Sweet Fig and Jumper Pottage

I have always loved the combination of meat and fruit. One of my favourites from my mum's repertoire is Apricot Chicken. Thanks to the providence of my backyard fig tree, I am literally buried in figs, so I have made this unctuous, sweet and savoury kangaroo stew several times in the past month, and I love it.

Ingredients

• 400g Kangaroo loin or rump. Kangaroo is a wonderful strongly-flavoured, very lean meat. It is wild-caught, so it can have some variability. I consider it an ethical ecological choice of meat in Australia.
  
  
• 1 litre of stock. I use my vege stock which I make from scraps each week. I don't like supermarket stocks. They are generally low quality and expensive for something so easy to make.

Green Grocer

• 3 carrots
• 1 onion
• 3 stalks of celery
• 3 bulbs of garlic (at least)
• 2 cups fresh figs (about the same volume as meat). You could use other fresh or dried fruit instead. Use about 3/4 cup if using dried fruit.
• 1/2 tsp of rosemary leaves, plucked from a neighbour's garden

Dry Store

• 1/2 cup plain flour
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2-3 Tbsp Rice Bran Oil (or other light-flavoured, high smoke point oil or fat)
• 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar or 1 glass of red wine

Method

These techniques are common for stews of all kinds: Flour and seal the meat, cook out your soffrito (Italian), or mirepoix (French) of root vegetables, add the sealed meat and other flavouring, and add a good stock.

• Chop the onions, carrot and celery into small dice (brunoise). If you aren't so handy with a knife, it is fine to use larger sizes (paysanne, or "peasant" cut). 
• Peel and chop the garlic and keep it separate from the vegetables.
• Halve the figs and remove the stems and any blemishes. I also remove the little "arse", which can be a bit hard, and any "scars" from where they have rubbed on the branches of the tree.
• Cut the meat into large cubes. The cubes will shrink a little with cooking. The goal is to end up with a bite-sized cooked article.
• Put the flour in a plastic bag with some salt and pepper. Add the meat cubes and smush it around with your hand to coat the meat. You could do this on a plate or bowl, but I find this method quite neat. I keep the leftover flour in the freezer for up to a couple of months so I don't go through so many plastic bags.
• Heat up your stew pot and add 2 Tbsp of oil. Get it to smoke point before adding the meat. Add a single layer of meat - otherwise you will cool the pan too quickly. I have a stew pot that is just big enough to do this in a single batch.
• Brown the meat well. This will both flavour and colour your stew. Remove the meat from the pan with a slotted spoon.

• Brown the vegetables. You may want to add a little more oil if the pan is dry. 
• Add some salt and pepper at this stage. 
• Add the garlic to the pan with the rosemary for a minute or two.
• If using the paysanne (larger) cut of veges, add a tablespoon of flour at this stage. The brunoise (small cut) will melt into the sauce and thicken it a little. 

• Add the figs and meat back to the pot. 
• Add red wine or red wine vinegar. If using wine, then let it reduce by half before moving on to the next step. If you like a little flash, you can flambé the wine once it comes to the boil.
• Add the stock. Let it come to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer for 2 hours.
• Correct the seasoning with salt and vinegar/lemon. Correct the consistency - a little more stock if it's too thick, or a cornflour slurry, if it is too thin. I like this kind of stew quite thin.

Serve with potato dumplings (kloesse), doughboys, baked potatoes or rice and some garden peas.

Potato Salad in the key of E Flat

This is one of endless variations on the same theme. In principle: hot potato mixed into a salad slightly warms the other ingredients and greedily drinks up a generous dressing.

Serves 3-4 as a meal

* 4 whole potatoes - for this variation, I prefer floury potatoes because I want them to break up a bit more. If you have waxy potatoes, decrease the amount of dressing a little as they won't absorb as much

* 1 whole egg

* 1 Tbsp white wine vinegar

* 3 Tbsp good olive oil

* 2 tsp hot english mustard

* 1 garlic clove

* 4 cups of hard vegetables - Your choice, but some combination of celery, red onion, carrot, celeriac, fennel, cucumber

* 1/2 cup of chopped herbs of choice - I had parsley and oregano to hand

* 1 tin of sardines

* 1 Tbsp capers

* Salad leaves to serve.

Roast the potatoes for 2 hours in a hot oven. Put them straight on the oven rack or put them on a layer of rock salt on a tray. Give yourself about 30 minutes to throw the rest of the salad together before the potatoes are ready.

Rub the inside of a large salad bowl with a cut garlic clove.

Whisk the vinegar, oil, mustard and egg together. Just bung them all in together, we aren't making a mayonaise. Note - you probably don't need salt in this salad because of the capers and sardines, but you should have a pepper grinder at table.

Chop the vegetables into easily manageable pieces for the plate and toss them in the dressing.

Take the potatoes, piping hot, from the oven. Quickly slice them into larger-than-bite-sized pieces and toss them into the dressing. This will partly cook the egg and thicken the dressing. The potatoes should fluff up around the edges during the mixing and absorb more of the dressing.

Add the herbs, capers and sardines and mix well.

Serve with a separate bowl of washed salad leaves. Put some salad leaves on the plate and spoon some of the potato salad on top.

Give a fig

So many figs! What can I do with them?

I've been picking about 1kg of figs each day from my bank yard tree. I gave them away to neighbours, ate as many as I could fresh, cooked an unctuous kangaroo casserole with them, made cocktails out of them, I even tried freezing them (didn't like the mushy result). One day, I ate so many figs that I had a pretty bad stomach ache (hey, I now know where that line is. 26 figs is too much YMMV). 

Finally, I had to resort to a conserve. I try to avoid conserves because of the vast quantity of sugar they demand. But, as far as effort goes, it is certainly the most accessible way to preserve fruit. 

I have to thank Useful Knowledge (youtube) for the proportions and encouragement.

Yields about 4 litres of finished conserve. Make sure you have enough jars!

* 4 litres figs (measured in 2x2L yoghurt buckets. One was full of my frozen, halved figs, the other was overflowing with whole fresh figs.

* 1.5 litres sugar (measured, roughly, in same bucket)

* 1 litre water (ditto)

* 1 lemon, juice and skin (so use organic)

* 1 tsp tartaric acid (cream of tartar)

Optional: 3-4 vanilla pods/vanilla essence

Optional: 2-3 Tbsp butter. I prefer without. Butter carries the flavour nicely, but I can always add butter to the end dish without any flavour difference, and leaving it out makes this a good offering to the vegan gods.

Cut the stems off the fruit and cut off any rough/tough patches of skin.

Bring the water to the boil and dissolve the sugar.

Add the fruit, lemon juice, lemon peel and tartaric acid (and vanilla if desired).

Boil for 2 hours.

Test a little syrup on a cold plate - draw a line through the cold syrup. When it's ready, it should hold a line for 3-4 seconds.

Roast your bottles in a hot oven for 10 mins and pour boiling water over the lids/seals.

Ladel the figs into the jars and seal.

Serve with rye bread, ice-cream or both (really - try it!).

sauerkraut

This is my first attempt at fermented vegetables. I got advice from various sources including https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/simple-sauerkraut

One whole drumhead cabbage. About 1.8kg

2tbsp coarse sea salt

tsp caraway seed

1 tsp pepper corns

Wash everything! Hands, bowls, utensils jars.

Core and finely sliced the cabbage.

Layer the cabbage with salt in a large bowl

Massage the cabbage for about 10-15 mins until the salt is dissolved, the cabbage is limp and the juices are flowing.

Toast the caraway and pepper corns and add them to the cabbage.

Put it in a sealed container, preferably with an air lock.

Ferment for at least 5 days. If you don't have an airlock, "burp" the jar every 12 hours.

You'll need about 2 litres of fermentation space. I squished it all into 1.5 litres and it is leaking brine.

Update: 26/3/2021

My fermentation stalled. I think because there was to much salt. I edited the quantity above to 2tbsp instead of 3. 

I drained some brine off and added some boiled water. Fermentation started again about a week later.

I kept it in my wine fridge at 16 degrees for another 2 weeks. It's been in my fridge at 4 degrees for the last couple of weeks. I had a trepidatious meal with kangaroo sausages and mashed potato. No side effects so far.

Also, overfilling is a risk for infection as the brine comes out the air lock. Leave a couple of cm gap in the top of the jar.

Update 30/9/2021

So that last batch worked out ok but not great. I would have liked a stronger ferment, and I want to avoid the stall in future.

I put another batch together last Saturday. It hasn't started bubbling yet. I put a little less elbow grease into the massage step, so I typed up with a few tablespoons of boiled, cooled water. Watch this space.