Megan Palmer

Thank you Thekla, I have listened to it just now!

Happy winter solstice from NZ😘

Here in NZ, this evening we’ll be celebrating winter solstice 🥰

Sire

[quote=Anne Miller]That looks yummy.  Is it a British dish?[/quote]

Roast dinners are very British - roast beef, leg of lamb, duck, geese etc.

NZ being a British colony follows the tradition of family roast dinners at the weekend - even in an immigrant Chinese family as a child.

Having lived with a Brit for 46 years, we have continued the tradition for just the two of us but not every weekend!

The leek and potato gratin is a Sophie Grigson recipe from many decades ago, cauliflower cheese is a very traditional British vegetable dish - a roux with lots of sharp cheddar poured over steamed cauliflower and baked in the oven with the chicken.

The potatoes are thinly sliced and layered in the baking disk with steamed leeks, seasoned with salt pepper, garlic and generous drizzles of olive oil.

Spatchcock is a great method when grilling or bbq’ing chicken, it cooks so much more evenly.

If you can be bothered to completely debone your chicken for a roast, the meat stays really moist and the stuffing can stretch the chicken to feed up to eight people if you have lots of roasted vegetables to serve with it - cauliflower cheese, a potato and leek gratin, sweet potatoes, beetroot, carrots, broccoli etc all get cut up and tossed in olive oil and seasoned.

The late Jacques Pepin’s video demonstration of how to debone a chicken is the easiest one to follow.

Carla, Dan, Bryant et al how are your saffron beds coming along?

Last summer, January 2025, I dug up one of my saffron beds at the community garden that had become overcrowded.

The corms had multiplied prolifically and sales of the excess corms raised over NZ$600 towards the cost of a new pump for our water bore at the gardens.

I kept the largest corms and replanted them into two separate beds.

One of the saffron beds still had couch aka twitch growing through it so dug it up again last weekend despite the saffron foliage still being green.

After just 18m all the original corms have reproduced multiple new corms but didnt separate them this time, just replanted the lot.

There really isn't any need to buy more corms after your initial purchase if you are prepared to dig up and separate the corms every year.

Ideally, they should be divided in summer after the foliage has died back but I really wanted to weed out the couch.

There are bound to be some couch runners that I missed but can dig over the bed again in summer.

Mugs

Sums

Lame