A Bonnetful of Bees

Kefir is a fermented milk product, a little like yoghurt, but not as thick, or as sharply acid, a little like like a dairy version of sourdough bread.  It’s relatively unknown in New Zealand except among health food people, and even then not widely.  It deserves a lot more recognition.

According to enthusiasts, it’s simply chock full of probiotics, which aid your digestion, lower your blood pressure and your bad cholesterol, and enable dairy-sensitive persons to eat it in quantity and more easily absorb its calcium. These little fellows may also help you to win lotteries or change governments.  Even if it does none of those things or only some, it will still have a place in my fridge from now on in.  I’m a convert.  (more…)

For a variety of perfectly good reasons, I neglected to put the Dutch Oven bread on to rise last night and breakfast saw the last of my bread disappear as toast.

I thought about my Beer Bread recipe, an hour from thinking about it to eating it, but my memory of it was not quite what I wanted.  I have been enjoying the taste and texture of the Dutch Oven Bread so much I wasn’t ready to settle for less.  Out of the inner tantrum came a thought.  What would happen if I mixed up a batch of Beer Bread, and cooked it the way I do the Dutch Oven Bread?

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OK, back to walking again.  With the possibility of a walk along the St James (NZ, not Spain) in November being dangled in front of me, I’ve been putting some kilometres behind me down at Rimmers.  The main problem is that right now, I weigh as much without a pack as I did with a pack when I last walked the St James, and I still recall the demands the up and down first day en route to Cannibal Gorge Hut made on my legs.  (See “Duke of York Territory”

It’s been said that a fit fat man is in better health than an unfit man of average weight, and while I believe there’s an element of truth in that, we are here talking about the kind of loads that an 18-20kg pack are going to place on knees and ankles over 5 days, in addition to what’s already there.

Anyway….  The Coast Rd down at Rimmers is a useful starting place to get into training.  It’s flat, and straight, and even if you think pine trees are boring — I do — there’s lots to observe besides.  To get there, turn west at Rimmers Rd, about a couple of km south of Helensville, and follow the tarseal until you reach the forest turnoff, then through the forest until you reach the Rimmers Rd parking lot.  About 13 km from Helensville all up.

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You’ve heard of Beef Wellington, and if you’re lucky, someone who knows what they’re doing might even have made it for you. Anyhow, I was being disrespectful the other day and wondering what might happen if we swapped the noble fillet steak for a piece of meatloaf, and I went ahead and tried it.
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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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