Quince Sambal

This is my new discovery for this quince season and, to date. my only recipe using raw quinces in the end product!

It comes from my previous life on the southern African continent, more specifically from the four years I spent living and working in Cape Town. There I was fortunate to be able to explore the (extensive) culinary heritage of the Cape as part of my professional life:

Strictly speaking a sambal is a spicy Indonesian sauce or relish, with a strong chilli focus. In the legacy of the Cape Malay tradition, a sambal tends to be more of a marinated salad or relish, also with a strong leaning towards chillies.

This Quince Sambal is ideal for making ahead and/or keeping in the fridge for a good few days, so its worth making a big batch for the week! Traditional recipes call for salting the grated quince and then discarding the resulting liquid. That liquid is wonderful quince juice, however, and so my recipe uses the quince juice as part of the dressing.

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Quince Sambal, the recipe

These quantities will make about 250ml of sambal, so multiply the quantities accordingly if you want to make more – which I strongly recommend 🙂

1 quince

1 small onion, finely chopped

2ml crushed garlic

1 small red or green chilli (or red or green pepper), finely chopped

30 ml sugar

10 ml salt (ideally celery salt)

Peel and core the quince, then grate coarsely.

Place in a bowl and sprinkle with the sugar and the salt. Mix these through thoroughly. Leave to stand overnight so that the salt and sugar are able to draw out plenty of the quince juice.

Retaining the quince juice, now mix in the remaining ingredients, adjusting the proportions to taste. Leaving the sambal to stand now for a few hours – or overnight again – greatly enhances the flavour.

Traditionally served to accompany a curry, quince sambal also goes very well with smoked fish dishes, or as a stand alone salad – drizzled with the salad oil of your choice if you prefer.

More inspiration for the quince season:

Quince and Honey Sorbet

Quince Chutney

Candied Quince with Ginger

Flammkuchen Orchard Style with Pumpkin and Quince

The Quintessential Quince: Quince Liqueur

Quinces… red wine, cinnamon, ginger, honey…

Quince, coffee and cardamom

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Dandelion Sugar and Meadow Herb Salt

Even in the depths of winter I find ingredients for whizzing up salts of my own creation, and come the magical month of May it becomes a must: Mother Nature has just so much on offer from meadow to hedgerow:

Dandelion Sugar:

What you do:

Pick your dandelions on a dry day and leave them for an hour or so

a) for the bugs to crawl off and out and

b) so that the flowers close up again and become tassel-shapped for you to then cut of the petals just above the green bits (that way you leave out the fluffy bits where the seeds start).

Place your petals in a food processor or blender.

Add the same quantity of fine sugar as you have petals (50% sugar, 50% petals). Whizz everything up together until you have a fine, even mix. Spread your sugar mixture out thinly on a large baking tray or similar and either leave to dry in the sun or in the oven at 50°C, with a wooden spoon holding the oven door ajar, for 2-3 hours.

Once the sugar is completely dry, whizz it again in the food processor to break up any lumps and store in airtight glass jars.

Use for summery things… like Summer Butter Biscuits with Dandelion Glace Icing 🙂

Meadow Herb Salt

Using:

Ribwort Plantain

Yarrow

Ground Ivy

What you do:

Gather your herbs on a dry day: leaves only.

Add the same quantity of relatively fine pure (no additives!) salt* as you have of the herbs (50% salt, 50% herbs). Whizz everything up together until you have a fine, even mix. Spread your salt mixture out thinly on a large baking tray or similar and either leave to dry in the sun or in the oven at 50°C, with a wooden spoon holding the oven door ajar, for 2-3 hours.

Once the salt is completely dry, whizz it again in the food processor to break up any dried lumps and store in airtight glass jars. And yes: this salt really does have nuances of hay and herbs and meadows on warm summer days 🙂

Use for summery things… like savoury cheese scones with labneh (or cream cheese), meadow herbs salt and fresh meadow herbs – here Garlic Mustard aka Jack by the Hedge:

Sugar and salt act as preservatives in the same way: both bind with water molecules, increasing osmotic pressue which subequently draws water out of bacteria, thus inhibiting growth. And so helping us to preserve just some of the ephemeral magic of May!

Bergamots

I do love to make a new discovery and proudly present my citrus discovery for January 2018:

 

 

and what wonderful little gems they are.

Reliably identified as the sour orange hybrid Citrus bergamia Risso,  I discovered them at my organic market this week, imported from Morrocco (this is the only time of year where I am to be found blogging about imported produce!), and I snapped them up purely out of curiosity.

 

And I am so glad I did!

“Grapefruit overtones, a spicy galangal-like punch (which calms down once cooked), as well as orange and lemon nuancing in the background, becoming lingering lime once cooked”.

That is my bergamot sound bite.

And this is what I have done with them so far: a classic soft set marmalade of delectable dimensions 🙂

 

Our German Gingerbread Gallery

All quiet in the orchard at this time of the year (but Hermann the German is sharpening up his specialist tree pruning saw for the winter pruning due to start any weekend now…) so we (mainly me and sometimes Mini-Kraut) have been busy in the kitchen creating some more exhibits for our gingerbread gallery.

This year’s main creation has to remain a secret for the time being until this year’s Christmas Guests of Honour have been able to peruse and applaud it live, but we have been busy baking building components for lucky recipients in the neighbourhood, complete with building instructions, in German:

Here are a few flashbacks to past creations where we have gained all this skill and experience 🙂

2016: Recreated in gingerbread, the little village in the Wiesent Valley, close to Erlangen, where we like to spend our holidays and long weekends

 

2015: The tree house that collapsed and became a forest hideaway (Waldversteck)

 

 

 

2014: The Forest Gnomes’ Railway

 

2013: Nutville, or Nußdorf in the vernacular

2012 was when we started expanding from single buildings to gingerbread urban development:

2011: was our very first attempt.

Lesson 1 was: make sure the roof weighs less than the walls 🙂

But it all came right on the night!

 

 

Happy Christmas!

 

Advent, Advent

Featuring four candles representing the four seasons enjoyed during the course of the year, the candles on the Advent wreath are lit one at a time on each of the four Sundays preceding the “Wend”, the Winter Solstice, now ‘Christianised’ as Christmas Eve (in Germany) or Christmas Day (in the Anglo Saxon realm).

 

In our family we celebrate Advent as a four week festival of remembrance of all the good things the four seasons have brought us in the past year.

Join us on social media for a daily stroll through the seasons this Advent: TheOrchardScribe

 

More Sugar & Spice & All Things Nice

For those of you who do not already know it, meet:

Galangal

Think: mild ginger with a soupcon of camphor and a peppery punch if you use lots of it!

A root related to ginger, widely used in Far Eastern cookery, and described by German medieval medicine woman Hildegard of Bingen as “warm and healing”, particularly for those suffering from “heartache”.

For those with a bad back she recommends Glühwein with galangal.

In the kitchen Hildegard of Bingen paired galangal with quinces (as well as with pumpkin, fruit salads, jams in general and marinades).

Clearly a lady after my own heart and so I have followed her example: the very last of this years’ quinces have become

Quince Jelly with Galangal

And what a very good idea that was: love it!

If you are quick you can get a jar with a subscription from our Online Orchard Shop – limited edition!

Sugar & Spice & All Things Nice

Cardamom

A fragrantly warm winter spice – I love it and the cardamom season is getting into full swing in my house where two of our top seasonal favourites flavoured with freshly ground cardamom are:

Winter Fruit & Spice Cake

and

The BEST Gingerbread Biscuits

 

 

Sloe Gin Time

This post is for Chris & Debbie, gin connoisseurs of note. You know who you are!

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness will soon be making way for frosts and mellow indulgence: get the sloe gin going in time for you-know-what (begins with C…) 🙂

 

• Pick as many sloes as you fancy (either after the first frosts or when ripe and then freeze overnight before using – the freezing/frost breaks down the sugar in the fruit making it easier to release its flavour).
• Prick them all over with a pin.
• Pour a bottle of gin into a large (sterilised) jar with lid (or two large jars), add the sloes together with one (or more depending on your taste) slit vanilla pod.
• Leave in a cool, dark place for at least 6 weeks (can be left for much longer too) before filtering and bottling. Will keep indefinitely and matures with age.

Cheers!

 

 

Spiced Pumpkin Cake

Yes they can, pumpkins can do cake!

Just substitute pumpkin purée (spiced to your taste or plain) for the fruit purée in my

Winter Fruit & Spice Cake

and this is what you will get:

As well as a lot of smiley faces – even the kids loved it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Wine & Chillies

Slow roasted,

our red muscatel grapes:

and fiery,

Tom’s habanero chillies:

That’s the main mix for our

RED MUSCATEL CHILLI CHUTNEY

homemade from our red muscatel grapes and Tom’s chillies!

Tom is serious about chillies and talks in terms of Scoville when describing his hand-reared hot crop! Fresh, dried and salsa’ed – he does it all and while I am certainly not in his league when it comes to Scoville & Co, I do know that you can’t go wrong pairing chillies and red wine (in this case, red grapes)!

This is where you can get your jar (the chutney goes well with anything from cheeseboards, burgers of all kinds, salad dressings and dips):

https://anediblelandscape.wordpress.com/our-online-orchard-shop/.