Give ginger the right conditions and it thrives so well that it’s not hard to keep a year round supply sufficient for making curries from scratch, adding to stir fries or tea, making pickled ginger for rice paper rolls and sushi, taking in a care package for pregnant friends, and crystallising for seasickness lollies or treats.
I try hard to avoid gluts. It was always a goal even in rural homesteading with lots of room, but I’m even more motivated now in suburbia, where every glut is using space that could have been saving a trip to the supermarket. But I don’t mind full day in the kitchen every so often if the product is worth it.
Someone asked me in a comment what I do with the Madagascar beans. So … Beans feature in many traditional (and blue zone) cuisines. They’re hugely healthy. Madagascar beans adapt to most Mexican, Tex Mex and Central American recipes – which is one of my favourite cuisines. Madagascar beans also adapt well to most Mediterranean recipes – which is another of my favourite cuisines.
Breakfast this morning. It’s a bit astounding, and very exciting, that just three years into this retrosuburbia challenge, I can eat a breakfast of yoghurt and fresh fruit salad most mornings if I want to – apple and plumcot and mulberries last month, passionfruit and blueberries and dragonfruit next month, citrus by winter, and next year there will be feijoas and figs, pears and cherries, custard apples and carambolas. I…
One of our Coffs Harbour Davidson’s Plum trees has bourne its first harvest. Davidson’s Plums are full of good stuff but the big claim to medicinal fame is a compound called ‘anthocyanin’. Anthocyanins do a number of generally healthy things but the one that really interested me was the way they improve gut microbiota.
I have one of those huge, chaotic families that are impossible to describe to someone else. And tomorrow, we’re all gathering, (outdoors, under marquees), for Christmas lunch. This year, my contributions to the table nearly all come from the garden, one way or another – icecreams made with real egg custard, passionfruit for the pav and the punch, green salad, rosemary oil sourdough crackers, and this seafood sauce.
Tomorrow morning, at 8.47 am, we here in eastern Australia reach the crest of the year. The earth tilts its face fully towards the sun, the shadows that day will be at their shortest, the day the longest.