The Armchair Traveller
Chapter 3. Food
Dreams of Lamingtons
In recent years I’ve daydreamed
Of those childhood party treats
Lamingtons stuffed full of cream
The first and best to eat
Those culinary masterpieces
Floated past my lips
Alas, today their legacy
Remains upon my hips!
When the children were young we decided that we would only bother with dessert after the evening meal if we had visitors. It didn’t take our children long to see the benefits of this and visitors were constantly overwhelmed by our friendly, welcoming offspring, urging them to stay for meals.
Number one daughter once invited the entire playcentre, adults and children, for lunch. I was very surprised when they arrived! Now she restricts herself to phoning thirty minutes beforehand to tell me she is arriving with six hungry student friends, and ‘they would like to be fed please.’
Growing up in a large family with constant visitors, our children quickly learned to count heads at the table and take only their share of the food. (Fortunately they are all good at maths, a skill they inherit from their father.) Unfortunately our guests were not always so considerate. Most of them arrive after having lived in tents or hostels and existed mainly on instant noodles and alcohol, so they appreciate home cooked meals. (Marc could cook and prepare instant noodles in twenty-four different ways.)
The children found that they didn’t have to eat their dreaded vegetables if there wasn’t sufficient meat left to go with them – a habit, I regret to say, they also inherited from their father. This meant that they were still hungry as they piteously informed me and so were entitled to extra dessert.
All our farm helpers seem to have an enormous appetite and interest in food. The girls in particular are keen to know how I prepare various dishes and we frequently have cooking sessions on wet days when it is too wet to work outside. I teach them how to make homemade pizza, kiwi style, apple crumble, shortbread or scones and muffins. One lovely Chinese lady was overcome by picking and eating an apple straight from the tree and listed that as her most momentous experience in New Zealand. I taught her to make pizza and later received a photo of her back in China holding up a pizza she had made with her nieces.
Hiroshi, a Japanese boy, was horrified at the amount of food I cooked as he said his mother would only cook a little at a time. I pointed out that I never knew how many people would turn up for any one meal and as I spoke a car load of hungry children and friends arrived and we all moved around the table to make more room.
One particular day we had a party to celebrate my young son’s birthday. The weather was too cold to eat outside – my usual remedy for feeding large numbers of people – so we set up two tables in the dining room and circulated each dish. Andreas, from Sweden, was at one end and managed to help himself both at the beginning and the end of the food chain. After the meal he announced with great satisfaction that he had found the best place to sit, then spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping it all off.
It is always interesting to give Marmite to our foreign guests. Kiwi kids are all brought up on it and are used to its strong salty flavour but the visitors think it must be some sort of chocolate and spread it thickly on bread before choking on the first mouthful. Others, like Katrina from East Germany, eat it by the spoonful from the jar, a feat that was observed with awe and wonder by the family.
Some visitors are very suspicious of anything they don’t recognise. Our younger son once went through a stage of producing hand made paper. He would use my food processor to grind up various revolting ingredients. One afternoon he had the kitchen bench covered in these preparations when Joe, an Israeli visitor, came in. He took one look at the food processor and recoiled telling me that he wasn’t very hungry so he wouldn’t bother with dinner, thank you. He resisted all attempts to get him into the kitchen again that night and spent the evening in his bedroom eating chocolates instead.
Our winter visitors love eating the oranges we grow and when told they can help themselves to the windfalls can be seen staggering back to the cabin with buckets of oranges. The juicer runs hot and vast quantities of juice are consumed. The record for the most juice drunk would have to go to Sven and Eric. These two Norwegians had had a dream to visit New Zealand ever since they were children and to eat oranges, not kiwifruit, as you would expect. These young men drank two litres of juice at a sitting, several times a day. They appeared to have cast iron digestive tracts, as they certainly suffered no ill effects from this.
When they left us to fly home they stuffed oranges into every bag they possessed and were determined to smuggle them into Norway. We waved them off, calling out that we would write to them in prison but still have not heard if they were caught or not.
An English couple, who arrived shortly afterwards, made sure that every job on the farm involved a detour past the orange trees. They, too, carted buckets of fruit for juicing but were a lot more realistic about their capacity when it came to drinking it.
We grow three main crops; kiwifruit, oranges and avocados, with two small blocks of mandarins and a few assorted fruit and nut trees. Our usual pattern when a visitor arrives is to go for a walk around the farm, sampling a fruit from each new variety we come to. Three Californian ladies came one day and asked about each fruit with great interest as we came to it. When we walked past the fenced off swampy area they asked what grew there.
‘That’s the gully,’ my husband answered.
There was silence for a few minutes while they thought about this, then one of the ladies asked,
‘What does a Gully fruit taste like?’
Some of our farm helpers are keen cooks. One French lass, Dominique, loved to make rich cakes and desserts and thought nothing of using half a kilogram of butter in each one, in addition to vast quantities of cream and sugar. She would wolf down these incredibly rich delicacies while we could only manage a tiny amount. She was very petit and never seemed to take any exercise so will no doubt always be the envy of some of her more generously endowed friends.
One memorable visitor was Jennifer from England. She rang, one year, just before Christmas to ask if she could come and stay for a week. At that time there was no orchard work suitable for her to do so I asked her if she would be prepared to come and spend the week making jam and doing some Christmas baking. She agreed to this with alacrity and duly arrived by bus. To my surprise I found she had never done any cooking at all before as her mother would not let her help in the kitchen. She had a wonderful week learning to cook, as I patiently showed her the recipes and explained the procedures, then spent hours chipping burnt jam from the bottom of my saucepans! The pig had a great week as well as he feasted on all the results of Jennifer’s attempt to cook edible food. It was hard to believe that my recipes, which up until then I had considered idiot proof, could go so disastrously wrong. The plum jam had the texture and consistency of concrete and resisted all efforts to remove it from the jars. We still have a few jars left in the pantry and even our starving student children turn them down, usually with the excuse that they don’t possess a hammer and chisel.
All was not lost with the cakes, as despite them raising unevenly with sunken middles, we managed to break them into pieces and after soaking in cherry brandy, topped them with cream and served them up as trifle for dessert.
Desserts are always a favourite with our farm helpers and even girls who normally are meticulous about counting their calorie intake find they can eat a lot more food after a day’s hard physical work.
Another visitor, Tracey, made batches of biscuits, which our children still talk of with wonder. She accidentally doubled the butter in the recipe and the biscuits dripped and spread in glorious golden lumps all over the oven from where they were prised out and eaten. The flavour was magnificent, despite their appearance, and much to the children’s disappointment I have never been able to achieve the same results myself.
&n
bsp; It is always a challenge cooking for a large group of people, particularly when they come from different cultures and have differing food requirements. My main triumph was organising and cooking the food when we had eight farm helpers staying, all of different nationalities, two of whom were strictly kosher and one vegetarian. Add to that two family members who cannot eat dairy products and you get some idea of the problems involved. I managed, as always, by having plenty of variety and explaining at length what was in each dish. I must have done too well as all the eight returned over the next two months for another stay and confessed that the main reason they came back was because they had been so well fed. Our policy is always to give visitors plenty of good food as that way they are more inclined to work well for us.
Most visitors adapt to our meal hours and eating habits happily although the Americans persist in eating with only a fork and feel deprived if they are not issued with a separate salad before each meal.
One poor Japanese girl, Fuki, had a very upsetting experience at the table one evening. As she went to pour tomato sauce on her steak, the lid came off the bottle. The entire contents of the bottle cascaded onto her plate. She was overcome with mortification but I whipped the plate away and scraped it into the pig bucket, making encouraging noises about how the pig would appreciate tomato sauce on his dinner. Equipped with a new plate and piece of steak Fuki decided not to risk the sauce again but by this time she was so flustered that she managed to knock the coffee cup and spill David’s coffee over him. We assured her there was no harm done but every meal became a torture for her after this. Poor Fuki! David persisted in teasing her by offering her sauce, orange juice and every other spillable commodity on the table. She shrank away from them and choked her food down dry so as not to risk another accident. When she left us she wrote a long and agonised apology in the visitors book, thus setting an unfortunate precedent, as each subsequent Japanese visitor felt they had to do the same. Until we explained the situation to new visitors it must have seemed that we were running some sort of prison camp.
I make my own bread. I used to do it by hand the old-fashioned way but now my most indispensable kitchen appliance is the breadmaker. We have worn out two of them and are currently on the third model. I wish I had bought the rights to sell the things or else shares in the company as most of our visitors purchase one while in New Zealand to take back to whichever part of the world they came from. It is not unusual to get an anguished e-mail from France asking for my spicy loaf recipe, so my recipes are now worldwide.
Sometimes guests cook for us. One Indian gentleman, Mahid, decided to make us a curry. He over rode our polite protests as we both loathe curry, even though David is a lot better mannered than I am and will choke it down if it is served up. So Mahid went to it – hours of slicing obscure vegetables and herbs led first to the kitchen then the entire house reeking of strong spices. I took the coward’s way out and ‘remembered’ a previous dinner engagement while David heroically ate the smallest portion of the stuff he could decently get away with. He complained that the taste was still in his mouth three days later. When Mahid left it only took a week for the smell to dissipate and on the bright side, it was time the curtains had a wash anyway! Now I give guests my own recipe books to choose from if they have an urge to cook – poor spirited I know, but then I’m like that.
Some of our farm helpers arrive at our place having left home for the first time and consequently leaving very anxious parents behind them. Barbara was a Canadian girl of twenty-two who had led a very sheltered life. She arrived here with a long list of instructions from her mother, designed to cover every aspect of life. Her mother was convinced that Barbara was not going to be fed properly in such a primitive country as New Zealand, although Barbara herself tried every new food with enthusiasm and could put away quantities of food that would have earned her respect from a Sumo wrestler. Her mother decided to send a food parcel over to her and would ring from Canada every few days to see whether it had arrived. Unfortunately in her enthusiasm to send a lot of food to her starving child she made the box so heavy she could only afford to send it by sea so the parcel eventually arrived the day Barbara left for the airport to fly home. Barbara was delighted to be able to distribute the food to us and we were the happy recipients of such vital essentials as ketchup and candy.
How to Make Chocolate Muffins
You will need;
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 cups yoghurt
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ cup cocoa
200 grams melted butter
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup milk
2 eggs
What you do;
1. First find a large mixing bowl. Check what this has last been used for. If found in the bedroom it has probably been used to wash Barbie, if outside it has probably been used to wash the dog or to collect snails or tadpoles.
2. Assemble the ingredients. At this point you will discover that the ants have found the sugar and you forgot to buy cocoa last time you shopped
3. Sieve sugar to remove ants. Use Milo instead of cocoa. This gives a grey, gritty texture but will disguise any ants you missed.
4. Go to the chocolate chip container where you will find that one of the children has eaten them all. Substitute sultanas instead (no-one likes these so there is a good chance there will still be some in the pantry)
5. Find that someone used the last of the plain yoghurt for breakfast. Use strawberry yoghurt instead and ignore the colour.
6. Find a teaspoon that hasn’t been accidentally dropped down the waste disposal and open the baking soda. This was last used as snow on a model village for a social studies project but the glue is probably not too toxic.
7. Crack eggs carefully into a cup one by one. Make note to collect eggs quicker in future before hen has time to start hatching them. Make further note to get rid of rooster.
8. Mix everything up with a fork, as the large spoon was lost during a tadpoling expedition.
9. Pour mixture into muffin tins and place in oven to cook for 20 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. Answer phone. Answer doorbell. Separate fighting children.
10. Cut charred pieces off the tops of the muffins and hastily cover in whipped cream instead. Accept congratulations modestly during the thirty seconds it takes for them to be consumed.