Sign up to receive newsletters from Jackie French by email every month! The newsletters will keep you informed of updates to the website, the latest news on Jackie and her books, and lots of other fun stuff!

DECEMBER 2009 JACKIE FRENCH NEWS

In this month's news:

• Introduction – welcome to our Open Garden
• New books
• New Awards
• Schedule for 2010
• The December garden
  • Six ways to have the Greenest Christmas Ever
  • What Not to Do in December
  • What to Plant in December
• A few Very Christmas recipes
  • Jackie's Christmas Biscuits (invented last Friday)
  • Excellent Fruit Punch (non-alcoholic)
  • Baked Fish with Fruit Salsa
  • Spectacular Vegetarian Christmas Timbale
  • Lemon garlic Corn Cobs
  • Dark and Fruity Christmas Pudding

Introduction - Welcome to our Open Garden

‘Christmas is a-coming, the geese are getting fat …’ except here it’s the lyrebirds. In winter and spring the male lyrebirds spend so much time prancing and dancing that they grow thin and tatty about the tail feathers. Now they’re properly sleek and gorgeous … and scratching out my new potatoes.

The creek has shrunk to dirty waterholes – mostly diluted duck and wallaby droppings, but the valley and garden were green for our annual Open Garden workshops. I am coming to love them more each year, as we get the routine of urn and books and cups et al perfected and can just enjoy the company and the happiness of the days.

Everyone arrives in the Open Garden bus … well, the local school bus, but ours for the weekend. This year everyone got out down past the cliff, so they could wander up the track by the creek and see the boulders washed down by floods in the years when great sheets of wet stuff still dropped from the sky.

We lashed out and bought chairs last year, so we no longer have to hire them, and a friend gave us his wonderful old trestle tables – lovely weathered slabs of wood. Morning and afternoon tea are spread out under the trees: tea and coffee and herbal tea, lemon mint and lemon verbena this year, picked from the garden, and then the food, which Sue and I and Sue’s daughters have been cooking all week: almond macaroons and apple rhubarb cakes, both gluten free, and jam drops with three kinds of jam, and date and prune fruit cake, with no fat or added sugar or eggs, and fruit slices and macadamia and cherry biscotti and chicken and cress sandwiches and lamb and apple chutney sandwiches and cheese and salad sandwiches and egg sandwiches, the eggs from our chooks and all the other ingredients, from the parsley to the lettuce, grown around here too, including the chook and the sheep.

I don’t known if everyone realised how much was home grown, but they did know they liked it. I think the average was five pieces of cake or slice and four sandwiches a head. Oh, and home-made lime and mandarin cordial, also home grown and tart, instead of sweet. A dozen bottles of that vanished on the Saturday afternoon, when it was hot but Sunday was almost ‘cardigan’ weather, so it was cup after cup of tea.

And I talked, with the help of a microphone Bryan rigged up, as I don’t have much voice these days; about how I fell in love with the valley more than thirty years ago, never knowing that my family came from here; how I watched the way the bush grew around me to design a garden that harvests its own water from the air, even in a drought; how it is planned so that it feeds the wildlife as well as us and our friends; how by doing things differently we can have a world that’s generous and fun and fruitful, from the solar oven that bakes the cakes to the solar panels that power this computer to the wallabies who are munching the fallen apricots as I write this so we don’t get a build up of fruit flies.

And now no more workshops till next November: which is good, as we can look forward to them, instead of thinking of them as work. Feeding a few hundred is a joy once a year, but not more …

Speaking of feeding hordes, it looks like being a slightly gigantic Christmas here: am hunting for spare mattresses for our guest cottage for the overflow from the house. I’ve made the cakes and four puddings; planned the menus and am about to make up the beds. The wallabies, ‘roos and wombats have mown the grass for us, the agapanthus are starting to burst into their Christmas glory ­– even in a drought they light up the garden, and there is a great mass of old-fashioned red and yellow gladioli that have gone wild on a bank near the cottage, so I pick great armloads of those for the house too.

It will be a good Christmas. Somehow it always has been, no matter what else had happened through the year. May it be a green and glorious Christmas for you too, and a joyous and flourishing new year.

Recent Books

Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior
This is the first in the series, ‘A School for Heroes’, and it’s funny, made even more so by Andrea Potter’s fabulous drawings. Look out for the sequel next March! For those who haven’t already discovered the School For heroes, it’s located in a volcano, staffed by an eccentric gaggle of Heroes Gone By.
It’s a Big Book, stuffed full of unlikely heroes, crazy adventures, and Zombie Spaghetti.  Who could ask for more?

The Night They Stormed Eureka
Everyone knows the story of the Eureka Stockade and its brave defenders. But do we really? This is the story of Sam, a modern teenager, thrust into the world of the Ballarat goldfields, and seen through her eyes.  She learns that when you stand together, you really can change the world – and your own life, too.

Baby Wombat’s Week
Gorgeously illustrated by Bruce Whatley, here’s the story of a week in the life of Mothball’s baby – and his human friend – and all the fun they get up to in the search for a new home.

Schedule for the next few months

As usual, the schedule is filling up, and I’m sorry there is a finite limit to the number of invitations I can accept. NSW bookings are done by Lateral Learning; Queensland bookings by Helen Bain at Speaker’s Inc, and for other bookings contact me at jackief@dragnet.com.au. I can only do one trip away from home a month though, and that includes trips to Canberra, so I mostly only speak to groups of more than 200, and where it will take six hours travel or less each way (except WA).

New Awards

The Canberra Critics Circle Award for Writing was awarded to me this month – many thanks indeed to all the critics! It was presented by Robyn Archer. My father asked me to tell her that he has been secretly in love with her for thirty years. So I passed it on, and she laughed. Dad has also been secretly in love with the cello player in the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, but I didn’t mention that. And also the waitress who makes him his morning coffee and biscotti …

The December Garden

Seven ways to have the Greenest Christmas Ever

1. Choose a living Christmas tree – a hardy native, like New South Wales Christmas bush (which comes with its own bright red decorations) that can be planted in the garden afterwards, or even the best looking fruit tree you can find in the nursery. Dwarf lilli-pillies make stunning Christmas trees. Even cumquats or dwarf peach trees can look great.
2. Go for truly recyclable Christmas platters ... like baskets lined with grape leaves, or use hollowed out watermelons or pineapples or even squeezed oranges and grapefruit for individual portions of icy sorbet or fruit jellies.
3.  Use the sun to cook your Christmas dinner. I’m serious – I’m using a sun-powered oven to cook ours this year. All you need is a sunny day (which isn’t too hard at Christmas). Who needs a gas barbecue? A solar oven will cook anything from turkey to bread to Christmas cake.
4. Make your wrapping ‘paper’ green too – use tea towels, cloth napkins or hankies, pillowcases … anything that can be loved and used, not thrown away.
5. Make your own ‘green’ presents from the garden: a giant hanging basket of flowers, or home-made jams or pressed flower soaps or candles. See this month’s web pages for details.
6. Cool your house naturally. A green garden around your house can cool the place down by 10ºC. Cover paving with sun-shades or shade cloth, too. That paving soaks up heat and reflects it (marvellous for winter but not so welcome on a hot summer’s day). If you live in a humid area grow tall trees like palms that shade your house but let the breezes flow into your window, or prune off lower branches.
7. Do a rain dance. Lots of rain dances, as soon as it gets cool enough to dance each night. We may not make it rain but, well, singing made the blitz better, so I reckon dancing makes droughts more bearable too.

What Not to Do in December!

• Don't panic about parched grass. Grass recovers. Our grass turns brown here each summer (we don't have enough water to keep it green) but green shoots appear just a few hours after rain.
• Don’t worry if your shrubs wilt (I wilt in summer too). But if they stay wilted even in the cool of the night or start to turn brown, give them a long cool soaking – then keep that moisture in the root zone with mulch.
• Don’t go on a shrub-planting binge just because you have time on holidays. Those newly-planted shrubs will need watering long after you’re back at work.
• Don’t feed your garden.  Not just because you have enough to do with holiday cooking, but because fertiliser can burn plants roots in hot dry times.
• Don’t forget to pick all fruit and tomatoes before the birds, fruit bats and fruit fly get them first and …

… put your feet up (just for a little while) each evening out in the garden, to smell the warm earth and the flowers – and relax.

What to plant in December

If you really do have time, energy, mulch and water...

Food garden:
Plants: Strawberry, sweet potato, choko and herbs.
Seeds: Artichoke, asparagus, basil, beans, beetroot, burdock, cabbage, capsicum, carrot, celery, celtuce, chicory, corn salad, cress, cucumbers, eggplant, endive, fennel, kale, kohl rabi, leeks, lettuces (may not germinate if the temperature is over 26ºC), melons, okra, parsley, pumpkin, radish,  salsify,  scorzonera, sweet corn, tomatoes, turnips, salad greens like mizuna and mitsuba, and zucchini.

Flower garden: Achillea, ageratum, alstromeria, alyssum, amaranthus, aster, balsam, Bellis perennis, brachyscome, calendula, candytuft, Canterbury bells, carnation, celosia, clarkia, cleome, coleus, coreopsis, columbine, cosmos, delphinium, dichondra, echinacea, echinops, erigeron, euphorbia, foxglove, gaillardia, gazania, globe amaranth, gloxinia, godetia, gypsophila, helichrysum, heliotrope, hellebore, honesty, lavender, marigold, nasturtium, petunia, phlox, Flanders poppy, portulaca, rudbeckia, salpiglossis, salvia, scabious, snapdragon, sweet William, viola and zinnia.

A Few Recipes

You know it's summer when:

• the first brown snake wriggles across the path (this year it was striped yellow and red);
• the lyrebirds’ tails grow back;
• the Illawarra flame tree blooms;
• the first mosquito (trap it with a torch and bowl of water);
• the fly traps need emptying;
• you realise why you shouldn't have planted six zucchinis;
• wearing three, two or one garment (or none) instead of four layers and
• you wonder yet again if you really do like Christmas cake.

PS: Do not buy a pudding or a cake. As a long-time cake and pudding lover I have tried just about all available … and absolutely none are as good as your own.
To boil a pudding: Cheat. Wrap it in two baking bags and just throw it in. Unwrap and heat in the microwave.
To make a cake: Any recipe will be good. The real secret is long slooooooow cooking, and dowsing with rum as soon as you take it from the oven. (The alcohol evaporates leaving the flavour.) Make sure you line the pan with three layers of paper and that the paper sticks up at least half the size of the pan again so the top doesn't burn. Trust me: it’s the long slow caramelising that makes a good cake or pud, not the secret recipe.

Jackie's Christmas Biscuits (invented last Friday)

These are delicious – an Aussie biscuit crunch with the colour and tradition of old-fashioned Christmas goodies

Ingredients:
125g butter
1 ½ cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup Self Raising flour
¼ cup rolled oats
½ cup dark or white choc chips
½ cup of your favourite nuts (sliced almonds are good, or macadamias)
3 cups finely chopped glace fruit, or just glace cherries if you prefer, or glace ginger
Optional: 3 tbsps candied peel
Optional: 2 tsps ground ginger or mixed spice
 
Method:
Cream butter and sugar. Mix in egg, then flour, then everything else.
Preheat oven to 200ºC. Place on non-stick trays or grease them first.
Place teaspoons of mix on the trays – they'll spread. Bake for about 10 minutes. They should be pale brown and still softish – they'll crisp as they cool.
Store in a sealed container.
 
Serves:                   about 30 biscuits
Ease of making:    moderate ... easy enough for kids to make as long as you watch to make sure they don't burn their fingers on the trays.

Excellent Fruit Punch (non-alcoholic)

Ingredients
A generous handful of eau-de-cologne mint, chopped or roughly torn (though with this recipe you can also use peppermint or even common mint at a pinch, though it's not as good as eau-de-cologne mint).
1 bottle ginger ale (can be lo-calorie)
1 litre pineapple juice (can be unsweetened)
1 orange, very thinly sliced, with peel still on
3 lemons or limes, very thinly sliced, with peel still on
At least 6 cups of ice
2 passionfruit, still warm from the vine (optional)

Method:
Place the fruit and mint in the bottom of a large bowl. Add the pineapple juice, and leave for at least an hour for the flavours to mingle. Just before serving add the ginger ale and ice.
Makes about 15 cups punch.

Baked Fish with Fruit Salsa

Ingredients
1 whole salmon or tuna or other firm fish
alfoil – or grape leaves, free of beetles and dipped in boiling water for 10 seconds
lemon or lime juice

Salsa
½ cup chopped coriander (yes, parsley will do at a pinch)
1 avocado, peeled and chopped
½ cup pawpaw or mango, peeled and chopped
2 tbsps Spanish or red onion, peeled and chopped
4 tbsps olive oil
1 tbsp lemon or lime juice
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsps chopped red chilli or red capsicum

Method:
Sprinkle fish with lemon or lime juice, wrap in alfoil or cover well with grape leaves (or both if the grape leaves refuse to stick around the fish) and bake for 30 minutes at 20ºC.  Check it’s cooked all the way through but don't overcook – it’s a good idea to check half way through as the cooking time depends on the size of the fish - the bigger it is, the longer it will need.  Remove from oven.  Cool and place in fridge.
Unwrap fish carefully. Nibble any bits left clinging to the alfoil. Place fish on platter.
Mix all other ingredients. Pour over fish.

Christmas Relish

I love the word relish. It gets the taste buds going almost as much as the word 'chocolate'.
A relish is what you add to make boring things taste good i.e. cold spuds, cold meat and most aren't bad on cheese on toast, especially if you liven it up with half-way decent bread and good cheese and call it bruschetta instead.
Most relishes will last for months if not years in the back of the cupboard waiting to be hauled out in case the meteor falls and life on earth – or at least the supermarket part of it – is extinguished.
This relish needs to be kept in the fridge and eaten within a few weeks, as it contains less vinegar, less sugar and more fruit than the ordinary variety. This also means that it tastes better. Good with turkey, ham or fish.

Ingredients
3 cups fresh mango, paw paw, or pineapple, chopped
½ cup raw sugar
½ cup good white wine vinegar
2 large red onions, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsps olive oil
1 red chilli, chopped, optional
2 whole cloves

Sauté onion and garlic in the oil till the onion is soft and totally transparent. (If it isn't, the acid in the relish will make it go hard and rubbery.)
Add the rest of the ingredients; simmer till thick (about 10 –15 minutes).
Place in a sealed container in the fridge. Keep for three days to mature before using.

Spectacular Vegetarian Christmas Timbale

Ingredients:
1 very large or 2 or 3 small eggplants, sliced
3 large red capsicums, quartered and seeded
6 fresh largish bocconcini cheeses
6 small zucchini, thinly sliced
1 fat orange sweet potato, very thinly sliced
1 large bunch silver beet
1 large red onion, peeled and chopped
10 tbsps olive oil
1 tbsp pine nuts
4 cloves garlic, chopped finely
6 semi-dried tomatoes
1 tbsp finely chopped parsley or coriander leaves
juice of 1 lime or lemon
salt

Method:

Sprinkle the eggplant slices with salt; leave for two hours, then wash in cold water.  This reduces bitterness and makes them more supple. Brush each slice with olive oil. Grill, char grill or fry on each side till cooked – about 5 minutes.
Brush zucchini slices with olive oil; fry, grill or char grill them.
Brush sweet potato slices with olive oil; fry, grill or char grill them. (Make sure they are cooked – you might have to try a small sample as you go!)
Grill the capsicum till the skin is black and blistered. Place in a plastic bag till cool, then rub the skin off. Brush the capsicum with olive oil.
Leave everything to cool.
Sauté the onion and garlic in 4 tbsps of the olive oil till the onion is soft; add the silverbeet, chopped or torn into small pieces (the stems can also be added but must be very finely chopped). When the silverbeet is soft, take it all off the heat and add the pine nuts.
Slice the bocconcini thinly.

To assemble:
Place four slices of bocconcini side by side on a plate, so they form a largish sort of circle. Now add a layer of eggplant, capsicum, sweet potato, zucchini, then cheese, eggplant, capsicum, zucchini till it's all used up. Place the dried tomato on top. Surround the circle with the chopped silverbeet and pine nuts.
Combine the remaining olive oil and lemon or lime juice. Add a touch of salt or pepper if you like. Pour it over the mound, then sprinkle on the parsley. Serve.

(Serves 6)

Lemon and Garlic Butter Corn Cobs

Note:  Don't buy corn wrapped in plastic.  It tastes like plastic.

Ingredients:
½ cup butter
4 cloves garlic, crushed
Black pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
8 cobs corn

Method:
Melt butter with garlic.  Take off the heat.  Add a good grating of black pepper and the lemon juice.  Soak corn cobs, papery wrapping and all, in water for twenty minutes. Then unwrap them carefully - don't tear the wrapping. Pour a little of the slightly cooled and thickened melted butter mix onto each cob.  Rub in well with your fingers or a pastry brush.
Grill until cooked through – at least twenty minutes or half an hour, turning several times.
You can also try this with alfoil instead of the natural corn packaging; but it's not nearly as good.

Dark and Fruity Christmas Pudding

Note: A Christmas pud is a lovely thing – dark and fragrant so you can smell it all over the house, and you only need a small bit because it's so rich.
I can never understand those who sling off at a pud as being unsuitable for Australian summers. You don't have to have it hot and flaming, do you? Actually we have ours cold and flaming, and I do all the boiling at night after the house has cooled down – and when the kitchen will cool down again by morning.
Christmas pud is also easily prepared several days before Christmas Day, so if you're having it cold there's no last-minute hassle.  Added to which a good pud is a great big gorgeous thing, in other words, there'll be plenty of left-overs to see you to New Year. Like a turkey, Christmas pud is destined for one day’s feast and many day’s nibbling at the crumbs.
Added to which, Christmas pud – a good fruity dark one – is one of the best accompaniments to ice cream that I know. (As you may have guessed, I do like my pud.)
Most families have pud recipes passed down from Grandma, though usually they’re changed a bit with each generation. This is my Grandma's, changed by Mum and changed by me.

Ingredients:
250g butter or margarine, melted
2 cups bread crumbs
¼ cup plain flour
3 eggs, beaten
2 cups sultanas
1 cup currants
½ cup glacé cherries
½  cup mixed peel
½  cup glacé pineapple or ginger
1 large apple or carrot (carrot makes an even darker pudding) peeled and grated
½ cup apricot or pineapple or cherry jam
¼ cup brown sugar
2 tsps mixed spice
½ cup rum, brandy, Grand Marnier whisky, sherry or orange juice; add more if it seems dry.

Method:
Mix ingredients together. Don't forget that every member of the family should have a stir for luck!
Place in a greased oven-proof bowl or divide mixture into smaller bowls. In any case the pudding mixture should only half fill the bowl. Cover basin with alfoil, tied on securely with string or wool. Place pud in a saucepan large enough for water to come half way up the bowl.       
Boil a kettle full of water, pour into the saucepan, light the stove and boil for four hours, adding more hot water as necessary.

To cook pud in a cloth: This does make a moister, thicker textured pud.
Dip clean cloth in boiling water for two minutes; you can use the traditional calico or even a new tea towel - not an old one, as odours may linger!
Lift cloth out of the boiling water, let cool for a couple of minutes then wring it reasonably dry and spread it out and brush over about a cup of plain flour.
Place mixture in centre of cloth, tie up with string and lower into rapidly boiling water.  With a steamed pud in a basin it doesn't matter dramatically if the water goes off the boil; it does with a boiled pud.
Put the lid on to keep the water boiling well and minimise evaporation (Don’t do this with the steamed pud). Top up as needed with boiling water from a kettle.
Boil for four hours.

Note:  You can make lots of small puddings with this mix.  They make good presents. For small puds place some of the mixture in small Tupperware basins, put the lid on securely and boil.
To keep: In cold climates puds were kept in the cool larder for months or even years.  Here they tend to grow interesting moulds after a week or two, so cover with plastic wrap and keep in the fridge.

Serving the Pud:
Both steamed and boiled puds need a second boiling. This darkens the pud and gives it its rich caramelised flavour. You can either boil them for two hours on the day and serve hot, or do it a day or two before and serve cold.
Wriggle a knife down the edge of the basin, or unwrap pud gently.  Don't bother if a bit is slightly damp - puds are so rich that this will hardly be noticed!
Fill a large dessertspoon with some high alcohol substance – I use rum or whisky. Hold it over the heat of the stove till it sends up an almost invisible cloud of alcohol.  It's now warm enough to light, so hold a match to it (do beware of singeing eyebrows and hands). At this point: I should advise wearing leather gloves, goggles, protective clothing and a flame-proof mat, but of course no one will, so let me just repeat, this can be exceedingly dangerous.
When it catches alight (and hopefully nothing else does), pour over pud and carry in in triumph.

Eating the Pud:
We eat pud with ice cream and cream; custard is traditional but after a heavy meal this is just one more burden. And remember – you don't need much pud!

For more information from Jackie, please go to her website: www.jackiefrench.com

Read last month's newsletter

Sign up to receive monthly email newsletters from Jackie French. The newsletter will keep you informed of updates to the website, the latest news on Jackie and her books, and lots of fun stuff! And it's free!

Please note: The privacy of your information is very important to us. It is our policy not to share the information collected with other organisations, nor will the information be used for any other purpose apart from sending you these newsletters.

You can unsubscribe to the newsletter at any time by sending an email to melanie.peake@harpercollins.com.au