Christmas Huevos Rancheros

Knowing the other eight or so meals we would be eating on Christmas Day would be classic Kiwi Christmas BBQ fare, I decided our breakfast at home would be something a little different.

In fact this breakfast was not just not-Kiwi but was kinda a round the globe mash-up. This certainly was not a traditional Mexican Huevos Rancheros, but more of what it has now become - baked eggs in a tomato sauce which turned into more of an Italian sauce which I ended up serving with Turkish bread.

My loathing of crowds and Christmas grocery shopping saw me at the supermarket at 8.00am on the 22nd to get everything I needed. Thankfully nothing too fresh was needed for this meal but it meant I had to get bread that could be heated on the day and was not bakery fresh and that left me with some Turkish bread that you keep in the fridge and heat for 10 minutes before serving and it worked a treat.

This is an extremely easy brunch to make as you can make the sauce in advance and then just add and cook the eggs when you need to. You can also make it as mild or spicy as you like and add anything you want - meat (or not), onions, garlic and whatever herbs and spices you have at home.

Our Christmas breakfast compagno Jo is not too keen on anything too spicy so this is just a nice medium heat - enough that you can definitely taste it but not too hot that you need to rush for the milk - which was lucky considering mimosas were the drink of the morning.

I was up bright and early checking if Santa had been (he had not) so got the sauce on early so that it could cook for about an hour and a half to really get some good flavour going.

The recipe serves four (which was perfect for Christmas breakfast for three plus my Boxing Day leftover breakfast).

2 cloves garlic, chopped very finely
Half a red onion, sliced thinly
Half a yellow capsicum, diced
4 rashers middle bacon, chopped
3 spicy sausages, sliced
2 cans tomatoes (I used chopped in puree)
Hot sauce to taste (I used about a couple of teaspoons of our Habanero hot sauce)
1 cup chicken stock
Punnet of cherry/grape tomatoes, cut in half
1 Tb smoked paprika
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried rosemary
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Fry the onion and garlic in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil for a couple of minutes, being careful not to brown them too much.

Add the capsicum and bacon and stir for a couple of minutes.

Add the sliced sausages (which I had precooked and let cool before slicing) and cherry tomatoes and fry for a couple of minutes.

Add the canned tomatoes, paprika, herbs, some hot sauce if required and some salt and pepper.

Simmer at a very low heat for about an hour and a half. When it is almost done preheat the oven to 200°C.

Towards the end of the cooking I realised the sauce needed some more liquid so added half a cup of chicken stock and let it simmer down and then added the other half and simmered for the last 20 minutes or so with the frying pan lid on to keep the liquid in.

Once you are happy with the texture, flavour and seasoning of the sauce, transfer it to an oven proof serving dish.

Make six wells for the eggs. Carefully break the eggs into the wells and place in the oven for about 10 minutes until the eggs are cooked.

I also heated the bread for those 10 minutes in the bottom of the oven.

Served the eggs with a sprinkling of fresh coriander and the warm bread and butter.

The sauce was herby, a bit spicy, meaty and extremely tasty and made a great start to a very merry Christmas filled with family, food, friends and a wine or two!

The sauce is also amazing as leftovers. I just fried an egg the next day and plonked it on top of the warmed sauce, some more fresh coriander and leftover bread. Heavenly.

The chillies are a'comin

We have had some amazing chilli growing weather of late, and that, along with Elliot fertilising the crap out of the plants, has made for some amazing looking chilli and tomato plants which will soon be providing a plethora of fire-filled fruits.

The fertilising is only one part of the Elliot care package these plants receive. The love and attention these things get may be considered somewhat obsessive, weird, extreme. It all just seems kinda normal to me now. Not sure if that says more about me or him. No less than four times a day the jandals and sunglasses go on and a quick "you know where I'll be" signals I have a good half hour to watch a snipet of Come Dine With Me, Project Runway or am able to cook in peace.

I'm still trying to figure out whether the comment the other night about playing music to them was in jest.

However, whatever he is doing is working as these are some extremely good looking plants which are bigger and bushier than last year and will be providing an abundance of fruit in no time.

When they went out at Labour weekend

7 December

Just three weeks later

As you can see from above, the three weeks we have had of hot, still, dry weather has worked absolute wonders and the plants are thriving. Flowers are blooming and fruit is setting on the chillies and the rest of the garden of herbs, lettuces and strawberries are growing extremely well. And we are getting very good at nabbing the strawberries and tomatoes just as they begin to ripen before those pesky birds get to them.

We have harvested the last of our potoates - half of which went with Mams to help feed the troops at the Dunedin Christmas and half stayed with us for an amazing potato salad and some potato rosti topped with bacon and eggs for one of those brunches that contributes to the inevitable weight loss new year's resolution.

Potato salad with bacon, sundried tomatoes and basil mayo

Potato rosti with eggs, bacon and sundried tomato and basil mayo

So, here are some pics of the chilli plants, the rest of the garden and just a few of the meals we have enjoyed over the summer so far made better by some of the fruits of our labour. More food and recipes to come.

Ornamental chilli - NuMex Twilight

Not having any trouble with basil this year

This is this Bhut Jolokia's third season

Bushier tomato varieties for the pots have worked really well

Carolina Reaper - the world's hottest chilli

Big Bhut Jolokia

Jalapenos a plenty

Takanotsume

Chilli row

Habanero - from the seeds of last year's best Habanero plant

Just planted some new coriander as am using plenty

A few decent sized lemons have set

Quesadilla feast with herbs from the garden

Lettuce, coriander and mint ready for spring rolls

Our delightful summer deck

Nana Poohah's Green Tomato Pickle

My nana was an amazing woman. Aside from being a generous, loving, witty, intelligent and strong woman, she was amazing in the kitchen.

And she certainly had her specialties...the best raspberry jam you'll eat, the most moreish Louise cake (that always went down a treat with a Milo after a walk around the Picton foreshore in the evenings), the tastiest vegetable soup and the world's best tomato sauce (which I have now made twice, and by made, I mean slaved for eight hours each time to do it). Knowing the time and effort that goes into these things now that I have ventured further into kitchen, I admire her even more (especially seeing as she did it all while having to raise my mother and two uncles!).

She has been missed for the past two and a half years but her memory certainly lives on in the food our family makes, eats and enjoys, especially at those very special family get-togethers.

And she certainly passed on her cooking skills to my Mams who is the most amazing cook and does her mother's memory and food very proud.

Nana, Mams and some random (nah, just kidding Girly... you better be reading this)

I credit any sort of skill or talent I have in the kitchen to both these wonderful women.

Nana shared her life, kitchen and amazing garden with my grandpa. Grandpa Poohah is the most wonderful man you'll ever meet. There is absolutely no one with a bigger heart of gold.

At Christmas time this year he managed to dig out from his shed (the most wonderful treasure-filled man haven) Nana's preserving pan which has seen many a jam and pickle produced in it's time, but of course is spotless and in immaculate condition.

Nana and Grandpa Poohah with my sister Hayley and I
in Dunedin a few years ago

Because of the abundance of Christmas presents I had to haul back from Picton, Grandpa insisted on sending the fairly heavy pan up to me and so it arrived not long after I had returned home, packaged to perfection, and ready for some creations.

This is the first real chance I have had to use it and it was fabulous. Elliot and I decided we had seen the best of the tomato plants this season, and I was sick of giving those pesky birds a free feed, so we decided to pull them. That left me with a kilo and a half of green tomatoes.

Green tomato pickle was one of Nana's creations that I unfortunately never got to try but I asked Mams about it in the weekend and was told it was served with cold roast beef and in cold meat sandwiches with white bread mmmmmm.

The recipe was given to me by Mams who said Nana had copied it out of a recipe book many moons ago. It used pounds and quarts (who knew there was UK and US quarts??) so thank god for online weight converters and the fact I had roughly half the tomatoes so could simply halve the other ingredients (saying maths is not my strongest point is a gross understatement).

So calculations and conversions done, away we went. This is a pretty easy recipe and the only thing you need to really plan in advance is the salting overnight.

Ingredients (this is the recipe halved and converted into metric measurements):

• 1.5kg green tomatoes
• 700g apples
• 700g onions
• 700g sugar
• 1 dsps salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1 Tb mustard
• 1.5 dsps curry powder
• 2 Tb flour
• 1L vinegar (didn't specify what type and turns out I didn't have enough of one type of vinegar so went with a white/malt/cider combo)

Method:

• Cut up the tomatoes, apples and onions. Sprinkle with the salt and leave overnight (in the middle of the night - well, 7am on a Sunday morning - I realised that because the pickle is not blended or anything at the end that I probably needed smaller pieces of the fruit as no one really wants half an apple covered in pickle do they? - so cut them fairly small).

I cut them smaller than this

• Next morning add the vinegar and sugar and boil for half an hour.

• Combine all the other ingredients with a little vinegar and stir into the mixture.
• Boil until thick (took about 1.5 hours).

• Put the pickle into steralised jars. 

• And eat. Eat with cheese and crackers and just try and stop yourself from eating it all. It is SOOOO good. Thank you Nana for a fabulous recipe and for everything else xxx

We're not growing drugs!

Hydroponics sounds dodgy. You mention hydroponics, you get a sideways glance (or a wink and a nod from certain folk), but sadly it was not that exciting and and we used our hydroponics system to grow chillies and tomatoes.

Hydroponics simply means to grow plants in water using nutrient solutions, as opposed to growing in soil .

We did it really just to see how it worked and it gave Elliot something to do (it really does sound like he's a child who constantly needs entertaining). Elliot watched hours of Youtube clips on what to do and how to do it and we ended up with a pretty impressive system.

The system consisted of two tubes with four net pots in each which housed the tomato and chilli plants. The plants sit in the net pots which are filled with hydroton (clay balls) and the roots grow down through the balls into the stream of water.

The water is pumped from a tank through the tubes and back into the tank. Nutrients are added (we used Growzilla and then Budzilla) as the plants need what nutrients they would normally get from soil (as a side note, if you want to feel like you are a crim without actually doing anything wrong, take a trip to Switched On Gardener - you feel dodgy just walking in but it was also a source of great amusement when you notice the lengths this place goes to say they do not support illegal growing activities - these are of course spelt out on signs mounted next to grinders, bongs and pipes; we also interrupted the guy who worked in the Pakuranga store from what I think was an impressive sleep on his feet with his eyes open and the guy in Henderson from his "smoko" break out the front).

Anyway... above the tubes sit the fluro lights. These are on pully hook things (that's the technical term) that are raised as the plants grow. The tank water and nutrients get changed about once a week.

Elliot is an automation technician by day which means if something can be programmed or timed using gizmos and gadgets, it will be. The pump cycle for the system and the lights were all automated and timed to turn on and off at certain times. Our set up was in our conservatory which gets really hot so we had a fan hooked up which turned on when the temperature reached a certain level and off when it fell again.

We germinated the seeds in a propagator. Once big enough they went to little cups in a light box. When they are big enough the roots get washed, they get put in the net pots and then placed in the tubes. The results were pretty impressive.

The seeds in jiffy pots in the propagator

The seedlings in the light box

The set up

The tomato plants grew out of control and gave us huge tomatoes. We also did the hydroponics as a comparison to growing the old fashioned way and the hydroponic plants certainly grew faster and produced impressive fruit.

We would not grow tomatoes in this particular set up again as there simply was not enough room for these huge plants.

The chilli plants also grew well and we got some great chillies from them.

Today marks the change from a hydroponics to an aquaponics system. We decided the plants needed to come out as they were too out of control. We also needed a full clean out of the system and conservatory as they had been overtaken by aphids and white flies.

We turned the hydroponics system off when we went on holiday so naturally what was there died and we got the last of the tomatoes and chillies off the plants and pulled them all out. It seemed then only natural to upgrade the system, add some more gizmos and gadgets, introduce some fish into the mix and see what happens.

Aquaponics is also organic as nothing is added to the water as the fish's waste provides the nutrients, so this was a plus and something we are keen to try and carry on.

Naturally Elliot has researched aquaponics extensively and as I write is wiring, building and programming ready for the fish to be introduced later today. Water testing is underway and we are as prepared as can be for this new system to take shape.

Updates and photos of our system and new little friends will come later today when we are all set up.

I'll leave you with an image of what our poor neighbours had to look down on from their place one night when the lights had been left on in the conservatory... they must have wondered who on earth had moved in next door...