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.