Apples, fried in butter. Cinnamon, walnuts and a splosh of cream.
Make sure you use a decent cooking apple - not a sweet modern excuse for an apple - I want sourness that softens to a flavourful mouthful. Try a reinnette, a russet, ballarrat, granny or some such pomme. Peel the apples, and cut into chunks. Use 1 large apple per person - more will be good.
Melt a good piece of butter - at least 2 tablespoons per apple, in a heavy cast iron frying pan. Add the apples and a small pinch of salt. gently fry the apples till they soften and get a little caramelised. Add some broken walnuts, some cinnamon and stir. When the apples are done - they keep getting better, but also keep getting smaller - so pick your moment… take the apples from the heat and when the butter has stopped bubbling, add a slosh of fresh cream.
The preparation of tinctures and medicines is a simple but quite beautiful process. Last weekend, under dark stormy clouds and a strange wet light, I made a jar of echinacea tincture. The process requires that you use the whole plant , the roots, stalks, leaves and flowers.
Essentially - the plant is washed to remove all earth from the roots, then chopped with a machete to increase surface area - and to fit it more easily into a jar. After the plant has been chopped - it can be dried in the sun for a few days - this will reduce it's bulk a little, meaning that more can be packed into the jar. Vodka is then used to extract the active ingredients from the plant - and after 6 weeks or so - the plant material can be strained out and the tincture drained into smaller bottles.
When using echinacea, it is my understanding that it is best to take a few drops several times per day for 10 days - if there are signs of a cold beginning or you're in a nasty environment such as an aeroplane. The tincture may also be used topically for ailments such as athlete's foot.
You can tell how active or strong the tincture is by the tingle you get in your mouth as you swallow it - the stronger it is...
All that green! I'm back in New Zealand, where talk of the weather is omni present - and there is rain so wet that the dandelions grow sweet and wild. This past week we've had more than 400mm of rain.
A memory has been prompted by a particular colour I noticed in my glass of iced Nettle tea. When I was 20 I attended a party that was themed by the letter "G", and everyone was asked to come dressed in costume, so there were Goddesses, Geishas, Gigalos, and a very scary Gynacologist, who kept a menacing set of pliers in his overcoat pocket. I dressed as "Green" and to complete my emerald outfit, I dyed my long hair dark green. The dye I used was a water soluable ink intended for paper in a very diluted form, but I didn't think much of it as i dunked long tendrils of my hair into the pot on the desk in my painting studio. My already dark hair gained only a tinge of green, and most of the effect was further lost in the dank basement light at the party. The real drama of the green hair happened a day or so later, when I was involved in a filming of a short video peice, being made a bunch of dancers. I was considering the possibility of allowing myself to be held upside down by the ankles, and then to be dunked head first into a local municiple swimming pool. I agreed to the idea in principle, the details where to be worked out by others.
In the meantime, I found myself in a shower scrubbing clay off my torso after another video peice that had required me to be caked in the stuff, in lieu of a costume. Opening my eyes, I watched the clay swirl and clump around the plughole, and I was suddenly aware of a stream of dark green water flowing from my head and frothing into slimy soap bubbles. The dye from the party was vividly alive again, and would not be dissolved away for many, many washes. The green infected my clothes and sheets, and the sweat on my forehead when I was dancing kept re-activating the dye, dissolving into green beads and settling into my eyebrows.
From the safety of the many years that have now passed, I wish now that I had gone ahead with the head dunking. I wonder how bad the consequences would have been, anyhow... A lot of water wasted, surely, but perhaps nothing more than a stern telling off? Perhaps, for the sake of art it would have been worth it. It would have been a wildly dramatic disaster, as the entire swimming pool would have been tinged eventually with the green dye from my hair. It would have been a dark green seeping, with clouds of dark colour billowing out from my swirling hair and staining the chlorinated water. Dye swirls through water as white smoke curls through cold air, and once added, it can't be removed.
Nettle Tea.
The nutritional benefits of Stinging Nettle are incredible and wildly useful; much has been written elsewhere if you are interested.
If you have find fresh stinging nettles growing wild, then you can make tea with the fresh leaves. The small young leaves are the best, the older, darker leaves can be bitter. Wear protective gloves to pick the stems, then rinse under cold water. When the weather is warm, I like to drink nettle tea as a cold drink, and so make a large batch to drink over the day. Use either 3 or 4 tablespoons of dried nettle leaf, or fill the bottom of the jug with about an inch of fresh nettle leaf. I also add a few slices of fresh ginger root. Pour over a litre and a half of boiling water, then allow to cool completely. As the herbs steep, the water will draw a beautiful green colour from the nettle leaves. Once cold, you can decant the tea to drink, and if you like, use more boiling water to make another batch for cooking, adding it to soups or using it for soaking grains or cooking pasta.
Serve the tea in a large glass with a slice of lemon, or if you prefer, chilled with ice.
I met Antonia Pont a few years ago, and since becoming friends we have worked on a number of projects together, such as our website project The Post Project, which is a conversation in text and images which began while Antonia was living in Berlin. Her own personal website - The Metabolism of Travel is a gorgeous collection of prose, poetry and other writings, and I'm glad to have this opportunity to interview her about her perspectives on life and food.
How do you spend your days?
I spend my days around the home a lot. After years of living in either temporary or 'interesting' living situations, I now live somewhere that is really a home. It is often the environment that I prefer to be in, for socialising, resting and working. My work involves thinking practice, writing practice, having conversations that are important to me, doing awareness practice, body practice.
At a party I'd say: I'm a kind of thinking artist, yes, that is what I'd call myself. I'm doing post graduate study, so I spend a lot of time thinking, writing, and teaching writing. I also spend time teaching and practicing yoga.
What is your favourite meal of the day?
My favourite meal used to be breakfast, because it was a decision not to rush the day. Preparing it was the luxury of not having to hurry. I'd often spend time having a long breakfast, with pots of tea, reading, and eating slowly. Recenty I've spent time doing a lot of yoga in the morning, and it has removed the need to spend a lot of time over breakfast. My favourite meal has become dinnner, where you can eat together, talk for a while, and then go to bed. There is a very simple expectation of what days can offer you, and it's deeply satisfying. But on the weekends, my favourite meal would still be breakfast. There is also that other meal - the one that consists of drinking wine and eating enormous amounts of cheese. I like this also.
What do you eat when you are alone?
If I'm alone, and I'm eating, my favourite dish would be something like an unboxed bento. It is perfectly cooked organic white rice, with salt. Then a combination of the fatty-salty and the fresh. It might be a poached egg with gomasio and shredded nori, and fresh cucumber and avocado with some tamari and some kind of good oil. Baby lettuce maybe.
Or, like my mother probably fed me as a three year-old, a meal of well-cooked brown rice, steamed vegetables cooked beyond the point of form, and then with lots of butter and some salt and pepper.
I'm interested in the associations of food and place, food that reminds you of a particular time.
Violets get something of a bad rap, along with lavender. For some people, they seem to conjour up images of dusty cheap grandmothers, and noxious talcum powders. Unfortunate, since they are both such delightful plants.
Purple often has a hard time.
In Derek Jarman's "Chroma", he emphasises the purpleness (the not blueness) of violets, musing "poor violets, violated for a rhyme".
Violet flowers are at once delicate and vibrant, the tiny petals hold the dark colour aloft on tiny stems, but close to the earth, hidden under their dark heart shaped leaves.
This winter I learned to eat violets.
Both the flowers and the leaves are edible, and since the leaves are abundant towards the end of winter, they are a valuable spring green when other plants are still slowly growing.
A brilliantly coloured sugar can be made by pounding violet petals with sugar crystals. Creating this sugar is something like making a potion from garden leaves and fairy dust. it feels delightfully childlike to be untanglying the tiny flowers from beneath the dark green leaves; collecting the flowers into a tiny bunch. You then rip the petals off, ( a bit like pulling the wings off an insect) and then smash them up with a pestle, grinding them until the sugar is fine and purple violet.
This violet sugar is faintly scented, and works well with the bitterness of dark chocolate, or the pale creamy texture of cream and almonds.
The flowers alone can be used in salads, (dress the salad without the flowers, or they will quickly become forlon and bedraggled)... or the leaves can be torn into salads of wild greens to give a mild taste and a beautiful dark green colour. As the taste is mild, the leaves work well with the more fiery tastes of wild greens such as dandelion or rocket leaves.
I would love to have access to vast woodlands abundant with wild violets, I've found old recipes that call for pounds of them - to make syrups and preserves. The bunch i gathered from my overgrown backyard garden weighed barely a few grams.
As the leaves are fairly bland, they can be used also to cut the richness of foods such as pizza. Here, a handful of washed violet leaves was scattered across a broccoli pizza, as soon as it came out of the oven.
Violet tea can be made, using both fresh or dried flowers and leaves. The varieties of violets that are most aromatic are best to use, and the dried flowers will be stronger than fresh. The flavour blends well with lemon balm (aka bee balm or mellissa), and can be sweetened with honey.
Around the turn of the last centuary, fancy folk where given to holding a "violet tea" when spring began and violets appeared in gardens. The emphasis was on dainty, tiny portions, and everything was themed and decorated with violets. Candied violet flowers adorned tiny cakes, delicate jellies were prepared and served on tables set with white linen, embroided with violets. The fashionable perfume bottle was re-purposed as a vase to hold tiny bouquets of violets and their heart shaped leaves, and one might be forgiven for thinking that the violet tea was for pansies. Quite possibly.
For the ancient Romans, a more robust sort of violet, spring celebration was in order, and Violetum, a sweet violet wine was made, and drunk without any dainty pretentions. The violet plant does have some grand health claims, but then again, most fresh vegetables and herbs do. Especially the wild ones.
Eat violets for their beauty, delicate scent, their colour, their butterfly shape and the fact that spring has arrived.
We live with such contradictions and juxtapositions.
I run out of letters and improvise. The elegies drift in and out of my life, I hope that they always will. Excerpts become more or less noticed, translations and contexts framing them in different ways. These lines of verse are painted in my favourite colours.
....
What they require of me? that I should gently remove the appearance of suffered injustice, that hinders a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits.
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to use no longer customs scarcely acquired, not to interpret roses, and other things that promise so much, in terms of a human future; to be no longer all that one used to be in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside even one's proper name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange, to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering hither and thither in space.
This is a tree that hopes have been hung on, the weather to take care of them. Each handwritten note has been bleached by the sun and dissolved slowly into the wind, dried fragile by the sun's heat and the passing of time.
Small lovely donkey, whose image i found in a jumbled box of cake tins and tupperware, in an op-shop in country Victoria. Pasted into my scrap journal, with black paper night and a jab of yellow.
I wondered at the incongruity of finding such an image, in amongst such domestic clutter, but i loved it immediately. The soft gaze that donkeys often have, slow and steady, watching with the people gathered waiting at the shore.
Today was a day of cool winter beauty. I was out walking, looking for dandelions, keeping my head down, scanning the grass. I was checking out the train line, the bike paths and the untended patches of grass alongside the suburban streets.
When i first visited the city of Krakow, in Poland, my brother and I were enchanted by the fact that the grass was allowed to grow. Outside national institutions such as the art gallery, we found dandelions and grass halfway to our knees. It made us feel relaxed, as if the city itself were friendly. It is a strange concept, the idea of a perfect "weedless" lawn. The habit of mowing the grass down so far that the earth is exposed, just seems so unecessary, especially when there is so little water. Let the lawns grow wild, I say. Let the whole city feel just a little more relaxed.
I set out for a walk today, hoping to find some dandelions. At first, I was dismayed to find the grass at the park had been mowed to within a millimeter of its life.... and was a successful monoculture. It was just pale scratchy grass and bare patches of dirt under the eucalyptus trees. Heading off further into unknown territory, I found a park that was planted out with trees and shrubs, providing the privacy these valuable little "weeds" prefer. The bright green leaves of stinging nettle plants caught my eye straight away, popping up from the sandy bark covered soil. Using a plastic bag to protect my hands, I picked the young plants, and soon had a paper bag stuffed full. These would be dinner, blanched and chopped into pasta. After straightening up from my duck like position, I brushed my head against the low hanging foliage of a pink peppercorn tree.
I picked a few handfuls to hang up and dry. The dry pink shells remind me of little bettles or lady birds. The colour stays bright when they dry, and can be used in sweet or savoury dishes. Great in a Bloody Mary.
Botanically speaking, they are not real peppercorns, but can be used as such, and have a lovely mild spice to them. I once ate a beautiful "pink peppercorn pavalova" at the Diggers Club restaurant . Oh so elegant and delicious.
In a whole hour of walking with my head down, i found just one dandelion. I did, however, find masses of the tiny chickweed plant, and filled a bag with it. The edges of paths and patches beneath trees seem to grow no grass, so the chickweed takes over. It is a tricky plant to harvest, as it is so delicately soft, and quite matted together. I ended up with a technique that made me feel a bit like a hairdresser, tussling in with two fingers and snipping off the roots and dirt with my other hand.
Chickweed Winter Pesto
2 Cups chickweed 1/2 Cup brazil nuts Juice of one lemon or lime 1/3 cup Olive Oil 2 cloves garlic 1/3 cup grated parmesan Umeboshi Vinegar to taste.
Chop the brazil nuts and toast them in a heavy pan until they just start to change colour. Crush the garlic in a mortar and pestle, and a teaspoon of umeboshi vinegar, the lime juice and a splash of olive oil. Stir to combine the flavours. In a small blender, process the chickweed until it is finely chopped. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend again. Taste, and add more umeboshi (salty taste) if necessary.
This pesto has a great zing to it, and is delicious as a dip. I'd suggest it would be great with: roast potatoes, creamy soups, baked fish, on a pizza with anchovies, or with soba noodles and tofu.
A memory has been prompted by a particular colour I noticed in my glass of iced Nettle tea. When I was 20 I attended a party that was themed by the letter "G", and everyone was asked to come dressed in costume, so there were Goddesses, Geishas, Gigalos, and a very scary Gynacologist, who kept a menacing set of pliers in his overcoat pocket. I dressed as "Green" and to complete my emerald outfit, I dyed my long hair dark green. The dye I used was a water soluable ink intended for paper in a very diluted form, but I didn't think much of it as i dunked long tendrils of my hair into the pot on the desk in my painting studio. My already dark hair gained only a tinge of green, and most of the effect was further lost in the dank basement light at the party. The real drama of the green hair happened a day or so later, when I was involved in a filming of a short video peice, being made a bunch of dancers. I was considering the possibility of allowing myself to be held upside down by the ankles, and then to be dunked head first into a local municiple swimming pool. I agreed to the idea in principle, the details where to be worked out by others. 
In the meantime, I found myself in a shower scrubbing clay off my torso after another video peice that had required me to be caked in the stuff, in lieu of a costume. Opening my eyes, I watched the clay swirl and clump around the plughole, and I was suddenly aware of a stream of dark green water flowing from my head and frothing into slimy soap bubbles. The dye from the party was vividly alive again, and would not be dissolved away for many, many washes. The green infected my clothes and sheets, and the sweat on my forehead when I was dancing kept re-activating the dye, dissolving into green beads and settling into my eyebrows. 
If you have find fresh stinging nettles growing wild, then you can make tea with the fresh leaves. The small young leaves are the best, the older, darker leaves can be bitter. Wear protective gloves to pick the stems, then rinse under cold water. When the weather is warm, I like to drink nettle tea as a cold drink, and so make a large batch to drink over the day. Use either 3 or 4 tablespoons of dried nettle leaf, or fill the bottom of the jug with about an inch of fresh nettle leaf. I also add a few slices of fresh ginger root. Pour over a litre and a half of boiling water, then allow to cool completely. As the herbs steep, the water will draw a beautiful green colour from the nettle leaves. Once cold, you can decant the tea to drink, and if you like, use more boiling water to make another batch for cooking, adding it to soups or using it for soaking grains or cooking pasta.
Violets get something of a bad rap, along with lavender. For some people, they seem to conjour up images of dusty cheap grandmothers, and noxious talcum powders. Unfortunate, since they are both such delightful plants.
Both the flowers and the leaves are edible, and since the leaves are abundant towards the end of winter, they are a valuable spring green when other plants are still slowly growing.
This violet sugar is faintly scented, and works well with the bitterness of dark chocolate, or the pale creamy texture of cream and almonds.
I set out for a walk today, hoping to find some dandelions. At first, I was dismayed to find the grass at the park had been mowed to within a millimeter of its life.... and was a successful monoculture. It was just pale scratchy grass and bare patches of dirt under the eucalyptus trees. Heading off further into unknown territory, I found a park that was planted out with trees and shrubs, providing the privacy these valuable little "weeds" prefer. The bright green leaves of stinging nettle plants caught my eye straight away, popping up from the sandy bark covered soil. Using a plastic bag to protect my hands, I picked the young plants, and soon had a paper bag stuffed full. These would be dinner, blanched and chopped into pasta. After straightening up from my duck like position, I brushed my head against the low hanging foliage of a pink peppercorn tree.
In a whole hour of walking with my head down, i found just one dandelion. I did, however, find masses of the tiny chickweed plant, and filled a bag with it. The edges of paths and patches beneath trees seem to grow no grass, so the chickweed takes over. It is a tricky plant to harvest, as it is so delicately soft, and quite matted together. I ended up with a technique that made me feel a bit like a hairdresser, tussling in with two fingers and snipping off the roots and dirt with my other hand. 
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