Annabel Langbein and her daughter Rose have collaborated again, releasing their second cookbook, Summer at Home.
Following the success of their 2018 collaboration Together, the mother-daughter team are back with more delicious, simple recipes.
After three years of life in the Big Apple, Rose is now living next to Annabel and husband Ted in a cabin on their Wanaka property.
Rose Langbein and mother Annabel have a new book, Summer at Home. Photo: Supplied/Ted Hewetson
Rose tells Jim Mora the book was written when Rose returned home from New York to escape the pandemic and the family reconnected over shared meals.
"We collaborated well on Together, but I think I was a bit younger, a bit spikier at the time so there were a few arguments and tiffs but this project has been so beautifully seamless, I think our skills are very complementary to one another.
"I'm so creative in the way I'm thinking about food and recipes, I think Annabel has had a couple of years where she hasn't done a lot of travel and I was offered to be able to come back home and share all of my experiences and flavours with her.
"Because there are many things my mother does well, but one of them is write a really bulletproof recipe that will ensure you success in the kitchen."
The cookbook begins by establishing the minimal pantry, with a handful of ingredients that can carry you through the duo's recipes without adding to waste, she says.
One of the simple recipes is pink pickled eggs using just eggs and beetroot. It involves, boiling the beetroot to make a brine, boiling the eggs, then soaking the eggs in the brine to make them turn pink.
"You can also do it turmeric and you can use onion skins, you can make your own vegetable dyes and use it do dye things like eggs," Rose says.
The brine cooking method helps in a process called osmosis, she says, and it's also used in her father's BBQ chicken which is in the book.
"What it means is that all the salt and sugar in the brine goes through into the chicken, it just makes it so moist and juicy.
"It's something we always do for turkey at Christmas and we've started doing it for chickens as well because it just gives you so much more flavour out of the chicken if you've got the time to brine it a few hours beforehand."
Another idea for the summer BBQ the book has is grilled lamb flatbreads, she says.
"It's great because these flatbreads are very inexpensive to make, you can use beef mince if you like as well.
"We preferred the lamb because it's a bit sweeter... you can make a little bit of mince go a really long way and it's great for kids, and you can make them in advance and take them camping, hiking or wherever you like. They're very portable."
Rosehip powder is her secret to a sensational strawberry dessert.
"You harvest rosehips and then you can dry them, and you can grind them to a powder, and they have the most incredible flavour, they're so aromatic and they're full of Vitamin C.
"You can buy these from health stores but you can also make them yourselves which is what we were doing in our summer and with strawberries and cream and a little bit of sugar, it's just the most incredible flavour but again so simple, it's just four ingredients."
In writing the book, Rose says she was looking at global trends in cuisine in times of uncertainty like world war and the Great Depression.
"I kept on coming back to comfort food and thinking about the pantry staples and things that you can create out of nothing, that don't cost a lot and it can be really simple and nourishing.
"When the world's been turned completely upside down, if you can have a really simple dinner that will make you feel empowered, whole, and grounded, it can be a really calming thing."
She says cookbooks are nice to have around because they're comforting to look through and can help give inspiration.
"There's something about cookbooks - it's a really great gift, and it's a book that can add a lot of value to people's lives ... it's a very generous thing I think which is nice because you give the gift of cooking."
