I was first introduced to this soup in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, but have more recently followed a recipe of Patricia Wells, which I adapt below.

The success of the soup as a summer tonic lies of course in the pistou. And the secret of a good pistou is a mortar and pestle, not a food processor. Patience Gray in her remarkable book Honey from a Weed has a whole introductory chapter on ‘chopping and pounding’. There she writes: ‘Pounding fragrant things – particularly garlic, basil, parsley – is a tremendous antidote to depression…Pounding these things produces an alteration in one’s being – from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated’.

Before I get to the recipe, I just want to reiterate what a peculiar — in a good way — cookbook Gray’s book is. She co-wrote an earlier cookbook, published as a Penguin paperback, with Primrose Boyd in the 1950s, called Plats du Jour, then she absconded to Europe to make a life with a Flemish sculptor for the next forty or fifty years, living in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia: in effect, chasing the marble that a sculptor needs.

One remarkable aspect of her book lies in the subtitle: ‘Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cylcades and Apulia’. Not only does the word ‘fasting’ rarely appear in connection with contemporary cookbooks, but here it is given priority of place before the word ‘feasting’.

Many contemporary cookbooks on regional cuisines are embedded in some sort of narrative — explicit or implied — about The Quest for Authenticity. It is not enough to know that we are going to use olive oil in a recipe; we need to be told that the dish was originally tasted on a hiking trip near Carrara, using oil obtained from the first pressing from the gnarled trees of a domestic grove of a poor but honest Italian farmer and so on. This Quest for Authenticity along with a persistent nostalgia coalesces to give us the Mediterranean Diet as Culinary Pastoral. Yet what we today evoke as the Mediterranean Diet probably bears little relation to how most Mediterraneans ate for most of history. Up until relatively recently, the Mediterranean diet was one of long seasons of malnutrition, interspersed with episodes of famine.

Gray’s book is one of the few Mediterranean cookbooks to acknowledge this in its overall approach. She captures what the anthropologist Carole Counihan, writing about rural Sardinia, observed when referring to an ‘iron clad ethic of consumption: daily consumption took place within the family and was parsimonious; festive consumption took place within society at large and was prodigal’, there being a ‘rhythmic oscillation between these two different modes’.

So yes, Gray’s cookbook-cum-travel memoir does play the authenticity card, but without the reassurance and comfort and warm fuzziness that comes with most books of this genre. At one stage she watches, and describes for the reader, a Greek islander woman’s method of cooking fresh haricot beans into a soup over an outdoor fire. When Gray takes some of the surplus soup to a neighbour, the neighbour ‘believing them to be cooked by me and foreign in consequence, later threw them to the pig’. The Mediterranean diet, like Tolstoy’s ideal of love, can be a harsh and dreadful thing.

Anyhow, the promised recipe for La Soupe au Pistou:

If you have access to fresh borlotti beans, buy half a kilo which will come down to around 200 – 250 g shelled beans.

Warm some oil in a saucepan with chopped garlic and some thyme sprigs, parsley sprigs and a bay leaf or two. Add the beans and cook for a minute or two. Add a litre of hot water and cover and simmer for around ten minutes.

In another pot, start the soup: oil, onions and garlic sweated over a low heat. Add chopped carrots, chopped potatoes and again more bay leaves, some thyme and parsley sprigs. Saute all this for ten minutes or so, stirring regularly, to build depth of flavour.

Then add the beans and their cooking liquid to the vegetables with some diced zucchini and some tomatoes (fresh or from a tin, whatever’s at hand) and another litre of water. Simmer gently until all is cooked. Add some small pasta shapes and cook until the pasta is cooked.

Serve the soup hot, passing both pistou and grated pecorino or parmigiano cheese to swirl into the soup

Pistou:

For pesto or pistou, I’d go with a cup of basil leaves pounded together with a tablespoon of pine nuts, a clove of garlic, half a teaspoon of salt and four tablespoons of olive oil. Enjoy.

It was on a cold and dreary night in November 1892 that I was first introduced to yet another of the singular talents of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, talents with which he was wont to so often surprise those that thought they knew him well.

The fire was blazing in our chambers at 221b Baker Street and I was seated comfortably in an armchair, browsing through the privately published memoirs of a Ruhr industrialist visiting Siam in incognito. Meanwhile Sherlock Holmes sat listlessly at his desk with his commonplace book open before him but ignored. Once again it was clear to see he was in the grip of one of his queer humours.

Looking across, I recognised of old that glint in his eye that signaled a brooding determination to break loose of his lethargy. I feared his gaze would soon turn to the drawer that held his vials of five percent cocaine solution, or worse still, to his violin case.

Suddenly Holmes leapt to his feet and began to pace about the room. “I feel like something spicy and gamey,” he ejaculated.

“Why my dear Holmes, whatever could you mean?” I murmured, rising to feet and closing a chapter on a stimulating account of nubile hermaphrodites in Indochine.

“The Devil’s Kidneys, Watson! That’s what I mean,” he curtly exclaimed.

“Good heavens! You’ve finally found the solution to the Case of the Missing Claret? I’ve always thought it was connected with the evening the Diogenes Club came back here after that show of photographic slides about fertility rites in West Africa-“

“No Watson,” Holmes vigorously interrupted, “I meant I could do with a spot of devilled kidneys right now.”

“A capital idea,” I remarked, for I too was feeling the pangs of night hunger, and I immediately rang the bell for Mrs Hudson. After waiting a minute I rang again as she had not appeared with her customary alacrity.

I looked at Holmes with a quizzical expression and said “Perhaps Mrs. Hudson is entertaining?”
“I’ve never found her so,” he replied with some asperity.*

At that moment, the door to our room was flung open and there stood Mrs. Hudson on the vestibule, clad in a blue and somewhat distressed flannel nightgown with her hair all awry and apparently in the grip of some strong emotion.

“It’s four thirty in the f_____g morning! What the f__k do you mad b_____ds want now?” Mrs. Hudson cried.

Holmes regarded this apparition with some amusement and then blandly remarked “Why Mrs. Hudson, I would venture a guess that you have recently risen abruptly from a deep sleep while reclining mainly -”

“Too f_____g right I was !” she replied with some passion.

“Please calm yourself my good woman,” Holmes crisply replied. “As you can see, Dr Watson and myself are perfectly safe and sound. Although perhaps not in such animal spirits as we would prefer. Could you pray prepare some of your delicious devilled kidneys and we shall feel whole again in a trice.”

“Oh f__k a fishwife with a Tilbury bunt! I’ve put up with a lot from you two I have. I never complained about the b____y bullet holes over the mantelpiece, I never said a word about Mr Holmes’s used vials littering the landing and I always turned a blind eye while cleaning to the Doctor’s folios of “artistic studies” left all over the b____y place. I’ve opened the front door to those f_____g Irregulars of yours at all hours more times that I care to remember and thrown some of them out again when you was passed out from that coco juice s__t, I can tell you. The things they get up to with your makeup case! And why only the other night I had to let the both of you in at three in the f_____g morning, reeking of cheap gin and even cheaper cologne – all dressed up as b____y Haymarket trollops.”

“Ah yes, the affair of the Dollymops and the Duchess of D________” Holmes languidly interrupted. “Thank you for the loan of your undergarments Mrs. Hudson as their appearance of verisimilitude proved invaluable at a certain crucial point in our investigations.”

“Loan my a__e! You pinched them from the b____y washing line! Now you want me to cook at this f_____g hour! Well, you can shove that right up your Khyber!”

With these parting words, Mrs. Hudson slammed the door shut with a resounding crash and left down the stairs with further and thankfully now inaudible imprecations.

Holmes turned to me and dryly remarked “I fear the absence of conjugal companionship these past fifty years since Sergeant Hudson failed to return from Afghanistan is finally taking its toll on his other half. ** Never mind Watson, we can fend for ourselves this just this one. It should be no hardship to an old rough campaigner like yourself.” ***

“What in the devil’s name do you mean Holmes,” I replied.

“I mean devilled kidneys and that is what I mean to have right now. Unwrap that parcel of eight lambs’ kidneys reposing on my desk that I bought to further my research for my monograph on penknife wounds inflicted in second-class carriages leaving from the Metropolitan Underground Railway station at Aldgate during Bank Holidays. **** Now hasten to the bath room and under running water, peel the filmy skin from these kidneys, remove anything else that is white in colour or gristly in texture and then cut each kidney into no less than three pieces but of no more that this length. As you do so, I shall assemble the other ingredients.”

When I returned from the bath room with the kidneys prepared as Holmes instructed, he briefly sniffed the organs before returning to the absorbing task of weighing various items on his scales.

“Look what I have here Watson,” he said with some pride. “I have accurately exacted the following measures. They are: three tablespoons of worstershire sauce; one heaping tablespoon of Coleman’s English mustard powder; one tablespoon of freshly squeezed juice of a lemon; half a table glass of water; one two-ounce canister of Fullers Earth, one substantial tablespoon of cayenne pepper; a heaping pinch of ground black pepper; and four drops of Tabasco sauce.”

While Holmes was distracted by the task of lighting up the Bunsen burner, I deftly removed the canister of Fullers Earth from his desk as I knew full well from the affair of the Radium Éclairs that my friend was often perhaps too dazzled by reports of the immediate effects of new but not sufficiently tested scientific compounds and elements.

“Now Watson!” Holmes urgently blurted, “The game is afoot. As I briskly blend the materials I have just assembled in a china bowl, you must place a saucepan on the stand just above the Bunsen burner and dissolve into that pan two ounces of fresh and unsalted butter. You will find adequate quantities stored in the toe of my Persian slipper*****. When the butter reaches liquefaction then cast in the pieces of kidney and stir until their colour turns from deep red to umber.”

I did as Holmes dictated and soon a powerful odor filled our chambers, followed shortly by the thumping of a broomstick on the ceiling below our floor, accompanied by muffled cries of protest. The scent emanating form our efforts carried some faint but perceptibly unwelcome reminders of the all too earthly functions of the originating organs.

I mentioned this observation to Holmes who replied with some spirit.

“Why this is why I am mixing together these compounds. They will completely hide your disapproval of the smell and yet subtly and indeed paradoxically play off against what olfactory and other traces linger. Now let me decant what I have stirred together over the kidneys that I assume are now the colour of your oxblood brogues. Yes they are and away we go. Whee-hee! Observe as I stir briskly using the wooden handle of that lethal edged souvenir of yours from Khandahar. Now I strongly urge you to place some slices of bread on the toasting fork and retire to brown them by the fire. When they are done, butter them well. If my calculations are correct, only five minutes should have elapsed since the kidneys have simmered, while being occasionally stirred, at half-full heat in the sauce I have prepared. Now if you please Watson, the hot buttered toast on the plate. I place the kidneys, with a generous dribble of Holmes’ Personal Effusion of Borneo Lavage, like so atop the toast. Et voila! Now perhaps you could remove the cork from the bottle of the Cockburn’s 1880 that I see there weighing down your medical bag and we shall feast. If it will taste as I suspect, I must send a telegram to Mycroft insisting that this be on the menu for the next supper meeting of the Diogenes Club.” ******

I did as Holmes instructed and then we ate with great good appetite and before long we were feeling quite sated. I rang for Mrs. Hudson to remove and wash the dirty dishes and cutlery.

“A marvelous dish to welcome the start of a new day, “ I observed to Holmes as rosy fingered dawn stole through the windows. ******* “However, it is curious is it not that a dish based on the mammalian glands of purification and extraction should prove so delicious?”

Holmes looked up keenly from the divan on which he was now reclining as he filled his pipe with shag tobacco and added a few grains of some opium-based tincture.

“Why my dear Watson. We have just consumed the concentrated essence of the organs that process food and drink. Sweetbreads, offal, call it what you wish. I have always found the consumption of such dainties when well prepared to be both a savoury experience and a very sensual summation of how all life is basically meat. Why, allow me to predict that within several decades, the manager of an establishment in Zurich that projects onto a screen moving photograms will attempt to artistically render in print the emotions and speculations that we have just enjoyed by consuming the parts of animals necessary to the passage of food throughout themselves.” ********

“Astounding Holmes! How do you do it?”

“Alimentary, my dear Watson,” Holmes replied and reached for his f_____g fiddle.

* A great one-liner from “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.” 1970. Feature film. Colour and sound, Co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, natch!

** Sergeant Hudson died fighting at Piper’s Fort, Afghanistan in 1842 – according to the first volume of the Flashman Papers.

*** Doctor John H. Watson was a military veteran of the second Anglo-Afghanistan war where the Afghans again handed the Brits their arse on plate. If you think of Watson as an affable late twenties Vietnam vet sharing digs with a brilliant high bohemian post grad student of similar age that’s also a well connected covert Empire fixer, then the whole Baker Street ménage and general mise en scène starts to come into focus a bit more, n’est-ce pas?

**** The Bank Holidays Act of 1871 specified in law the days when both metropolitan and country wage earners could take time off at the same time to attend major matches between regional cricket teams.

***** Holmes was documented as using his footwear as a storage medium for valuable and/or perishable commodities. See “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”, 1893. The Strand Magazine. B&W.

****** Mycroft was Sherlock Holmes’ older brother – sometimes perceived as perhaps too smart and well fed for the Empire’s long term good. His possible involvement in instigating the latest ill-fated Mesopotamian excursion by HMG remains unproven.

******* I spent some serious time working how to integrate that classic piece of Victorian innuendo naturally into this text. In the end, as you can see, I just gave up and blodged it in where I could.

******** James Joyce – regrettably Irish – who discussed at length the pleasures of eating kidneys and other sweetbreads and organs in the opening chapter of “Ulysses”. 1922. Book. Colour, sound, smell and taste.

And a tip of the bowler to Sidney Paget for the original Strand Magazine illustrations with which I fear I have taken some liberties.

Recently returned to a single state, I have resolved that I simply have to devote as much attention to cooking nice things for myself as I do when cooking for other people, or I will become lardy and unhealthy. As we know, being lardy and unhealthy is inimical to dating but, more importantly, leads to permanent ill-health and it’s hard enough to meet a bloke in Katoomba without confining yourself to the hospital grounds.

But enough about non-dating in the Blue Mountains. This post is about how virtuous I am for cooking even though I didn’t really feel like it, how I managed to work dukkah into the meal without overdosing on the stuff, and how it’s important to just get going and do stuff for yourself, because the results are really special. And it doesn’t take much effort, or cost much.

This week, I made a VERY yummy celeriac and parsnip soup, which was dead easy. You just take a celeriac – a funny lumpy vegetable that manages to be like celery, potato, cauliflower and ginseng all at once – and chop the tops and bottoms off it. Then you quarter it, eight it, peel off the skin and chuck it in the pot with two quartered onions, two or three cloves of garlic, some water, some dry white wine, two peeled parsnips, a bay leaf and some thyme. Cook it until the veges are soft (about 20 minutes) and then blend it to bejeesus, add some soy milk or stock to get it to the consistency you want and warm it through with some salt, pepper and a vege stock cube if it’s not savoury enough. Serve it with some crumbly parmesan on the top and drink the rest of the wine while you eat.

But the nicest dinner of the week incorporated green veges AND enabled me to eat dukkah. I just love simple pasta dishes like grated zucchini or pumpkin tossed through spaghetti. Tonight, I fried an onion with some small pieces of sweet potato, garlic and a finely sliced piece of preserved lemon (my most specialist secret ingredient). When that was rocking I shredded a small bunch of silverbeet into the frypan, tossing until the colour brightened. I mixed it up with some fetta, a bit of butter, a smidge of cream and a small handful of coriander leaves. Then I mixed it into hot, fairly wet pasta (so the pasta water made a kind of sauce) and sprinkled dukkah over the top.

It came out lemony, with plenty of bite in the silver beet and the salt of the feta and nuttiness of the dukkah hanging perfectly off the sweet potato. I even had enough left overs to ensure that I don’t have to buy lunch tomorrow, which is good in these global financial crisis-ridden times.

I am really interested to hear about other people’s eating vices so invite PDP readers and writers to share their sins against fine dining. However, to ensure we honour the goals of this blog, perhaps it’s best to temper stories of vice with tales of how we have managed to redeem ourselves by cooking clever and artful food, even when we is by ourselves. So, c’mon contributors and commenters, share.

I think the source of my exhaustion arises rather from the fact that for much of the university teaching year thus far I’ve been reading and marking 50 blogs per week, all written by students enrolled in subjects to do with new media.  If Twitter is to bear any responsibility for my failure to blog in any substantial way either here, at Sarsaparilla Lite, or at my own blog, then it’s because one of the other pieces of assessment that I’ve spent the semester  drowning in has been the Twitter workshops I’ve co-ordinated in lieu of the usual face-to-face tutorials. All of these pieces of assessment have rendered me barely capable of reading, never mind making a comment on those blogs by people who like to write and engage in discussions for the sake of it.

Anyway, you’re not really interested in my work-a-day woes are you?  It’s all about food here at  the Progressive Dinner Party. And no doubt you’ll be pleased to know that it’s because of food that I bothered to mention Twitter at all in this context.  It’s due to Twitter that I came to know of my most recent food obsession, when one of the people I follow declared that she was going to make 5 minute ice-cream for which she posted a link.

At first, I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed with the recipe, but only because I simply can’t justify having double cream anything given the familial condition of high-cholesterol that I have.  Still, I thought about the idea of 5 minute ice-cream with longing; maybe I could make it just once?  Then, while I was in the supermarket one day, I alighted upon the idea of using yoghurt instead of cream. (It’s only since I’ve gone back to the recipe that I realised this substitution had already been suggested).

Ever since I’ve been combining 1/2 cup of sugar, 2/3 cup of yoghurt, and 250-300g of frozen fruit in a food processor and eating smooth, creamy, sweet, tart and refreshing 5 minute frozen yoghurt.

So far I’ve made the yoghurt using raspberries and blueberries, and I have a packet of mixed berries in the freezer for  future versions.  I’m also thinking ahead to the mangoes of summer and freezing my own fruit to whip up into this tasty treat.

It’s probably worth mentioning a couple of things that I’ve noticed in the short time I’ve been making this quick dessert. If you want to eat the confection straight away, the crystals of the sugar are still very evident.  I’ve tried to lessen the sugar’s granularity by mixing the yoghurt and sugar together first, then adding the fruit.  It helps to some degree, but it’s probably better just to use the finest sugar you can in the first place.  When I next go shopping, caster sugar will be on the top of my list.  If you can wait, I’ve found that leaving the yoghurt in the freezer overnight removes any hint of the granularity. I generally can’t wait and the only reason I’ve discovered this is because I’m not a total pig (only slightly) and there’s always been some left over for the next day.

I like the softer consistency of the yoghurt when it’s first made, but if you like a firmer yoghurt or icecream then that’s another advantage of waiting overnight before eating it.  It does freeze to a very good firmness, and importantly one that you can still get a spoon through with minimal muscle-power.

The next level of experimentation on my agenda is to try and lessen the sugar content.  I’ve already tried a bit less sugar than 1/2 cup without adversely affecting the consistency of the frozen yoghurt. I’ll see if I can go down to 1/4 cup.  I’m not willing to eliminate the sugar entirely because, between the tartness of the yoghurt and the berries, a bit of sweetness is still required to get that indulgent feeling that comes from having a much needed treat.

So, while I was sitting in front of the toasty Glowburn this afternoon, supposedly writing, I decided that it would be wasteful to burn fossil fuel by firing up the gas cooktop or the electric oven to cook the stew I had planned for dinner. Why not use the wood heater? Would it get hot enough to actually cook a beef stew? Only one way to find out, and tonight I am child free and my intended dinner guest doesn’t mind waiting if it turns out to be a slow meal. So I decided to do it and, because I really should be writing something else, to blog the results of this experiment in fossil-fuel-free cooking.

4.00pm: Put pot on wood heater, add some olive oil and two quartered onions.

4.16pm: Pot and onions warm to the touch, and nice smells are emerging, but no real action. Add two garlic cloves, whole because I like how they melt. Here’s how it looks, dark blue pot is hard to see on mission brown stove.

4.30pm: Nice sizzling sounds from pot. Safe to add spices for toasting – a tablespoon of cumin seeds, about a teaspoon of ground coriander, a shake of cinnamon and a touch of garam masala.

4.37pm: Smells yum but wonder if strong food smells in your lounge room are a good thing. Decide you should only do this if your house is open plan. Of course also need a wood heater.

4.50pm: All seems warm and brown in the pot so have just added a kilo of diced steak and about two diced and salted medium eggplants (which I found in the bottom of the crisper and I say about two because I used three but there were grubs in some bits so I took the grubs out, along with the sections the grubs were chewing). Also have thrown in a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes from my freezer, two baby carrots and a few sprigs of oregano, and a cup of beef stock.

Now I’m just going to leave it alone.

5.44pm: Not much of an aroma, figure fire probably needs stoking, but when I take the lid off it’s simmering. Stoked fire up and will check back later.

6.15pm: Ask dinner guest to please bring red wine as nice smells of eggplant and beef require a shiraz or cabernet sauvignon. The wine will have incurred food miles, but my dinner guest is arriving by foot so he’s not otherwise adding to greenhouse.

6.18pm: Occurs to me that I will need something carbohydrate to accompany stew and that it would be cool to manage carbs without using Westinghouse. Couscous? Barley?

6.27pm: Decide on the latter as it’s all simmering away nicely and there’s enough liquid to cook the barley. Add about two thirds of a cup of the pearl variety plus an extra cup of stock and a cup of water to leaven the saltiness.

6.31pm: Pause for smug reflection on how all food in this meal has come from my pantry, freezer and garden and that I have not had to go to the shops for anything at all. Think am getting much better at shopping sensibly and saving food miles, dollars and time. Remember am supposed to be writing other article and smug feeling disappears.

6.39pm: Dinner guest arrives, early. Wine is welcome, as is dinner guest. Pot simmering fast but barley taking a while so refrain from adding logs to fire in the hope it all settles down a bit.

7pm: News time. Try not to let news about asylum seeker situation ruin dinner, hope for happy Sunday night stories soon. Oh, here’s some news about rising electricity prices in NSW. I don’t feel exactly happy, but do feel smug again.

7.05pm: Seems barley is just right, serving time! Chopped fresh coriander on top … btw, not a table-cloth, the rug. A Syrian camel rug, no less, but the story of how I got it is too long to narrate.

7.25pm: Bloody yum! Meat not as tender as I had hoped, but suspect it was the cut and recommend chuck or blade for future attempts, plus earlier introduction of barley. But the barley is divinely nutty and goes really well with the beef and spice flavours. Onya Glowburn – now all that’s left is to wash up, using the solar hot water system which finally works after the electrician figured out how to stop the cockatoos eating it.

Yours in extreme and nauseating virtuousness plus inelegant sufficiency, Dr Sister Outlaw.

If you try to eat seasonally, particularly if you grow some of your own food, Autumn is the best time of year. I live in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses, four of which have veggie gardens, and it’s quite common to see someone or other ambling across the road with a handful (or a box) of excess produce. It was our turn last week, when our neighbour Kev dropped in with two lovely early butternut pumpkins from his patch. I’m hoping for some figs, as our tree is tiny. It’s one of three in this street and the next grown from a cutting from No. 8′s magnificent tree.

One of the best arrivals with the cooler weather is lemons. Meyer lemons seem to be the most commonly grown variety locally because they tolerate cold fairly well, but I spotted the first fresh thin-skinned Eurekas of the year at Choku Bai Jo last week. While they’re very common and often cold-stored to sell over the summer, freshness really brings out their appetising sharpness. I love their colour too which is more “lemony” than intensely yellow.

 

The other ingredient I had around and was keen to use plenty of is biodynamic garlic. We’ve been buying organic and/or byodynamic garlic for quite a while now, so the prices for a home delivery of a kilo of Patrice Newell’s Garlic wasn’t as frightening as it might be if you’re used to the (irradiated, Chinese) supermarket stuff. It’s excellent garlic, with a pungent, intense flavour that the imported crap can’t approach (that’s it in the picture in my last post).

I had no idea that all garlic harvested in Australia is harvested in November. The site suggests that from May it can start sprouting. I’ve always understood – although I can’t remember from where – that sprouting garlic was worthless. But I’ve also heard that you can cut out the sprouting germ, and I know you can plant some. Our garlic arrived at the end of January, and I’m a bit pissed off sad to see that some has started to sprout already, but perhaps my storage method – open in the box it came in, in a dry warm room – wasn’t quite so good as I thought. What’s left is now hanging in one of those orange mesh bags in the kitchen. If you haven’t snapped some up yet, there’ll be no more available until the next harvest, but you can register your details at their site.

Thinking lemony-garlicky brought me to braising, and chicken, and I ended up adapting this recipe a little. This is how good it looks before it’s even made it to the oven -

Ingredients

1 organic and free range chicken, jointed (or buy pieces if you fancy)
4 medium waxy yellow potatoes
3 merguez or other lovely spicy sausages (mine were from Meat Guru in Civic)
1 Eureka lemon, cut lengthways in eighths
1/2 a preserved lemon, flesh removed, skin julienned
half a dozen sprigs of lemon thyme (which we grow, but thyme is fine. Rosemary would work too, but use much less.)
a bunch of sorrel (*optional As is everything else, of course, this being the food blog of a suburban mother with no culinary enforcement squad.)
2 heads of garlic, cloves separated and peeled

Method

Heat the oven to about 180. I say “about” because my oven is crap, so do what your oven tells you.
Peel the potatoes and cut each crosswise into about three or four fat slices. Brown them in a little olive oil and remove from the pan, then add a smidgen more oil and brown the seasoned chicken pieces. Brown the sausages and cut into chunks of a similar size to the potatoes.

Put the potatoes, chicken and sausage chunks in a casserole with a cover. If you used something other than the casserole to brown everything, deglaze it with some vermouth and scrape all the yummies in. If you used the casserole itself, splash in some vermouth and/or white wine (not too much). Tuck the garlic cloves and lemon pieces in here and there and strew over the herbs and preserved lemon.

Cook covered for about an hour, then toss in a bunch of very finely chopped sorrel. You might need to add a splash more vermouth (or you could use stock). I won’t tell if you put a knob of butter in to enrich the sauce, although it’s not necessary. Cook it for another half an hour or so, but keep an eye on it, and remove the cover at the end if the juices need a little thickening up.

You won’t need any starchy base for this, as it already has potatoes, although I cooked some mograbieh in chicken stock for the carb-hungry kids. You will need a big green salad, preferably one with some bitterness and substance to the leaves. You could also try some wilted greens, such as the last of your rainbow chard. Which is a bit sad, but delicious.

Don’t skimp on the garlic, either – it becomes a vegetable here, sweet, mellow and warming not at all harsh and bitey. It might appear from the recipe to be a too-intensely lemony dish, but the flavours are complex and layered rather than a full-frontal single-note lemon assault. Not to forget that the highly flavoured sausages need something capable of standing up to their punch. It’s delicious, but doesn’t reheat as well as I’d hoped. This means you should have seconds if you feel like it.

I made this again recently, and while I was tempted to try it with chick peas (one can = 1/2 cup soaked and cooked) I bought some Dutch Cream potatoes at the Epic market on Saturday and wasn’t able to ignore them. I’d run out of vermouth, and had no dry white wine, so I used white wine vinegar to deglaze the pan, and that was fine. I considered caramelising the cut surfaces of the lemon wedges, but I decided that was stupid overkill.

I’d taken the lemon thyme out, in case you were wondering, because it looked brown and sad. And no need to mention the state of that casserole dish, thank you very much. I already know.

I’m not sure if that’s sharing or territorial pissing that you’re seeing in that picture, but that’s five year old boys for you.

My sister was keen for a slow red wine braise, and she got really lucky because today was unseasonably cold and wet – there was hail where we are and “sago snow” (pdf) about 20 minutes north at Lambert’s vineyard where they had lunch. Because wild meat is intensely flavoured, and I because I cooked it with further intense flavours, I kept the other elements very simple – King Edward potatoes boiled and mashed with a bucket and a half of butter and cream, and boiled super-fresh green beans from Choku Bai Jo.

I was surprised how much meat the hare provided – enough for four adults and two kids eating dinner (two kids not hungry at dinnertime) and leftovers for a family meal tomorrow, likely to be with some simple home-made pasta.

Those weird brown bits on top are grated chocolate, rather than some poxy exudate, btw.

If you’re lucky enough to bag a hare, here’s how you might cook it.

Wild Hare with Red Wine

Recipe adapted from Over a Tuscan Stove

First, catch your hare. Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany says that Hannah Glasse really wrote “Take your hare when it is cas’d”, meaning skinned, but I can’t tell you how pleased I am to begin a recipe this way.

Skin and gut your hare. Joint it, rub with olive oil and leave in the fridge on a rack wrapped in muslin for three or four days. This isn’t supermarket food, and you shouldn’t be afraid of ageing the meat. That said, it’s important that the meat is draining well and not sitting in blood or other fluid. Muslin or cheesecloth over a rack resting on a roasting dish is perfect, if space-consuming. Bear with it, it’s worth it.

A couple of days before you plan to cook the hare, make this marinade:

Chop an onion, a stem of celery and a small sweet carrot into half inch pieces – you want three fairly equal piles, so adjust to what you have. Brown the veg briefly in olive oil and then add 1½ cups red wine and ¾ cup red wine vinegar (not the fancy pants kind, supermarket red wine vinegar is perfectly adequate), two or three small fresh bay leaves, a couple of generous sprigs of thyme, half a dozen peppercorns, a stick of cassia bark (or cinnamon, if that’s what you have) and a good generous slug of the gin from the freezer.

Cool the marinade completely, immerse the hare in it and pop back in the fridge for two days, rotating the pieces of meat around to ensure all of it is infused with the marinade.

Start a little after lunch to make dinner on the day of eating. Put the hare and marinade in a heavy lidded casserole dish (a roasting pan tightly covered with foil will work well). Cook at 150° celsius for about three hours, checking every now and then to rotate the pieces of hare into the juicy and less juicy parts of your pot. Let it cool enough to shred the meat from the bones with two forks, and add 1 square of finely grated Lindt 70% chocolate, a handful of prunes chopped in half, a generous tablespoonful of currants and several pieces of orange peel (I used saved blood orange peel – anyone who eats a blood orange in this house without keeping the peel hears about it until they never make that mistake again). Stir through two tablespoons of luscious lard that you rendered out of your last roast of Mountain Creek Farm Wessex Saddleback Pork. Failing that, ordinary lard or butter is your friend, despite what the Heart Foundation would have you think. Then again, they endorse some McDonalds “meals” these days for $330 000 a year, so you be your own judge. Some sharp green olives (and vinegared capers) would have been a good addition, as in the Silver Palate cookbook’s Chicken Marbella recipe, but I didn’t have any today.

Half an hour before you want to eat, warm the pot and stir a couple of tablespoons of cream through the shredded hare, chop some flat leaf parsley, make ridiculous mashed potatoes and boil some green veg. Await the acclamation for a meal that is tender, sweet and gamey without being overbearing, and sophisticated without being fussy.

The pudding basin I scored yesterday had its first use today, again with thanks to the unseasonable weather. I’d picked up some tiny delicous Josephine pears for $2.20/kg at Choku Bai Jo, and made a variation of this steamed pudding, adding dried figs in place of the crystallised ginger.

It was good.

Over the years I have moved a lot, and had many herb and vegetable gardens. Building them has proven to be an essential part of my settling into any new place, even if the landscape is not ideal. I have gardened in tight spots, in pots and sour soil, dealt with overshadowing, put up with short term leases and, in the first home I owned, accommodated the tendency of my then partner to steal the best spots for spiky grevilleas.

My garden tends to reflect my mental state. If it flourishes there is every chance I am procrastinating mightily, but my soul is mending. The reverse applies. The garden in my last house fell over and decayed because I got too busy writing a PhD, but my relationship was also withering on the vine. In the year that passed between moving out and buying my new house I had no garden – just a few styrofoam pots. I didn’t even have a compost heap. Now I have a new house, Maxholme, and this is the backyard, as it appeared on my first day of ownership.

It’s a 611 square metre blank slate, so the work begins to build a garden that reflects who I am – a woman on the very brink of turning 40, with no inclination to please anyone other than myself and my hungry child. A blank slate suits me very well indeed, and I will fill it with food. In these days of financial uncertainty and mortgage stress it is quite fashionable to be worrying about food security, but that doesn’t matter one jot to me, I’d be planting food anyway.

Of course, blank slates take a lot of work to fill. This was the herb patch – dead tomatoes, crusted earth, feral Vietnamese mint, barely hanging on rosemary and sage and a death lily patch (a nursery for snails).

After a permaculture makeover, the insertion of some herbs I’d been coddling and some spring rain … the death lilies and mint are a nice feature now.

My pride and joy is my ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ compost heap, which uses corflutes retained from political campaigns in a most creative way. Look whose face is helping the lawn clippings decompose! If you take your fingers from your eyes and look behind the compost heap you can see nascent vege beds.

It’s both exciting and soothing to watch the garden take off. When I moved in, on the coldest day of the winter, all I found was sage and rosemary, but since then a range of mints have come up, and I’ve added parsley, thyme, chives, lemon balm, garlic chives, pyrethrum, curry plant, tarragon, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuces, oregano and coriander to the herb bed, along with a bay tree. I’ve put in beds of spuds and asparagus, broad beans, corn and peas and am nursing seedlings of zucchini, pumpkin, basil, kale and silver beet. The trees are the biggest investment. I’ve got a crab apple, a cumquat, a meyer lemon, and four hazelnuts, which are part of a local food sharing initiative, along with raspberries and blueberries. I’ve also added trees that will bear the fruits I love the best, and that are so hard to find in good quality in the shops – black genoa fig, white peaches and apricots. In this picture you can see the very first baby apricot.

However, if I’m to be honest, all there is to eat right now in my garden is herbs. Which brings me to the chooks, and the cooking part of the post. The chooks are a curse in many ways. They have obliged me to buy many rolls of wire to keep them from turning over my mulch and devouring my seedlings. But they are funny, cute and friendly. They talk all the time and rush all over you if you venture into the garden. Their A-frame chook tractor, which lets them scratch away at the ground, has been a great way to start neat little squares of garden. They provide precious chook poo and they also pick through the death lilies to devour legions of snails. Here they are, at work in the back yard.

And they reward us with perfect eggs, whilst exerting a powerful influence over food-averse children (one I own and one who visits often). The kids delight in things like this:

Also, it seems, my vegetable averse one will eat vegies if they are wrapped in or mixed into an omelette and the egg-averse visitor changed his tune after a few trips to the chook house.

The challenge of using all those eggs has led to new discoveries. I’ve learned the secret of the perfect poached egg, which is to boil a deep potful of water, slip in some vinegar, get it to a rolling boil, stir it to a whirlpool and crack a day old egg into the central vortex. When made with home grown eggs my Dead Cert Seduction Lemon Delicious comes out a brilliant yellow. And I also came up with this, a variation on a Spanish trick, which uses my favouritest lentil in the universe, Puy (blue) lentils.

To do this all you need is a thick gluggy beany mix, like Stephanie Alexander’s divine Puy lentil salad, or the version I did here, which has tomatoes and optional bacon in it, and pop it into a casserole dish. Level off the top and pack it down. Then use the back of a table spoon to make recesses in the surface and break an egg into the hollows. Drizzle some olive oil on top of each egg and bake at about 180 for about 30 minutes, or until the eggs look set. It’s delicious. You can also do baked eggs this way in ramekins, with a beany blob underneath. The creamy egg protein goes so nicely with the beans and who’d have thought the kids would lap up the entire package?

By the way, the chooks are never for eating, and neither is this resident of Maxholme:

Sorry about the red eye, but it’s kind of her nature.