Month: February 2016

Mushroom and Silverbeet Kiwi Pie: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Three

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DSC_0764In which our heroine turns this gorgeous ruby silverbeet into scrummy Kiwi Poise (New Zealand for “pies”) and explains how to improvise cake flour.

Pie is as New Zealand as, well, pie. The New Zealand pie is a cut above American pot-pies, which often only have one crust and a fairly soupy filling. Here in New Zealand, and in that other country over the ditch, pies are self-contained in a flaky, almost puff pastry, crust with a gravy filling. They are finger food, like Cornish Pasties. Only they aren’t Cornish, and they aren’t pasties. Your typical kiwi poi is meat-filled — beef, lamb, or chicken. There are veggie poise, but they tend to involve pumpkin and kumara, which are not well-loved in our household.

I’ve been developing my kiwi pie technique for a while now.

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My Hobbit Pies with Mushrooms, carrots, celery and cheese

Typically, I’ve filled them with rich mushroom and cheese fillings. Just the ticket for cold, rainy Wellington winter nights. But it is high summer here, and I wanted to make a pie that was lighter, less stodgy, but still had plenty of flavour to stand up to the rich, sour cream pastry.

Last Saturday morning, on my weekly foray to the Riverbank Market in Lower Hutt, an enormous, shiny ruby silverbeet (a sort of mutant chard) called to me from across the carpark. While silverbeet is botanically chard, it has a whole different attitude from your Frenchified, Northern Hemisphere chard. True, the flavour is the same. The big difference the size. Silverbeet can whoop chard’s ass! You can’t really buy a small silverbeet. It also has thicker, but also more edible stems and veins. There is very little waste from a silverbeet.

I wanted my slow-cooked Silverbeet to be the star of my pie, but it needed a little something to give the filling some heft. Enter: sautéed cremini mushrooms. A bit of Te Aro Swiss cheese from the Kapiti Coast, and I was good to go.

I have a lifelong, love-hate relationship with pie crust. Mom was a pasty wizard. Especially  sweet short crusts. Her German apfelküchen was legendary. Ditto the fig and plum pizzas she made with the annual windfall from Dad’s fig tree. My conscience wouldn’t let me use frozen pie crust from the supermarket, but my pies always look like I make them with my feet. My friend Judy and I took a pastry course at L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Maryland a few years ago. Thanks to that investment of time and money, I can make a plausible patê brissée and a kick-ass puff pastry. And passable croissants — which in my kitchen will always be crescent-shaped.

But neither are quite right for kiwi pie — one is too crunchy and the other too rich.

Here I have to confess to not entirely inventing my pie. A year or so ago, I found a recipe on food.com called “My Gran’s Sour Cream Pastry” posted by Zurie. Thank You Zurie! You can find the original recipe here: http://www.food.com/recipe/my-grans-sour-cream-pastry-197151.

I’ve memorised Zurie’s awesome pastry by now because it is the perfect pastry for Kiwi pie. The only problem is that Zurie’s recipe calls for cake flour, which doesn’t exist here in New Zealand. So, back I went to The Food Substitutions Bible. There, I learned that you can substitute 1 cup of cake flour with 1 cup of all-purpose/standard grade flour, minus 3 tablespoons, plus three tablespoons of starch. I use potato starch (or potato flour), but you can also use cornstarch. The first time I tried this, the results were so-so.

The thing about cake flour is that it is really fine and light: a cup of all purpose flour weighs 5 ounces or  142 grams; a cup of cake flour only weighs 4 ounces or 113 grams. That’s a pretty big difference. So, here’s what I do:

  • Measure out 142 grams of all-purpose flour
  • Remove 3 Tablespoons (27g) of flour
  • Add 3 Tablespoons of (27g) of potato starch/flour or cornstarch/cornflour
  • Sift together at least 5 times
  • It will weigh a bit more than the equivalent amount of cake flour, but distributing the starch this evenly ensures that the texture will be pretty close to the real thing.
  • I wish I had known this before I bought all those boxes of Swan’s Down flour that I never finished and had to throw away when they got weevils.

We normally have our pie with mashed potatoes and gravy (because they haven’t invented the food that doesn’t go with mashed potatoes and gravy). But since it is summer, I decided to roast some baby red potatoes to go alongside instead. Tonight we are having the leftovers — with mashed potatoes and gravy. Summer be damned!

Mushroom and Silverbeet Kiwi Pie

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Makes enough for six single-serving pies.

For Zurie’s Gran’s Sour Cream Pastry:

2 1/2 cups of cake flour, or cake flour substitute

1 tsp kosher or sea salt

1/2 lb (250g) well-chilled butter, cut in small bits

1 cup (250ml) sour cream

  1. In a food processor with the steel blade, combine the flour and the butter. The butter should be really cold.
  2. Pulse several times until the mixture reaches a cornmeal like texture
  3. Add the sour cream and process again until a ball of dough forms. You’ll want to stop and scrape down the sides once or twice.
  4. If the dough is dry, add a teaspoon of vinegar. I’ve never had to do this, though.
  5. Remove the dough onto a floured surface and form into a flat disc. It will be fairly sticky. Handle it as little as possible.
  6. Wrap the dough in cling film and put it in the coldest part of your fridge to rest overnight.

For the Filling:

1 large silverbeet (or about 2 average bunches of ruby chard if you are not fortunate enough to live in New Zealand), stems chopped fine, leaves rolled and cut into thin strips

2 shallots, chopped

1 medium leek, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped or put through a press

a handful of chopped fresh dill (or a teaspoon of dill weed)

a sprig of fresh thyme (or a pinch of dried)

3 or 4 roma tomatoes, coarsely chopped

1 1/2 cups of vegetable stock or water

1 dried chili

1 bay leaf

1/2 lb cremini mushrooms, sliced

1/4 lb (113g) grated swiss-type cheese

1/4 cup (59ml) olive oil, divided

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 recipe of sour cream pastry

1 egg

I made the silverbeet part of the filling in the slow cooker the day before I planned to assemble and bake the pies. This gave all the flavours a chance to marry.

  1. Chop the shallot, leek, and garlic and microwave together with 2TBSP of the olive oil for 2-4 minutes, until they start to turn translucent. Transfer to the slow cooker.
  2. Add the finely-chopped silverbeet stems, along with the tomatoes, dry chill, bay leaf and dill. Sprinkle with about a 1/2 tsp of salt.
  3. Add as many of the silverbeet leaves as you can, sprinkle with a bit more salt and pepper. Don’t worry if you can’t get it all in. You can add the rest later as the stew cooks down.
  4. Add the stock and turn the slow-cooker to low for about 2-4 hours, adding greens if you need to as the stems cook down.
  5. I like my greens cooked down until they are really soft and creamy, so I left them on for about 4 hours. If you like your greens more al dente, they’ll only need a couple of hours. Just taste as you go.
  6. Mine were so delicious that I tasted about half the pot before they finally got into the fridge to rest. Luckily, I only needed about three cups of the greens for the filling.
  7. On the day, sauté the sliced mushrooms in the remaining 2 TBSP of olive oil. Season them well with salt and pepper.
  8. When the mushrooms are cooked well, stir in 2 TBSP potato starch or flour and continue to cook for a couple of minutes.
  9. Stir in about 3 cups of the greens with their broth and simmer with the mushrooms until they form a nice, gravy-like filling.

Preheat your oven to 425/210.

Now, Assemble your Pies!

I have a handy baking pan that was designed for baking hamburger buns (which I never do) and is just right for baking single-serving pies. If you don’t have one, and you love pie, you should probably get one. Or you could use ramekins, or single serving pie tins. Mine hold a 1/2 cup and a little bit of filling each.

  1. Get your very well-chilled pastry dough out of the fridge and cut it into 2 or 3 pieces. Rewrap the ones you aren’t using right away.
  2. Now, this is the fun part! On a well-floured surface, take your first chunk of dough and bash it over and over and over with a rolling pin until it is about 1/4 inch (1/2cm) thick. You’ll want to change directions (bash in a sort of x pattern). This loosens up the dough without warming it up too much.
  3. Repurpose your rolling pin, now, and use it to roll the pastry out until it is about 1/8 inch (1/4 cm) thick, or however thick you like your pie crust.
  4. Line the pie pans with crust, leaving and inch / 2cm or so over hang.
  5. Put a shaving of the swiss cheese on the bottom, enough to cover the dough. This will help keep the bottom crust from getting soggy. DSC_0780
  6. Put the pan in the fridge to rechill for 1/2 hour or so.
  7. Fill each crust with 1/2 cup or so of the filling you can mound it up a bit in the middle, if you like.DSC_0781
  8. Roll out dough for the top crusts. I cut the top crust to be the same diameter as the top of the pie pan, and poked a vent in the middle. Put this over the filling, so the whole thing looks like this:DSC_0782
  9. Crimp the overhanging dough up and over the edge of the lid. This way, the filling won’t leak out the sides, and you can over-stuff your pie, if you want.DSC_0783
  10. Now, make an egg wash with an egg and a little ice water and brush the tops of the pies.
  11. And they are ready to bake. Start them in a very hot oven — 425F/210C — for the first 15minutes, then turn the heat down to 375F/190C and bake for an additional 20 minutes or so, until the pasty is nice and golden brown.DSC_0784
  12. Let them cool a few minutes before you take the pies out of the pans. If you want, you can put them back in the oven on a cookie sheet to crisp up the bottom and sides. I just put them on the pan I was roasting the potatoes on. They don’t need long, maybe an additional 5 minutes or so.

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Not-Quite-Tanta’s Peach Kuchen: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Two

/ cziemke / 2 Comments


“A Georgia peach, a real Georgia peach, a backyard great-grandmother’s orchard peach, is as thickly furred as a sweater, and so fluent and sweet that once you bite through the flannel, it brings tears to your eyes.”

Melissa Fay Greene, ‘Praying for Sheetrock’

I grew up in the Peach State.  I’ve lived many places, but in my heart, I will always be a “funny talkin’ honky-tonkin’ Georgia Peach.” Georgia is no longer the United States’ top peach producer, but it still has the best peaches. My High School sweetheart was somehow related to the owners of the local orchard, Thomas’ in the thriving metropolis of Bishop, Georgia. He could get us in early, before they opened to the general public and — more importantly in Georgia in July — before the temperature and humidity rose into the mid-80s.  Still, peach picking was hot, humid work. After an hour or two Thomas’, I’d be sweaty, thirsty, sticky and covered with peach fuzz and the occasional bee sting. But nothing can match the joy of standing on a step ladder in the middle of a peach orchard and biting into a warm, perfectly tree-ripened peach.

Peaches are my absolute, all-time favourite fruit. I came by my love of peaches early. Long before we moved to Georgia. You see, my Great Aunt, Tanta Ida, made the absolutely most delicious peach coffee cake ever.

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Tanta Ida (2nd from the left) with Dad, Mum, Grandma, Janice, Grandpa, and the budgie (circa 1955)

My Aunties tell me she would make huge pans of küchen for all the various boyfriends who visited the foxy Saltenberger girls over the years. She made some for my Dad when we visited Eagle River every summer, and I happily embraced the peachy deliciousness windfall. [The family lore says Dad hated Eagle River — he didn’t — because he was bored without any libraries to hand. I think it was more a matter of vanity: people were constantly feeding him and, as you can see in this vintage photo, he got a bit chubby. And then there were Grandpa’s Scotch and Root Beers.]

All my life, I’ve tried to find that special peach deliciousness. A few weeks ago, while I was going through some of Mum’s old recipes, I found a very old, stained recipe for Tanta’s Peach Küchen. Joy! My next invention test was born.

New Zealand produces peaches. They are tasty, but they are delicate wee things. In the effort to minimise the fuzz, the varieties of peaches they grow here have very thin skins. It’s almost impossible to get them home from the market unscathed. Fortunately, the nectarines are fairly robust. Peaches have fuzz to protect the fruit from water and keep it from rotting. It’s like a little peach raincoat. Nectarines are just peaches without their raincoats. As far as this recipe is concerned, they are interchangeable.

I was, however, determined to work with the real thing. Tanta didn’t use nectarines, so I wouldn’t either. As it turns out, getting the peaches home safely was only the first of my challenges. When I started this Lenten journey of recipe invention, I said I would share the successes as well as the less-then-successes. In this case, there were a couple of false starts before I finally settled on formula that works.

The challenge, in this case, was translating a shorthand recipe from another era on another continent into something that I could recreate in my kitchen in New Zealand. The directions were fairly general, but, obviously, 3 cakes of yeast and 7 1/2 cups (1,065g) of flour was going to make one honking big cake.  But how big? “Spread in pan (greased well)” wasn’t much help. And what is the modern, dry yeast equivalent of 3 cakes of yeast?DSC_0787

For some help, I turned to my trusty copy of The Food Substitutions Bible (see “The Third Cookbook of Christmas”). It suggested that one cake of fresh yeast is equivalent to one package, or 2 1/4 tsp (8g) of active dry yeast. Great. That means I would need over 2 Tablespoons (24g) of yeast for 7 1/2 cups of flour! Argh! An oven explosion was sure to ensue.

I decided I would cut the recipe by a third(ish), since there was only me and Simon to eat it, so I trusted my baking experience and estimated how much yeast I would need. So, for 4 cups (568g) of flour, I would use the equivalent of one package of dry yeast, 2 1/4 tsp (8g). And 3 tsp of salt seemed like an awful lot, so I cut that back to 1 tsp.

The next hurdle was the liquid. Tanta, at least before my Grandfather burned the farm down (long story for another post), would have used whole, raw milk and eggs straight from the chicken. My concern was that our supermarket milk, even whole milk, might lack the right balance of fat and natural sugar. We don’t buy whole milk, but I keep a bag of New Zealand’s #1 export commodity, whole milk powder, on hand for baking. That’s what I ended up using.

I reckon the butter we get here in New Zealand is probably closer to what Tanta would have had than the processed butter we used to get in the States. The fresh (unsalted) butter here is incredibly dense, with very little added water. So no worries there.

Her farm eggs were probably as unpredictable as our farm eggs, so I held back one of the yolks, just in case everything ended up too gooey. It didn’t and I ended up using the whole egg.

The biggest question mark turned out to be the fruit-to-cake ratio. The recipe just says “arrange the peach slices on the dough.” How many peach slices? How many peaches?

In the end, I decided, the first time around, to base the number of peaches on the size of the cake. I guessed that Tanta would have made her küchen in a lasagne-sized pan (9×13 inches). I had inherited a marvellous lasagne-sized pan from the farm that Mum told me was Grandma’s coffee cake pan. Coffee Cake? Küchen? Same pan? I decided to use my 8×8 inch glass cake pan. Based on the reduced amount of dough I had, it seemed a reasonable assumption.

Tanta’s recipe called for 3 cups of sugar and 4 1/2 tsp of cinnamon for the topping. Yikes! Another hint that she was making big, sheet cakes. I cut that back to 1/2 cup (100g) sugar and 1 tsp of cinnamon — you can always add more if you like your streusel really cinnamony.

So, my first effort was OK, but not right. Why? It came down to two miscalculations: too much yeast, not enough pan. So my first küchen rose too much and threw most of the fruit and topping out of the pan and on to the pizza stone that lives at the bottom of my oven. Smelly burning sugar mess.

The good news is that two weeks later I tried again, adjusting the yeast, using a larger pan, and, just to put my own spin on things, adding oatmeal and brown sugar to Tanta’s sugar-butter-flour-cinnamon topping. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the final result.

Not-Quite-Tanta’s Peach Küchen

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This is not an extravagantly sweet coffee cake. It is an old-fashioned, gather around the kitchen table for elevenses coffee cake. You can eat this for breakfast and not feel guilty. After all, it’s basically peaches and oatmeal. Right? My theory is that my Tanta and Grandmother developed their recipes during the Great Depression, when money was scarce, especially on farms, and the sweetness in food came, as much as possible, from the natural sugars in the milk and fruit.

Ingredients:

1 cup (250ml) whole milk (reconstituted dry works well)

1/3 cup (65g) granulated sugar

6 TBSP (85g) unsalted butter

1 1/2 tsp (7ml) active dry yeast (NOT quick rise or bread machine yeast)

2 large eggs

4 cups (568g) all-purpose / standard grade flour

1 tsp (5ml) kosher or sea salt

Topping:

7 peaches (or more, if you like)

Juice of 1 lemon

3 TBSP brown sugar

1/2 cup (100g)2 granulated sugar

1/3 cup (70g) standard grade flour

1/3 cup rolled oats

2 TBSP butter, melted

1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 375F/190C. Butter a 9 x 13 pan. To make removing the cake from the pan easier, you can line the bottom and two sides with parchment to form a sort of sling. Don’t forget to butter the parchment.

  1. Scald the milk. This makes the milk taste sweeter and, well, milkier. You can do this on the stove by putting the milk in a small saucepan and heating it until it has a skin on top, but short of a simmer. It will just be beginning to form tiny bubbles around the edges. The easier way is to put the milk, butter, and sugar in a glass container and microwave the whole works for about 3-4 minutes at high. Just to be on the safe side, I zap it for two minutes, check the temperature, and zap it for another minute or two.
  2. Let the milk/butter/sugar cool to lukewarm (skin temperature), then add the yeast and let it proof for five minutes or so. If your liquid is too hot, you’ll kill the yeast. If your yeast is good, it will go to town and end up looking like this
  3. Gently beat the eggs and add them to the wet ingredients.
  4. Sift the flour and salt together in your mixing bowl. If you are using a standing mixer, using the flat paddle, add the wet ingredients to the flour. If you are mixing by hand, make a well in the flour and add the wet ingredients.
  5. Mix everything just until it comes together into a ball. This doesn’t want a lot of kneading.DSC_0756
  6. Cover the dough and let it rise for at least an hour.
  7. While the dough is rising, peel, pit,  and slice your peaches. To peel the peaches, drop them, one or two at a time, into a pot of boiling water for 20-30 seconds then into a bowl of ice water to stop them cooking. Then you can just rub the peel off with a paper towel. Be careful. They are very slippery.
  8. Toss the peaches with the juice of 1 lemon (to stop them turning brown). You can add a little sugar here, but I don’tDSC_0751
  9. Roll out the risen dough into a rough rectangle slightly bigger than your pan, then press the dough into the pan with the dough going up the sides. Like this:DSC_0770
  10. Arrange the peach slices over the dough in one or two layers. I thought seven peaches were enough, but Simon wanted more. Use your judgement here. Or, you can throw in a handful of blueberries. The photo on the right is my first attempt — the one that exploded all over the oven — you can sort of see the signs already. But the combination of yellow and white peaches and blueberries was pretty, and tasty.
  11. To make the topping, sift together the dry ingredients, then stir in the melted butter with a fork. Mix it all up until the butter is well distributed. DSC_0769
  12. Spread the topping evenly over the peaches, then cover with a towel and let rise for another 30 minutes. This is a good time to preheat the oven, if you haven’t already.DSC_0773
  13. Bake the küchen in the 375/190 oven for about 40 minutes. The toothpick test is tricky, with all the gooey fruit. It should be done when the crust around the edges is nice and golden brown. If you did the sling thing, you can try pulling it up. If the whole thing sort of slumps in the middle, you might need a little more baking time.
  14. This is delicious hot, so you only need to cool it on a wire rack for a few minutes before you grab your fork, brew and cuppa, and eat Not-Quite-Tanta’s Peach Küchen.DSC_0774

 

Smoked Tomato Bisque with Roasted Corn and Zucchini: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode One

/ cziemke / Leave a comment

I love smoke. I’m not advocating smoking. Don’t do it.Cigarette smoke is nasty. But, I have to confess an appreciation for the fragrance of good pipe tobacco or a fine cigar. My Uncle Chuck, though, smoked tobacco that smelled wonderful. A whiff of lovely pipe tobacco still makes my heart squeeze and I think of him. And miss him. The smell of a wood fire always smells like winter, and home. Here in New Zealand, lots of households still supplement their heating systems and hot water with wood-burning fireplaces. At the first cold snap, the air smells like hardwood smoke.

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A mini Kale Whisperer with Uncle Chuck and his sweet-smelling pipe, circa 1958

I had a wood-burning fireplace in the basement of my house on Mt. Airey lane, but the chimney was three stories high (it was a row house) and didn’t pull very well. Every time I lit a fire, the house filled up with smoke, setting off all the smoke alarms, even the one the top floor — turns out the interior of the house pulled better than the chimney! I also discovered that wood smoke in large amounts gives me migraines. So the WBFP was replaced with a less evocative, but healthier gas fireplace.

Not only do I love the smell of smoke, I love the flavour of smoke. Smoked salmon, smoked cheese . . . smoked anything, really. Smoke is a boon to vegetarians. It is one of the ways to impart a rich, umami flavour to vegetables. I use smoke often in my cooking. I have a Camerons stovetop smoker that my Auntie Janice gave me for Christmas years ago.    If you don’t have an outdoor smoker or a stovetop smoker, though, there are lots of videos on You Tube that show you how to improvise one.

 

Whichever method you use, it is well worth adding smoking to your vegetarian cooking repertoire. In my first invention test, smoke lifted tomato soup to a new level.

Smoked Tomato Bisque with Roasted Corn and Zucchini

I started out with a kilo or so of tomatoes, half Roma sauce tomatoes (which they call “low acid” tomatoes here in New Zealand) and half regular old slicing tomatoes. The first step was to smoke the Romas. I smoke the Romas because they are meatier and seem to soak up the smoke better. I just sliced them in half, lengthwise, put them in the smoker, drizzled them with a little olive oil and tucked five cloves of garlic in amongst the tomatoes. The garlic smokes nicely and comes out sweet, not at all “garlicky”. These smoked over applewood chips for about half and hour and came out looking like this:
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In the interest of not overpowering all the other flavours with smoke, I roasted the slicing tomatoes, along with the kernels from two large ears of sweetcorn.

If you don’t have a stovetop smoker and can’t be bothered to improvise one, you can approximate the deliciousness by adding a teaspoon or so of liquid smoke. Then, you will roast all the tomatoes with the garlic.

Cut the raw kernels off the sweet corn. Don’t worry about getting every last little bit, because you are going to make a broth with the corn cobs. Just break the cobs in half and plunk them into a saucepan, add a little salt and sugar (which enhances the corniness of the corn, but is optional if you are really concerned about added sugar), cover with water and boil those puppies for twenty minutes or so. You can give the cooked cobs to your chickens. We have learned the hard way, however, NOT to give them to your dogs, no matter how much they promise not to yack them all up on your carpet!

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Line the baking sheet with foil so you can catch all the sweet roasting juices. Drizzle the tomatoes and corn with some olive oil and smoosh everything around to coat the veggies, sprinkle with a little salt and pepper, and roast in a 425F (220C) oven for 15 minutes, stir things around a bit and roast for 10-15 minutes more till it looks like this:

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The smoked and roasted tomatoes will slip right out of their skin. If you are sensitive to tomato seeds, you can also deglop them. I don’t mind the seeds, but I do like to remove the woody bit of the core that is right next to the stem. It’s not very nice. Put the tomato innards into a medium soup pot in which you have sweated two large chopped shallots or a small chopped onion with a Tablespoon of olive oil, along with the smoked garlic, a few kernels of the roasted corn, and the corn cob broth and simmer over low heat for a while. I like to keep it long and low, say 45 minutes, to really let the flavours combine.

While the tomatoes and broth are simmering, clean a couple of medium zucchini and halve them lengthwise. Remove about 2/3 of the roasted corn from the baking sheet. Smoosh the zucchini halves around in the oil and baking juices, put them cut side down on the sheet along with the rest of the corn kernels. Roast them in the same 425/220 oven for about 10 minutes, flip the zucchini over and roast for another 10-15 minutes, until the zucchini has started to brown. The corn kernels should be brown and crunchy. Cut the zucchini into chunks and set aside with the roasted (but not the crunchy) corn.

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Let the tomatoes cool a bit, add a handful of chopped herbs (basil, parsley, tarragon, mint, or dill — whatever you like) then puree everything in a blender, or in the pot with an immersion blender. If you want a creamier soup, you can add 1/4 cup or so of half-and-half or milk. To make a vegan soup, just throw a handful of the roasted corn in when you blend the soup to thicken it a bit.

Now, add the zucchini and the rest of the roasted corn and reheat everything gently (especially if you have added dairy). Stir in a Tablespoon or so of lemon or lime juice or white wine vinegar and garnish each bowl with some of the crispy roasted corn and some more fresh herbs — I used basil.

 

This is not your mother’s Campbells tomato soup, but it is just as yummy with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Ingredients:

This makes four main course servings, unless you’ve invited Simon over for dinner. Then it makes three. If you want more soup, just start with more tomatoes, zucchini, and corn.

1 1/2 kilos (or a little over 2 pounds) of ripe tomatoes, a mix of Romas and slicing tomatoes is nice

2 large shallots or 1 smallish onion

4 cloves of garlic, peeled but not chopped

2 large ears of sweet corn

2 medium zucchini

2 limes, 1 lemon, or white wine vinegar

Extra virgin olive oil

Fresh herbs of your choice (basil, tarragon, mint, dill, parsley)

kosher or sea salt and black pepper to taste

Liquid Smoke (optional)

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A Forty Day Invention Test

/ cziemke / 1 Comment

When I was a kid, my fellow Episcopalian and Catholic pals and I spent weeks thinking about what we would give up for Lent. I tended to lean toward such noble sacrifices as Brussels Sprouts — which as far as I remember my Mother never, ever cooked — or liver and onions– which my Dad loved meaning we had it about once a week. I tried very hard to score an invitation to eat at a friend’s house on those days. I remember being in awe of my best friend, Jeannie, the year she gave up watching TV.

The Porter Wagoner Show was a Saturday night staple at our house
It featured a noticeably less well-endowed Dolly Parton

I don’t honestly know whether she stuck with it for the whole 40 days, but I do remember her sitting with her back to the set on our regular Saturday Porter Wagner and hot dogs nights. My usual fall back was chocolate, which was sort of a sacrifice — I do like chocolate — but as we seldom had chocolate in the house, not much of one.

As I got older, the whole ritual of giving something up for Lent fell by the wayside. I guess this was because, once we moved to Georgia, most of my friends were Baptists and Methodists for whom Lent didn’t really seem much of an issue, although Easter certainly was.

Once I became an adult, I again embraced the notion of a Lenten discipline, Most years, I 21-days-to-form-a-new-habit-lori-welbournedecided to take up something — meditation, daily prayer, volunteering, swimming — in the hope that what started as a seasonal discipline would become a habit. It worked the year I challenged myself to go to the gym every day. I initially took up yoga as a Lenten discipline. That stuck too, for a while.

For several years, I gave up meat for Lent. This is, of course, a time-honoured Lenten discipline. The whole idea of Fat Tuesday or Pancake Day had to do with using up all your indulgent foods — butter, cream, eggs, bacon — in preparation for the lean, disciplined days of fasting that lay ahead. pancake day

For me, the Lenten meat fast would end with the Easter Vigil — the Saturday night service that begins in the dark (at least until Congress moved Daylight Savings Time, meaning it didn’t get dark at Easter until 8pm or so) with a cantor and Old Testament lessons and ends with with bright lights and festive music, representing Jesus’ resurrection. It is my absolutely favourite service of the entire year — far surpassing Christmas. One year, we were encouraged to make animal sounds during the Noah’s Ark story, rattle our keys during the reading of Ezekiel 37:1-14 — the Valley of the Dry Bones — and ring bells or toot horns during Psalm 98 — Sing to the Lord a New Song.

5guysburgerfries

No, I don’t eat meat anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss it.

After the Easter Vigil, I would head straight to Five Guys Burgers and Fries for a gloriously greasy bacon cheeseburger with the works and a bog of their miraculously delicious fries then head home to eat it accompanied by a bottle of bubbly. Now that’s breaking a fast!

One year, I gave up wine. I’ll never make that mistake again.

Ditto: coffee.

mobyAnother year, I pledged to read Moby Dick, my lifelong literary bête noir. The. Most. Boring. Novel. Ever. Written. I failed. I’d rather spend forty days wearing a hair shirt. Note to l’Académie française: I’ll give up my circonflexe when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. If for no other reason, because without it, my spell checker keeps changing bête to bets or beets.je suis circonflex

My friend Mary earned my everlasting admiration the year she gave up baking bread for Lent. When we were preparing to move to New Zealand and it came time to find a foster mother for my beloved sourdough starter, I reckoned that someone who loved baking so much that she would give it up for Lent would treat my sourdough baby with all the love it deserved.

God and I had a parting of the ways some years ago. I am now what I call a philosophical Christian, with some Judaism, Buddhism, and Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster mixed in. While I no longer believe in an afterlife or a loving God, I still believe that Jesus’ teaching — the stuff he actually said — is as good a guide for living a decent and rewarding life as any other. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Care for the sick. Embrace outsiders. Keep only what you need and share the rest with those who have less than you. Judge not lest ye be judged. This is all good. Are you listening, Donald Trump?

This Lent, a year after my soul fell to pieces, I am once again embracing the value of a discipline for restoring mindfulness and spiritual resilience. For most of the last year, just getting out of bed was an exercise in discipline. It would be disingenuous for me to give up meat — that is already gone. Chocolate? Not enough of a sacrifice. Wine? lentToo much of a sacrifice. As much as I admire Mary, giving up baking would rob me of one of my most important emotional outlets. Simon and the boys might appreciate my giving up the accordion, but I wouldn’t want to lose my place with my lovely accordion teacher, Katie. The Kale Whisperer can’t give up Kale.

So, what’s a girl to do?

After long deliberation and utterly without consulting my devoted partner, I have decided to give up cookbooks for Lent. Not only will I not buy any new ones, I won’t use them. For the next forty days, I will be a totally improvisational cook. Because this is my discipline and I’m making the rules, I will leave myself three exceptions. I’ll allow myself to use Karen Page’s The Vegetarian Flavor Bible [see “The Seventh Cookbook of Christmas”], to ensure I check before pairing radishes and chocolate. I’ll also allow one all purpose book to look up basic recipes, like choux pastry, that I don’t carry around in my head. For this, I’ll use Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I’ll also use cookbooks for any pickling and preserving I do because I don’t want to kill anyone. Starting at sunrise on Ash Wednesday until sundown Easter Saturday, all other cookbooks will remain closed.

Note that I am giving up cookbooks, not necessarily recipes. In addition to improvising my own recipes using whatever seasonal ingredients are available, I will, on occasion, revisit some of the old recipes I inherited from my mother, Aunties, Grandma, and Tante Ida. I hope, in so doing, I will stretch my kitchen creativity as well as knitting my cooking more tightly to my new home.

I pledge to include ingredients that are new to me: Maori yams, feijoas, Asian greens. Maybe even these things. weird fruit

My hope is that at the end of this exercise, I will have a greater appreciation for living in tune with the seasons, greater culinary creativity, and a better food blog.

I’ll share the successes. When there are failures — as there are bound to be — I’ll share those, too. I promise, though, that I’ll only consult the ones I have on paper. Consulting the internet; that would be cheating. I am setting off on a forty day Master Chef Invention test. The Pantry is open.

invention test

 

 

Living from the Downside Up

/ cziemke / 3 Comments

One year ago today I broke.

For months, on the nights that I slept at all, I had been waking in the wee hours in full blown panic attacks. Simon and I had moved to New Zealand almost a year and half earlier, and we had been in our house for a year, but I still felt untethered and completely, catastrophically alone. I spent whole days curled up like a fist. Even on good days, I was trapped in the wrong end of the telescope. There were days I couldn’t feel my arms. Days when everything tasted like sand and I couldn’t swallow. Days when my pulse roared in my ears like the surf. I wanted to cease to exist. I wanted to have never existed.

One Sunday night, I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. My mind had shattered.

Simon intervened. I can’t imagine how frightened he must have been. He insisted I request a compassionate leave from my job and seek professional help.

I had committed to participate in a bilateral engagement with a delegation from Vietnam the next day. I rallied my reptile brain and managed to get through the meeting without humiliating myself or my hosts. Then I walked away from my career to mend and, I hoped, find a way to want to stay alive.

The past year has been an extraordinary journey to the centre of myself. With Simon’s support and the help of my excellent doctors, I have healed. I have moved beyond fear and loss to reclaim my life. I have stopped striving to become the person I thought I should want to be and am, finally, discovering and nurturing the person I am.

I got my first tattoo.IMG_1079

IMG_0251I am learning to play the accordion.

I have chickens.

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And, one Saturday morning at the Riverbank Farmers’ Market in Lower Hutt, I became the Kale Whisperer.IMG_1217

This wasn’t my first crackup. I’ve lived with the black dog on my shoulder most of my life. The first time I clearly remember being depressed was when I was 10, during our first year in Georgia. The first time I remember coming completely apart was in my second year at University. I was a crazy intense student. I was working two jobs, maintaining a 4.0, not sleeping, and living on Dr. Pepper and Milky Way bars. I passed out in Botany class. I got myself to the end of the Semester and spent spring break in bed. In a tight little ball.

A dozen or so years later, it happened again. I had finished my Ph.D. and was a few years into my career as a defence analyst. I’d been battling a prolonged period of depression, self-harming, and a relapse into the bulimia I developed while ending my first marriage. Since University, I had been wrestling with what I thought might be a call to become an Episcopal priest. As a defence analyst, I felt like a fraud. Everyone knew more than I did. More to the point, they all seemed way more interested in the ins-and-outs of the Pentagon than I would ever be. So, I had taken the step of starting the gruelling process of discernment of a call to ordination.

My discernment hit a brick wall that threatened not just my faith but my survival. My escape route into seminary was gone. I was like the mythic hero who rode his horse into a valley that grew ever narrower until, at the end, he couldn’t go forward, he couldn’t go backward, and he couldn’t get off his horse. I was broken and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to begin to get mended. So I took pills. Lots of them. My best friend, Susan, found me just in time. To my everlasting amazement and gratitude, she remains my best friend to this day. I’m Godmother to her beautiful daughter.

For the next two years, I was in and out of hospitals until I finally connected with a sensible therapist who helped me get all the odds and ends back into the closet and set me on a more-or-less steady course. I found a comfortable and challenging professional niche. I bought a house. I was determined to learn to like myself. I started to learn French.  I was, at last, on an even keel.

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Mom and Dad shortly after their marriage in 1949

Then my world shattered again. My father, the one steady anchor in my life, my hero, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. My mother was agoraphobic and wouldn’t leave the house. Neither of them would even talk about moving. In a desperate attempt to keep them in their home, every other week for the next two years, I drove to Georgia and spent three days cleaning my parents’ house and filling their freezer with delicious and nutritious food. It was the one way I could still show them how very much I loved them.  It worked for a while. And then it didn’t. My Dad died in October 2007 after a short but nightmarish illness, for which I blamed myself.

I got through all the turmoil of those four or so years because I had to. I accepted the support and generosity of friends who helped look after Mom and Dad when I couldn’t. Paul came over from the UK to help me sort through the house and move Dad to Virginia. Kline and Carolyn opened their home to me. Carolyn fed me to near bursting and took me to Target at dawn on the day of Dad’s Memorial Service to buy funeral clothes because USAir lost my suitcase and all I had to wear was bluejeans. Elsie shuttled Dad to his neurology

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The noble Maxwell in his retirement

appointments and took him to the lunch buffet at the Peking Restaurant. Nash drove Dad and his beloved cockapoo, Maxwell, to the dog park. Nash and France adopted Max after Dad died and gave him the pampered retirement he deserved. I took anti-depressants to calm my anxiety. Mom’s best friend, Margaret, and the ladies of St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church arranged two memorial services and two receptions to farewell my parents. What they say about Southern Hospitality? It’s all true.

When I finally brought Mum to Virginia, she had lost the will to live. I could tell she was staying alive for me. Because she knew if she died, I’d be alone.

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Honor Guard for Cpl. Earl F. Ziemke, USMC, at his interment at Arlington National Cemetery, 31 October 2007

On a professional trip to Australia in 2008, I met a handsome chap from New Zealand on a cross-country train journey. The rest, as they say, is history. Mum met Simon when he came to Virginia over Christmas. She relaxed. I would be safe, and happy. When she was diagnosed with lymphoma, she was ready to let go and passed much more peacefully than my Dad, in May 2009. Two weeks later, Simon got his fiancé visa. We got married in Hawaii in July. Three years later, we decided to move to New Zealand.

When I broke a year ago, I survived by leaning on Simon, seeing doctors, stripping wallpaper, and cooking. IMG_0015

As I began to feel better, I contemplated both my past and my future. For years, as my defence career got ever more frustrating, I toyed with the idea of a new career. Gourmet dog cookies, perhaps? A personal chef? A food and travel writer? New Zealand’s next Master Chef? A pizza blogger?

A pizza blogger! In an effort to do something to get the rest of my life started, I started thinking about creating a vegetarian pizza blog.

My young cousin, William, came to spend a few months with us in his break between graduating High School and going off to University. So, for the first time since we had moved here in 2012, I also started exploring New Zealand. William and I traveled all over this beautiful country — Dunedin, Stewart Island, Fiordland, Napier, Rotorua, Christchurch, Hokitika. We ate seafood chowder in the far South and went to a Maori hangi in the geoDSC_0246thermal North. As I fell in love with my new home, I also started to learn, slowly, how to live with myself.

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William eating the most delicious vegan dumplings ever at the Christchurch container mall

And I continued to cook, trying new things I’d never had time to explore when I was working and traveling all the time. My vegetarian food universe expanded well beyond pizza. I tried to invent vegetarian versions favourite comfort foods. For me, cooking became an exercise in mindfulness. A way to calm my anxious monkey mind. A way to connect my American roots to my new life in New Zealand.

Today, one year later, I am — dare I say it? — happy. Most of the time. I expect I will always feel the presence of the black dog. I will probably always get sad at Christmas. I expect to take anti-depressants for the rest of my days. But, through it all, I will cook.

The biggest challenge for me has been to learn to live in the moment. I cannot change the past, and the best way to ensure a good future is to have a good present. My new routine of going to the Saturday Farmers’ Market to buy whatever produce is in-season and beautiful, creating seasonal pizzas, nurturing a weekly batch of sourdough bread, and cooking food that is absolutely the best I can make it today has healed me. It has grounded me to my New Zealand home. It has also brought me back in touch with my long-ago roots in different family rituals in different and far away places.

IMG_0086Now my scars are honestly come by, from a blazing hot pizza oven or careless use of the mandolin slicer. They tell stories of pizza and coleslaw; of bread loaves and pickles; of kiwi pies and vegetable calzones; of turning hot corn tortillas with fingers instead of tongs.

And in sharing those stories, I will explore life from my new perspective and continue to heal.

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