The Hampering

Happy New Year, readers! I hope you've celebrated in style. Ladies of taste and distinction that we are, Tara and I ushered in the new year with fascinators, passion pop and a lot of rather terrible dancing. I drank, I ate, I took my shoes off and ran around outdoors, and now that those last few fateful swigs of cheap champagne are leaving my system I'm finally feeling capable of blogging again.

So, Christmas hey? Well that's done and dusted for another year. My Christmas was the usual exhausting, lovely, talk-politely-to-that-distant-relative-you-hate kind of affair. My sister, my man and I combined our vegetarian super powers to make Jamie Oliver's delicious nut roast (otherwise known as "the best stuffing my Pop has ever tasted" *sigh*) and of course we had pudding, salads, daggy christmas hats and wine. So. Much. Wine.

What else happened this Christmas? Well... I totally made hampers you guys! I gave them to people, and they were well received, and people ate and drank and were merry. You have no idea how relieved I am that the hampers were well received. Baking, jamming, truffling, macaroning, turkish delighting... I held my breath when people first tasted what I'd made, and I swear to Dawkins had someone looked unimpressed, I would've staged an almighty Christmas meltdown. I'm not saying homicide, but I have a feeling the fallout would've attracted the attention of the local media... the words "crazed" and "rampage" come to mind.

So above is a photo of my completed hamper. Chris, my tolerant and talented partner (fiancee, boyfriend, guy I like to kiss on the mouth) did all of the design work, I did all of the cooking, and together we hot-glued and folded and tied bows until what you see above was finished. Rather naively I had assumed that preparing eight odd Christmas hampers would be relatively straightforward. Hah. Flash forward a month and I was stuck in my kitchen at 2am on a wednesday night, microwaving vegan gelatine alternative and scraping almond meal from the walls. Nonetheless... I'll do it all again next year. I'm just proud as punch at how everything turned out:

Lime Jelly from here. I didn't modify this recipe at all, except to leave the lime pulp in (but not the peel).

Chocolate Truffles from here. I prepared half with the milk chocolate and sea salt, and rolled the other half in a combination of cocoa powder and cayenne pepper. The salted truffles tasted a little like caramel, and the chilli chocolate ones were warm, rich and slightly spicy.

Turkish Delight from here. I substituted gelatine for agar-agar, a nifty vegan seaweed derivative that works just like gelatine but without all of the snouts and trotters and beef skin. I'm pretty sure Turkish Delight is one of those inherently difficult to enjoy sweets. It's sickly, it smells like grandma's potpourri, and the powdered sugar it's rolled in is a choking hazard. But I got it in my head that I needed to make a Turkish Delight with the White Witch quote from Narnia printed on it. So: Turkish Delight for all!

Pfeffernüsse. I made these using this basic recipe, but I doubled the spice quantities. Apparently these babies develop their flavour over time, but given that I was baking them a day or two before Christmas I thought it best to flavour them heavily to start with.

Oh, and I made Macarons. Boy did I make macarons. I made three failed batches of Macarons, two average batches, I made a great batch really early on and then promptly ate the lot, and I made the macarons seen above in the few days before Christmas. I'll blog about the delicate art of macaroning some time soon. I'll need an entire post to dedicate to my macaron saga...

So, hampers! Burns and spills and hot glue everywhere but hampers got done, bitch. Please let me know what you think of our lovely goods! New year, new goals... I'm toying with the idea of attempting a market stall this easter.

A Long Awaited Reunion

Picture this scene: A busy Melbourne marketplace. Early afternoon. Thousands of hungry foodies bustling about with trolleys, vying for the best pumpkin, the juiciest tomatoes, green-bags akimbo and smug "I buy organic" facial expressions firmly in place. All of a sudden, spied across the crowded market floor. Could it be? Yes! I let out a gasp of joy, the boyfriend, a dismaying groan. No folks, it wasn't Alan Rickman, down on one knee and come for me at last. It was... a feijoa. Several feijoa's to be precise. Sitting in a happy green pile, just waiting for me.

What is a feijoa, you may ask? Well, I know I've probably said the same of countless foodstuffs before, but feijoas are my all time favourite food. They are defined variously as a strange gooseberry, a sort of guava, or if you're my boyfriend "that dirty fruit that tastes the way deep heat cream smells." To most, they are a strange green item roughly the size and shape of an egg, never tasted and therefore never enjoyed. To me, they are autumns in my grandmother's backyard. They are spoons and sticky hands. They are excess consumption, followed by indigestion. In short, they are the best.

You'll have to pardon this odd, ecstatic little post. It's just that I've finally found someone south of my Grandma's poolside who grows and sells feijoas - until the weekend, a feijoa hadn't passed my lips in years, and needless to say it was an overdue reunion. If you haven't tasted my favourite of fruits, you really ought to. Take a close look at the photo provided, and if you see one hanging over a back fence, or lying idly in a front yard, snap that shit up and eat it where you stand. Feijoa's are a strange fruit, something like a guava, a kiwi, and a fig combined, but... better somehow. Delicious.

A Few Feijoa Recipes, should you ever get your hands on some:

Jam: http://sallywise.com.au/blog
Muffins: http://www.lifestylefood.com.au
Salad (substitute figs for feijoas): http://villagefeast.com.au

Cocktail - Feijoa Mule:

• Vodka (The 42 below feijoa flavoured kind is delicious, if you can find it!)
• Ginger beer
• Fresh mint, lime, and a peeled and halved feijoa.

Muddle ice, a shot of vodka, mint, lime wedges and feijoa. Pour over ginger beer and enjoy.

So go forth and enjoy the humble feijoa. Just keep your hands off the ones at the Vic Markets, they're mine.

The Jammening*

We'd been living in our new little rental place for a few months when spring hit and suddenly, we were drowning in blossoms. So it shouldn't have been a surprise when, a couple of months later, we discovered seven of our trees were bearing fruit. For someone with a child's grasp of botany, however, it was, and I couldn't stop myself from taking roughly 8 million photos.



Our felicity was compounded when we realised that not only did the fruit look great, it tasted delicious. I cannot now remember how many days I came home from work only to stop before I got in the door and gorge on sun warmed plums, straight from the tree to my mouth. And much like this farmer I was loving the fact that it was free. Bliss.


It all got a bit too much, and realising that I and my housemates couldn't possibly eat the nearly seven kilos I picked from one tree in one day in a bout of plum madness (and also realising that my friends had started to look slightly terrified when I kept trying to offload plums), I stored them in the freezer and made plans for jam. Enter jam queen, fellow Morrissey lover, and ridiculously talented illustrator, Alice.

According to Alice Jam (plum)

What You Will Need
(This is the only recipe I've made that requires more apparatus than ingredients.)

• Knife

• Large plastic or ceramic bowl

• Large saucepan

• Glass jars

• Ladle

• Sugar

• Plums

You will need plums

What You Will Need to Do:

Day One, or, The Four C's of Jamming

• Check your fruit for gross bits (cut off if needed), and then wash and weigh them. Alice suggested that for every kilo of plums, you need roughly 3 cups of sugar. We ended up with about three kilos, and about seven cups, allowing for the fact that stoning the plums would reduce the weigh somewhat. Chop your plums up, leave the skin on, remove the stones. We hypothesised that it doesn't really matter if a couple of the stones get in – after all, that's where the pectin lives – as long as you get them out again before jarring your jam.

• Chuck all your plum bits into a non-metallic bowl and mix in with sugar. It should be wet and oozy when combined.
  

Wet and Oozy

• Cover with cling film and refrigerate overnight.

Day Two, or, I Couldn't Figure Out Alliteration For This One, Sorry

• Remove bowl from fridge, and poke fruity goo with a wooden spoon. Marvel that the nascent jam looks so much like alien slime and realise that even if this jam caper goes horribly wrong, you could probably make a living selling this stuff to SFX companies.
  

• Put goo in a large saucepan over a medium heat

• Put a clean ceramic plate in the fridge. This will come in handy later.

• Stir, adjust temperature, stir some more. This will likely go on for about an hour: your jam (for this is what it is at this point) will have reduced by about a third. Be careful you don't get scalded at this point. Boiling jam is the hottest substance known to man!

Tastier and Hotter than Lava

• This is where the cold plate comes in handy (you were wondering, right?). Put a blob of jam on the plate: place the plate in the fridge. After five or so minutes remove from the fridge, and eat. If this is the consistency you would like your jam, you're done. You don't want to cook it to long – you won't be able to get it out of the jar and that would be tragic.

Part Three: Cooking Your Jars.

• Meanwhile, I hope you've been collecting glass jars. Preheat your oven to around 150 degrees.

• Soak jars and lids in very, very hot water, and scrub labels off. Clean the lids thoroughly and set aside to dry – they won't be going in the oven.

• Place jars on a tray and in a preheated oven. Turn oven off. The heat from the oven will sterilize the jars in about ten minutes.

• Ladle your jam into hot, clean jars. You will probably want gloves, tongs and friends around to help with this bit, it gets a bit awkward.

• Screw lids on tightly: press the buttons on the lids down. Now, I don't know if this is true, but Dr Dean says it is. There is always a risk that jam will go bad if the jars aren't properly sterilized – set jam aside for a few days, and if your lids don't pop up you're ready to go!

• Make some scones and eat a whole jar of jam with a friend of yours. You will feel a little bit sick, but it will be delicious.

Fruit Goes In, Jam Comes Out

Listen to some happy jam making songs. I recommend:

Jogging Gorgeous Summer by Islands
A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill by Jens Lekman
The New Cobweb Summer by Lambchop

*Alice not only helped with the jam, but provided the title to this blog.