Foraging on my driveway (and the beach)

A while back Glynis bought me a book named ‘Find it, Eat it’. As is often the way with information books, it sat in a drawer for a while, brimming with potential. But, in a nice bit of serendipity, it was hanging out with the cookery books and my daughter, Annie, had a hankering for a curry and, while rummaging around for a curry recipe (she made a beautiful lamb madras) I happened upon the book. Seemingly it had been waiting for its moment. Perhaps, like the One Ring, it wanted to be found?  🙂

Anyway, it piqued my interest again, so I had another look through it and I found a project I thought I’d have a go at. It’s called  “Native Salt and Pepper mix” and uses three powdered plants, all of which I knew I could find, plus sea salt.

NZ Native Salt and Pepper mix

2 Tbsp Kawakawa powder

2 Tbsp Nasturtium powder

1 Tbsp Black Flaxseed powder

200g Marlborough Sea Salt.

Marlborough is where most of New Zealand’s salt comes from, but I thought why not make the whole lot from scratch and make my own salt as well, that would be more satisfying right?  So, I’m trying for Waikanae Sea Salt instead; harvested and produced by me.

Back to the salt in a minute.

Kawakawa and Nasturtium Powder

First up were the Kawakawa and Nasturtium leaves. We have a whole heap of Kawakawa on our section so that was no problem. We’d also planted a small amount of Nasturtium last year but it ended up doing too well and taking over the mint and coriander, so had gone the way of weeds. As we were driving down the driveway to head someplace I asked Annie to keep her eyes peeled for any Nasturtiums as I wanted some… Her immediate response was “There’s some!”. Sure enough, right there on our long drive was quite a bit of Nasturtium, hiding out amongst the other plants. Too easy! And, looking in my rear view mirror I could see Kawakawa right behind us.

I picked a bunch of leaves of both, washed all, removed the stems, dried them on a baking tray in the oven (100°C for about 30 mins) and crushed the results into a fine powder in a mortar and pestle. Tick to two ingredients.  I was pretty chuffed with myself.

     

Salt

Making salt was something I’d been interested in having a go at for a while. Extracting something so useful from something so plentiful and free seemed like a fun challenge. And I knew it was a fairly simple process: take some saltwater, and remove the water… How hard could that be? So, down to the beach I went and filled a couple of large containers with water (It was a cold and windy winters day but there were a heap of people out kite surfing which was fun to watch for a while).

So, how to remove the water? There are two ways within my means…

• Solar evaporation, whereby you put the seawater in a shallow tray out in the sun and let the sun do its magic evaporating the water (and turning it into clouds – which is a cool thought) and leaving behind the salt crystals. This is the way I’m really interested in, as it makes the whole process free. However, being the middle of winter, with not great weather, and lacking a glass house, I figured that process might take a few months, and I was impatient to see results and know I could do it…
• The other, much quicker, way is to heat the seawater, converting the water to steam. I tried for a couple of days having the water in a tray by the fire, but there seemed to be little or no progress so put the water in a big pot on the stove and had it on a low heat all afternoon while I worked (checking it periodically to make sure the water level was dropping).

And low and behold, I finished work to find salt crystals forming at the bottom of the pan as the water level got low. What’s more, there was more than I thought there would be. I know that seawater is about 3.5% salt but that turned into more salt than I had figured in my head.

 

The stove top method isn’t the way I want to do this though, as it adds expense to the process. With a bit of patience, the sun will do it for free – but it worked beautifully and easily. I remember reading about a solar oven that somebody made and I’ll investigate to see if I can create something that will concentrate the winter sun’s power.

There are a few things to do to finish the project…

1. Dry the salt (easy – it’s happening now)
2. Find the black flaxseeds. I fear it’s the wrong time of year for that, so I’ll have to be patient.
3. Make the mix and try it as a condiment.

In the meantime, I’ll work on salt production methods.

I’ll let you know how I get on…