How to make the most of your market haul
On being greedy but resourceful. Plus: the rise of Indian food trucks and a fishy snack.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with Farro. I hope you’re hungry!
When I picture the market, it is always this time of year. Crisp air, dripping nose, counting coins with cold fingers. Sunlight pale, filtered through specks of dew still suspended in the cool morning. Summer’s bounty of berries may have disappeared from the stalls, but there are still a few taut glossy plums, sugar baby watermelons stacked like bowling balls, troughs of dusky late season tomatoes and aubergines the size of newborns dark and glistening like a puddle under streetlights. And now there are pears, firm nashi cocooned in thin paper, a tumble of new mandarins, crumpled bags of tiny perfumed figs, bundles of minerally kale, tubs of grisly blood-brown beetroot, rows of glowing daikon thick as an arm.
At the market, I am voracious, greedy, rash. When faced with an abundance of radiant, fairly priced produce, I will always buy too much: more than I can eat, more than I have time to cook, but I refuse to let anything go to waste. When I arrive home, shoulders red beneath straining bag straps, I play fridge tetris. The crisper drawer won’t close. I wash, spin, rearrange. I strip frilly leaves from stalks, roast tomatoes whole in a deep bath of olive oil with garlic and branches of oregano cut from the bush that is slowly colonising my entire garden. I dice the aubergine that is so large the cubes fill an entire sheet pan, chip a frozen wodge of chopped garlic from its dedicated ice tray, soften it in the microwave before adding olive oil, salt, smashed cumin seeds, oily Aleppo pepper, a handful of oregano (so much oregano), whisk and massage into the aubergine so each spongy piece is smothered in flavour. This goes into the oven above the tomatoes – no timer, just however long it takes for them to turn golden and jammy, to sigh and yield when I scoop them into their glass tub.
By the end of the week, the tubs are empty. Confit tomatoes have become rich pasta sauce. Kale has been transformed into a mustardy salad with walnuts and parmesan, eaten for lunch with boiled eggs and sardines. The aubergines were eaten beneath garlicky yoghurt as çilbir and alongside roast honey chicken with nutty brown rice and spring onions. I cooked the apples and floury pears in a seedy crumble that we ate for breakfast and dessert. There’s still produce in the crisper, but it’s only the misfits now: wilting spinach that needs to be eaten today, four enormous misshapen breakfast radishes, a rainbow of nubby peppers that turned out to be more jalapeño than capsicum.
I slice the radishes and pickle them with a little lemon juice and salt, ready to be tucked into rice bowls. The peppers are halved and roasted – I accidentally apply lip balm without washing my hands and my face burns for the rest of the afternoon. I’ll make a kind of faux-romesco sauce with them and some toasted walnuts – that should temper their heat. The spinach will join half a block of feta in a frittata made using my failsafe formula: cook the add-ins (today this will be onions, diced kale stalks and spinach) in an ovenproof pan, whisk a quarter cup of full-fat dairy (usually greek yoghurt) with half a dozen eggs and season well before adding to the pan along with the crumbled feta. Once the edges have started to firm up, whack the pan in the oven (preheated to 180°C) and take out when the centre is still a little wobbly and custardy, around 20 minutes.
Anything left – three flaccid carrots, half a leek and a few ribs of celery – will be diced and frozen, if I can find room in the freezer, a ready-to-go soffritto for the inevitable stews and ragu soon to be on heavy rotation as autumn swirls into winter and I begin to crave spoonable foods, bowlfuls of soup, sauces cooked slow and enriched with butter. I may be greedy, but I’m resourceful. I tell myself that next time, I’ll restrain myself, but by then there will be fresh kūmara, citrus, and maybe shiitake mushrooms…
New season fruit and veg is cropping up at Farro!
Unearth our beautiful selection of fresh autumn produce! From the jumbo ’joas you’ve been waiting for, to a menagerie of mushrooms; all sourced fresh from the morning markets and whisked straight to Farro for that just-picked taste. Our seasonal selection ensures you're always tasting the best of nature's bounty, while supporting local growers and snagging some of the best produce prices in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Weekly bites
Some of the best food in the world is cooked in a truck, or under a canopy of fabric on the side of the road where it can be passed straight from grill to bowl to the diner’s mouth. Across Aotearoa, we are witnessing the rise and rise of Indian food trucks serving kai not often available in traditional Indian restaurants. Rizwan Mohammad credits low startup costs and flexible work hours as just some of the reasons for the boom, but more importantly, his recent RNZ article names some of the best trucks and describes the kind of food you can find there – I’m personally going to try the Indian Maggi noodles at Gujarati-fusion truck Apna Adda in Mt Roskill ASAP.
With Menulog pulling out of Aotearoa this week, it’s unlikely that the likes of Wonder – the latest disruptor in the food delivery market – will ever reach our shores. Yet it is a fascinating concept: the app enlists well-known chefs and restaurants from across the US to develop recipes exclusively for Wonder, which then refines the recipes to enable them to be prepared quickly and perfectly in a Wonder kitchen. Consumers in New York can order food from a celebrated Southern restaurant and have it delivered hot to their door in under 8 minutes. What sets them apart from other concepts is their control of the entire experience, from recipe to fulfilment, allowing them to offer “exclusive menus with the sort of high-quality, thoughtful dishes that aren’t usually associated with delivery.” But will it work out? Only time will tell.
Eid al-Fitr has passed – a belated Eid Mubarak to you all! – but these beautiful recipes from chef Nabila Kadri carry on. If you have been silly enough to plant mint in the ground, Kadri’s green chutney is a perfect way to use some of your bounty – and samosa and biryani are perfect foods to warm your belly as we head into the colder months.
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Snack of the week
Shing Shang Seasoned Anchovy with Sesame Seed $6.89 for 100g from The Filipino Hub in Mt Albert
This snack didn’t start well – I cut my finger attempting to get at them. If you buy these and the aluminium pull tab breaks off in your hands, don’t do what I did and try to rip the metal apart with your bare hands. Once accessed, these babies were crispy, salty, spicy and sweet, and as soon as I popped the first sesame-encrusted anchovy in my mouth I wanted a beer. More than just a beer, I wanted to rewind the clock so that it was summer again, call some mates, tell them to bring over a box of cold lager so we could sit in the sunny garden alternating mouthfuls of crispy little fishies with sips of crisp beer. Without a beer, I’m on the fence. They weren’t as deeply salty as I expect anchovies to be, and had a slight bitter note that wasn’t quite masked by the sweet or spice – possibly because this pack was approaching its best before date. The texture was also super dry, which on the one hand means they were nice and crispy with a satisfying shatter, but on the other hand, they are a little grainy and would be easier to swallow with a drink – or as this website suggests, sprinkled over a bowl of fresh rice or curry as a crunchy topping. 6.5/10
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
Our seasonal highlight has been the annual feijoa, fig and walnut crumble. It was so good I made it twice.
Oh, how I envy your markets. Skinny aubergine (any FRESH aubergine), quince daikon - you don't even see them up here, in the Bay of Islands!! And as for the Indian food trucks. Please one of you - come to Russell!!