Search Results for: lemon beans

This is so simple, yet it is one of my most used recipes this time of year, when both parsley and lemons are in glut and dinner is often a long slow-cooked soup or stew that could do with some brightening up.

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.

Traditionally, corn silk tea is used for urinary related problems – things like cystitis, kidney stones, prostate problems, bedwetting. I’ll keep some dried silks on the shelf and keep it in mind in case of cystitis, but the reason I like drinking corn silk tea routinely is that it reduces LDL or “bad” cholesterol levels, without at the same time affecting HDL or “good” cholesterol. I have the genes for high cholesterol, and though my ratio is good (more good than bad cholesterol), anything that keeps the LDL cholesterol low is a good thing with my genes.

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.

Come with me on a picking walk as I pick dinner out of the garden.

I forgot about the party. I had half an hour to get a plate together to take. Woops. This is such a good, easy, fast recipe, and if you have sourdough culture going and rosemary in the garden, it’s all but free. And they are really good.

It is year three of this retrosuburbia challenge, and most days now we are eating substantially what can be produced from this little, 500m2 suburban block. No food miles, no packaging, no energy loss through processing or storage. With important gaps – cooking oil, dairy products, flour – but also with some surplus shared with neighbours, and at least in spring of a la Niña year and not taking our luck for granted, we eat very well.