It being the party season and all.

Though I have to confess, this was our lunch yesterday.  In our defense, the filling meets healthy – and is possibly even a decent way to get lots of vegetables into a children’s party plate.

The Recipe:

This recipe fills two dozen wonton wrappers – what we get in a packet of wrappers from the supermarket.  Using bought ones makes the recipe really really fast and easy, but making your own isn’t hard especially if you use a pasta machine, so I’ll include the wrapper recipe too.

Part 1: Wonton Wrappers

You can buy wonton wrappers in the fridge at any supermarket these days, but if you make your own, you can use real egg.  In a food processor, blitz until the dough just comes together (just a few seconds)

• ½ cup of flour (I use the same Laucke Wallaby Unbleached Bakers Flour that I use for my sourdough, but any high gluten flour will work)
• 1  large egg
• a couple of teaspoons of  any light flavoured oil
• pinch salt

Flour the workbench well and knead very briefly, kneading in enough more flour to make a smooth, non-sticky, soft dough. Then leave it to rest for a few minutes while you make the filling.

Part 2: The Filling

For 24  ( a packet of skins) you need about two cups of filling when it is all raw.  The inspiration for these actually came from harvesting the very last of the season’s cabbages out of the garden.  I used cabbage, snake beans, carrots, and spring onions, all finely chopped and shredded.  You can use a food processor to coarsely grate if you are in a real hurry.

Add a half thumb of ginger, finely grated, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic, a little chili to taste, a handful of herbs finely chopped (lemon basil, Thai basil, coriander, mint or a mixture) and a couple of teaspoons of light soy sauce.

Add a little oil to a wide pan or a wok, get it hot, and cook the filling, stirring, for just a couple of minutes.  You are trying more to dry it all than to cook it, and best to leave undercooked rather than over.

Mix a spoonful of cornflour (corn starch) with water (or ordinary plain flour if you don’t have cornflour in the pantry).  Take the vegetables off the stove and add a little of it to the hot vegetable mix, just enough to make it all sticky.  Keep the rest for sealing the rolls.

Let the filling cool a little while you roll out the wrappers.

Part 3: Assembling and frying

If you are using home-made wrappers, use a pasta machine, or a rolling pin and a well floured benchtop, to roll out the dough till it is translucent thin.  You will be cutting it into 10cm squares, so aim for a 10 cm wide pasta strip.

Put a teaspoonful of filling  on each wrapper.  Roll diagonally, folding the corners in. Use a finger dipped in the flour and water mix on the last corner to seal.

Wipe out your wok or pan and heat up a couple of centimetres of frying oil until it is quite hot.  I usually use light olive oil for frying like this because it has mostly monounsaturated fats, it  has  a high smoke point and it’s fairly neutral flavoured.

Fry in two or three batches so you don’t overcrowd the pan, use tongs to turn them and fry for just a couple of minutes till they are brown and crispy.

You can keep them warm in an oven if you have to, but they are best eaten freshly cooked and hot with a soy and sweet chili dipping sauce.

I seem to have dozens of half written posts and  not so great photos banked up, shoved into random folders to get back to after Bentley.  There’s a late pick of turtle beans being slow cooked and turned into a kind of ful medames.  There’s the new induction hotplate so we can fast cook using solar electricity.  There’s the first harvest of red claw from the dam and a fairly spectacular red claw pasta.  There’s the first flush of the citrus glut and kumquat marmalaide.  There’s the new drake named Bentley because he arrived the day of the (provisional) victory.

But I’m going to start with this one because the time for it is right now. Guavas are in glut right now and I keep seeing unharvested trees everywhere. Guava jelly, which can be made as jam to spread on toast (just by using half the quantity of sugar) but is spectacular as a firm jelly to eat with cheese on crackers is the only really good thing I know to do with a glut of guavas, but it’s a really good thing to do with it.  I don’t make a lot of jams or jellies – in general I find  fresh fruit better than the version cooked down with lots of sugar for just about every kind of fruit.  But the flying foxes and birds love our guavas and strawberry guavas so much that even the uneaten fruit risks little bite marks and I don’t fancy sharing saliva with a bat.  And though I love the aroma of guavas I’m not so keen on the texture.   This took me literally minutes to make and was worth depriving the bats.

Guava Jelly

I used a mixture of guavas and strawberry guavas, the big ones roughly chopped and the small ones just left whole. Add a bit of water to start them off, then cook enough to make a soft mash, that you can strain through a chessecloth to get the juice.  I did this stage in a pressure cooker, which meant I only needed to add a little water – about a third of a cup for each cup of guavas – and pressure cook for just a few minutes. If you cook in a pot you will need to add a bit more water and cook for maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

I lined my big colander with cheesecloth and sat it over a pot, poured in the guava mash, let it strain for 5 minutes, then twisted the cheesecloth to make a little bundle and weighed it down with my heavy mortar and pestle to squeeze out all the juice. This is important even if you have so many guavas you can just waste them because the seeds have the pectin in them, so that last squeeze of juice is the one that makes it set.

Put a saucer in the freezer.

Grease a plate with a lip with butter (or two or three if you are making a large batch).

Measure the guava juice back into a pot, and for each cup of juice add a cup of sugar and the juice of quarter of a lemon.  I used raw sugar because that’s what I had, but if you want the clear  jewel like jellies, refined white sugar would be better.

Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes till it starts to thicken, then test it every couple of minutes by putting a teaspoonful on the cold saucer till it turns to jelly.

Working quickly (or it will set in the pot) pour the jelly out onto the greased plate and tilt to spread it into a thin layer.  It will set in a couple of minutes and you can use a sharp knife to cut it into squares.

If you are not serving straight away, chill the jellies in a single layer before you put them all in a container in the fridge, or they’ll stick together.

With camembert or brie or white castello cheese and crackers, it’s a gourmet feast.

PS.

My daughter made this with jaboticabas. She sent me the pic.  “It is so good mum. Same recipe as your guava jelly on witcheskitchen.com.au but with cinnamon and nutmeg and star anise. So simple for such an extravagant treat.”

 Bunya nuts are in season, and it is easy to see why aboriginal people arranged festivals around bunya season.  We stopped on the way to Brisbane to visit our son and pick up a native bee hive (more on that later) and picked up half a dozen cones that had dropped from a tree.  A feasting quantity.

Bunyas aren’t a taste sensation but they’re nice – a fairly mild, slightly sweet, chestnut or waxy potato flavour.  They dry out if they are roasted once they are shelled, and they don’t absorb sauces or marinades very well – in curries and dishes like that, the bunyas are a bit of a filler. They make a good “potato salad”, and they work really well in pesto, and I’m experimenting with grinding them the way aboriginal people used to and making cakes or patties.  But so far, my favourite use of them is just boiled and served with a dipping sauce.

I took these to a party last night.  I actually took a couple of dipping sauces. The mayo and harissa one was very good, and lemon butter with parsley is nice,  but this was the one that won the day.

The Recipe:

The Bunyas:

The method here is exactly the same as preparing them for pesto, or really anything else.  The big green cones fall apart as they ripen.  It’s fairly easy to peel off the corm to release the nuts inside, that look like this:

You can roast them at this stage, but I think they are better boiled or pressure cooked.  Boiling takes an hour or so, but pressure cooking is much faster.  I pressure cooked these for 20 minutes then cooled them, then cut them in halves and scooped out the nut.

There is a knack to doing this without cutting your fingers off.  Use a big heavy knife – the kind you’d use for a pumpkin.  Hold the nut with one hand, sitting it on its fat end, and get the blade of the knife dug in across the pointy end.  Shift your holding hand to the top of the knife and cut down.  Once you have the knack, it’s easy and fast.

The Dipping Sauce:

The basis for the sauce is home made whole egg mayonnaise.

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.

1. You put all the ingredients in the blender jug and they separate.  The oil floats on top of everything else.
2. 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.

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.

Put in the blender jug:

• 1 whole egg
• juice of ¼ lemon
• good pinch of salt
• 100 ml of light olive oil (or other mild flavoured oil – not virgin 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. Don’t think you can make less by skimping on the oil – it won’t thicken. If it is thin, pour another swig of oil on top, and with the blender fully submerged, hit the button again.

Once the mayo is emulsified, add:

• 6 fresh kaffir lime leaves, roughly chopped
• big marble of peeled ginger, roughly chopped

Blend until they are blended in.  Taste for enough salt.  Scrape into a dipping bowl, and, if you can, leave in the fridge for an hour or so for the flavours to blend in.

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Yesterday was the longest day of the year, the shortest night, an invisible turning point recognised and celebrated in just about every human culture. 

Lots of knowledge is like that – very real but invisible to the naked eye.  We humans just don’t have senses finely tuned enough to perceive more than just our own tiny, tiny patch of time and space.  Like the shortening of the days.  Today will be a second or two, depending on where on this spinning planet you live, shorter than yesterday.  We can’t perceive it without using science, but the plants we depend on for our survival can. It’s why we need science, and why we need to trust science and hold a little humility about our ability to see the big picture well enough to make good decisions in contempt of it.

Eons ago, clever humans figured out how to mark the point, and because it was so important, mark it in a way that everyone noticed and remembered. Make it numinous, special, sacred.

So whatever your heritage and traditions for celebrating this season when we pause for a little while at the crest of the year,  remembering that we are very small in the scheme of things and that all those busy busy preoccupations pale to insignificance beside the power that turns a planet, I hope it is numinous, special, sacred for you.

Spin and sing, spin and sing
Half year out, half year in,
Earth at full must spiral in

The Recipe:

I’ve been making this a bit lately and it makes a great dip and sandwich spread too, but last night I found it’s true vocation – on a pizza.  It’s a variation on the Green Olive  and Macadamia Tapenade of a few months ago, using our home pickled green olives.

It’s very simple – just a blend of  green olives, roasted macadamias, parmesan cheese, basil, and enough olive oil to make a good texture.

Roasting the macadamias makes all the difference.  You can toast them in a heavy pan over a medium low heat till they are lightly brown, or (better, if you have the oven on for something else) roast them in the oven for about 5 minutes till they just start to colour.

The quantities are variable to your own taste.  Mine is one cup of olive flesh, one cup (packed) of basil leaves,  to half a cup of roasted macadamias and quarter of a cup of parmesan, with about a third of a cup of olive oil.

Spread the blend lightly over a pizza base, and top with thin sliced tomatoes, thin sliced red onion, and a little (not too much) grated cheese.

Then, to make it really sublime, bake in a wood fired pizza oven and share with friends.

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