Ginger, lime and vanilla-spiked feijoas (Photo: Emma Boyd)
Got more feijoas than you know what to do with? Preserve them to enjoy all year round.
I may have mentioned before that we have 26 feijoa trees. It means that at this time of year, come rain or shine, you’ll often find us outside under the trees picking up each and every feijoa that hits the ground. They fall thick and fast and as we pick it’s not uncommon to hear the soft thud of falling fruit or have feijoas rain down on our heads as we bump into boughs heavy with fruit! Mid-season we fill a wheelbarrow with fruit everyday. As we’re not currently able to share them freely, we have taken to leaving them by the bucketful at the letterbox in the hope that they’ll all be made good use of. What we don’t share, we preserve, and my partner Nick turns hundreds of kilos of fruit into cider, much to the delight of all our friends and neighbours. I do my preserving on a much smaller scale, making jam and chutney as well as these delicious ginger, lime and vanilla-spiked bottled feijoas.
GINGER, LIME AND VANILLA-SPIKED FEIJOAS
Makes 3 x 1l jars plus 2 x 750ml jars
4 limes
4kg feijoas
2 cups sugar
6 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
25g ginger, finely sliced
Preheat the oven to 100°C. Put three 1-litre jars into the oven along with two 750ml jars. Put the lids and/or seals for the jars into a heatproof jug or bowl and pour boiling water over them. Leave the jars to sterilise in the oven for 30 minutes while you prepare the fruit.
Peel the zest from the limes in long strips and set aside. Juice the limes into a large bowl. Peel the feijoas and put them into the bowl of lime juice, stirring as you go so the feijoas are coated in the juice to prevent them from going brown.
Put the sugar and water into a large stock pot and bring to the boil. Once boiling, add the feijoas, put on the lid and wait for it to come to the boil again, stirring a few times as the heats comes back up. Once boiling, add the vanilla, ginger and lime zest and boil for 1 minute then remove from the heat.
Take the sterilised jars out of the oven, put them into a roasting dish and pack the feijoas into the jars. Pour over the syrup until it just begins to overflow out of the jars. Take a butter knife and slide it down the insides of the jars in between the feiijoas and the glass to remove any pockets of air. You can gently tap the jars on the bench to do this too. Top up with more syrup if needed and then seal with sterilised seals or lids.
Keep going!
Fuck this shit and octopie, two of Devoney Scarfe’s lockdown creations (Photos: Devoney Scarfe)
Fuck this shit and octopie, two of Devoney Scarfe’s lockdown creations (Photos: Devoney Scarfe)
We’ve all been dealing with Covid-19 confinement in different ways, but Devoney Scarfe’s preferred medium is pies. Expletive-laden, delicious pies.
Devoney Scarfe had had enough.
She was locked down in suburban Auckland, with a husband, two kids and the dog. “Nobody was at their finest. There was a tantrum thrown because PlayStation didn’t work. Everyone was making everything my problem.”
And while there are plenty of hitherto proven ways to handle the inevitable bleakness that sets in during Covid confinement (send dark memes to your friends/engage in futile, enraging arguments on the internet/dob in your paddle-boarding neighbour to 105), Scarfe expressed her feelings of hopelessness and frustration through the medium of pies. The first one? A pie chart divided into three sectors. Fuck. This. Shit.
“I presented my family with my pie chart and said, ‘This is how I feel about today.’ I sliced the pie, passed my oldest son a portion and said, ‘Here you are darling. You can eat shit.”
Two of Devoney Scarfe’s beautiful, not-so-rude pies (Photos: Devoney Scarfe)
Devoney’s “pie phase” had, in fact, begun on March 9, just before this whole hot mess began. A rhubarb pie, each chunk of fruit angle-cut and placed in a chevron pattern, painstakingly graded by shade.
“You should see how I hang out my washing,” Scarfe says. “I peg it by colour.”
While “other people’s brains do words, or numbers”, hers, it seems, does obsessive cutting, shaping, placing, egg-washing, and baking until golden brown. For several years, Scarfe ran a small bespoke cake-making business called Sugarmama out of a commercial kitchen she built in her garden. It began when, with two little boys at home, she started “really overachieving on the birthday cakes”. They were, as you might imagine, extraordinary works of art cloaked in fondant, painted in watercolours, or slathered in butter cream.
Devoney Scarfe and her Talking Heads pie (Photos: Devoney Scarfe)
But, a series of calamitous events put paid to the years of hard work. Devoney was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune condition that can rear its injurious head in myriad ways. For Scarfe, that meant crippling fatigue and aching joints. Cakes gave way to needlepoint. “It was something I could do in bed. You can’t bake lying down.”
Then, there was a redundancy. And one of the boys needed multiple surgeries on his legs. He also had to learn to walk again. Scarfe spent every moment by his side, literally living at the hospital for several months. The lovely outdoor kitchen was dismantled and sold and Sugarmama went into indefinite hibernation. “I pulled the plug on everything. It was really hard. I grieved,” says Scarfe, who has a degree in fine arts. “But somehow, in that slow process of letting go, it’s come back to me.”
The Pielennium Falcon and Homer (Photos: Devoney Scarfe)
Under lockdown, the Sugarmama Facebook page – and Scarfe’s personal Instagram account – is once again flushed with flour, bolstered with butter, peppered with perfect, whimsical creations, impossibly intricate design, and cussing. Lots of cussing. It’s not for everyone. “My youngest son doesn’t believe in swearing, so he won’t eat the parts of my work that have rude words on them.” For the pie-chart design, for instance, he’d only eat from the section that read “this”.
But he’s also been the incentive for possibly Scarfe’s most ingenious pie. “I asked him what a cool pie would be and he replied, ‘The Millennium Falcon.’”
Um, OK.
“I just told him he was absolutely right, and I got to work. It was actually pretty meditative and quite chill.”
Turmeric and parmesan crackers to mark the announcement we’d be moving down to level three, well, next Tuesday (Photo: Devoney Scarfe)
Which is perfect for now, she says. Devoney has gained control of her condition and is feeling well, “and grateful”. The daily government-mandated walks are a blessing, “because for a few years, I couldn’t go for a walk at all”.
Her other lockdown creations are a mix of social commentary and sweet delights. Among the traditional-with-a-twist lattice-work apple pie and marshmallow-candy pie, there’s a Talking Heads-inspired pie, an octopie, and she’s reverted to type once or twice and bashed out some angry baking. Her Same Shit Different Day cookies are lavished in sprinkles. “If you’ve something to say, you might as well do so in sprinkles. There’s a great TED talk about why sprinkles are so joyous – it’s because the colour and abundance please our caveman brain.”
Says it all, really (Photo: Devoney Scarfe)
She doesn’t have fancy camera gear or a light box, but has worked out that if she drags her kitchen table outside and positions it under the shade of her eaves, she can take a pretty adequate photo – good enough to share on her social media pages. “It’s turned out to be a really nice way to stay connected with people during these strange times,” says Devoney. “I get to be creative and work out a new thing, and then I’ve already cooked dinner, so there you go.”
And she’s only just beginning. “I have about 100,000 ideas for pies I could make next.”
Depends, of course, on how the family behaves. Or what they ask for. “The only request I’ve had from my eldest son so far is if we could please eat something that isn’t a pie.”
