A few months ago I saw a healthy eating programme on the local television station. A viewer had written in with their Carbonara recipe asking if it could be made more healthy so they could keep enjoying it.

I was surprised at the ingredient list that included a cup of cheddar cheese and a whole lot of cream. I was even more surprised at the show host’s response. She changed the cheddar cheese for a “lite” version, she changed the cream for a evaporated milk or some other lower fat option and she added vegetables to make it healthy. I will admit to yelling at the television during this bit of the show.

The good recipes that last through the generations in any culture are made by usually the women and they are a lot like me – cooking the dinner with small children in tow. So if it seems too hard, there is likely to be another way. It helps me to think about the surroundings the recipes were developed in. Some Italian pasta recipes do use cream. If you had a cow for your milk, you would have some cream lying about the place from milking, it seems logical you would mix it into your pasta sauce. But it would not be a lot.

Back to the Carbonara – a quick look up on the internet and I found this recipe. In this one there is no cream. Sure there will be a number of variations but the viewer could have enjoyed a more authentic and healthier carbonara by looking backwards. It seems today we often complicate recipes and ingredients to give us so called healthier food but if we just look back, the answers are already there and usually with more flavour.

Over the past few years, I have read a huge number of cook books and food travel books. A brilliant one on understanding Italian cuisine is “Eating up Italy” by Matthew Fort – it is in the Christchurch library. One of the lessons I have learnt from reading all these books is if an everyday recipe seems over the top in ingredients or has numerous steps, it has probably been fiddled with beyond recognition and it is worth looking for a more original version (hooray for the internet). The one proviso to this theory, is if there is specialised equipment in that culture that everyone has, that makes it easier. Not only will the original version be easier, usually it is tastier and healthier too.

I recommend that Carbonara recipe it is certainly worth trying – easy, fast and delicious.

A couple of months ago when I was driving around, I saw a family collecting berries off a tree on the side of the road. Then under another bush further along there was a big bucket like someone had been collecting there too.

I kept wondering what these berries were and one day while walking past a field that had them right a long the road, I picked some and put them in my pocket. I completely forgot about them until a week or so later when I put my jacket back on again and found shrivelled red lumps in my pocket.

Of course it should have been obvious who might know the answer: good ol’ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (or Hugh Wobbly-Wobbly as he is known at our place ).

Sure enough he had a recipe for a sauce. But I wanted to make sure we had the right thing. I found some around the edge of a park near our house and picked a couple of handfuls as well as leaves and twigs to help with identification.

This site, and this site were the most useful. I decided I did have fruit off a Hawthorn bush and set about cooking the small amount of Haws I had. I used Hugh’s recipe but I did forget to add the black pepper at the end. It was one of the easiest sweet ‘n’ sour sauces I have made. There was a touch of intrepidation as we all tasted it and hoped the identification was right. I was surprised that it had a really nice flavour, more subtle than my usual sweet ‘n’ sour sauce and a pretty red colour as well. The berries are brown when you strain them off and all the colour is in the sauce. Definitely very good for some berries I picked off a bush by the park.

According to the internet, this sauce is a classic old British recipe and there are other yummy things you can make like Haw Jelly so it might be time for another trip to the park.

I know it has been a long while since we updated this blog, but we will try to be more regular now. The lack of content is not because we haven’t been experimenting and trying things, so we will fill you in on our experiments.

Recently we have been under the influence of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and decided to try making his gorse flower wine.

Being in New Zealand, I have always viewed gorse as the enemy, the ruination of our beautiful country by its fast spreading ways. So it was novel to think of it as useful. We took gloves and the stockpot and went up on the Port Hills and it was easy to find gorse bushes in flower. We had so many to choose from. Gorse flower picking does take a long time and careful attention to avoid getting spiked but four year old Lucy helped out so it is child’s play. The flowers have a coconut suncream oil smell that reminds me of walking on hills in spring. By the time we left I was looking at gorse bushes in a whole new way, seeing one and thinking, that would be a good one to pick.

Once back with our half stockpot of gorse flowers and with lemons gathered off my parents lemon tree, we set about boiling up the flowers. We used Hugh’s recipe in the end but Gorse Flower wine is a traditional Celtic mead and the internet is awash with recipes.

We all tried the syrup before we put it in the fermenter. It was really nice and refreshing and only had a hint of the coconut the flowers had smelt of. Next time (yes I am already thinking there will be) I would like to make gorse flower cordial syrup, too.

It has now been sitting on top of our heater in the lounge for nearly three weeks and bubbling away until this week. The house is too cold to put it anywhere else. We tried some the other day and it is now very cider like and tastes of apples, even though none were put in.

We have some bottles arriving soon so we will be ready to bottle and by summer we should have ten litres of a nice sparkling wine.

I have a real thing for a good chilli sauce, and I am always keen to try a new one. While shopping in our local Middle Eastern shop we came across a hot sauce that I have never seen before. It’s called Alfa Hot Pepper Sauce and it’s made in the United Arab Emirates (of all places). Now that I had the chilli sauce at home, I had to line it up against some more familiar ones to see how it fared.

Representing the USA was the venerable Tobasco. New Zealand was in the safe hands of Kaitaia Fire, and the UAE challenger was ready for a chilli face-off.

• Tobasco: Very hot, with a slight sourness that comes from the fermenting process (Tobasco is packed in barrels and fermented for 2 years)
• Kaitaia Fire: Scorchingly hot with a rich, almost smoky flavour.
• Alfa Hot Pepper Sauce: The mildest of the three (but still with a kick like a mule). It has a real sweetness that the others don’t have and a complex flavour. Amazing. It’s about a quarter of the price!

Alfa Hot Pepper Sauce impressed me so much we will keep a bottle in the fridge for lack-of-chilli emergencies.

Spätzle

We had some German visitors a while back who encouraged us to try some Spätzle (pronounced shpatz-ler). These are German egg noodles and you can either make your own, or buy packets of commercial ones. We managed to find a packet of the commercial variety. We went for Bavarian style because they were smaller and looked similar to the galuska we tried in Hungary.

There are a variety of classic Spätzle recipes, but they can also be used as an side dish to accompany meat—particularly stews with a sauce or gravy. We decided to have them with a spicy sausage casserole.

They took a lot longer to cook than we were expecting, but when they were cooked we tossed some butter and pepper through them. They were good with the stew. They have a similar flavour to tagiatelle, but a completely different texture. They are really halfway between noodles and dumplings and they can soak up a lot of sauce!

The commercial ones were OK, but next time I will have to try making my own. It doesn’t look too hard, but apparently there is a bit of a technique to getting them the correct shape.

On Thurday we opened our first package of kimchi—a Korean condiment made of fermented vegetables and spices. We weren’t quite sure what to expect, but we was thinking maybe something like sauerkraut with chilli.

Kimchi is made by packing heads of cabbage with spices and grated vegetables. The cabbages are then packed into jars and allowed to ferment for a specified time. The commercially available kimchi has been fermented and then packaged with a small sachet of “gas absorber”. The warning on the pack was really cool. It said that “Kimchi was a fermented product, and may bubble on opening”.

We opened the package but disappointingly there was no monster movie-style bubbling. As we opened the package a very distinctive aroma wafted out at us. I have to confess that kimchi is not the most attractive of foods. The process of fermentation seems to leave the cabbage with a slightly grey colour (it looks a little like cooked fish), covered with bright red chilli powder and other bits of miscellaneous vegetables. In fact, with the dead-flesh cabbage and the blood red sauce it does somewhat resemble a murder scene. It smelled really good though, and we quickly grabbed forks to taste this much revered condiment.

It turns out Kimchi is a flavour all it’s own—nothing like sauerkraut at all. The tang of the cabbage hits first, followed by a wave of chilli heat. Once you have got over the chilli, there is a remarkable complexity with lots of different flavours vying for space on your palate. I can see why Koreans think about Kimchi like a fine wine or scotch with different areas producing Kimchi with unique character and flavour.

OK, so we have a whole 500g packet of Kimchi open, so what do we do with it? Well, after hunting around on the ‘net the next day, we found this recipe for Kimchi fried rice. It was lovely. The kimchi gives an amazing flavour to the rice and the chilli colours the dish to a rich red. We put a whole fried egg on top and the runny yolk mixing in with the rice and kimchi made for a very pleasant Friday night meal.

If you haven’t tried kimchi then you need to acquire some and see what you’re missing. It can be used in Korean stews, fried rice (as above) or simply put on the table to be eaten with rice and other food as part of a Japanese or Korean meal.