Today we pass the point on the day-length bell curve where it flattens right out. The days are now nearly as long in the southern hemisphere, and short in the northern hemisphere, as they will ever get.
Broad beans are a good source of low GI complex carbs, protein, and fibre, which means that they keep your blood sugar stable for a long time, so quite apart from the l-dopa, a broad bean breakfast makes you feel good all day.
At the moment I am giving away armloads of silverbeet to visitors and using every silverbeet recipe in the repertoire, but any day now I expect the grasshoppers to arrive and the urge to bolt to seed to win out and the bounty will be over. Seasonal eating. Make the best of it while it lasts, then leave it off the menu till next winter.
The first compost pile of the season, and it’s a good one. It’s a lasagna pile with nice thin layers, with mulch from the Mulch Mountain every second layer.
The fishing hasn’t improved. He’s still catching mostly Australian salmon. Luckily, the recommendations are to eat oily fish at least a couple of times a week, and Australian salmon are one of the best oily fish. And they’re one of the few on the list that are sustainable – gemfish are a threatened species, blue-eye trevalla are often long-line fished, Atlantic salmon are all farmed, and canned tuna is overfished,…
If you’ve been following The Breakfast Challenge then you’ll know I’m a bit ambivalent about porridge. I’m trying to like it. Oats for breakfast are hugely healthy – low GI, cholesterol busting, lots of B vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals – but regular old porridge is a bit bland for my tastes, unless it’s loaded up with brown sugar and cream, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Azolla is a really valuable plant. It’s a rampant native waterweed, that is symbiotic with a nitrogen fixing bacteria, so, like legumes, it is capable of harvesting nitrogen out of the air and putting it into a form that plants can use as a fertilizer.