My nasturtiums are seeding already. Not all of them – the ones in full sun flower most profusely and set seed first. But there’s enough…
Bountiful carrots and radishes out of the garden at the moment, which is very nice because it’s coming up to rice paper roll season, and if you have some lightly pickled carrots and radishes, an avocado and rice paper roll wrappers, you have all the ingredients for a real work or school lunch box treat. The recipe is dead simple – some julienned carrots and radishes (and you can add…
No doubt this recipe is not authentic, and I would love anyone who has a real Vietnamese grandmother to share the authentic version. But one of the nice things about multicultural Australia is the cross fertilization of ideas, in food as in everything else.
This is straight hot sauce – just chilies, vinegar and salt. Depending how hot your chillies are, it can be anything from magma to mildly spicy. Its simplicity is its strength – you can add it to anything without muddying flavours.
Olives are easy to process. You just have to allow them time. I pick them over to remove any damaged ones, then put them in big glass jars and cover with water and drain and change the water every day for a fortnight. This is the work part. The rest is mostly just waiting.
Peeled, the red eggplants work in just about any eggplant recipe. They are a bit more bitter and I tend to pick them green, just as the colour turns for most recipes. Unpeeled and fully ripe, they work brilliantly in an Indian style eggplant pickle.
There’s quite a lot of edible plants native to my part of the world but not so many of them that are abundant and really delicious. But macadamias (Macadamia tetraphylla) and Davidson plums ( Davidsonia jerseyana) are endemic to right here, real bush foods.