Annabel Langbein's Christmas Garden

Our Christmas dinner always featured a wonderful roast of turkey or duck, with all the fixings of gravy, bread sauce, stuffing and cranberry jelly. Often there would be a first course, such as a shrimp cocktail with crisp salad greens, cooked prawns and a tomato cream dressing.

But it was the range and variety of vegetables that really made it Christmas – often my mother would serve five or six different vegetables. Dad would always dig a big bucketful of the first new potatoes for Christmas Day. Their skins were so soft they would just rub off under your thumb and each one had to be carefully scraped, not peeled, before they were simmered gently with a spring of fresh mint, a little salt and a knob of butter (to stop them from breaking up). It always seemed to take so long, not just to prepare but to cook these baby gems, but it was just because there were so many in the pot to feed all the extra mouths!

Potatoes are ready to harvest when they come into flower, but you can get in earlier and steal some of the first small, sweet spuds without the plant knowing, using a time-honoured practice called “bandicooting”. To do this you carefully dig in around the roots with your fingers, hunting for the first new potatoes that have formed, and then very carefully remove them without disturbing the plant or the roots, so that it will continue to grow as if nothing had happened. It’s a great way to get a first early pick from your crop and yet ensure that there will be many more potatoes still to come.

After the potatoes it was time to deal with the new-season peas and broad beans – a major shelling mission that required buckets and bowls out on the back steps, the fresh peas and beans on one side and the compost bin and pot on the other. Every now and then I would slip out of the rhythm and find myself dumping the skins into the pot and the pods into the compost, and then it was a major scrabble to get everything back into its rightful place. It never ceased to amaze me just how many pods you needed to produce a medium-sized pot full of peas and beans.

New-season carrots would be served buttered, with orange rind and finely chopped parsley, while the last of the parsnips and pumpkin would be roasted with a little honey and oil so they went all golden and caramelised.

These days I love recreating for my own family these rituals of Christmas dinner around the first harvests of the garden. In Wanaka the season tends to run three or four weeks later than in my Auckland garden, so I always plan my plantings back from a Christmas Day harvest date to ensure new potatoes, snow peas, carrots, broad beans and baby salad leaves will grace our Christmas table. As well, of course, as strawberries and raspberries.

And when it comes to berries it’s hard to go past meringues, filled with cream and accompanied by a big bowl of freshly picked berries. They might not remember the turkey or the ham, but I guarantee no one will forget in a hurry those first waxy new potatoes and the decadence of a big bowl of homegrown berries. It’s memories like these that have us coming back year after year for more.

Wishing you an abundant Christmas

Annabel x