Pheasant breasts are usually skinless. They’ve worked pretty hard so can often be tougher than chicken. Wanting a quicker dinner than slow cooking would produce, I stuffed some pheasant breasts with mozzarella and wrapped them in bacon to keep them moist during their half hour in the oven. Served hot for dinner with roast winter vegetables – pumpkin, onion, cauliflower and parsnips and then sliced cold for lunch the next day with a beetroot, rocket and radish salad with a white wine vinaigrette. The roulades release a reasonable amount of juice which I serve as it is poured over the top. You could add some white wine and thicken to make a sauce.

four skinless pheasant breasts

four rashers of streaky bacon (Freedom Farms do a good one)

100g mozzarella (I used Hohepa available in Wellington from Commonsense Organics and Moore Wilson)

Olive oil, salt and pepper

Pre heat the oven to 200 degrees C. Slice the cheese and divide into four equal portions. Wrap a pheasant breast around each portion of cheese. Stretch the rashers of bacon using the back of a knife and wrap each pheasant breast with a spiral of bacon, sealing in the cheese as much as possible. Put a little olive oil in an oven-proof dish. Arrange the roulades in the dish, season well with salt and pepper. Bake un-covered for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, cover loosely with foil and allow to rest for a further five minutes. Slice each roulade into four or five to serve. Serves four.

Fennel grows well through the winter and has an affinity with the sweetness of apples. I’m not a big sage fan but this was a subtle combination that would work well with pork or ham.  Serves 2 as a side dish.

A knob of butter

One small bulb of fennel, trimmed of leaves and stem and finely shredded

One apple, cored and sliced

One tablespoon of verjuice or orange juice

One teaspoon brown sugar

One sprig of sage

Saute the fennel gently in the butter until soft and starting to brown. Add the apple, verjuice, sugar and sage. Cover and cook gently for a few more minutes until the apple has softened. Serve warm (don’t eat the sage).

If your chooks are laying, it’s time to make your own pasta, because pasta is a game you can eat. Even better when it’s green. You could use young nettles, spinach or silverbeet to colour your pasta. Each would add its own distinctive taste. I chose wild watercress shoots for this one. The trick is to blanche your greens for a minute in a pan of boiling water, drain quickly and refresh in cold water to retain their colour. Then drain again and squeeze out as much water as possible with your hands or with a potato masher in a sieve or colander.

A couple of large handfuls of greens, prepared as above

One large egg

One teaspoon salt

About 200g ’00′ pasta flour (available from La Bella Italia or The Mediterranean Food Warehouse) or you can use high grade (bread) flour

Puree the greens with the egg in a blender. Sift the flour into a bowl and add the green eggy mixture. Bring together with a spatula and knead with your hands for about 10 minutes until silky smooth. Add a little more flour if it’s sticky. Allow the dough to rest for about half an hour in the fridge. Roll out thinly with a pasta machine or a rolling pin. Flour generously to prevent sticking. Slice into narrow strips (fettuccini, pappardele or tagliatelle, depending on width) dust again with flour. Cook in a large pan of boiling, salted water for 2-3 minutes. Freezes well or will keep in the fridge for a few days.

This slow cooked pheasant casserole would work just as well with chicken or rabbit. Sweet chestnuts are a traditional accompaniment to pheasant as they both appear at the same time of year. Pheasant is very lean so works better casseroled rather than roasted in my opinion. One good sized pheasant would serve four like this, accompanied with some steamed winter cabbage. Not entirely necessary as you’ve got your greens in the dumplings.

Two tablespoons olive oil

Two large carrots, sliced

Two medium onions, peeled and diced

One pheasant, jointed, with or without skin

One can of chopped tomatoes

Salt and pepper and a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme.

For the dumplings

20g butter

Handful of parsley

100g cooked sweet chestnut flesh

100g self raising flour

One teaspoon baking powder

One egg, beaten

Quarter of a cup of milk, more or less

Place the oil in the slow cooker. Add the onions and carrots. Top with the pheasant joints. Pour over the tomatoes, rinse the can with a little water and add that too. Season with salt and pepper. Add the thyme. Switch to low and cook for 4-5 hours.

About an hour before serving, turn the slow cooker to high. Put the parsley, chestnut and butter in a food processor. Pulse to mix. Sift together the flour and baking powder into a bowl. Add the chestnut mixture and beaten egg to the bowl. Mix together, adding the milk a little at a time to form a soft dough. Using a couple of spoons, make the dough into six to eight dumplings and place on the top of the casserole in the slow cooker. Space them apart as they do increase in size as they cook. Cook for another half hour or so, until the dumplings are risen and cooked.

If you find some battered bargain bananas at the supermarket, you can always freeze them, without their skins on, until you’re ready to make banana cake. They’re often not as battered on the inside as they appear. I find a 23cm square silicone baking mould doesn’t need greasing, cooks quickly and never sticks. You need to put it on a normal baking tray as it has no structural stability when warm.  Makes 16 slices.

125g butter

Three quarters of a cup of raw sugar

Two large eggs

Two large bananas

One teaspoon vanilla essence

Two cups (300g) plain flour

One teaspoon each of baking soda, baking powder and ground ginger

16 walnut halves

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C. Process the butter and sugar together in a food processor, fitted with a blade, until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, banana (defrosted if frozen) and vanilla essence. Process until smooth.

Sift in the flour, baking soda, baking powder and ginger. Process until well mixed. Pour into the tin or mould and top with the walnut halves. Bake for about 30 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.  A loaf tin or deeper cake will take longer. Allow to cool slightly before removing from the tin and cooling completely on a wire rack. Freeze cut into pieces, tightly wrapped in foil.

I’ve experimented making my own biscuits for cheese recently. You can make numerous biscuits cheaply and easily. They store well in an air-tight container or you can freeze them. Oats do deteriorate, so buy some fresh ones if you’re not making porridge regularly. I favour Harraways’ or Moore Wilson’s wholegrain New Zealand rolled oats. These oatcakes are a relatively sweet biscuit for cheese, almost a digestive.

Makes 40 or so 5cm diameter biscuits

3 cups rolled oats
1 cup wholemeal flour or a gluten free baking mix

1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons raw sugar
60g butter
3 tablespoons golden syrup
One third of a cup of milk

Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees C. Put the oats, flour, salt and sugar into a food processor. Pulse until roughly combined.
Warm together the butter, syrup and milk until the butter just melts. Add to the food processor while still warm and process until it forms a dough.
Roll out between two sheets of baking paper to about 3mm thick. Cut out 5cm rounds and bake for 12 minutes until golden on a baking tray. Cool on a wire rack.

I realised it was about time used the bags of broad beans that have been rattling around the freezer since last spring. Things are a bit sparse in the vegetable garden so it’s an ideal opportunity to take advantage of things I’ve squirrelled away. I’d blanched the broad beans before I froze them so it was easy to slip off their skins once they had defrosted. I used about 400g of shelled beans which ends up as a much smaller quantity once you’ve taken off their grey, outer skins. This is based on a recipe from Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life. My fritters turned out very hot as I used a rather large, frozen fresh red chilli. This made six fritters – enough for lunch for two with a salad of winter leaves.

400g broad beans – weight without their pods

handful of fresh mint, chives and coriander

grated zest and juice of a lemon

one small fresh red or green chilli

salt and pepper

one tablespoon cornflour

olive oil for frying

Put the herbs, lemon zest and juice and chilli in a blender or mini food processor.  Pulse to chop finely. Slip the skins off the beans and discard. Add the bright green inner beans to the food processor. Season generously with salt and pepper. Add the cornflour and process until just a paste. Form into fritters with wet hands. Shallow fry in a heavy bottomed saucepan in a little olive oil.

There are some beautiful fresh New Zealand chestnuts in the markets and on roadside stalls. Buy them fresh, keep them in the fridge and use them as soon as possible after purchase. They’re somewhat laborious to deal with if you’re not just going to have a romantic evening, roasting them by the fire. Pierce each one with the point of a knife and allow them to simmer in a pan of boiling water for about 30 minutes.  I covered mine with boiling water and left them for an hour on high in a slow cooker and they came out very well. Drain and allow them to cool. Cut in half and scoop out the flesh with a teaspoon. Avoid the thin, brown skin under the shell if you can as it’s bitter. One kilo of chestnuts yields about 750g of chestnut flesh, if you haven’t got too many predators in the kitchen with you. The flesh freezes well. I like to make sweet chestnut and chocolate cake. Gluten free, don’t you know.

If you’re wanting to fill the tins, try some oaty date, orange and cardamon squares. Ray McVinnie summed it up at the Food Show – I paraphrase, ‘eat a little of great food and don’t listen to nutritionists’. His book Eat is a great place to start.

The fabulous Femke Koene is holding an information evening about how exercise kinesiology can enrich your life. If you feel you could get more from you body, go along for a no-obligation introduction from Femke, 7-9pm Thursday 27 May 2010.

My fig tree is very slow to grow and is some years away from producing a crop. Perhaps if I get an abundance of figs I’ll grow tired of them, but until then, I delight in buying them and just a couple make a spectacular addition to some greek yoghurt and manuka honey for breakfast. The perfect lunch is a couple of figs on some wild rocket leaves, a few scraps of proscuitto and some shavings of grana padano cheese dressed with a glug of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. Fast, and portable, food at its best.

Mid-May is garlic planting time so take a look at some tips for growing great garlic. Sow broad beans now too – even if you don’t like to eat them, they’ll improve your soil over winter. Trap your mice first though.

It’s Food Show time in Wellington – Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Westpac Stadium. If you’ve got pumpkins, make some pumpkin soup, some slow-cooker pumpkin cake or try stuffing some mini pumpkins.

I stuffed some mini pumpkins and baked them in the oven for dinner. The varieties were ‘hooligan’ (mottled), jack be little (flattened) and wee be little (dark orange, round). Delicious for breakfast too.

Cut off the lid of the pumpkin. Cut a sliver off the base if necessary so it stands up straight. Scoop out the seeds with a knife and a teaspoon. To make the stuffing, in a blender combine a slice of grainy bread torn into pieces, a handful of chopped parsley, a small onion and a clove of garlic (both peeled and roughly chopped), and about 50g parmesan cheese. Pulse until it forms bread crumbs. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and mix well. Fill the cavities in the pumpkins, replace the lids. Bake for about half an hour at 180 degrees C, uncovered until soft. Leave to stand in a warm place for 10 minutes.  The skins will be tender enough to eat, the stalks and base less so.