I live smack bang in fruit fly territory. Bactrocera tryoni – Queensland Fruit Fly. They seem to be getting, if anything more prolific as the climate heats up, and I think over the years I’ve tried every known method of control, short of spraying, which I can tell without trying it wouldn’t work.
My platter this week was centred around a bowl of smoky eggplant and pomegranate dip, sort of like babaganoush but with pomegranate instead of lemon juice.
t’s a nice planting day today and I’m sort of ready – which is just as well because I have to go out and I’ll only get an hour or so in the garden today. I have advanced seedlings of carrots ready to go out, and places to put them, and seed raising mix for another batch of seed using my standard method for carrots. And the same for beetroot…
I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about gazpacho, until I realised it was the look of it, not the taste, that was uninspiring. The problem with gazpacho is always the colour. If you use red tomatoes and capsicums, but then mix them with green cucumbers and capsicums, you end up with a kind of khaki that doesn’t look very appetising. But its the season of red and gold, and in…
I have Principe Borghese and yellow cherry tomatoes. Both varieties are chosen for their fruit fly resistance and mildew resistance (autumn is often wet here), and they will cope with cold, so I expect them to keep bearing well into winter now. I have one Blackjack zucchini. There are several bearing now, and the tromboncino. I’m learning not to overdo it on zucchinis! I have a couple of Rod’s Lebanese…
I spent a couple of hours making corn vadai and azuki vadai and eggplant and beetroot pakora and zucchini muthia, and I really needn’t have bothered cos there were two clear favourites on the platter, and they were the quickest and easiest ones – the muthia and the pakoras.
The thing I love about snake beans is that you pick all these today, and tomorrow there’s the same amount again. And the other thing I love about snake beans is cutting them into finger lengths, lightly blanching, and dressing with a garlic-olive oil-balsamic-soy-honey dressing while they are hot.