Happy 15th to my K

Fifteen years ago I gave birth to my first child after a long labor and a forceps delivery. I remember the feeling that morning when I held my healthy, beautiful daughter for the first time: a sudden rush of love, a dizzying sense of being overwhelmed and at the same time, up to it.

I still feel that way many days.

I snapped this shot of K last night at the Black Olive in Kerikeri, right before K’s friends arrived for a birthday dinner (all of them dressed up, very 15 years old, so fresh and happy and giggly, with me playing the part of wise old matron. It’s a part I play happily.).

B. and I walked to the market at Town Hall yesterday morning, where we were hoping to find something perfect for K’s present. We did! We came away with a beautifully tailored dress and a pair of blue earrings. S gave her a mother-of-pearl shell she’d made into a necklace, and A gave her an origami box filled with beachcombing objects d’art.

It’s turned chilly in the mornings and evenings now, so to celebrate K’s autumn birthday, we’re having shepherd’s pie and for dessert, pumpkin custard.

New Zealand pumpkins are grey-green on the outside but with the familiar bright orange flesh inside. Here’s my latest recipe for pumpkin pie or custard from scratch:

4 cups roasted mashed pumpkin
2 13.5 oz (400 ml) cans coconut milk (or use homemade coconut milk)
4 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 c brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp salt
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1/2 tsp turmeric
3 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp nutmeg

Roast pumpkin wedges for 1 hour at 400 F. Scoop out pumpkin into large bowl and mash; measure out 4 cups. Mix everything with whisk until you’ve got a smooth batter. Pour into pie crust or bake without a crust for a nice pumpkin custard. 375 F for about an hour.

Happy Easter Weekend!

My moveable type is made of kowhai pods. S, B, A, and I spent some time down at our beach yesterday making a fort, toe-toe grass carpet, and other fancy stuff.

B looks like a quintessential Kiwi with his gumboots and shorts.

Look at this gorgeous mint I used for minted peas tonight. Sensory delight just walking outside barefoot on the damp grass, breathing in the heady after-rain smell and then the sharp mint.

Easter Weekend here spans Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, (and for the kids, Tuesday as well). We’ll spend at least part of that time comfortably turning into bookworms and swapping our Easter books with each other. Our Easter books this year were all from op-shops: A Harrod’s Cookery Book from 1985 for S (it’s as fabulous as it sounds), The Joy Luck Club for K, The Jane Austen Book Club for me and B (plus the Proust B got set up for me on my laptop–that’ll probably take me more than a year…I’ll check back with you next Easter), and a Readers’ Digest Book of Facts, also from 1985, for A.

Top Chef Hokianga Live

Top Chef Hokianga was this evening! MasterChef finalist and self-proclaimed “bloody good cook” Jax Hamilton led the judging at Rawene Town Hall.

She was joined by three others, including the fabulous L, who I met just the other night. L persuaded me to join the competition, so I entered a dessert: coconut-blueberry tarts.

The tart base is my almond tea cookie recipe:

2 cups almond flour
1 cup tapioca starch
1 cup rice flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp lemon zest
1 tsp freshly grated ginger
1/2 cup melted coconut oil

Mix dry ingredients in large bowl. Combine eggs, vanilla, lemon zest, ginger, and coconut oil in separate bowl and then add to dry ingredients. Mix until dough forms. Chill before baking. 375 degree F oven for 10 minutes.

The filling is my coconut custard recipe.

My little tarts made it to the semifinals!

The entries were beautiful; New Zealand foodies are really good at food presentation. I’ll know for next time to step that bit up a notch. New Zealand is a cornucopia of good food, in every season, influenced by so many cultures, and the tables at the Town Hall were covered with gorgeous dishes that demonstrate this well:

The hall was packed full of people who watched while the judges tasted and commented on the semifinalist dishes—someone sitting next to me quipped, “What kind of strange torture have we gotten ourselves into?” There was soup and fresh fruit available at the back of the room, which A very gladly chowed down on.

Two of the dishes that made it to the semifinals were made by kids, and S and A are all afire with even more cooking ideas.

Celebrate Everything: Pi Day and Piano

It’s already Pi Day here and we’ve had our pie a day early, because we had something specific to celebrate: A. completed the Primer level for his piano studies and gave us a little concert last night! The past several months of being his piano teacher have been really pleasant and rewarding. I’m using the Faber Method books, which I particularly like because of their emphasis on student-teacher duets.

A’s favorite song is “Bells of Great Britain” (which has the supercool direction to hold down the damper pedal throughout the whole song). Least favorite is “Alouette”, because of the lyrics. After B. told him that he was singing about a lark getting his feathers plucked from head to tail, simply for singing, A. grew very quiet and sad for a moment, then said with decision, “I’m never going to sing that song again!” That’s okay by me.

On to the coconut custard pie with peaches, mmm.

We use this recipe for coconut pots de créme all the time; it’s perfect with strawberries too.

Coconut Custard (GF, DF)

14 oz coconut milk
3 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp corn starch
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 c dessicated unsweetened coconut
4 egg yolks in separate bowl

Combine first 6 ingredients in saucepot over medium heat; bring to a rolling boil, stirring constantly. Temper egg yolks in their separate bowl by adding in a little of the hot coconut mixture at a time, until yolks are warm. Add them to the rest of the custard in saucepot, stirring well. Return to heat until just boiling. Done! Chill for at least two hours.

Recipe: Crepes (GF, DF)

I took the kids to the Kerikeri Farmer’s Market a few days ago, where they got freshly-made crepes and I got some blueberries. Though the market was smaller than their advertising would lead one to believe, it was still a neat gathering of artisans and small-scale farmers. There were live chickens for sale, free-range eggs, macadamia nuts, apiarists with jars of manuka honey, vintners, folks selling local organic silverbeet, pumpkins, summer and winter squash, avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, garlic, onions, figs, apples, peaches, pears, and of course, blueberries. Autumn’s bounty in the Far North of New Zealand would just about cover one of those posters with every fruit and vegetable in the rainbow.

Today’s lunch with A. was a quick batch of the best crepes ever, with cinnamon and the rest of those blueberries.

3 eggs
1 1/4 c. coconut (or almond) milk
1/2 c. tapioca flour
1/4 c. almond flour
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
Put everything into blender and pulse on low until thoroughly mixed. Pour from blender–easy peasy.
This recipe makes about 8 crepes.

Recipe: Biscuits (GF, DF)

If you go asking for a biscuit in New Zealand, you’ll likely end up with a TimTam or maybe a snickerdoodle or even a gingernut, but you probably won’t have something you’d like to eat with chicken soup. This recipe is the one you want if you’ve got a cold rainy day (break out the tea and blackberry jam) or a hankering for biscuits and gravy or you’re making a supper of soup and biscuits with your oldest daughter.

Sunday soup has been a long-standing tradition in our household; I think when I read of Adam Gopnik’s habit of making a Sunday soup in sufficient quantity to stretch to weekday lunches we began to make large batches of soup, intentionally simmering ourselves into leftover-land. Over the past few months I’ve often thought wistfully of my capacious stockpot back in WA.

The biggest pot in the kitchen here is the crockpot, which right now is simmering away some chicken soup (which, knock on wood, will take care of this lingering bug we’ve been passing around) to go with these little biscuit babies:

Biscuits (GF, DF)

1 c almond flour
1 c tapioca starch
1 c rice flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar
3 eggs, well-beaten
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 tsp vinegar

Beat eggs and add vinegar and olive oil to their bowl. Mix dry ingredients in separate bowl, then stir in egg mixture and mix well. Form balls and bake on parchment paper at 375 for 12 minutes. (This recipe makes 18 mini-biscuits.)

On Roots and Roads

I did two new things today: I picked up a couple of hitchhikers, and I bought a taro root. The taro was from Fiji (about 1600 miles away) and the hitchhikers were from Kaikohe, (about 25 miles away).

From our first days here, I noticed hitchhiking is still practiced by all sorts in New Zealand. Some short-term travelers get themselves here and then plan to simply hitchhike around New Zealand. It’s certainly cheaper and in some ways simpler. (Hitchwiki.org is a fascinating glimpse into hitchhiking experiences around the world.) Local people hitchhike to get from town to town in Northland–I’ve picked up a friend who happened to be looking for a ride when I pulled up at a gas station in a nearby town.

Before we left, I read Joe Bennett’s rather cranky but funny Land of Two Halves detailing his adventures hitchhiking around NZ.

There’s a level of trust here that just isn’t there in the U.S., maybe because of the Hwy 101 murders in California in the 70s that were never solved. While I’ve passed hitchhikers in the U.S. who make me think maybe possibly it could be a good idea pick them up, the voice that says, “You’re a mother and little ones depend on you staying alive and out of the clutches of possibly murderous maniacs posing as harmless folks who just need a ride” is stronger.

Every morning when I drive K to the bus stop, we pass kids walking along the highway with backpacks on and their thumbs out. They seem like stranded starfish in a way; I don’t have time to pick them all up, so I don’t pick any of them up. I get K to the bus with a couple of minutes to spare and then I’m on my way home again, going the way no one needs to go.

But this afternoon, as I was leaving Rawene and putting on my turn signal to pull out of town, I saw a young couple just off the road with their thumbs out. I made eye contact with the young man and immediately he came bounding over to the car, the girl he was with following. “Going to Kaikohe?” he asked as he slid into the back seat with A. If a car has its left blinker on from the Rawene peninsula, it’s certain that it will be going at least part of the way to Kaikohe—there’s just the one main road there.

After I told them I’d be happy to take them to Kaikohe, they really didn’t say much. They’d been looking at an apartment, but it turned out to not be promising. They were very warm; it was a very sunny and hot afternoon and it felt gracious to offer the open seats in my air-conditioned car. Half an hour later in Kaikohe, I dropped them off and that was that.

On to the taro:

I saw it in the grocery store as I was filling a bag with courgettes (aka zucchini; can you believe I’d actually buy the stuff in high summer?) and its ugly brute presence was irresistible. I’ve been looking up recipes and it looks like you can treat it like an overgrown potato. I’m going to bake it into oven fries tomorrow.

Cornbread sunset

Cornbread Muffins (GF, DF)

1/2 c tapioca flour
1/2 c rice flour
1 c cornmeal
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
4 tsp baking powder
1 c coconut milk
1 egg, beaten
1/4 c coconut oil, melted

Mix dry ingredients, then whisk in remaining ingredients. Bake at 425 F for 15-20 minutes, depending on muffin pan size.

Dinner tonight was chili, cornbread muffins, and garden salad. B was at a rare late meeting, so it was the kiddos and me eating at our now-usual hour of 7pm.

We’ve been passing a VIP chair cover from person to person each night; after we each share something interesting about our day and the dinner conversation winds down, we mention something we appreciate about the VIP and then they get to be the Quiz Master and give out trivia questions.

This new tradition is a big hit, but I was a terrible VIP tonight (if you’re the VIP, you can’t really scold the kids for this and that and then feel like prompting them to tell things they appreciate about you) so we didn’t have quiz questions. We had our muffins that S made, and our salad that saved us from our too-spicy chili.

And for dessert we had a grand sunset.

Here’s what happens when you let a little time pass: blue sky again, even after the sun’s gone down.

Recipe: Carrot Cake with Lemon-Ginger Glaze

Having visitors today gave me a good reason to make a carrot cake! I’ve tinkered with carrot cake recipes for years, and this is my latest iteration.

You might want to double the recipe if you’d like more than 8 pieces of cake; I baked this one in an 8-inch springform pan.

Carrot Cake (GF, DF)

2 large ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups grated carrot
3 eggs, well-beaten
¼ c. coconut oil, melted
½ c dessicated unsweeted coconut
½ c almond flour
½ c tapioca starch
½ c chopped walnuts
1 Tbsp lemon zest
½ c brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
2 tsp cardamom or nutmeg
2 tsp freshly grated ginger
2 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp baking soda
1 ½ tsp baking powder

Mix everything well and bake at 350 degrees F for about 30 minutes.

Lemon-Ginger Glaze

1/3 c soaked cashews (4 hours minimum)
1/4 c coconut oil, melted
1/2 c powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp freshly grated ginger
2 tsp lemon zest
1 Tbsp lemon juice
dash salt

Mix everything in a blender or food processor until smooth.

Recipe: Black Rice Salad

We’ve got green beans growing in the garden and the local veg shop had some new exciting things, black rice among them, so I created this savory, hearty salad for a dinner party last night. It was a summer salad smorgasbord, with salsas and fresh vegetables with hummus and garden cherry tomatoes. However, this salad/pilaf would be nice all year round–just use frozen green beans.

Black rice is nutty and very slightly sweet, and it cooks up with a beautiful autumnal reddish color.

Black Rice Salad (vegan, GF, DF)

• 2 cups black Thai rice
• 3 cups water
• 1 lb fresh green beans
• 1 Tbsp garlic, minced
• 1 Tbsp red chilis, minced
• 1 Tbsp yellow mustard seeds
• 4 Tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 lemon
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• one green onion (green part only), chopped
• salt to taste
• pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Steam rice (note that the proportion of water to rice is slightly lower than with white rice) for 20 minutes.

2. While rice is cooking, make the green beans as follows: trim stem ends and cut into one-inch lengths. Put olive oil, garlic, chili, mustard seeds, and salt in frying pan or wok and heat until sizzling. Add green beans and stir-fry until beans are cooked through.

3. Combine rice and green beans (add oil and spices from cooking pan too) in serving bowl, add juice from one lemon, the extra Tbsp of olive oil, green onion, and salt and pepper. Stir well; serve warm or at room temperature.