Mice, the Autumn harvest and edible grasshoppers

Posted by Katherine on the 15th of April, 2009

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Two events herald the definite arrival of autumn in our part of the world –the first mouse droppings in the kitchen and armfuls of courgettes being thrust at you by every gardener you visit.

This year the mice have my sneaking admiration as we’ve recently spotted at least three wild cats around the house including one which has taken to sleeping on our sofa on the verandah. (We watch it every morning as it nonchalantly stretches its limbs before sauntering off into the garden. I guess their selfish former owners took a short drive into the country and dropped them off near our house as they are too comfortable around humans to be feral. Anyway, we had hoped these cats would keep our mouse population down – the nature versus nuke ‘em argument but it seems a less holistic approach is called for…

Luckily the courgette, or zucchini depending on whether you are feeling French or Italian, (squash is courge in Frenchand zucca in Italian) is easier to deal with. I would dearly love to make large quantities of ratatouille and freeze it but I live with someone nursing two equally virulent loathings – courgettes and aubergines. So I must resort to vegetable subterfuge and I’ve successfully disguised the courgettes in chutney and he is none the wiser. Sadly, I’ve not been able to get away with slipping aubergine into anything so now I just wait till we have friends for dinner and serve it up with a “majority rules” indifference.

The chutney is a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall classic that he calls glutney as it uses up the glut of whatever late summer/ early autumn vegetables you and your other friends have ready to eat all at the same time. The recipe I made used my dad’s tomatoes and my sister’s courgettes and granny smiths. It’s got some chilli in it so is best kept a couple of months to develop a really good attitiude. It’s easy despite there being a lot of chopping and peeling but I lazily did NOT skin the tomatoes. I’m reassuring myself that it will give the relish that authentic homemade look!

Another great Hugh recipe for using up an excess of tomatoes is this delicious roast tomato sauce. Fill up a roasting dish with tomatoes, a couple of cloves of garlic, some olive oil and pop it in the oven until wrinkly and oozing their magic juices. (As a child I wrote a Ode to Tomatoes.. it’s a love affair that lingers on!) The only effort involved is pushing the end product through a sieve but once you’ve tasted it, you’ll be looking round for any groaning tomato plants with over-worked owners. I use one of my favourite kitchen staples – a couple of cloves of manuka smoked garlic. I get mine from the Original Smoke and Spice Company - a Christchurch based outfit – you’ll see their product at the many farmers markets and school fairs in the region but they will post all around NZ and the salt is utterly brilliant for meat, chicken, roast vegetables, bloody marys…!

With the brilliant weather we had over Easter, Good Friday was the perfect time to have friends to stay, ignore all the jobs overdue in the garden and settle into late lunch that took us into the evening.

I wanted to do a roast so once they arrived it would be a hands-off afternoon. I had a leg of lamb in the freezer and given one of our party was Spanish I sought inspiration from the chefs at Moro – a restaurant in London that was one of the first to introduce the intense flavours of the food of southern Spain and North Africa to the UK. New Zealand is now discovering the sensuous delights of Spanish cooking for itself and this recipe is an ideal alternative to the traditional rosemary and garlic roast. It is from “Moro: The Cookbook”, by Sam and Sam Clark.

The marinade is designed for a butterflied leg of lamb to be put on the barbecue. But as long as you remove as much fat from the outside as possible, it still works really well rubbed all over the leg and roasted in the oven. For the marinating, I use a ziplock bag which makes it easy to work in the flavours, preserving your hands from becoming something out of a paprika-coloured horror movie and keeping the smells from the fridge! The best paprika to use is a smoked Spanish brand that is readily available in most delis (or some supermarkets with aspirations) La Chinata - in its distinctive small red tin boxes. There are two varieties – sweet and hot. Not all paprikas are smoked so it really is worth trying to track this one down.

Moro's butterflied leg of lamb

1 leg of lamb, 1.5-1.8kg

For the marinade:

2 cloves of garlic, crushed to a paste (I use a mortar and pestle)

1 tablespoon of sweet smoked paprika

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar or the juice of one lemon

2 teaspoons of fresh thyme finely chopped (or pounded in the mortar )

1 tbsp olive oil
Black pepper

Remove all skin and fat from the leg and bone it. Open out the meat with a knife so it is more or less the same thickness throughout, divide into four pieces and trim again if necessary.

Place the lamb in a shallow dish. Mix all the ingredients - except the olive oil - together with some black pepper, and rub this marinade all over the lamb. When it is rubbed in well, pour on the olive oil and leave the lamb to marinate for at least an hour, turning the pieces occasionally, or, preferably, leave it in the refrigerator overnight so that the flavours really permeate the meat.

For BBQ – bring the lamb to room temperature and when you are ready to cook, season the lamb well. Place on the barbecue for about five to eight minutes either side for pink meat, turning once or twice. Remove from the grill to rest for a few minutes before serving.

OR – grill the butterflied lamb slowly on the barbecue until sealed on all sides (or seal it in the roasting tin on the stove top) and finish it off in a hot oven (220) for about 15-20 mins. Rest for ten minutes before serving.

If roasting the leg whole, bring the leg to room temperature, pre-heat oven to 220, fast roast for 30 mins then remove from oven, lower the temperature to 150 (I just open the door!) cover the tin with foil and slow roast for about two to two and a half hours depending on the size. Uncover for the last half hour to crisp it up a bit but as most of the outside fat should have been removed, it won’t take long. At this stage, I drain off the paprika and thyme infused juices and put them in a bowl in a sink of cold water to set off the fat. When the hard fat it taken off, this makes the most beautiful gravy. I deglaze the roasting pan with a little flour and use the juices to thicken it up but you can just heat up the liquid as is in the microwave.

I served this with pumpkin roasted with a couple of teaspoons of pomegranate syrup and oil plus potatoes sliced up, layered with crumbled feta and a handful of sage leaves and lots of olive oil (a sort of non-cream potato gratin! ) and a green salad. And a giant bottle of Leasingham Shiraz that was a birthday present to my husband last year. Delicious!

To end, I’ve included a couple of shots of Oaxaca’s famous grasshoppers for sale at the market. Called chapulines, Oaxacans have been eating them for more than three thousand years. They are thoroughly cleaned and washed out, then toasted on a comal (clay cooking surface) with garlic and lemon juice and sal de gusano to create a sour-spicy-salty taste. Oaxaca is one of Mexico’s 31 states and it is the historic home of the Zapotec and Mixtec peoples, and contains more speakers of indigenous languages than any other Mexican state. I was there for a wedding and yes, I did eat the chapulines in a quiche and, my favourite way, ground up into a margarita. Viva mezcal !!!