Freeze, dry or bottle abundant autumn produce

By Debbi Carson

Ōtaki’s great soil and climate make it the perfect place to have your own garden. If you can’t grow your own, fresh produce is still abundant and always available from local growers, such as Penray Gardens and others up the road.

And with the new expressway open, visiting Penrays is a whole new experience, with quiet traffic flows.

Before we moved back to Ōtaki, on whānau visits, I would buy my veg at Penrays to take home to Wellington. Because it was often just picked that day, vegetables would last nicely for up to two weeks.

The onset of autumn brings a bounty of orchard fruits and vegetable harvests offering the chance to preserve and enjoy through the winter months. Plums, damsons, blackberries, figs, persimmons, feijoas, limes, apples and pears abound, and are suitable in sweet and savoury dishes.

We are personally lucky to have plenty of feijoa trees. With too much fruit to eat fresh, we make jam and chutney. We also freeze feijoas by halving the fruit, scooping the flesh out and freezing in an ice-cream container ready to be used in winter smoothies, feijoa ice-cream, or made into muffins.

We also have a persimmon tree that crops well every year. We cut them in slices to eat (I like them with the skin on). Persimmons are best eaten when they are firm – not hard – and will last for up to two weeks after they have been picked. Once they go soft, you can still stew them, bake them or blend them in a smoothie.

Enjoy

• Until May pick fresh, vine-ripened Beefsteak and Italiano Tomatoes. Capsicum, Hungarian Peppers, Mexican Peppers and eight different Chillies. mild to super hot.

• March PYO Pears

• March to May PYO Orchard fresh tree ripened apples. Ring 06 364 5302, Press 1 for PYO INFO LINE

Also at the Penray shop you can buy produce already picked, & sauces and relishes from our own homemade preserve range.

We have had great success with our rhubarb this year (pictured right). It is my market gardener fatherin-law’s rhubarb planted in the 1940s, and it thrives in its shaded position, sustained by regular watering.

For an easy dessert, clean and chop the stalks (discard the poisonous leaves), add sugar and cook on low heat until soft (no need for water). Refrigerate or freeze when cool.

Drying fruit at home is simple, and you don’t need a fancy dehydrator to get great results, although they are a worthwhile investment if you have an abundance of fruit each year. Dry fruit in your oven, on a very low heat for a long time. It’s not an exact science, so you’ll need to keep your eye on progress until fruit becomes shrivelled, leathery and tough – the finished result is so intense in flavour! After washing and draining the fruit, make sure it’s totally dry before spacing out on a baking sheet and placing in your oven. Larger fruits like apples will need to be cored, sliced and put in a solution of water and lemon juice to prevent browning.

EASY FEIJOA JAM

1kg feijoa (weighed whole)

¼ cup water

4 cups sugar

Cut feijoas in halves. Scoop out the flesh, roughly slice. Add water and boil gently until soft. Stir in sugar and boil hard for 5-10 minutes, or until a drop popped onto a saucer solidifies and gels. Feijoas are high in pectin so this happens quickly. Pour into heated jars and seal.

RHUBARB & ORANGE CAKE

Prep: 35 min. Cook: about 1hr 15mins

400g rhubarb, thickly sliced

280g raw caster sugar

225g butter, softened

Grated zest and juice of 1 orange

225g self-raising flour

100g pack of ground almond

1 tsp baking powder

3 medium eggs

Small handful of flaked almonds

Icing sugar, for dusting.

Put rhubarb in a bowl with 50g sugar, stir, and set aside for 30 mins. Grease and line a 23cm loose-bottomed, round cake tin with baking parchment and heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4.

Put rest of sugar, butter, orange zest and juice into a large bowl and beat with an electric whisk until well blended. Add flour, almonds, baking powder and eggs, then beat until smooth. Fold in rhubarb and any juices. Spoon into the tin and level the top. Sprinkle with flaked almonds. Bake in the centre of the oven for 1hr to 1hr 15mins until risen, golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cover with foil if the cake starts to brown too much during cooking. Leave in the tin for 15min before removing and cooling completely on a wire rack. Dust with a little icing sugar before serving.

– Recipe: Sara Buenfeld, bbcgoodfood.com