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

Ful Medammes is a traditional Egyptian dish. To do it properly you need to start with dry fava beans. I will do this as I have been planning to do it for ages. But impatient (as I mentioned in the sourdough experiments) I wanted to try Ful Medammes now. So I used a can of fava beans already cooked to the first part of the recipe with lemon and spices. Then I searched the internet and compared recipes with the one I had photocopied out of a book over a year ago. I cooked some onion, garlic and crushed cumin seeds in olive oil and added the can of beans in their sauce to that. It didn’t take long to cook and then I added some salt to bring out all the flavours. I served it with warm pita bread, chopped mint and coriander, roughly chopped boiled egg and lemon wedges. It was delicious. We ate it for a fast and easy Sunday dinner, which is probably not the done thing. It would certainly set you up for the day eating it for breakfast as I understand it is more usually eaten. The combination of the beans, the fresh herbs, egg and lemon juice was bright and zesty.
Now I have some dried fava beans, I will have to make it completely from scratch and compare the taste.

- Fiona

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

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

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.

–Karl

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.

–Karl

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.

–Karl