After a sodden start, I’m been steadily harvesting produce from the patch this month. Every week I’ve been able to dig up fresh potatoes, the rhubarb is going nuts and we’re getting at least one zucchini a day. My sweetpeas have started flowering too, and the hydrangeas are enormous, presumably because of all of the rain. I’m loving the colours of our hydrangeas this year: pink, white and blue. I laughed when I saw them selling for $10 a stem in New World supermarket last week. We obviously have a garden worth a small fortune

Summer is flying by. We’ve had water fights in the shower, been bike riding with cousins, sung along with the Muppets, and picked strawberries in Waipukurau. And despite the weird amounts of rain, we’ve managed to capture the taste of summer in a glass by making this ruby-red strawberry cordial. It keeps for about a week and a half in the fridge. Only if you don’t drink it all at once, that is.

The recipe comes from NZ Gardener‘s Homegrown Berries, and is so simple to make:

Ingredients
2 cups of sugar (I used less)
2 cups of water
500 grams of strawberries, hulled
1/4 cup lemon juice

Method:
Place sugar and water in a pot over a medium heat and stir until sugar has dissolved. Simmer for 5-6 minutes until syrupy. Set aside to cool.

Blend firm, undamaged berries in your food processor until smooth. Strain through a fine sieve to remove seeds (this takes a while!). Combine strawberry puree with sugar syrup and lemon juice. Stir well.

Serve in glasses, topped up with soda water and ice. Sit back, relax and savour the sweet, sweet taste of summer.

Our bellies are full of good, good food and drink. We celebrated Christmas with family and soaked in the sunshine. We sang Christmas carols, walked up Mt Kaukau and admired the red pohutakawas that are blooming throughout Wellington. Merry Christmas everyone!

Happy upcoming 5th birthday to Mr 5′s buddy Alex! I made this blanket for her last night, sewing a felt garden onto some nice thick woollen fabric, then backing it with lime green polar fleece. It’s a really cuddly blanket, so we hope you like it Alex. Happy travels to Blenheim too – we’ll miss you guys xx

We’re adjusting to the ebbs and flows of the school day. It’s quite a big adjustment, but so far Mr 5 is enjoying it. His teacher is fantastic and his classmates are so little and sweet. When Mr 5 fell over in the playground on his third day, two ‘bigger kids’ helped him out by getting some bandaids for his knees.

Today we painted our nails green – the colour chosen by Mr 5 himself. I asked him if any of the kids at school liked his nails and he said “some kids said it was ‘girl’ “. I asked him how he felt about that, and he said “I told them NO”. So cute.

The end of the week brings our first school fundraiser, so I made up some ‘galaxy packs’ today for Mr 5′s schoolmates to buy for a dollar or so. They’re full of galaxy playdough, some glow-in-the-dark stars, stickers and some marbles. I hope the kids like them.

Tuesday is always baking day, so I also made some chocolate chip biscuits. I like that Mr 5 always has something homemade in his lunchbox. Because he gets so tired after a school, I find that he really needs to eat by 5pm. Unfortunately tonight’s dinner stretched well past that timeframe, but some veges and chicken quickly thrown together, with wine, chicken stock, preserved lemons and herb salt filled up our bellies and Mr 5 was fast asleep in bed before 7pm.

For the most space-crazed kid I know: happy fifth birthday gorgeous boy, love your proud Mama xxx

The elders are flowering, I’ve started foraging, and now is the perfect time to start making elderflower champagne. I’ve been making this for 2 years now and have perfected my technique, so thought I’d share it with you today. Although it does involve a fermentation process, the final drink is very light and bubbly, and not very alchoholy at all. I like to bring along a couple of chilled bottles at Christmas, and it goes beautifully with a strawberry in the glass – it’s a perfect summery, fizzy drink!

There are a couple of things to bear in mind when bottling elderflower champagne. If you google for recipes, you’ll discover hundreds of horror stories of bottles exploding. So don’t google it, just use your noggin. I use glass bottles, and have never had any bottles explode, although we have had a few incidents with corks exploding off the bottles! We store our bottled champagne in the laundry, which is coolish in temperature, and also means that if any corks do come unstuck, the resulting puddles are easy to clean up.

Without further ado, here’s the recipe and my method. NB – I usually just halve the recipe and work with 5 litres of liquid:

Equipment:

- A large bucket (that you never use for anything else)

- Wooden spoon

- Muslin cloth, or teatowel to cover bucket

- Funnel

- Muslin cloth to line funnel

- Ladle

- Packet of sterilising rinse

- Wine bottles (with indentation in bottom)

- Champagne corks

- Champagne wire cages

Ingredients:

– 10 litres of boiled water, cooled

- About 25-50 elderflower heads – stripped from their stalks, but not washed

- 2 lemons (juice and zest)

- 1 kg white sugar

- 4 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

Method:

I’m a stickler for cleanliness/hygiene, so make sure your bucket is super clean. I usually wash ours with boiling water, and I make sure I never use it for any other purpose. I adore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as much as the next forager, but the episode where he made elderflower champagne in black plastic rubbish bins made me cringe. And when he scraped the mould off the top of his mixture – well… (also, his recipe that the BBC posted online originally had an incorrect amount of sugar or something, which seemed to result in many of the “holy crap my bottles have exploded” stories).

Boil ten litres of water, then let it cool in your clean plastic bucket. To this cooled water, add the juice and rind of two lemons, 1 kg of white sugar and four tablespoons of white wine vinegar. It’s really important to let the boiled water cool, because the elderflowers contain a natural yeast that is going to trigger the fermentation process, and this yeast will simply die if you plunge it into boiling water.

Add your elderflowers to your water/sugar/white wine vinegar mixture, and push the flowers down until they’re submerged. Again – don’t wash the flowers beforehand because you don’t want to wash away the yeast. Just sift through them by hand to remove any obvious wildlife. (You don’t need to add any brewer’s yeast either – honestly, the natural yeast in the flowers works just fine.)

Give the mixture a good stir with the wooden spoon, cover with a piece of muslin/teatowel and stand in a warmish room for a couple of days. Stir the mixture every once in a while. I’ve found that our mixture needs to sit for about 5 days in total.

After about 5 days, you’ll notice that the mixture in the bucket fizzes when you stir it. When I say “fizzes”, I mean that it makes a fizzing noise, and you can see bubbles. The flowers have turned brown by this stage, but that doesn’t matter. As soon as your mixture is fizzing, this means you need to bottle it.

I mentioned the bottling process earlier – and how confusing it can be to figure out what sort of bottles to use. If plastic 1.5 litre bottles float your boat, then go ahead and use them. After a bit of trial and error though, I’ve found green glass wine bottles to be the best type of bottles to use – they have the indentation in the bottom, and champagne corks fit into them. After all, if I’m going to give someone a bottle of elderflower champagne – I want them to get the champagne cork popping effect! I bought my bottles (and re-use them year after year) from here, but I also save Lindauer bottles, which work perfectly too.

Before you pour the fizzing elderflower mixture into bottles, you need to make sure they are sterilised. It’s important to sterilise the corks as well. I used to wash all my bottles and pop them in the oven for 100 degrees for 15 minutes, but I’ve since discovered a MUCH easier method – I buy a sterile solution in packets from the local homebrew shop, and simply wash the bottles and corks in this. I was hesitant to use this mixture at first, as I thought it might affect the end product flavour – but it works perfectly and has no discernable impact on the taste.

Line up the sterile bottles and pop a clean funnel into the first. Overtop of this funnel, I lay a clean piece of muslin cloth (that has been washed & then ironed at a very high temperature). The muslin is important because it’s going to catch the flowers and any little critters from the mixture that you don’t want going into the bottles.

I then use a ladle to dip into the elderflower liquid, and carefully pour it into the funnel/muslin cloth and fill the bottle almost to the top – remembering to leave enough room for the cork to fit in. To be honest, I usually require the help of Skruff at this point, as he’s much better than me at wedging the corks into the bottles. We then tie the wire cages overtop the champagne corks, and repeat for the remaining mixture/bottles.

We do keep a careful eye on the bottles once they’ve been corked and caged, as the mixture continues to ferment inside the bottle, and the corks can be forced out – despite the wire cages. We’ve only had to do it once before, but you can release a bit of the gas from inside (if you do it carefully and slowly) and only if it looks like the corks are going to explode. Otherwise, you just need to leave the bottles for about 4 weeks or so (or less), before you can can open them and drink the beautiful elderflower champers!

Some other useful tips:

Try to pick the flowers on a sunny day as they will contain more yeast. If you pick the flowers from different trees you guarantee better fermentation as the amount of yeast differs from plant to plant.

Don’t know what an elderflower looks like? Here are some places where you can find elders growing in Wellington.

Discard any mixture that goes mouldy. This usually happens because bottles have not been sterilised properly.

I recommend opening bottles outside – we’ve seen the corks sail over two back gardens and numerous rooftops. You get an awesome popping effect!

I transport the bottles in the boot of the car because I’m a scaredy cat.

If you keep your bottles in the fridge, then it’ll reduce any possible explosions. Plus – the elderflower champagne is much nicer to drink when chilled.

If you have IBS, or other stomach problems, then don’t drink too much, as it will upset your stomach, in a similar-to-baked-beans kind of way…

Bottles of elderflower champagne make the ultimate handmade Christmas present, and most people adore the taste of fizzy elderflower. Enjoy!

Labour day has been and gone, and I haven’t planted out any seedlings. Not for want of organisation though – I was highly organised and had a tray of seeds ready to go, but the only ones that sprouted were the zucchini. As a result I went back to the drawing board and bought new seeds. I was pretty chuffed to find Koanga Seeds at Commonsense Organics, so bought a few packets to try out. Hopefully I get a better strike rate with these…

I’ve re-sown my trays with tomatoes, and apple cucumber, squash, beans and sunflowers. Sunflowers always make me happy, so these ones had better thrive.

I also realised that my pen-on-iceblock-stick markers were pretty useless, so I made some pretty lasercut-on-plastic markers to go in the trays. They’re pretty flash and they will always be legible, no matter the rain/sun/wind/rain combo that always strikes Wellington at this time of year. Take that iceblock sticks!

This slab of dark brown mess doesn’t look very attractive, does it? Unfortunately it is unlikely to last until the morning, when I would have been able to photograph it in a much better light. This, friends, is ‘Jo is thirty chocolate fudge’ – an incredibly decadent and velvety chocolate fudge that is one of those go-to recipes for when you need to ‘take a plate’ of something along to someone’s house. The recipe was given to me a few years ago by a good friend, who made it for her flatmate’s birthday. The plate was consumed almost at the speed of light, and guests were astonished when they were told that one of the main ingredients was melted marshmallows.

Written down, the recipe also comes across as rather unpalatable – but let me assure you that it is *extremely* edible. I took a plate of fudge along to my sister’s birthday afternoon tea today (happy birthday Sarah!) and it was devoured in under 5 minutes. Even by our Mother, who usually avoids anything with dairy in it. I foolishly didn’t take along the entire slab along, however, and now the rest of it is sitting in the fridge quietly whispering “eat me” every ten minutes. And I’m more than happy to oblige…

Even though it says to refrigerate the mixture overnight, it sets incredibly quickly, and today it only had 40 minutes to chill in the fridge before we needed to leave. So, without further ado – here’s the recipe for my favourite fudge. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t like it:

Ingredients:

- 200g marshmallows

- 25g butter

- 1 Tbsp water

- 375g dark chocolate (or half dark & half milk)

- 1 tsp vanilla essence

- 1 cup nuts (walnuts & pistachios are my personal favourite)

- Raisins, cherries, dried apricots, lollies etc (today I used dried cranberries, dried apricot pieces & jellybabies)

Method:

1. Place butter, marshmallows and water in a large microwave-proof bowl and cook on high for 3 minutes (stir once or twice as marshmallows melt).

2. Stir in chocolate and cook for 30 second bursts on high until it has all melted, stirring to blend.

3. Add vanilla and mix.

4. Add nuts, lollies etc.

5. Pour into a 20cm square lined tin. Wrap in tin foil and refrigerate overnight.

(I’d add a further caveat too: don’t make it on the eve of the Rugby World Cup Semi Final. I don’t even particuarly like rugby and am currently eating this fudge in a flurry of nerves.)

A quick visit to Waipukurau a few weeks back netted us a huge bag of lemons and grapefruit (thanks Gran!). I’ve turned some of them into cordial, which is highly addictive (I’ll blog the recipe later), and preserved the rest of the lemons by packing them in salt. (By the way, read this book about salt – the most fascinating book I’ve finished this year.)

I first read about preserved lemons in one of Ray McVinnie’s food columns in the SST a few years ago, then noticed they rated a mention in the NZ Gardener Magazine. I now understand why people rave about them so much – it turns out that preserved lemons are DELICIOUS! After three months of marinating in lemon juice and salt, the lemon rind becomes soft and sweet and the liquid turns into a wonderful syrup. They enhance almost any savoury dish they’re added to – we add chopped up pieces to roast lamb, roast chicken, roast potatoes, rice, salads and we use the syrup in vinaigrettes. I now make several jars throughout the year, using whatever lemons I can lay my hands on – usually Meyer- and I’ve also preserved limes as well, to lip-smackingly-good effect. I reckon some preserved lemons would go perfectly with Emma’s perfect roast chicken recipe. Here’s how I make them:

Ingredients:
- Lemons – about 4 per jar & the juice from another 4
- Sea Salt
- Bay leaves, rosemary spring (if you like)

Equipment:
- Some jars with lids
- Tongs
- Lemon juicer
- Seive
- Bowl
- Lemon zester
- Saucepan
- Oven heated to 100 degrees C
- Oven gloves

1. Heat the oven to 100 degrees C. Wash your jars well in hot soapy water, then pop them into the oven to sterilise them, for at least 10 minutes. At the same time, pop your lids/seals in a saucepan full of water and bring these to the boil on the stovetop. Boil them for at least 10 minutes, just to make sure they are sterile.

2. Give your lemons a bit of a scub, to make sure they’re clean. Pat them dry, then slice them with an X through the top, but not all the way through – so that the lemons are still intact, as per this photo:

3. Scrape out as many lemon pips as you can (it doesn’t matter if you don’t get them all). Pop the sliced lemons into a bowl, and start packing them with sea salt. You want to cram as much salt into the middle of the lemons as possible.

4. Once you have packed your lemons with salt, juice the other lemons – the stuffed lemons will be covered with lemon juice in the jars. I find it easiest to juice these lemons ahead of time, and also zest them *before* I juice them, so that the zest doesn’t go to waste – I simply pop the zest into a bag in the freezer to use at a later date.

5. Remove a sterilised jar from the oven. Using the tongs, pick up a salted and stuffed lemon and add it to the jar. I can cram about 4 lemons in a 500ml jar. Use the tongs to push the stuffed lemons down – because the jar is sterile, I don’t want to touch it with my fingers. I usually throw in a sprig of rosemary and a bay leaf as well. Some people add cinnamon quills and cloves – basically, add whatever herbs and spices you like!

6. Sprinkle a few more spoonfuls of salt into the jar, then pour lemon juice over the top of its contents. I usually pour the juice through a seive, to catch any rogue pips and pith. I’ve found it doesn’t matter if the lemons aren’t totally covered with lemon juice – the sterile jars and salt pretty much make it impossible for any bugs to grow.

7. Use the tongs and fetch your seal/lid from the boiling water in the saucepan and pop on top of the jar. I don’t worry if the contents don’t seal properly (ie if the lid doesn’t ‘pop’), because I’ve never had a problem with the contents going mouldy.

8. Put your jar of lemony goodness in a cool, darkish place for about three months and shake it up every once in a while. After three months, the liquid turns to syrup and you can open the jar and start using the lemons however you desire. Once opened, I keep them in the fridge.

9. Clean up the shocking mess!