For the love of Feijoa's

There are few things I really like about Autumn and Winter.  I hate the cold, I'm not a fan of root vegetables and I can never find a good jacket but I do love feijoa's!  At this time of year there is nothing more delicious than sitting beside a luscious feijoa tree, heavy with these tart green fruit on a sunny Autumn morning.  One after the next you collect them from the ground, split them in half with your fingers, slurp out their content and throw the peels over your shoulder.  Yes at some point you'll get up groaning as you clutch your belly and curse the huge pile of skins that have amounted up behind you, but in the moment it's all well worth it!
So while we still have an abundance of feijoa's, Saba has been giving them a little French twist...

 Feijoa Tarte Fine

Tarte fine is a simple, delicious French tart, made from puff pastry, thinly sliced fruit, butter and sugar. That's it!  We like to use store bought pastry, to keep it ultra simple!  Sadly today we only had non-butter based puff pastry in the freezer, but I highly recommend making this with a butter puffy pastry, it's 100% more delicious (in New Zealand, Paneton make a great ready to use butter puff pastry, you can find it in Nosh, Farro Fresh and selected New World supermarkets).

What you'll need:
Ingredients:
1 sheet of puff pastry
30g unsalted butter, melted
6 large feijoas, peeled and sliced
Sugar for sprinkling

What you do:
Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius,
Cut four 10cm discs from your pastry (I used the base from one of my mini tart tins to trace around)
Place pastry discs on a buttered baking tray, and brush with melted butter.
Arrange feijoas on the pastry, overlapping slightly, leaving a small border around the edges.
Brush the tops with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar (how much really depends on how ripe your fruit is, and how sweet you like things!)
Bake for 20-30mins until the pastry is golden and crisp.
Let cool for 5-10mins, sprinkle the edges with icing sugar, and serve!   Of course no dessert is complete in this family without adding a little whipped cream, but this tart is just as delicious without it.
 Recipe from Cuisine
Serves 4
Don't have feijoas?  Tarte fine is traditionally made with apples, but so many other fruits work really well too such as plums, apricots, peaches, pineapple... The options are endless.


Feijoa cake

What you'll need:
2 large eggs
100g sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

100g butter
150g milk
170g all purpose flour (this cake works well with spelt flour too!)

5g corn flour

3 tsp baking powder

Enough feijoas to cover the top of the cake.

What you do:

Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease a 28cm baking tin.
Peel and slice your feijoas (not too thinly).
Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla until pale, thick and creamy (this is the most important step, so make sure you don't under beat this).

in a saucepan, heat the butter and milk until it just comes to the boil.

Sift the flour, corn flour and baking powder together, and fold into the egg mixture.

Lastly add the hot milk in 2 batches, mixing until just combined.

The mixture will be creamy and quite runny, and may even have a few small lumps, that's ok!

Pour it into your greased baking tin, arrange the feijoa slices on the top (you want to squeeze in as many as possible!)

And bake for around 20-25mins. Try not to over bake this one, or it will be a tad dry.

Notes: I made this cake yesterday as a simple lemon cake, to do so, just add the zest of 3 large lemons to your sugar, and omit the feijoas. I then slathered it in a not too sweet lemon cream cheese icing, yum!
xx
P.S

Ayana is obsessed with feijoa's!  There are some days when I feel like I can't get the girl to eat much else, but at the moment if it distracts her from her teething misery then I'm happy :).

Crabapple and lavender compote

For some reason both Saba (the true heroine of this story) and I both recall being told that these little red pigmy fruit were poisonous.  As children we would look at them longingly as they hung in big clusters off the tree outside the lounge.  In fact it wasn't until very recently when we saw our cousins from overseas devouring them that we realised that although extremely sour, they are very much edible! 
Having just come back from learning to be a pastry chef in Paris, Saba is full of great ideas on adapting classics with whatever wonderful delights we can pillage from the garden.  So last Sunday I was instructed to come over nice and early (well early for a Sunday) with a big bag of crabapples and a handful of lavender. 
Oh boy the result was too good not to share.  Lights fluffy scones, healthy dollops of whipped cream, a sour lavender infused compote and a drizzle of homemade caramel sauce.  Should I go on?  Or are you already half way to the kitchen?

Saba's Crabapple and Lavender Compote
You probably won't find crabapples in your local supermarket, but your local farmers market should have them in early Autumn.  Or if you're really sneaky you might be able to pinch them off your neighbours tree.

What you'll need:
Compote

245g Crab apples - Cored and cut into quarters (I like to leave a few in halves, for extra texture)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

25g Unsalted butter

30g Sugar

10g water

Lavender Syrup:

75g Water

75 Sugar

4 x Lavender flower heads

 

What you do (this sounds long and complicated but is actually very easy!):

To make the lavender Syrup:

- Combining equal parts water and sugar in a small pot, 

- Heat until the mixture comes to a boil and the sugar is completely dissolved. 

- Remove from the heat and immerse the lavender heads in the syrup

- Put the lid on and let it infuse for 5 minutes

- Remove the lavender and reserve it for later

 

To make the compote:

 - Cut the crab apples into quarters and remove the core (some recipes say this isn't necessary, but I find the  core is a bit woody when cooked). I like to keep about a quarter of my crab apples cut in halves, because it adds a little more texture.
- Squeeze the lemon juice over the apples, to stop them from browning.-

-  Melt the butter in a medium sized pot (on medium heat)

 - Stir until it is well browned and emits a soft caramelised smell.
- Add the crab apples and sugar, mix to combine, and put the lid on the pot.  

- Cook for 5 mins, stirring occasionally

- Add 10g of water.

- Mix well and pop the lid back on, cooking for another 5 minutes or so, until the apples are soft, but not quite falling apart.

 

Finally:
- Add 40g of the lavender syrup

- Cook until the mixture becomes thick (almost jam like in appearance at the edges)

- Lastly, pick the lavender petals (including the small 'buds') from two of the lavender heads reserved from the syrup, and mix evenly through the compote. At this stage I also like to mix in a dash more of the lavender syrup.

Best served with scones and lashings of cream!  (We are big fans of the trusty Edmonds scone recipe which you can find here)

Notes: 

- Crab apples are very tart, and this compote is too! We love it, but if you would like some extra sweetness, just add 10g of extra sugar before you add the lavender petals, and cook until the sugar is combined.
- Don't have crab apples?  This recipe would also work well with any tart apple variety.

 

xx

Cultural fix

A lot of people don't know this but I'm half Eritrean. 
You're half WHAT??
Half Eritrean.
What's that?
It's a country.
Never heard of it.
You're not alone, most people haven't.  It's a tiny little country, in case you were wondering.  It's nestled in along the coastline of the Red Sea in Africa.  I'm sad to say that I've never been there before and know very little about the culture, but there are two things I am very well acquainted with... the food and the coffee!  Ask me what the one food is that I could happily eat for the rest of my life and I will tell you injera.  Glorious, delicious injera.  And then I'll wash it down with a little cup of your best Eritrean coffee. 
Injera is this sour sort of yeasty pancake that gets piled up with spicy sauces, vegetables and salad.  Then you use the pancake to scoop this irresistible mountain of goodness up and shovel it into your mouth.  Mmm and then you savour every last bite!  I am yet to come across somebody who isn't utterly in love with injera from the very first taste. 
Then comes the coffee.  Oh my, it's like no other coffee you've tasted.  It's coffee the way it was always intended to be brewed!  Fresh green beans are roasted in a little pan over red hot coals, then ground in a mortar and pestle before being boiled in a long necked vessel.  The end is stuffed with horse hair to filter out the grinds when the coffee is poured into tiny cups piled high with sugar.  All the while a chai smelling incense is burning away on coals beside you filling the air with a smell that makes you forget you're sitting in a West Auckland sports field. Traditionally you drink three cups in a row, but if your caffeine tolerance isn't up to scratch you're probably jittering after the second hit.
So you see every year we wait for the International Cultural Festival like it's Christmas.  We head straight for the Eritrean tent, say our hello's and take our place in the semi circle around the coffee lady.  And we don't budge for the next few hours!
xx

Mimosa

There aren't many good cafes over this side of the bridge.  In fact if I'm perfectly honest I can only think of a couple, and Mimosa* is at the top of my list.  It's one of those places that just make you feel at home, or at least the kind of home I wish I had!  It's a little vintage, a little rustic, it has local influences and is just the right kind of quirky.  We come here when country life is getting the better of us and we're craving a bit of cafe loitering and people watching.  We hang out by the window sipping our coffee's and devouring our sushi rolls (well that would mainly be Ayana, she rates their sushi pretty highly).  You see this cafe has a little twist, it's run by the sweetest Japanese woman and therefore the food has a delicious Japanese influence.  Everything also happens to be organic and fair trade which is something I'm finding increasingly important. So if you ever find yourself stranded on the North Shore and would rather pretend you were somewhere more exciting then this cafe serves as a great refuge.
Must try: A Japanese breakfast (which I haven't actually tried yet but am dying to!)
Parking: Plenty of 30 minute parking on the street outside, 120 minute prepay parking on the side streets or if you're sneaky you could park at the mall for free.
Highchair: No proper high chair but a cute retro kids stool for the slightly older ones.
Vegan/ Gluten free/ Vegetarian friendly: You betcha!
* Psst, Mimosa isn't just the name of a prissy cocktail, in Japanese it means Silk Tree.

Address: 460 Lake Rd, Takapuna
Website

KOKAKO: historic post office turned cafe

For years this old building on the corner of Williamson Ave in Grey Lynn stood casting a gloomy shadow over the shops.  It housed Auckland's most depressing post office. Outside it the local glue sniffers, meth heads and crazies huddled together on the park bench across the road screaming the odd obscenity at unlucky passerby's.  If only somebody would make use of that building and it's hidden deco charm, I often thought.  Then one day I heard a rumor, psst there's a new cafe in town!  They're roasting their own coffee, are quietly vegetarian  and proudly fair trade.  Going into town has become a bit of a luxury since we moved out to the country, but this one seemed worth making a trip for.  The transformation was amazing!  The space was light and bright, the staff (many old hospo comrades) were easy going and friendly, the food was unique and delicious, and when you really ran out of conversation you could let your gaze fix on the coffee roasters to the right.  Anyway it's safe to say we came back, and then again... and now it's our number one spot for a coffee fix in town.
Must try: The cold drip coffee!
Parking: Any side street is best (main street parking times have been reduced to 30 and 10 mins)
High chairs: Yup
Vegan/ Gluten free/ Vegetarian friendly:   Sure are
Kokako

Lately

1. Another lovely morning spent at our favourite cafe Cosset.  Everything always looks so pretty here that I end up pulling my camera out almost every time.
2. Testing, testing.  Waiting for Nic to figure out the lighting on his fancy new camera.
3.  You know Spring has arrived when you find beautiful broken eggshells on the lawn.
4.  Wishing and longing that the pool was warm enough to dive into. So far it's just good for dangling feet into.
5. Celebrating a birthday with little cupcakes.  Of course we forgot candles so had to use a little match instead (because it's important to make birthday wishes regardless).
6. Sitting in the garden eating pea's.
7. Admiring the beautiful lamps at Neighbourhood bar in Kingsland.  Somebody did an excellent job of the interiors.
8. Finding cafes without surcharges on labour day to indulge in coffee fixes.
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