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JANUARY 2010 JACKIE FRENCH NEWS

In this month's news:

• A New Year and a New Earth
• Wombat News
• Book News
• Schedule for 2010
• The January Garden
• ‘A Heck of a lot of recipes’ – or, The Six by Six Cookbook – Bumper 2010 edition
  • Introduction
  • Essential Kitchen Equipment (and what not to buy)
  • The Fastest Meals I know
  • Six Ways With… Entrees
    • Stuffed Eggs
    • Delicious dips
    • Puff Pastry
    • Six Soups
    • Supermarket Dips – using them or making Your own version
  • Main Course
    • Six Ways with Roast Chicken
    • Six Sticky Chicken Wing Recipes
    • Chicken Thighs
    • Six Ways with Baked Fish
    • Rice and Vegetables
    • Potatoes
    • Parsley and other Salads
    • Salad Dressings
    • Leftovers and other favourites
  • Desserts, Cookies and Cakes

A New Year and a New Earth

Here’s the good news; the increased CO2 that is heating our planet will also help plants grow more strongly.

The bad news, of course, is that the much of the planet’s trees will die as the weather gets hotter, or more extremes of heat and cold and storms, or floods.

The good news: other areas will get wetter … possibly far more of the planet will grow trees than now. Other good news; humans are very, very good at growing things in all sorts of conditions.

The Copenhagen talks failed, no matter what spin they put on it. No government, it seems today, is going to tell their major power producers and manufacturers to stop or radically change their methods.

The trouble is that in the past 100 years we’ve come to think of the government as all-powerful. Governments are in charge of education, health, police, defence – all the major things in our lives. Or are they?

Most caring for the sick is still done by families; we only have enough police – or not enough police – to cope with major crimes and a bit of road traffic and other education.  Society still runs because we work together, as families or as neighbours or as givers and volunteers.
If the governments of the world won’t act on climate change, it doesn’t mean it can’t  be stopped, or even reversed.

I’m serious. Yes, we need to cut down on the amount of CO2 produced … and governments may help with a bit of that. But basically what this planet needs is a way to soak up the excess CO2, to lock it back in the earth again, as it was once in the coal and oil under the ground. We need a new earth.

If we can double the amount of green leaves on our planet, we’ll not only stop global warming, we’ll reverse it.  There’ll be other benefits too: humans are just plain happier with greenery around them – less vandalism, less illness, in areas where trees have been panted and parks established. There’ll be places for kids to play, and local food that hasn’t lost its taste in freezers.

How?

1. The first is the big one – we need research to find local species that will re-colonise areas lost to water rise, bushfire, and heat.  But it’s not really a very big question. The earth still has abundant species, and yes, many don’t burn well, and others grow in water and tolerate being flooded in fresh or salty for weeks or months at a time, not just mangroves but even varieties of avocado, for example.
   There are already workable techniques to roll seeds in dirt with powdered milk to stop them rotting, and pepper to stop ants and birds eating them, and broadcasting them from aircraft to colonise many, many square kilometres. If they are the right plants for the right area, that’s all they’ll need – to be there. We often forget the earth has changed climate many times in the past. Our planet is good at repair jobs.
2. A local council change; every high rise building to have half its area as green space, whether it’s floors of hydroponic plants, or walls covered in greenery, like the tiny Tillisandias  that collect their own moisture from the air and grow on desert rocks, or even vertical gardens, computer controlled watering and fertilising and harvesting. Once more, the technology is there, and the prototypes work.
3. Another local council change: every new development to be half green space, either parks or community gardens or community farms.
4. Earth covered roofs, covered with sun loving succulents – we have them growing in piles of rooks on our place, and they survive with almost no soil, temperatures of over 50C – these are hot rocks. The only problem here is that the wallabies eat them in bad droughts. But they grow back. And there are unlikely to be wallabies on your roof.
   No more tiles. No more colourbond: roofs will be either greenery or solar panels. This alone should take up about 10% of Australia’s CO2 – and we are one of the great CO2 emitters per head of population.
5. Plant. But don’t just plant any old tree. The trees we need – or shrubs or vines - need to be ones that last for hundreds of years, or ones that can be used for wood that will last hundreds or even thousands of years. Huon pine and red gum will do this, and there are others. (Pinus radiata lasts a few decades of you are lucky). While young growing trees capture the most CO2, the old trees - or their timber - need to be preserved to keep that carbon ‘sequestered’ so it doesn’t get back into the atmosphere.
   Our family has a ‘negative’ global footprint. We are responsible for more CO2 being locked up in trees than we produce.  This is partly because we lead slightly different lives from most Australians, and so don’t cause as much CO2 to be released in our daily lives.

This could change in half an hour if our place is burnt in a bushfire – all that carbon stored in trees gone into smoke. But our land would be covered with trees again in a few years, and the CO2 recaptured.

So that is my New Year’s resolution. To plant even more trees that will last hundreds of years; ones that will regenerate after a bushfire, locking up the same amount of carbon again- or even more.

Another resolution is to eat more ‘tree crops’ and less grain and annuals – no hardship. My morning ‘muesli’ is based on nuts, with added cranberries and goji berries, both low in sugar.  In one bowlful, I had (I think) every vitamin, amino acid, flavonol and mineral and vitamin etc needed for the day.  It’s also entirely delicious and keeps me going the rest of the day.

Our protein increasingly comes from nuts, or vegies and is increasingly from perennial bushes, or fruit from ungrafted trees that should still be here – even if regrown from their deep underground roots after bushfire - in hundreds of years time.

It can be done. A new earth – adding what is basically another system of ecosystems to the existing ones. Enough to lock up the CO2. Enough to give us, well, paradise. 

PS: My rule of thumb, when considering a new law or fashion, or even what to do tomorrow, is to think: will this make life better or worse for wombats, in the long run? As a way of choosing the right answers for the planet, it’s pretty good.

Wombat News

December was the driest ever here. For the first time I had to put out water for the animals. Not that Mothball was grateful. For the first time in nearly 14 years she launched a full scale attack at Christmas, reaching up to gnaw the doorknocker, flinging herself against the front door, trying to eat the doormat.

But Bryan had replaced the doormat with a metal and fibre one, which hurt her teeth. So instead she tried to climb up onto the garden chair to launch herself through the window and onto the sofa where we were watching a DVD.

Luckily wombat legs are short and not meant for hauling up 40 kg (at least) wombats. So we never did end up with an enraged wombat on our laps.

I started putting out food again, for her and Bruiser and Bounce, who has also moved back in. The ground was bare – no grass, just dust – for a month, and although there is a bit of green pick now, it’ll dry again as soon as we get a couple of hot days.  As I write this the wombats have been happily vacuuming up the grass in the way drought stressed animals do – eating every bit within reach before taking a step, instead of mooching around for their favourite bits. But when it dries again – which it will within a fortnight – they’ll remember food can come from humans, and Mothball will be at the door again.

She is elderly for a wombat – at least 15, and the oldest I’ve known in the Valley has been 14. I don’t want to wait till she’s starving before I put out food.

And anyway, she might just work out how to dive through the window.

Book News

Coming February 1: The Tomorrow Book, illustrated by Sue de Gennaro

… a look at the paradise we could create, maybe just tomorrow.

This is a special book. It’s closer to my heart than anything I’ve written, and Sue’s work is inspired: funny, whimsical and extraordinarily beautiful. It’s what happens when the king and queen retire and go off in the campervan, and leave the kids in charge, finding the solution to each of the world’s major problems in their library, and creating…tomorrow.
            Every one of the solutions really does exist – and the possible tomorrows are very, very good indeed.
PS. Sue created the extraordinary artwork in collage, using materials she found in her kitchen, from tea bags to labels. It is too magic to even have words to describe it.

School for Heroes Book 1: ‘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?

Coming in March 2010! Boo and his friends continue the adventure in Dance of the Deadly Dinosaurs.

The Night They Stormed Eureka
A fresh look at the history we thought we knew.

Are the history books wrong? Could the rebels have succeeded? Could we too have seceded from Britain, like the USA?

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.  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).

The January Garden

This isn’t a time to plant, unless you’re pretty sure you’ll get rain. But if you do have young plants, it’s amazing how many young plants survive sharing four buckets a day from your bath or shower. Don’t use this on vegies through, in case of pollutants, and don’t use too much in any one area because you’ll risk clogging up the soil with soap or other residues. We soap ourselves down out of the shower, rise off quickly, then catch the water that is relatively soap free.

If you are one of the places in Australia that has water (or even far too much water)… plant. Wet times are precious. I go on planting binges now whenever I’m pretty sure I’ll have water for the next three months. And as I said, it’s amazing how much survives on a share of the shower water.

‘A Heck of a lot of Recipes’ – Bumper Summer Holiday Selection

I like to cook. (I like to eat, too). Which means that there was so much food at Christmas that we are still eating it now … and will be for at least another few weeks, if not months.

Some of the female Christmas guests asked for my cook book, assuming that somewhere among the 140-odd books I’ve written (they’re not all that odd) there’d be a cook book.

There isn’t, though some, like The Best of Jackie French do have recipes. But I decided as a post Christmas gift to write a short book of easy-to-make recipes, the sort that could be made in ten minutes by someone who hasn’t be taught things like how to make gravy or cheese sauce or biscuits that are crisp, not tough.

So here it is. I’ve called it Six by Six – basically six ways to cook a variety of easy-to-obtain cheap things, plus a few recipes for the food we shared at Christmas … or at least the meat bits of it.

This isn’t a book about the food Bryan and I eat, which is based pretty much on what’s in the garden, not what’s in the supermarket, and we eat very little meat, and that mostly from feral or home grown animals. (Look for a collection of the food I love best later this year.) 

This is for young meat eaters (though there are non- meat recipes too) with not much time to put meals together or hunt for ingredients.

So merry post-Christmas, with my love.

‘A Heck of a lot of Recipes’ – Bumper Summer Holiday Selection

I like to cook. (I like to eat, too). Which means that there was so much food at Christmas that we are still eating it now … and will be for at least another few weeks, if not months.

Some of the female Christmas guests asked for my cook book, assuming that somewhere among the 140-odd books I’ve written (they’re not all that odd) there’d be a cook book.

There isn’t, though some, like The Best of Jackie French do have recipes. But I decided as a post Christmas gift to write a short book of easy-to-make recipes, the sort that could be made in ten minutes by someone who hasn’t be taught things like how to make gravy or cheese sauce or biscuits that are crisp, not tough.

So here it is. I’ve called it Six by Six – basically six ways to cook a variety of easy-to-obtain cheap things, plus a few recipes for the food we shared at Christmas … or at least the meat bits of it.

This isn’t a book about the food Bryan and I eat, which is based pretty much on what’s in the garden, not what’s in the supermarket, and we eat very little meat, and that mostly from feral or home grown animals. (Look for a collection of the food I love best later this year.) 

This is for young meat eaters (though there are non- meat recipes too) with not much time to put meals together or hunt for ingredients.

So merry post-Christmas, with my love.

The Six by Six Cook Book: Sixty good meals in six minutes (plus a few others)

Introduction

Four decades ago every girl learned to cook.

You had no choice: food came in sacks or metal meat trays carried in by the butcher or bought from the back of the dusty fruit and veg man’s ute. It needed skill and experience to turn it into meals.

Girls absorbed cooking technically by watching. The only place to do your homework was the kitchen table, and anyway you had to stir the gravy while Mum changed your brother’s nappy.

Then came freezers, and cheaper canned and frozen food, and take away. Women were out at work, not making lamingtons at home.

But somehow there is still a legend that any woman can cook … or is supposed to be able to do so.

No man can change a tyre without someone showing them how. They don’t expect their kids to swim by throwing them in the pool either. (I hope)

But somehow the myth survives… Women can cook.

Most ‘easy’ recipes - like roast lamb and gravy, roast chicken, scrambled eggs, chocolate chip biscuits - really need someone to show you how it’s done; exactly how much and when to stir, and what it should look like. Women try them without this ‘safety net’, and it doesn’t work, so they think they can’t cook. They can.

But not without a cooking lesson.

To be honest, I didn’t learn how to cook from watching my Mother, though I did learn how to roast meat and make gravy from Grandma. I learned how to cook because I could only afford the cheapest food from markets as a student, and then later because I had no money to buy food.  Things like dried beans and rice, or food I grew or gathered or hunted. Luckily there was still an older generation around to show me what to do. 

I can’t teach you how to cook most of the food I prepare without a TV camera, or even better, you watching in the kitchen. There is an art to grilling steak, making and baking biscuits, rolling pastry so it doesn’t turn tough, even cooking sausages so they aren’t either hard or raw. But the recipes below don’t need lessons. (They are also, of course, for blokes too.) They are truly simple ones.
           
If you:

• have the right ingredients
• the right equipment
• and take it slowly the first time you make it,

you’ll be fine.

Once you have made it the first time it’ll be very fast the next time - and faster still the time after.

Cooking is easier than driving - mostly because it’s just you and the food in the kitchen and no other idiots to get in the way. (Note: remove all onlookers from the kitchen before you cook these for the first time, unless they are experienced cooks who’ll help).

Essential Kitchen Equipment

A big wooden spoon, flat on the bottom if you can find one rather than rounded.
A big frying pan, made of thick ‘non stick’ metal. Don’t buy a thin teflon coated one, as they burn food more easily, don’t cook evenly, and the teflon soon flakes off leaving you with food stuck to the pan, or worse, bits in your tucker.

• A big metal oven baking dish – deep and rectangular
• A deep pottery oven dish
• A large bowl
• A potato masher- it has a metal head with small squares
• A large saucepan
• A large metal casserole that can be used in the oven or on top of the stove, though at a pinch the metal baking dish can be used for this
• A rotary hand beater for whipping cream, and maybe egg whites

Also useful:
A hand held blender

You don’t need:

• A bread maker (bread making is as easy in a bowl if you really want to make your own)
• An ice cream machine … all the cheap ones don’t work terribly well, and you are better off using a blender and your freezer. I own an expensive ice cream machine because Bryan eats a lot of ice cream in summer, and won’t eat the bought stuff. But if you just want to make a sorbet or ice cream once a month or less, you don’t need one.
• A large electric mixer or beater…. These overbeat biscuits and cakes, so the biscuits are dry and the cakes are tough. Trust me - it takes longer to wash the damn things and put them away than it does to whip cream or egg whites with a rotary hand beater - and the latter produces much better stuff.

What you can make with the Essential Equipment listed above

Until the last two generations, all food was with the equipment above - or less. As long as you have a stove (or a fire) and a fridge (or freezing nights) you can do all this with no other equipment:

• make butter
• dry vegetables and meat for jerky
• make bread
• freeze ice cream
• make beer
• distil wine into brandy
• roast fresh coffee beans, grind them and make coffee
• bottle fruits and vegetables
• make jam, chutney, vinegar, wine, dry home grown tea leaves and a thousand other things, with no specialised equipment, most of which doesn’t work terribly well and is marketed at the person who’s never done these things before, so  thinks they need special equipment.

Actually none of these are in this book, but I’ve written about them elsewhere, so if you ever get a hankering to go further, I’ll do Book 2. 

Important note: Invest in really good knives, a good steel saucepan and fry pan, a few big bowls and platters you love, and don’t bother with the rest. From then on, you only need knowledge to do everything from butchering a sheep and turning it into roast lamb and lamb sausages, to making cheese.
             
The Fastest Meals I Know

If I’m home late, too bushed to cook, I have a few very fast meals … much faster than buying a take away, and better tasting.

1. Fillet of fish - usually salmon - baked in the oven, served with boiled asparagus or salad and home made oven chips. Time taken: five minutes to prepare, ten in the oven…about the time it takes to get served in the take away.
   This is our real ‘fast food’ standby, but it depends on really good fish and really good greens i.e. fresh, plus having lemons or limes on the tree. The other secret is not overcooking the fish, or it turns dry, and not overcooking the greens, or they turn soggy. See recipes. 
2. Stuffed curried egg salad, served with a spud from the oven for me and mashed potatoes for Bryan, with salad or asparagus or some other boiled green … the egg goes wonderfully with any green veg.
3. Fried chicken breast, with one of the sauces in this book, boiled (or steamed) greens and mashed potato.
4. If I’m by myself (Bryan likes meat/fish and potato for every meal), one of the ‘blender’ sauces served on a couple of baked potatoes.
5. Also if I’m by myself - grated potato cakes.
6. Again, if I’m by myself, chilli beans with cabbage, but this can turn into a meat dish if you add mince or chicken.
7. And again, just for me Stir fried whatever veg are in the garden. Once the veg are fried I break an egg on top, and leave on low till  the white is set and the yolk still runny.

As there are sixty (!) recipes in this months newsletter, we have spread them out over three pages: Entrees, Mains, Desserts. Enjoy!

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

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