Central Australia, on the Road

Photo: Alessandra  Zecchini  ©

How to use an iPhone for drawing during a long trip

iPhone Artwork by Max Zecchini Dowling ©

iPhone artwork by Arantxa Zecchini Dowling ©

Central Australia

Photos: Alessandra  Zecchini  ©

Bush Banana

Aboriginal food: Bush Banana from Central Australia, but it  smells and tastes like snap peas...

Photos: Alessandra  Zecchini  ©

Give me your hand...

Photos: Alessandra  Zecchini  ©

5 minutes of sunset in Alice Springs

Photos: Alessandra  Zecchini  ©

First photo of Sydney, from Max

Photo: Max Zecchini Dowling ©

Taste Magazine, Italian issue, and bye bye

This month I am in Taste Magazine talking about a few of my favourite things (and one is quirky men...)!!!! Also if you have time have a look at this post on the Dante Blog, I thought a few Italian students how to make sugar flowers, it was so much fun, and a novel way to learn Italian. I am off on holiday now, I may not have much internet connection or time, but I will try to post, and to read your posts, whenever I can.

Ciao

Alessandra

Amarena Cherry Cupcakes for Sweet New Zealand, and remembering friends

Ingredients

120 g butter

3 eggs

130 g sugar

1/2 tsp lemon zest

200 g self-rising flour

60 ml milk

12 Italian Amarena Cherries (I used Toschi)

to sprinkle:

icing sugar

Fresh As Blackcurrant powder

Makes 12 cupcakes

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Line a 12-muffin tray with cupcakes paper cups.

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 lemon zest. Keep beating at a low speed now; add half of the flour followed by half of the milk. Add the rest of the flour and milk and keep beating making sure that there are no lumps. Divide the mixture between the 12-cupcake cases and add one cherry on top of each cupcake, pressing it down lightly.

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. Mix the icing sugar with the Fresh As Blackcurrant powder and dust the top of the cupcakes.

This recipe is for Sweet New Zealand, this month hosted by Bridget of After Taste. All Kiwi bloggers living in NZ or overseas can participate, for inspiration just have a look at last month's event, hosted by Sugar and Spice.

Blogger Arfi proposed to dedicate this Sweet New Zealand session to our fellow blogger and friend Barbara of Winos and Foodies, who passed away last Saturday. Barbara was a real lady, in every sense, and we will all miss her. She is also one of the first blogger I have met when I started blogging  (I guess that in those days we didn't have many NZ bloggers!), but among all of us Kiwi bloggers I think that Arfi was possibly the one who knew her better, so I will direct you to her words to farewell Barbara.

These are sad times, I have also lost another friend last week, he was only 49 and he left behind a wife and two kids, and a big hole in our hearts. I didn't really plan to talk about him here, in my blog, in a way it is so personal, as his wife is one of my closest and oldest Italian girlfriends, and a colleague too, and when we live all so far away from home we have become like an extended family. But cancer is such a terrible illness, and after so much crying I just want to say to all of us: please, let us look after ourselves.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Blackcurrant coconut macaroons

A super easy and quick recipe for the weekend! My husband loves coconut macaroons, and I often make them if I have some leftover egg whites. 

I just made a meringue base with egg white and more or less the same amount of icing sugar (this time I had 2 eggs whites). To add interest I included one tbs of Fresh As Blackcurrant powder. The colour was very pretty!

Then I folded in some dried coconut, enough to make them 'spoonable' over a baking tray, lined with the Lynette's baking sheet I won form blogger Zo. Nice to use a baking sheet that can be recycled over and over again!

I Baked at 100 C for an hour or so and then I let them dry with the oven door open. They aren't pretty, but they are nice, and gluten free too :-). Have a smashing weekend!!!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Opossum scaloppine... I mean...Tofu scaloppine!!!!

This month's MTC challenge is about scaloppine, and very kindly they allowed not only meat and fish scaloppine, but also seitan, for vegetarians. Now, the seitan in Italy may be better and more suited to scaloppine, I dotn't really know, but I can assure you that the one here is as suited as a shoe sole would be and so, risking of being eliminated, I am using tofu instead. 

So what about the opossum?

For those who don't know, opossums in NZ are an imported dangerous pest that is destroying our native forests and birds. So it is our civic duty, especially if we live in the bush, to trap them... and kill them. For a vegetarian this is hard to stomach, but since I show little pity to mosquitos, for example, I have to come to term with the fact that yes, opossums and other predators must be eliminated. We didn't have any for a while, and then the other night my husband saw one, and he said that he was going to set the traps in the morning. But during the night the opossum got busy in my garden!!! The day after I decided to make my tofu scaloppine with white wine and parsley and... all the parsley was gone!! Eaten!! By the Opossum. OK, it could have been worse, I still had the wine, but the beast didn't leave me a single little leaf, and I had to buy the parsley, it was slightly irritating. That night, tempted by an apple with peanut butter, the opossum died in its trap. I still cannot get used to it, fortunately the boys deal with the carcass. How? Well, my next door neighbor is an old hippy, basically a vegan except for roadkill type of meat. He says that since we have to kill it we should also eat it. So when we get an opossum we call him, he checks to see if it is healthy (tb is a risk here) and then he skins it and cook it. This time it was nicely parsley flavored, and stuffed with apple and peanut butter! His son was most appreciative too: he doesn't like the policies of the meat industry and prefers to eat meat that comes from a wild animal, killed for an ecological purpose. Well, my hat off to them, but I still rather eat tofu :-).

Tofu Scaloppine with wine and parsley, and thin roast potatoes

I used 4 dried blocks of Japanese tofu: first I let it rest in 500 ml of warm vegetable broth to rehydrate, then I cut each piece into two thinner slices (scaloppine must be thin) and pressed them well to get the extra stock our (keep it, you will need it later!) and flatten them a bit more. I passed the slices in flour, and then placed them in a pot with plenty of sizzling melted salted butter. A quick sauté on both sides, and then I added a good glass of white wine. Once the wine was absorbed and the scaloppine had been turned around a few times I scraped the bottom of the pan (you may need to remove the scaloppine to do this, I didn't) and added the leftover vegetable broth. I simmered everything until I had a thick sauce, then I added salt and pepper to taste, and plenty of (bought) chopped parsley.

To accompany the scaloppine I made some thinly cut roast potatoes, (simply brushed with olive oil and salt only and roasted until crisp) and it was such a nice, vegetarian, main!! 

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Persimmons: the Italian way and the Japanese way

I have fond memories of eating cachi (Italian for persimmons) as a child in Italy. Ahhhh delicious sweet cachi, from October to December, always so soft that they were bought in trays from the fruit vendors, and then Mum would put them in a bowl, give us a spoon, and let us enjoy the runny soft flesh. Then at 19 I went to live in the UK, and for 6 years I had no persimmons, with one exception. To be honest I could not believe how little fruit they had in the UK (back then), every house I went in seemed to have only three types of fruit: oranges, green apples and bananas. Berries and stone fruit were luxuries and mostly used canned, or to top desserts. There was exotic fruit but mainly in fruit baskets given as presents (with the exception of the previously mentioned bananas, and the occasional pineapple). Persimmons were probably considered exotic too, although things may be different now. During those six year the only time I saw them was when a friend, married to a Japanese lady and with a catering business (so he knew where to get unusual fruit) offered me some. I didn't even know the English name, but I discovered that the Italian name cachi sounds like the Japanese name Kaki. And then I was surprised to see that the kaki where hard, not soft, and cut into slices and peeled.

Definitely a different variety, I thought: hard cachi were impossible to eat in Italy, as they tasted really unripe. I did eat my slices, and they were nice, but then I left the remaining kaki that my friend gave me to ripen fully until soft enough to be eaten with a spoon :-). They were smaller and tasted a bit different from the Italian ones, but they were still good, and a real treat (although my English boyfriend was disgusted by my way of eating them). 

After London I went to live in Tokyo for three and a half years, and I had plenty of kaki there! I learned to eat them the Japanese way too, and yes, I do enjoy them, and occasionally I still eat them cut into slices (especially if I eat them on the low table in my Japanese room, something nice to do in Autumn and Winter). In Italy my aunt has two persimmon trees, one for soft and one for the smaller, Japanese type that can be eaten hard. But I still prefer the soft ones, (and so does my daughter).

A funny story now:
In Tokyo I lived in front of a tiny greengrocer shop. When kaki were in season I checked from my window the colour, to assess the ripeness. I learned that yes, some Japanese did eat them with a spoon also, but mostly they just like them sliced and peeled, so the over-riped and soft didn't really sell. As soon as the kaki looked soft enough I went out and started my bargaining with the old greengrocer.
"They are a bit soft, aren't' they?"
"Yes, but they are still very good! You can eat them with a spoon!"
"Mmmh"
"What about 100 yen for the lot?"
"Ok!"
The bargaining was purely ceremonial. Of course he worked out pretty quickly that I like them soft, (I didn't buy any other fruit or vegetable that looked old or over ripe, even when he tried to sell it to me) so much that the days I failed to notice soft kaki he would call out to me:
"Hey, honorable foreigner, I have some soft kaki for you!"
"Mmmh, so you have..."
 "What about 100 yen for the lot?"

"Ok!" :-)

Photos by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Gorse flower cupcakes, foraging in Anawhata

Gorse cupcakes and Anawhata

On Sunday we went to Anawhata, one of my local beaches, and one of my favorites, as you can only reach it walking down a path in the bush. There are many gorse plants around, a weed in New Zealand, but the flowers are lovely and smell like coconut. They are also edible so I picked some on the way back.

The walk to the beach

From top left clockwise: Vegetarian humor on a sign (and no, it wasn't me!), the path to the beach, the beach and a far away surfer (needs to carry his board down, and then up again the path!), cute shells on the black sand.

Beautiful seaweed

I picked about two large handful of gorse flowers, made a syrup with a 100ml of water and 1 tbsp of icing sugar, put the gorse in the hot syrup and let it rest for one night. 

For the gorse cupcakes: 

120 g butter

3 eggs

130 g sugar

1/2 tsp lemon zest

200 g self-rising flour

100 ml gorse flowers and syrup

Makes 12 cupcakes

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Line a 12-muffin tray with cupcakes paper cups.

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 lemon zest. Keep beating at a low speed now; add flour followed by gorse and syrup and keep beating making sure that there are no lumps. Divide the mixture between the 12-cupcake cases and bake for about 18-20 minutes, until golden 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. 

Would you like to know what they tasted like? They tested like banana cupcakes!!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Fruit smoothies: a bit of sunshine in a glass!

Guys I am freezing! This photos was taken a few weeks ago and I am behind with my posting, but today I need to look at it because it is sunny and bright! And after all I make fruit smoothies every day when the kids come home from school, a burst of vitamins! I mostly use apple juice as a base (the one I buy from Dragisovich, the last apple orchard in Oratia that sells apple juice from the shed) with a banana or two, then I add whatever fruit I have, and since I had just about 1 tbsp of Fresh As Plum powder left, I decided to use it!

Doris Plum Winter Fruit Smoothies

500 ml apple juice, 2 bananas, 1 tbsp Fresh As Plum powder

Blend well. Serves 3-4 vitamin loving kids!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Vegan school lunch boxes, eat your colours and 5+ a Day

Carrot and cucumber sticks, grapes, blueberries and Cape gooseberries, Olive focaccia (homemade)

When I was living in Japan I learned to present lunch boxes including a spectrum of at least 5 colours.

I try to do this with the kids' lunch boxes now, and these days the 5 + a Day is also promoting 'colours', which is a good way to make food more interesting. Of course here in NZ lunch boxes are stuffed down the school bag and tossed around, so I could never make them like these super pretty bentos, (I also wouldn't have the time in the morning or late at night!) but sometimes I do them for a lunch at home.

Now it is a complete coincidence that these lunch boxes are all Vegan (and containing mostly raw food!), often the kids would have cheese rolls and homemade pizza, and often a milky chocolate drink or a drinking yogurt too, but as they have so much milk and yogurt for breakfast everyday that they can do without for lunch!

My problem has been trying to have 5 different colours as the season is getting colder, especially for the blue! The first photo was taken a couple of month ago, and the rest followed every couple of weeks. When there are blueberries around it is so easy, now most of the berries they have are frozen, good for smoothies and cereals and desserts, but not school lunches.

Avocado sushi, cherry tomato, banana, kiwi gold, feijoa, mandarin, grapes

If I don't have blueberries I try to put a few red/black grapes, is a pity that they are all imported, but so are the bananas. For the rest I always try to be seasonable and use fruit and veggies that grow in NZ, the tomato here was from my garden. Sushi only happens if there is some left over after dinner the night before: I could never get up at 5am to make it fresh!

Baguette with green salad and hummus with Dukka, banana, mandarins, kiwi gold, dried prunes

When I don't use grapes I try to add something close to purple/blue, like dried plums. Hummus is also another favourite filling, if they could my kids would have a hummus rolls every day, and they don't seem to be fussed if it smells of garlic.

Baguette with rocket salad, hummus and broad beans, orange, grapes and Cape gooseberries

Hummus again, this was just over a week ago, believe it of not I had broad beans in the garden, an unseasonal plant that followed its own schedule! Not enough for a meal, but enough for a couple of rolls. The Cape gooseberries too are from the garden, incredibly enough they are still going!

Dolmas (rice wrapped in vine leaves), carrot sticks, cucumber and cherry tomatoes, banana, grapes and mandarin

Winter is progressing and the lunch boxes are becoming a bit repetitive: mandarins, banana, carrot sticks and grapes seem to dominate, and I occasionally buy cherry tomatoes even if they are grown in hothouses (but so are most cucumbers, I guess). The dolmas came from a can, a very occasional purchase, but it does add variety and, yes, the kids love those too!

I am dreaming of cherries and strawberries and blueberries and plums and colorful capsicums which make it so easy to add colour, but I also guess that winter is the time when we should overdose with oranges and yellows.

And if you have kids please tell me, what goes into their lunch boxes this season?

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©