Chere's Verandah Cafe Lunch

From left: Christine, Colleen Frances, Kim, Chere


Lunch on the Verandah at Chere's

Even two days before, it was obviously going to be a hot day. So I wanted the food to be light, light, light and delicious and appealing.

This is the menu I chose.

MENU
Champagne Mocktails

Appetisers of
Smoked salmon with crème fraiche and caviar

Local flathead marinated in coriander, lime and ginger with avocado sauce

Watermelon with black pepper

Main
Local prawns, scallops and feta with strawberries, edamame beans, local baby beets, mixed salad leaves & mint and pistachios with a honey and mustard dressing

Dessert
Petite chocolate cake
Peach ice cream with blueberry sauce
Lime coconut and macadamia ice cream

To drink – Mountain Ridge verdelho & light macadamia dessert liqueur

You'll see that I intended to use our lightly enclosed verandah to eat. It turned out that we ate our appetisers in the cool of the house, our main course on the verandah – then we escaped into the cool again for dessert. What else can you expect in the middle of summer?

You'll see from the menu that you can make much of this food without recipes. I've just included the ones you may not know or can't find anywhere else.

Actually the Champagne Mocktails were really just fresh apple juice, (grape would have been nice too), mixed with sparkling mineral water, a touch of lime and mint and lots of ice. For those who wanted it, I added a slurp of the light macadamia dessert liqueur we had on the day, which made a nice difference!

I'd recently bought some lovely spoons from Vinnies (I'm a great Vinnies fan and manage to find many wonderful table accessories there). So I wanted to use them for my appetisers.

The marinated fish I used was fresh local fillets or flathead which I'd marinated overnight in freshly squeezed lime, lemon and grated ginger. Just before the others arrived I chopped the fish into bite sized pieces and topped them with an avocado mashed with a little light whipped cream and sprinkled on some chopped chives from the garden.

The smoked salmon with creme fraiche and caviar speaks for itself.

If you don't have the recipe for crème fraiche, it's easy! Just mix a generous tablespoon of buttermilk with a cup of low or full fat cream (both work). Stir lightly, cover with a cloth and leave in a warm place until the mixture thickens. You'll see when it's ready – around 24 hours.

(I drizzled a little good olive oil over both the appetisers just before serving).

The watermelon was local, but was a bit disappointing as there was not much taste! So I sprinkled a good teaspoon of castor sugar over it the night before to bring out the flavour and added freshly ground black pepper to the chilled squares.

The main course was basically an interesting salad of prawns, scallops, local feta, fresh steamed baby beetroot (from my garden) strawberries, edamame beans (steamed and chilled) pistachios, mixed salad leaves and good bunch of individual mint leaves from the garden, with a honey and mustard dressing.

I mixed the salad in a large pot and then dished it onto individual plates, mixing through 2/3 or my dressing, then adding the beetroot last.

I then cooked the green prawns in hot olive oil and a little butter for a couple of minutes and set them aside on a hot plate. I cooked the scallops in the same pan (hot again) for a minute on each side. I added the prawns again and poured in a little lime juice and grated garlic and almost immediately removed the pan from the heat. They were then add to the salad with their sauce and I drizzled the remaining honey mustard dressing over the whole salad.

Honey mustard dressing
2 tbsp rice wine vinegar, 1 tsp castor sugar, 1 tbsp dijon mustard, pinch of salt, ½ cup good olive oil (you can vary these quantities according to your taste).

Dessert

Peach ice cream with blueberry sauce

To make the ice cream:

Have your ice-cream making bowl in the freezer overnight.
626 g fresh ripe peaches and nectarine, peeled and stoned. Keep the skins and stones.
(You can just use peaches, but it turned out that only 3 of my peaches were really ripe, but I had some lovely ripe nectarines, so I mixed the two to make up the amount).

¼ cup lemon juice
1 ½ cups thickened cream*
1 ½ cups milk*
¾ cups sugar (I used raw because I like the taste).
3 large room temperature egg yolks.

* I use low fat

Puree the peach and nectarine flesh with the lemon juice. Cover and refrigerate.

Put the skins and stones into a large saucepan with the cream and milk. Simmer over a low heat for 20 minutes, making sure the mixture doesn't boil. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved (the skin and stones are still there). Remove from the heat.

Beat the egg yolks and whisk in about ½ cup of the creamy mixture. Return the pan to the heat and stir in the egg mixture. Continue to cook until the custard coats the back of the spoon, this should take about 8 – 10 minutes. Once again, don't let the mixture boil. Remove from the heat, press some plastic wrap over the custard so that it doesn't form a skin and let it cool.

When the custard is cool, strain it, discarding all the stones and skins, and then combine the custard with the peach & nectarine puree (or just peach). Mix well and chill. Get out your ice-cream maker and make the ice cream according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Transfer to a container to freeze.

Serve with blueberry sauce.

Blueberry sauce:

Puree 1 cup blueberries, sugar to taste and a squeeze of lemon juice. Pass through a strainer.

Lime, Coconut and Macadamia ice cream

2 cups reduced cream
2 cups light coconut milk or cream
¾ cup raw sugar
1 tablespoon of your favourite liqueur (mine was coffee based)
pinch salt
finely grated rind of a lime and a tablespoon of lime juice.
½ cup crushed macadamia nuts roasted with honey

Mix cream and milk, lime juice, sugar, liqueur and salt.

Mix well and chill. Make the ice cream according to the ice cream maker/s instructions.

When it is ready, stir in the macadamias and lime rind and put in a container to freeze.

Petite chocolate cakes

I made up a rich dense chocolate cake and chilled it. I cut mini rounds of the dense cake, spread whipped light cream on the first round, topped with another and then added a very large dollop of the cream on top and sprinkled it with organic ground chocolate.

The frosting on the grapes I'd made to top the lime, coconut and macadamia ice cream melted in the heat!

It was a hot day, but we had a good time!

Chere

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Cheesemaking with the Foodies

By Chere

The Shoalhaven Foodies recently had a cheese making day. All of us had expressed an interest in making our own cheese, so when Frances' sister Rachael offered to share her cheese-making knowledge, we were quick to accept.

Frances stirs the milk.

Kim following Rachael's instructions on cutting the curd

Rachael brought some samples of her own feta, mascarpone and quark cheeses – delicious!

Our efforts produced some excellent feta and quark, which we shared out and took home to savour and make into some dishes of our own.

The feta was truly delicious (both Rachael's feta and the batch we took home). Really creamy and smooth. Not too salty – just right.

What can I say about the mascarpone? Only that it was one of the best I've ever eaten. Also silky and smooth. We made short work of it with fresh strawberries, dates and tamarillos. (The Shoalhaven Foodies never go hungry at our get togethers!). pic

Colleen brought mouth-watering gluten-free rosemary shortbread which we polished off in a flash!



Chere's dishes from the cheese
A sad tale, when I went to make some dishes, I found my oven wasn't working - damn! Obviously that meant nothing oven baked.

I set myself another challenge and decided to only use what I had available at home. I'd brought home some lovely fresh oranges from our cheese-making day (picked from a large tree in the delightful garden). I also had an avocado from Christine's garden (now just ripe) and a large bowl of organic limes and lemons a friend had given me.

Oh yes, and someone had given me a bag of prunes. So, armed with the feta and the quark, I made:

Some delicious avocado mousse by mixing the flesh of the avocado, a dessertspoon of lime juice, a little fresh vegetable stock, a splash of Tabasco sauce, some finely chopped fresh herbs from my herb garden (chives, tarragon and a little basil), about 4 tablespoons of quark, black pepper and some made up agar agar to set it. Into the fridge and …. yum!

I cut the feta into cubes and marinated it overnight with pan roasted cumin seeds, lemon zest and olive oil. Yum too! They went on a platter and my daughter Kimella and I had a very nice little feast.



I made up a mix of red wine and sugar and brought it to the boil, added the juice and zest of an orange and marinated a big cup of prunes in it overnight. (You could add some liqueur to this, but I didn't have any!).
I made a caramel sauce of sugar and water and added some orange zest and finely chopped dates. I poured this over four oranges, (skin and pith removed and cut into slices) and left it overnight too.

The quark went on top of the oranges and dates. The mixture of the caramelised oranges with the quark and the marinated prunes was truly delicious!


Thank you Rachael and thank you Frances for organising the day.

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Preserving the summer lusciousness

by Colleen

Sometimes there are gluts of goodies from the vegie patch, and sometimes I just want to keep something to use later. Going way back to my early days of growing my own food, orchards etc. I've made marmalades and other jams. When I was younger I'd simply preserve using the deep freeze but in my single, more simplified lifestyle now, I don't have a deep freeze other than the top of the frig.

Over the past year I've made lots of different preserves, including the yummy zucchini chutney, beetroot relish, lime marmalade, cape gooseberry syrup, green tomato relish, ripe tomato relish. I've done so many preserves I can't remember them all!

Check out the jars above, from left: picked cumquats, mulberry preserve, lime and ginger marmalade and cape gooseberry sauce.

Last week I harvested the rosellas that grew over summer. Rosellas are a variety of hibiscus, best grown in warmer climates, but reasonably successful in my temperate zone garden. They produce large flowers with a crimson enlarged calyx. I used the fleshy red calyx, without the green seed pod to make my jammy syrup. After stripping the calyxes from the seed pods there wasn't a huge quantity of fruit to work with and I've finished up with about 750mls of the syrup. The colour is fantastic, bright red and the taste is a bit cranberry-ish. This is a keeper and I'll make sure I plant out more seeds next year for more fruit. I'm keeping the syrup to use for sauces with meat etc. And there's also the possibility of a rosella cosmopolitan cocktail for a special occasion.The recipe below is an experiment. If you were to use rosellas for jam, it's best to tie the seed pods into a muslin bag and cook along with the fruit to extract the pectin.

Rosella syrup:

200g rosella calyxes

200g white sugar

a little water

Poach the rosellas until tender, which surprisingly, doesn't take long, then gradually add the sugar, stirring until dissolved and cook gently until thickened. Bottle in sterilised jars while still hot.

Another garden experiment this year were the purple heirloom tomatillos. I'm guilty, I'm afraid, of not looking after these bushes as well as I could have and as a result lost a lot of the fruit. I'm sorry now I didn't pay more attention and harvested the fruit to be used ongoing, for instance like tomatoes.

What attracts me to these little darlings are the papery husks they grow in, similar to but larger than the beautiful husks of the cape gooseberry.

Roasted tomatillo and capsicum salsa

A few tomatillos roasted under the griller until brown

Two large capsicums (peppers) - one red and one green, charred under the griller. Place in plastic bag and when cooler, rub off the skins.

Zest of one lime

Finely chopped red onion

About a cup of chopped coriander

Salt and pepper

Blitz the tomatillos, capsicums, lime zest and coriander in a kitchen whiz, then add to a bowl with the chopped onion, salt and pepper to taste.

This salsa is delicious with steak or other grilled meats, and I also used it as a pasta sauce one night.

That's about the end of the summer crops, with autumn really kicking in now with its chilly mornings, crisp sunny days (sadly no rain) and cool evenings. I sowed garlic and shallots yesterday, along with some onion seedlings. Later today I'll plant out some broccoli and spinach seedings and sow broad bean, sugar snap pea and japanese turnip seeds.

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Frances' Croquet Fun Day

Frances hosted a great croquet and games party in her country garden. The Foodies all turned up to enjoy the great food and company, and contributed some locally sourced goodies ourselves.

Chere's contribution was a delicious and beautiful savoury platter featuring local produce with local watermelon marinated in a little balsamic with black pepper and basin chiffonade. It seemed a shame to spoil the artwork of the food by eating it, but eat it we did!

Kim's platter looked too good to eat as well:

Figs stuffed with Blue cheese, wrapped in prosciutto with Rocket and Walnuts.


Cut figs almost open, then stuff with blue cheese, wrap in prosciutto and secure with a rosemary stalk. Bake for approx. 10 minutes or until prosciutto is crispy and cheese is oozy. Roast walnuts for 1-2 mins. Arrange rocket, top with figs and drizzle Balsamic vinegar and olive oil mixture, sprinkle walnuts and cracked pepper.

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