I think it was Diego from Sao Paulo who first introduced us to barbecued chicken hearts. Since the weather is fabulous at the moment, just right for a bbq, I thought I would share them with you too.
Chicken Hearts on the barbecue are really nice. They taste like little morsels of steak. Sure if you think about it being a chicken heart, it can make you feel a bit funny but you get over that pretty quick once you have tasted them.
To prepare chicken hearts for your next barbecue, marinade them for a few hours with oil, garlic, salt and pepper. That is all the prep done and then just cook ‘em up when you’ve got the barbecue going. The internet offers other marinade recipes you can try once you have found the chicken heart love, like sherry, sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger and garlic or the intriguing adobo sauce and lemon or lime.
Brazilians have other cool ideas for barbecuing too. Another recipe I really liked for the end of the barbecue was green bananas (normal bananas not plaintains), thrown on the barbecue until they went soft and they were split open and sugar and cinnamon sprinkled in on the hot banana. Lucy loved this, especially with some cream or ice cream.

- Fiona

The kids and I had a plan. We wanted a speedy, tasty meal and kedgeree fitted the bill nicely. Only issue was when we got to the cupboard our supply of basmati rice was running too low. A couple of tablespoons of rice wasn’t going to cut it. What we did have was some couscous and it pretty much fills the same niche. Could kedgeree be made with couscous instead of rice? Only one way to find out!

We have a good system for cooking light, fluffy couscous so that’s where I started. Cover the couscous with a bit of water and leave it to soak it all up. Add some oil and mix it with your hands until every grain is coated with a thin coat of oil and cook in the oven (tightly covered) until light and fluffy. It usually takes about 10-15 mins at 180 degrees.
To make the kegeree I did much the same, but I added some peas and tinned tuna (yellowfin, of course) along with some cumin seeds, fennel seeds and salt. A pinch of Indian chilli powder and a grind of black pepper to give it some bite, and into the oven.

While the cous-cous was cooking I hard boiled a couple of eggs but not completely hard- just so the yolks were nearly set. Once the cous-cous came out of the oven, the eggs were peeled, quartered and served with the cous-cous.

It worked pretty well! It was far from authentic, but it tasted wonderful and I would definitely make it again. I might even make it if there was rice in the cupboard…

–Karl

I bought some kidneys with the plan of making a steak and kidney pie but we used the steak for something else so we decided to try devilled kidneys. Neither of us had particularly good memories of kidneys but having watched a couple of shows where they raved about them and their flavour, we decided it was time to give them a second chance. Besides there was cream in the sauce, so surely anything with cream has to be good? This recipe is very close to what we made. It looked good on the plate. Karl cut out the little veiny bits and everything.
The verdict on the taste? I’m sorry I couldn’t finish it. It had more to do with the smell. The flavour was also very strong. It seemed to stir up some memory I couldn’t quite place but it wasn’t a good one. I was disappointed, maybe I was expecting too much or maybe those people who go “mmm delicious” on television cooking programmes, lie. I am not ready to give up yet, next time maybe I will try them at a restaurant or try a different recipe.
Earlier I tried Hugh’s slow cooked Chinese pig’s trotters. This dish actually turned out pretty well. The flavour was excellent. However the first part of the recipe calls for browning off the trotters. Maybe I did this wrong but the smell was of burning flesh and it was not a nice smell. It was hard to get that smell out of my head. Next time maybe I won’t brown off the trotters!
Karl made a fantastic English Pork Pie using the trotter to provide the jelly. So trotters are definitely worth messing around with.

- Fiona

Mmmmmm sumac...

Until a few years ago, I was completely ignorant of this wonderful red powder. Sumac is made from the ground berries of a shrub (Rhus coriaria) and features a lot in Middle Eastern cuisine. The spice is used in several different ways, but it has a tangy, almost lemon-zest flavour so it can be used as a souring agent (much as we use lemon juice). Sumac works perfectly with meat because the sourness is accompanied by a nice, fruity, berry flavour. I often mix it in with marinades instead of lemon juice, before tossing the meat onto the barbie. It’s subtle enough not to overpower chicken, but it stands up pretty well with stronger flavours like lamb too. It can be sprinkled as a garnish onto hummus and other dips, it can even be used in place of lemon zest to give a different, but equally wonderful result .

Good sumac can be hard to track down. You are looking for a nice, dark red colour, rather than a brown and the sumac should have a fruity, berry smell. When you taste it, it should deliver way more than just a sour or salty taste (salt is used in the processing of sumac).

Find some, and start playing around with it in your kitchen. Sumac is really good!

–Karl

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.

–Fiona

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.

–Fiona

Making home-made bacon isn’t anywhere near as difficult as you are thinking! Inspired by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Meat book, I wandered down to our local butcher and asked for a slab of belly pork. I ended up with a nice square of meat 30cm x 30cm. I could instantly see that if it was cut into thin slices, it would be streaky bacon.

The process for making the bacon is very straight forward:

Take a good 1kg of salt and chuck it into a food processor
Add aromatics if you want (I used 2 bayleaves, about 20 peppercorns and some juniper berries )
Add a handful of soft brown sugar

The pièce de résistance for my bacon was the addition of a splash of liquid smoke. I hoped that this would impart a nice smoky flavour to the bacon without the hassle of making a cold smoker.

I blended the ingredients until I had a fine brown powder—my cure! I rubbed a couple of handfuls into the pork belly, making sure I got the cure into every nook and cranny. I then placed the bacon, for that is what it had become, into a plastic sealed container and put it in the fridge.

An impressive amount of ‘juice’ came out of the meat over the first 24 hours. This was poured away and another handful of cure was rubbed into the meat. I continued to do this each day. After about 3 days of this I fried up a small piece to see what it was like. It was good. Very identifiably bacon and with a very subtle smoky flavour (I have since made myself a simple cold-smoker and realised what a gentle smokiness the liquid smoke imparts—it’s the difference between a friendly pat on the head vs a whack in the face). The bacon was much saltier than shop bought bacon, but it would be absolutely perfect to cut into rustic chunks for adding to stews and casseroles. I sliced it as thinly as I could without an actual bacon slicer and put it in the freezer. It was wonderful added to various recipes, and I try to always have some in the freezer these days.

Why not give this a go? The ingredients are easy to get hold of and the result is nothing short of real bacon!

–Karl