How to forage and cook bamboo shoots

Nothing like freshly foraged bamboo!

I live in the Waitakere Ranges and there is quite a bit of bamboo here, mostly considered a weed, but as you know I eat quite a few weeds, and this is no exception. I have some in my driveway too, but I tend to walk down to the neighbour, who has some really big clumps of big bamboo! Or it brings it to me, since he sees when new bamboo shoots up... you have to be quick picking the shoot, once they are out of the ground they grow very quickly! The image below is the maximum length allowed.

I started cooking bamboo shoots when I was living in Japan, they were different kind, much 'fatter' but these are good too, better than buying canned bamboo! Peel off the outer green layers, then cut into slices (I also like to cut the tips into two to see the layers), and discard the hard nodes. Rinse and cook for about 20 minutes in the water left over from rinsing rice (or add a little rice bran to your cooking water, I don't have rice bran so I keep the rice rinsing water), a pinch of salt and a chili (optional, but apparently it takes away the bitterness). 20 minutes suffice for small tender shoots, but if you have longer ones just make sure that you can pierce them with a knife or leave 5 minutes longer. If not using immediately store in lightly salted water.

The tips (the best part) can be served as a side dish for a Japanese dinner, the round bits are good in stews and stir fries, but I tend to cut off and discard the nodes, which are harder (I do this before cooking the bamboo shoots if small and tender, but after when my neighbour brings me big long shoot which are quite hard to cut). 

For this stir fry I used bamboo shoots (previously cooked as above), oyster mushrooms, and carrots. Heat a little vegetable oil with a few drops of sesame oil, add a tsp of mince ginger and then the chopped vegetables. Cook for a few minutes, stirring, then add a tbsp of lemon juice and 2 tbsp of Japanese soy sauce, lower the heat, cover and simmer for 6-7 minutes, stirring from time to time. Add chopped coriander at the end (optional). Serve with rice. 

Happy weekend!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Oratia Beauty Cupcakes (or muffins)

February is the month to celebrate our Slow Food Auckland heirloom apple Oratia Beauty.

These beautiful apples are available at the Dragicevich Orchard: 556 West Coast Rd, Oratia. I usually eat them raw or make cakes, but this time I made some cupcakes to take to the Slow Food Picnic at Waitantgi at Waititi. 

This is my very own cupcake recipe, which I adapt easily and frequently (to add fruit and/or other ingredients) and always works well. The outcome with apple is a bit of a 'muffin', thus the double name in the title of this post.

The doses below are for 12, but I doubled them for two tins of cupcakes (so about 8-10 apples, 220g butter, 6 eggs etc.). If your cupcake tin is for smallish cupcakes you may have some leftover mixture even with below doses, so scroll down for more ideas. 

Ingredients for 12 cupcakes/muffins

4-5 Oratia Beauty apples

40 ml water

10 ml lemon juice

120 g salted butter

3 eggs

130 g sugar

A few drops of pure vanilla essence (optional)

200 g self-rising flour

Granulated sugar for topping (optional, this in an Italian product, not sure if available in NZ, but it is not vital to the recipe!)

Preheat the oven to 175°C. 

Line a 12-muffin tray with cupcakes paper cups.

In the meantime place the water and lemon juice in a mixing bowl, peel and slice the apples and drop them directly into the lemony water.

Melt the butter in a jug, either in the microwave or in the oven (while the oven is warming up for the cupcakes). Place the eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl and whisk, using an electric beater, until the mixture looks light and pale yellow in colour. Slowly add the melted butter and the vanilla essence, if using.

Keep beating at a low speed now; add half of the flour followed by half of the lemony water from the apples. Add the rest of the flour and water and keep beating making sure that there are no lumps. Fill some cupcakes paper cups with the mixture and top each one with two or three slices of apple. Sprinkle with granulated sugar 
 
Bake for about 18-20 minutes, until golden brown at the top. You can also check by inserting a toothpick into the cupcakes: if it comes out clean the cupcakes are ready. Remove the cupcakes from the tin and let them cool down. 

Because I double the doses to make two tins I also made a few plum cupcakes (basic recipe here) with Luisa and Black Doris Plums (also from the Dragicevich Orchard in Oratia) and, with still a little mixture left (when you use slices of fruit they do take space!), two heart shaped mini cakes (apple, plum and raspberry). 

And now the latest posies from Instagram, all flowers from my garden except the orchids (from Larsens Orchids in Oratia) 

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Vivere in Nuova Zelanda: Radicchio e orchidee, la vita capovolta

Radicchio leaves with goat cheese and a drizzle of olive oil, on crackers

Sono mezza veneta, cresciuta con radicchio, non ne sono mai stata entusiasta eppure adesso mi manca. Ma ad Auckland cresce a fatica, troppo caldo e umido nel bush. Tentativi miseri e se non lo mangio quando le foglie sono piccole mi finisce subito in semenza. E cosa cresce invece? Orchidee!! Ho sempre sognato di avere orchidee, e adesso le ho sia in casa che in giardino! In giardino!!! Quando posso vado anche alle mostre di orchidee, queste sono cresciute da professionisti e appassionati, molti belle e curate.

E queste sono le mie (ne ho altre, ma non sono in fiore adesso), un po' misere a confronto, ma gli voglio bene :-). Quelle singole (prese dal giardino) sono in mini vasi giapponesi che svolgono la seconda funzione di appoggia-bacchette.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Italian chips and beautiful things in my garden

How silly can a recipe be? I never thought that I would bother writing something so basic, but the world where I live is so full of chips, and terrible chips I must say, that I very rarely eat them out, and very occasionally I like to make them at home the Italian way, patatine fritte, like we made on special occasions, usually on a Sunday. These are not deep fried but pan-fried, and they are flavoured with garlic and rosemary, 

Peel the potatoes, cut the potatoes into chip sizes, rinse (or just soak in water) and pat dry. Sizzle some garlic in a frypan with extra virgin olive oil, then add the chips and pan-fry stirring and/or shaking the pan constantly. I add just a little salt at the beginning, and remove the garlic before it burns. Then I add rosemary when they are nearly cooked (they takes about 20 minutes), finish with more salt and eat immediately (although if you cook them this way they are also tasty when cold, unlike British style chips). 

And now something from my garden

The pink orchids are glorious this year, the yellow ones will follow soon, and every year they cheer me up in the middle of the Auckland winter.

And then, look who is sleeping on one of the Nikau palms!

A Kereru! The New Zealand native wood pigeon, all puffed up and using her chest for a pillow.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Homegrown bananas

No much time to blog these days, too busy with this event, so here is just a pic of the bananas from my plant, finally ripen. Making lots of banana cakes!


Photos by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Quince and kahikatea berry tart

The Kahikatea trees in the bush are full of berries, and birds are singing happily. The berries (koroī) are edible, but the trees are too high to climb for me, so I can only pick what falls on the forest floor. It takes time, but foraging runs in my veins, plus it is a good squatting exercise! After picking you need to wash the berries well and remove the hard blue seeds, another time consuming job! After all this you are left with an handful of berries so it is easy to understand why you don't see koroī jam around! In fact there are not many recipes with these berries, and this is my third one only (the other two are Flan with Kawakawa cream and Kahikatea berries, and Kahikatea Cupcakes. 



The berries don't have much taste so I added one tsp of sugar and a tbsp of lemon juice and I let them marinate overnight. They day after they were yummy and ready to put on cereals, but I preferred  making a tart. I use quinces from Oratia, in season now. I peeled two big quinces and cut them into slices. Then I melted 50 g of butter and two tbsp of sugar in a iron skillet and sautéd the quinces for two minutes. After that I added a small glass of grappa (I used this aged Prosecco Grappa by Bottega). As soon as you pour the grappa over the hot quinces the kitchen fills with a wonderful aroma and you could eat the quinces just like that, maybe with some ice cream on the side. After most of the liquid had evaporated I added 2 tsp of corn flour diluted with a little water to make a paste. I stirred well and positioned all the quince slices neatly on the bottom of the pan. Then I added the kahikatea berries, keeping just a few aside for decoration.

I cut a circle of puff pastry (I used Paneton) and fitted it over the fruit and then baked the lot until the pastry looked golden and puffy. Then I carefully reversed the pan over a serving plate and let the tart slip down (by itself) onto the plate. I added the remaining berries and took a few photos! The tart was very good, you don't have to use quinces, apples and pears are good too, and the berries are just a fancy addition, but what a satisfaction! Today I am going to ask the kids to do a bit of foraging for me, it is a good skill to learn after all, and since it is Easter Sunday in New Zealand, they will be excited after that other form of 'foraging' that happens here: the Easter eggs hunt! In fact here they are coming down now, I'll better go and enjoy this!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

A vegetarian meal from the garden and beautiful Waitakere (and tui)

I made a dinner for 4 for the garden: fried zucchini flowers (recipe here), 

borage bread cutlets (recipe here), fried sage (just fried the sage leaves 

with the leftover oil from the zucchini and borage fritters), fresh salad leaves, 

boiled new potatoes and carrots with herbs sauce 

(just mixed feta with basil and parsley). It was delicious, 

and such a satisfaction to grown my own dinner!                                                                                                               And now, And And now some photos from the Waitakere Ranges, where I live, 

and of a New Zealand native bird, the tui, eating nectar from flax flowers.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Two New Zealand birds in my garden; tui and kererū

I love the fact that I can use my phone to video the birds I see out of the window. We are surrounded by native forest, including plenty of nikau palms, so we have lots of kereru, and we also have flowering trees like puriri, and a one exotic, an Australian frangipani, that tui love! In fact this morning there was quite a fight between two tui for the control of the frangipani, it was like living in a Attemborough's documentary. Here tui and kereru feeding (in peace).

The Tui is an endemic bird of New Zealand that mostly feed on nectar. Here is feeding on an Australia frangipani tree (Hymenosporum flavum).

The New Zealand pigeon or kererū is a bird endemic to New Zealand. The nikau is the only palm native to New Zealand. Filmed in the Waitakere Ranges, Auckland.

I am on TV

Tune in to TV One this Sunday at 11am for the Neighbourhood episode of Oratai, which I will be presenting. And if you miss it you can always watch it on TV On Demand by clicking here. http://www.tvnz.co.nz/neighbourhood

For the readers overseas, I am not sure if you will be able to watch TVNZ On Demand fro your computers, but there is the trailer on FB, just click here to see it.

Season 3 Episode 20 - Oratia

This week Italian born Alessandra Zecchini shows us around her neighbourhood - Oratia a rural community of about two and a half thousand lucky souls on the border between Auckland’s city sprawl and the wild forests and beaches of the West Coast.

We’ll meet a glass artist, born in Greece, who finds inspiration in the myths of her homeland and an Oratia man shares his Dutch mother’s love of the soil.

We’ll join in the celebrations with the Dalmatian community who have made Oratia home for such a long time and a local woman demonstrates her mother’s recipe for a classic French Pate.

Curator Bio:

Alessandra Zecchini is a food writer, stylist and publisher, born in Northern Italy. She moved to Oratia with her kiwi husband, after years spent in London and Tokyo.

Alessandra feels very welcome in her adopted country. “For me, it is a privilege to be both Italian and a New Zealander. I don’t need to renounce my Italian heritage and culture to live in NZ, which is a very accepting society and offers great opportunities for new arrivals to enrich the cultural tapestry of this country. Migrants to Oratia – generations back or more recent - have all brought something to the table that makes this area unique.  I couldn’t be happier to call it home.”

 Continue reading….

Tofu and spring onion skewers

My friends Astuko and Hideko often send me this dried tofu which I find super versatile! I just soak it in water (or stock) and then use it in a variety of dishes. This time I just soaked it in water and then cut each blog into four pieces, and put them in a skewer (soak the skewers too!) with some spring onions. 

I sautéed the skewers on both sides with a little rice bran oil to which I added a few drops of sesame oil, then I brushed the tofu and spring onions with a sauce made by simmering a teaspoon of honey (use sugar or molasses if you are vegan) with two tbsp of water, two of soy sauce (gluten free please use tamari) and a pinch of freshly grated ginger. I turned the skewers over one more time and then I served them, hot and yummy! The scrapings from the pan were delicious on plain rice too!

And this is a picture of Karekare from a walk last Sunday, the Hau Hau track going up, and the Coman on the way down. Splendid! Click here if you like to see more photos of the views from these tracks.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©