Growing young gardeners

The smile on Livvie's face as she holds the flowerpoint bouquet 

and a jar of seeds says it all.

In mid-November I took my 'Flowerpoint Presentation' to Lyttelton Main School, and presented it to the whole school, in three different groups. The juniors seemed to know much more about gardening than the seniors, and to be more engaged with it. I'd love to know why that is, and how long it has been the case. 

 I talk to the junior school in the school library

The juniors told me about their gardening successes and failures, and were very interested in what I had to show them by way of food flowers (a bouquet of the flowers of peas, rocket, chives, pak choi, etc.), food seeds and plants, preserves, and walnuts (which they caught when I tossed them out). They also enjoyed passing around my puppet helper, Frieda the Frog.

She was a big hit with the children in Room 3 (7-8 year olds) who made me lovely original thank you cards which told me about their gardens, and what they liked best. Some samples...

“I really liked the smell of the tomato and elderflowers and I really liked the seeds. I have heaps of minnie pumpkin plants in my garden because I knocked over a pot of pumpkin seeds and they grew.”

“ I am a good (sort of) gardner too. I am 8...I liked the puppet frog best.”

“ My favourite part about your flowerpoint presentation is passing around all the fantastic things.”

“ The best bit was smelling all your loveley flowers.”

“I liked getting the wall nuts. I really liked your frog too.”

“ My favourite part was when you fow the warnuts up in the air.”

“I really liked the tomarto plant. It smelled like tomarto.”

“I enjoyed passing the plants around, that was fun. I like the smell of the elderflower that was strong and sweet smelling.”

“My favourite part was when you let us pat your toy frog.”

I was impressed with how much the children knew about some tricky subjects related to gardening, such as photosynthesis, and how taking cuttings works. They are a credit to their teachers and their own efforts. As so often, I wished that important matters like food and environmental policies were decided by young people living close to ecological reality, and not by distant corporations that know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Still, if these children continue as they have begun, I feel that at least in Lyttelton the future is in good hands.

I made my Christmas tree this year from a branch of flowering kanuka hung with the children's cards, and put the very popular Frieda at its base.

The Christmas Cake Collection

This year's cake awaiting 
its icing, plus a batch of 
strawberry tarts.








Every year I bake a rich fruit cake from the same easy recipe (see below), and exercise my imagination to decorate it in an original way. Here are some samples from past years...

My 2009 cake was decorated 
with 'cherries' made from balls of almond paste,  and coloured with red currant jelly, with green glace cherry 'leaves'.

The 2007 cake had stars and an angel cut from almond paste, silver balls and red cherries.

In 2010 the almond paste cut outs were animals and a star, and the glace cherries made flowers.

For 2011 - another take on cherry flowers and silver stars

  CHRISTMAS CAKE – EASY MIX*

Ingredients

1 kg dried fruit (two-thirds raisins; the rest currants, sultanas, mixed peel, glace cherries to taste)

¾ cup rum and/or sherry

2 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

200g butter

¼ cup golden syrup

½ cup milk

3 eggs, beaten together

Method

Put the dried fruit in a large bowl, add the rum and/or sherry, mix well, cover with a plastic bag, and leave to stand for 24-48 hours, until the liquid is absorbed.

Prepare a 20-23 cm square cake tin by lining it with 3-4 layers of baking paper.

Heat the oven to 150 degrees C.

Mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt together and rub in the butter. (This is easily done in a food processor.)

Measure the golden syrup into a jug pre-heated with very hot water. Add the milk and mix it well with the syrup.

Add the dry mix to the dried fruit in its large bowl, and mix well. Add the wet ingredients and stir them in well.

Put the cake mix in the lined tin, pushing it well into the corners. Bake for 1 hour, then cover the top of the cake with aluminium foil to prevent it from getting too brown. Bake for another hour, or until firm.

Leave to cool completely in the tin before peeling off the baking paper.

* Based on Alison Holst's Easy Mix Christmas Cake recipe

A weed to cure hayfever

This spring on Banks Peninsula we have had wet and cold then warm and dry days alternating in groups for the past three months. It has been great for grass growth, and hence grass pollen, which is a well-known trigger of hay fever.

A cup of hayfever relief, with its ingredients

On November 18 I started showing the symptoms – sneezing, runny nose and eyes, tickly throat, feeling stuffed up in the head. I endured it for a week until I finally had the sense to consult my copy of James Wong's Grow Your Own Drugs, to see what he recommended by way of herbal help. I was amazed to discover that the answer was a simple tea made of the common stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) and German camomile, sweetened with local honey. I did not have any camomile (memo to self – sow some soon!) but there were plenty of nettles 

around (they liked the weather too), and I had some local multi-flora honey in the cupboard. (The idea with using local honey is that it contains the local flower pollens that are triggering the allergic reaction when being breathed in, and may help create some immunity to them.)

It was easy to snip around 3 tablespoons of fresh nettle leaves and stalks into a 3 cup tea pot, pour boiling water over, leave it to brew for 5 minutes, strain off the liquid, and drink 1 cup sweetened with 1 teaspoon of local honey. After drinking 4 cups at roughly 3 hour intervals I was feeling about 60% better when I went to bed that night. I woke the next day feeling 80% better. I had another 4 cups that day, and the hay fever went and has not returned in the past week, despite the grass still growing strongly and plenty of other plants shedding pollen around here.

If it does, I will definitely be brewing nettle tea again. What's not to like about a simple, effective remedy that costs nothing and uses up an annoying weed?

Flowers from an abandoned garden

 A bouquet of late spring flowers gathered from an abandoned historic garden

Recently I took a stroll in the garden that used to surround Godley House in Diamond Harbour. The house was built in 1880 and the painter Margaret Stoddart lived there with her mother and sister between 1907 and 1913, when the house and its surrounding land on Stoddart's Point were sold to the Lyttelton Borough Council. Later the house was used as an hotel, and was a popular summer weekend destination for many years. That included 2010, until the earthquake in September damaged it badly. The quake in February 2011, which was centred on the other side of Lyttelton Harbour, did even more damage. The  house could not be saved, and was eventually demolished. Before demolition the community held a wake for the house, with a big gathering for music and reminiscing in the nearby community hall, and then a march to the house site to take one last look at the building that held so many good memories.

 The west facade of Godley House in September 2011, just before demolition.

Now all that remains is a fenced-off area of foundations and remnant flower borders. Margaret Stoddart's painting of the house and its garden in 1913 

in the Christchurch Art Gallery shows the lovely informal garden borders that surrounded the house then. The daisies in the picture are surely the ancestors of the daisy bushes which have naturalised in some parts of Diamond Harbour.

Today other flowering plants from the gardens of Godley House are showing that they too can survive without constant tending. The roses rambling over the hedges at the back of the garden look like they will last a long time yet, and so do the little yellow, white and purple violas that have self-sown into the rough lawn near the house site. Granny's bonnets (also known as columbines or aquilegias) are great self-seeders as well. I will come back in late summer to collect the seeds from this fine specimen which jumped the fence.

The view of the harbour from the garden remains as appealing as ever, but I hope that the site will not be abandoned for too long, and that an even more attractive building and garden will one day take the place of those that were lost. 

 The view from Godley House garden

A longing for lemons

 Helena among her lemon trees.

On my recent trip to the West Coast I enjoyed the bed and breakfast hospitality of Helena Fierlinger at her lovely house and garden in Queen St, Westport. I also admired her prolific lemon trees - and thereby hangs a tale...

...when Helena was growing up in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s citrus fruits were a very rare and special treat, that came only at Christmas time. One year Helena was given a can of lemon juice drink. She loved it so much that she treasured the can with its lemon label for several years. She dreamed of living in a place where lemons would grow in her garden.

For most northern Europeans such places are further south in Europe, in Italy or Greece. The German poet Goethe was recalling Italy when he wrote

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,

Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn...

(Do you know the country where the lemons bloom;

Amid the dark foliage the golden oranges glow...)

For Helena, her 'lemon land' was to be much further south again. Getting there involved a long detour via the USA, where she lived for three decades, raising two sons and producing films. When one son and his family moved to New Zealand she also came and created a new life for herself, in a garden where lemon trees bloom and fruit. 

Fern trees grow tall in Helena's southern garden

Helena's raised vegetable beds in springtime

The garden wraps around her charming house. Guests enjoying her generous hospitality can relax in the garden (or on the flowery verandah) and enjoy some of her home-made lemon drink. Helena is no longer longing for lemons, but only for good recipes to use up her abundance of fruit. As soon as I get her Lemon Crush recipe I will share it.

Slices of the West Coast

There are many lovely gardens on the West Coast of the South Island (of which more later) but I must admit that the first thing that caught my eye when I was over there last week was not the colours of garden flowers but rather the colours of these classic Kiwi slices or squares in the window of a Greymouth bakery. 

Later that day, in King Dick's cafe at the Shantytown Heritage Park, I shared the magnificent Chocolate Peppermint Slice below with a friend. A rich treat, with a combination of flavours which seems to be pleasing to the Kiwi palate but not the European one (if my Continental friends are anything to go by), Chocolate Peppermint Slice recipes are many and varied and still popular. This recipe, given away by a supermarket chain, is a nice simple one. 

A few days later we were in Reefton, at the Broadway Tea Rooms and Bakery, where the chief (and welcome) concession to contemporary urban tastes is the excellent coffee now served there. The cakes are very traditional, and included these two slices.

I feel certain that the local knitter of this amazing outfit, photographed in the nearby Blacks Point Museum, was also a great baker of such slices. 

Yet not all the slices I tasted on the Coast were retro Kiwi classics. If you are ever in Westport on a Saturday morning do head for the little market in front of the municipal chambers, where a German baker has an irresistible array of fruit and cream filled slices. These include a slice I have never seen before – Lambada Cake. You can find lots of recipes for it on the web (e.g. at 11 Lambadaschnitte Rezepte) but your German had better be good because this is a real German slice and the recipes are all in German. This slice seems to have a Brazilian name because it contains tropical fruit juices, not because it dances. The Westport baker was also selling a German classic, Bee Sting Cake, which seems to have become (deservedly) popular in the US, in South Africa, and – in Reefton, where it was also for sale at the Broadway Tea Rooms. 

 Lambada Slice is on the left

My Flower Point Presentation

 The Flower Point Presentation ready to go.

The wonderfully community-minded citizens who have formed the Avon-Otakaro Network (AvON) invited me to give a food-from-the-garden talk at their inaugural Spring River Festival on Saturday October 20. In keeping with the season of flowers, and also because all our food starts with a flower, I decided to give a Flower Point Presentation.

I made 3 identical tussie mussie bouquets of flowers and leaves from food plants – two to be passed around the audience while I was talking, and one for me to pull apart and speak about each flower and how we use it, or the vegetable or fruit that grows from it, in the kitchen.

My bouquet included flowers that can be eaten directly – nasturtium flowers to scatter over the top of a green salad, and calendula petals to toss within it. There were also flowers that grow on leafy greens – rocket and pak choi – which we don't usually eat, but which are fine to eat raw or cooked. The leaves rather than the flowers of sage and thyme are what we grow the plants for, but I have over-planted these herbs in my vege garden because they are so attractive to bees. For the same reason I included some sprays of forget-met-not in the tussie mussies. I let forget-me-nots self-sow freely in my vege garden, because although humans don't eat them they also bring the bees to the vege garden, and without bees to pollinate our food plants, we would go very hungry indeed.

Other food plant flowers included in the tussie mussies were peas, pineapple sage, chives and two tree flowers – apple and walnut. Apples have an easily recognisable flower, but walnuts have catkins. These are still tightly closed on the Eco Garden trees, and my audience had a hard time guessing what food came from them.

An Eco Garden doesn't make a strict division between flower garden and vegetable garden, but recognises the useful role that annual flowers which are usually confined to flower beds can play in a vegetable garden, attracting bees and other beneficial insects and generally increasing biodiversity. It also makes sense to let some vegetables and herbs flower freely and self-sow next year's crop. Coriander, dill and rocket are my top three for this neat trick. The self-sown plants are always stronger than the first sowing from a packet, because they have adapted to your garden's soil and climate. If they grow in inconvenient places they can always be transplanted when very young. 

Last – but not at all least, to my way of thinking – flowers in the vege garden make it a more colourful, beautiful and enjoyable place to work in, and that has to be good for the gardener. 

 This view of the Flower Point Presentation shows 

the walnut catkins more clearly.

Vegetable literacy

Can you identify these Asian vegetables? (* Answer below)

Is New Zealand becoming a nation of vegetable illiterates? Are we a people who don't know the difference between a courgette and a cucumber – let alone how to cook them or grow them? Sadly, the results of a recently released WeightWatchers survey of 1000 New Zealanders suggest that this is increasingly true.

As reported on the Stuff news website on October 10, the survey found that 80 per cent of the respondents born after 1990 (Generation Z) didn't use any fresh ingredients in their daily evening meals, while 39 per cent were unable to correctly identify common vegetables. 45 per cent of the Generation Z respondents said that young people don't know how to cook, and 20 per cent said they were too busy doing other things.

Stuff did its own data collecting on this subject, questioning young people on the street and running an on-line poll. The street interviewees mostly stumbled over correctly identifying a courgette, and only one of them cooked and ate meals using fresh vegetables regularly. By noon on 12 October 18,887 people had responded to the online poll about their cooking habits. Just under half (49.5%) said that they “cook dinner from scratch using raw ingredients most nights”, while 45% said that they cooked “but use a few pre-made sauces and products”. 2.5% said that they heated up pre-made products or ready-made dinners, while 3% said they didn't cook at all and ate out or takeaways.

Gorgeous fresh veges at the Matakana Farmers' Market

The ignorance of young Kiwis about vegetables and cooking is not surprising, given that home cooking ceased to be a part of the core curriculum for 11-14 year olds in New Zealand schools in 1987. Sadly, just as boys as well as girls were finally being offered the opportunity to become literate in kitchen skills and good nutrition, the tools were snatched from their hands. Many school kitchens were closed, and twenty five years later (quite predictably) we have a generation of vegetable and kitchen illiterates. Also a generation which is a lot fatter and heavier than the preceding generation, and starting to suffer from a previously very rare disease, Type 2 diabetes.

So I'm not inclined to laugh at the young people on the Stuff video who think that a courgette is a gherkin or a cucumber. Such ignorance is not bliss, and it could be deadly. As I argue in the 'Healthy policy prescriptions' section of my book Food@Home, it is vital that vegetable literacy becomes part of the national curriculum again, with children growing food gardens and cooking what they grow. It's not only way healthier than living on takeaways – it's way more tasty and enjoyable as well. 

* Answer: Taro stalks, sze gwa and 'fish smell plant'. Find out more about them on p. 126 of Food@Home.

Autumn vegetable harvest display at the Auckland Botanic Gardens

School holiday baking day

 

 Aleks mixes gingerbread dough; Hannah models a flour facial.

I love to bake – and so do my niece Aleksandra and my young friend Hannah. It's school holiday time, so on Wednesday we could spend a whole day baking, extending the girls' baking repertoire and skills.

We started by making two different kinds of cheese scones (different cheeses, one batch with finely chopped chives and parsley and one without) for morning tea. Cheese scones are the quickest and easiest savoury baked treat there is, but there is an art to getting just the right amount to liquid to dry ingredients, handling the dough quickly and lightly, and getting it into the oven as soon as possible, which makes the difference between a tough scone and a light one.

 Olive and cheese focaccia breads for lunch, with homemade pickles.

Then we moved on to making focaccia bread (recipe below) for lunch. Again this is one of the simplest breads to make, which is easily jazzed up by adding different flavourings. We put finely chopped rosemary leaves into the whole batch of dough, split it in two to knead and rise it, then added halved black olives to one batch before baking, and a mixture of Gruyere and Parmesan cheese to the other.

Cutting gingerbread dough

After lunch it was on to the sweet stuff. We marvelled at the unlikely way in which choux pastry dough is made, but the best fun was had making gingerbread biscuits to the recipe given by Alexa Johnston in her wonderful NZ baking book Ladies, A Plate. Traditional home baking (Penguin Books, 2008). These also use an unusual (but easy) method, and make the best gingerbread biscuits I have ever tasted. Perfect – with the chocolate cream puffs – for afternoon tea in the garden.

FOCACCIA BREAD (WITH VARIATIONS)

Ingredients

2 C lukewarm water

1 t honey or sugar

4 t dried yeast

¼ C olive oil

1 t salt

5 C flour (approx) (white, wholemeal, or a mixture)

chopped fresh herbs e.g. rosemary, oregano (optional)

Method

Mix the water, honey/sugar and yeast together well, and leave to stand for 10 minutes to go frothy.

Add the oil and salt and stir them in; add enough flour to make a kneadable dough.

Add the chopped fresh herbs, if using, and mix them in.

Knead the dough for 10-15 minutes.

Leave it in an oiled bowl in a warm place to double (1 – 1 ½ hours).

Shape the dough into a long, flat loaf, and leave it on a greased baking tray for 30 minutes.

Dimple the top of dough (using finger tips or the end of a rounded wooden spoon handle), and drizzle olive oil over the loaf. Sprinkle with salt crystals if liked.

Bake at 200° C for 20-30 minutes.

Variations

Olive Focaccia - Add halved black olives to the dough before shaping it into a loaf.

Cheese Focaccia - Roll out the risen dough, put 2-3 T of grated cheese on one half, fold it over and pinch the sides together, sprinkle the top of the dimpled loaf with grated cheese.

Onion Focaccia - Roll out the risen dough, put 3-4 T of caramelised onion slices on one half, fold it over and pinch the sides together, sprinkle the top of the dimpled loaf with a few slices of caramelised onion.

Focaccia Rolls - Shape the dough into clover-leaf rolls rather than a loaf before rising for 30 minutes and baking.

Quince blossom

A quince branch covered in blossom

If I were to plant one fruit tree solely for its flowers it would be the quince. The true quince, Cydonia oblonga, has a long history of being cultivated. Its beautiful flowers and fruit were appreciated by the very first civilisations in the countries now called Iraq, Turkey and Greece, where the quince tree evolved. 

 Close up of a 'Smyrna' quince blossom

The quince fruit is very beautiful too, so it is an excellent ornamental as well as useful tree. It is a relatively small tree (5-8 metres maximum) with a spreading habit if given space. The quince trees are flowering in the Eco Garden now – here are some more pictures to show how pretty they are...

'Giant of Gascony' 

quince flowers

 - the tree is being grown on

the lawn as an ornamental to

complement the double 

flowering cherry behind it.

 An old quince tree in full flower

How to pot up seedlings

Do try this at home. You will need

a work bench

pots

potting mix

water

seedlings

 Seedlings growing and waiting to be potted up, above black plastic containers full of water which keep the glasshouse warm at night.

I sowed tomato, cucumber, broccoli and many other vegetable seeds in punnets and pots in the lean-to glasshouse on August 17. The glasshouse is not heated, but we store the sunshine overnight in large black plastic containers of water kept under the bench. These heat up during the day and release heat slowly after dark. Vegetable seeds and seedlings don't need a lot of heat to germinate and grow (15 degrees C is the minimum required) but they do better if the temperature is kept as even as possible.

Tomato seedlings with their first true leaves are ready to be potted up.

One month later some of the baby seedlings have their first true leaves (the ones that look like the leaves of the adult plant). They are therefore ready for potting into larger pots where they can grow to the size they need to be for planting out in the garden (or sharing with friends, family, neighbours and good causes). 

Shake the potting mix gently around the plant, holding it upright as you do so.

There is only one thing you really need to know to pot up seedlings successfully – DON'T SQUEEZE THE STALK. The stalk is the main trunk line carrying water, nutrients and energy between the roots and the leaves. If you crush or bend its delicate tissues during potting up it will not be able to do its job properly, and the seedling will not flourish.

So hold the seedling by one of its seed leaves, lower the plant delicately on to the damp potting mix in the pot, shake more potting mix carefully around the roots and stalk until the plant can stand up unaided, then gently tamp the potting pix around the plant before watering it.

That's it. Keep the potted-up plants warm and well-watered, and within 3 or 4 weeks they will be ready for planting out in the garden.

Crab apple blossom

Crab apple blossom from an unnamed seedling 

crab apple tree in the Eco Garden

It's hard to pick a favourite flowering tree of spring time. Right now in the Eco Garden there are kowhai, magnolias, flowering cherries, amelanchiers, peaches and an over-sized ngutu kaka all saying – pick me! But I keep coming back to the crab apples. I love them so much I have planted some 15 of them around the Eco Garden. I love their simple flowers (some species and cultivars are scented) in spring, and their colourful little apples in autumn. 

Malus ioensis Plena blossom; and a young M. ioensis tree in
full bloom.

My favourite of favourites is the American species and cultivar Malus ioensis Plena. It is a selection of M.ioensis, originally made in Illinois, and chosen because it has many more double flowers than the wild type. Its buds are deep pink, then the flower opens to show palest pink (fading to white) petals. These are violent-scented, in an old-fashioned talcum powder sort of way.

Another American beauty, similar to Plena, is M. coronaria Charlottae, which also has scented flowers, and lots of semi-double flowers in pale pink and white. Neither tree has particularly profuse or ornamental crabs (usually just a few large bright green ones), but their autumn leaf colour is good. 

The other crab apple trees in my garden put on a great show of crabs, in red and orange. I especially like the almost triangular shape of the shiny red crabs on the NZ bred variety 'Ellerslie'.

While the crab apples are at the height of flowering in New Zealand, they are showing off their fruit in North America. A great place to see them in flower or fruit is in the Jennings Crab Apple Collection at Cornell University in upstate New York. This is a great collection of American and other species and cultivars. Alexy Sergeev, a visiting physicist at Cornell, took some great photos of crab apples in the Jennings collection in 2005. 

I don't know what hemisphere the crab apple tree in the picture below thought it was in when I photographed it three years ago on the Lincoln University campus. I have never seen a tree with so many flowers - and so much fruit - on it at the same time. I guess those fruits are not very tasty to the birds, or they would be long gone - like most of my crab apples. 

 
P.S. Crab apple blossom makes a fine bouquet for the second birthday of the Eco Gardener blog. It is a still rather a mystery to me who reads this blog and why, but I do know that there have been over 31,000 page views since it was launched two years ago, and that in each of the last three months the number of readers from the USA has been greater than the number of readers from New Zealand. Hence I thought it was only fair to showcase my American crab apple trees, and let those readers know how much they are appreciated Down Under.

New Asian flavours in Aotearoa

Typical Nyonya cuisine ingredients - ginger, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, 

chilli peppers

I am still digesting all the many, many things I learned at the Food Bloggers conference in Wellington on August 24 and 25. It is taking a while to get them on to the blog because while I was away spring went 'sprong!' in the Eco-Garden, and I came back to profusion of spring colours and scents - and seedlings popping up in the glasshouse from the seeds I sowed in pots before I left for Wellington. (Except for the pumpkin and zucchini seeds, which had been eaten by a rogue mouse which sneaked into the glasshouse.) There were also lots of weeds to pull out, carrot seeds to sow, and many other spring tasks to get on with.

But as I worked away at growing food, I kept remembering the delicious flavours of the lunch served to the conference participants on August 25. It was prepared by staff from the Little Penang restaurant, which serves authentic Malaysian Nyonya food. Less than a year old, Little Penang is already a big hit with Wellington diners, to judge by the reviews at MenuMania. Nyonya cuisine is a delicious mixture of Malay and Chinese ingredients and techniques, developed over several centuries by Chinese immigrants to the Malay peninsula, and their Chinese-Malay descendants.

Chinese food traditions and base ingredients have been retained, but many new flavours and combinations have been added. Before lunch we were shown our dessert being prepared. It was a special little cake called Ang Ku Kueh or Red Tortoise Cake. Some of us were able to try our hands at moulding a ball of soft rice flour dough with a hole poked in it around a small lump of sweet bean paste, pinching it shut, flattening it a little, then pressing it in a traditional wooden mould, which makes the distinctive pattern on the cake. Read more about the cakes on the Nyonya Food website.)

Mary from the Little Penang restaurant shows a finished cake.

Then we sat down to three delicious savoury courses. First came pieces of chicken on a bowl of rice made fragrant (and golden) with coconut milk and spices, then a salad of cabbage and other blanched green veges with tofu and hard-boiled egg, dressed with a delicious 11 ingredient satay-style sauce. This was made using properly roasted and ground fresh peanuts – peanut butter is a big no-no! After comparing this sauce with the peanut butter versions I have had I can certainly see why, as the flavours and texture are so much better. Finally we had thick noodles served in a soupy sour sauce in which the flavours of tamarind and anchovies predominated. This was like no other dish I have ever eaten in New Zealand, and a real revelation.

A Nyonya style salad with spicy peanut sauce

I will be experimenting with making Nyonya dishes in my own kitchen from now on, and growing some of the ingredients in my glasshouse - but most of all I am looking forward to my next trip to Wellington, and dining at Little Penang.

Cold Cures from the Garden

  The ingredients for Elderberry Cold & Flu Tonic

 Last winter I had a terrible cough, and I made my own cough drops with thyme from the garden, and aniseed. (Find the recipe at Seasonal Sweets - Thyme and Aniseed Cough Drops.) I also made a cough relief tea by steeping fresh horehound leaves in hot water for ten minutes, then sweetening the liquid with honey to make it drinkable. Both remedies were very effective at calming my cough.

Last week I caught a cold and immediately started on 'from the garden' treatments. I ate the blackcurrants I bottled in December with muesli and kiwifruit for breakfast, and I crushed garlic to spread on bread. (It is best to leave the crushed garlic for 10 minutes to develop its therapeutic properties before eating it. I steep it in extra virgin olive oil for that time. It makes it easier to spread, and it tastes much nicer.) I didn't have enough onions for onion soup, but there were enough assorted veges to make minestrone (and it goes well with garlicky bread).

My main treatment this time, though, was copious amounts of Elderberry Cold and Flu Tonic.I found the recipe in James Wong's excellent book Grow your Own Drugs A Year with James Wong. Last year in elderberry season (November – January) I froze enough elderberries to make several batches of tonic. I put them small plastic bags, with one batch lot of 12 tablespoons of berries per bag.

The recipe is very easy – just boil all the ingredients together for 30 minutes. Wong's recipe also includes meadowsweet flowers, which act like aspirin to relieve head and body aches. This was a pre-organisational step too far for me last year, but next year I may get round to planting the plants and drying the flowers for later use. Even without them, I found the tonic a pleasant and effective drink. Although there is nothing that will cure a cold immediately, drinking a mug of tonic every 2-3 hours as soon as I felt the cold coming on certainly alleviated the symptoms a lot. Here's the recipe.

ELDERBERRY COLD & FLU TONIC

Ingredients

12 tablespoons fresh or frozen elderberries

4 tablespoons cinnamon stick, broken up

30g fresh root ginger, roughly chopped

1.7 litres water

Method

Put all the ingredients into a stainless steel pot, bring them to the boil, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Strain into a jug, and store in a thermos to drink as required.

Sweeten each cup with a little honey. (Lemon juice or brandy can also be added to enliven it.)