I don’t know how many of you have ever tried tahini straight off the spoon. It’s sesame butter as in peanut butter, right, and sesame seed is wonderful on rolls and stuff……
Except in tahini, it’s not. Tahini grabs for every bit of saliva in your mouth and tastes really foul and sticks to your denture like well, there’s nothing I know to compare it with. I always wondered what it added to hummus and I have experimented with peanut oil and peanut butter with some success, especially among kids. Also. tahini separates out into oil and solids, and it’s hell to get out of the jar. Expensive, too.
The other day I was in Lim Chhour’s shop in Henderson – wonderful Asian supply shop and good for economical meat and veg, and I came across a bottle of toasted sesame seed oil. Note the “toasted“. A 750ml bottle was just under $13, and I hummed and hahed a bit before it went into the basket. Something new to play with. Did I deserve it?
Today, I made the first batch of hummus with it, using 60 ml of sesame oil instead of the 30-40ml of tahini I would normally use. It just looked a touch less substantial than tahini so I decided to boost it’s presence a little, as it were.
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Peter is an inveterate collector of newspaper clippings – in fact he is an inveterate collector of almost anything of interest – and he arrived last visit with a page from the W(h)anganui C(h)ronicle from last December, featuring “home-made” recipes suitable for gifts; and in amongst the coconut ice and the apricot and orange balls and such was a recipe called “Indian Chutney”, which, if you know anything at all about Indian food, gives absolutely no clue at all as to what you are going to get.
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When we were very small, in the late 1940s, at Pukeoware Primary School, we learned by heart the poetry of the great masters, and one afternoon a week we stood at the front of the room for a few stage-frightful minutes and recited what we had learned. These poems stayed with me right through my MA degree in English, and they are still there for the most part sixty years after I learned them.
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How many recipes eventuate from a surplus you’ve already used in all of the conventional ways. I had reached the stage where I was about to pull out the determinate tomato plants that had finished their main burst, and the question was what to do with the assorted greens and partially ripe stragglers that littered the vines when it seemed wasteful just to throw them on the heap.
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The simplest bread of all – and very possibly one of the nicest I’ve ever made.
The original of this recipe as far as I’ve been able to track it is to be found at
http://www.sullivanstreetbakery.com/recipes/noknead.html
but it’s been through a change or two on the way here. The source I originally used did not specify a baking temperature, so I settled on 190C for a start, later increased to 210C. The original used 230-250C but I am well satisfied with my version.
I’m talking ingredients here, not method: no sugar, no oil, minimal yeast, just time to let the basics do their stuff.
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We paid a long over due return visit to this circuit today. I have long recommended that you do not do a full circuit, and that you begin at Mountain Rd Carpark, not the Scenic Drive one. Take the Old Coach Rd track to just past the ranger’s house, then hang a left onto Goodfellow track. (The prolonged and steepish walk up a rough Old Coach Rd track is probably the least attractive part of the expedition, but that out of the way, the rest is paradise.)
The Goodfellow track has to be one of my favourite Waitakere tracks. It has had a major facelift in recent years and apart from a slight trickiness on the second stream crossing, is mostly motorway.
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We turn off SH 16 at Restall Rd, just south of Woodhill School, and drive in to the crossroads, then right down Boundary Rd a kilometre or so to the bikes carpark.
“I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree” – Ogden Nash
Nature Valley. Hmmmmmmmm.
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I’ve written a heap about Woodhill and Rimmers over the years, about my disillusion with the inaction and neglect of those nominally maintaining the walking tracks and so on. I’m consigning that to a linked history section and revisiting the walks for an up-to-date assessment.
There are two official walking tracks at Woodhill, the Short Loop Track and the Long Loop Track.
I’m going to add a couple more: the Short Short Loop Track and the Long Short Loop Track.
In fact, depending on the use you make of the myriad horse tracks and quad bike tracks and forestry roads, there’s no limit to the routes you can devise. The BMX tracks, though, are totally off limits. Bikes, being silent, ridden by complete lunatics, and considerably faster than pedestrians are bloody dangerous to be around.
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One of the main reasons that this section of the website exists is to draw attention to the utter stupidity of the “one-size-fits-all” attitude that has characterised the thinking, or lack of it, behind the construction of certain areas of New Zealand social policy. Everything from a wolf-whistle to a pack rape has been characterised and dealt to as “sexual abuse”, and everything from a raised eyebrow to bloody murder has been characterised as “family violence”.
For the sake of further economy of thought, the villain has in both cases been characterised as a male in close relationship.
Procrustes the bandit had an iron bed on which his victims were invited to sleep. Those too tall he cut to size, and those too short he stretched until they fit. Our Procrustean therapists have had nearly thirty years of fitting people to their pc beds and we need to rethink.
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It’s that time of the year again when meals are determined not by well-thumbed recipe books but by selecting from the flood of vegetables pouring in from the vege garden, and finding ways of making them work together.
What I’ve got at present are Hungarian banana chillies — low-medium heat — Ponsonby Red and Baxters Early Cherry tomatoes — both huge croppers — cutting celery — a strong-flavoured wild version that has been feeding me solidly for about three months now from half a dozen plants, dwarf Purple Tepee beans, and basil bushes growing luxuriantly in the double tyre.
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