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Category: In Season

Fruit and vegetables in season in my garden and in northern NSW.

Picking dinner

Rosa bianca eggplant, beets, carrots, sweet peppers, button squash roasted with lots of oregano, and steamed green beans, topped with a garlic yoghurt dressing, all of it bar the powdered milk used to make the yoghurt with about 10 steps of food miles. There is something very decadent about dinner shopping like this.

A vegetable garden bed with mixed crop plants including leeks, carrots, beans, eggplant and squash. But dominating the image is silver beet. We can see at least three plants with big, glossy, dark green leaves.

In Glorious Excess

Look at my silver beet! It won’t be like that for much longer. Pretty soon it will think about going to seed. But what made me think about this post was not just the silver beet begging for a photo but a conversation with a friend this week about how we decide what to cook.

A knobbly, scaly, irregular shaped dark brown tuber with roots coming off it.

Yams

My part of the world is not kind to potatoes, or wheat, or sugar cane. More and more I am realising that our northern European food culture, imported along with the first fleet, makes very hard work of it. The food crops that dominate the Farmer’s Market are mostly south-east Asian, African, Central American, or Pacific Islander. Besides all the wonderful range of greens and fruits, there’s the starchy calorie…

a basket full of large, brown skinned tubers. In the background is a garden.

All About Yacon

I’ve been bandicooting the yacon for months now, but this morning I harvested the rest – over 10 kg from about 2.5m2 of garden bed. The tubers are sweet and crisp and very good for you. My grandkids love eating fresh yacon just as is, peeled and eaten like an apple straight from the hand. We adults eat it mostly finely sliced in salads, or as batons in stir fries,…

A large pile of leafy greens, lots of different shades and textures, all of the named ones pretty identifiable in there. At the top, you can just see the bottom of an EzyYo container with some yoghurt in it, a blue plate with a block of white cheese, four eggs, and a bowl of red cherry tomatoes. On the right, you can see half of an unbaked pie crust filled with baking paper and beans ready for blind baking.

Picnic Pie

This morning on my picking walk, I picked silver beet, lucullus, chives, spring onion greens, nasturtium leaves, dandelion leaves, chickweed, scurvy weed, aragula, leaf amaranth, sweet potato leaves, lemon basil, dill, oregano, parsley, sorrel, curly kale, dino kale, rocket, warrigal greens, molokhia. So I made a last minute pie to take to a picnic lunch.

First of the Season Broccoli

I don’t plant the supermarket kind of large head broccoli any more. It’s too slow, too short a season, to low a yield, too prone to pests and diseases. And broccolini fills the spot so much better. I have two favourite kinds, favourites for different reasons.