The Early Bird

I feel very virtuous. Yesterday I got myself out of bed at 5.30 (am, not pm!) and baked. How is that for dedication?

I made scones, although I must add that I did not follow the recipe exactly. The recipe for plain scones stated - make as for fruit scones but omit fruit, sugar and butter. Butter? Surely it is not possible to make scones without butter. Scones without butter is glue, right? Perhaps someone can clarify for me whether I am right here.

I also made bermaline loaf - please excuse me if the spelling is not up to par. This is a loaf with white flour, wholemeal flour, bran and golden syrup. It seems ok if a little unremarkable. To be honest I think it needs dates, but then I think almost every loaf needs dates so I'm a little biased. It is still hidden under a tea towel on the chopping board - perhaps it will become more remarkable with time?!

So I took my scones to a meeting, complete with a little dish of butter and a pot of gooseberry jam (because I've got to find some way of getting rid of it!) and their were no complaints. I'm fairly sure everyone has survived the experience.

Pickled and Jammed

I have been so productive I am not going to bother writing up every recipe individually. The highlight of the weekend was the jam biling over the hob and the floor and even, briefly, catching on fire. Runner up was one of the rabbits making a run for it out the kitchen floor and sitting out on the lawn in saturday's torrential rain evading my best efforts to get her back inside.

Over the weekend I made –

1)Fruit Salad Jam – peaches, apricots, bananas and the passionfruit pulp I made last week. It’s very pretty but I’m not at all sure about the bananas although Gus the bunny got pretty excited about them– There is something wrong about cooked banana I think. I will have to find someone unsuspecting to try it out on.

2)Apricot Sauce – No dramas here – believe it or not

3)Gooseberry jam (green) – required me to add absolutely ridiculously quantities of sugar and them boil quickly. I think it took about 30 mins for my poor ceramic hob to get it back up to a boil. Jam is not perhaps as green as it might have been!

4)Gooseberry jam – I had to pass this lot through the colander after the fruit was cooked. I have learnt that you lose a lot of bulk by passing something through a colander. I have also learnt not to go off and read the newspaper while you are boiling the jam after adding the sugar. I had about a 1’ square bright red boiling hot puddle on the floor. Very bad. Very very bad. I fear both the kitchen and I may be permanently sticky.

5)Tomato Sauce – Things which are predominantly made out of tomatoes seem to have a very low yield. I have a jar of rather murky looking tomato sauce, I don’t think we’ll throw out the Heinz in a hurry

6)Mustard pickle – is very VERY yellow. Scary yellow, and quite watery. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it – cauliflower, onion, green tomatoes and cucumber in runny yellow sauce – Edmonds are you pulling another orange sponge pudding trick?

7)Peach chutney – made quite a lot of this using white flesh peaches so I’m hoping it is ok to use white fleshed peaches – they were $2 a kg cheaper than normal peaches. Please don’t tell me if it isn’t ok to use them, all will be revealed in the fullness of time.

8)Plum Sauce – very similar to apricot sauce, again no dramas

9)Tomato Relish – is relatively dry, but smells pretty good.

And I have pretty much finished the pickles, chutneys and sauces section. How exciting! I am slightly worried that with this hurdle passed I might need to tackle something else – like all the livers and kidneys lurking within the pages. Not all that happy about the though of that.

I’ll finish with some photos for those requiring visual stimulation
1)Gus begging for banana
2) Soggy Roo
3) not so green gooseberry jam
4)Scary yellow mustard pickle
5) Apricot sauce
6) Tomato sauce - note use of CLEAN chux cloth as emergency muslin
7)Plum Sauce
8)Tomato Relish
9)Fruit salad jam

Success at last!

I’ve struck Edmonds gold at last, this is the anti-orange sponge pudding– Coconut kisses with Passion fruit icing. Two little crunchy coconut biscuits sandwiched together with passion fruit icing. And they were incredibly easy to make – no creaming or anything, just add the melted butter to dry ingredients and roll into balls. One of the menfolk at work even asked (with a certain degree of awe, or perhaps that was just my imagination!) whether I had made the both the biscuits and icing by myself. God love him!



If food (and indeed any inanimate object) can be cute, then these are cute. I feel quite attached to them.


Still I’m left with a certain nagging feeling that this isn’t true Edmonds, I’m still looking for the truly forgotten recipes. I will admit the kisses were supposed to be sandwiched with butter icing but I couldn’t resist using the passion fruit icing. One of my better decisions!

And keeping on the passion fruit theme I also made passion fruit pulp from the preserving section. 1 part passion fruit pulp, 1 part sugar, boil, put in a jar. Not too challenging but I did make rather a meagre amount due to the exorbitant price of passion fruit. Next year when my passion fruit vines start to flower I’ll have so much passion fruit I won’t know what to do with it and I’ll have to make passion fruit pulp out of necessity. Fingers crossed!

This is a bit around the wrong way but I made all this while I was waiting for my tomato relish to cook for 3 hours. Green tomatoes (only just managed to get in there while I still have green tomatoes), onions, apples, brown sugar, sultanas and a lot of vinegar. I halved the recipe but managed to add the original amount of vinegar and salt. I am quite worried that this degree of mental degradation is not normal in someone of my age. I realised in time and managed to pour out half the vinegar and spoon out some salt. Phew! It did cook down quite nicely though, it looks a lot like tomato relish. I probably shouldn’t be so surprised or relieved!

Concerningly, my house now smells very strongly of vinegar. I’m wondering if this is a common problem and how long it lasts. The Husband seems fairly happy with it, he says it reminds his of his childhood. Although in saying that, he was a little less than impressed when his towel smelt like onions – I swear that had nothing to do with me!

I’ve been warned that Apricots are coming to the end of their season so I might have to make a buying mission. My calendar is also booked solid for the next couple of weeks but I’m going to have to make some jam time. Is there some kind of irony that I’m starting Thai cooking classes from tonight?

Well Preserved?

Last time I wrote I had the Rhubarb soaking in it’s own juices and a mountainous pile of sugar. I managed to find a little spare time to turn it into Rhubarb and Fig jam and I’m pleasantly surprised. I’m not a big fan of Rhubarb, it makes my teeth feel all furry (and I can’t seem to find anyone who can empathise with me on that one). But Rhubarb jam doesn’t taste much like Rhubarb at all – it’s kind of caramelly (that isn’t a real word is it?). I think perhaps if I liked jam I might like this. Anyway it’s really quite pretty, at least I think so, as pretty as a jar of brown stuff can be. Perhaps I’m getting a little emotionally involved with my Jam?

While I was waiting for my jam to jam I thought I should fill in my time by cooking up a little something extra. Tomato pulp and Date Rolls ensued. Tomato pulp is the oven method sibling to the stove method which stole all my Tomatoes before my holiday. Hopefully that sentence makes sense to someone. Method was to bake the tomatoes with a little salt and then shove the whole lot into a sterilised jar. I did it but it isn’t all that pulpy. I might keep it for a while and see if it will grow mould, I have only minimal faith in my ability to keep something sterile.

Date rolls. I’m sure I’ve written more than once about forgetting to put baking powder in things. It happened again. Shhhhhhhh, I just figured that I wouldn’t tell anyone, I passed it off as a bad recipe. After the carrots in jelly people will believe me when I blame anything on the Edmonds. In case you were wondering, yes, I do feel a little bad.

And now? Well I didn’t manage to cook anything on the weekend. It was one of those weekends. Another one of those weekends. I’m making up for it by making Tomato Relish, Coconut Kisses with Passionfruit icing and passionfruit pulp but it’s almost time for Prisonbreak so the write up on that will have to wait. Never seem to quite catch up do I!

I hope you like jammin' too

Ok so yesterday was picking fruit, next step is making jam. I made three recipes on Sunday – Raspberry Jam, Cashmere Pickle and Nectarine Jam. I am now officially out of jars, well almost.

Raspberry jam – Naturally my raspberries managed to leak through the suitcase on transit and through my clothes. Aside from that jam making went smoothly apart from the fact that I am badly in need of a jam funnel or at least a ladle with a lip for pouring. Suffice to say some of the jam gets in the jar but a lot gets on the bench, the tea towel, the hob, my clothes and in one rather unpleasant incident, my foot.

Cashmere Pickle used up some of my excess gooseberries – lord knows I have enough of them now! Gooseberries, dates, raisins, vinegar, brown sugar etc. I was quite excited about trying it until I read the bottom of the recipe and found out that I have to leave it for a year. A YEAR! Good things take time perhaps?



Nectarine Jam – it was nectarine or peach and nectarines were $3.45 a kilo so we got nectarines. Now I’ve never heard of anyone making nectarine jam before, I was hoping there was not a very good reason for this. I cooked them up to a surprisingly pink paste, added my sugar and two packets of setting agent – I’m not taking any chances! I had bought about 6 ½ lb of nectarines which filled more jars than I had sterilised. Oooops. Never one to chuck anything out I just poured it into a mug and put it in the fridge. It’s a very pretty peachy colour and only just set – lucky huh!

I’ve already done the pre-preparation for my Rhubarb and fig jam. I’m not sure how much of a good idea this jam sounds but I have absolutely no choice in this so why query it! So the Rhubarb is all cut up and covered with sugar and ready to go, now all I have to do is cook it up! Best cut out the canasta and get on to it eh!

Life's little pleasures

Right – where to start. I’ve been doing quite a lot but my writing time is limited as Shortland Street is on soon. That and I divide my computer time between writing the blog and playing canasta on the computer. Ahhhh Shortland Street. Ahhhhh Canasta. Anyway enough about my guilty pleasures – Looking back on this I note that I sound roughly 50 years older than I am. Should I take this opportunity to point out that I also Crochet? No perhaps that will not do my reputation any good…

Gooseberries. Well I’m still picking the thorns out of my hands, arms legs etc. Is it just me or is picking a good prickle out of your hand/foot/whatever one of the greatest enjoyments available. Even better getting in there with the pin in someone else’s finger! Fantastic! I do wonder though whether that is just me, it does seem quite wrong when I write it down.

So gooseberries grow on plants not dissimilar to black and red currants but with REALLY big spines. The gooseberries of the Cardrona valley are fantastic – it is almost impossible to find two plants producing identical fruit – green, yellow, white, red, pink spots, smooth, hairy, really really hairy, big, small, tiny, round, oblong, teardrop shaped – amazing variety. I guess all the bushes have just been interbreeding since the miners brought them here.

Anyway we collected two buckets full, which is an awful lot of gooseberries. It’s even more gooseberries when you sort them out by colour, pack them into eight ice cream containers, try to pack it into your luggage along with the 3lb of rhubarb, bag of strawberry leaves and two horseradish roots. Oddly the amount seems to multiply further when you bring them home try to fit them into the fridge and then have to top and tail each individual berry. Sigh.

So anyway Shortland Street is on and I have some more gooseberries to top and tail.

Good as Gold

Today the Husband decided to take me to Skippers – proud owner of one of the only public roads where rental cars are not insured. Good thing we didn’t have a rental – even better than that we borrowed the brother in law’s farm truck. A spectacular drive made some what more spectacular by the driving style of some of the commercial operators on the road – I can only say that there must be some very ill tourists out there!

So naturally this does have some relevance to cooking and Edmonds. In true pioneering style we took our ice cream container and picked ourselves a reasonable pile of Raspberries. They grow wild in the area from the mining days which is very lucky for me seeing I have never seen wild Raspberries before and it was going to cost me a fortune to get enough raspberries for a very meagre quantity of jam. I think we must have got in just at the end of the season – what fantastic luck. After an hour or so of picking the husband may have felt differently but I was generous enough to release him from his duties for a well earned lunch break (a bag of Cheezels - haute cuisine no less).

But wait there’s more! I’ve had a tip off that there are Gooseberries on the brother in laws station so that is tomorrow’s job. Very good luck really because I had no idea where I was going to find a decent quantity of Gooseberries otherwise – at least not at a price that wouldn’t permanently bankrupt me! There are two Gooseberry jam recipes so any minute portion of my limbs which have not already been scratched to hell will most likely get a going over tomorrow. All for a good cause of course. If only I ever actually ate Jam!

I do feel very much in the spirit of Edmonds out collecting my fruit in the wild, so I will have Raspberry Jam from Skippers and Gooseberry jam from Cardrona. Thank goodness for those miners eh! So I guess I know what I’m doing on Sunday when I get home then…

Things not to do with a Carrot

I am being oddly productive on my holiday – I guess that’s what you get when you aren’t working 10 hour days. Oh yeah, and when someone else does the dishes, I mentioned how wonderful my Mother in Law was right? How someone so diligent with dish washing managed to spawn someone who is so reluctant to do my dishes I’ll never know.

Anyway. Seeing I was sitting around on my backside not doing very much I thought I could make dessert. Now Central Otago weather (in the summer at least) and the Cold Sweets section are just made for each other. Those of you who remember back to "Special Jelly" and "Lemon Souffle" will be aware that I have not had a great deal of luck with the cold sweets section in the past. God, apparently, loves a trier. But then this recipe was never ever going to turn out well.

Now I scanned through the ingredients of the recipes in the section and seeing there was no Gelatine in the house and only one packet of lemon jelly crystals in the house I had a limited selection of recipes to choose from. One in fact. Orange Jelly Sponge. Which oddly contains neither orange – in any form – or sponge. It does how ever contain carrot so it is at least partially orange in colour. I feel the need to explain…

Orange Sponge pudding – make up a pack of jelly crystals with boiling water, cool, add milk and beaten egg yolk, cool until almost set. Whip the mixture and fold in egg white and grated carrot. Set.

This was foul. The lemony mousy bit was quite nice but the grated carrot did not work in the least. It was really quite scary. I apologised before anyone saw it, then while I served it up and again while we were eating it. Perhaps I should start measuring these recipes by the number of apologies required. We sat around the dinner table, heads in hands, asking "WHY?". Surely no one who had ever actually made this recipe would think it was a good idea to share it with others – and surely they wouldn’t have thought it was worth printing.

I wonder if there is anyone else out there who has ever actually cooked this. I wonder if perhaps all of the housewives in 1966 took one look at this and thought, "carrots in jelly, you’ve got to be joking" and flipped over the page to the recipe for trifle. Perhaps no one else out there has ever made orange sponge pudding. If it hadn’t been so incredibly awful I would almost feel a little sad.

A Drop in the Bucket

So after the three-egg fiesta that was Thursday’s breakfast I continued to do the packing for our trip away. About 10am I went outside to check on the veggie garden and returned with 2 lb of tomatoes. Bugger. Naturally these are the first tomatoes we have had ripen this year and they all ripen just as we go on holiday. So what does any sensible person who is about to go on holiday in two hours do with 2lb (that’s about a kilo for those of you in 2008) of tomatoes? I’m not sure but I thought it would be a great idea to make tomato pulp a la Edmonds.

Tomato pulp is made by cooking your tomatoes with a little salt until thoroughly mushy then sieving to get rid of the seeds and skin. The pulp is then concentrated by boiling for 15 minutes and then poured into a sterilised jar and sealed.

Now this was indeed as easy as it sounds. The staggering thing was the incredibly low yield. I had, somewhat over enthusiastically sterilised three rather large jars. After I had strained my pulp I had to go an find one modest sized jar and sterilise this. The pulp only half filled it. For my 2lb of beautiful shiny tomatoes I ended up with under a cup of tomato pulp.

Now I could perhaps live with that if it was concentrated like tomato puree but it is about the consistency of tomato soup. Ready to serve, not concentrated. I feel quite cheated. Somehow I had imagined myself as having whole shelves of glass jars full of jewel like preserves, a veritable bounty rather than a drop in the bucket. My mother came around to take us to the airport and having seen the bounty of tomatoes I had picked that morning would not believe just how little pulp I had been left with. I’m still not sure that she actually believes that I haven’t hidden the tomatoes somewhere.

Might I add that despite the fact that I too thought I was tempting fate by preserving in such a limited time frame that I managed to complete it successfully without any major accidents. I’m only hoping the dishes won’t still be sitting in the sink when I get back…

Now I did have a minor brainwave this morning and figure out how to down load the egg pictures. Marvel in their glory...

B is for boiled, C is for coddled - of course

You may be able to see that the coddled egg is somewhat less cooked? Otherwise just use your imagination.

Puffed egg going into the "steamer"for the last 3 minutes and after the 3 minutes but before the yolk falls off

The Husband 'enjoying' his puffed egg. Note the yolky swirly bits all over the plate - oops.

Eggsperimentation

Well I did say I wouldn’t write anything for a while now that I am now officially on holiday, but what can I say, seems I can’t keep away.
Important news items first – oven is fixed. I am incredibly lucky to have a very good friend who is an oven fixing God – or at least a very good friend of God’s. Actually technically he is a very good friend of a very good friend of God’s. I digress.
It turns out the limiters on the oven had blown – the doohickeys that cut out the power when the whole thing gets too hot. I did tell you it was hot in my kitchen! Suddenly I feel fortunate that the previous owners of our house decided to buy the worlds most basic oven, had I had flash things like electronics, a fan or – imagine the luxury – a clock, things may have been much much worse.
So I celebrated having my oven in full working order by cooking four things on the stove before we flew out. No there isn’t really any logic to that but the Husband did say that he fancied some eggs for breakfast (naturally he stopped short of telling me to cook them) and I was feeling unnaturally obliging. But these were no normal eggs, these were eggs cooked three ways – boiled, coddled and puffed - and all Edmonds Style.
Boiled and coddled first – Boiling is putting an egg in boiling water for 5 minutes whereas coddling is putting an egg in boiling water, then taking the pot off the heat and leaving it for 7 minutes. The theory is that coddled eggs are cooked at a lower temperature and therefore are more tender and more digestible – in 1966 there seemed to be a great deal of importance placed on digestibility, I think perhaps their energies would have been more wisely focused on palatability.
And the results? Well in a highly scientific comparison the Husband found that his coddled egg was definitely more tender. It was also almost liquid. Still he did decide that he preferred his coddled egg over the boiled. From an egg cookers perspective it is also far easier to coddle an egg than it is to boil one – no cracked shells. I also discovered after eating my pair of eggs some ten minutes later (due to the preparation of the puffed eggs below) that the eggs were now quite different. My coddled egg was still dark yellow and quite waxy in the middle while being not even a touch runny, while the boiled egg was the normal light yellow of a hard boiled egg. A bit spooky really. There are photos of this to follow that will clarify things better than my description has managed to.
Speaking of spooky we have been initiated into the world of puffed eggs. To make a puffed egg the white and yolk are separated and the white is beaten until stiff. This is then put into a saucer and steamed for 3 minutes, the yolk is then placed on the top and it is steamed for a further 3 minutes. This process is intended to increase the digestibility of the egg making it suitable for invalids. Hmmmmm.
Now naturally I decided to make this without owning a saucer or a steamer. A saucer was relatively easy to improvise with a little flat dipping bowl. The steamer was a little more challenging and I ended up having to use a large plastic colander inserted into a saucepan with a plate over the top. Unfortunately due to the curved base of a colander only one egg could be steamed at a time but this was no really hardship seeing I was busy supervising the production of eggs both coddled and boiled already. The egg and the dish went into the colander fine and despite almost having doubled or tripled in size by the end of the first three minutes I managed to get the yolk on top. Three minutes later I realised that it’s quite tricky to get a relatively flat, hot dish out of a curved colander. And I did relatively well. That is until the yolk slid off the white, into the colander and started to leak through the holes…
Although I managed to reassemble it to some extent the Husband still was unenthusiastic about the joys of a puffed egg – enhanced digestibility and all. I did try some and the texture was a little odd to say the least.
Now I am afraid that I have the sore shoulder of someone who is typing on keyboard which is at nipple height (a graphic but necessary description) so I will have to sign off and leave the description of my fourth recipe - Tomato pulp – to a time when can again feel all of my limbs. I also have some rather fascinating photos of the various eggs to add which will have to wait until I have a battery and lead for my camera. As if needing more evidence that I should not be allowed to use scissors without the help of an adult - let alone a kitchen full of knives, hot elements and boiling water it’s nice to know I’m the kind of person who takes the camera on holiday, but no battery. Nevermind.