Virgil Evetts

It’s that time of year when seasonal fruit are all but absent from the garden and fruit shop unless you count citrus, which I’ve now had my fill of well and truly. And don’t insult me with  mention of California stone fruit either.

Normally around now I’d be harvesting bananas but the summer drought dissuaded my trees from flowering this year. Thank God then, for that queen of the cool-climate papaya clan, the Babaco. My tree is currently holding about 20 kilos of the dusky green torpedoes, and is thoughtfully dispensing them to ripeness one at time.

There is a great deal of confusion about the names of the various plants called pawpaw and papaya in New Zealand, so here’s my attempt to offer some clarity on the matter. Irrespective of which member of the papaya clan you are dealing with, they are a fruit for unadulterated enjoyment only, except, perhaps, a little sugar in the case of the babaco, and limejuice with tropical papaya.  Do not bake with them, do not bottle them; just enjoy their simple charms unaffected.

Babaco (Carica pentagona)

The babaco is a natural hybrid between a couple of varieties of mountain papaya, but unlike its parent species (a rather underwhelming lot) is a headily fragrant, juicy and flavoursome charmer. Not only is it a welcome supplement to the mostly fruitless winter/spring cusp, but it’s a sensational fruit in its own right. The trees produce fruit all year around but the winter crop tends to be the heaviest.

It’s only fair that I warn you though; babaco do not taste anything at all like tropical papaya. Despite appearances and DNA, they are different beasts entirely. Although comparisons never do justice, the closest I can think of for a babaco is a pineapple crossed with a honey dew melon – but not so sweet. Like all of the papaya clan, Babaco are packed full of vitamins and dietary fibre. They also contain high levels of papain, an enzyme which assists with the digestion of animal protein.  Rather like grapefruit, fresh Babaco is greatly improved by the addition of a little sugar.

There are other hybrid species out there – notably Rainbow Valley and Pabaco.  As yet untested…

Papaya (Carica papaya)

This is the true tropical papaya, as found in supermarkets and fruit shops nation- (and indeed world-) wide. They can be either red- or orange-fleshed, with the latter being the most commonly available in NZ.  In my humble opinion, red-fleshed papaya is by far the better of the two, but I’ve yet to find it outside of the tropics. Influenced by her childhood in Samoa my mother always prescribes fresh papaya for an upset stomach – and very effective it is too. Medicinal properties aside, the papaya is a delicious tropical fruit but sadly it doesn’t grow well in New Zealand. That said, the seeds from those supermarket fruit germinate easily and the plants will grow up to a metre high over the summer months. The trick is getting them through a winter and producing edible fruit.  A few years ago, and after much molly-coddling, I harvested one very small fruit from a tropical papaya grown in my greenhouse before the tree changed sex (as they are wont to do), and I lost interest. You never know your luck though…

Mountain Papaya (Carica pubescens)

Common in gardens all over the upper North Island, theses plants look wonderfully tropical but the fruit is only really edible in the very loosest sense of the word.  Shaped a bit like a small, deformed rugby ball they are more seed than fruit and pack a rather fetid,  gastric aroma and an oddly tomatoe-y flavour. The fruit  makes great chicken food though. Anything labelled as a pawpaw or papaya at a garden centre in New Zealand will probably be this species.  Caveat emptor ,and all.

Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)

Although widely used to describe various papaya (carica)species in New Zealand, the name pawpaw actually belongs to a North American fruit related to the cherimoya and soursop. The true American pawpaw is a delicious custard-fleshed fruit with a rich tropical flavour reminiscent of bananas, mango and pineapple. Native to inland parts of North America it can tolerate quite extreme cold (minus 25 Celsius!) and should perform nationwide. That this fruit has never caught on is a mystery to chefs and nurserymen/women worldwide.

All of the plants described here and many, many more are available from Subtropica Nurseries in Waipu. Claire will happily ship plants nationwide.

http://www.subtropica.co.nz/index.php

Also see Russell Fransham’s excellent catalogue at

http://www.subtropical.co.nz/catalogue2.html

Russell is probably New Zealands’ most knowledgeable guru on all things subtropical and really nice guy to boot.

Debbie Byrom

I don’t often eat ice cream. Especially the fat-laden sugary behemoth that is a Memphis Meltdown – I’m afraid I may be afraid of big nuts as the advertising suggested. There was however a moment of weakness on an unseasonably sunny day last weekend and I found myself leaning over the ice cream cabinet in the local gas station. I got suckered by a ‘new’ sticker.

There are two kinds of people on this earth – those who like their ice cream plain (vanilla, hokey pokey etc) and those who think the more bits and pieces you add the better. I’m firmly in the second camp. Or at least I was. Enter the Rocky Road Memphis Meltdown. The description on the pack goes something like “A mountain of jelly rippled chocolate ice cream dunked in marshmallow and smothered in choc, nuts and coconut”. The mother in law, who also got suckered in, described it as being like eating a jandle.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with it as such. The individual components were fine (excluding the marshmallow which was like cloudy tough jelly) but the ultimate combination was wrong – too much other stuff, not enough ice cream, the whole thing was barely even cold.

I feel the need to add in a disclaimer at this point in the defence of Tip Top. Other people might love the product, it just didn’t do it for me.

Anyway, I was so disappointed that I got halfway through, gave up and put the thing bag in the bag, dropped it in the nearest bin and proceeded to sulk. For some reason food has an astounding ability to upset me; I feel cheated and let down in a way that is neither reasonable nor rational. It’s been happening a bit recently – Pak’ n Save steak that tasted not quite right and my first tasting of Collective Dairy yoghurt which just couldn’t match up to Piako.

Surely I am not alone in being lured in by the look of something to find that the reality is far less fulfilling. Anyone got any good examples?

Virgil Evetts

From my mid-teens through to my late twenties I was a consummate late nighter.  Lights-out at 2am was quite the norm on weekdays, and weekends were much, much worse. I don’t know how I did it. But then age, work and my general softness took their toll. Bed times crept back until I literally couldn’t stay awake much beyond 10pm. Although a bit boring, and alarmingly indicative of the onward march of decrepitude, I certainly felt better for a good night’s sleep.

But now, in my mid 30s, with my baby brother in law (he of the frock coats and black nail polish) recently having left home and a real baby only weeks away, I seem to be regressing. Despite my good intentions, I find it all but impossible to get to bed before midnight again.

The main problem with staying up late is not tiredness the next day, which so far hasn’t been too dreadful, but the fact that the sated affects of dinner wear off around 11pm.  Hungers beckons, gnaws and nudges.  There are always leftovers in the fridge, but I don’t do sequels. So I’m forced to graze the pantry, usually making do with whatever salty, fatty and sometimes sweet convenience-morsels I can lay my hands on.

Cheese and crackers are a common choice – usually in the company of our neighbour’s excellent feijoa chutney; I’ve been enjoying a bit of a crumpet revival lately too… a fine thing, a toasted crumpet, especially spread thickly with Kaya (coconut jam) or honey; and if I’m feeling really desperate (i.e. no crackers or crumpets on hand) I’ll raid my precious stockpile of frozen roti, usually reserved for Thai curry nights. These are very good drizzled with kecep manis and sesame chilli oil…

But the thing is, none of these quite satisfies me enough to quell greedy thoughts for long. I could cook something I suppose, that might do it, but I hate going to bed with cooking smells lurking about the place.

There are many schools of thought about what foods are good to sleep on too. Some based in rational science (e.g. sugar and excess carbs really are stored as fat if you don’t burn them up quick-smart) and others based on nonsense superstition and weird Englishness e.g. cheese gives you bad dreams.  But to be honest, when the late night hunger horrors find me, I couldn’t care less about side effects.

It’s perhaps a good thing then that I have at last found the perfect, late night snack – and as a happy accident it’s a healthy one too. Well sort of/probably not at all.

In my latest attempt to start eating breakfast, I test-drove a number of  cereals. Overall they were just as I remember them being from my childhood i.e. a pretty ‘meh’ affair. Until I discovered granular love in the form of a certain very-well-known brand’s berry-laden-muesli-cluster-and-other-nice-things  mix.  Ok it’s Sanatarium’s Cluster Crisp Triple Berry,  and before any of you get antsy about covert advertising etc, I’m volunteering this opinion entirely unsolicited. Of course, if the good people at Sanatarium wish to furnish me with an unending supply of their product, that would be just fine.

Anyway, suffice to say, this cereal is very, very good indeed. Well I think so. It includes a great variety of mostly toasted grains and delicious freeze-dried fruit, all bulked out with too-too-good berry-juice-soaked clusters (of oats, I think). For reason of economy and potential obesity I strictly ration myself to two bowls and two bowls only per day: one in the morning, and one last thing at night. Well that was the plan -turns out I really don’t do breakfast, even when it’s terribly good. So now my late nights are capped off and complimented by two large (my rationing never stipulated volume) bowls of cereal. Satiating perfection.

I also hear good things about porridge at 4am.

Virgil Evetts

Let’s be honest now, nothing ever really happens in New Zealand, so the most trivial things attract media attention. Remember how long that escaped otter led the evening news? Last week saw another instalment of that perennial favourite of local news hounds: ‘attention seeking shopper finds bug in processed food’. This time it was a rather bedraggled wasp in a can of soup. These stories pop up at least a couple of times a year and stick to a tight predictable formula: cheeky/alarmist headline, the company assures customers that it was a freak occurrence and the ‘victim’ is always ‘shocked, disgusted and appalled’. And evidently quite naive.

Because I abso-bloody-lutely guarantee that all of us consume various bits of insects, spiders and possibly worse in our food on an almost daily basis. We are never further than around 30cm from invertebrate life, so as you read this there at least one multi-legged creeping thing within arm’s reach. So is it really any surprise that some of these end up in our food? The American Food and Drug administration have some rather alarming statistics to back this up if you don’t believe me.

But should we even care? In the case of well-cooked wasp I would say not. They’re pretty clean insects (I suppose a wasp-sting allergy could be a problem), and any associated bacteria will have been stopped in it tracks by the pasteurisation. It’s all very well to say that nothing should make it past the rigorous screening processes on the production line, but fact is, most insects are small. There is no way to thoroughly check every millimetre, of every item of produce. There will always be bugs in processed food. Not many, hopefully, but always a few. But ideally by the time we as consumers get anywhere such food, these unwanted guests will have been fragmented beyond any recognition.

However, I have more trouble when such stowaways turn up in restaurant food. Just last week I was working my through a bowl of fried udon at a clean and reputable Japanese restaurant, when I removed what was left of a rather large beetle thorax from my mouth. It was very crunchy and tasted peculiar to say the least. I looked carefully through the rest of the dish, but no more beetle. Thing is, I was very hungry, we were very pressed for time and the staff spoke very little English. I could have quite legitimately made a fuss. But I’m a little ashamed to admit that after a moment’s hesitation, I just kept eating. It was only a beetle after all. Not as bad as the cockroach I once found in a meal in Singapore, or the used plaster a friend once recovered from her mouth while sculling soup from a very well-known cafe.

But none of these compare to such great urban myths as the Kentucky fried rat, the cola mouse or the severed finger in the frozen peas. I’d love to get my hands on any of these as I’m pretty confident the companies concerned would pay through the nose to shut me up. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found in your food?

Virgil Evetts

It might seem a funny time of year to be talking about preserving sweet peppers, but it’s been such a strange season. My plants (Spanish Pequillo) gave up what will probably be their last major crop for the season only last week.  Even now the odd fruit continues to ripen.  I’m guessing others in the north will be seeing similar backyard oddities this year.

I hardly ever eat any of my peppers fresh, mostly because the variety I grow have very tough skins, but also because I think they just taste better preserved. It’s a bit like the difference between milk and cheese I guess. But I don’t mean just any method of preservation. Vinegar is brutish stuff and obliterates the complexity and finesse of a good pepper. Drying is fine if you plan to use your peppers in soups, stews, stocks or ground into homemade paprika, but the very best way, with the most versatile results, is strangely little-known and rarely practised in these parts.  Effectively just a stripped back version of the water bath method, it has been used around the shores of Mediterranean for hundreds of years.  It can be used to preserve many other fruits and vegetables (and even tuna!).

In the case of peppers, the process starts off in a very primal way, with the cleansing lick of the flame. Pepper skins are literally indigestible to humans and pretty unpalatable too. The only practical way to be rid of them is by chargrilling.

This can be done under the grill of an electric oven or directly over the flame of a gas BBQ, but for the best results you need the subtle seasoning of wood smoke. There is no need to get an actual pyre going in your backyard – this is probably illegal where you live anyway and takes forever to get going anyway.  My preferred short cut is to drop down the grill on my gas BBQ until the flames are licking through, and then make a small pile of twigs (grape and fruit tree prunings work really well) ontop. Lay the peppers (whole unless you want to save the seeds) on the twigs, and keep turning them until blackened all over. The idea is to scorch the skin not immolate the fruit, so don’t wander off at this point. The twigs will burn down fairly quickly so keep replenishing. As individual peppers are ready, drop them into a waiting plastic bag and cover them up. The steam inside the bag will help loosen the skins later.

Once all your peppers are burnt black and bagged, leave them to sweat it out a bit. About 15 minutes will do.

Next, under a running tap, slip the skins from the peppers – they should come away very easily – and pull out the core. Rinse away any loose seeds or flecks of burnt skin. Now firmly pack the peppers into preserving jars with sealable metal lids, and top with a few basils leaves and a teaspoon of salt to each cup volume of peppers. Seal the lids very tightly. Wrap each jar in either newspaper or a tea towel (this prevents breakages), and submerge in a large pot of water. Bring the water to the boil and continue to boil for 20 minutes. Remove pot from heat and allow to cool.

Once cool, carefully unwrap each jar, dry and briefly invert to ensure there is no leakage.

The peppers will have lost volume and will not be fully submerged in the pepper syrup that has formed. This is quite normal. Don’t worry. Until opened, the peppers will remain completely safe and sterile.

These peppers can be used immediately but improve with age. They keep unopened for at least a few years and probably much longer.

I use my preserved pepper on pizza, tossed through pasta, in salads, on toast, crackers, pretty much anywhere and at anytime. They are my most treasured pantry item and I’m very loathe to share them.