Spring has Sprung

So spring has sprung and I’ve started thinking about gardens and chicken coops and lambs. I am always a bit cautious about Spring in Dunedin, no sooner do the days get longer and the winds get warmer than a whole bunch of weather pops up from no-where to give us what for. This spring was no exception. No sooner had I got some seedlings in the ground than a cold front swept over Southern New Zealand bringing a dumping of snow and hail. Luverly.

For me, Spring is when we should be celebrating Easter. It feels wrong to me, to be celebrating new life and fertility in Autumn. Easter is now a Christian holiday but it’s no coincidence that we celebrate it with chocolate eggs and baby chicks, it was originally Eostre, a pagan celebration of the changing seasons and new life.  Spring is when chickens start laying cackleberries left right and centre and so it felt right to me to celebrate Eostre in the correct season, using recipes that utilise eggs. Eggs are also a nutritional powerhouse, I don’t know about you but whenever I find a recipe that uses egg yolks or egg whites I scour my recipe books for a complementary one that use the equivalent number of eggs so as not to waste any egg! That’s why my famous 8 egg black pavlova always comes with 8egg home made pasta or a luscious crème brulee.  Or when I make fluffy egg white pancakes I also make Jamie Oliver’s tomato and egg yolk soup. Yumm.

And as such here are 2 egg recipes for you!

What to do with 4 eggs

Spring Linzer Bikkies

Usually these biscuits are made in two circles, one with a hole in and then sandwiched together with jam in the middle. My spring version were plain and cut out in festive spring animal baby shapes. I like how easy these biscuits are and they have a delicious bite to them.

1 cup almonds

1 cup hazelnuts
1 cup sugar

4 cups flour

1 block butter – softened and cut into cubes

Pure vanilla

Zest of two lemons

4 egg yolks

Grind the almonds and the hazelnuts until they are a fine meal. I leave the skins on, it’s not as pretty but it has a better  flavour and nutrient value so looks shmooks! Then it’s a simple matter of placing everything in your food processor and pulsing until it starts to hold together.  If you don’t have a food processor then roll up your sleeves and get rubbing!

Bake the cookies at 160 degrees Celsius on paper lined baking sheets, they only need 10 minutes or so until they catch the barest hint of golden brown.

Dairy and Gluten free Coconut Chocolate Macaroons

4 egg whites

1 cup caster sugar

Vanilla

3 cups organic dessicated coconut, I prefer coconut threads for a more rustic texture

1 block dark Ghana whittakers chocolate (dairy free)

First off toast the coconut. You don’t have to but it improved the flavour a huge amount. A light toasting is all that is needed. Once it has been toasted, cool and set aside. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks  and then slowly add the caster sugar beating the whole time. A splash of vinegar at the egg white stage will prevent them from becoming overbeaten. Once the mixture becomes glossy and heavy and all of the sugar has dissolved stir in the coconut and vanilla being careful not to collapse the mixture too much. Dollop onto a paper lined baking tray (or pipe if you are a perfectionist, though this recipe is intentionally a little rustic) and bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes at 165⁰C. Once they are cooked take them out to cool and prepare your ganache.

Melt one block of dark Ghana chocolate and whisk in 3/4 cup hot water until it becomes glossy and shiny. It might ‘catch’ and look a bit rough at first but if you keep mixing it should come together and smooth out. Once the macaroons are cooled and while your ganache is still warm, dip the bases of the macaroons in it and then sandwich them together base to base. Decadent!

And there you have it. 4 ways with eggs.

Imbolc

Spring is here! I love the change of seasons. All of a sudden we seem to go from cold quiet earth to little lambies springing about and trees in blossom. You can almost feel mother nature taking a huge breath out. I always thought that it was such a shame that Easter (or Eostre) wasn’t celebrated in spring, all of the allusions to fertility and new life with rabbits and eggs seem a bit lost on Autumn. Being a bit of a celebration fiend I feel that most of the ‘traditional’ commercial holidays are a bit off in the Southern Hemisphere and as such I have recently bought a NZ published book called Celebrating the Southern Seasons: Rituals for Aotearoa written by Juliet Batten. It’s a fabulous book which looks at seasonal changes, pagan ceremony and native maori traditions to construct a more logical way to celebrate the change of seasons.

Bird Hunter Tautoru, also known as Orion the hunter

On August the second we had Imbolc or ‘first light’, in ancient Celtic tradition this was symbolic of the flowing of milk or the birth of new stock.  The word Imbolc literally means ‘ewes milk’. For New Zealand Maori  this change of seasons was known as Hongonui, a cold time to light fires. This is when the ground would be prepared to plant crops. The constellation Orion was known as Tautoru the bird hunter and after Matariki when the Pleiades entered the Southern skies time was spent observing Orion and the Pleiades movement in the night sky. When I was little I remember dad pointing out Orions belt to me, it is my favourite constellation!

 Rituals associated with first light are the lighting of candles, drinking of milk or eating milk based meals, feeling the earth (Papatūānuku), spring cleaning, star gazing and lighting fires.

 We celebrated Imbolc in a low key manner (which is the tradition) with a candlelit dinner and a peek at the night sky. It strikes me that if you were an Easter type person then now would be the time to decorate eggs and eat rabbit. You could also do something earthy and pagan like pouring milk into the earth. Next year I might be a bit more organised and go a little more into the ceremonial side of it. As it was it felt really amazing to actually be engaged in a celebration that had some relevance to our life in the antipodes. I felt more in touch with our seasons and what they mean to us and, almost like magic, as soon as Imbolc had passed all of my farmy friends suddenly had lambs, goats, sheep and cows being born left right and centre. 

 Spirits were dampened however by almost a whole month of rainfall (scuse the pun) which drove everyone with kids stir crazy and turned the ground into a mucky mire. As a result a coccidiosis epidemic occurred which knocked out a lot of new life. And that’s the understanding really, when we are more in touch with the land and the seasons there is the flipside, new life and death go hand in hand. It’s easy to see how celebration and ceremony could be turned into superstition and sacrifice!



Here are some family friendly things you can do to celebrate imbolc



1.       Build a hugelkultur or start a compost heap

2.       Make real custard out of eggs and milk to eat with spring fruit

3.       Have a milk bath like Cleopatra

4.       Camp out for the evening and do some star gazing ( this works so much better in the countryside)

5.       Decorate some eggs a la Easter

6.       Have an easter egg hunt

7.       Bake some spring biscuits

8.       Have a candle light dinner

9.       Build a bonfire (check with local council regulations first)

10.    Float tealight candles in a pond or pool

11.   Make a bird feeder