One quick thing!

Tomorrow (Sunday 2 Aug) I'm giving a low key, informal presentation at the Museum of City and Sea on 'Harvesting Without a Garden.' I'll be at a table from 2.30 to 5pm to chat about foraging and fermentation, and blending the two. I think it'll be fun!

Before that, Donna Lee will be presenting on home-made cosmetics (from 11am-12.30) and on natural household cleaners (from 1.30-2.30). I'm really looking forward to seeing her.

Independence Days Challenge update 3 (or is it 4?)

I haven't done much towards food independence over the past couple of weeks ...

No planting or harvesting at all. (Although I've done a lot of looking at my garden and pondering which things are coming up and which are not, and why ...)

Preserved: Got together with a friend, Nadine, and while our children played she made a bowl of kimchi and I made a bowl of sauerkraut, then we swapped a jar each.

I think I overdid the salt in the sauerkraut. Sorry Nadine - if you are reading this! Nadine's kimchi is, however, delicious and I have to use all my willpower to not eat it before it is fermented properly.

Eat the food: Does picking at the kimchi count? Maybe not ... Apart from that, I've been working my way through the quince syrup I made. (It was meant to be quince jelly, but I didn't boil it for long enough.) It's delicious on porridge.

I've also been making tea from the oat straw I dried, and it's lovely. Definitely going to plant a lot more oats.

101 ways with sugar beets (well, okay, six)

I only planted a tiny patch of sugar beets this year, as an experiment. (Most of my gardening has been experimenting really - it's all pretty new to me - although I'm lucky enough to have a Dad who is something of an expert, although he's too much of a perfectionist to see himself that way ... He was the one who suggested I try growing sugar beets one time when I was off on a wishful thinking tangent about growing maple trees ...!)

I was thrilled to bits by how well the sugar beets grew. That's our harvest above - not alot - but enough to try a few different things with:

1. Leafy greens
The sugarbeet greens were enough to meet all our green vege needs for a week. They are a bit thicker and more leathery than other beet greens I've tried - so I treated them more like kale.

2. Raw beets
I thought they might be nice grated raw in salad, like beetroot is. One taste of a few gratings was enough to put paid to that idea. Raw, the sugar beet was very bitter and, worse, burned my throat as it went down.

3. Roasted beets
Again, treating them like beetroot, I tried roasting some chunks in oil along with some other root veges. Success! The texture was like roast beetroot. The taste - very similar but even sweeter than beetroot. Because of the strong sweetness, I wouldn't eat them roasted on their own. But mixed in with other veges - yum.

4. Fermented beets
I have some grated sugarbeet lacto-fermenting in brine on a shelf. I put a bit of carrot in there for colour, too. It's fermenting very slowly - because of the cold weather I suppose - and I'm not sure how nice it's going to be.

I tried a taste yesterday and it reminded me of old dishcloth smell. (I haven't had much luck, taste-wise, with fermenting beetroot either.) Still, I think it could be improved with a bit of onion and spice. I might try adding some.

5. Beet syrup for lemon cordial and water kefir
After I'd tried all those other things, I peeled and finely sliced all the rest of the sugar beets and boiled them to make an enormous batch of sugary syrup.

I started out using the method here. At first I didn't boil the mixture down as much as the recipe says. I left it fairly watery (it was still very sweet)and tried using that for a couple of things:

I fermented some water kefir grains in 50/50 water and sugar beet syrup. The kefir grains seemed to like it! And the result was nice. A slightly more interesting taste than kefir made from just cane sugar and water.

I also used it in some lemon cordial instead of sugar - and both children gave it their stamp of approval.

6. Beet sugar crystals
I really hoped to be able to boil the syrup down and crystalise it, as the recipes said. But for whatever reasons, I didn't seem to be able to get the crystalisation to happen. Maybe I just didn't boil it down enough.

What I ended up with was just a thick syrup - super sweet - and quite bitter. I noticed though, that it loses obvious bitterness when diluted, so this doesn't seem to be a problem.

I froze this very reduced syrup in ice cube trays to chuck into the blender for smoothies instead of honey - and use for whatever else.

I'm really happy with the sugar beets, and hoping to grow more of them this year, and try a lot more things with them.

Maybe I can even power our car with them. Or maybe not.

For sourdough fans

I've been rummaging through cookbooks that used to be my grandmother's, and among the treasures is Any one Can Bake - a 1929 promotional publication from 'the Educational Department of the ROYAL BAKING POWDER CO.'

You might get a laugh from their version of the origin of leavened bread - from a longer article entitled, 'The Evolution of Baking Powder'.

The Royal Baking Powder Co tells us ...

Yeast came first
Very early in written history we come upon mention of both 'leavened' and 'unleavened' bread, so the actual origin of raised bread is obscure. Some prehistoric matron, perhaps, was not too careful about washing out the vessel in which she mixed the grain and water for her baking. A stray yeast cell lodged in the scrapings and developed in the next moist mixing so that the loaf grew astonishingly. It was porous and softer than her ordinary loaves.

She tasted this unusual mass - and found it good. She added a bit of the magic dough to her fresh mixture in the hope that it would impart its characteristics to the new loaves - and of course it did.

Thus began the leavening of grain mixtures, and for generations yeast in some form or another was the only leavening agent known.


What can I say? Let's all pay homage to that prehistoric slattern whose naughty lapse in hygiene turned out to be a blessing for us all. And thank heavens that a single yeast cell just happened to come along at the right time! :P

Elderflower and water kefir - a yummy duo!

Just had to share ...

On a whim, I mixed a bit of our elderflower syrup into some very tart already-brewed water kefir - and I tell you, it is DELICIOUS!

A quick google revealed that the combination of elderflower and kefir is not stunningly original, but it was new to me anyhow!

(And in passing I noticed some sites talking about the cosmetic applications of kefir . Anyone know anything much about that?)

Apple blossom and raspberry leaf alcopop!

I'm pretty sure it's Sandor Ellix Katz who is responsible for popularising (among us westerners!) home-made t'ej - Ethiopian style honey wine. It's the first, and simplest recipe in his book 'Wild Fermentation'.

Basically - 1 part raw honey to 4 parts water. Stir to dissolve honey. Cover. Leave in a warm room for several days. Stir at least twice a day, and wait for the wild wine-making yeasts to take up residence. Once the liquid is bubbly and smells and tastes like wine - well, it is.

You can use the basic principle to experiment with any sweeteners and additional ingredients you like.

Recently I tried using sugar instead of honey, and using water infused with blackberry leaves (tannins for some dryness) plus the last blossoms on our apple tree. The idea was that the sugar would be less strong-tasting than the honey, and allow the subtle apple blossom taste to come through more.

I'm not sure if sugar water is as good a breeding ground for wild yeasts as raw honey though! The result (above) was a nice tasting drink that tasted somewhat fermented, but was only very slightly alcoholic. More a home-made alcopop really!

Oh well. Further apple blossom experiments will have to wait till next year (and this time, I'll get started before they've almost all fallen off!) Meanwhile I'll find some other things to try and make wild wine from ...

Exceptionally fluffy pancakes

This morning I put Ruth's lively sourdough starter to good use, making Emma's sourdough buttermilk pancake recipe. (Except I didn't have any buttermilk, so used Caspian Sea Yoghurt instead.)

I think they were the fluffiest pancakes I've ever made. And they tasted good too.

My jar runneth over

Oops. Ruth's Westport sourdough starter is clearly rearing to go!

Thanks heaps Ruth. It made the trip well.

Coastal foraging

I'm thrilled to bits with beach spinach (Tetragonia trigyna) as a leafy green. It tastes mild, salty, and little sour. It keeps for ages in the fridge, and it holds its volume when cooked. (It's better cooked than raw.)

Like 'real' spinach it's relatively high in oxalic acid - so all the usual warnings and recommendations apply.

I've been looking for it every time we're near a coast.

So far I haven't found it on the south coast, only up the west coast near us. You Kapiti dwellers, I envy you!

We also tried gathering and eating ice plant. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

It's truly disgusting raw. Just a taste made me feel nauseous. But, as per the received wisdom, we tried chopping some up and pickling it in vinegar. We added some roughly chopped onion as well. All in all, it wasn't too bad like that.


I'm keen to have a go at lacto-fermenting it in brine or whey. I imagine that would break down even more of its undigestible components. I'll also slice it more finely.

Our kombucha lives! (I think)

I have unfairly maligned my mother in law. She didn't throw out our kombucha at all.

I found it the day before yesterday in the darkest recesses of our fridge, looking like - well - something you would find in the darkest recesses of your fridge. (But kombucha always looks like that anyway.)

People describe kombucha colonies as 'pancakes', but I think they look more like placentas.

Ours seems to have had a baby placenta - or maybe there were already two before we lost them in our fridge. I can't quite remember. I'm not sure if either of them are still alive or not, but they're not turning black, which is apparently a good sign.

I've taken the younger one out and put it into a big jar of sugar/tea mix to see if it's still doing its thing. I should be able to tell in a few days time, I hope.

The social side of sourdough

So I have Rebecca's wonderful Kaitaia sourdough starter. Now I'm going to do a similar swap with Ruth in Westport. (Ruth's sourdough starter is twelve years old, and quite well travelled.)

Unfortunately all I can offer Rebecca and Ruth at the moment is an IOU, since I washed my last starter down the sink some time ago in a brain-dead moment. The pressure will be on for me to try and get a new one going this summer that will make a worthy exchange!

I love the ways that live cultures connect people. Sourdough, kefir, yoghurts, kombucha ... You can share them with friends so easily. If you keep them going, you always have some to give away.

And I love the way they can span time and space. Swaps by post link people across geographical space; and the many live ferments that are looked after within families and passed down through generations link people through time.

(Although what happened to our kombucha? I have a sneaking suspicion my mother-in-law threw it out while kindly but zealously cleaning out our fridge for us ...)

There's also another quite different way that fermented foods bring people together. A lot of fermentation processes are about preserving food (cheese, sauerkraut, miso, to name a few). Preserving is often done in bulk, and so it makes good sense to get a bit of a working bee going when you're doing it.

Apparently in some parts of the States they have 'sauerkraut parties' - where everyone comes along bearing cabbages and other veges, which are then pooled. Everyone works on the chopping and brining together, and then leaves with their share of the finished jars of sauerkraut.

It sounds fun. Anyone interested in doing this sometime this summer?

Introducing Uglybread

One of my favourite pieces of advice came from a cheese making course I did with Katherine Mowbray last year.

Katherine said: when you make cheese, don’t get too stressed out if things go wrong because (within reason) no matter what mistakes you make, you’ll still end up with cheese. It might not be the cheese you intended to make – but it WILL STILL BE CHEESE.

I remembered this advice today when I was making bread. This was not the bread I intended to make – but it IS STILL BREAD! (I’m sure the general principle behind this reassuring advice could be applied to many things, food and otherwise.)

I made this bread with the lovely sourdough starter that Rebecca from Farmlet sent me the other week.

The trouble was, I made a very moist dough and then attempted to cook it on an oven sheet without putting it into a container. In the oven it began to spread, rather than rise.

I wasn't sure what to do. I wondered whether I should just leave it, and accept that it would be a very wide, low bread - but I didn’t really want to.

I wondered whether I should shore up the sides with a couple of ovenproof containers - but I could only find one that was the right shape and size.

Finally I decided to scoop it all off the oven sheet and put it into a loaf dish! I'll leave you to imagine how that went.

I ended up with a very rough, crumpled pile of dough in the loaf dish, and as it rose and cooked it didn’t smooth out.

So – above is the end result. I call it Uglybread.

I was going to say that it still tasted very good despite how it looked – but actually I think it its roughness added something ... I’d smothered it in olive oil as it cooked (because I like the way it makes a crunchy crust). And with all those bumps and folds there was plenty of extra surface area to go crunchy.

Anyway – thank you Rebecca! This is the first loaf I’ve made with your sourdough starter. It proved beautifully, and the flavour is divine – with a strong sour tang that I’ve been missing from the sourdoughs we’ve bought in stores lately.

An exciting parcel

My son and I have been having a gloomy day at home sick - so it was nice to look out the window and see a parcel in the letterbox. It was the long-awaited water kefir from Rebecca.

She's painstakingly grown a jar of water kefir grains for Deb and me to split between us.

In the parcel she also included detailed instructions on looking after them (which I for one will need), PLUS a small jar of her very own Kaitaia sourdough starter.


The idea is that Rebcca and I will do a sourdough swap by post - except I'm not able to meet my end of the bargain until the weather warms up a little and I'm game to try making one again. (I started one last summer, kept it going for several weeks, and made several loaves of bread, before one day accidentally washing out the dough bowl without saving any.)

I really love this idea of swapping wild ferments from different parts of the country by post. I wonder how much the microbial colonies vary from region to region. I was fascinated to take a sniff of Rebecca's starter - it smells quite different from the way I remember mine. It's more vigorous than mine ever was, too. It was bubbling away like anything, and I had to open the jar verrrrry slowly.

Fermenting juice with milk kefir (Cheat's Apple Cider)

Hooray! I've just heard that Rebecca has some water kefir ready to send us - so soon I'll be able to ferment all sorts of different sweet drinks (assuming I can keep the kefir grains alive this time.)

In the mean time, my son and I have been fermenting apple juice using milk kefir. The apple juice is from our CSA and is very sweet and concentrated so it lends itself well to fermenting with kefir I think.

Opinion's divided over whether milk kefir grains can or should be used to ferment anything except dairy products. In Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz writes that you can use them to ferment almost anything you like, as long as you give them some time to recuperate in dairy straight afterwards - so we thought we'd give that a go.

We've developed a system where we use half our grains to ferment apple juice, while the other half ferment milk or cream. Then we do another dairy ferment with all of the grains in together, then divide them in half again and go back to the beginning of the cycle.

I think that means that, taken over time, each milk kefir grain is spending roughly a third of its time in apple juice and the rest in dairy. (Any mathematically minded person able to confirm that?)

Here's some apple juice we fermented - with the grains still floating in it.


We call it our Cheat's Apple Cider. Apparently milk kefir can be very slightly alcoholic, so I suspect this apple juice is too, but only a little. When you take the first gulp, you get that warm feeling flowing through your veins ... but none of us have ever managed to get tipsy from it!

Something foraged, something fermented

Last night we had big chunky potato wedges - made from a mix of huakaroro and urenika potatoes - with chickweed pesto and kefir sour cream on the side.


Actually I'm going to stop calling the chickweed thing 'pesto', out of deference to Italian friends! It wasn't a true pesto, but was a paste based on this pesto recipe.

I used chickweed instead of basil, and cashew nuts (soaked and dried) instead of pine nuts. I was pretty inaccurate with measurements, and when I had a taste and found I'd put in far too much garlic for me to bear, I added a whole lot more cashew nuts. It turned out deliciously in the end!

(Speaking of foraged herb pastes, Hannah from World Sweet World has had success with Nasturtium leaves.)


The kefir sour cream was a batch I'd started a couple of days earlier. I put all our milk kefir grains in with 400 grams of organic cream and left it for about a day and a half in a warm cupboard, then strained out the kefir grains.

Usually when I've made sour cream this way, the cream has a tendency to separate, and after straining out the kefir grains the soured mix is still not thick enough. I have to leave it to sit for a few more hours to separate again, then spoon off just the creamy stuff on the top to use.

However, this time the cream must have been extra thick because it didn't separate at all; it just fermented into one big mass of sour cream!

The NZ Water Kefir Crisis of 2008

(over-dramatised only a little)



It started unportentously enough. Deb from WAPF asked me if I still had the water kefir grains she had given me last year, as hers had died.

I checked. Mine had died too. Not that there was anything too ominous in that; I (unlike the conscientious Deb) can be a bit crap at looking after live ferments, and I had certainly neglected my water kefir.

It wasn't until Deb started contacting other locals, and finding theirs had died too, that things started to look a little bad.

Then I read Kaitaia smallfarmer and fermenter Rebecca's blog. Yes, her water kefir had also died, and she was looking for more. (Turned out she had already been in touch with Deb.)

Deb, Rebecca, and others were soon busy getting in touch with all their fermenting contacts throughout the country, but it seemed there was no healthy water kefir to be had here at all. Water kefir was extinct in New Zealand!

So Rebecca ordered some from the very knowledgeable Dom in Australia. It was quite expensive, and it took a while to arrive - but she finally has it and is growing it carefully in the hopes of soon having enough to distribute.

Why did everyone's water kefir die? Well, Deb and Rebecca have been researching how best to look after it, and it turns out to be pretty high maintenance - the diva of live ferments. If it doesn't get the service and attention it demands, it sulks mightily and eventually turns up its precious little toes and expires.

When there's enough water kefir to go around again, I'm going to have another go at keeping it. I'm a little nervous about it though ...

The easiest yoghurt ever

I love my Caspian Sea yoghurt!

I've never had much luck with 'ordinary' yoghurt. Into a jar I'd put scalded milk and starter. I'd leave it in a warm place, open it up a day or so later, and find - scalded milk and starter.

It's true that I didn't perservere as determinedly as I could have. But since getting this Caspian Sea yoghurt (from Deb at Wellington WAPF) I haven't seen the point in trying to make regular yoghurt again.

Making Caspian Sea yoghurt seems almost failsafe, and perfect for people like me for whom precision is not a strong point.

Put a few dollops of the starter in a clean jar. Add any kind of milk (or cream). Then put the lid on, shake it around a bit, and leave it somewhere that's not too cold. Open it up the next day, and there you have it! A jar of yoghurt!

(This may not seem so amazing if you're used to success with yoghurt, but for me it's nothing short of miraculous. I feel like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.)

Caspian Sea yoghurt, also called Matsoni, originated in Georgia apparently, and was introduced into Japan in the 1980s. It contains yeasts as well as bacteria - so it tastes very like ordinary yoghurt, but with an extra yeasty tang. It also has more of a gloopy, viscous texture.

So far I've used it in curries, smoothies, dips, and for Bircher muesli. Next on the to-do list is a frozen yoghurt dessert.

It's so ridiculously easy, I feel like I want to make more ... and more ... and MORE! And I want to give little pots of it away to everyone - so they can start making more and more and MORE!

There are some interesting community swap networks getting going in Wellington at the moment - as well as a Really Really Free Market happening in town on Buy Nothing Day - November 29.

I'm hoping to be there with great mountains of Caspian Sea yoghurt.

Food activism article

A while ago, a couple of people asked if there was a link available to the article on food activism that I wrote for Sunday magazine, but there wasn't. (Often Sunday articles go up on stuff.co.nz, but this one didn't.)

So anyhow, I've put it up on a file sharing site, in case anyone is still interested. It's here.