Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

The Kahikatea trees in the bush are full of berries, and birds are singing happily. The berries ( koroī)  are edible, but the trees are too high to climb for me, so I can only pick what falls on the forest floor. It takes time, but foraging runs in my veins, plus it is a good squatting exercise! After picking you need to wash the berries well and remove the hard blue seeds, another time consuming job! After all this you are left with an handful of berries so it is easy to understand why you don't see  koroī jam around! In fact there are not many recipes with these berries, and this is my third one only (the other two are  Flan with Kawakawa cream and Kahikatea berries , and  Kahikatea Cupcakes .  The berries don't have much taste so I added one tsp of sugar and a tbsp of lemon juice and I let them marinate overnight. They day after they were yummy and ready to put on cereals, but I preferred  making a tart. I use quinces from Oratia, in season n...

A New Zealand Bush inspired dessert… I have never seen so many kahikatea berries like this year…I love them, I dreamed of making jam… But the Dacrycar pus dacrydioides ( kahikatea in the Māori language ), a coniferous tree endemic to New Zealand, is a very tall tree, and the ones in my bush are particularly tall…no chance for me to pick the red fleshy arils from the branches … I had to pick them from the ground. After 20 minutes and sore legs I had just filled the bottom of a bowl…mmmmhhh, no jam, I think. So I made a flan using some frozen puff pastry as a base, fil led with crème flavoured with the peppery and a romatic leaves of another New Zealand plant: kawakawa ( Macropiper exce lsum ). To make the crème I mixed 3 eggs with 4 tbsp of sugar, 1 tbsp of flour, 500 ml of full fat milk, 100 g of butter and a few leaves of kawakawa. Bring to simmering point and stir until the crème is velvety. Line a flan dish with baking paper, roll in the puff pastry, cover with more baking pa...