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.
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:
(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 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.
Introducing … Slow-Small Media for the Weekend, a weekly digest of things which have caught my eye lately. My hope for these digests is that you can curl up with with a cup of tea over the weekend and enjoy these things as an antidote to the overstimulation of social media.
Her article about progressive pickles and caring for her child particularly resonated with me. I, too, have had to let go of a lot of ideas about what loving family routines ‘should’ look like. I have a family member who dislikes eating with us. He eats his meals alone out on the porch.
Kirsten writes:
‘I have learned that insisting that we do things in the Family Way (…) was something I needed to let go of. (…)
Care can look like learning to pay close attention to what is actually doable for this kid, this day, rather than assuming I know better and pushing them too far.’
If you have time, read her other essays, too. All rich, contemplative stuff about nature and art and care.
A song
When I find a song I love, I listen to it over and over and over. It feels like spending time with a friend. This has been my song of early autumn: ‘Time to Bide’ by New Zealand artist, Monty Bevins. It’s a whole journey in one song and a great example of song as storytelling.
I love the spaciousness of the beginning. The song begins in Māori and then switches to English. Then just as you think you have a handle on what the song is going to be… changes pace. It is a song which demands close-listening.
+ It’s a song that references cold weather and fires so it is a beautiful one to play loudly beside the fire.
The Theme Zine is a project which brings together an international cohort of artists and writers to collaborate on zines based around set themes. Their latest issue’s theme is ‘Nature as Sanctuary. It’s beautiful short read (and best read on a laptop so you can enjoy the art).
It’s got me thinking about where in my small garden I can intervene even less and ‘rewild’ small pockets for all the other creatures I share this little patch of land with. We (humans) like to try to be in charge of our gardens…it takes some real reprogramming (deprogramming?) to let go of control and let nature do what it is so good at, romping greenly.
+ I recommend Mary’s two books, also. I’ve read both and they are beautiful and inspiring.
A recipe
If you were too busy in late summer to make a tomato kusundi, Nicola Galloway has a fantastic version made from feijoas. If you like Indian flavours and haven’t tried kusundi before you will love this spicy, aromatic pickle. It’s a great thing to have around to liven up winter sandwiches.
This weekend I’m planning on sharing a morning tea with friends, making Nicola’s kusundi with our feijoa abundance, painting a new sign for the sharing shelf (the orange one in this post got stolen) and digging up some of my abundant strawberry and yarrow plants to share.
Tell me what you’re getting up to in the comments. Happy weekend, friends!
(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’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.
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.
Helen Lehndorf 