Chilli and Parsley Condiment

 

One of the things I have found gastronomically annoying about having children – and there's been more than a few – has been the absence of chillies in our diet. I was never a huge chilli eater, and during pregnancy and breastfeeding I couldn't stomach them at all. But when I was ready to introduce a little heat back into my diet, I realised my kids couldn't tolerate the things. Damn.

Other friends facing the same dilemma came up with different solutions. Mark chops a chilli and puts it on a saucer at the dining table, then sprinkles it on his dinner, but that's too raw for me. Naomi often prepares two or even three variations on a meal (one spicy); but I'm way too lazy. Marty gets a lot of takeaway, but our household has so many food intolerances and fussinesses that takeaway usually feels too hard for us. I resigned myself to the idea that I wasn't going to be eating many chillies for a long, long time.

Then earlier this year I spotted a most excellent chilli and garlic condiment. I had tried variations on this theme, and none were quite what I was looking for, but this was fantastic! I blobbed it on my lunchtime scrambled eggs while my four year old had hers plain; I dumped it in my leftover minestrone; I stirred it through pasta sauce to give it a lift; I scraped a little on quesadillas to cut through the cheese.

Within days I had finished the jar; and I faced a dilemma. While I was willing to buy it once and give it a go, this sauce came from Calabria. I didn't really want to keep purchasing an expensive product which had travelled over land and sea; the cost! the air miles! But then I was given a bag of home grown chillies. I got to wondering just how hard it was to make a chilli and garlic condiment; with a bag of free chillies, I had no excuse not to give it a go. So I whizzed up the chillies with garlic and covered them with olive oil; I did another batch with parsley and garlic, and it's great stuff. The condiment takes no time to make, keeps in the fridge for weeks, has a zillion uses, and if it's made with chillies from the garden and a local olive oil, requires no air miles at all.

While it feels a little late to be writing about chillies from the garden – it's almost winter – I notice three neighbours have ripe chillies in their front yards this week. I take this as a sign that they are still in season, and so with no further ado, I offer you… chilli condiment.

Chilli and Parsley Condiment - 6 fresh long red chillies - 6 big stems of lovely flat leaf parsley - 2 cloves garlic - sea salt - olive oil How you make this depends on your tolerance for heat. For everyday food, I prefer things warm, not blazingly hot. Therefore, I top the chillies, slit them open, and scrape out the seeds and membranes. If you prefer numb lips and the back of your head blown off, leave the seeds and membranes intact. Throw the chillies, parsley, garlic and a hefty pinch of salt into a food processor and pulse-chop until you have a rough sauce. The parsley should still be in tiny squares; the chillies in teeny-tiny dice; and it should all be studded with little lumps of garlic. Scrape it into a very clean glass jar, and cover with olive oil. Gently ease out any air bubbles with a flexible knife or a small spatula; add more olive oil if necessary to cover the surface. Screw on the lid, pop it in the fridge, and you're ready to jazz up absolutely anything. Well, maybe not breakfast cereal. Version two: Omit the parsley, and up the garlic to 6 cloves. It has more heat, and is also very good! (Backyard: chillies, parsley. Local: garlic, olive oil. Northern Victoria: salt.)

Slow Cooked Tomato Sauce

When I think of preserving tomatoes, I always come back to the idea of sauce. I imagine an extended Italian family gathered together to cook down tomatoes, tell stories, sing songs and crack bad jokes, the older women wearing frumpy aprons, the young men a little flirtatious, a little cheeky, and everything a bit like the saccharine sugo scene in Looking For Alibrandi . But that’s not my reality, nor, I suspect, that of many Italian sauce-makers). I’m not Italian, I don’t have a big vat bubbling away with tomatoes or family and friends who seem interested in making an event of sauce making, and I’m not even sure I want it. I’m happy with just me and the kids fooling around in our kitchen, making small batches of sauce when we feel like it.

So I don’t make big batches. Instead, I preserve whole tomatoes; then, if I feel like a slow cooked tomato sauce later in the year, I use the bottled tomatoes to make a batch. But I do buy 15kg boxes of tomatoes for preserving. A 15kg box of tomatoes yields 24 Fowlers Vacola #20 jars of plum tomatoes, plus 2 to 2 ½ kilos of tomatoes left over. It’s not enough to bother bottling and running the processor again, but it’s a good amount to make sauce in a frying pan. Two kilos of fresh tomatoes cooks down to about a litre of sauce – enough for two meals in our family: one for dinner, and one in the freezer for some time next week.

Note: You will need to use a food mill or do some serious work with a sieve for this recipe.

Slow Cooked Tomato Sauce - 2 to 2 ½ kg ripe Roma tomatoes (the sauce is all about the tomatoes, so ensure they are ripe to begin with – and Roma, or sauce, tomatoes make the best sauce, surprise surprise, because they have lots of flesh and very little juice or seeds) - 1 red onion - olive oil - rosemary (or if you prefer, thyme or basil) - salt Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a wide deep frying pan over low heat. Peel the onion and halve it lengthwise. Slice it into very thin half moons. Drop the onion in the pan and sprinkle it with a good pinch of salt. Cook it for a few minutes, or until it softens, but do not let it colour. Take a sprig of rosemary a couple of inches long. Strip the needles from the stem and chop them very finely. Add them to the pan. Quarter the tomatoes – no need to peel or core – and throw them in the pan. Cook over a gentle heat, stirring from time to time to ensure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan. The tomatoes will collapse and the skins will loosen. Keep cooking for two to two and a half hours, or until most of the moisture has disappeared. Remove from the heat. Scrape the tomato mixture into a food mill and press through. (Or rub it through a sieve, much harder work!) You will be left with a rich red sauce; discard the skins. Test the sauce. If it is thick enough, well and good; otherwise, return it to the pan and cook down until it is the consistency you long for. Half a batch is enough for a packet of pasta for our family – but if you like your pasta to swim in the sauce, use the entire batch! Serve with grated parmesan. Notes: Of course, you can also make this sauce with two or three Fowlers Vacola #20 bottles of whole tomatoes. Because the tomatoes have been processed, you can reduce the cooking time: first check the thickness at 1 hour, and then cook until it's as you like it. This sauce is also good as a pizza topper, and it freezes well. It is not, however, suitable for preserving via the Fowlers Vacola system as the addition of onions can lower the acidity to a point where little nasty microbes are able to breed. If you want to see how real Italian Australians make sauce, click here. 34 boxes of tomatoes? Eight hours of boiling? Very impressive – but not my cup of tea! And I see that a neighbour and fellow blogger just posted on her never-to-be repeated childhood experience of sauce; now she opts for small batches, too. (Backyard: rosemary. Grampians: olive oil. Local veg box: onion. Northern Victoria: tomatoes, salt.)

Steak with Thyme Sauce

 

When I left home at 17, my father gave me some good advice. ‘When you’re feeling melancholy,’ he said, ‘play a hard game of squash, eat a steak, and go to bed. You’ll be right as rain in the morning.’

I adopted his advice to much success; and years later, when I read The Worried Well, the Quarterly Essay by Gail Bell, found it largely vindicated. Bell is a pharmacist and writer who is concerned by the explosion in antidepressant usage in Australia. While there is no doubt in her mind that there are some people who need medication in order to cope, she raises good questions about why depression is now so common, why talk and other therapies are so rarely employed, and why traditional remedies for melancholy have all but disappeared.

She closes the essay with a cure for melancholy from a medieval text: a meal with friends eaten al fresco, with borage flowers floating in wine, followed by a long restorative sleep. Good digestion also played a part in the remedy.

I am someone who has repeatedly been offered the diagnosis of depression and, had I gone with it, I am sure a prescription for antidepressants would have followed. Each time, however, I resisted the diagnosis, believing instead that I was experiencing sadness, a natural consequence of a lifetime of moving cities, the deaths of many loved ones including the very slow and cruel death of my mother, and general growing pains.

Instead, I have managed my melancholia using my father’s method and found that exercise, red meat and a good sleep were about all I needed to feel that life is tolerable. And so, although I was mostly vegetarian for many years, there were always times when a good steak was indicated.

All this comes to mind because, over the last few months, three different people have asked me how to cook a steak. It is so simple that I feel a bit silly for posting instructions; and it will be, shock horror, the first time red meat has featured on this blog. However, I always said this blog was about uncomplicated home cooking, so I will bow to popular demand.

The thyme sauce is an optional addition. It’s absolutely delicious, and I love to make it; but I also find a steak served with a bright green mixed salad, the bloody juices drizzled over the leaves, can be enormously satisfying in its simplicity.

Personally, I like my steaks disgustingly bloody, a bit of caveman raw meat on the plate, but I will give the times for a longer cooking if you prefer to eat your food like a civilized being.

Steak with Thyme Sauce The Steak - 1 steak (grass fed rump steak for best flavour, no namby pamby environmental terrorist grain fed meat here), at room temperature, about an inch thick - a teeny tiny bit of olive oil Thyme Sauce - 2 tbs thyme leaves, picked from the stems - 2 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice - 2 tbs olive oil - a hefty pinch of sea salt Put a heavy based frying pan or, better, a grill pan, on to heat. While it is heating, ready the sauce ingredients. When the pan is smoking hot, massage your steak with a drop of olive oil and place it on the cooking surface. Do not move it, but leave it to cook on one side for the allotted time (below); then turn it and leave it to cook on the other side. Remove it to a plate or wooden board, cover it with a sheet of tinfoil and leave it to rest as specified. Rare: 2 minutes a side, then rest for 6 minutes Medium: 2 ½ minutes a side, then rest for 5 minutes Well done: (for people who only pretend to like steak): 5 minutes a side, no rest Meanwhile, make the thyme sauce. (If you are not making the sauce, the steak must still rest; it is part of the cooking process.) Pound the thyme with the salt in a mortar. Once it has formed a thick green paste, slowly drizzle in the lemon juice then the olive oil, whisking away. You will end up with a thin green gloop. Serve the steak drizzled with green gloop and a spicy green salad dressed with lemon juice and olive oil; think rocket and/or watercress. Delicious. I buy meat direct from a farm less than 100 miles from my home; if you are inclined to do the same, have a quick search on the internet. There are a few options, and you should be able to find a balance between how you want your beef to be raised versus what you’re prepared to pay. Heavy marble mortars and pestles are readily available at Asian food stores. I use the steak times from Tamasin's Kitchen Bible (out of print); and the thyme sauce is tweaked from a recipe in The River Cafe Cookbook. The Worried Well (QE18) should be available from here. Which reminds me, do you have my copy? It’s gone walkies. (Backyard: thyme, salad, lemon. Wimmera: olive oil, salt. Gippsland: steak.)

Chicken Meatballs with a Spectacular Marjoram Sauce

 

The funniest book I read last year was Lily Brett's You Gotta Have Balls (also published as Uncomfortably Close). Ruth Rothwax longs for a group of supportive women with whom she can meet regularly and talk about empowerment and mutual cooperation. Instead, she gets an ageing father, Edek; his enormously busty Lycra-clad Polish girlfriend, Zofia; and Zofia's weedy hanger-on, Walentyna. Among other skills, Zofia has an incredible knack with balls: meatballs, chicken balls, vegetable balls and, one presumes, Edek's balls.

Like so many good comic novels, You Gotta Have Balls has a serious side. Edek is a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and much of the book is about the ramifications sixty years later. Edek is determined to live exuberantly. For him, each day is a bonus and he is open to all the wonderful possibilities life holds. On the other hand, Ruth, a child of survivors, is earnest and hardworking, stifling her emotions and preferences in overcompensation for all her parents went through. Like the children of so many survivors, good fortune, and life in general, weigh heavily on her; and Brett explores the tensions between the generations gently and well.

However, she really shines in the comic passages. As I read page after page of Edek urging Ruth to try the balls (you gotta have these balls, Ruthie, these balls are unbelievable), I found myself collapsed with laughter at a cafe in Lygon Street, wiping the tears from my eyes and being looked at rather snootily by the unamused patrons at the next table. I can't be entirely sure what annoyed them most: perhaps it was my sitting alone or my grotty clothes? Or could it have been the great snorts of badly suppressed laughter that rudely punctuated their interminable boasting about their holidays?

Whatever it was, it caused a stir and the waitress came over to check that I was okay. She had never, she said, seen anyone laugh at a book like that; but somewhat unbelievably she didn't write down the title. If I saw someone guffawing in a public place over a book, especially someone who wasn't drinking, I would have run over and made sure I had the title down pat.

Maybe laughing aloud at a book is weird and the incurious waitress is more the norm, yet I know which I prefer. Anyway, it can be useful. Years ago, I had to sit in the passports office for several hours. I had with me Neal Stephenson's The Big U, also hilarious, and as I read and laughed and read some more, the section I was sitting in cleared out and I found myself alone in an otherwise crowded waiting room. For that matter, if you ever want a compartment of four seats to yourself on the tram, I can recommend reading a funny book, and laughing – or breastfeeding, of course.

In homage to Edek and Zofia and laughing in public places, here is my recipe for balls. What follows is a very plain chicken meatball; the ball is no more than a vehicle for the scrumptious marjoram sauce, which is not quite salsa verde and not quite salsa agresto but certainly sits in the range of both these lovely sauces. Marjoram is a sweet and delicate herb whose flavour is greatly diminished by cooking. So there is a little marjoram in the balls (think of it as a preliminary whisper), and a great deal of marjoram in the sauce (a fanfare of trumpets and a clashing of cymbals). Put them together, and you have music in your mouth.

The sauce is also good eaten with other meats and felafel; it can even be used as a strong dip. It tastes best the day you make it. The meatballs are enough for two meals for our family, so I make a half quantity of the sauce fresh for each meal. It takes about three minutes, hardly an effort.

Chicken Meatballs with Marjoram Sauce The Balls - 500g chicken mince - 1 large red onion - ⅓ cup marjoram - good pinch of salt - olive oil Chop the onion and marjoram, or pulse chop them in the food processor, until they are very fine. Do not let them go to mush as you want a little texture. Mix them with the mince and a good pinch of salt, using your hands to knead it all through. Form the mixture into small balls, 1½ to 2 tbs of mixture per ball. The balls will, if anything like mine, always resemble 3D trapezoids; clearly, I don't have the knack. You should get 16 to 20, depending on how large you make each one, of course. Place the balls onto a tray, cover with plastic film, and refrigerate until you are ready to cook. To cook the balls, warm the olive oil in a wide skillet over medium heat. When it is reasonably hot, place the balls close together in the pan; they should all fit. Cook without moving them until the bases are golden. Then using a thin egg slide or similar, gently scrape under each ball and turn it onto one side. Continue to cook and turn, cook and turn, for about 15 minutes. When all the sides are golden, cut the largest ball open (like a good tailor, I'm assuming your balls are not identical) and check that it is cooked through. Keep them in a warm oven until you are ready to serve. The Sauce - 10 to 12 sage leaves, preferably from the tips of the plant - 20 stalks flat leaf parsley - two small handfuls of sweet marjoram - 8 walnut halves - 2 fat cloves of garlic - 2 tbs balsamic vinegar - 6 tbs olive oil - a good pinch of sea salt Ensure the herbs are clean and dry. Chop off the bottom half of the parsley stalks and discard. (Keep the top ends of the stalks as these are less fibrous but very tasty; no need to pick all the leaves off.) Peel the garlic. Throw all the ingredients into the small bowl of a food processor (or chop very finely) and whizz. Check for acidity; you may need a little more oil or vinegar. Scrape the sauce into a small bowl. It will be very thick and nubbly. This is enough sauce for all the balls; halve it if you intend to eat only half the balls today. If you are making the balls for a party, form smaller balls and cook for less time; then arrange the balls in a single layer on a platter, and dot each ball with a delicious blob of sauce. The Marjoram Sauce is adapted from a recipe in the intelligent, absorbing and absolutely delicious The Original Mediterranean Cuisine: Medieval Recipes for Today by Barbara Santich, which is, sadly for you, out of print. (Local: onion, marjoram, sage, parsley, walnuts, garlic, olive oil. Mysterious provenance, but free range and chemical free: chicken mince. Not so local: balsamic vinegar, salt.)

Mayonnaise

My great grandmother was a caterer. My mother often spent weekends and holidays with her, helping in the kitchen at various events – including at Freemasons' dinners. At the Freemasons' hall they were confined to the kitchen. There my great grandmother would prepare dinner; but, lest she observe their goings-on, men would carry the meal into the hall, and later return with the dishes.

After dessert, any traffic between kitchen and hall would cease and the door be carefully locked. My great grandmother would wait a few minutes, then beckon to my mother; the two of them would creep over and take turns peeping through the keyhole to watch the men strutting about in their aprons. 'Look at those silly men, Ruth,' she'd whisper, and they'd giggle and peek, their own far more functional aprons stuffed into their mouths to silence the sound; when it became too much, they'd tiptoe back to the sink to chortle softly over the dirty dishes.

My great grandmother was, by all accounts, a magnificent woman, and not just in spirit. She had a mighty chest and bulging biceps. In the days before mix masters were common, she'd whip up wedding cakes and pavlovas and gallons of cream, and all by hand.

My chest may be mighty, but my biceps do not bulge; in fact, I may be developing fedoobedahs. So to counter this, and in homage to my great-grandmother, I have been whipping: cream, egg whites, hollandaise, and, of course, mayonnaise. They may not be the ideal foodstuffs to develop shapely arms and Buns of Steel™, but they are a great way to get protein into my fussy five year old. At least, that's my excuse.

This mayonnaise is nothing like the gluey white substance found in a jar. This is the real thing: a soft yellow glop, and absolutely delicious. Use it anywhere: blanketed over lightly boiled eggs, smeared on a sandwich, tossed through coleslaw, drizzled over asparagus, or mixed through a celeriac rémoulade.

Mayonnaise - 2 egg yolks, at room temperature - 1 tbs lemon juice plus more to taste - 1 tbs seeded mustard (or not if you want a more gentle mayonnaise, or Dijon if you want your mayonnaise to be zingy but not seedy) - 1 tbs chopped parsley or tarragon (optional) - about 200ml olive oil - salt to taste Place a heavy bowl on a damp cloth on the bench; the cloth will stop the bowl from sliding around. Place the egg yolks, lemon juice, mustard and a pinch of salt into the bowl, and whisk. The bigger the balloon of the whisk, the easier this is. Add the olive oil just a drop, and I do mean just a drop, at a time, whisking frantically all the while. This job is made infinitely easier if you have an oil nozzle on the bottle and hold the bottle up high above the bowl. When you have added enough oil so that it is beginning to look like mayonnaise (a couple of tablespoons), you can start adding the oil in a thin stream, still whisking continuously (I use my left hand to drizzle, and my right to whisk; you could also use an apprentice to drizzle as long as the apprentice understands that they must not slosh it in). When most of the oil has been added and you have a lovely soft glop, taste for lemon and salt and correct as needed. If the oil is added too quickly, the mayonnaise can split. If it does, place another egg yolk into a clean bowl and whisk it. Gradually add the mayonnaise a little at a time, whisking frantically all the while, until it is combined and all is right with the world. Alternatively, you can whizz it in the food processor ('shock horror,' say the purists – it won't be as light, but it will certainly have amalgamated). The photograph shows mayonnaise with seedy mustard and no herbs – perfect for celeriac rémoulade! (Backyard: eggs, lemons. Local: olive oil. Not local: mustard, salt.)

Lazy Aioli

It's lovely to be married. The ties may bind, but they have a liberating effect: I have freedom to relax, to be myself, and to eat raw garlic.

One way we like to eat it, smelly old us, is in aioli. Last night we dropped great dollops into a vegetable stew, and swirled it through the potatoes, the fennel, and the sauce fragrant with saffron and orange. At the bottom of the dish, tomato and aioli surged together. I mopped them up with a bit of bread, and sighed with delight.

This morning I have the soft taste of garlic at the back of my throat and my skin is slightly fragrant. It makes me feel warmer, more sensual, less harried, less Protestant. And in the approaching madness of the holiday season, that, my friends, is wonderful.

Lazy Aioli - 4 to 6 cloves garlic - a generous pinch of coarse salt - 1 egg - ½ or so cup olive oil - the juice of a lemon juice Whack the garlic cloves with the flat of a knife and flick away the skins. Drop the cloves into a mortar along with a generous pinch of coarse salt. Grind the garlic and salt together until it has formed a paste. Scrape the paste into the small bowl of a food processor. Add an egg, and whizz until well combined. Gradually add the olive oil, initially a little at a time and then in a thin stream, processing very thoroughly all the while. When the mixture is pale and thick, add the lemon juice, and whizz again. Taste, and add a little more olive oil or lemon juice if required, whizzing once more to amalgamate the ingredients. Traditionally, aioli was made by hand. To do so, pound the garlic and salt together, then proceed using a whisk. Use only the yolk of the egg, and add the olive oil in tiny, tiny increments to ensure emulsification. Serve aioli with potato wedges or grilled vegetables; stirred into white beans; dropped into soup; or drizzled liberally over a vegetable casserole. (Local: garlic, egg, olive oil, lemon. Not local: salt.)

Salsa Agresto

Every now and then, I experience a minor miracle: a food that my three children all like. Currently there are ten things on the list, and it is, indeed, a literal list, a dog-eared square of yellow card on our fridge naming the dinners my children have agreed to eat without fussing.

For the record, they are green pie, green tart, rice and lentils, pasta puttanesca (no chilli), pasta with olive and parsley sauce, pasta with tuna and peas, fried rice, tortillas with beans and guacamole, and couscous with chickpeas, cranberries and pine nuts. They will also eat homemade pizza they have topped themselves with olives and capers. It's not a very local list, and I struggle to find local foods that all three enjoy.

But this week, the miracle: salsa agresto! Salsa agresto is a sauce made from nuts, parsley and verjuice. It's principally used on meats and poultry, but I pretended it was a pasta sauce, tossed it through noodles and sprinkled it with parmesan. Boy, was it good.

It reminded me of a favourite salad I used to eat at a restaurant in DC made with fresh greens, and topped with homemade falafel balls, fresh grapes and toasted almonds. This was like eating the best bits of the salad in every mouthful.

At the base of the sauce lies verjuice*, which contributes a clear fruity flavour. Ordinarily I'd substitute something else; unlike lemons, verjuice doesn't grow on my neighbour's tree. However, the verjuice is what makes it. Its sweetness rounds out the flavours beautifully; straight lemon juice or vinegar would be too sharp. In any case, the word 'agresto' refers to grape juice, so without verjuice Salsa Agresto would have to be called something else.

The almonds were from our tree; the walnuts, local. If you are going to make this sauce, ensure you too are using fresh local almonds and walnuts. They're easy to find in the organic shops. Most imported nuts are rancid and will make your sauce sour and deeply unpleasant.

I based my sauce on a recipe in Maggie's Harvest. Maggie uses a combination of parsley and basil, but in my garden we don't see any basil until the parsley has well and truly gone to seed. In any case, I think the flavours of parsley, walnuts and almonds are quite enough, so I left the basil out.

Once the sauce was made, I reserved what we needed for one meal. The rest I placed in a very clean jar, covered it with a blanket of olive oil, and popped in the fridge. It should keep there for at least a week. We ate it with pasta; it would also go well with poultry, falafel or roasted root vegetables.

*Note: Verjuice contains sulphites; I realised this when I wandered around grumpily tight-chested for a couple of hours after the meal, then finally thought to check the bottle. If you, like me, are mildly sensitive to sulphites, consider warming the verjuice then simmering it uncovered for a few minutes. The heat will break down the sulphites into sulphur dioxide, which will evaporate (this is why you need to leave the lid of the saucepan off). Allow it to cool, then proceed with the recipe.

Of course, if you are highly sensitive to sulphites, cook something else; or try substituting half water, half lemon juice with a pinch of sugar, and adjust to taste; or even press your own grape juice from unripe grapes, which, in fact, is what I intend to do later this year as some of our grapes make a lovely juice, and the very thought of that delicate flavour as the base of this nutty sauce makes my mouth water even now.

Salsa Agresto - ½ cup freshly shelled walnuts - ½ cup freshly shelled almonds - 1½ packed cups flat-leaf parsley - 1 clove garlic - ½ tsp salt - ½ cup verjuice - about ½ cup olive oil Preheat the oven to 200°C. Roast the almonds and walnuts on a baking tray for 5 to 7 minutes, stirring from time to time. Remove from the oven when they smell lightly toasted. Rub any loose skins off the walnuts with a tea towel, and leave to cool. Place the parsley, garlic, salt and nuts in a food processor and whizz. Slowly add the verjuice, then enough olive oil to loosen it up. Check for seasoning, and serve. Adapted from a recipe in Maggie's Harvest by Maggie Beer. (Local: walnuts, almonds, garlic, parsley, olive oil. Not too far away: verjuice. Not local: salt.)

Hollandaise Sauce

Some couples come back from their tenth wedding anniversary pregnant. Us, we came home with an assignation. And a couple of weeks later, as arranged, my four-year-old and I headed up country and met with an eccentric man wearing a gaudy apron; we came home with four chickens.

Now these ladies are pecking and preening their way around our garden. They gobble up slugs with relish; they eye off the weed seeds and strip them clean; they endlessly turn over the compost heap; they peer in our windows and check what we're up to; they follow us around as we work in the garden. And they lay eggs.

We are totally smitten. My four-year-old spends hours each day carrying one chook or the other, or sitting on a little wooden chair in the run and chatting with them as they peck around her ankles. My six-year-old came home from school yesterday. 'I'm tired and cross,' she announced, then went and read with the chickens. She came in an hour later much refreshed. And I stand at the kitchen sink, looking out and laughing at the little heads peeking out from behind a flowerpot or popping up from a clump of grass.

All of us, young and old, crow with delight when we find an egg. It's like finding treasure two or three times a day. And I find myself wondering, what took me so long?

I can castigate myself for putting it off. Or, better, I can celebrate that we have an abundance of fresh eggs just as asparagus comes into season. Between asparagus, eggs, and a lemon from the neighbour's tree, we're most of the way to poached eggs and asparagus with hollandaise sauce.

I trim the asparagus and simmer it for a few minutes in a wide skillet until just cooked – not squishy, but not crisp either; meanwhile, I poach eggs in another skillet. And in a breathtaking feat of kitchen management, while the asparagus and eggs are cooking I whip up this hollandaise sauce ready to blanket the lot.

For more on how to poach an egg, click here.

Hollandaise Sauce - 2 egg yolks (freeze the whites for meringue) - 2 tbs cream or top milk (that is, the first bit of a bottle of unhomogenized unshaken milk) - 1 tbs lemon juice, or to taste - 4 tbs unsalted butter - salt, pepper Put the 4 tbs butter somewhere in easy reach. Place the yolks, cream, lemon juice and salt into a deep pan. Whisk together. Heat over a medium flame. Holding the saucepan with one hand, whisk rapidly and continuously with the other. Make sure you whisk right to the edges of the pan. The instant it thickens, take the saucepan off the stove – keep whisking – and walk to the butter. Throw it in, and whisk and stir until it is combined. Serve. Precautions: Do not stop whisking or you'll end up with scrambled egg yolks. If you are timid, you can make it over a double boiler (or a bowl resting over a saucepan of simmering water), but the double boiler method usually results in a thin undercooked sauce. Using direct heat is riskier, but as long as you remain observant it is easy and quick. Adapted from a recipe in Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, reviewed here. (Local: eggs, cream, lemon, asparagus. Not local: butter, salt.)