Rhubarb fool

A truly delicious thing to do with rhubarb.

There is a theory in my family that you can't go wrong with whipped cream. My father has claimed for years that one can eat an unlimited amount of pavlova provided there is enough cream to cut the sweetness. And be the consequence what it may to my liver, I am my father's daughter in that regard. Cream makes practically everything better. I would be a smaller person if I did not feel this way, I am sure.

Cream, anyway, is half the substance of a fruit fool. There is hardly an easier dessert; it is elegant, simple, beautiful and delicious. Rhubarb is especially good, being both acidic and astringent, though admittedly it makes an uglier fool than some. Hence, no photo. However, the cooked fruit does not need sieving, unlike raspberry or gooseberry. With sweetener rather than sugar, this dish fits easily into a low carbohydrate regime. I will try it that way next time my dear friend gives me a bunch of fresh young rhubarb:

Recipe

bunch of young rhubarb
sweetener or brown sugar to taste
vanilla (preferably home made) to taste
whipped cream

Wash and chop the rhubarb, and gently steam in a tablespoon of water until tender. Stir in sweetening and vanilla. Let cool, stir into a soft stringy mush. Fold into at least its own volume of cream, whipped very firm. Serve in glasses or a glass bowl, perhaps with crisp biscuits.

First fruits

Blackberries, apples, pears, walnuts. Sounds like autumn but we're definitely not there yet. We were down at the Bach on the weekend and picked several cups of blackberries around the section. Of course they are a terrible weed, but in fruiting season I can forgive them, unlike ivy which is a year-round abomination with delusions of grandeur. I claim.

Also picked at the weekend: apples from our columnar Bolero trees planted winter before last. These are first fruits from those trees and they are encouragingly good eating! Too good for jam. I did put one in the blackberry buckle (of which more below.)

I snagged a couple of windfalls from a disregarded tree on the vacant section next door. And to round out the jam, pears and walnuts from roadside stands in Gordonton and Karapiro respectively.

300g blackberries
100 ml water
1 medium apple
1 medium pear
Handful shelled walnuts
300g sugar

Simmer the blackberries in water til soft. Rub through a sieve. Add the walnuts and simmer til also soft. Now add the other fruit and, again, simmer til soft. Add the sugar and boil hard until setting point. Makes about 2 cups, so I didn't bother processing for long storage. Around here, it will be lucky to last out the week!

Lithuanian Apple Cheese

The Poole plate looks enough like Crown Lynn Colourglaze to satisfy me, though a purist will spot that it's not the real thing (irony alert!) A slice of apple cheese shaped in a terrine, and that's a chunk of Tinui ewe's milk blue from the wonderful Kingsmeade Cheese in the Wairarapa.

I have been making this for a long time, but only every couple of years. Use it like quince paste, to serve with cheese or just as a sweetmeat. The recipe comes from Lithuanian Traditional Foods (Yowza! I paid a lot less than USD195 for my copy!) You can halve the quantities, but it keeps for ages. It makes less than you'd think - say a kilo and a half?

Recipe:
Peel and thinly slice 5 kg apples. You must use apples that keep their shape well while cooking, or the end product will be yucky and mushy, where you want it to be firm enough to slice.

Combine the apple with 1.5 kg sugar and let sit, covered, for 48 hours.

Strain, retaining the liquid. In a large pot, reduce the liquid by half.

Add 3/4 of the apple slices and cook until there is no liquid remaining. The apple slices will turn to apple sauce, and the whole thing should be dark red or amber like apple jelly. Stir it very frequently (you could experiment with a slow cooker here.)

Add the rest of the apple and a teaspoon or more of spice. The book says cinnamon - cardamom is amazing too, and I could also imagine that orange zest plus clove would be good. Cook until the last of the apple is soft and well cooked through but still pale in colour.

Dampen a cheese bag or an old tea towel. Put all the apple stuff in it, tie it closed and weight it heavily for 48 hours. Keep it covered, you can use the stuff that drains off - this is basically apple jelly, but I would use it quite quickly rather than storing it.

Put in an airy place to dry. In humid places this probably means the fridge or hot water cupboard. Store cool and dry.

Note:
I have also experimented with making smaller 'loaves' of the cheese and this works well. Line a ceramic terrine with damp muslin, fill with apple mixture and fold the cloth over the top. Cover a piece of cardboard with a plastic bag and put that over the top. Turn upside down onto a couple of cans. Weight the top (that's the underside of the terrine) with a few big heavy cans. Drain for two days, dry and store.

Sauerkraut

I made sauerkraut again. Can't believe I had left it for so long since the last time, it is so easy to make, delicious and completely healthy. And keeps for months! No down side. It bubbled away gently in a shady bit of the kitchen for 5 days. And now we have a big jar of it in the fridge. Oh and did I mention total outlay of about a dollar for the cabbage - half of a mighty $1.99 beast.

I love the glass inside the top of the jar, works really well, easy to clean and kept most of the air out. I am sure that's why there was less mould bloom on this than on previous batches I made.

Also gave me a chance to play with my new friend Ken Wood, as seen on right. Sure, it's a bit of a faff emptying the tiny baby food prcoessor bowl every thirty seconds, but I don't usually need a full size processor, and this one was so cute I had to have it.

Recipe:
1 kg cabbage, 25 g salt
* Shred the cabbage and mix with the salt.
* Tamp it down extremely well in a clean vessel.
* Weight the mixture with a glass jar filled with water.
* Cover to exclude fruit flies! Stand at about 20 C out of direct sun.
* The mixture will start to burp and bubble gently after a day or two. After that, taste a shred every day.
* When it is sauerkrauty and incredibly moreish, decant or cover and refrigerate for up to six months or so. Eat it raw or in your favourite recipes.

Warnings: if it goes slimy, squashy or stinky, heave it on the compost pile. If there's a mould bloom on the surface or on the side of the glass, remove with a clean, wet cloth. The cabbage needs to be covered with juice. Else top it up with brine until covered. It also needs to stay submerged while fermenting, so make your arrangements accordingly.

Note: you can bottle sauerkraut, but then you have to boil it before eating. And it keeps for months, so why would you bother?

Eight treasures

New year, new leaf. Thought I'd resurrect this blog and scratch down some of the cooking adventures that I am determined to make time for in 2012.

Afternoon trip to the very wonderful Buddhist temple in Flat Bush and the eight treasure congee New Year's ceremony (which we missed) put me in mind of a recipe in a book I got for my wedding a bazillion years ago (20. On Wednesday.)

So, I've never made eight treasure pudding. It was a lot of fun. I tend to make quite a dry style of rice pudding, soak the rice first so it cooks very soft, then simmer on the stovetop with about half and half milk and water. The treasures were: home-bottled apricots, Anjou pears, prunes, almonds, ginger, raisins, angelica and orange. I flavoured it with saffron and cardamom. Usually I'd use rosewater too, but visiting step-daughter doesn't like, so I served it with pouring cream and a home-made vanilla and rose mascarpone.

My other favourite rice pudding is black rice, coconut cream and lime or coffee. Visiting step-daughter also doesn't like coconut, so that one can wait for a few weeks.

The raisins and prunes look like bumblebees in the pic but honest, it's vegetarian.