The Breakfast Challenge – Spring Fruit Salad With Oat Nut Crumble

by Linda on September 29, 2011

We picked the first of the season’s paw paws this morning (papaya in USA).  And Brian brought me a bucket of mulberries from their magnificent tree – the earliest around.  After months of citrus and custard apples, the berry season is here!

You don’t get to enjoy mulberries unless you have a tree (or know someone like Brian, or can find an unharvested neighbourhood tree) – one of the many fantastic foods that have never made it into our commercialised system only because they are too soft to transport and store.  Mulberries are  hugely healthy – most foods with that deep colour are rich sources of anti-oxidants, and mulberries are also a really good source of iron along with a batch of other vitamins and  minerals.

The best way to eat mulberries is to be ten years old and sitting up in the fork of the tree,  near naked to save clothes from stains, maybe with some other kids to chat with or maybe just with your thoughts, selecting the fattest purple berries to go directly from tree to mouth.  Failing that though, paw paw, strawberry, mulberry and citrus fruit salad is one of those made-in-heaven combinations.  With home made yoghurt and oat nut crumble….

Oat Nut Crumble

Get all the ingredients assembled before you start.  This cooks really quickly and is easy to burn.

Put a heavy bottomed fry pan on over a medium-high heat.

Add just 1 teaspoon honey and 1 teaspoon macadamia oil, then, as soon as they are warm and mixed,

  • 2 dessertspoons rolled oats
  • 3 dessertspoons seeds and nuts – I used one each of pepitas, sunflower seeds, and macadamias.

Cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes until they brown and the seeds start popping.

Best fresh made, and it only takes a minute.

(The Breakfast Cereal Challenge is my 2011 challenge – a year’s worth of breakfast recipes based on in-season ingredients, that are quick and easy enough to be a real option for weekdays, and that are preferable, in nutrition, ethics, and taste,  to the overpackaged, overpriced, mostly empty packets of junk food marketed as “cereal” .The Muesli Bar Challenge was my 2010 Challenge.)

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Summer Kangaroo Kebabs in Green Paw Paw Marinade

by Linda on January 1, 2011

We celebrated New Year’s Eve at a barbeque with neighbours. It’s one of the things I love about living in a functioning community – socialising within walking distance.  I could go on about greenhouse footprints but really it’s enough that I can drink half a bottle of red wine and wander home in the starlight wishing happy New Year to the owlet nightjar that lives on the way!

I took kangaroo kebabs to the barbeque.  Normally I buy kangaroo fillet steak to make kebabs – it’s so cheap compared to beef fillet, and you really don’t use a lot of it in kebabs. But there was no fillet steak this time, so I bought diced kangaroo which is much tougher and usually best suited to long slow cooking.

It is the very end of the pawpaw (Carica papaya) season here.  We’ve been harvesting several every week for four months now, all from one really prolific tree.  But the bounty is almost over and the wet weather is causing them to develop a fungus disease called anthracnose if we let them completely ripen on the tree.

Which means they’re perfect for green paw paw salads and tenderising diced kangaroo. Pawpaw has an enzyme called papain which is the main ingredient in commercial meat tenderisers.  Green pawpaw has more of it but ripe pawpaw has enough to work as a marinade.

The Recipe:

An hour or two beforehand:

Soak 20 kebab skewers.

In the food processor, blend together

  • a small pawpaw (200 grams or so), thinly peeled and de-seeded
  • several cloves of garlic
  • knob fresh turmeric
  • an onion
  • a chili
  • two dessertspoons of lemon juice or some other acid – I still have Eureka lemons fruiting, but you could use verjuice if you have unripe grapes, or wine.
  • some sweetener.  I prefer treacle, but you can substitute honey or brown sugar.  Somewhere between one and two dessertspoons – more for a green pawpaw and less for a ripe one.
  • a dessertspoon of  soy sauce

Massage the marinade through 1 kilogram of diced kangaroo meat, cover, and leave it in the fridge.

Dice a small eggplant into cubes a bit bigger than the kangaroo.  Sprinkle with salt and put it in a colander.

An hour or two later:

Rinse the eggplant and squeeze out the moisture.  It will have shrunk to roughly the same size as the kangaroo cubes.  Thread the marinated meat onto skewers, alternating with eggplant, capsicum, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and mushrooms.  Pour the remaining marinade over the skewers.

Cook on a hot barbeque for a few minutes each side.

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Pawpaw Gingernuts

by Linda on October 25, 2010

Paw paws are in season and we are picking several a week at the moment.  If you live in their climate zone and grow pawpaws, you probably also have a glut.  If you don’t, sadly this recipe won’t be for you.  Pawpaws don’t travel well and those picked green for supermarkets are not worth buying.

If you do though, pawpaws are another of those orange coloured fruits rich in carotenes, vitamin C and flavonoids that are potent antioxidants and protective against a whole range of chronic diseases.  They also have fibre, folate, and a good range of minerals.  But their special power is a group of  protein-digesting enzymes including papain, that are anti-inflammatory and good for reducing allergies.

These biscuits (or cookies for US readers) easily satisfy the Muesli Bar Challenge rules:  easy enough for busy parents and even kids themselves to be bothered actually making, routinely, for daily school or work lunchboxes, not too loaded up with sugar or fat, based on real whole grains and in season produce, and robust enough to survive being bounced around in a school lunch box. Let’s see if they meet the other criteria: approved by my school age reviewers .

The Recipe:

Makes 2 dozen biscuits

Turn your oven on to heat up. Grease two biscuit (or cookie to US readers) trays.

  • Cream together
    • 4 dessertspoons of butter (100 gm)
    • 4 dessertspoons of brown sugar
  • Beat in:
    • an egg
    • 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind
    • 2 teaspoons  (or more) of ginger powder, depending on how fresh your ginger is and how gingery you like it.
  • Blend or puree half a cup of paw paw pulp and stir in.
  • Sieve together and stir in
    • 1½ cups of wholemeal plain flour
    • 1 teaspoon of baking powder
    • pinch of salt

You should end up with a dough that is sticky, but using wet hands you will be able to roll it into small balls and arrange them on a greased biscuit tray.

Using a wet fork, flatten the balls into a biscuit.  Sprinkle a pinch of raw sugar crystals on each one.

Bake in a medium hot oven for around 25 minutes until they are lightly browned.

Cool on the tray (they will crispen up as they cool).

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Paw Paw and Citrus Fruit Salad

October 23, 2010

My current favourite breakfast – paw paw and citrus fruit salad with homemade yoghurt and toasted pepitas (and a few strawberries to top it off).  Paw paw and citrus flavours go so well together, and luckily I have the last citrus of the season – late mandarins and pomelos – still picking. I hesitated to [...]

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