Menu Close

Sun Drying

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…

In My Kitchen

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…

Crystallised Ginger

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.

Kangaroo Lasagna

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.

Roots and Perennials Planting Days in Late Spring – Hazpac-ing the Carrots

There’s a permaculture principle of designing for disaster. The same principle applies to big disasters (whoever had the bright idea of building the Fukushima nuclear plant wasn’t taking account of it), or small disasters like a hailstorm or a day of sizzling hot weather when carrots are germinating or establishing. Like many permaculture principles it’s hardly rocket science: just research, consider and design for the extremes not just the ideal,…