We picked the first of the new season’s macadamias yesterday. It’s a bit earlier than usual, but the warm wet weather seems to have been bringing them on, and they are starting to drop and be got by the creatures. I don’t mind the creatures getting some of them. Because they are a native to this region, we’ve included seedling trees in all the riparian native plantings. But we also have some grafted varieties that were planted for human food, and I want some harvest from them! The first of the season nuts are so sweet.
Macadamia and fruit nut butters are one of my favourite recipes. I’ve posted Macadamia and Pear Butter and Turmeric and Mandarin Nut Butter, before, but the idea works with just about any sweet juicy fruit, and Banana Macadamia Butter is one of the favourites.
Fresh nuts in season, unprocessed and in their shell, are one of the things that don’t seem to get appreciated enough to make it into the weekly fresh food shopping. With my family’s history of heart disease, I really like it that macas work as well as the “clinically proven to lower cholesterol” margarines that taste fake. Their fats are the “good” kind and they are also high in protein, fibre, B vitamins, minerals and and antioxidants. Put it on Oat and Linseed Sourdough, and I feel so virtuous as well as happy.
The Recipe:
Dry roast a good handful of macadamia kernels in a heavy frypan over a medium heat for a couple of minutes, shaking the pan, till they just start to colour.
Tip them into a blender or food processor with a banana. Blend the mixture till smooth. Taste and add a little salt, or honey, or both.
Slather onto your favourite bread, toasted, and eat.
I wasn’t going to post until the new year, but my love for patterns got in the way, and it seemed a pity not to make it a clean sweep – a Breakfast Challenge recipe for every week of the year. And this is one I’ve been waiting all year to get to! It is my partner’s very favourite breakfast, and cooked tomatoes are specially good for blokes – there is good evidence the lycopene in them is strongly protective against prostate cancer – but there’s lots of reasons for women to like them too.
It has been an interesting challenge. We have had a few favourites, recipes that made an appearance several times a week in their season, and variations on the same theme that flowed into another season.
Some version of oatcakes, based on fruit in season, eggs and rolled oats has also appeared on our breakfast table most weeks of the year. I posted the Mango Oatcakes, and the Banana Oatcakes, but Peach Oatcakes, Blueberry Oatcakes, Apple Oatcakes, and Pear Oatcakes have also been favourites in their season.
Some version of omelette pikelets, with vegetables in season mixed with egg yolks and whipped egg whites are another standard. I posted Sweet Corn and Capsicum Omelette Pikelets and Spinach and Feta Omelette Pikelets, and Fresh Pea and Mint Omelette Pikelets, but there have also been Broccoli and Lemon Omelette Pikelets and Pumpkin and Cheddar Omelette Pikelets and Zucchini and Feta Omelette Pikelets that haven’t made it onto the recipes yet.
Nut butter on sourdough toast, made with macadamias and fruit in season was a favourite all the way through from April to August through maca season. I posted Macadamia and Pear Butter and Turmeric and Mandarin Nut Butter, but it felt a bit mean to post the Banana Nut Butter in this year when the bush turkeys ravages on our bananas were nothing compared to the effect cyclone Yasi had on prices.
Citrus curd – lemon curd, mandarin curd, lime curd, orange curd – on toast or pancakes came up much more often in real life than in the blog, but since the technique is the same it didn’t seem worth another recipe.
And of course there were eggs every which way, and a good few of my favourite ten minute vegetable recipes that are good for breakfast but also for a quick easy lunch or dinner. It’s been fun, it has made me a little more creative, a little less likely to just go with a piece of toast, and I hope it has shifted someone just a bit towards the idea that packaged breakfast cereals are a complete waste of everything – money, kilojoules, health, joy, food miles, packaging, water, and even, somewhere way back in the process, a little bit of agricultural land. Life’s too short for bad food!
The Recipe:
(For two. But this is a good recipe for breakfast for lots of people if you multiply the recipe and use a very big pan, because it doesn’t require too much multitasking to get it all out at once.)
Toast on to cook and a heavy frypan on to heat up with a little olive oil.
Add (in this order):
An onion, diced
A zucchini, diced (or not – just we’re not allowed to eat anything without zucchini in it this time of year!)
A capsicum, sliced thinly
Chili to taste, finely diced (not too much – there’s not much to mellow it out in the recipe – I like spice and I only go for one mild-ish chili)
Garlic – two or three cloves crushed
Half a teaspoon of cumin seeds
Saute for a minute or two until the cumin seeds start to pop, then add tomatoes. If you have cherry or grape tomatoes, just add them whole. If you have Roma or beefsteak tomatoes, roughly chop them. Cover the bottom of the pan with tomatoes – a good cup or two per person.
Add a little salt and pepper and cook for a minute or two till the tomatoes start to soften, then mash them roughly with a potato masher to release the juice.
Simmer for a couple of minutes, just to get it all hot then turn it down to medium low.
The next bit is easiest with a helper. If you don’t have one handy, you’ll need to break eggs into cups first. Use an egg flip to make a little hollow in the tomato mix and quickly break an egg into it. Repeat for one or two eggs per person.
Put a lid on the pan and simmer for about three minutes till the whites of the eggs are set but the yolks are still runny.
I love stone fruit season. We’re too far north for the best of it – I’ve learned that it is futile trying to get decent apricots or cherries this far north. But we get good local peaches and plums from within my “100 mile diet” range, with most of the 100 miles vertical, up onto the Northern Tablelands where there is enough chill factor and less fruit flies.
We do have several very early plum varieties that we can pick early enough to beat the fruit flies. And we have several seedling peach trees that bear beautifully fragrant peaches with a thickish skin, that protects about half of them from fruit fly. Trouble is, you don’t know which half until you bite into them.
I’ve tried baiting and bagging and netting with some success, but it’s a lot of work. I remember reading a report years ago where someone was bagging out organic gardening by calculating that a tomato cost something like $10 in resources and labour, and I thought, well you’re just growing the wrong type at the wrong time. My basic garden philosophy is that if you want a garden that yields quality as well as quantity with a viable amount of time spent overall, you have to go with your climate and environment. For me, that means virtually effortless mangoes, but peaches that are half for me, half for the chooks.
But, the end result of all that is that, this time of year, I have lots of really nice peaches that need to be cut, and I don’t want to make jam because then I’d just eat it and I really don’t need that much sugar. This is our favourite way to use them.
The Recipe:
Cut the peaches in half and stone them.
Put them, skin side down, on an oven tray. If you have a real sweet tooth you can sprinkle with sugar, but I don’t.
Bake in a very low oven for an hour or two until they are semi-dried, like semi-dried tomatoes. I put them on the bottom shelf of my (not fan forced) oven while it warms up for bread baking, take them out for half an hour while the oven is hot, then put them back in with the oven turned down very low while it cools down.
Blend the semi-dried peaches in a blender or food processor, adding a (very) little butter, oil, or just or water if needed to get a smooth spread.
It will keep for a few days in the fridge, and I imagine would freeze well, but we eat it fresh, spread thickly on toast.
You can’t really call this a proper, by the rules, Breakfast Cereal Challenge recipe. By the rules, breakfast should be low GI – food with “slow burn” carbohydrates to keep you feeling clear headed and energetic through to lunch time. And potatoes are high GI (though cooking them skin on and mixing them with eggs helps lower it a bit). But I’ve started harvesting the potatoes and they are such a treat, and breakfast is such a good meal for them to star in.
I grew kipfers this season – an elongated waxy variety specially good for potato salads and for baking. The cooler nights so far have made it a good season for them. I don’t grow a huge amount of potatoes, and we treat them as a seasonal vegetable rather than a storage staple. I don’t really need the calories of potatoes every meal, and fresh in-season spuds spoil you for the supermarket kind. The treatment used to stop them sprouting worries me too. So when they are in season, resistance is futile!
The Recipe:
This works best with a waxy potato variety like kipfer or bintje, desiree, pink fir apple, or red pontiac. It’s also a really good way to use the little marble sized potatoes that you always get along with the full size ones.
If you cut your potatoes into large marble size, they take the same time to cook as a medium sized egg hard boiled, so you can cook both in the same pot.
Put a good handful of chopped potato per person and 1 or 2 eggs per person in a pot of cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes, till the potatoes are just “al dente” and the eggs are hard boiled.
Meanwhile, finely chop a good handful of herbs per person. I like parsley, dill, mint, and aragula or rocket, along with some spring onion greens or chives. If you still have celery going well, a bit of celery adds a nice crunch. My celery is usually all gone to seed by this time of year, but the unusually cool year means I still have some.
Drain the potatoes, peel and chop the eggs, and toss the lot together with a couple of teaspoons of home-made whole egg mayonnaise per person. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve.
Two Minute Mayonnaise
The super easy, super fast, super reliable way to make mayonnaise is with a stick blender. No dribbling the oil in, no splitting, no whisking.
There are two bits of chemistry that make it work.
You put all the ingredients in the blender jug and they separate. The oil floats on top of everything else.
You put the stick blender in the bottom and start it, and it creates a little vortex, dragging the oil down at the perfect rate to emulsify it.
Works every time. This is the ingredients before blending. And this is them after.
It’s so easy, I like to make small amounts of fresh mayonnaise when I need it, rather than a big batch to keep in the fridge. It uses raw egg, so it’s good to make with eggs from chooks you know are well fed and healthy.
100 ml of grape seed oil (or canola or sunflower oil – not olive oil – it makes bitter mayo).
Put the stick blender in and let it settle for a minute to separate into layers. Then, with the blender fully submerged, hit the button. Once it has started to emulsify, you can move the blender around to make sure the garlic and capers are blended in.
These aren’t exactly the 5 minutes of the usual Breakfast Cereal Challenge recipes, but they’re fast enough for a weekday morning. We had this batch for breakfast this morning before work. Like everything made of sourdough, the time is not in the doing but in the waiting. It only takes about 20 minutes to make a batch, but the 20 minutes has to be the night before, and you have to start by feeding the starter the morning before. So you really have to start dreaming of bolo levedo for breakfast a full day in advance. The upside is that you can wake up knowing that you are minutes away from sweet Portuguese muffins for breakfast.
I have (as usual) taken huge liberties with the traditional recipe – real Portuguese cooks should turn away now. The traditional version is made with yeast (though presumably the real traditional ones were sourdough), and if you don’t have a sourdough culture going, you can make them with a yeast dough. The traditional ones have more sugar too, and no blueberries.
Blueberries are just coming into season and they are hugely healthy – any food with that purple colouring seems to be loaded with antioxidants. The eggs and cottage cheese add a bit of protein to it too, so it fits the Witches Kitchen definition of healthy well enough to be a regular breakfast rather than a special treat.
The Recipe:
To make 8 English muffin sized bolos.
You need a cup of fed sourdough starter for this recipe, so I start the morning before – take my sourdough culture out of the fridge and feed it a cup of bakers flour mixed with a cup of water. In cool weather, I would pour a cupful into a bowl and leave it covered on my benchtop for the day, and put the rest back in the fridge. But in these warm summer days I leave it in the fridge for the day and only take the cupful I need out when I get home.
The Evening Before:
The sourdough starter should be nice and frothy as in the picture. Use an eggbeater to beat in
2 eggs
a good dessertspoon of raw sugar
a good dessertspoon of skim milk powder
half a teaspoon of salt
Stir in a cup of bakers flour and tip another cup on the bench top. Knead the dough for a few minutes – enough to incorporate the second cupful, or most of it, and to get a smooth non-sticky dough.
Divide the dough into 8 balls and use a rolling pin to roll each ball out to the size of a saucer.
Put a dozen or so blueberries and 2 teaspoons of cottage cheese in the middle of each circle and fold in the edges, squeezing them together to make a ball of dough enclosing the filling.
Place the balls of dough, joins side down, on well oiled plates, cover with a clean tea towel, and leave them to prove overnight. By the morning they should look like this – spread and flattened but nice and plump and risen to twice the size.
In the Morning
To Fry:
This is the traditional way to cook them. Heat a heavy lightly oiled frypan. Slide the bolo off their plates into the pan and cook over a fairly low heat for about 7 to 8 minutes each side until they are golden.
To Bake
You can also bake the bolo, but then they wouldn’t be bolo. They’re good that way too though. Just put them on an oiled baking tray (instead of the plates). I have an antique gas (not fan forced oven), and in my oven I put them in a cold oven turned up high and bake for 20 minutes till golden. I put a blueberry decoratively in the middle of each of these and brushed the top lightly with milk before baking.
