and sweet. She helps the reader to understand basic taste combinations and how these work to enhance and compliment each other.

A chapter is given to each taste, with salt and umani combined, plus one on how chilli heightens taste awareness and another on how aromatic ingredients - spices and herbs - have an impact on each of the five tastes.

Taste: A New Way to Cook is photographed like the science book that it is closer to than a cookbook. But there are also recipes for each chapter, carefully chosen to highlight whichever taste Kapoor is focusing on.

This is not an easy read, and it can be somewhat confusing, but it is always truly intriguing. This is a book to return to again and again as Kapoor suggests experiments and combinations to try and you start making sense of her statements in your own head. This, rather than atomic particles or the table of the elements is the part of science that makes most sense to me. Informatively educational.

Yesterday was the Boyfriend's birthday so I decided to throw a small surprise birthday dinner - just us, three of his sisters, one sister's boyfriend and our two Scottish Housemates. The plotting and planning for this has been going on for a couple of weeks but, after pondering various options, I only decided on what we were going to eat fairly late in the day. My first idea was for a kind of Chinese banquet, heavily influenced by the fact that I'm reading a cookbook by Chinese Australian chef Kylie Kwong at the moment. That, and the fact that it contains a recipe for Sung Choi Bao of Pork. We loved this when we had it for the first time - and the second - at Indochine restaurant and it looks like a good dish to try out at home. I think I'll still end up cooking it at some stage but it looked like a difficult dish to make for eight. So, eventually, I decided on another of the Boyfriend's favourites - the good old Kiwi meat pie.

Pies are big business over here. You can get them at any local corner store or garage shop and they, rather than the plastic Irish sandwich in a plastic box, seem to be the food of choice for anyone travelling a long distance. Why I don't know. The only way they seem to differ from that typical 'hang' (otherwise known as ham) sandwich is that they're usually served hot. Other than that, the pies that I've had seem to be a matter of indifferent pastry enclosing mysterious meat filling and dried up gravy. Not necessarily a culinary classic - but, when well made, pies can be delicious. Never being one to cook a single dish when two will be too much, I decided to make a Beef and Chorizo Pie, adapted from Julie Le Clerc's Simple Café Food, as well as a Chicken and Mushroom Pie, inspired by Nigel Slater.

Simple Café Food and its successor, More Simple Café Food, were the origins of my accompanying salads for the meal. Fed up with my usual tabbouleh and couscous salads, I branched out with slight adaptations of Julie Le Clerc's Orzo with Spice-Roasted Carrots, Currants and Pine Nuts, Cracked Wheat with Lemon, Spinach, Herbs and Seeds and Roasted Purple Onions with Dried Sour Cherries. Although not a very extensive menu, I would have been lost without the help of one of the Boyfriend's sisters, on the salad-making side of things, and one of our Scottish Housemates who got stuck into the washing-up with a will and a way so that we were finished - just! - before the Boyfriend and the other Scottish Housemate (deputised to distract Boyfriend from preparations) returned from the local pub.

For desert we had a dense Chocolate Birthday Cake with cinnamon and chilli. I had just purchased this fabulous Kashmiri Chilli Powder from Aji in Christchurch and, being a fan of chocolate/chilli combinations, couldn't resist using it. Although both the cinnamon and chilli did add a depth to the flavour of the cake, it was not enough to satisfy me. More chilli the next time, methinks, and I might even pop back to Aji for some of their 'Triple A grade' cinnamon to give it an extra richness.

After just putting up my own review of Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion a couple of days ago, I was delighted to see it featured in the Waitrose Food Illustrated Magazine's top ten most useful cookery books.

My other favourite from the list, by a long shot, is Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food. I asked for this for Christmas ten years ago, fell in love with the man's simple yet tasty ideas and have become a convert to Nigel Slater's sensual and mouthwatering writing ever since. His food column is the main reason that I started to buy The Observer on Sundays and, since coming out to New Zealand, my mother faithfully posts the Slater-edited Observer Food Monthly out every month. I ended up getting Real Fast Puddings later that year - in fact, I blame him and that book for my never-ending Crumble fascination - and have since collected the rest of his books including the particular well-used Appetite: So What Do You Want to Eat Today?

I don't have many dealings with Delia Smith's books, although have been known to buy them for the members of my family that wouldn't be so practiced in cooking, but I have become a fan of her website. It's a useful resource to have on hand when you're looking for a reliable recipe for Flapjacks at a moment's notice or, for those of you living in that side of the world, what fruit and vegetables are in season and what's good to do with them.

Several of the other books on the list - Claudia Roden's A New Book of Middle Eastern Food, the Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook by Alice Waters and Elizabeth David Classics - are on my eventually get round to reading stack of books. At this stage I think I've taken Elizabeth David books out of the library about three times and never had time to read more than the first few pages before it's due back! Some day...