Farewell to summer

I bought popsicle moulds at my sister's Tupperware party. It seemed like an odd purchase, since I can't think when I ever had a hankering to make popsicles, but these moulds were a cheery, egg-yolk yellow with orange bottoms and a bright green popsicle stick. They looked happy and fun, even if I wasn't sure that I was going to use them. They also reminded me of my childhood, as mum had a similar set, except hers were a boring plain white plastic (Tupperware has really sexed up its colours since the 1970s!)

Rather than just admiring the pretty colours of the moulds, I thought I should use them before summer's long, hot, ice-cream-friendly days disappeared for the year. There's still some dangerously hot conditions forecast for the next few days (and here's praying that there's no repeat of the truly horrendous Black Saturday of 7 February) but there's also an autumnal tone to the days, a slight chill in the morning and a mellowing at dusk, and it won't be long before I'm longing for hot puddings instead of freshly made ice-cream.

So, to celebrate the end of the season, I bought a punnet of raspberries and pureed them. I pushed the puree through a strainer to get rid of the seeds and swirled the puree prettily through a mixture of natural yoghurt and caster sugar. I spooned this mixture into the moulds, put them in the freezer and only a few hours later had an icy treat ready to go. For a spur-of-the-moment indulgence, frozen yoghurt hits the spot: ice-cream requires you to pre-freeze the ice-cream maker's bowl and make and chill an eggy custard to form the base.

The sour tang of the natural yoghurt balanced nicely with the slightly tart raspberries, and these two strong flavours were united and softened by a little addition of caster sugar. You could use a number of combinations of pureed fruit to make a similar popsicle; you could even make two types - say raspberry and mango - to make lovely striped popsicles.

I'm reluctant to give precise measurements for these popsicles, as I just used what was in the fridge and mixed it together. I had a 250ml tub of yoghurt, a 125g punnet of raspberries and I added about 50g of caster sugar. You could use more or less of any ingredient to suit your own tastes and size of popsicle moulds. I think this mixture would also successfully freeze in a metal container and could then be scooped out into bowls or cones.

Cool treat

The mercury continues to soar to 40 degrees and I can feel the sun burning into my skin the moment I step out of doors. Our relentless summer heatwave continues. Although the kitchen is the last place I want to be, the cooking bug is nagging at me. I feel the urge to bake, to create new dishes and to try out my new cookbooks. But I don't want to turn on the stove or cook heavy, savoury dishes.

What else to turn to in such a situation but my ice-cream maker? I haven't given it a run for some time and this is perfect ice-cream weather. A container of frozen blackberries makes a great basis for ice-cream. Pulverised with caster sugar in a food processor, the rich, deep red berry juice is the colour of good wine as I swirl it into a custard base, made from milk, cream, egg yolks and vanilla extract. A churn in the ice-cream maker and we have a cool treat to enjoy after dinner.

I adapted this recipe from a recipe by Tony Bilson that appeared in the Fare Exchange column in Australian Gourmet Traveller.

Berry ice-cream

200ml milk
600ml cream
4 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract
500g berries (I used blackberries, as I love their rich flavour in ice-cream but other berries, such as raspberries, would also be OK)
240g caster sugar

Heat the milk and 200ml cream in a saucepan until hot but not boiling. Beat the egg yolks and 90g caster sugar until thick and pale. Whisk in a little of the hot milk mixture and then pour the egg mixture back into the saucepan. Cook over a low heat until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon. Take off heat, pour into a bowl (strain if necessary) and put into the fridge to cool. Whiz the berries with the remaining caster sugar in a food processor. Strain through a sieve and mix with the custard. Whip the remaining cream until soft peaks form and fold through the berry custard. Pour into an ice-cream machine and churn according to manufacturer's instructions.

Too hot to bake

Melbourne's weather is the butt of many jokes, mostly about its unpredictability. Despite our many long, grey days in winter, Melbourne does do summer with a vengeance and often to excess: days of 40 degrees can be followed by days of barely 20 degrees and cool changes during the middle of hot days can see the temperature quickly plummet.

We're in the middle of a sizzling hot heatwave at the moment. New Year's Eve was 41.1 degrees celsius (106 fahrenheit), making it the hottest day in the hottest year on record in our state. There's been little respite - it was followed by 41.2 on 1 January and it's been high 30s for the past few days.

All of which means I am avoiding the kitchen (which is not such a bad thing after the indulgent excesses of the Christmas season!) The kitchen is a warm and comforting place in winter, with the enticing smells of roasts, casseroles and soups wafting around the house. But in summer, it is a place where no-one wants to be. A quick trip through to grab a cold drink from the fridge, a biscuit to nibble on or some fruit from the fruit bowl and we're out again. It's certainly not a place to linger near a hot stove, or be bothered planning meals or baking cakes.

Thank goodness for light healthy salads that require no cooking, for an outdoor BBQ to sear meat on and for friends with beach houses. The leftover Christmas ham is chopped finely and mixed with corn kernels, spring onions and cheese into a basic batter to make fritters. Juicy pieces of fish and crispy chips are perfect at the beach. Fat porterhouse steaks, spicy kebabs and shaslicks, herby rissoles and flavoured sausages taste all the better for being cooked outdoors, with the added bonus that the kitchen is free from both the cooking smells and the heat.

Glamourous salads accompany the meat: grated carrot mixed with currants, pinenuts, lemon juice and olive oil; the cool simplicity of green apple, celery and mayonnaise; farfalle bows teamed with capsicum, bacon, red onion and a dressing of sweet chilli sauce and whole-egg mayonnaise; little chat potatoes cooked and halved and mixed with sour cream, chives and crispy bacon; couscous flavoured with lemon juice, olive oil, pinenuts, spring onions and currants. It is a time of fresh flavours that can be put together with minimum fuss and no stove.

Soon I will venture back into the kitchen and start trying recipes from the two new cookbooks I received for Christmas. One was Bill Granger's latest, Holiday, which is, as always, full of simple delicious recipes to try. The other book is Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen, a book that mixes Vietnamese recipes from the Nguyen's Sydney restaurant, Red Lantern, with the tale of their life, starting with their escape from Vietnam and eventual resettlement in Australia. It is a sumptuously designed, hardcover book, with the recipes broken up by stories and gorgeous photos. I love to eat Vietnamese food but have never cooked it much, so I'm looking forward to being guided by this wonderful book.

A day in the kitchen

Have you ever had a day where you planned to cook just one dish but one thing leads to another and, before you know it, you've spent the whole day in the kitchen? It usually happens when you're the recipient of bounteous home-grown produce or you're reaping your own bumper crop, and is a joy if you have the time and energy for it.

Yesterday was such a day for me.

It all began with passionfruit. Our passionfruit vine, planted only two years ago, is rapidly taking over the back fence and growing up into the neighbour's apple tree. I love passionfruit but I've never had ready access to the fruit before, so haven't collected many passionfruit recipes over the years. I was keen to try passionfruit creams (a Jill Dupleix recipe featured in The Age's Epicure Summer cookbook), a blend of cream, caster sugar and lemon juice, topped with tangy passionfruit pulp. But when I went to the garden, I discovered at least a dozen passionfruit - many more than I would need. Before I had time to peruse my recipe books, the latest issue of Gourmet Traveller arrived in my mailbox, featuring, in a wonderful coincidence, an article on passionfruit. I wanted something easy and that used ingredients I already had in my cupboard, so a twist on an old favourite was the easy winner: passionfruit yo-yos.

But there were other dishes to think about before I could get to biscuit-making. The passionfruit creams were whipped up within five minutes and left to cool and set in the fridge. Then it was time to give the ice-cream maker, a Christmas present from Adam, another whirl. I had made a flurry of ice-cream in the weeks after Christmas as the ice-cream maker and I got to know one another, but it has languished in the deep freeze for several weeks. It was time to try blackberry and honey ice-cream, with some of my recently picked blackberries. Most ice-creams are made with an egg custard base of milk, cream, sugar and egg yolks (there'll be much more about my ice-cream discoveries in a future entry), which always leaves me with left-over egg whites. Not being a huge fan of pavlova, I've been searching for other recipes to use up these egg whites. In her column in The Age's Epicure last year, Stephanie Alexander featured several fabulous meringue recipes. One was chocolate meringues with a chocolate ganache icing but, alas, my cupboard is (unusually) bare of chocolate, so the brown sugar meringues got the nod. It is amazingly easy - whip the egg whites, add some caster sugar and brown sugar, put blobs onto a lined baking tray and bake for 50 minutes in a low oven, then prop open the door with a wooden spoon to let the meringues cool. Usually I use a hand-beater but today I pulled out my fabulous Kitchen Aid mixer and it made such a difference - the meringues tasted like a puff of sugary air on my tongue.

While the meringues were baking, it was time to tackle savoury dishes and dinner. My dad has come to stay for a few days and, as usual, he arrived bearing gifts. There is a big bag of juicy red roma tomatoes, massive bunches of basil and parsley, a container of cherry tomatoes and some small red onions. I've already planned to turn the basil into pesto and decide that it might be nice to accompany this with a tomato tart. I took a sheet of puff pastry from the freezer (but I think pita bread would also work well if you didn't have any pastry handy), spread on some dijon mustard and bake for a few minutes. I then sprinkled over some chopped spring onions and red onions (if I had more time, I would have sauteed these in a little oil with some crushed garlic), and topped the tart with slices of roma (seeds removed). A little drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and pepper and it was back into the oven for 10 or so minutes. Depending on what you have in your pantry, I think olives or anchovies would also work, and some fresh herbs, such as basil or oregano, would also add some flavour.

There was just time to mix up the passionfruit yo-yo pastry (which needed to rest in the fridge for an hour) before dinner. For a day where I had planned nothing beyond using passionfruit in the garden, I instead managed to fashion a three-course meal that was the essence of summer and received an enthusiastic response from my dinner guests (who hadn't yet seen the mountain of dishes in the kitchen that was waiting for them!)

After dinner, the passionfruit yo-yos went into the oven, while I made the icing. The recipe called for a rich passionfruit and white chocolate ganache icing but I was all out of inspiration and patience, so a basic icing, flavoured with passionfruit juice, was enough to sandwich them together.

My feet might be aching but what a sense of achievement it is to turn a pile of fresh, seasonal produce into delicious goodies for all to enjoy.

Pick of the crop

This year's berry season is sadly drawing to a close. Plump, luscious berries of all colours are my favourite fruit. All winter, I look forward to the first appearance of the new season's berries. Usually I have frozen some of last season's fresh-picked berries to tide me over but it's not the same as dipping into a container full of fresh berries that taste like you're eating sunshine.

Half the fun of berry season is the picking and gathering. Berries are easily picked, as long as you watch out for thorny bushes, and it is cheaper and more rewarding than buying them ready-picked. Although you can get a wide variety of berries from the markets (sadly I'm yet to find punnets of mulberries), there are several excellent berry farms close to Melbourne and it makes for a fun day out.

As children, berry season meant stained mouths, hands and clothes. Our neighbours had a magnificent mulberry tree growing on their farm and they would often invite us to come over and pick our fill. Mum would dress us in our very oldest clothes, as mulberry stains are impossible to remove, and we would arm ourselves with buckets and ice-cream containers. The tree had big, broad branches, so it was easy to climb and find a comfortable perch where we would proceed to fill our buckets and stomachs with the dark wine-coloured berry. Mum always made mulberry swirl afterwards, a cake-like pudding with rich berry juices bubbling through the crust. Mulberries remain my favourite berry, perhaps because it is not readily available unless you are lucky enough to have a tree or know someone who does (sadly, our neighbours' tree has long since died).

Although the blackberry is classified as a noxious weed in Australia, another favourite childhood memory is blackberry picking at Bright, a picturesque town in north-eastern Victoria. We'd put on big sun-hats, wear long-sleeved tops to avoid scratches from the bush's thorns and carry big buckets. Our stomachs were usually faster to fill than the buckets!

Because mulberries are rare to find, raspberries are my favourite berry. As Stephanie Alexander says in The Cook's Companion, raspberries are "the most heavenly of fruits. One swallows a perfect berry and the flavour swells around the mouth like the finest wine."

I've visited berry farms in both Kinglake and the Otways. Kinglake Raspberries is about an hour's drive north-east of the CBD (you can get there either through the Yarra Valley or the Plenty Valley). As well as offering PYO (pick your own), you can buy jams, sauces and cordials and there is an annual raspberry fair with live jazz, entertainment, childrens' rides, food and wine, market stalls and, of course, lots of berries!

Although it is further away (about two hours from the city), my current favourite berry farm is the Pennyroyal Berry Farm in Murroon (between Birregurra and Barwon Downs). This is because it is about a 10-minute drive from my grandfather's former farm at Deans Marsh and I remember visiting this farm as a child when it was the Pennyroyal Herb Farm. As my grandfather died 15 years ago, it's an area I've rarely visited since until I discovered the Pennyroyal Berry Farm and its near-neighbour, Gentle Annie's Berry Gardens and Tea-Rooms. For the past two years, we've picked at both these places. Pennyroyal Berry Farm has raspberries and many blackberry hybrids, such as boysenberries, youngberries, marionberries, brambleberries and jostaberries. The first year we went on the last weekend before the season ended and had to scavenge hard to fill our buckets. This season, we went before Christmas and the berries were abundant, despite the drought. We quickly filled our buckets and then it was time to retire to the tearooms for enormous scones, fresh from the oven, served with homemade raspberry and blackberry jam and a big pot of thick cream. The scones are made to a secret recipe and are to die for!

Gentle Annie's is a bigger farm and is on the Pennyroyal Valley Rd. It has raspberries, gooseberries, red and black currants, silvanberries, boysenberries, marionberries, blackberries and blueberries. You can also pick heritage apples, nashis, plums and apricots and their tearooms serve devonshire teas and light lunches with many berry dishes, including pancakes, pies and sorbets.

The first thing I do with my fresh raspberries when I get home is make a batch of raspberry jam. Raspberries make a wonderful jam because they are high in pectin and set easily. I also like to mash some berries into butter to serve on hot toast and crumpets and I've included a family favourite dessert that Mum discovered years ago in The Age's Epicure section. This dessert was often served up at her dinner parties.

RASPBERRY JAM

Place 500g (1 pound) raspberries into a saucepan and mash with a wooden spoon. Stir over medium heat until the pulp boils. Warm 2 cups of sugar and add. Continue stirring until the mixture boils and then cook rapidly for six minutes. Cool slightly, then pour into sterilised bottles, cover and label.

BERRY BUTTER

Place 1 cup of berries (I think blackberries or brambleberries work best), 1-2 tablespoons of caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice into a saucepan. Bring to the boil and then reduce heat and simmer until syrupy (about five minutes). Soften 125g (4 ounces) butter in a bowl and whip until light and fluffy. Mix through the berry mixture. Spoon into a small bowl or ramekin and refrigerate, covered, until required. This is delicious spread onto hot sourdough toast, muffins and crumpets.

RASPBERRY AND YOGHURT CREAM

1 cup yoghurt
4 tablespoons caster sugar
grated rind of 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup cream
1 cup raspberries
100g (3 ounces) dark chocolate

Mix the yoghurt, sugar and grated lemon rind together. Lightly whip the cream and fold into the yoghurt mixture. Crush the raspberries on the back of a plate. You want some juices to run but you also want some pieces of berries. Scrape the chocolate with a knife and add to the cream mixture, along with the raspberries. Don't mix too thoroughly, as it should have a nice marbled effect. You can serve within 30 minutes or leave to stand for six hours before serving.

Sizzling on a summer's night

One of the best things about summer's endless hot nights is barbeques (BBQs). Walk the neighbourhood streets on a hot night and the smell of sizzling onions and meat will have your stomach rumbling and mouth watering. BBQs are attractive for many reasons: the kitchen's hot enough without turning the oven on to cook; it's a simple meal to put together - buy some excellent meat at the local butcher, throw together a salad and dinner's done; and, best of all, barbequing is a man's domain, so you can send him out with a platter of meat, a cold beer, and make the salads in peace.

I'm fortunate that my local butcher, Eddie the Butcher in Newport, has a fabulous array of good-quality products to choose from. I often drop in on my daily walk, tempted by the enticing window display. In winter, I buy chunks of lamb or beef that become meltingly tender in casseroles, or a good roast that will fill the kitchen with delicious smells for hours. In summer, his tasty rissoles and award-winning sausages are perfect for a BBQ dinner.

BBQ cookbooks often rave about kebabs or fish or seafood grilled on the BBQ but I'm simple and old-fashioned with my tastes and a thick steak, some juicy chops, tasty rissoles or fat sausages are about as adventurous as I get. (I'm not averse to any of the other offerings, but much prefer someone else to be organising and cooking this for me!) I often par-boil slices of potatoes that are then crisped up on the hotplate and no BBQ is complete without a mountain of sizzling onions, sliced into thin rings.

The meat is easily taken care of. There are plenty of simple marinades you can use to flavour the meat (my current favourite is a steak marinade of hot English mustard, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and crushed garlic), and it is easy to mix up your own tasty rissoles, livened up with fresh herbs, if you prefer to make your own.

This leaves the more delicate task of salads. I like to have a few on the table to choose from: a simple green salad of lettuce and tomatoes, perhaps given a Greek twist with the addition of black olives and feta chunks; a tasty coleslaw, made with sliced cabbage and grated carrot and onion, mixed with some good home-made, or store-bought, whole egg mayonnaise; and perhaps a potato salad, with chunks of tender potato slathered in mayonnaise and finely chopped chives.

My latest salad delight is a simple pasta salad that I first tasted at a BBQ at my Auntie Jess's house. Made by her friend's daughter, we discovered there was a secret ingredient that gave the pasta a delicious twist: sweet chilli sauce. The salad is very simply put together: cook one packet of farfalle pasta according to the packet instructions. Drain and combine with one finely diced red capsicum, one finely diced red onion, and 125g (4 ounces) (or more, according to taste) bacon rashers, cut into squares, fried and drained on paper towel. Combine equal amounts (about one-third of a cup, but use more or less according to your taste and current diet status) of whole-egg mayonnaise and sweet chilli sauce and stir through the salad. Enjoy!

Essence of summer

It's a common complaint that fruit and vegetables these days don't have taste; that they're bred for their looks and shelf life rather than flavour. Perhaps it's the rose-coloured glasses of adulthood but so many fruits and vegetables don't seem to have the intense, juicy flavour that I remember from childhood. I think the biggest disappointment is tomatoes. I'm so sick of eating watery, tasteless tomatoes that I've actually gone right off them. I eat canned tomatoes by the truckload in stews, casseroles and soups but fresh tomatoes are much rarer in my kitchen.

One of the favourite food memories from my childhood is the fresh tomato sandwiches at my mother's Saturday afternoon tennis matches. Once all the tennis players had eaten, the kids were allowed to devour the leftovers. I always went straight for the tomato sandwiches: fresh white bread, smeared with butter, filled with fire-engine-red slices of tomato and finished with a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper. It's been years since I ate a tomato that could compare. I told this story so often, and lamented the state of modern tomatoes so much, that the first thing my husband Adam made for me when we grew our own tomatoes last year was a fresh tomato sandwich. So simple, yet so divine!

Whenever my parents come to visit, they bring bags full of home-grown produce from their vegetable and herb garden: huge bunches of basil to turn into pesto; handfuls of parsley to flavour dumplings to simmer on top of a beef stew; bunches of tangy spring onions for my stir-fries; leafy green silverbeet to chop into frittatas; and, this visit, a kilogram of Dad's first tomatoes for the season, as well as a handful of baby red onions. The tomatoes were plump and juicy, a little blemished on the skin, but glowing with flavour. I boiled them with some water for an hour and strained the juice to make an intensely flavoured stock for risotto, one that had the essence of tomatoes rather than the texture or colour.

This recipe had been given to me last year by a work colleague, John, an infrequent cook who found the recipe years ago in The Age's Epicure section and used it at a dinner party to impress his friends with his cooking skills. I have been waiting for the right amount of fresh tomatoes to make this recipe. Melbourne supermarkets might be open 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and you might be able to get most fruit and vegetables every month of the year, but this recipe calls for fresh tomatoes at the peak of their season. Sometimes you have to ignore modern-day convenience to get old-fashioned flavour.

The preparation of the stock is slightly unusual, but the end result is an absolutely delicious risotto, and the quantities are easily halved if you have, like me, only a kilogram of tomatoes available.

ESSENCE OF WHITE TOMATO RISOTTO

Serves 8

2 kg (4 1/2 pounds) ripe tomatoes (big, juicy ones, not the fleshy roma types)
water or vegetable stock
4 shallots, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
50ml (1/4 cup) olive oil, or 25g (1 ounce) butter
400g (14 ounces) arborio rice
150g (5 ounces) cold butter to stir in at the end
200g (7 ounces) parmesan
sea salt and freshly ground white pepper

Score tomatoes and place in a non-reactive heavy-based pot. Add about 100ml (3 1/2 ounces) water and heat slowly, with the lid on tightly. After about 10 minutes, the tomatoes should be cooking in a clear liquid. Don't stir and let the tomatoes cook for about 40 minutes at a gentle simmer.

Strain the liquid through a fine sieve. Don't crush or press the tomatoes but use their own weight to allow the clear juice to drain through. The remaining liquid should be a clear broth with an intense tomato flavour. Don't reduce any further, as you will lose the freshness of taste. Set aside. Dilute with one-third water or vegetable stock.

Heat the olive oil or butter in a pan and saute the shallots and garlic for a few minutes, until they are soft but not coloured. Add the arborio rice, making sure each grain is coated with the oil or butter, and heat through. Add the stock in small batches, stirring after each addition. You may need to add extra water or stock until the rice is cooked.

Once cooked, stir in the butter and parmesan cheese and season with salt and pepper. Rest for three minutes with the lid on. Stir once and serve.