christmas food

For christmas, even if we don't care too much for big gatherings or presents (the kids like the latter), we still love drinking and eating well.

For starters we had gravad lax made from a salmon, our dill, which is growing like a weed at the moment, salt and sugar. This was really good served with classic swedish dill sauce made with mustard, sugar, vinegar, oil and chopped dill. We washed it down with nice chilled vodka.

For the main meal, we killed three small geese and deboned them. One was used as the "bag" for the rest and stuffed with the breasts and a forcemeat made with the rest of the meat and fresh sage and garlic.

this was then stitched into one big ballotine or sausage and then roasted in a moderate oven until done. It was crisped up on the outside in the frying pan. I served this with steamed beans - Bri is very good at forcing early green beans for christmas - and tarragon, new pink-eye potates boiled and crushed with some of the rendered goose fat and a sauce made with red-currants that Noah picked, stewed with cinnamon, cloves and a little sugar. We washed this down with a bottle of Bleasdale sparkling shiraz. Delicious!

To finish we had a summer pudding that I made a few days earlier using 750 grams of raspberries and 250 grams of redcurrants from our garden. These were briefly cooked, strained then packed, not into white bread, but pandoro which is like a panettone without the dried fruit. It's a little like a not-so-rich brioche. We finished the sparkling shiraz with this and it went really well.

after this, we fell asleep.

tapas

Somehow a meal of tapas was inevitable. We had experimentally prepared some snails from the garden by feeding them on grains and greens for 3 weeks to purge them of grit. Also, it was about the time that our jamon (or prosciutto) was ready. I prepared this last summer with a boned leg of free-range pork following the method of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It has been hanging under our verandah, covered in muslin and wire mesh since then.
I also had just bought some spanish-style blood sausage - morcilla - and really wanted to make a typical spanish dish of broad beans with morcilla.
So, we had (clockwise from the bottom), grilled home-made bread rubbed with new garlic, grilled and garlicked mushrooms from our mushroom box, pipis (Noah went down to the water to collect these) steamed with some white wine, broad beans sauteed with morcilla, jamon serrano and, in the middle, snails braised in garlic, olive oil and tomato. All that was missing was the sherry and the flamenco guitarist.

grilled chook and scapes

Today for dinner, I deboned a whole, free-range chook and marinated it with smoked paprika, dried greek oregano (from last year) and orange juice. I tied it up and then grilled it with a bunch of garlic scapes (the flowering stems) over embers on my fire drum. It was sooo good! The orange juice added some acidity and a bit of sweetness. The scapes tasted like a cross between roasted garlic and asparagus. A simple green salad (oak lettuce, mizuna, cucumbers, red tuscan onions) that Briony picked and made was a good accompaniment

malfatti

Malfatti, meaning badly made, are Italian ricotta dumplings. They are really easy to make. Steam a whole lot of spinach (500g to 1kg) and then squeeze ALL the water out. Chop it up finely with a small bunch of fresh basil then mix it into 2 and a 1/2 cups of ricotta. Not the creamy pureed stuff but the real Italian stuff that still has some texture. Mix in 3 eggs, salt, pepper and 1/2 a cup of grated parmesan or pecorino cheese and a cup of homemade breadcrumbs. Form the paste into quenelles with 2 dessertspoons and then roll them in some flour. Shake off the excess and drop them gently into a very large pot of salted boiling water. As soon as they have risen to the surface, scoop them out and serve them them with a really nice tomato sauce that has some basil in it. I used some of our bottled sauce from last summer. These malfatti are really, really delicious and better than any kind of meatball. You can serve them over pasta as you would a meatball sauce. We simply ate them with a green salad.

fresh faba falafels

We are having a glut of broad beans and I wondered if I would be able to use them to make falafels. You can make them with rehydrated dried beans so fresh ones should work. I ground up broad beans with garlic, coriander/cilantro, mint, cumin, chile a bit of flour and salt and pepper. Quenelle shapes were then fried in hot olive oil and served with yoghurt, garlic and tahini sauce and a salad made of cooked pearl barley with red onions, more coriander, mint, olive oil, lemon juice and

food getting greener

It's really nice to eat more green things. We did eat kale and cabbages over winter, but spring greenery tastes better or just different. This is a dish of salt and pepper deep fried flounder, topped with cilantro and green chiles (from the freezer) and served with kai lan (chinese broccoli) and oyster sauce.


The other green thing that we really love and truly signifies the start of the summer is pesto. Pesto has become so boring and bastardised that it's often ignored. If you make it with just picked basil (leaves only and completely dry of surface water), excellent garlic, extra-virgin tasmanian olive oil and really good cheese (we use a Romano), it is just divine.
By weight, use one third each of basil, pine nuts and cheese. Grind the leaves, nuts and garlic, then add oil till it's a bit looser than it should be. Then add the grated cheese. Adjust the texture with oil and add salt to taste.

tacos!

Tacos in Australia means those crispy taco shells from the supermarket filled with all sorts of horrible things. We really love real tacos in the USA from taco trucks and little taquerias. So, we have to make our own. Starting with masa harina (corn meal - not polenta) mixed with lard and water to make a soft dough. Balls of this are squashed into 4 inch circles and cooked on a steel plate. The filling can be pretty much any meat. Here, I've used free range ground pork cooked with garlic, onion, cumin, and corn (frozen from last summer).
Salsa verde is made by boiling tomatillos (also frozen from last summer) then blending them with salt, green chiles and coriander leaves. Chopped onion is then mixed through. Take a bite then take a bite of radish. These ones are called D'Avignon - not very mexican but they taste the same.