Maya's Favourite- Potato Salad

 Maya is our dear Czech/Vietnamese friend who we serendipitously met when we walked to Bell Rock on Labour day this year. In spending time with this delightful young woman I learnt that her favourite celebration food is potato salad. When we talked about how they make potato salad at "home" we were amazed at how most of the ingredients were just the same as we might include here.

When Maya came to stay a few weeks ago I made this potato salad for us to share together. And it's true, it made it feel like Christmas.

My recipe is really just a list of ingredients, but you can easily add or leave out anything that takes your fancy. 

The first step is choosing good potatoes- not a variety that says great for mashing for instance- a white waxy kind is best. Peeled is fairly important. Potato salad has a strange texture if you leave the skins on. Even chopping is also useful so that the pieces cook uniformly. Just cover with water in a pot and bring to the boil then simmer until just tender. Strain and leave in the pot with the lid off to cool.

When the potatoes are warm sprinkle over some sea salt & ground black pepper.

Then 1/3 cup of honey mustard vinaigrette. adding the seasonings and dressing while the potatoes are still warm helps the flavours to soak in to the potatoes best.

I then added:

Lightly cooked asparagus pieces, finely sliced red pepper, lots of fresh herbs finely snipped up with scissors- lemon thyme, parsley, mint, coriander, onion weed are all good options depending on your own preference and what's in the garden or the fridge.

Spring onions are an important flavour here, or wild onion weed- so add a few of them finely chopped up.

1/2 a dozen boiled eggs, shelled and chopped.

Some diced ham or cook some bacon if you like.

A couple of tbsps of capers is great and several diced gherkins or other pickles. I like to add 3 or 4 Pepperdews- sweet/sour wee peppers in a jar from the supermarket.

You could also add olives, panfried courgettes or artichoke hearts- I buy those in large jars from Bin Inn.

The balance of flavours is in all the various components.  

Gently mix everything together with your hands or a large spoon making sure not to mush the

potatoes too much.

Last thing is the creamy dressing which could be your favourite mayonnaise or this yogurty one that works well too:

A good creamy Greek yoghurt is great. We like the Cyclops brand.

So perhaps put 1 1/2 cups of yoghurt in to a small bowl

Add: sea salt, ground black pepper,

1 dsp wholegrain mustard, 1 dsp runny honey, some chilli of some sort if you like.

Add the juice of half a lemon and 1 tbsp of olive oil.

Stir and taste and adjust the flavours until you're happy with it and that's it. Keeps well in the fridge.

Let me know if I've left anything out.

Have fun making up your own potato salad as you go along.

Catherine X

Sweet Violet Marshmallow

What could lift our spirits more than sweet violet marshmallows, right at the end of winter!

Every year I make violet honey syrup. I would never be without it now as it takes care of almost every sore throat or cough that ever comes our way and tastes delicious.

I've made the syrup already and I was wondering what else I could do with some violets when I thought of marshmallow made with honey.

So here's what I did today: I simply picked a packed cupful of sweet violets (Viola odorata)- the scented ones. Any colour will do. I rinsed the flowers briefly as there is an abundance of pine pollen around at the moment. 

Put the flowers in a small jug and pour over them a cupful of just boiled water- pop a plate over the top and leave them to infuse for around an hour until the colours almost gone out of them. 

Meantime line a small tin with greaseproof paper- hang some over the edge so that it's easy to remove the marshmallow.

Strain the violet liquid in to a pot, add 3 tbsp of a good gelatine and leave it to bloom for a few minutes.

Heat gently (stirring) to dissolve the gelatine.

Then add the juice of a lemon & 1/2 cup of honey and stir to dissolve.

You'll notice the amazing colour transitions of the violet water as you add various things. 

I added 1 tsp of blackcurrant powder to make sure there was enough colour- stir again.

You could use an electric beater, but I don't own one as I love my vintage hand beater.

Beat the mixture until it is pale & fluffy and starting to get really hard to keep going.

Quickly pour in to the container and it will set with in minutes.

Cut with a large knife or scissors when set and roll in fine coconut with a little more blackcurrant (or other) powder rubbed through it and you're done.

The marshmallow is fine kept in a sealed container sitting on the bench.

Next time I think I might try a mix like elderberry. blackberry and violet- delicious and a fabulously easy to take immune support combo. 

Apple Sauce, Appelmoes

I love learning new, richer ways of doing familiar things- especially when that knowledge comes through friendships. These funny little organic cooking apples turned up at Cornucopia recently aned with a name like "Tydeman's Late Orange" (raised in East Maling in 1930) it would have been remiss of me not to try them. But even better my dear Dutch friend Margaret gave me a little pot of Appelmoes a month or so ago- made by cooking whole apples, sweetening just a little, working through a mouli (yay I found a little one last week in the hospice shop) and then adding a touch of vanilla. I'm never going back to the old ways now. I just know that this applesauce is good for the microbome, not to mention delicious.  

Equally delicious are these wee wild apples we found in June near the railway line in Dannevirke. 

Later I added some Mexican hawthorn fruit we found in Frimley park. 

The Mexican haws are very high in pectin so great for setting jams and jellies. They have hard little stones in them which don't go through the mouli quite so easily.

We're eating our appelmoes as we go but it can be popped in to a preserving jar for later too.

Nicola Galloway of Homegrown Kitchen writes so nicely about this process here- search Homemade Apple Sauce 15th May 2023

Katie X

Cherry Guava Ice Cream

It's a strange time of the year to be eating ice cream I know, but it seems that all the best ice cream fruits are in abundance in late autumn. Here in Hawke's Bay we have such a fabulous lineup: figs feijoas, cherry guavas, medlars, sweet persimmons, cape gooseberries, white sapote, kiwifruit, mandarins and so much more. One of the easiest fruit trees to grow in a home garden is the cherry guava (Psidium cattleyanum). An evergreen and elegant small tree that never fails to bear fruit, year after year.

I have written about making guava jelly and paste just here.

Every year I make at least one or two jars of ruby red guava jelly. Guava has the best flavour of all the jellies, I reckon.

My Nan used to make guava jelly, but you know I never saw her do anything else with the leftover pulp. A few years ago I decided to press the cooked berries through a sieve and of course you then ditch all those hard seeds. There is so much goodness in guavas- just what we need heading in to the winter months, 

This year as I was making paste with the pulp I remembered the guava ice cream recipe that my lovely dutch friend Margaret shared with me. She even gave me a little to try. The flavour is truly exquisite and the texture sublimely creamy, however, I can't quite justify the extreme sweetness of all the sugar and condensed milk that was in the recipe. So I made up my own version which I think will be happily flexible. I really don't think you can go wrong with it by adding a bit more of this and not so much of that. Next time I might try honey instead of condensed milk for instance.

This recipe is great for using up the half a jarful of jelly or paste that you often end up with when you're making preserves. Since there is only two of us I was happy to make a small batch so here's the general idea:

After I have strained the cooked fruit and used the liquid to make the jelly, I push the rest through a sieve. I then return the pulp to the saucepan and add perhaps a cupful of sugar. This mixture is then simmered to reduce (stirring often) for 10 minutes or so. If you want to make paste/cheese there's a whole lot more cooking to do so before you get to that stage take out 1 cupful of pulp, set it aside and leave it to cool completely.

Beat 125 mls of cream, add a 1/4-1/3 cup of condensed milk and then fold in the cooled pulp and a tablespoonful of jelly. Lastly add a splash of rosewater. Taste to see if it's how you want it. That's it. Freeze. This batch stayed soft and very creamy once frozen.

Katie X

Kawakawa Berries- what can I do with them?

 Kawakawa berries are a unique little fruit that taste a little like rockmelon with a hit of spicy seeds.

You don't really think about Kawkawa berries being Christmasy, but they are. Along with the flowering of the Pohutukawa trees, the sweet abundance of the Linden's, Kawakawa berries also serenade the years' end. I have one little local spot that is easy to access every few days. As long as the fruit is plump you can harvest them while they are still green and they will ripen over the next few days. If you click on the photo below you'll see the progression of the fruit ripening over 48 hours.

I have tried them in all kinds of ways now - in dressings, infused in honey, in various desserts & mixed through strawberries, but this year I have decided that I like them best just as they are.

There are some lovely peaches at our Farmer's market just now- this combo was amazing: Hohepa (local) mozzarella, local honey, good salt, fresh peaches & perfectly ripe Kawakawa berries. Brilliantly balanced & the Kawakawa flavours just shone. Baked peaches with a little maple syrup are also delicious with them.

Dressing with Kawakawa berries, orange or lemon juice, lemon zest, thick natural yoghurt yoghurt, olive oil, honey, salt, pepper.

Add a teaspoon of tomato paste to go with a seafood salad.

Thick natural yoghurt, Mango chutney and plenty of ripe Kawakawa berries, especially if you chew well and get the hit of all the spicy seeds. So good with a curry.

Fairy cheesecakes

All mixed in with Mascarpone.

Kawkawa berries are lovely with chocolate too. They can even be dipped in chocolate if you like.

Katie X

Wild Rice, Quinoa and Cherry Salad

When we were planning what we would take down to Wai Ora at the beginning of of December for our wedding anniversary, I got it in my head that a wild rice & cherry salad might be good. I couldn't find a recipe, so I made one up. Not hard when it's a salad.

I cooked equal quantities of wild rice and three coloured quinoa (or just white or red or brown).

Or just use rice if you prefer.

Make sure the rice is well cooked- this lot was just a tad under down.

I stoned cherries and halved them

Added dried cranberries, pomegranate seeds, chopped pistachio nuts, chopped onion weed bulbs or spring onions. I also added a good amount of finely chopped mint, parsley and coriander.

Salt and ground black pepper.

The nuts could also be pinenuts, walnuts or hazelnuts.

The dressing makes all the difference:

4 tbsps olive oil

2 tbsp tamarind puree- either ready made or soak the caked tamarind version in water to soften, then push through a sieve.

2 tbsp maple syrup

2 tbsp lime juice

2 cloves of garlic or onion weed bulbs crushed

1/2 tsp fennel seeds lightly toasted & crushed- mortar & pestle or a spice grinder.

A pinch of chilli flakes

The salad went nicely with salmon that we cooked with a pomegranate molasses glaze on the little barbecue. 

Variation

Here we are at the beginning of February and some of the cherries from this season have hung on in the fridge. So I cooked some little Beluga lentils until tender and added them to the wild rice instead of quinoa. 

The other additions are: red shiso, variegated apple mint, wee unsprayed begonia flowers, nasturtium leaves, purple kumara and a dressing made with slow baked Black Doris plums, honey, yoghurt, salt & pepper, 1/2 tsp Garam marsala, olive oil & thick natural yoghurt.

Slow baking fruit is amazing! It concentrates the flavours and makes the fruit even more delicious and digestible. A sprinkling of good sugar and in to the oven at 150C for 1/2 an hour. 

Katie X