A Gentleman in Full

April 18, 2016April 20, 2016 / cziemke / 2 Comments

This is Chris.

As you can tell from his impish smile, he was full of beans. And as you can tell from his bacon-wrapped Christmas turkey, he was no vegetarian. Still, Simon loved him, and so did I.

Even though he once told me my vegetarian pizzas looked like dog vomit.

Chris said exactly what he thought, exactly when he thought it.

And he seemed to own (at least) one of everything. When we were preparing the paddock for our Kune Kune pigs, he had a fence-wire-stretching-thingy. And a trailer to pick up the pig shelter kit from the shipping depot.

You see, Chris didn’t believe in delivery charges. So, every so often, Simon and Chris would head out of a Saturday to pick up some impossibly heavy and unwieldy thing or another and man-handle it up, or down, the stairs.

Chris believed in living life to the fullest. He rode a motorcycle to work in all kinds of Wellington weather. He drove his Porsche through New Zealand’s narrow, twisty turning roads, in clear defiance of the nation-wide 100 kph speed limit. When he found a Scotch Whiskey he liked, he bought a case. An excellent bubbly at an excellent price? Two cases! He owned more bottles of Limoncello than any other person I’ve ever known.

Were it not for Chris, I wouldn’t be here — as in, I wouldn’t be here in New Zealand. You see, it was Chris who made it possible for Simon to emigrate to New Zealand from the United Kingdom in 1998 to escape the ravages of a broken heart. They worked together, ate cheese toasties, did crossword puzzles, and played darts. And Simon’s heart healed.

Were it not for Chris, Simon wouldn’t have been on the Indian Pacific Railway from Sydney on July 5th, 2008.

July 2008

Were Simon not on that train, we wouldn’t have met. Had we not met, I would have continued to go on ever more bizarre internet dates until I went totally mad and started collecting cats. Which would have made my dogs most unhappy.

I first met Chris a few days before Simon and I got married in Hawaii in 2009. He was Simon’s best man. They turned up together after a nine hour Air New Zealand flight during which, I’ve no doubt, they were the life of the party. By the time Simon made his way through immigration as a new migrant on a fiancé visa, Chris had charmed everyone in Customs.

Over the coming three days, we three went to Wal-Mart, where Simon bought his wedding clothes (which I am certain made my Dad smile, wherever he was) and Chris bought discount electronics. We went to the outlet mall, where Chris bought running shoes for his step son, Logan. CCI18042016 The cardboard cutout of Logan’s left foot was a prominent feature throughout the festivities. And we went to the Saturday flea market at the University of Hawaii football stadium parking lot, where Simon sunburnt his feet to a crisp.

Oh, and we got a marriage license, which, for the record, looks just like President Obama’s birth certificate.

Chris hit it off immediately with my Goddaughter and bridesmaid, Alex, who sneezed all over him (and pretty much everyone else) during the ceremony. CCI18042016_3 He was a dapper Best Man in his linen suit, Panama Hat, Hawaiian shirt, and dress shoes. The celebrant wore a turtle print sarong and a t-shirt with krishna on it. The groom wore shorts and bare feet — it was a beach wedding, after all.

When I came to New Zealand as a potential job candidate, in 2012, he picked me up at the airport and drove me to the top of Mt. Victoria, and showed me the beach where Ma’a Nonu sometimes worked out, which pretty much sealed the deal. And he woke up at 4 am to get me to the airport for my 6 am flight back to Sydney, and home. Service above and beyond the call.

It was Chris who introduced me to the Lower Hutt Saturday morning Riverbank Market, in all its vegetable glory. Chris was at the airport when Simon and I arrived in Wellington from the United States, stinky and travel weary, with our duffle bags full of what we thought we would need to survive until the shipping container with our worldly goods arrived. The next morning, he shepherded us, jet-lagged and bleary eyed, to the market. I thought I was hallucinating. It was the first week of August, the deepest Southern Hemisphere winter, yet the market was replete with freshness — leeks, silver beet, lots of lovely brassicas, and those New Zealand standbys, kumara and pumpkin. And these weren’t just leeks — they were leeks the size of baseball bats. And daikons the size of cricket bats. And handmade noodles, and food trucks. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I was right about the heaven part.

Were it not for Chris, there would be no Kale Whisperer.

Over the coming months, Chris would pick me up every Saturday morning and we would go to the Market together, leaving himself to sleep in and get the kettle ready for our return. Chris introduced me to the Tofu and Chinese Noodle Man, and the Thai Herb Lady, and the best free range eggs in the market, and the French Bread and Stinky Cheese Man. Some weeks, we would visit the Mad Butcher or Pack ‘n Save — places I rarely have occasion to enter. Then back to chez nous for a cuppa.

Then, one Saturday, Chris seemed not his chipper, sassy self. He didn’t rise to the bait when I ribbed him about the half-dressed Barbie doll in his Land Rover. He’d been sleeping badly. He thought he had gastroenteritis. Then he thought he had become diabetic.

Then he had a scan.

There was a mass.

Then surgery and chemotherapy.

That was two years ago.

He faced the end of his life with his usual charm, humour, dignity, and generosity of spirit. Even when we knew he was in pain, he could laugh. And make others laugh. He faced cancer head-on and fought it with everything he had. In short, he succeeded in doing what we all hope to do: he remained Chris, in full, right to the end.

He adored his girls.

He wore a beaded bracelet that read: Fuck Cancer.

I agree.

Tomorrow, we will farewell Chris.

Today, I am unspeakably grateful to have known him.

CCI18042016_2

Zhen Kailian Won Ton Soup: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Six

March 22, 2016March 22, 2016 / cziemke / 1 Comment

Last Wednesday, I woke up with a bit of a throat. Nothing big, just one of those fizzy, back of the throat tickles that could be allergies or could be the beginning of a cold. The kind of sore throat that makes you crave chicken noodle soup, or a vegetarian equivalent. Fortunately, I had some homemade, Saturday morning after the Market vegetable broth in the freezer. That could stand in for chicken stock, but what about the noodles? That’s when I hit upon won tons. I’d had dumplings on the brain since I made pot stickers for Chinese New Year. Some yummy won tons in a slightly Asian-ised vegetable broth with a few fresh veggies and lots of tummy-settling ginger would satisfy my desire for throat-and-soul-soothing, brothy soup while constituting a sufficiently hearty meal for my hardworking sweetie.

What, you might ask, qualifies me — an ageing white chick from the Deep South of the US living in New Zealand — to improvise Chinese soup? Well, first of all, I had a poster of Mao Zedong tacked to the ceiling over my bed throughout my teenage years. Why, you ask? Probably for the same reason I wore a dog collar all through High School: to annoy my parents, to get attention without actually DOING anything. My rebellion was pretty wimpy. I also own and have actually read The Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, relics of my Ph.D. studies. Mao

Second, I took — and survived — two semesters of Chinese History at the University of Georgia. The professor, Dr. Thomas Ganschow, was recognised as one of the very best teachers at the University of Georgia. He was also renowned for his marathon exams, the undergraduate equivalent of the Mandarin Eight-Legged Essays, for which the questions were sort of : write down all human knowledge. Be specific and include dates. Tom was the main reason I finally realised resistance was futile: I would be an historian. He also launched me on my lifelong quest to understand how other cultures work. My Dad continued to hold out for accounting in the hope that I might, someday, be gainfully employed.

Tom and his lovely Taiwanese bride, Lisa, became good family friends over the years. Lisa was the manager of the Athens Area Community Food Bank, where my mother volunteered as a board member and Thank You Note writer. Really, everyone who donated food or money to the Food Bank got a handwritten Thank You from my Mum. The Thank You Note is a lost art, leaving the world a less gracious place. Lisa is also a fabulous cook. Before my first wedding, some of Mum’s friends threw me a Recipe Shower. Lisa gave me her recipe for Chinese Egg Rolls. I cherished it. I still have it. In fact, I think I will dig it out and work on a vegetarian version. Watch this space!

I have been to China twice, both times for work. Because I was not allowed to take any technology — no smart phone, no laptop — into China, I actually got out and did things instead of staying in my hotel catching up on work, which was too often what I ended up doing on work trips. On my first trip I visited the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and met Helmut Kohl, despite my falling victim to fairly paralysing food poisoning. I was at the Great Wall on the hottest day in human history. It was 114F/45C. Honestly! I was the only person insane enough to be up there in such weather. It was so hot my hair turned bright orange! Between sweat and food poisoning, I lost about 5 kilos on that trip!

On my second trip, I had the unique “pleasure” of being stuck in a parked aircraft on the ground while Beijing had a rare, early November blizzard. The snow plows were still in dry dock. But the snow did, temporarily, sweep away Beijing’s legendary air pollution, so I woke up the next morning to the truly once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of Beijing under clear, sparkling blue skies!

My adopted Elder Sister, Kongdan Oh Hassig, a Korean China expert and linguistic whiz kid, gave me a Chinese name for my 50th birthday. Zhen Kailian means “triumph” and “lotus flower.” CCI22032016 I love that. Triumph means so much to me, given my lifelong war of attrition with depression and anxiety. And the lotus flower symbolises, according to buddhist.org, “rising and blooming above the murk to achieve enlightenment.” My next tattoo will be a lotus flower.

Note to Katy: my reputation is in your hands. If Zhen Kailian actually means “Old Lady with Baggy Knickers,” it’s on you!

Katy and I traveled together a lot. She is fearless and up for just about anything. Sadly, we have never been to China together, although we did drink civet poop coffee in Bali. 299900_10150433922303410_1665493123_n

Finally, some of the most interesting foods I find at the Riverbank Farmers’ Market are Asian: the beautiful Asian greens, giant daikons, strange and wonderful bitter melons, snake beans, and snow peas. Then there is the Thai herb lady who sells all kinds of Asian flavour makers: Thai basil, lemongrass, galangal, and turmeric root. And the Chinese gentleman with his handmade tofu and fresh Chinese noodles.

And last but not least, the “I Love Dumplings” ladies serve up the most delicious vegan potstickers ever. My last stop every Saturday morning is at their stall, where I buy a dozen dumplings for $5. Sometimes they are so busy, I have to wait. And I do. Because the dumplings are just that good. Simon and I arm-wrestle for them for the rest of the day. I could get 25 dumplings for $10. Every week I consider this option, only to conclude that there can be too much of a good thing. But I don’t believe that. Some Saturday in the future, I’ll probably give in to temptation. But not this week. Their dumplings provided the inspiration for my won tons.

So, armed with these questionable qualifications, I set out to invent a delicious and healing won ton soup that would be 1) edible, 2) not insulting to Chinese cuisine, and 3) worthy of the name Zhen Kailian. What I came up with was pretty darned tasty, if I may say so myself.

Zhen Kailian Won Ton Soup

Ingredients: For the Won Tons

200g / 7 oz extra firm tofu

1/2 small napa cabbage, finely chopped, (about 1 lb / 450g)

1 TBSP grated fresh ginger

3 shallots, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced or put through a press

1/2 0z / 15 g dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in 1 cup / 700 ml) boiling water

2 TBSP / 3 ml white sesame seeds

2 TBSP / 3ml soy sauce

24 fresh wonton or gyoza wrappers

1 egg white, beaten to soft peak stage (optional)

For the Broth:

6 cups / 1 1/2 liters vegetable broth, preferably homemade, definitely low-salt

2 pieces dried kombu (optional, but nice)

a thumb-sized bulb of fresh ginger

2 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half

leftover mushroom soaking water

2 glugs (about 1/4c / 60ml) low-sodium soy sauce

1 glug (about a TBSP) toasted sesame oil

For the Soup:

Broth

1 large carrot, thinly sliced on the diagonal

1 stalk celery, also thinly sliced on the diagonal

a handful of greens, I used thin ribbons of kale, but baby bok choy would be nice, too

Steamed Jasmine Rice, optional

thinly sliced scallions for garnish

Let’s Make Soup:

Set the broth on to simmer at very low heat with the kombu, ginger, garlic and mushroom water. Give it at least 30 mins, but an hour plus would be OK, too.

To make the wonton filling:

Toss the finely grated cabbage with some salt (a big pinch) in a colander and let sit for an hour or so to drain. If you are careful with the salt, you shouldn’t need to rinse the cabbage, but taste it just in case, to ensure that it isn’t too salty.
Squeeze out as much liquid from the cabbage as you can, then roll it up in a tea towel and squeeze out even more. The cabbage should be really dry.
Drain and finely chop the mushrooms.
Chop the scallions and garlic and grate the ginger.
Either dice the tofu (I used sesame marinated tofu) or chop it in a food processor.
Heat about a tablespoon of neutral oil, preferably peanut oil, in a medium skillet and sauté the shallots until they are getting brown and crispy.
Add the garlic, ginger, and chopped mushrooms and sauté for a couple of minutes.
Then, add the diced/chopped tofu and sauté until it starts to get brown and crispy.
Add the cabbage and sauté until it is wilted and dry.
Take the filling off the heat and add the soy sauce and sesame seeds.
When the filling is cool, fold in the beaten egg white. If you want your won tons to be vegan, you can leave this out. The egg white sort of puffs up when the won tons cook, so they are fluffy, but this is a purely aesthetic thing. If you don’t mind dumpy dumplings, leave out the eggs!
Lay out your dumpling wrappers. Put a generous tablespoon of filling on each one, then brush the edges with water to seal them.
You have a choice of dumpling shapes: if you have square wrappers, you can make flat triangles (just fold them over once and seal), “nurses caps” (pull the two tips of the triangle on the folded edge together and seal, or “purses” (dampen all four sides, bring them together and twist to seal). If you have round wrappers and you are a showoff, you can make pleated dumplings. I didn’t have round wrappers, so I couldn’t make those. Which shape you chose is just a matter of personal preference. Simon and I were divided. He preferred the purses. I thought the bunchy part was a bit too stodgy. I preferred the nurses caps. The flat triangles turned out to be a bit tricky to eat.

Now, put it all together!

Bring your yummy broth to a simmer and add the sliced carrots, celery, greens. Let them simmer for a couple of minutes, add the soy sauce and sesame oil, then
Add your won tons — yes, you are going to cook them right in the broth. Let them simmer for 2-3 minutes.
If this is dinner, you can bulk things up a bit by putting a scoop of jasmine rice in the bowl. This also adds a little textural interest.
Lay the cooked wontons on the rice, then ladle over the broth and vegetables.
You can garnish the whole thing with some thinly-sliced scallions and/or bean sprouts.

Carries’ French Apple Pie: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Five

March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 / cziemke / 1 Comment

More years ago than I care to mention, I was named for my two grandmothers: Frieda Matthaie Ziemke and Caroline Ketz Saltenberger. Frieda died too young and many many years before I was born. I never knew her. I have a few photos of her. She was very beautiful, and very young. Sadly, I will never be able to share any of her recipes. We have none. No written memories of her at all. At least none that I have seen. All I have of her are a few photos and her name, which I cherish. She always looks a little sad.

Frieda with Dad as a baby, 1923

Frieda and Otto Ziemke, newlyweds, 1920

Frieda Matthaie, 1920

Caroline lived into her 80s, but she was damaged by a series of strokes, also too young, a few years before I was born. I knew her, but the Carrie Saltenberger I knew was frail, largely confined to her armchair (and later a wheelchair). She was felled by the hypertension that runs in my family and that was, sadly, untreated in her case. She was feisty, though, and had a wicked sense of humour. Woe be on any little kid that thought they could pull something over on Grandma because she couldn’t move very fast. She was a demon with her fly swatter.

For the first fifty years of her life, Grandma Saltenberger was a hard working farm girl.

Carrie Saltenberger with her three eldest children, Idamae, Billy, and baby Anita, c. 1936

Along with my Grandfather and his maiden sister, Ida — known to us as Tanta — Grandma worked their little farm in far Northern Wisconsin, raising dairy cows, chickens, occasional turkeys (which she hated), growing vegetables, and sustaining the family through the Depression and the War years on very little in the way of cash.

As the years went by, Grandma became less and less rooted in the present, but her command of the past was astonishing. I remember her teaching me to make biscuits by reciting the recipe, step by step, as I measured, sifted, blended, cut and baked. Much of what I know about the Saltenberger family’s (occasionally colourful) history came from Grandma. Usually on the sly, while my Grandpa was napping. Like many other families, the Saltenbergers have two histories, the official one and the “interesting” one. Grandpa was the keeper of the official history. You went to Grandma for the interesting bits.

Portrait of Carrie Saltenberger in 1975

She was always called Carrie. In our family, I have always been called Carrie. In my mind, I have always been Carrie. I am proud to be Carrie, because I am proud of my Grandma and what she achieved and endured. So, no, “Carries’ French Apple Pie” is not a typo. Instead, it is my take on her long cherished recipe. Two Carries. One pie.

Strictly speaking, this is not a pie at all, but a cobbler or, perhaps, a crumble. I found the recipe tucked among the correspondence between my Mum and her aunt, our Tanta. Tanta would have written the recipe after Grandma’s illness made it difficult for her to write. But Tanta made the provenance of the recipe clear, this was Carrie Saltenberger’s recipe, her favourite recipe. “Many years old.” Part of my family’s past. CCI21032016

As is often the case with Tanta’s recipes, the directions are a bit notional. I’m not sure what makes it French. Perhaps they called it “French” to distinguish it from Dutch Apple Pie, with custard, and German Apfel torte. “Put in a baking pan.” What kind? Glass? Metal? What size? Does the baking pan go in the oven while I’m making the crust? How long? These were all questions I set about to answer, through trial and error.

I did make a few changes to “modernise” the recipe a little, but nothing that changed the fundamental simplicity and homeyness of Carrie’s original. I’m not a huge fan of nutmeg, at least not in large quantities. So, I stepped up the cinnamon, cut the nutmeg, and added another dimension with allspice and black pepper. I love black pepper with fruit. It makes it taste fruitier, somehow. It is a must on flabby tasting supermarket strawberries. The Italians use black pepper on fruit a lot, so perhaps I transformed Grandma’s French Pie to an Italian one.

Grandma would have used apples from their apple tree (which was still going when I visited as a child). The apples would have been harder and more tart and probably would not have produced as much liquid as my New Zealand-grown Farmers’ Market apples would. So, I also added cornflour to the fruit as a thickener (which is entirely optional), and dotted the fruit with 2 TBS / 1 oz / 25g of well chilled unsalted butter, cut in smallish chunks, also to thicken it a bit. I also cut back on the sugar and added a bit of salt to the crust.

As it turns out, the experiment was a thundering success. The result was everything I’d hoped: homey, delicious, and as Tanta wrote, “very good easy to make, too.” Not too sweet, either. The crust tastes pleasantly eggy, something between a cake and a meringue. When warm, the spicy apples cry out for a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but all I had was cream, which was also pretty darn yum. No wonder Tanta encouraged Mum to try it, adding it was “my favourite recipe and also your Ma’s.” Ladies, you had good taste!

Carries’ French Apple Pie

Ingredients:

For the Fruit:

2 1/2 lbs / 1 kilo mixed apples (I used Braeburn and Galas),

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground allspice

1/4 tsp finely ground black pepper

1/2 cup / 100g sugar (I think raw sugar would be nice here, but I used granulated)

1 TBSP cornflour (cornstarch)

1/2 cup water (120ml)

Juice of 1 lemon

For the Crust:

3/4 cup / 105 g all-purpose flour

1/2 cup / 100g sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 egg, lightly beaten

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 375F / 190C

Butter a glass 9×12 or similar sized baking pan. I used an oblong gratin dish.

Peel, core, and slice the apples.

Stir together the sugar, cinnamon, allspice, black pepper, and cornstarch in a small bowl, then combine it with the sliced apples.

Arrange the apple slices in the baking dish, sprinkle the water and lemon juice over them, and put them in the preheated oven for 20 minutes.

See, Auntie J: I tried to arrange the slices in sort of rows! But my soul resists order.

While the apples are baking, sift together the flour, sugar, baking power, and salt. Lightly beat the egg in a separate bowl.

Combine the beaten eggs with the dry ingredients and crumble together like pie crust, just like Tanta says. It will feel softer and crumblier than a short crust dough, but not as dry as a crumble topping.

Take the apples out of the oven, dot with the butter, and spread the dough over the apples.

Return to apples to the oven and bake for another 45 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown.

Serve warm or room temperature with cream, custard, ice cream — whatever you fancy!

Northeast Georgia Barbecue, Sort of: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Four

March 8, 2016March 8, 2016 / cziemke / 1 Comment

We are having our first rainy day in. . . oh. . . ever so long, so it is a good time to catch up on my adventure in improvisational cooking.

Of the foods I miss most since adopting the vegetarian lifestyle — bacon, sausage, and really juicy, rare burger — pulled pork barbecue is right at the top of the heap. Actually, I started missing proper pulled pork pretty much as soon as I left North Georgia. True, pulled pork has become a foodie “thing” in recent years, but, to my mind, nothing matches the pulled pork I grew up on in Northeast Georgia. I learned to tolerate other regional versions, but none of them lived up to my tangy, vinegary memories.

Pulled pork reaches its Platonic Ideal at Zeb Dean Barbecue in Danielsville, Georgia. Before I was a vegetarian — and, OK, once or twice since, mea culpa — whenever I went home for a visit, a pilgrimage to Zeb’s was a must. I’ve written before about Zeb’s, in the context of Sweet Tea. In the context of pulled pork, Zeb’s is nirvana. The. Best. Pulled Pork. In. The. Universe.

The key to Zeb’s deliciousness is the sauce. As you can see in the photo above, Zeb’s sauce is fairly thin, with lots of vinegar, pepper, and paprika and little or no tomato. Now, for Southerners, barbecue is a very personal thing. If you travel around the Southern United States eating barbecue, you’ll realise that the preferred meat (pork, goat, beef, or chicken) and the sauce ingredients vary widely from one county to the next. In low country North Carolina, they like mustard-based sauce. In Kansas City, Missouri, where they also pride themselves on barbecue, the sauce is sweet-and-sour, brown sugar and tomato-based. I hear they make barbecue in Texas. Out of cow. I’d say I’m skeptical, but then, I am about to tell you how to make barbecue out of tofu. Glass houses, and all that.

At Red, Hot, and Blue — which was co-founded by Bush 41 hit man, Lee Atwater — the original Memphis sauce was heavy on Worcester Sauce and ketchup. Red Hot Blue Now they are a national franchise and they have wandered from their Memphis roots. RH&B now offers five different sauces, <gasp> Barbecue Brisket, and <double gasp> pulled chicken. The original, homey, hole-in-the-wall location in Arlington has, sadly, closed.

Fairlington United Methodist Church, in Arlington, Virginia, had a chicken barbecue every spring and served absolutely melt-in-your mouth half chickens, cooked over hardwood and mopped with a tangy, sweet-and-sour barbecue sauce. My mouth waters just thinking about it. I haven’t been for years. I hope they still do it.

The Annual Chicken Barbecue and Fun Fair at Fairlington United Methodist Church

The sauce I grew up with was a little bit greasy, a little bit hot, very vinery, and very black peppery (which is different from hot). My original exposure to this North Georgia sauce was at PTA fund-raising barbecue dinners that my elementary school had at the beginning of each school year. You’d get one of those plastic, divided plastic school lunch plates with pulled pork, stew (scraps and burnt end of pulled pork that were chopped and stewed with sweet corn, onion and other stuff), coleslaw, and a slice or two of squishy white bread. The sauce looked like a vinaigrette with lots of pepper and paprika.

Charlie Williams’ Pinecrest Lodge was most famous for its all-you-can-eat catfish fry — complete with deep fried dill pickle chips and fried okra — but their barbecue was great, too. Vinegary. Peppery. Smoky. Yumminess. Tragically, Charlie William’s is now gone, too. Sometimes progress sucks.

Charlie William’s Pinecrest Lodge on Whitehall Road

Pulled pork, barbecued chicken, and catfish fries are all in my past now. But was it possible that I could develop a formula for a barbecue sauce that might at least pay homage to those childhood memories? I’ve tried various versions over the years. But my Forty-Day Invention Test provided the motivation, finally, to knock the barbecue sauce challenge on the head.

There are some obvious challenges to creating a vegetarian version of something as decidedly carnivorous as pulled pork. If it strikes you as odd that a vegetarian food blogger spends so much time reminiscing about meat, just remember, I’m not doing this because I hate meat. I’m doing it because I love my husband, animals, and the planet, pretty much in that order.

For a sauce that will go on vegetables and/or tofu, the flavour needs to be a little subtler and a good bit more complex. There is also the problem of smoke. I smoked my tofu (I’ve been making smoked tofu “bacon” for several years), but because tofu is essentially fat-free, the smoke taste can be a bit harsh. You have to take care not to overdo it. Smoking the tofu also cooks it, which comes at some price concerning texture. I want to get my hands on a cold smoker, which would eliminate that problem and could enable me to smoke things like cheese. In the meantime, getting some smoke in the sauce gives you options. I added a bit of smokey flavour to the sauce by using smoked paprika instead of the regular paprika that you would typically find in a North Georgia sauce. Smoked paprika is sort of wood-neutral, that is, it isn’t obviously hickory, apple, or mesquite smoked. You could also use Liquid Smoke, which comes in hickory flavour. The only smoke essence I can get here is manuka smoke-flavored, which is lovely, but isn’t North Georgia. I wouldn’t use mesquite smoke, either, but you can do what you want. I’ll never know!

Mouth feel, at least in the tofu version, was a bigger challenge than flavour. Let’s be honest. The thing that makes pulled pork barbecue taste awesome is the fat. Perfectly slow-cooked pork is oleaginous, almost creamy, with crunchy bits of skin and burnt bits of meat. So, all the sauce needs to do is complement the flavour of the meat and balance out the fat. That’s what the vinegar does — it emulsifies with the fat to transform grease into deliciousness.

There is no grease in tofu, so my sauce was going to need more added fat than I might want to put in a sauce for meat. I used butter, but margarine would work just as well, here. Maybe even better.

In general, I disapprove of ketchup in barbecue sauce. In this case, though, it was necessary in order to hold the sauce together and make it, well, saucy. It gave the sauce the substance it needed to coat the tofu bits.

Another challenge for vegetarian barbecue is Worcester Sauce. The best-ever-and-really-only-acceptable Worcester Sauce, Lea and Perrins, contains anchovy and is not, hence, vegetarian. Some of us choose to look the other way, or pretend we didn’t read the ingredients. My ultra-principled partner will have none of that. Here, however, New Zealand came to the rescue with HP (Brown) Sauce, which is a bit like A1 Sauce, but, again, without the anchovy. It also adds a bit of saucy texture. If you can’t find HP Sauce, Pick-a-Peppa (my go-to vegetarian Worcester replacement) would work just as well, but I haven’t found Pick-a-Peppa here in New Zealand. I’ve tried a couple of vegetarian Worcester sauces, but they lack a certain zing.

Kechup is much sweeter here in New Zealand than I’m used to, so I didn’t add any sugar. You can add some, to taste, depending on the sweetness of your ketchup. You know what you like.

I’m pretty sure Zeb’s doesn’t put lemon juice in their sauce, but I like it here.

I’m happy with what I’ve come up with, even though Zeb wouldn’t recognise it. I hope you are, too!

Northeast Georgia Barbecue Sauce, Sort Of

1 cup (250ml) ketchup

1/2 cup (60ml) cider vinegar

1/2 cup water (60ml)

1/4 HP Sauce (60ml)

2 ounces (50g / 4TBS) unsalted butter or margarine

1 TBS smoked paprika

1 tsp garlic powder

Lots of finely ground black pepper (something between 1 tsp and 1 TBSP)

1 tsp Sriracha Sauce (or 1/4-1/2 tsp Tabasco)

1 bay leaf

juice of 1 lemon

Combine all the ingredients in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil.

The sauce is best if you let it rest for a day or two so the flavours can marry-up.

Pulled Tofu

There is a Chinese gentleman at the Riverbank Market who sells lovely, very compressed tofu. It is the consistency of cheddar cheese and doesn’t need draining. If you use the extra-firm, water-packed tofu commonly available in supermarkets, you’ll want to drain it very well.

1 lb (450g) extra firm tofu

kosher salt

1/2 recipe of Northeast Georgia Barbecue Sauce, Sort of — more to taste

Optional: your favourite spice rub.

Drain the tofu by putting on a plate and weighing it down with a couple of heavy cans or a bag of flour.

Next, you need to “cure” the tofu. Rub it well with kosher or sea salt, a 50/50 mix of salt and finely ground black pepper, or salt and your favourite spice rub. Penzy's Ozark I used Penzy’s Ozark Blend, which is very black peppery. Think Col. Sanders secret herbs and spices. If you don’t live in the United States and can’t get Penzy’s excellent spice blends, use whatever spices you like. And next time you are in the US, find a Penzy’s store and stock up! You can mail order, too.

Wrap the tofu with its salt and spice coat in cling film and put it in the fridge overnight.

Next, you have two options.

Option 1: take the tofu out of the fridge wipe off the excess salt, and grate it on the coarse side of a box grater. This gives it that “pulled” look. Sauté it briefly in a neutral oil, like peanut or canola, then add the sauce and let it simmer for a few minutes so the sauce can soak into the tofu.

Option 2: smoke and chop the tofu: I smoked my tofu over hickory wood for about 20 minutes in my handy-dandy Cameron’s stove top smoker. My extra-firm tofu developed a bit of a crust in the smoker, so instead of grating it, I chopped it very fine. The smoker added a nice, smokey verisimilitude, but aesthetically, I would have liked to have had some grated tofu, too. Next time, I think I will go half and half.

Serve the pulled tofu on a toasted bun topped with cole slaw. I used my favourite North Carolina Pickle Slaw, recipe below.

North Carolina Pickle Slaw

I don’t know what makes this North Carolina, except I based it on a recipe from Nava Atlas’ American Harvest: Regional Recipes for the Vegetarian Kitchen (Ballentine, 1987) that she called North Carolina Slaw. Sadly, American Harvest is out of print. I think of this as my one-third slaw, since all the dressing ingredients are 1/3 cup. I guess the metric version would be 75ml Slaw.

I don’t think the celery seed is authentic. But I like celery seed in my slaw. Potato salad, too.

For the Dressing:

1/3 cup (75ml) mayonnaise

1/3 cup (75ml) American-style yellow mustard (don’t use your fancy Dijon for this)

1/3 cup (75ml) vinegar, I used malt, but cider would be more authentic

1/3 cup (66g) sugar

1 tsp celery seed

Whisk all this stuff together to form a smooth dressing

For the Slaw:

1/2 small green cabbage (about 1 lb / 450g), shredded

1/2 small red cabbage, shredded

3 or 4 scallions, chopped fine

1/4 c / 60ml chopped pickles or cornichon

1 large or 2 smallish carrots, grated

a handful of parsley, finely chopped

First, sprinkle the shredded cabbage with a bit of salt and let it drain in a colander for about an hour. Unless you’ve gone overboard with the salt, no need to rinse it. (That’s why I don’t add salt to the dressing)

Second, run the cabbage through a salad spinner to drain out as much water as possible. If you don’t have a salad spinner, wrap the cabbage in a kitchen towel as squeeze it as dry as you can. (These steps ensure that your cabbage will not weep and make the dressing all watery. Don’t worry, the cabbage will stay nice and crisp.)

Third, combine the dressing and the slaw ingredients in a big bowl and mix it well. Let it stand for at least an hour before eating.

Your delicious pulled tofu sandwiches will look something like this. Although, with luck, you won’t burn your sandwich buns!

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

February 26, 2016 / cziemke / Leave a comment

In 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.

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

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

In a food processor with the steel blade, combine the flour and the butter. The butter should be really cold.
Pulse several times until the mixture reaches a cornmeal like texture
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.
If the dough is dry, add a teaspoon of vinegar. I’ve never had to do this, though.
Remove the dough onto a floured surface and form into a flat disc. It will be fairly sticky. Handle it as little as possible.
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the day, sauté the sliced mushrooms in the remaining 2 TBSP of olive oil. Season them well with salt and pepper.
When the mushrooms are cooked well, stir in 2 TBSP potato starch or flour and continue to cook for a couple of minutes.
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.

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.
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.
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.
Line the pie pans with crust, leaving and inch / 2cm or so over hang.
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.
Put the pan in the fridge to rechill for 1/2 hour or so.
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.
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:
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.
Now, make an egg wash with an egg and a little ice water and brush the tops of the pies.
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.
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.

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

February 26, 2016February 26, 2016 / 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.

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?

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

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.

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.
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
Gently beat the eggs and add them to the wet ingredients.
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.
Mix everything just until it comes together into a ball. This doesn’t want a lot of kneading.
Cover the dough and let it rise for at least an hour.
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.
Toss the peaches with the juice of 1 lemon (to stop them turning brown). You can add a little sugar here, but I don’t
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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

February 16, 2016February 16, 2016 / 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.

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:

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!

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:

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.

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)

A Forty Day Invention Test

February 9, 2016February 10, 2016 / 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-welbourne decided 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.

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.

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.

moby Another 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? lent Too 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

February 2, 2016February 2, 2016 / 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.

I am learning to play the accordion.

I have chickens.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 geothermal North. As I fell in love with my new home, I also started to learn, slowly, how to live with myself.

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.

Now 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.

Snow Soup for You!

January 27, 2016January 27, 2016 / cziemke / Leave a comment

I hate snow. I hate shovelling snow. I hate it when I have to get up at 0-dark-thirty to shovel out a spot of grass so the dogs can answer the call of nature. I hate scraping ice off my car. And I really hate it when the snow on the roof turns into ice dams and water leaks into the rafters to come out. . . oh, anywhere. 009 When the hundred-year blizzard hit DC in 1996, I was attending a conference at Wilton Park in the UK. I came home to find all my upstairs window wells an inch deep in water. I hated that. I hate that people put salt on the sidewalk that irritates my dogs’ feet so I have to wash their paws whenever we come in from a walk. I hate people who think that just because there is snow on the ground, they don’t have to pick up after their dogs, as though the poop will disappear with the spring thaw. I hate leaky snow boots. Snow ice cream? Yuck. Snowmen? Depressing when they melt. And they always melt. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a snow Scrooge.

So why, whenever there is a big snowstorm on the east coast of the United States like the one this past weekend, do I get homesick? After all, one of the things I like best about living in Wellington, New Zealand, is that it never snows. So why, when CNN started warning, mid-last week, that a huge, hundred-year blizzard was headed toward Washington, DC, did I feel the urge to run to Countdown and stock up on toilet paper, white bread, and milk?

Why do I feel this longing to get my hands on a snow shovel? Why do I keep checking on washingtonpost.com to see if the Federal Government is closed? Why do I want to Scotty to beam me back to DC?

The truth is, while I hate the snow, I love the magic of a snowstorm. It isn’t just the old cliche of waking up to a wonderland dusted with icing sugar. It isn’t just that the sky is never bluer than on the morning after a massive snow dump. 008 I love what a snowstorm brings out in people. Some of my best memories of my old neighbourhood in Annandale, Virginia, involved snowstorms, when everyone came together to dig out the parking lot and make sure our neighbours who were unable to shovel themselves would have clean and safe stoops and sidewalks. We built an iceberg in the cul-de-sac from the snow we cleared from our parking spots. It was a kid magnet. We were all in the same boat, and it was, for the time being, a boat that wasn’t going anywhere. You might just as well sit back and enjoy the ride. So we went to each others’ houses for supper; we shared snow shovels; we traded videos. We were neighbours, at least for a few days.

And the dogs. Every dog I’ve ever lived with got in touch with their inner wolf when it snowed. This wasn’t a surprise in the case of our two Samoyeds — Nikita and Piroshki. They were never far from their inner wolf. But Miss Peanut, Crackerjack, Shakespeare, and Cully all got a far away look in their eyes when it snowed, as if they were ready to hitch up the sled and go mushing.

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Even crabby old Cindy Dog got her inner puppy on when it snowed. Granted, in his last couple of winters, Crackerjack, at 16, had decided that he was over snow. But, for the most part, my canine family always went just the teensiest bit feral when the snow began to fly.

I was born in a mini ice-age, between two historic nor’easters that hit the DC area in February and March 1958. I remember there being one or two big dumps of snow each winter in the 1960s. The biggest was in January 1966. CCI26012016_3 I got a sled for Christmas the year before — a blue plastic toboggan that looked like a space ship. It was one of those Christmases — much like Christmas of 2015 — when the temperature hit 70F on Christmas Day. My ever amazing Dad pulled me around the yard on the toboggan, on the grass. So, when the snow hit, the sled had grass stains. Jeannie et. al.2 Our house was on a steep hill — excellent for sledding and snow fort building. Not so excellent for shovelling out the driveway. And since we lived on a dead end street with only three houses, Dad had to shovel all the way up to Sharon Chapel Road. Dad — a son of Milwaukee and lake effect snow — didn’t love snow.

Perhaps that’s why he decided, a year later, to move us to Georgia, where he could be assured that there would be no blizzards. Now, it’s true there aren’t blizzards in Georgia, but there are ice-storms, which can be much worse, really. All the the cold and wet without the fun and, often, without electricity and cable. Once in a blue moon it would “snow” — which wasn’t really snow but accumulated sleet. And we did have snow days. My freshman year in High School we got an extra week of Christmas vacation because it “snowed.” CCI26012016_2 My friend Andrea broke her leg sledding and spent the next several months in a full-leg cast. Usually, though, snow in Georgia meant some version of ice. Any Yankees who are tempted to make fun of how we Southerners panic at the first sight of snow, I defy you, or anyone, to drive on the sheets of ice that form on untreated roads in a Georgia ice storm. One year, during a particularly bad ice storm, one of the pine trees in our yard came down under the weight and took down our electrical lines. It was so cold in the house that our budgerigar and my Siamese fighting fish died. Dad, not one to take chances, and in revenge for the lost, cut down all the rest of the trees in the yard. Overkill? Maybe.

When the first wave of Snowmageddon hit DC in January 2010, I was in the UK, at a conference at Wilton Park. Sound familiar? Spooky, huh? Anyway, I managed to get on the first flight back from London — when we landed at Dulles, we sat on the plane for about an hour because no one who knew how to drive the gate had managed to get to work. Then we waited for another hour in customs. None of the baggage handlers had made it to work, either. That was nothing compared to Simon’s ordeal. My adorable new husband, bless his cotton socks, made what had to be a harrowing drive to the airport to meet me, and we slipped, spun, and slid home in his trusty RAV4. The experience was so shattering, Simon was never able to drive on the Beltway again.

As a newcomer to DC, Simon wasn’t up on the culture of panic pre-snow shopping, so for the next week or so, while the Federal Government — and hence my place of employment — remained stubbornly closed and our neighbourhood roads remained stubbornly unplowed, I became a pantry cook.

I always keep a sizeable stash of dried beans, flour, and canned things, so there was plenty to work with. I channelled my homesteading ancestors. OK, I didn’t have any homesteading ancestors, but my grandparents lives in Eagle River, Wisconsin during the Great Depression were challenging enough. I baked bread. I made long, slow cooking soups. I baked dog cookies. We shovelled snow. We watched a lot of videos because the snow had blocked the satellite dish — leading Simon to insist we get cable. They were golden days.

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One of my blizzard rituals is to make a big pot of stock. This goes back to my carnivorous past, when chicken stock was a pantry staple. The store bought stuff is never as good as homemade, but making large amounts of stock presents a challenge when it comes time to cool it. It isn’t really safe to leave a pot of meat stock at room temperature for the hours it would take to cool down. But put in in your fridge and you run the risk of warming up the cold food faster than you cool down the hot stock. During a blizzard, you can bury your hot stock in a snow bank. It’s the next best thing to a blast chiller.

I don’t make chicken stock anymore, but snow — even snow ten thousand miles away — still triggers in me the urge to get out the stock pot. Instead of chicken bits, I gather up excess veggie bits — the tops of the enormous leeks, green onions and celery I buy at the market, onions, slightly dry mushrooms, carrots, a couple of waxy potatoes, the odd apple or pear, a parsnip, maybe a bulb or two of fennel, and garlic, always lots and lots of garlic. If I’m feeling industrious, I chop everything. If not, I just leave it in chunks. Add enough water to cover the lot, throw in a couple of bay leaves, a few black peppercorns, a handful of whatever herbs you have around, and some kosher or sea salt and bring it all to a simmer. If you want a dark stock that looks and tastes more like beef stock, you can caramelise some of the vegetables (carrots, onions, celery, potatoes) in a very hot oven until they are good and brown. Don’t let them burn, though. Brown is good, but burnt just tastes like burnt.

Caught in a blizzard without a fridge full of vegetable bits? Peel a couple of heads of garlic (yes, the whole thing), add a bay leaf, a spring of fresh thyme (or a teaspoon or so of dried), some black peppercorns, a bay leaf, a teaspoon of salt, a glug of olive oil, and two quarts of water. Simmer that. It smells heavenly and tastes just like chicken stock. I kid you not.

So, next time it snows, forget the white bread and Doritos. Gather up your veggies, add water, and just let the whole delicious mess simmer, and simmer, and simmer. Long and slow. Go outside and shovel snow. Build a snowman. Make a snow angel. Come inside. There’s soup for you!

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Zhen Kailian Won Ton Soup

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Northeast Georgia Barbecue Sauce, Sort Of

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

Mushroom and Silverbeet Kiwi Pie

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Smoked Tomato Bisque with Roasted Corn and Zucchini

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