Helen Lehndorf

Tag: food

  • Capture and store: Silverbeet

    A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how we were eating a lot of silverbeet in an effort to keep up with the spring bolts of the plant.

    This has continued, I’ve discovered that if you snip off the ‘bolt’ stem…the thick stem growing up the centre that is beginning the process of sending the plant to seed…sometimes the plant will do another flush of leaves so I’ve delayed having to remove the plants entirely. (While our local spring continues to be more like winter…with ground temperatures too low for summer meditteranean plants like tomatoes and zucchini…there’s no urgency to make space.)

    If you’re not a permaculture practitioner, ‘Capture and Store’ is one of the main permaculture principles. The idea being…it isn’t enough to grow things (or create energy)…an important piece of the equation is to honour the garden by capturing the harvest and, if possible, storing some for later on.

    Occasionally, I like to write articles about the ways our permaculture family ‘captures and stores’ around our small, urban property. As food and energy prices rocket, I imagine these skills will ripple out beyond permaculture to become more important for households.

    Yesterday, my son Willoughby and I spent around an hour and a half processing the silverbeet, celery and flat leaf parsley plants which had begun to bolt.

    The celery stalks went into dinner and the fridge. The celery greens and flat leaf parsley bolt-stems we chopped up and put into our dehydrator. I will put them and some NZ sea salt through our electric spice grinder to make a herb salt which is great for adding to soups and stews.

    We picked a huge amount of silverbeet. Approximately the equivalent of five of those plastic-wrapped bunches you can buy at supermarket.

    Here’s how we processed it to become freeflow bunches of chopped silverbeet, similar to the way spinach comes frozen at the supermarket.

    We harvested the ‘bolt’ stems. I cut off the leaves with a pair of kitchen scissors into a large bow of water and gave it a wash.

    We then chopped it.

    Next step was a quick blanch in a shallow pan of boiling water. Just long enough that it wilts and goes bright green.

    Then I strained it and pushed as much water out as I could with a wooden spoon (obviously it is too hot to touch with bare hands at this stage. I left it sitting in the strainer to cool.

    Once it had cooled enough to handle, I formed it into balls. (Think about the amount you’d like to add to a soup or stew.) The trick to a tasty end result is to squeeze and squeeze it getting out as much of the liquid as you can. Silverbeet seems to retain a lot of liquid so keep squeezing…think of it as a workout for your hands!

    After that, place the fistfuls on a biscuit tray and put into the freezer.

    Once they are frozen, remove from the freezer, put into a ziploc bag or plastic container and put back into the freezer and there you go, you have one meal amounts of pre-prepared silverbeet ready to add to your cooking.

    You might ask why we’d bother doing this when silverbeet grows all year round in most of New Zealand’s climate? I suppose a big motivator is frugality, but also, I find I use more silverbeet if it is prepared this way. I also loathe waste and, because I know the effort I’ve put into growing the food, I prefer to have it travel through the kitchen rather than go straight from garden bed to the compost heap.

    Silverbeet is so nutritious! I think it needs a PR campaign. In NZ we tend to take if for granted or spurn it because it’s so ubiquitous in our vegetable gardens. Forget about overpriced supermarket spinach….eat your silverbeet!

    If I’ve inspired you to make more of your silverbeet, here are two excellent links with multiple tasty-looking silverbeet recipes.

    11 tasty silverbeet recipes from Delicious magazine

    12 yummy silverbeet-based dinners from NZ Woman’s Weekly magazine

    One of my favourite ways to eat A LOT of silverbeet at once is to make an Indian Saag Aloo, using silverbeet instead of spinach. Delicious and so greeeeeeen.

    If you have a signature silverbeet dish…please share it with me.

  • Salted Lemons & Sharing

    Recently, a new local friend, Kaydee gave me some beautiful small ripe lemons.

    I’d been wanting to make some salted lemons so they seemed perfect for a smallish jar of those. Salted lemons are used a lot in both Middle Eastern and Indian cuisines.

    If you’re interested in having a go, here’s a good recipe which takes you through the steps. It’s pretty simple (just sea salt and lemons) but still, good to have some guidance for that first go.

    On the weekend, I judged them ready. I was going to a social gathering that day so I took the lemons out, scraped away the flesh*, and put the preserved rinds through my blender to make a salted lemon paste.

    (*some people use this part too…but it didn’t taste very good to me. I did use it to clean the inside of my sink before I put it in the compost.)

    I know my friends are busy people and I figured the preserve was more likely to be used if they could just scrape out a bit with a spoon rather than having to take it a lemon, rinse it and finely slice it.

    Even a small jar of preserved lemons makes a lot...too much for our household to get through in the six months they last. So it was helpful to me to have some people to share it with.

    This is how it looked blended & before I labelled the lids.

    Something I’ve learned from attending Crop Swaps is that making signs is super helpful. Then anyone interested can just take a photo of the sign and the gifter doesn’t have to answer the same questions many times.

    So here’s the little note I made when I put the containers of lemon paste on the table to be shared:

    From this one small social transaction:

    Kaydee shared her harvest with me,

    I learned a new ferment,

    I shared it back into our friend group,

    friends learn how to use a new-to-them ferment…

    & the lemons (and the love) keep circling.

  • Winter is a great time for harvesting volunteer ‘microgreens’ from your garden (or local park)

    (Above: today’s bounty from a little wander around my own garden.)

    Do you buy sprouts, bags of mesclun mix or microgreens from the supermarket?

    Winter is a great time to find volunteer (‘weed’) microgreens, or young greens, around your garden or local park for FREE!

    Because of winter’s rain and damp, the young weeds will be beautifully bright green, healthy and not heat-stressed.

    To share some likely contenders with you, I took a walk around my small urban yard and here’s what I harvested.

    I took care to only harvest volunteers/weeds and nothing that I’d planted intentionally. (Violet grows like a weed in my yard.)

    The trick is to just harvest the young leaves, or the tips in the case of the dead nettle.

    These wild ‘microgreens’ can be used in a salad, or chopped and sprinkled on top of soup, or in sandwiches, or blended into a smoothie…the same as you would use supermarket or homegrown microgreens.

    I numbered the plants for ease of ID-ing them:

    1. Nasturtium leaves. These are peppery in flavour so great in salads and on sandwiches, not so great in smoothies.
    2. Dead Nettle tips. Great stand-in for lettuce.
    3. Young violet leaves and flowers. Use in salad or cook as your would spinach.
    4. Young ribwort plantain leaves. Important to pick the young ones as the older ones get stringy. The young leaves have a nutty flavour.
    5. Chickweed. Such an enthusiastic garden volunteer. Use the young growth and chop finely.
    6. Young dandelion leaves. These add a nice bitter element to a salad or sandwich. Not so great in smoothies.
    7. Oxalis (known in the UK as ‘wood sorrell’ and the USA as ‘sour grass’) Has a sour, lemony flavour similar to sorrell. Use just a little at a time as it contains oxalic acid. Treat it more like a herb than a main vegetable.
    8. Young mallow leaves. Mallow (also know as ‘Malva’) is a much-used vegetable in Middle-Eastern cuisine and parts of Italy. You can make dolmades with the leaves in place of grape leaves, making it useful during the winter when there are no grape leaves about. Young leaves are good in salad or cooked like spinach.

    & of course, these plants have medicinal properties as well, (most plant food does.

    I hope this inspires you to have a close look at what might be growing in your own back yard and save yourself a little money (or time) by eating some of the weeds around you.

    Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

    Do you eat any of the weeds in your garden?

  • In the kitchen this week: an experiment with basil and a batch of Fire Cider

    (Above: the things I put in this batch of Fire Cider. Every batch is unique. It’s a real ‘use what you have’ medicine.)

    Kitchen-witchery is slow work.

    Sometimes things that end up the jars in my kitchen began months ago with literal seeds in the greenhouse or foraged finds from a season the opposite to now. If I count growing, harvesting and sometimes drying or macerating in to the recipe hours…I have to describe the recipe method in months rather than hours. This is why I love ‘slow food’ or the localising food movement…it operates on an entirely different time-scale to the deadening speed of supermarkets and fast food outlets.

    An example of this, I just conducted an kitchen experiment which began in back spring as seed…basil seed…grown by both me and my friend Bev of Kereru Natural Products. I had a modest basil harvest but Bev’s basil really flourished this summer and her basil patch was thigh high! I’d never seen such large basil plants. Whilst looking after her place for a weekend in summer, I harvested some and made a large batch of pesto; some for her, some for me. I’m used to making pesto without a recipe but for such a large batch, I googled a recipe to help me with proportions. I used this one which calls for 16 cups of chopped basil (!) to give you a sense of scale.

    (Above: basil, basil everywhere.)

    After the big basil-making session, the woody stalks were left behind. The stalks smelled so divinely peppery and aromatic, I felt loathe to compost them. So I tied the stalks from Bev’s basil and from my own in a bunch and hung them upside down in my greenhouse to dry.

    (Above: one of the bunches of dried basil stalks and flowers.)

    Last weekend, with harvest season madness slowing down enough to get to some more peripheral tasks, I bought the dried basil stalks in and had a go at turning them into a basil salt by cutting them into small chunks and grinding them into NZ seasalt in my electric spice grinder.

    I had to use garden secateurs for this, as they were very woody once dried. My spice grinder juuuuust coped. It made a not-very-visually-appealing, khaki, fibrous salt. However, what the salt lacks in visual appeal in more than makes up for in flavour.

    (Above: ground basil stalk + NZ sea salt. It’s not pretty but it’s delicious.)

    It has that intense, almost licorice smell that the top notes of basil has. It tastes like ‘essence of basil’. It’s freakn’ delicious and while it’s not attractive enough to be the kind of salt you’d put in a cute dish on the table, it makes a great ‘deep notes’ salt. I will be adding it to things which slow cook, like soups, stews and using it more like a stock than a table salt. I think this experiment was a success although if you have any thoughts about how to make it look more attractive, let me know in the comments. (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of each post to find the comments box, btw.)

    Another thing I made on the weekend, was a batch of Fire Cider as we’ve gotten through all of last year’s.

    Fire Cider is basically a brew of ingredients which stimulate the immune system, the digestive system and are anti-inflammatory, steeped in apple cider vinegar. The resulting fiery brew can be taken as shots with a little water through the winter to help stave off winter colds. I also use it in dressings to we are ‘eating’ our medicine through the winter as well.

    There’s a fascinating story about Fire Cider. In america, a natural goods company attempted to trademark ‘Fire Cider’…an insult to this commonly-known and used folk medicine! An angry and indignant group of ‘fiery’ herbalists fought in court against this attempt to trademark folk medicine and WON! Hoorah! A victory for the commons.

    There’s no real ‘recipe’ to Fire Cider. You use what you have and the ingredients you prefer. I don’t like white onion in mine but I do like the heat of chillies and garlic. I used some oranges for vitamin C. Rosemary, sage and thyme, calendula from the garden > all great for sore throats and coughs. Plus ginger and turmeric. by the way, I’d made the apple cider vinegar myself from our summer apple harvest. (See what I mean about slow food?)

    I find it a fun thing to make because it looks so pretty in the jar while it’s brewing. Our is currently sitting on the kitchen table…at least for a while.

    (Above: still life with garden blooms, fire cider brew and a huge persimmon my mother-in-law gave me.)

    Every late summer and autumn, I make various winter medicinals: oxymels, tinctures, vinegars, throat sprays…etc. I think everyone should be able to access simple herbal medicinals. They can be very expensive from the health store so I like to share what I make around with my friends and family.

    & that’s what’s been happening in Ahuru Kitchen this week. (Our house came with a name on the front: the Māori word, Ahuru, which means nest.)

    Do you make medicinal things in your kitchen as well as culinary things? Do you ever do strange experiments with odd ingredients? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

    & May we all have robust health this winter! x

  • fennel from the river

    (Above: My favourite selfie, out foraging beside the river.)

    In autumn, I forage for fennel seeds. Along the Manawatū river, the fennel plants are plentiful. This year, it’s been such a warm autumn, there is still fennel in flower as well as the older plants going to seed. I find fennel such a beautiful plant in all it’s stages: the bright green fronds of early spring, the sunny yellow umbels of summer…then the handsome dried seed heads of autumn.

    (Above: A ‘fennel tunnel, fennel tunnel, fennel tunnel’ < a little phrase from my foraging book.)

    Fennel is an enjoyable thing to forage for because each plant is so laden with seed heads that it’s easy to forage enough for the pantry in just a couple of walks. I fill up this 500ml jar and it lasts me a year of curries and pickles and tea.

    (Above: yellow fennel flowers going to seed.)

    I take secateurs with me and snip some of the seed heads that look grey and dry. Although they are probably dry enough off the plant, I leave them on a tray on my kitchen table to dry more…just to be sure they are totally dry. Then I rub the seeds off over a large bowl.

    (Above: the fennel seed heads drying a little longer at home.)

    I have an interest in Ayurveda. Fennel seed is highly-valued in Ayurveda for it’s digestive properties. In some Indian restaurants, they offer tea spoons full of tiny coloured sweets as a digestif after your meal. These are sugar-coated fennel seeds.

    (Above: The fennel seeds fresh off the seed heads before I sort through and get all the little bits of flower head out.)

    Here is a recipe (well, more a proportions guide) to a digestive tea I make with my foraged fennel seeds. I get the fenugreek from my local Indian supermarket and the licorice root powder from Pure Nature. Fenugreek has powerful digestive properties and can help regulate blood sugar, too. Licorice powder aids digestion and adds sweetness to the tea blend. Ginger helps with digestion also and tastes wonderful.

    Digestive Tea

    One part fennel seeds

    One part fenugreek, seeds or leaves

    One part licorice root powder

    One part ginger powder

    This tea is great to have first thing in the morning to awaken your digestive fire, or agni as it is called in Ayurveda. It’s also good to drink about an hour after a meal to calm the stomach, prevent flatulence, help with digestion.

    *

    I have an avid interest in folk herbalism so I tend to mostly make medicinal things with my foraged finds.

    Autumn is a lovely time for foraging…less chance of getting sunburn and so much to see everywhere! I’ve been enjoying looking at all the different fungi friends who emerge this time of year, picking up windfall eucalyptus leaves for eco-dyeing and harvesting mullein for making winter medicines with.

    What have you been foraging or harvesting?

  • What do green tomatoes have to do with mutual aid?

    (Above: many hands make work fun. A harvesting and chopping working bee at Kirsty’s place. Photo by Kirsty Porter.)

    Fascism is on the speedy rise, climate collapse is escalating, increasingly our governments and power structures are unreliable at best, malevolent at worst. What is there to be done?

    I am reading a lot of Margaret Killjoy , Adrienne Maree Brown, Bayo Akomolafe and Donna Harraway. Listening to a lot of collapse-aware podcasts. & Trying to be (mostly) off (anti)social media. But beyond what I consume and intake…I am making slow steps towards deeper resilience within my friend groups.

    I’m in a couple of ‘conscious-collapse’ groups. One is aimed more at emotional support and mutual aid (deep listening, space-holding, nourishing one another with beauty and soothing art), the other is more about practical supports, and intentional-relationship-building over time (working bees, resource sharing, fun gatherings.)

    While both groups have group chats in messaging apps, we make a conscious effort to take them offline and get together regularly, because actually being together is so much more healing than more time staring at our phones.

    The photo above is the latter group. We had a working bee to harvest all the end-of-season green tomatoes, then we sat around Kirsty’s kitchen table and chopped up the harvest. We filled four buckets (!) with chopped green tomatoes. Kirsty kept two, M & R took one and I took one. Kirsty, M&R turned theirs into Kirsty’s Grandmother’s recipe for green tomato chutney and I turned mine into a spicy Mexican green sauce.

    While we worked, we chatted, we laughed and the folks in the group who had only recently met got to know each other better. It might not seem to have much to do with the mitigation of fascism & climate collapse…but it was a practical, positive, soul-warming way to spend an afternoon. Every small action like this brings us closer, braids us together a little more…all while we work on our food resilience skills.

    Kirsty might have struggled to ‘capture and store’ her green tomato abundance alone…but with five of us at work…we got it all done in a couple of hours.

    ‘Communities are not built, relationships are built. Communities build themselves.’

    -Patrick Jones

    What sorts of things are you doing to nourish yourself in these challenging times?

    In other tomato news…I like to challenge myself to memorise high-rotate recipes, like fruit crumbles, scones, pikelets, simple cakes…so in the unlikely event I am somewhere I can’t use my recipe books or the internet, I can still make these things. I figure it’s good for my brain, at the very least. Also, it makes me feel next-level to be able to bash them out without cracking a book.

    This winter, I am attempting to perfect and memorise focaccia. I made this one with one of the last crops of cherry tomatoes and basil from the garden.

    In my household, we are seasonal eaters, which gives the last tomato harvests a real poignancy.

    The basil is valiantly carrying on, despite some colder nights…but how much longer for? Time to make some big batches of pesto, I think.

  • the sharing shelf

    Late last year we put a sharing shelf outside our front fence.

    We’ve always shared excess produce from our vegetable garden by putting it in a box on the community seat (for more about the community seat, check out my last book, ‘A Forager’s Life‘) but I wanted to make it a little more formal so that it could be a site of #radicalreciprocity* in the neighbourhood and many people could contribute to it.

    (#radicalreciprocity is how I try to live my life. Giving generously, receiving with gratitude and humility, and trusting that there is more than enough to go around if we can all learn to do both.)

    I bought the planter from a local young woman who makes them from upcycled pallets and then I painted a dandelion motif on it. The dandelion is a plant that means a lot to me and acts as a symbol of courage and generosity in my personal symbology.

    It didn’t take long -a few weeks or so- for neighbours to get the idea and things began to appear in it that weren’t from us.

    Part of putting something like this into a public sphere requires a willingness to look after it well so I check it twice a day, first thing in the morning and then at dusk.

    Although the purpose of it is to share the excess garden produce and garden related things, occasionally people put perishable or pantry food in it. The perishable food (things like bread, sandwiches, etc) I dispose of (usually feed it to the backyard birds, or my worm farm, if possible) because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone getting ill from spoiled food. Mostly, though, people seem to get the idea. There’s been all sorts of vegetables, seedlings, cut herbs. It’s been mostly delightful things.

    My original sign (paint and vivid marker on an art canvas) melted away in the rain, so I painted an old cutting board with outdoor paint in an attempt to make a more weather-proof sign:

    People have not 100% ‘been cool’. There’s the occasional beer bottle or pizza box after a Friday or Saturday night. There was one incident when someone kicked the front of it in, breaking a board. But for the most part, it’s been a success and a fun, new element in my days.

    March has definitely been the month of the giant marrow. Hearteningly, these swollen offerings have all been taken, though so I guess there are some good marrow recipes being cooked around Takaro. There’s also been lots of bags of tomatoes and apples.

    Every day is different in the sharing shelf. Things flow in and out.

    With feijoas just beginning, I’m expecting it to become mostly a ‘freejoa’ booth any day now.