It’s a rough and ready operation, a back yard job turned semi-professional but nevertheless one that appears to be carefully observant of food safety and handling regulations (all his bottles are labelled with a ‘best before’ date but I didn’t ask how he sterilises the jars). He uses recycled jars and his niece makes the labels for him on her home computer. On his business card Keith describes himself as a “Maker of Quality & Fancy Jams & Pickles for Australian & Continental Tastes”, and I would not disagree. They are indeed quality, and many are really rather fancy.

I discovered Keith’s jams during a three-week writing retreat I organised for myself late last year. Every day after my early morning ocean swim in Jervis Bay, I’d make myself a strong cup of coffee and a plate of toast with lashings of jam, and sit quietly in contemplation of the words ahead. Under conditions of self-imposed social isolation, this ritual of morning toast and jam was incredibly comforting, so much so that it quickly became habit. And Keith, god bless him, was my dealer.

Hundreds of jars of jams and pickles line the walls of Keith’s modest weatherboard home. He’s got your tried and tested traditional sorts: plum, strawberry, raspberry, apricot, and smooth and creamy lemon butter with just the right amount of zest. He’s also runs a line of offbeat moderns and fusions: tomato and pineapple jam, chilli jam, mango jelly, rhubarb and apple jam, onion jam, and banana jam. He makes over fourteen varieties of marmalade including cumquat, ruby grapefruit, melon and lemon, bush lemon and tangelo.

Then there are his relishes and chutneys, many of which give expression to his love of all things spicy: mexican tomato chutney, choko chilli garlic chutney, plum and chilli bbq sauce, and cauli chilli relish. For the curious, a chutney is a form of relish, specifically indian relish, derived from Hindu word chatni. A relish is a form of pickle served as a condiment. and we all know a pickle is something that is difficult to get out of. And for those of you are aware of my passion for all things beetroot, you can only imagine how excited I was when I discovered both beetroot chutney and spiced baby pickled beetroot.

One could spend a lifetime tasting them all. What a pity I’ve only got a few days over Christmas and limited luggage space in the Troopy .

Keith grew up on a farm in the nearby district of Tomerong. The farm had over twenty different fruit trees, all of which were at various times in glut and therefore preserved and shelved in his mother’s walk-in pantry. Keith didn’t lay eyes on a commercially produced tin of jam or relish until he was married; in fact he reckons he didn’t even know they existed. Keith went on to spend his professional life working in kitchens, and when he retired just kept on cooking, preserving whatever local produce he could get his hands on. He makes his LillyPilly jam, a delicate little jewel which might be compared to a good sparkling from the fruit of the LillyPilly trees [insert link to LillyPilly info page on net] he planted in his front yard.

Keith and I both agree that his fig and ginger jam constitutes his masterwork. I didn’t ask him which was his favourite pickle, but his recommendation of green tomato and chilli mustard relish to accompany our Christmas day ham this year was genius and did not disappoint. As you can see, it hasn’t taken us long to put a rather large dent in it. Home made bliss indeed.

I’m not much of a jam maker: it’s probably anxiety associated with figuring out when ‘setting’ stage has been reached, and the fiddliness of sterilising lots of jars. One solution to the jar issue would be to make smaller batches, but this seems a bit counterintuitive. I tend to associate making jam with making lots of jam. It’s partly because, as Gay Bilson has pointed out, we tend to make the error of thinking in terms of the fruit, when we should be thinking in terms of the fruit and sugar combined. It’s also about seeing preserving as a way of dealing with gluts and windfalls: you know, that box you got from the market near closing time. Or we make lots of jam because we want to move large amounts of it at the school fete.

Anyhow, the recipe, which is disarmingly simple, is below, but it got me thinking about the history of marmalade, and food history is always insightful, not least because it puts some of our current concerns about globalisation into some sort of perspective.

I recalled reading somewhere that Dundee became the centre of marmalade manufacture because oranges from Spain arrived there as the backload on boats that had shipped coal to Catalonia, a region which underwent an early industrialisation while the rest of Spain remained a rural, peasant-based economy. Perhaps this was in Robert Hughes’ book on Barcelona, which I don’t have to hand. I can’t find any other record of this theory – although I did find out that Spain is the world’s top market for Scotch whisky, so perhaps now it’s a case of whisky outbound/oranges home.

Whatever the historical explanation, the Scots still like to think of themselves as the inventors of marmalade, although the word derives from marmelo, which is Portuguese for quince, and quince preserves were probably the inspiration for English and Scottish preserve-making. Nowadays, under EU law ‘marmalade’ can only be applied to fruit preserves made from citrus. A product made with any other kind of fruit must be called jam. (Whenever I hear something like this it brings to mind memories of the dreaded ‘euro-sausage’ from an episode of ‘Yes, Minister’).

But the Scots didn’t just need the fruit, they also needed the sugar. The oranges in Dundee marmalade are Seville oranges, which are not sweet at all. We rarely see them in Australia – or not in Melbourne, at least – but I recall staying in the Barrio Santa Cruz in Seville early one January many years ago, and plucking oranges from the trees where they grew abundantly – mainly so I could pretentiously record in my journal ‘Didst breakfast on oranges from the Alcazar…’. But on biting into them, they were near impossible to eat. So the other part of the marmalade equation was the West Indian plantation system and the slave trade, which made sugar accessible to the British Isles.

Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power has described how the use of sugar by the eighteenth century British working class provides the first instance in history of the mass consumption of imported food staples. But this was in relation to sugar’s connection with new stimulant beverages: tea, coffee and chocolate. Marmalade doesn’t just require sugar, it requires lots and lots of sugar. It was a dramatic drop in the price of sugar (due to the removal of duties) in the mid-nineteenth century, along with the perfection of relatively reliable and cheap preserving techniques, that saw preserves adopted as a convenience food by the working class: full of calories, cheap and appealing to children, and tasting better than costly butter on store-bought bread.

So whilst I think of Dundee marmalade as a quintessentially Scottish product, it’s worth remembering that it contains no indigenous Scottish produce but depends entirely on ingredients being shipped from around the world.

There is now a Marmalade Festival, held not in Dundee but in England’s Lake District. During the festival, the local vicar offers up the following in church:

‘Let us remember in our prayers those who grow fruit and those who process fruit. Especially oranges. Let us remember in our prayers those who make marmalade. And those who eat it.’

So if you make and eat marmalade you’ll be twice blessed. And if you grow your own mandarins, thrice blessed.

Recipe

(adapted from Gail and Kevin Donovan’s Salute!)

Take a dozen or so organic mandarins (or, at least, unsprayed: you’re using the rind after all) and cut into pieces. I cut each into 6 or 8 pieces, depending on the size of the mandarin. Soak the cut up fruit in a cup and a half of water for several hours or overnight.

Bring the fruit and water mixture to the boil and then simmer until the rind is soft (about 30 minutes or so).

Measure out the fruit mixture into a new saucepan and then add the same volume in sugar.

Heat up, stirring and dissolving the sugar. Add 4 tablespoons of lemon juice, bring to the boil and boil until setting stage (shudder: this will take again about 30-45 minutes. The test everyone recommends is to put a blob of the marmalade on a chilled saucer, return it to the fridge for a few minutes, then run your finger through the blob to separate it into halves. If the halves remain separate, you’ve reached setting stage nirvana. I take a near-enough-is-good-enough approach. Most preserves will set further as they cool in a jar)

Ideally, stir in something like Cointreau or Grand Marnier if you have some to hand.

Spoon into sterilised jars, etc, etc.

A gathering of disparate friends in a small suburban kitchen on a cold winter’s night (a thick frost had formed on the cars outside even before we had finished mains) was the perfect occasion to bust out a bit of beet action in the form of a borsch. What I love about this particular recipe is the degree to which each guest can nuance the taste and texture of their bowl to suit their mood. Feeling like a little tart? Add a bit more sour cream. Need to carbo-load for the ten minute walk to the shops in the morning? Add some potatoes. Your razor-sharp wit getting in the way of small talk with the cutie sitting next to you? Add a little dill. Served with a cheese board of cheddar, stinky blue, organic figs, dried apricots and roasted almonds, and a choice of fluffy white or fruit loaf, this went down a treat.

Two cattle dogs wrestling under the table and oodles of red wine added considerably to the pleasure of the borsch and the general chaotic atmosphere of the evening. The conceptual-artist-turned-art-blogger hypnotised my puppy, and then called the independent-activist-documentary-filmmaker on her paranoia about all things ‘nano’. At the other end of the table myself and another anthropologist grooved to some Italian lounge jazz, while an expert in Taiwanese art tried to get her head around the difficulties of building houses in remote Aboriginal communities being explained by a bureaucrat in a position to know. The only time the ruckus died down was when the historian of Jewish Lithuanian execution sites shocked us all with a detailed account of how to identify mass graves using ground penetrating radar.

If it sounds like I’m bragging about how interesting my dining pals were it is because I am. They are all ace individuals whose munificent friendship, along with the borsch and the wine, helped to take the chill off my winter blues for at least another day.

Luscious Borsch

Ingredients

6 beetroots
Veggie stock to taste
1 large onion
2 sticks of celery
Lemon or vinegar
Dill
Parsley
4 boiled eggs, chopped into chunks
4 boiled potatoes, chopped in to chunks
Sour cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Trim and boil the beetroots for half an hour or so, until tender. Cool, skin and dice into small cubes. Brown finely chopped onions with celery, add beetroot and stock and bring to the boil. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for twenty minutes. Add finely chopped dill and juice of one lemon, or a tablespoon or so of vinegar, and simmer for another ten or until done. Puree, and if too thick add a little water.

Serve hot. Provide sides of chopped boiled potato, sour cream, more dill, chopped parsley, and chopped boiled eggs (or anything else you think might go well – pickles? chives?) and add these to your bowl with generous whimsy reflecting the mood of the moment.

This is approximately how much stuff you need to demystify your average Asian grocery store, with the addition of a bonus Hairy McClary backpack full of nappies, wipes, toddler snacks and a cold drink. If your car is getting fixed, you’ll be needing a large hand truck. Fortunately I didn’t have far to go.

When you get there you’ll need tables to fill up with all manner of until-now mysterious things, like giant packets of fungus and small jars of stinky fermented tofu, bundles of greens, jars full of bark, tiny bottles of mustard oil so pungent it burns your nasal hairs, etc, etc.

I think one reason why some people are cautious about buying things from an Asian grocery store is that so much stuff is packaged, and if you don’t know what it is, or what the thing you want looks like, it gets confusing. So we ripped open all the plastic and set about rehydrating, sniffing, poking and tasting.

I wish someone had mentioned my hair before they started taking pictures, but there you go.

We rehydrated four different kinds of dried fungus and compared them, observing that the (relatively) expensive white capped shiitakes absorbed more water, became much softer and more luscious and had an altogether more savoury and appealing smell than the cheaper brown ones, that black cloud ear (also called wood mushroom) was a “texture food” because it didn’t really have a lot to offer in the taste department but that on the other hand there’s something pretty special about white fungus.

Many of the women were very familiar with tofu, but some had never cooked with or eaten it, so we opened up some silken, firm, puffs and pressed five spice tofu – I forgot the tofu sheets – and talked about what kinds of uses they have and what they weren’t good for. Unfortunately I couldn’t bring some of the really good locally made tofu (by Shanghai Yulin Tofu) because I hadn’t been able to get to the shop.

We passed around dishes of light and dark soy sauce, and talked about what the hell that meant. We sniffed black vinegar, and rice vinegar and Chianking vinegar. We had a go at the Shaoxing wine, which Anglifed recipes often suggest can be substituted for with sherry. Well, why would you when a flash bottle costs about $8 and is MUCH better than sherry.

By this stage we were getting pretty hungry, so started to whip up some food. I explained that you only need a cheap wok from the Chinese shop, but that it must be seasoned properly. The claypot dish I had intended to make went belly up because there was a concealed switch to turn the oven on, but we ended up stir-frying the topping so we could taste it anyway.

Basic leafy Chinese veg stir-fry

The NSW Government has standardised names and published a pictorial guide to Asian vegetables. Personally I’m sad to see the end of the hairy melon, but that’s progress I suppose. Clicking the veggie’s name in the guide will give you a bigger image, alternative names and cooking information

Ingredients

• non-stingy splash of corn or peanut oil (not olive, it doesn’t handle the necessary intense heat well)
• 2 cloves garlic, smashed in a theatrical fashion with the flate of a cleaver from shoulder height down onto the chopping board
• 1 bunch leafy greens like kang kong or amaranthen choy
• light soy sauce (I like Kimlan best, then Pearl River Bridge)
• Chinkiang vinegar (Gold Plum brand is the best, but has been hard to find recently)

Method

• Wash your greens and trim into 5 cm lengths
• Turn the exhaust fan on
• Heat the empty wok hot, hot, hot until smoke is rising
• splash in oil, quickly followed by garlic
• push the garlic around quickly with a big flat spatula/wooden spoon for about 30 seconds
• As soon as you can smell the garlic, toss in the greens
• push, push, push them around to coat them with garlicky oil
• throw in a splash or two of soy sauce and push around for a minute or two more – the stems should be crispy and the leaves soft but not “melted”
• take off the heat and add a splash or two of Chinkiang vinegar

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Ma Po Tofu

It makes a huge difference to roast and grind the Sichuanese peppercorns fresh each time. We passed around some raw and toasted peppercorns so the women could see the difference themselves. We also chewed one to get the “numb and tingling” effect that they’re known for. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle to grind them, put them in a teatowel and give them a good bash with something heavy, like the end of a cleaver, a rolling pin or a can of beans.

Ingredients

• 1 block of silken tofu
• 6 stems green garlic (garlic chia), or green onions aka “shallots”
• 150 g beef mince (although we used pork)
• 2 tablespoons Sichuanese broad bean chilli sauce (look for one that uses broad beans, not soy beans. Ideally, the ingredients list reads something like “broad beans, chilli, flour, salt”
• 1 tablespoon soaked salted black beans
• 1 cup chicken stock
• a pinch of sugar, a splash of soy
• 2 teaspoons potato starch in enough water to make a slurry (cornflour is fine; you don’t need to use either if you like a slightly runnier sauce)
• roasted and ground Sichuan peppercorns

Method

• Cut tofu into squares (you can do this while it’s still in the packet) and set aside. If feasible, rest in it just boiled salted water for a few minutes.
• Cut the green garlic stems into “horses ears” – 2 cm long slices on a sharp diagonal.
• Measure everything else out into little bowls or dishes and line them up next to the stove.

• Turn on the exhaust fan. Heat the wok on high heat and add 4 tablespoons oil (1/3 cup). It might seem a lot, but remember that Chinese food is served from a shared dish on the table, and you leave the oil in the serving bowl.)
• Add the mince and cook until it has brown crunchy edges.

• Lower heat to medium, and add chilli bean paste. Stir quickly, then add the black beans. Mash up a few with your stirring tool. If you’re keen, add a couple of teaspoons of ground dried chilli now.
• Have a bit of a cough. If you added the ground chillies, have a sip of water as well.

• Add the stock and then the tofu. Move everything around gently so that the tofu gets coated. If you don’t want the pieces to break up, be careful.   You don’t need to move fast here, it’s not stir fry.
• Add a pinch of sugar and a couple of splashes of soy and leave for a few minutes to simmer.

• Stir in the green garlic and after a couple of minutes, add the starch slurry.  Let it thicken for a couple of minutes.
• Scatter Sichuan peppercorns on top to serve.

Dry fried green beans – vegan and omnivore versions

To make this substantial enough as a meal on its own with rice, you can add some smoked or five-spice pressed tofu, cut into slivers of a similar size to the beans. We did because the packet was open and because I wanted the vegetarians to stop looking sad.

Ingredients

• 300 g snake beans cut into 5 cm lengths (green beans are fine)
• 75 g soaked and finely chopped shiitake mushrooms (or use a mix including some soaked and finely chopped white fungus and black fungus, aka black cloud ear, which we did because we’d been inspecting them all) or the same weight of pork mince
• 2 teaspoons light soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons Shaoxing wine
• 1 tablespoon Tianjin preserved vegetable (finely chopped if not already shredded; it often comes in a squat little brown crock with a plastic lid)
• Sesame oil

Method

• Turn the exhaust fan on
• Heat the empty wok hot, hot, hot until smoke is rising
• Splash in oil, then the beans.  Move them around until they start to blister and get black spots – five minutes or so. They should start to get a smoky and slightly sweet smell.  Set them aside.

• Heat the wok again over a high flame and add more oil.  Add pork mince or mushrooms and stir fry for a minute, splashing in the wine and soy.
• Add Tianjin preserved vegetable and mix; add the reserved beans.
• Put in a bowl or plate and drizzle a little sesame oil on top.

Claypot pork with dried shiitakes, red dates and dried sausage

Claypots are cheap and surprisingly useful, but any heavy pot with a lid will do. If you’re using a claypot for the first time, soak it in a bucket of water for 24 hours (the lid, too). For subsequent uses, soak it for an hour or chuck it in a bucket in the morning to use in the evening. I have made this in one big claypot or two smaller ones.

Ingredients

• About 500 g pork, with some fat and lean meat (ie, 750 g chops with bones and some fat removed and sliced into pieces about 4 cm by 2 cm by ½ cm)
• 4 large shiitakes, stems removed and soaked in hot water for ten minutes then sliced
• handful dried Chinese red dates (aka jujubes, and not a true date – leave out rather than use other dates)
• 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine (or use Sherry, but as Shaoxing wine is tastier and cheaper, go buy a bottle – get Golden Pagoda brand if you can)
• 1 teaspoon roasted sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon of ginger in fine matchsticks
• 2 tsp potato starch (cornflour is fine)
• 4 green onions or garlic stems, cut into 3 cm lengths on an angle
• 3 chinese sausages, cut inot ½ slices on an angle (so they look like ovals)
• 2 pinches sugar
• 300 g jasmine rice
• two generous cups of chicken stock

Method

• Marinate all but the rice and stock for an hour or more.  You can make the mix the night or morning before.

• Wash the rice really well and drain. Put it in the claypot with a pinch of salt stock. Homemade stock is best, but use a liquid one in preference to powders. If using a bought stock, check if you need the salt.
• Bring it up to boil, put the lid on and turn down as low as you can. I use a heat diffuser on an electric hotplate, but the hotplate itself would be fine. Don’t muck about checking it, it’ll be fine without you.

• After ten minutes, stir fry the marinated mix in a hot wok with some oil until nearly cooked (less than 5 minutes). Splash in a little stock and maybe an extra splash of soy.
• While still very hot, spread it on top of the rice and put the lid back on for 10 minutes.
• It will be very tender and the fat will have a slightly jelly-like consistency.  Eat with a stir fried green veg.

Black Bean Sauce

This recipe is for beans, but can be adapted for most anything you fancy.

Ingredients

• about 500 g green beans or snake beans, topped & tailed and cut into 4 cm pieces
• 3-4 cloves garlic, chopped fine (as much as you like)
• 2 tablespoons fermented black beans (salted black beans) soaked and drained
• 1 tablespoon clear rice vinegar
• light soy sauce
• teaspoon of potato starch (or cornflour) mixed to a slurry with a little water
• pinch of sugar
• 2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine

Method

• Follow the first three steps in the dry fried green bean recipe above, reserving beans.
• Heat wok on high heat, when smoking add oil.
• Add garlic and black beans and toss about.
• Return beans to pan, and add a splash of vinegar and a pinch of salt.
• When veg is all hot again, stir in 1 – 2 tablespoons of stock (or water) .
• Take off the heat and drizzle them with sesame oil.

It was really good fun, and I got lots of good feedback. Nancy of Roving Lemon’s Big Adventure came along to the session, and blogged about it here. Even better, two members of the group cooked stir fries for dinner that night.

Zucchini Muffins look so damned good the boy recanted his anti-zucchini stance and tucked in. They are also easy. Take a giant marrow or a few small ones and grate until you have 400 grammes worth. Then add: 1 cup white flour, 1 cup of polenta or some polenta and wholemeal, 1 tsp of baking soda, 1 tsp sugar, a pinch of salt, 1 lightly beaten egg and 60g of butter you’ve melted in the microwave. You can add flavourings such as a big handful of grated parmesan; a small handful of shredded herbs; six semi-sundried tomatoes sliced up; a big chunk of crumbled feta; ham, bacon, salami or smoked salmon in chunks; a handful of lightly toasted pine nuts or walnuts. Or any combo. Mix it all together until it just comes together into a lumpy mess and put big spoonfuls, lumps and all, into a lightly greased muffin pan. Bake at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes in a shiny new electric fan-forced oven, if, like me, you have one (I truly love my oven), but any one will do.

But everyone knows about muffins. If you want to get people raising their eyebrows, cook Zucchini Loaf! I’ve made this for more than 20 years and it produces a smooth yet textured cake that keeps very well. Take three eggs and beat them with one cup of sunflower oil (a moulinex or bamix works best – this idea comes from a moulinex cookbook). Eventually the eggs and oil will thicken and go almost white, at which point you add 3 tsp vanilla extract and one cup of caster sugar.

Assemble the dry ingredients: 1 and one half cups white flour, 1 and one half cups wholemeal flour, 1 and one half teaspoons of baking powder, three teaspoons of mixed spice and a shake or two extra of nutmeg, 1 teaspoon salt. Then grate enough zucchini to fill two cups (pack it down hard and include the rind – it will look stunning) and add a cup of sultanas, walnuts or raisins.

Mix it all up and chuck it into two loaf tins. Bake at 160 for about 45 minutes to an hour. Eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, preferably with butter.

Stuffed Zucchinis are very good indeed. Slice a marrow lengthways and hollow it out so it looks like a boat (keep the pulp, but not the seeds). Then take about a cup of carbs, like cooked rice, lentils, barley or couscous. Add some flavourings, like sundried tomatoes, cheeses (especially feta), herbs, nuts, half a cup or so of cooked mince, salami or bacon (if that’s your thing), capsicum, cooked onion and bulk it out with the zucchini flesh, then loosely pack into the boat. Stick the whole shebang in a baking tray and add a good slosh of white wine, stock or even water. Cover and bake at about 180 for about 25 minutes, then remove the covering and brown it off. Cheese and parmesan on the top make a crispy crust.

And, finally, the best summer soup recipe EVAH! Especially if you’ve grown it yourself. This soup tastes like it is filled with cream, but has nothing of the sort in it. It comes from my friend Rachel, who has raised her three kids on little more than Centrelink payments and is extraordinarily good at budgeting, as well as cooking. (As she told me,  at this time of year zucchini, tomatoes and even basil are cheap, so you can go to town on this one without going broke).

Rachel’s zucchini, tomato and basil soup (utterly vegan)
olive oil
2 sticks of celery, sliced fine
2 carrots, chopped fine
1 kilo zucchini, sliced
1 kilo tomato, diced
1 litre of water
1 bunch of basil
1 tsp sugar, 1 good pinch of salt

Pour a good whack of olive oil into the bottom of a big saucepan and fry the celery, carrots and onion gently, with the lid on. Then add the zucchini, tomato, and fry gently, again with the lid on. Add 1 litre of water. Cook for about 20 minutes. Add sugar and salt. Turn the heat off, take a bunch of basil and rip all the leaves off it. Cover the soup with the basil leaves. Then you can either get our your food wand and puree the lot, or tip it into a food processor and hit the high notes. Warm it gently again before serving, just to bring out the fragrance in the basil (though you can eat it cold). You will end up with a lovely orangey khaki blend, that tastes like summer. It is especially good for kids, because it’s all vegetable but they don’t suspect a thing. It can be turned into pasta sauce, eaten with rice, served gloopy for a substantial meal or watered down to a more refined soup.

I don’t have a picture, because it’s not always possible to photograph heaven.

I can understand that. I wasn’t raised to eat chilli, being Tasmanian as well as growing up in the house of a 10 pound pom with serious issues with flavour. It wasn’t really a feature of cooking in the student houses I’d lived in and I remember arriving in Sydney and perusing Thai and Sichuan Chinese restaurant menus in desperation, because everything seemed to have more chilli in it than I could bear.

My awakening was a Thai beef salad that hurt so much to eat it made my face burn purple and caused fat oily tears to roll down my cheeks but, once the 90 seconds of agony passed the flavour was so exquisite that you were prepared to do it all again. I never looked back, although I remain bemused by friends, particularly blokes, who seem to have permanently destroyed their tastebuds by overdosing on chilli. Nor would I ever eat an entire dorset naga. This Aussie bloke reckons it destroyed his sense of taste for 36 hours. Why would you do that?

The other extreme is, of course no chilli at all, and it has been hard living with a boy who is determined to avoid spice. He did make a concerted effort when he was five (announcing ‘I’m going to change my life’). Like most New Year’s resolutions, it didn’t last. But now we have to get into serious training, otherwise he’ll be stuck with Chinese food in Thailand, and what a shame that would be.

Fortunately he is prepared to take on the chilli challenge. Last week I bought a green chilli, and chopped the end off it for him. He ate it, apprehensively, but survived and was prepared to go one step further. My fingers were laden with the juice from the seeds so I placed one finger lightly on his tongue, and watched while he went ‘phwoar!’ and realised, for the first time, that chilli is joyous, as well as painful. Now he sees chillis in the supermarket and wonders …

We’re so excited about the trip, and I know that nothing we make here will ever taste as good as it does over there. I also know we can’t really prepare for the blasts of chilli to come and there will be tears – mine as well as his. But we’ve enjoyed upping the chilli ante and there have been some cool experiments, including chilli chocolate. One of those experiments, which I was inspired to make following a discussion on this blog about caramelising onions, was this nice quick chilli sambal. It involves my favourite chilli sauce, sambal oelek, which I love for its saltiness, particularly when blended with things like tempeh and Vietnamese mint.

Quick chilli onion sambal
Take two onions and slice them very thinly. Warm a tablespoon of sesame or peanut oil in a heavy saucepan. Add the onions and cook, covered, on a slow-moderate heat for at least 10 minutes until they go transparent and are beginning to brown. Take the lid off the pot, step up the heat a bit and add a tablespoon of brown sugar (or palm sugar) and a tablespoon of sambal oelek. Sit with it and cook it off until it’s a nice rich sticky, orangey brown, gloopy mess (don’t let it catch and burn). You end up with this;

The sugar and salt counter each other perfectly. It makes a terrific sauce for fish, or alongside spuds – it would be very good with tofu or tempeh. I also ate it with Francis Xavier Holden’s beef curry and it was fine. Obviously, if you want it properly hot, doubling the sambal oelek doubles the heat, and the onion can take it. Not sure the seven year old can …

I’d just like to say at this point that I hope nobody confuses my love of Christmas pudding with love for the festive season or even Christmas dinner. For me, the only good thing about Christmas is the pudding and it has to be perfect. This one is. It’s based on Stephanie Alexander’s mum’s recipe, AKA Emily Bell’s Christmas Pudding. However, over time I’ve worked in some important enhancements. Mine is more alcoholic and has nuts and treats in it. Best of all, I’ve learned how to do it vegetarian, which is helpful if you want to show Christmas love to people who object to consuming beef fat with their fruit.

Make it now so the flavour develops over the coming weeks. It takes some planning, so I’ve laid it out in stages – both vego and suet versions are included. The given quantities make two puddings, each of which furnishes about eight slices. You can do the math, because there are families in which eight slices will go a long way, but mine is not one of them. Just halve or double, depending on your pudding needs.

Necessary accoutrements

1 very large basin (and room for it in the fridge), two full-sized pudding basins or four little ones (see pic below) a stock pot or pressure cooker pot, a trivet or a round cake rack, foil, baking paper, string, a food processor with a grater attachment. Pudding basins don’t cost any more than $15 each and are worth it because they are pretty for give away puddings or can be reused at home. You can also use calico, which is cheaper, and I’ll tell you how, but the puddings don’t keep so well.

If you are not vegetarian or vegan, go to a proper butcher: ask them to put aside some beef suet (you cannot use suet mix, it won’t work as it’s got stuff added and the proportions don’t hold). You need to order proper suet. Ask for about a kilo – it’s really cheap and you’ll need more than you think.

Allow at least a weekend to do this: the mixture soaks for two full days and it takes six hours to cook each pudding. So choose a weekend when you’re happy to stay home and guard the fridge and the stove.

Now you are ready.

Ingredients

• Shortening: at least 500g suet OR 360 grams of vegetable shortening, cooking margarine or unsalted butter
• Dry ingredients: 180g plain flour, 180g fresh white breadcrumbs (not dried ones), 180g dark brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
• Fruit: 900 grams in combinations that please you. The original recipe calls for 360g seedless raisins, 360g currants and 180g sultanas. I prefer to reduce the raisins in favour of extra currants and other additions. You could add some dried apricots, apples or figs, just make sure you keep the weight up to 900g. I warn thee, fruit from the co-op will have far too many seeds and sticks in it, so it’s best avoided.
• Liquids: 4 big eggs, 600 ml milk (or soy milk), 150ml brandy, at least 1/4 cup of vodka (the original recipe is far too dainty in the alcohol stakes and calls for extra milk to make the mixture wet. I added extra vodka, with pleasing results). Note, you need more than 150 mls of brandy as it’s necessary for serving.
• Special magic additions: 125g candied peel and/or crystallised ginger, 180g (very) roughly chopped hazelnuts or almonds, around 125g of glace cherries if that’s what you are into. Again, whatever you choose to substitute, make sure it weighs about 430g. Also, grated zest of a lemon (or two if you don’t add peel) and a half a nutmeg grated (about two teaspoons of ground nutmeg). You can add allspice and cinnamon if you love them as I do.

Assemblage

Dead easy, except for managing the shortening. If you are a vegetarian shortening is no big deal. Just stick it in the freezer then grate it (don’t bother rubbing it into the flour).

If you are doing it the traditional way, with beef suet, it gets messy, but it’s worth it for flavour, holding quality and keeping ability. Suet is the fat that forms between layers of skin and muscle and comes with a membranous layer. Peel that off, and take the lumps you’ve got left (without any bits that are pink or gristly) and put them through your food processor’s grater blades or sit there for hours hand grating (and grating your hand). I know I’m not exactly selling the process, but do persevere! Keep the suet loose. It’s naturally soft, so if you pack it into the grater it sticks together. Starting with the suet very cold or frozen helps. Do try to avoid spraying it around the kitchen as it’s smeary and hard to clean up. Once you’ve got a nice fluffy lump of the stuff weigh it. You can stop grating when you get to 360 grams.

Take the shortening and everything else and chuck it in the bowl and stir until you have a big sloppy mess. It will be quite wet. Stick it in the fridge and ignore it for one day. Then get it out, stir it and taste a little bit. If you think it needs more spice, add it. Likewise brandy and vodka. Then refrigerate it for one more day.

To cook

Prepare your basins. Invert the basin onto baking paper. Draw a line around the bowl, and then cut out a nice little circle. Butter the dishes. Divide the pudding mixture evenly between the bowls and level off the surface. Butter the nice little baking paper circle and lay it butter side down on the pudding. Then get tinfoil and put two layers over the top of the bowl so it covers the sides at least 1/3 of the way down. Get a rubber band to hold it in place and tie it with heaps of string (the rubber band won’t stand up to the cooking, but it will help you get the string tight).

If you’ve decided not to use a basin, get two big pieces of calico, about 1 metre square, and boil them. While they are steaming hot lay them down on a scrupulously clean bench and chuck a big handful of flour in the middle. Smooth the flour out to make a circle. That will form a gluey coating that will protect the pud from the elements. Put half the pudding mix in the middle and pull the corners together. Use rubber bands to pull the top of the pudding into the characteristic pudding shape – you want as little room as possible between the top of the pudding and the rubber band and you want the floured bits to go all the way over the pudding. It’s tricky, so redo it if you need to. Tie long lengths of string around the top.

To cook them, get your biggest, tallest pot(s). If you are using a basin, put a trivet or cake rack in the bottom and sit the bowl down on that. Pour water in so it comes 2/3 the way up the sides of the bowl. If you are using a cloth tie the string on the handle of a wooden spoon and balance the spoon on the top of the pot so the pudding is suspended in the water. Whichever method you use, cover them, bring them to a boil and keep them going, topping up the water as needed. (If they are full size basins cook for six hours, half size three, teeny weeny two, etc.) Bits of suet or butter will leach out into the cooking water, just ignore. DO NOT GO OUT, we don’t want the firemen coming and destroying the puddings.

After cooking and cooling the foil on top of the basins will have gone all grey and horrid so replace it (an opportunity to smell the puds). If you’ve used a cloth, fan the fabric out so the top dries over a couple of days and keep the pudding hanging somewhere. Basin puddings keep for at least a year in the cupboard or the fridge (hah!). Cloth puddings can develop mould because this mix is wetter than you’d usually use so watch them, keep them in the fridge and eat them within a few months.

To eat

On Christmas Day boil it for another hour, using the same arrangements. To serve invert the bowl (or peel off the cloth), and you will have something that looks rather like this:

But before you eat it, you must flame it with brandy. To do that, get a big old tablespoon and fill it with brandy (remember, I told you that more than 150ml is required). Hold the spoon over the pudding and use a lighter to warm the bottom of the spoon until you see heat rising from the brandy, then flick the flame over the edge of the spoon so you get a blue flame. Pour the whole shebang over the pudding. Kids and adults are invariably delighted to see this:

After you’ve done that three or four times, as Zoe and Owen did for this picture in 2007, you are ready to eat. You can use cream or make proper vanilla bean custard or ice cream or brandy sauce, or serve it with hard sauce (which is overkill for such a rich pudding). One of my best moments was eating it with diet carton custard. Whatever you accompany it with, enjoy.

And here’s to you Ducky – a project for when you are feeling a bit better.

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.