Gingernuts are a well loved biscuit in New Zealand. They are the perfect cookie to dunk in your tea or coffee; they hold together with no little crumbs lurking at the bottom of your cup after dunking. They should not be eaten by anyone with slightly dodgy teeth - not unless you actually want a tooth removed, because these little cookies will do it. They’re hard…. the hardest cookie you are ever going to find; that’s part of their appeal. There is nothing like a cookie that you have to steel yourself to eat and in turn you are rewarded with a spicy warm mouthful.

I was looking all around for a recipe to make these at home and I was pointed in the direction of this one from Nellie. The resulting biscuit is not quite the same as store bought; in fact I think they’re much better. They’re not quite as hard, but crisp and spicy. They have the characteristic crackled top and a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar with cosy flavours of ginger and golden syrup.

We have a vegan friend staying with us for a few days. His name is Shanti and he is the proud owner of not just one, but two, iconic t-shirts - the legendary three wolf and a vegan zombie t-shirt. He’s awesome. You can see him here making parathas. I thought I would give you a vegan version a try as well as a regular one since I am experimenting a little with vegan baking.

These cookies illustrate quite nicely the kind of thing that happens when you convert regular recipes to vegan. The regular cookies are thicker and crisper, the vegan ones are thinner and harder. This is not necessarily a bad thing, they are just different. The vegan version is closer to the store bought variety in texture.  I could have made another batch with a little less vegan margarine to make them closer to the regular version, but I wanted you to see the difference. I have two variations on Gingernuts today for your viewing and eating pleasure.

The vegan one is on the left and the traditional on the right. The colour difference is actually not that great, it was just a difference in lighting. The traditional ones are slightly darker though because they were cooked for longer. Being a tad more fragile, the vegan variety were baked for three minutes less.

Try one with your next cup of tea.

Go on, you know you want to. Just don’t break your teeth!

Gingernuts

• 150g of butter or vegan margarine
• 250g sugar
• 1 egg (or one eggs worth of egg replacer)
• 1 T of golden syrup (substitute light molasses or honey if unavailable)
• 250g flour
• 1/2 tspn baking soda
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 3 heaped tspns ground ginger
• 1/2 tspn cinnamon

• 1/4 cup of sugar and 1 tspn cinnamon for rolling the cookies in.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F

Beat the butter (or margarine) and sugar together until well mixed and light.

Add in your egg/egg replacer and beat well. Add in your golden syrup and mix

Sift together your dry ingredients and mix into the butter/sugar mixture it should make a slightly sticky cookie dough.

Roll into walnut sized balls and then roll in the sugar and cinnamon mix.

Do not flatten. Place well spread apart on a tray lined with baking parchment, they need room to spread.

Bake for 15 or so minutes for non vegan and 12 for vegan. Do keep an eye on your cookies towards the end of the cooking time, they will burn in a flash.

Enjoy with tea, coffee or milk - feel free to dunk!

I looked at my lovely crop of thriving beetroot growing in the garden and I wondered if I could come up with something slightly different for it. My father planted the seeds and gave me the seedlings when they were about an inch high. Now look at them!

There is always something incredibly satisfying about growing something, harvesting it and then making something delicious with it.

We often have pre-conceived ideas about how certain things taste and how they should be prepared and only if they meet our particular set of criteria will we eat them. Although the idea of beetroot bread was not really something that I’d considered before, I could not help myself .. the thought of making bread which had a hot pink dough was just too much for me to resist. I had to make it.

Look at this - there is no food colouring in there, that’s just how it is! The colour of the dough is really amazing - I could not take my eyes off it when I was kneading it. It was like squishing a giant raspberry marshmallow. I had playdough flashbacks and felt the urge to make all kinds of funny things with it.

I’m really glad I was brave enough to try this bread, because we all loved it. As long as you like beetroot you’ll enjoy the bread. The bread has a slight beetroot taste, but certainly nothing overpowering and in fact quite complementary to sandwhich fillings. I made a second loaf very soon after we devoured the first, to use as sandwich bread for the next day. While beetroot is in season this bread will be made regularly in our house.

There was no recipe which really drew me to it that I could find online or in my books, so I came up with something based around this one here at Travel Flower Children. The bread has a soft crust rather than a crisp one.

Beetroot & Sunflower Seed Bread

Please note: The quantities of water and flour are very much approximate in this recipe, because it will depend on the size of your beetroot and just how juicy it is. Don’t be scared to add a little more flour if you need to. This bread is very forgiving. The sunflower seeds are a wonderful addition, they add some texture to a very soft bread.

Tip: Use rubber gloves to cut and grate your beetroot - or you will have stained hands.

• 1 medium beetroot peeled and grated raw
• 2 tspns of sugar
• 1 Tblspn of olive oil
• 1 tspn of salt
• 300 mls of warm water - just slightly warmer than skin temperature
• 1/2 cup of hulled sunflower seeds or green pumpkin seeds.
• one package of instant yeast (8 grams instant yeast- 25g/0.6 oz compressed yeast- 2 1/4 tspns active dry yeast)
• between 500g/16oz and 700g/1 1/2 lbs  of flour plus more for the work surface
• Milk or water to glaze
• Sesame seeds to sprinkle on the top if wished.

Place your warm water, oil, and sugar in a bowl with your yeast and leave until foamy (about 5 mins). Then add your sunflower seeds, grated beetroot, flour and salt

If you are using instant yeast you can just mix it in with your water, oil and sugar and add your other ingredients adding flour and salt last.

Stir together initially with a spoon (this is so you do not get bright red hands) until your dough starts to come together. Tip out on the work surface and knead together to form an elastic dough - about 10 minutes kneading. If your dough is very sticky do not be afraid to add more flour while you are kneading. Your dough should be slightly sticky, but still be able to be kneaded with relative ease. You can use a Kitchen aid for the kneading if you wish, but you will miss out on the playdough experience if you do that!

Set aside in a warm place in a covered bowl to rise until doubled in size - roughly 40 mins to an hour.

Punch down dough and form into the shape of your choice.

Leave to rise at room temperature for about 30 minutes. When well risen brush with a little milk or water and sprinkle black sesame seeds on the top if wished. 

Bake  in a 200C/392F oven.

If you choose to braid your bread into a long loaf it will take roughly 20 minutes cook time. If you place your dough in a loaf tin it will take closer to 40 minutes to cook through to the centre of the loaf. Your cook time will vary depending on the shape. Test for doneness by tapping on the bottom of the loaf it will sound hollow when cooked.

Leave your bread to cool on a rack and slice when cool. This is a soft-ish  loaf, if you try to cut it when it’s too hot it will be doughy. The sunflower seeds add a fantastic texture to the bread, they were a perfect addition.

This was quite an experience making this, the dough was so wonderfully pink, and each person that came into the kitchen uttered some kind of exclamation depending on their age - ranging from “Cool Mummy!” to “Holy *&^%# how did you get the dough that colour?!”

I love this bread!

This is one of the best and tastiest ways to use up left over potatoes that I know of. These simple little croquettes (from the french croquer which means to crunch) are leftovers in the guise of a golden crumbed cylinder that no one will turn their nose up at.

I served them with Chipotle mayonnaise for big people and tomato ketchup for little people. Paired with a salad they make a nice vegetarian meal. I pan fried this batch, but there is no reason why they could not be baked in the oven for a lighter version.

Vegetable Croquettes

• 6-8 cooked potatoes
• 4-medium cooked carrots
• 1 onion chopped
• 3-4 cups of cabbage chopped
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup of cheddar or other flavoursome cheese
• 1 tspn garlic seasoning salt (or 1 tspn crushed garlic)
• 2 Tblspns fresh parsley chopped finely
• pepper to taste
• fresh breadcrumbs to coat (roughly 3 cups)
• Oil for shallow frying

In this particular batch I also had a couple of roasted parsnips that were mashed and added in.

Lightly cook your onions and cabbage in a pan until your onions are transparent and your cabbage wilted.

Mash your potatoes and carrots (and any other leftover vegetables e.g parsnip, sweet potato) together with the garlic seasoning salt and add in your cooked onions and cabbage, parsley and cheese.Taste for seasoning and add pepper and additional salt if you wish.

Lightly beat the egg in a small bowl and set aside.

Shape the mixture into a croquette like a small sausage and dip in the beaten egg then roll in the breadcrumbs to coat.

Place in a pan and lightly pan fry over a medium heat until golden on the outside and warmed through. Or spray a baking sheet lightly with cooking spray and oven bake until golden.

For a vegan version simply omit the egg and cheese - they will still be tasty just a little more fragile. Quantities of the vegetables are flexible as long as you have enough potato to hold the mix together. If your potatoes are quite floury in texture, you might need to add some breadcrumbs into the actual mix to help bind it. Don’t be afraid to taste and add your own touches to this.

Leftovers never looked or tasted so good.

This week we have had a friend of ours staying. He’s a vegan animal rights activist with a peanut allergy. I like to tell him he’s annoying to cook for, but it’s actually been very good for my cooking skills, it makes me think a little creatively about what to make to feed all six of us when he comes to visit.

He comes from Los Almos in the US, he’s here in New Zealand studying political science and most importantly, he taught me how to cook paranthas!

Meet Shanti.

Yes that is quite a T-shirt he’s wearing - apparently it’s a legendary three wolf T-shirt and I’m guessing it’s a favourite judging by the amount of ventilation in it.

Lets get back to those paranthas. They are a type of layered indian bread, often with fillings tucked inbetween the layers. Parantha in Hindi literally means “layers of cooked flour”. Today he showed me how to make this yummy bread, we left some plain, had some with finely chopped onion and others with garam masala. It made roughly eight large paranthas.

Wholewheat Paranthas

• 2 cups wholewheat flour
• 2 cups plain flour
• water to mix
• Olive oil
• salt (optional)

Place the flours and salt in a bowl and mix to a dough with water. The dough should be pliable and not sticky, you need to be able to roll it out. If you find you’ve added a little too much water, add a little flour until you have a dough that you are happy will roll out well. Sorry there are no exact quantities given for the water, it’s just one of those things that you need to judge as you go.

Divide the dough into eight pieces.

Oil a rolling pin and the surface that you are going to work on with a little oil.

Roll out a piece of dough into a circle and spread some oil over the circle with a brush or spoon - cover the whole circle.

Fold in half and spread some more oil over the top half of the half circle

Fold in half again and again place another light coating of oil on the top of the parantha.

It should look like this

Now roll your parantha flat, trying to keep the triangular shape when you roll. It should be rolled to roughly 3mm/18th of an inch thick. The one I rolled looked more like an alien than a triangle - it had a kind of nose shape… but I guess I just need more practice.

Now cook in a frying pan or on a hot griddle that has had a little oil brushed over it. You may need to turn the parantha several times until it has cooked through, remember that it has a lot of layers. You will see it start to lose it’s doughy look when it is cooked. You can press down with a spatula on any areas that look like they are not completely cooked through.

They should have little light brown speckles on them when they are done. Shanti was not happy with the one below saying that the darker brown areas should not be there, but it was quite difficult to adjust the heat to the right temperature. It looked fine to me!

You can see the layers on the top one there - they do just peel apart - crispy on the outside and soft on the inside - really delicious.

We had ours with Aloo Gobi - also courtesy of Shanti.

He made the Aloo Gobi with romanesco from our vegetable garden

All in all a satisfying meal and some new skills learned, thanks to the guy in the three wolf t-shirt.