It’s bunya nut season, and though it’s not one of the bi-or-triennial bumper seasons like last year was, it is worth checking the ground around your favourite bunya pines for fallen cones. Here’s how I process them, and how to make bunya felafels.
Our local farmer’s market is a brilliant display of ethnic diversity in food. There’s East Asian, West Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, Pacific Islander stalls. I can buy fresh bamboo shoots, banana flowers, yams, red eggplants, cassava, abika, kang kong. It’s where I found fish mint, a little pot of it for a dollar, from someone who spoke so little English that all I got was that it was…
Sometimes I think we overelaborate recipes. Last night I made a Middle Eastern style stuffed eggplants for dinner, and it was good, but when I compare it with tonight’s Pasta alla Norma, I think it was over-elaborated. In-season produce needs so little. Pasta alla Norma does justice to eggplants – so good, so much better than you would think for something that simple.
Today is Lammas, Lughnasadh in the Southern hemisphere. It’s the end of the long lazy days of summer holiday, and the start of the autumn season of bringing in the harvest. It’s the start of the season where you reap what you have sown, for good or bad.
My Burundi neighbour introduced me to bitter leaf. It’s a well-known, widely cultivated culinary and medicinal plant in Africa. She uses it for her diabetes, and when I started looking I found quite a lot of research supporting its folk medicine reputation, especially as an antidiabetic.
I love the chair. It saves me the angst of murdering perfectly healthy seedlings, or worse, being tempted to plant them and use up all my precious garden space on more basil or zucchinis than any household can stand. The chair brings me into lovely conversations with passers by who garden, even just pots on highrise balconies. Because I am sharing what I am myself planting, it creates conversations about…
The catbird, for some reason only known to its birdy mind, doesn’t like the teepee as a perch nearly as much as my vertical or arched wire trellises. So I have accidentally solved the problem of growing pole beans in the garden. Which I am very happy about because these beans make an excellent cannellini bean substitute.