This morning, lying in bed with my cup of coffee (yes, I get coffee in bed every morning), a mother antechinus ran along the window ledge with four babies clinging to her back, and dropped them into my handbag. A few minutes later, she was back with another lot, and another. In total, there were twelve babies, dropped into my bag. And she was off. Handbag day care.
My garden came through the frizzle weather of the last couple of days not too badly, though the dam is low now and I’m very much hoping we don’t get more of it before decent rain. Stacking to the north, shade, mulch, and plant selection did the trick though.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and when life gives you a heat wave, make sundried tomatoes. Last year I sun dried the principe borghese and made the yellow cherries into passata. The flavour of the passata was good but the yellow colour was just a bit too odd for many dishes. This year I thought I might try sun drying the yellow ones and making passata from the…
n my kitchen is a blackboard list of what is harvestable in the garden. I have a wonderful partner who does a lot of the cooking in our household but the garden is foreign lands to him. So I had the brainwave of writing a list of what is in the “outdoor pantry” right now. Dumb idea. He is never going to plough through that lot when he’s thinking about…
I’ve been making this a bit lately and it makes a great dip and sandwich spread too, but last night I found it’s true vocation – on a pizza. Recipe:
If you have a real sweet tooth, crystallised ginger is a good one because the spiciness of the ginger means you aren’t so tempted to overindulge. I’m not much of a sweet tooth, but this ginger, especially covered in dark chocolate, is to die for. And because it is so decadently gorgeous, it would make good last minute Christmas presents.
Though I’m very critical of the intensive farming of animals for meat, I’m not a vegetarian. If you’ve ever seriously tried to grow enough to feed your own household (let alone enough to fully support it), you will know that food webs include predators, prey, animals, plants, insects, funghi, bacteria – the whole complex web. If you take animals and predation out of the system, it teeters and falls.