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 recipe uses treacle, which is just as healthy as maple syrup and much more local. I also uses 1½ cups of pumpkin puree which makes no dent at all in the pumpkin pile but at least makes me feel like I’m trying.
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.
It’s a bunya year, and easy to see why they are a feasting food for multitudes. We’ve been eating them just sauteed in butter and garlic, or made into pesto, or used as a dipping stick, or stirred into stir-fries or curries, just about every day. Bunya batter is a nice find though, worth sharing. Recipe:
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.
Still on figs, and this is just the white figs, the first to come into season. The brown figs are still to come. This white fig tree was pruned last winter, not too heavily, and this year has been such a good crop I’m thinking that pruning might become much more regular.