It’s so important!

My Mum taught us all to cook, and once we hit secondary school we were expected to take on a cooking night and feed the family. We learned a load of valuable skills in the process. We had to plan what we were going to cook in advance so Mum could get the ingredients; we had to cater for a range of tastes and food aversions (mercifully very few of those in my family); we had to get a handle on portion sizes and how much food to prepare; and we had to think on our feet when unexpected guests arrived, or when ingredients were missing.

Sure, the family had to put up with some fairly bland and clumsily prepared meals, as well as a few spectacular failures and experiments gone awry. But we all got there in the end. When we left home we could all cook, and fairly skillfully too! Even better is we all found that we really enjoyed it, and to a greater and lesser extent, we all still cook.

I’m pretty grateful for my parents’ lessons. My love of food has moved from a hugely enjoyable hobby to a serious business proposition, and I’m going to make damn sure that our kids learn to cook too. They’ll have a cooking night, and they’ll learn all those valuable skills. At the very least they’ll be able to keep themselves fed, but who knows? Maybe they’ll get hooked and have a lifetime of fun and culinary adventure like their parents!

–Karl

Most weeks we have Fake Takeaway Fridays. Basically we make takeaway type food but we make it at home so it is yummier (and possibly healthier ). Our Fake takeaways include; crumbed fillets of fish pan fried and potato wedges – cut thin to cook fast in the oven, burritos – especially yummy if I have managed to cook up some dried beans and make the refried beans myself (not very hands on just needs prior planning! ) and homemade pizzas are some of the mainstays. The homemade pizzas the kids get in on the action too. I set the breadmaker making the pizza dough in the morning. OO flour makes a lovely texture to the base when you are eating it, but often I just use normal flour. Then when we are ready for pizzas, the kids get the pastry brushes and paint the thin crusts of dough with a tomato sauce – made from diluted tomato paste or mashed tomatoes (whatever is handy), while I cut up toppings for them to sprinkle on once they have finished the painting bit. I do try for us to make different flavours and not just pile all the toppings on all the pizzas. Lucy usually makes her own, choosing her own toppings. Then it is in the oven for 10 or so minutes at 200C.
We also have Vegetarian Thursday and I was totally excited to hear a little girl in our shop mention their family had Sushi Sunday. What a great idea!

- 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

Before we went to Hungary in 2003, we got our paprika from the supermarket. I used it mostly for colouring really, sprinkled on the top of things before cooking. Then we tasted proper Hungarian paprika. What an explosion of flavour! What a delicious smell! We came back and made numerous dishes of goulash, packed with proper flavour. It is the paprika we use in any recipe that calls for standard paprika. It is now a staple in our pantry and we miss it if we run out. We use it by the tablespoon to fully enjoy the flavour in the dish. It is not especially hot.
I have been meaning to try this dish too – I had this recipe described to me recently and it sounded really good.
Hungarian paprika is different to the Smoked Spanish paprika or even non smoked Spanish paprika. It is ground dry whereas the Spanish paprika is ground with oil.
Once you start enjoying decent paprika, I think there is no going back to dull, tasteless stuff.

- Fiona

It often comes up, especially at the moment with recession going on, that you should do your own home baking. The theory is if you do the sums it is much cheaper than buying ready made biscuits or slices and you can put proper ingredients in them.
I don’t always agree with this. There were these biscuits in the supermarket that were quite cheap and no one else in the family was that keen on them so they lasted all week. If I do baking we eat it up far too quickly because it is so yummy and then I need to bake again.
Now I do bake more – I am eating homemade chocolate slice as I type – especially now the supermarket doesn’t stock those cheap biscuits.
When I bake, I tend to be patriotic. I think New Zealand does have some of the best slice recipes around. In a hurry, family hand-me-down biscuit and slice recipes are the best.
I have also switched to butter for baking, it seems to be cheaper than using the special “lite” spreads we use for on toast and the taste is just so much better. We also finally got around to putting a vanilla bean in a jar of sugar(after we had used the seeds). This is so worth it, especially for biscuits. The bean keeps staying in the jar and I keep refilling it with sugar – it smells yummy too.
My latest triumphs in the biscuit area is this recipe from Brit Allegra McEvedy. I have this dough in the freezer as I write and it is easy to cut off some rounds and cook ‘em up in 10 minutes with whatever toppings I find in the pantry. This solves my running out of biscuits problem very nicely.
Recently I also made “apple cakes lovely” from our family recipe book, so called as someone had (quite rightly too) put “lovely” beside the recipe title. I made this recipe because we had some homemade apple sauce that had been sitting around in the fridge for awhile and this recipe required stewed apple. They were a fantastic afternoon tea hot from the oven. I’ve frozen some for lunches. It reminded me again how these older recipes are often about using up what is leftover to get the most food for your money.

- Fiona

Recently we have been trying to be thrifty, moral citizens and buy our chicken whole, unfrozen and free-range. We cut it up into portions (you can get 8 of them) and put them in the freezer. Aside from the wonderful flavour of chicken that has been reared properly and cooked with the bones in, we have a carcass that we can make into stock.

We have really got into our stock making. If all you have ever tried is the stock from the supermarket, then it is worth giving this a go. Sometimes we roast the carcass for extra roasty flavour, sometimes we just bung it in the pot. You can use all the bones and leftover bits from a roast (even if the bones have been nibbled – it’s going to boil for hours anyway). We sometimes make beef stock from the t-bones left over from a steak dinner. A bone from a lamb roast is perfect too – take all the leftover meat off and get a stock on the go.

Water is added to cover the meat and then we normally add our mirepoix (stock vegetables – onion, carrot, celery).

Celery normally comes from the garden, but here’s the cool bit!! None of the veges need to be in good condition. Bendy carrots? Chuck ‘em in! Limp celery? Get it in there! You could even see that the celery was going limp, throw it in the freezer and then add it to your stock later. Onions can be biffed in skins and all, leeks can go in there, any tired herbs can be used. Just about the only thing that you shouldn’t use are brassicas like cabbage and brocolli.

We normally throw in some aromatics as well. Black peppercorns are a must, and always, always a couple of bay leaves. Juniper berries often find their way into the stock too. The thing we don’t add is salt! Stocks aren’t supposed to be salty. You should be seasoning any dish the stock is added to anyway, and you’d lose a lot of control of your seasoning if you dumped a load of salt in there with the stock.

Once you have the pot loaded up, you simmer it very, very gently for hours. We set ours going just after dinner and it bubbles away gently to itself all evening. We turn it off and sit it outside in a safe place just as we go to bed, in the cold, so any fat solidifies and sits on the surface.

I never really “got” stocks when I first tried to make them. I couldn’t understand how this watery dishwater was the thing that all the top chefs were raving about, and why people bothered with them. Then I discovered the secret to good stocks—REDUCE THEM!

In the morning, the stock gets skimmed to remove the fat and drained. All the bits from the pot get a good squeeze in the sieve to get the last bits of liquid and flavour from them, then the stock goes back onto the stove at a very high heat to reduce by at least half. If you can be bothered to reduce more then it’s worth it. Not only does it make the stock easier to store, it massively concentrates all those wonderful flavours that you were after in the first place. You can always add more water later if it is too intense. I can have the stock reduced before it’s time to leave for work

Give stock making a go! It takes ages, but most of the time the stocks take care of themselves on the stove, and you aren’t actually doing anything towards them.

– Karl

I always used to find, “salting to taste” tricky. Some dishes were not even cooked yet and the recipe would say add salt and pepper to taste. I would just randomly add some salt and pepper and hope for the best. Even in dishes that I could taste as they were cooking, I found it hard to know how much salt to add. What taste was I aiming for? The options I thought were to add some salt or too much salt. To avoid too much I added just a little, in most cases not enough to make any difference to the dish. Then I was reading a book by Linda Carucci who is a chef and cooking instructor. In her book she said to add salt until you can taste the first ingredient you added. For me, this really works. I might be looking for garlic or an onion flavour, if they went in the pan first. The process is almost like bringing a camera into focus. Suddenly all the flavours are there and the point of adding salt to the dish is worthwhile – bringing out all those great flavours.
I do like how not all cuisine styles follow the adding salt to bring out the flavours routine. Some Indian dishes are completely a balance of the ingredients – hence the large amounts of the ingredients that make up the dish. Some Thai dishes it is the balance of the salty (usually from fish sauce) the sweet (usually from palm sugar) and the sour that make the dish.

- Fiona

Now the shop is up and running, I am an even bigger fan of tagines. We have it on good authority (from a Moroccan), that these days electric slow cookers are the preferred implement in which to cook them, which is fantastic because we have one of those.
My two mainstay tagine recipes are variants on a lamb tagine and this beef one.
It seems from a lot of reading we’ve done, that it is the normal method to not even brown the meat or the onions. I like this sort of easy preparation. The spices have to be good and added in quantity. The dried fruit adds a sweetness I really like with the meat and it makes the kids eat more meat as by the end the meat, dates and prunes look very similar. The other great thing about tagines is being a slow cooked dish, it requires cheaper cuts of meat with more flavour.
I put it on in the morning after breakfast and then come home late to a dinner mostly prepared. I usually add slivered toasted almonds and fresh coriander and serve with some couscous or yummy Lebanese bread. There is dinner and the house smells fantastic as well.

- 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

The other week our dinners were a wee trip around the world in quick-to- prepare dinners. Monday we started off in New Zealand with a good old fashioned Kiwi sausage casserole recipe – golden sausages – with kumara, peas and carrots.

Tuesday we went to West Africa with a Chicken Palaver served with rice. The name palaver and this dish seems to have an ambiguous history. I am not sure how authentic the recipe I had was but the kids liked the peanuts. It would have been better with fresh spinach rather than the frozen I wanted to use up but our fresh spinach is still too teeny in the garden.

Wednesday we were all late home so a fast dinner was needed. I whipped up a kedgeree. I am amused how this dish has been “adapted” by the English from colonial times in India. It seems to be enjoying a resurgence at the moment and there are millions of recipes on the ‘net.

Thursday was a pumpkin soup which seems to take a variety of ingredients from around the world but is absolutely delicious and I served it with sour dough bread. I have made this before so I had the spice blend already made up and I was out of cashews – but I preferred the creamy texture without them.

Friday it was lamb tagine with dried apricots and almonds, served with couscous. Okay this wasn’t quick but I put it in the crockpot just after breakfast and then it didn’t matter how long I was out for coffee, it was all done when I got home.

Saturday, to end our tasting trip around the world, what better than a Kiwi barbecue at the neighbours with eight different nationalities.

– Fiona