Hamming it up

Nine of us for early dinner this year, and a new approach (for me): a move away from Harvey's beloved roast dinner, and I didn't make a Christmas pudding.  Instead we had a half-ham from Cameron Harrison in Kelburn (their ham won best in New Zealand this year).
         My smartest move was at the butcher's the day before - they weren't busy when I got there, so I asked them to skin and score it for me. What would have taken me half an hour and lots of swearing took them two minutes.  I took lots of advice about glazing and warming the ham (it's already cooked, of course), and settled for a simple but delicious glaze of quince jelly (made by friends) with a dash of Dijon mustard. Not very good photos though - blame it on the champagne...

With it there were boiled Jersey Benne potatoes, roast kumara with chili dressing, and a trio of vegetable salads, which were partly trad and partly invented: a green one, a ruby one, and a red, orange and yellow one.

The green one had to be made mostly on the day: ribboned courgettes and spring onions (from the Hill St market) with chunks of avocado, lightly cooked skinny asparagus, finely chopped mint, and a sharp lemon and avocado oil dressing. The courgettes and mint went into the dressing a couple of hours before serving, and the rest was added just before we sat down.  The pretty lettuce serving as a frilly surround is my Drunken Woman Fringed Head.

For the ruby one, inspired by my neighbour, I roasted very small whole tinned beetroot, drained and cut in half if they were a bit bigger, with lemon zest, finely chopped garlic, brown sugar and balsamic vinegar, first wrapping them in foil lined with baking paper, and cooking for 30-40 minutes at 180C. (Of course you could make this with fresh beetroot, but it would take much longer and it's hard to get very small ones.  Roasting the tinned ones this way changes their flavour.)
         On the day, I combined finely chopped red onion (soaked briefly in salted warm water to make it milder) with finely sliced radishes. I added the beetroot just before serving, with a dressing made of good olive oil and a superb blackcurrant and balsamic reduction, sent for Christmas by my sister. Then I mixed in pomegranate seeds - such beautiful, ancient things, and I hadn't used them since I lived in Albania. I topped it off with a scattering of borage flowers offered by two of my guests.

The last salad was based on the recipe for "Insalata di peperoni arrostiti" in Antonio Carluccio's Invitation to Italian Cooking. He says it "improves with standing, and is excellent eaten the next day", so I could make it on the 24th.

Roasted pepper salad
4 fleshy yellow and red peppers (I added an orange one too, and slightly increased the dressing quantities)

Halve or third the peppers, removing the seeds and white inside bits,  and grill them skin side up, spread out on a grill pan, or skin side down on a barbecue if you're having one, until the skins go wrinkly and blacken in places.  (You can also blister them individually over a gas flame, but this mass cooking is much faster - only they do need careful checking to make sure they aren't getting too charred, and you'll need to move them around a bit to get even coverage.)

Put the peppers into a plaastic bag or bags, twist the neck, and leave till cool. Then peel or scrape off the skins with a sharp knife. Slice the peppers into thin strips (no more than 1cm wide).

2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 Tbs good virgin olive oil
1 Tbs parsley, coarsely chopped
salt

Place the pepper strips in a serving dish and toss with the garlic. Dress with the oil, parsley and salt.
Leave until needed (preferably overnight). Check seasoning before serving.

I wanted to get tomatoes in somewhere, so I added halved baby oval tomatoes at the last minute.
Two of these salads, and the kumara, were slightly sweet or sweet/sour, and the green one had lovely fresh flavours. They were all very good with the ham.
         The other four courses - starters, cheese, dessert, afters - were supplied by my guests. The black forest trifle had to have its photo taken before the spoons went in.

Back from Rarotonga

Ah, Rarotonga. The part of the island we were staying in was like the nicest possible New Zealand seaside retreat, only with wonderful warmth and better sand and water. The local superette, a few minutes’ walk away, had proper cone icecreams and fresh tropical fruit, and the owner of the big house gave us more. I ate masses of it – golden pawpaw, pink guavas, pink passionfruit, pink watermelon, and little green bananas cut from the tree in the garden (forgot to photograph those). With the Palm Grove breakfast the first three days, there were home-made muffins as well...

For the three nights on my own, I had the restaurant barbecue (broadbill steak), 

then cooked a nice little ribeye steak with local veges, and a kind of pasta with tinned salmon (to buy fresh fish, you have to time it right).

After that I was with a family group, and they wanted to eat out, so I happily tagged along. Fresh local tuna, seared as part of a salad nicoise, with thin crunchy local beans. Broadbill in coconut curry. Delicious. Marinated fresh fish (I don’t know what kind) at the Friday night dinner with drums, song and dance, up the mountain. At the wedding itself, a whole roast pig, basted with seawater as it cooked. The last night we had the tuna Bruce and his mates caught, barbecued for us to eat with the usual generous Sunday night salad array at the restaurant over the road. 

       

By the time I got back, I really fancied some meat. So for dinner with neighbours on Friday, I splashed out on a small lamb fillet. 

         The recipe was a summer one I used to make for Harvey, from a great book his mother Betty gave us. The original has spinach leaves, but I used the new crop of lettuce from the garden - oakleaf, red cos and freckles.

Roasted lamb fillet on a young leaf salad with garlic dressing 

(Adapted from Homes and Gardens Cookbook, Brian Glover, 1996)

Lamb

About 300-350g lamb fillet (the Silver Fern pack at the supermarket is 340g)

1/2 tsp whole cummin seeds (though I used ground cummin)

1/2 tsp whole coriander seeds (I had these in the garden!)

black pepper, salt

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Dry-toast the coriander and cummin in a small pan over a low heat for a few minutes, then grind coarsely (I use my cleaned-out coffee grinder to do this). 

Wash and dry the fillet and roll it in the ground spices. Grind over some black pepper. (You can do this first part a few hours in advance if you want to - the lamb will pick up more flavour.)

Preheat oven to 200C (fan forced if you have it).

Heat olive oil in a large heavy pan till hot, then brown the fillet on all sides.

Place in a small roasting tin, season with salt, and cook for - well, it depends how rare you want it. It should be beautifully rosy inside when it's cut and served. For me this took about 20 minutes.

Turn oven down to 190C and leave on for garlic (see below).

Cover with foil and leave to rest while you do everything else.

Salad

Assortment of young salad leaves

2-3 Tbsp of green herb sprigs (I used sorrel, parsley and chives)

1 plump head of garlic

3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp French mustard (Dijon is good)

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar or lemon juice

1-2 Tbsp plain yoghurt

black pepper, salt

Wash and dry the leaves and herbs (a spinner is good). 

As soon as you take out the meat and turn down the oven, trim the hard top off the garlic, sit it in a piece of foil, dribble 1 Tbsp of olive oil over it, wrap it up and put it in the oven to roast (about 30 minutes).

When it's soft, carefully squeeze all the garlic out of its skin into a blender or small bowl, witht he oil.

Mash it to a puree, then beat in the other 2 Tbsp oil, the mustard, and the vinegar or lemon jiuce. Just before you're ready to serve, add the yoghurt. Taste and add salt and pepper as required.

Lay the salad out on a large shallow serving plate and drizzle over the dressing.

Slice the lamb thinly and arrange it down the centre.

We had tiny potatoes with this, but crusty bread or pilaf rice or brown rice are all good too. You can scatter toasted pine nuts over it too (but at $85 a kilo I usually leave them out). Instead I threw in a few strips of yellow pepper to look pretty. This was taken after our first serving, I get too hungry and forget. And it's a bit fuzzy, I'd had rather more pinot than usual. But believe me, it was good.

Cooking in the Catlins

Here I am on the perfect picnic log, at what used to be called Moa Bone Point, on the Papatowai estuary in the Catlins. Walking along the beach, you can see where the sea has eaten into the bank and exposed the layers of ash from the moa hunters' hangi. If you're lucky you might even see a moa bone sticking out (though of course you won't remove it - all such finds are protected).
      We picnicked most days, very simply - bread and butter, salami, cheese, fruit - but not till 2 pm or even 3. No rushing, that's the essence of a good holiday. We were lucky - we left Dunedin on a Saturday, so we were able to stock up first at the railway station farmers' market.

Breakfast was fancy organic muesli and fruit, including the rhubarb from the cottage garden cooked up with the wonderfully tart red apples Jenn salvaged from a roadside tree. You can't buy proper cooking apples like these any more. (Apparently everyone has the right to pick fruit from roadside trees growing outside fences or hanging over them - it's called fructage.)

After coffee and one small piece of toast with comb honey, we set off for wherever Jenn had planned. She grew up in the area so I couldn't have had a better guide. By lunchtime, after what seemed to me like a really virtuous amount of walking - to beaches, waterfalls, rainforests - we were ready for morning tea. I'm happy to report that there was no shortage of good cafes. Owaka had giant slabs of carrot cake. Balclutha's indifferent coffee was offset by sensational home-made neenish tarts.  Gore had magnificent date scones and passionfruit yoyos, plus remarkable sculptured latte leaves. The only off-note was the eye-watering $24 we paid for two mochas and two afghans at McLean's Falls.
    

 

I had offered to take over the cooking, to give Jenn a break after doing all the driving. I really like working out what to make in holiday kitchens, and our Papatowai eco-cottage had all the basics. I think my piece de resistance was the Owaka Four Square's Bluff oysters, followed by a pretty pasta with (frozen) shrimp, broccoli and fresh pale green Italian courgettes (a present from Jenn's friends' Dunedin garden), and a sauce made from the oyster liquid, softened mild fresh onions (another garden gift), lime juice and white wine....

.... but the salad of Taylor's Gold pears, farmers' market goat's cheese, gifted Dunedin walnuts and rocket nicked from an absent local friend's garden was pretty good too....

... and our market plums and sweet little pinot noir grapes, plus a square or two of chocolate, did very well for dessert, priming us up nicely for the nightly Scrabble contest. Once (thanks to two blanks) I got all my letters down - but even so, I only just beat Jenn.


PS: The only cheese roll I had was awful.