Wednesday 25 January 2017

Garden update - January 2017

I can't have a garden without roses and herbs. They're the first things I planted in my previous garden and now in my new home in Featherston, history repeats itself. At least this time I had the perfect spots already prepared. Like in Tawa, I chose to plant my roses along the front of the house and there were two large rose bushes already. The other existing plants were overgrown and straggly and needed to come out anyway, so it was the perfect spot.

I have to admit that I didn't do the hard work myself. I'm not as able-bodied as I was in my twenties and ripping up brush and digging holes is really hard on my joints, so I got a professional in to do the hard part for me. What she achieved in three hours would have taken me days otherwise. I got the roses online (you can get just about anything online these days) from South Pacific Roses. They arrived in excellent condition and I doing really well. I ordered the most fragrant ones I could find in each of the standard rose colours. I can't wait for the flowers to open! Keep up to date with my Facebook page, you'll be sure to see pictures of the roses there.
The new rose garden
Wednesday morning was gorgeously mild and still, and quite conveniently the herbs I ordered from Awapuni Nurseries (I love shopping online!) had just arrived that I decided to postpone my office work and instead get stuck into planting my herb garden.

I had already cleared out some of the weeds a few days earlier, so it didn't take me long to dig out the rest of the weeds and prepare the bed.
The prepared bed
Meanwhile Trixie worked on quality control making sure all the newly-arrived herb plants were up to scratch by tasting them!

I like buying plants from Awapuni as they come bare-rooted wrapped up in newspaper. Not only does this help cut down on plastic container wastage (they reuse them by sending you the plants only), it makes planting a breeze as you don't have to spend time and effort getting the plants out of punnets. And you often find one or two extras thrown in for good measure ;-) In next to no time, the bed was all planted up and ready for a good soak with the hose. The heat of the day had arrived and I was happy to now go back to doing office work. Aaah, the joys of working from home!!

All planted up











Sunday 22 January 2017

When life gives you lemons - part 3

I took a break from lemon operations on Friday and caught up with some emails and other admin. In the evening though I tried out a lemon chicken recipe that I found on Pinterest for dinner. It was certainly fun to make, and smelled heavenly as I grilled the lemons in the skillet. As for eating though, I was a little less enthused. I guess I'm not really a savoury lemon person – too sour for my taste. But, it was a nice change from my usual dinners all the same.

A picker getting stuck in
Saturday brought with it sunny weather and I had two people come over to pick lemons and so I made my first small change from my lemon harvest – $3 a bag. At last the mass of lemons is starting to reduce, though the tree is still pretty full, sigh. I can't even give them away! It seems everyone has a lemon surplus around here.

Once my lemon pickers had been, my first project of the day was to make lemon vinegar. I had quite a lot of fruit from Wednesday's batch had tears in the skin where they had detached from tree and needed to be used fast. So after I washed them, I chopped them into chunks and packed them into glass jars which I then filled with white vinegar. I'll leave them like that for two weeks or so to allow the vinegar to infuse with the lemon. After that I'll strain the mixture, removing the fruit, pips etc and bottle the liquid. It ought to be good in salads and if it flops it can be used as a eco-friendly cleaner, lol.
Lemon vinegar in the making

I spent the rest of the day washing, juicing and zesting the rest of Wednesday's lemons. I ended up with a large tub of zest and another 1.5 litres of juice, which I put in the freezer. Sadly I ended up having to throw out a lot of them as they had already gone off, so that's the end of the harvesting. I'm just not using them fast enough, so it's better if they just stay on the tree until I need them.

On Sunday, I moved on to flavouring salt. I used the zest I collected on Saturday. Be warned, if you are going to do this, use an old blitzing machine that you don't mind damaging. The combination of the abrasiveness of the salt and the acidity of the lemon will eat away at the plastic jug and dull blades. I used 500g coarse sea salt with 4 heaped tablespoons of lemon zest. Blitz until all the zest is reduced and evenly mixed with the salt. Then transfer to a paper lined pan and dry in an oven at 105℃ for around an hour to remove all moisture. Bottle once cool.
Making lemon salt
I also made a second batch with the addition of fresh rosemary. This time I used 500g coarse sea salt, 2 heaped tablespoons of lemon zest and 2 heaped tablespoons of rosemary leaves. Blitz and dry as before.
The finished salts
It was a good day and to reward my hard work I whipped up a batch of scones which I flavoured with – you guessed it – lemon zest! Topped with my strawberry jam, they were absolutely scrummy!





Thursday 19 January 2017

When life gives you lemons - part 2

Zesting
After Caroline left, I still had a large number of picked lemons remaining that needed to be dealt with quickly. So Wednesday morning, I continued juicing them to freeze for future use. Following suggestions on the Internet, I discovered that the easiest way to remove the zest is to use a vegetable peeler. You can then cut the pieces of skin into strips with a sharp knife or mezzaluna.

I am going to dry this batch of zest to use in bath salts, so I spread out the zest in a large glass pan and then pressed down paper towel to soak up the excess juice. After leaving the zest like this overnight, I think transferred to it to a drying frame (an old picture frame with net attached that I used for paper-making once), covered it with another layer of netting and then hung it up in my hot water cupboard.
Drying the zest
I
Haul no.2 and still heaps to go!
finally came to the end of the lemons, having put over a litre and a bit of the juice in the freezer, when a friend popped round to help me harvest some more. Just in time too. Soon after we got them rinsed off and moved onto the deck, the weather packed in, bringing with it rain and wind. And so, I finished the day with another huge haul to deal with. Back to square one, sigh!

Thursday morning, the worst of the storm had passed and we were treated to another spectacular rainbow. The dawning of another day of the age of lemons.

A lemon dawn
I started by baking a lemon syrup loaf from a recipe off the Chelsea sugar site. For the syrup I used 1/3 cup of juice to 1/3 cup of sugar to make it extra syrupy. 
Lesson learned:
Line the tin with paper as once the syrup has soaked in, the loaf is impossible to get out!
It might also have helped to let the loaf cool down properly, but I was impatient and hungry to get a taste of my baking and in my haste to get the luscious loaf out of the pan it split, leaving the bottom in the pan which I had to scrape out. Sigh! Of well, it certainly tasted good and as I had baked it for myself, it didn't matter. 

I continued juicing lemons, but I must admit, I was starting to get a bit jaded of the process. I tried a shortcut of blitzing the whole zested/skinned lemons, plus a small amount of skin in my blender and then sieving the pulp. I figured that since many recipes call for zest and juice, why not simply chuck in the whole fruit. Besides, store-bought orange juice is made the same way, the entire fruit – skin and all – is squeezed, which is why it's so sour and bitter even though the fruit is so sweet. 

It worked well and produced that same sour tang to the juice that you get in squeezed orange juice. I think it will work well for my lemon cordial where one wants a tangy sharpness to the drink, but not for my lemon jelly where sweetness is the aim.

Juicing for cordial
Trixie: Operations supervisor, office paper shredder and nap specialist
Another two milk bottles full of juice later, and still a huge number of lemons to go, I packed it in for the day. Like my blender, I work best in short bursts! Time to follow Trixie's example and have a nap.










Wednesday 18 January 2017

When life gives you lemons - part 1

My new country life in Featherston gave me more than my fair share of lemons! More lemons than I can cope with.

The lemon tree - misleading from the outside, but look under the branches and it's lemons from heaven
I made a valiant attempt to harvest them on Monday, but after tripping up over my own feet and grazing my knee pretty badly on the concrete path, I gave up for the day. Instead I washed the lemons I had already picked, which turned out to be a pretty reasonable haul – around 15kg worth, though it didn't make a dent to the crop still left on the tree.
Picked lemons and after washing
Lady Lemon
On Tuesday, my friend Caroline, aka Lady Lemon came up from Wellington for the day. After meeting her at the train station, stopping for morning tea at a local cafe and going on a walking tour of town we spent the rest of the day cooking up lemony goodness in my kitchen.

Caroline baked us a yummy lemon coconut cake and I set up about juicing as many lemons as I could to use later. Caroline was very envious of my tree and left for the train with a backpack full of lemons and lemon juice to use in her curd making.

Lemon and coconut cake


  • 250g melted butter
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 cups self-raising flour
  • 1 cup desiccated coconut
  • 1 lemon zest and juice (2 if using Meyer lemons)
  • 1 cup milk
  • 3 tsp vanilla essence


Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease and line cake or slice tin.

Place butter and sugars into large bowl and beat until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and mix well. Gradually add the flour, coconut, milk, vanilla and lemon juice and zest and mix well until well combined.

Pour mixture into baking tin and bake for around 30 minutes until golden and a skewer comes out clean.  Allow to cool in tin before turning out.

Serve as is with cream or ice with a cream cheese icing or simple glace icing using lemon juice.
Lemon Coconut Cake



Monday 16 January 2017

Lavender loveliness



It's something I wanted to do when I was in Wellington, but never got around to it. It was such a long way to go, but since I moved to Featherston that all changed. Now picking lavender in Carterton at Lavender Abbey is just around the corner.

A good friend of mine came up for the weekend and together we headed out on Sunday morning. Despite some rain and strong wind during the night, the weather settled and we were treated to good picking weather, though there was still a fine drizzle – it helped keep the heat of the day down.

Lavender Abbey is set in beautiful surrounds with grassy paddocks and sheep on all sides. The field itself wasn't quite as big as we imagined, but then each compact lavender bush produces a fair crop. The secret is to prune the bush back at the end of the season to encourage increased flower growth and long flower stems in the next season.
Lavender Abbey, Carterton, New Zealand
L. x 'Grosso'
Lavender Abbey grows the variety, Lavandula x intermedia 'Grosso', which has long stems and is strongly perfumed. Compared to the common garden varieties L. angustifolia and L. dentata, which tend to smell simply 'herby', the fragrance of L. x 'Grosso' is sweet and truly a perfume.

The field was buzzing – quite literally. There must have been thousands of bees buzzing about the bushes and we picked the lavender rather gingerly and made sure that when we left we checked our bunches for any stowaways before getting in the car.

There is certainly money to be made in growing lavender. We paid $5 a bunch and I came back with a double bunch for $10. So at a rough approximate, if one counts only the flowers, you could be looking at a going rate of around $100/kg?! And with lavender and vintage goods making a come back, I think it might be a good time to start planting lavender. I'm certainly going to get my own Grosso plants so that I can harvest my own flowers for free.

As I want to use the flowers in bath salts and other products, I prepared the flowers for drying when I got home. This is easily done, you don't need any fancy equipment, just some netting and a warm dry area like a conservatory or a hot water cupboard. Wrap the flowers in a square of netting and tie to the bunch. This is to catch any flowers that fall off and to protect the flowers from bugs and dust. Then hang the bunch in your dry area for several weeks until the flowers are dry. I tied my bunch to an old coathanger to make it easier to hang it in my hot water cupboard.
Drying the flowers





Monday 9 January 2017

Strawberry bliss

It's coming to the end of the season and yesterday's farmers' market was selling strawberries at $5 for a 1kg punnet. The time had come. I purchased two punnets and today it's strawberry jam-making time.

I always use Chelsea Jam Setting Sugar. It might be a 'cheat's' way of doing it, but I'm a firm believer in anything that makes one's life a little easier. This sugar makes the process very easy, a lot faster and virtually flop-proof.

After preparing the fruit, it really is as easy as adding 1kg of chopped fruit with 1kg of the jam sugar to a pan and heating it over low heat until the sugar has dissolved.

Then you add about two teaspoons of butter and raise the heat until the mixture boils. Once the mixture is boiling rapidly and doesn't slow when stirred, it's a matter of letting it continue at that heat, stirring occasionally for another four minutes. And that's it. All that's left is to bottle your jam and enjoy it.

And what goes best with strawberry jam? Scones and cream of course! Again, I cheated: scones made using Edmond's scone mix and canned whipped cream.

Quick, easy and thoroughly decadent!



Friday 6 January 2017

Let that stew...

Well, I'm really taking to the country life. I cooked stew, not a casserole or tagine, but real stew for the first time in my life.

Following yesterday's sudden rain storm there's been an iciness in the air, so yes, I made stew in summer! And instead of frozen peas which the recipe calls for, I used fresh shelled peas from the farmers market that I bought on the weekend. I served it with fresh Parmesan bread from our local artisan bakery - it had just come out the oven when I bought it. Yum!

Stew in summer!
When I was a child my mother would cook stew once in a while and I would dread it. Poor Mum, her cooking skills were inherited from a British background and as such many of her traditional recipes were typically British: practically zero seasoning or flavouring and all boiled until unrecognisable. So sadly Mum's stew was more like bland gruel.

Many later when I was in my teens, Mum underwent a major operation and was confined to bedrest for several weeks. During this time Dad and I had to fend for ourselves, and many friends and neighbours came to our aid bringing us home-cooked meals to help us get by. On one such occasion, the wife of a good friend of my Dad's dropped by with a large pot of stew. My heart sank, dreading the soulless meal we politely thanked her for.

However, when we tasted it we were blown away. It was rich and full of flavour. Even Mum was astounded. We all helped ourselves to seconds and devoured the whole pot in one sitting. Who knew stew could taste so good? Her secret? Apples and chutney. Ever since she shared her secret with us, Mum's traditional stew days were over and it was Dawn's stew from then on with no complaints from me. So, on the one day that I felt moved to make a stew, it was her recipe that I used, though I substituted a pear for an apple as I had run out of apples. It still tasted just as good.

Dawn's stew

  • 500g stewing beef
  • 2 large or 4 small onions
  • 1 green cooking apple
  • fruity chutney
  • carrots
  • potatoes
  • frozen peas
  • beef stock 
  • mixed herbs
  • basil
  • salt and pepper
  • cornflour

Slice the onions and fry with butter or lard till lightly brown and soft. Cut up the beef into chunks and brown with the onions. 

Transfer to a slow cooker and add a heaped teaspoon of the mixed herbs and about 3/4 tsp of the basil, 2 tsp sugar and salt & pepper to taste.

Add enough beef stock to just cover the meat and onions. Leave to simmer.

Grate the apple and add to the mixture along with about 1 cup of chutney.

Chop carrots and potatoes and add, with around a cup of frozen peas. 

Cook on high for 6 to 8 hours until meat is tender. Just before serving, mix about a teaspoon of cornflour in about 30ml of cold water and add to the mixture. Stir through evenly and leave to thicken for a few minutes. Serve with bread, rice or whatever takes your fancy.





Monday 2 January 2017

New Year, new life

The mammoth task of moving from Wellington to Featherston is over, the unpacking is done and the pain of losing my darling boy Scooter so soon after we arrived is beginning to dull.

Other than eat, sleep, read and watch TV, I haven't done much since Christmas Day. I've just had no energy - all the stresses and strains of the last few years caught up with me and I simply gave in and crashed for the week. I have so needed the rest!

Today is the 1st of January 2017 and I'm not sure what to expect for the year. Being here in Featherston, living the country life is the fulfillment of a dream, so there is a bit of an element of, Ok, now what? to my thoughts. I'm so used to having the pressure to have goals and make plans that I feel both liberated and a little nervous about having neither goals nor plans for the year. Since the opportunity to move to Featherston seemed to appear purely by chance, I feel like I might be better off having no plans and simply let fate guide me. All of my big plans have failed, brilliant ideas burst and hopes dashed, so this year instead of trying to have it all planned out, this time I am leaving it up to fate. It seems things work out better that way.

And as if to reassure me that I'm on the right path, this evening we had the most spectacular rainbow and it lasted for a long time. A good omen, methinks :-)

View from the back garden


View from the front