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Category: Preserves

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,…

Jars of dark red sauce, labelled "Tamarillo Sauce April 2023"

Tamarillo Sauce

Tamarillos are like a sweet, tart tomato in a tough skin. If you like tart fruit, they are good to eat just out of the hand. To my mind though, the highest use is for tomato sauce. In the tropics and subtropics, fruit fly make bulk organic tomatoes a bit of a challenge. I grow cherry tomatoes for eating and cooking fresh, but I’ve moved to substituting tamarillos for preserving.

top left is a basket of unshelled Madagascar beans, and next to it a bowl of shelled beans. Bottom left is a bucket of bananas and next to it a pile of ripe bananas. In the middle is a tray of tomatoes, a bowl of Davidson's plums, and a pile of green grapes extending beyond the photo edge. At the bottom is a pile of tromboncino and cucmbers.

Processing Mid-summer gluts

I try hard to avoid gluts. It was always a goal even in rural homesteading with lots of room, but I’m even more motivated now in suburbia, where every glut is using space that could have been saving a trip to the supermarket. But I don’t mind full day in the kitchen every so often if the product is worth it.

Sun dried tomatoes

Too many tomatoes for eating fresh but not enough for passata making yet, so it’s sun drying time. We have a dehydrator but often low tech is easiest. A dark coloured enamel plate with a dark tinted pyrex pie plate in the sun. Halved cherry tomatoes and some sprigs of basil, oregano, thyme. Easy peasy.

Pickled Red Cabbage

Remember fridge pickles? This is just another variation on that theme, and a really good way to use up cabbage if you are finding that the cabbage moths have ramped up to a level where the last of them have to be harvested now. If you want quick and easy, ready tomorrow, very delicious, failsafe, and will last for at least two or three weeks in the fridge (but you…