Saturday, March 24, 2012

Rainy Day Rusks


When you live in a country and culture different to that in which you grew up, there are many things that are new and exciting, but there are also those things that one never stops missing. When it comes to food, biggies around here are english style marmalade (see previous post!), marmite, rooibos tea (south african style - unembellished and every day) and rusks. We love rusks, our kids love rusks and our friends now love rusks too. Today was a day for rusk making.

A rusk is like a biscotti in that it is a bready-mix that one bakes, cuts up and then dries in the oven. The similarity ends there. A rusk is a un-precious, un-fancy everyday pleasure that is dunked in tea/ coffee/ hot chocolate. Flour, buttermilk, eggs, sugar (not  lot of it) are the basics and then any combination of nuts, bran flakes, granola and dried fruit gets added, according to whim, taste or what is in the cupboard. Rusks stem from the Afrikaans food tradition ("beskuit") and are easy to make but also time consuming since the drying part can take most of a day or more and it involves a few steps. I channel my inner Karoo farmers wife as I mix, bake, cut and dry. The whole house smells of buttermilky, baked goodness as the rusks dry. Quite often one gets snagged and eaten while warm and semi-crisp, since the waiting can be tough!

Rusks are drying in the oven as I type, saturday night beckons (Terrapin Croassroads! http://terrapincrossroads.net/), tomorrow will be a rusks for breakfast day and I will add a recipe.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

3 Marmalades

I have been making marmalade with various degrees of success for about 13 years. My recipes have been guessed, written by friends on napkins and interpreted to achieve flavors reminiscent of my Grandmothers fabled "Fairacres Three Fruit Marmalade". Her marmalade was made with mineola oranges, grapefruits and lemons grown in her garden in Natal, South Africa. My Grandfather liked a darker marmalade, so she cooked it until the sugars started to caramelize, giving her marmalade a hint of caramel along with the bitter citrus flavors. My canning/ jamming/ marmalade making has been a bit hit and miss, until I recently conscripted the help of Rachel Saunders and her "The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook" (http://bluechairfruit.com/blue-chair-jam-cookbook/). Her recipes are useful, but what has been the most helpful is her explanation of what happens when sugars and fruit turn to jam and what these changes look like. Thanks to her I was recently able to make a batch of plum jam on the fly, without scale, recipe book or proper canning equipment simply because a tree dripping with plums begged for it.

On to the Marmalade part - 3 jars of Rangpur Lime marmalade are in the attached photo - each tells a different story. On the left is the most recent, on the right the oldest, from last winter. The greenish hue in the right hand one, is due to the fact that we still thought we had to pick the limes when green, it is a super tart marmalade, made pre-Rachael Saunders and after not having made marmalade for a few years. It is densely fruity, but without all the jammy stickiness we love around here. The middle jar is my first with-Rachel's-help batch from earlier this winter. It cooked a little too long due to the child emergency mentioned in a previous post, but it did gain that caramel touch that I love. The left hand, 2/3 full jar is my most recent attempt, where I tried to stick very close to Rachel's instructions. What amazes me always is how much fruit goes in to 1 jar. I used about 25 limes, which cooked down into 2/3s of  a jar of limey goodness. Quite an amazing thing to spread on a slice of hot, buttered toast with a wedge of sharp cheddar on top.

Ranpur Limes



We discovered a few months ago that we are the proud owners of  Rangpur Lime tree. Up until then we were pretty sure we had a lime tree but the small green fruits kept producing brilliant orange flesh and then after a while, orange skins too. The Rangpur Lime  is a cross between a Mandarin and a Lime, with orangey looks but a super limey taste. I recently picked the last of this year's crop and took photos - believe what you see, it is indeed a lime! Our tree was until 2 years ago trapped between the garage and a garden shed which was butting up against it the garage. Our crops aren't huge, but good enough for now and growing each year as the tree revives. It still grows next to the garage but the shed has moved away a little and we now walk under the arching branches of it as we walk in to our vegetable garden.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Rineke Djikstra




A guest in the casita this week gave me the perfect excuse on tuesday to avoid doing the taxes in order to see the SFMOMA Rineke Dijkstra show. What a treat to immerse myself in the work of someone whose work I have tracked and been inspired by for 20 years. Her portraits range from single images to series, to video. People are in all their beautiful and messy human-ness and somewhere along the way we find that we are looking in a mirror.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Pizza night

Its a busy weekend with lots of things going on and not much time to record it. One quick photo of a tray carried over to our neighbors for back yard pizzas last night. Sauteed swiss chard (fresh picked), oven roasted onions, rangpur lime cordial from our tree, toasted pignolis, fresh chilli sauce (that turned out to be not hot at all - bland jalapenos make me sad in the way of fragranceless roses!). We added our offerings to the mix of good things next door. We ate outside, gazed at the moon , heard our resident owl doing a few fly overs and enjoyed the seasonal return one of our favorite things - food from our gardens eaten under the stars with friends.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Hello world!

Here I am at last, my very first blog post and wondering what auspicious things I should be saying, but then I realize that this is no fancy blog, it is just me, recording what I am up to, since a lot seems to happen around here.  Its a rainy day, I am not going to get in to my studio today and have yet to figure out what I will make for dinner tonight, so no grand entry, just a mellow slide of sorts.
What is on my mind are the Rangpur Limes growing on my tree and the marmalade I want to make with them. My first batch was great but got a little gummy as a result of a medical moment (child with fever and husband not able to find the thermometer) right at the sweet spot when I should not have left it to keep on boiling. Tastes good but is a bit gooey. Or maybe I will make more lime cordial, the bottle in the fridge will not doubt be finished off after cocktails and homemade pizza with the cooking-gardening-too neighbors this saturday.