I post a lot of vegetarian recipes here but we’re not vegetarian. Sometimes we go for ages eating vegetarian, but more because that’s what I feel like cooking and eating and I have all the ingredients I need without going shopping, than for any philosophical reason. If you’ve ever seriously tried to feed yourself out of a garden, you will know that animals – big ones and very little ones…
My favourite variety of beans at the moment – brown seeded snake beans. So long as I can keep water up to them, they don’t mind how hot it gets, and they bear really prolifically over a month or more. They make a great salad, blanched then dressed with a balsamic olive oil garlic dressing while they are still warm. Or, like this, lightly sauteed with lots of garlic, then…
Every year a few garlic plants manage to escape harvesting in early summer. The leaves die off and I lose them in the garden. Every…
I don’t make jam. If I did, I’d just have to eat it and I really don’t need that much sugar. Besides, I am very very lucky in that I live in a place where there is some fruit in season pretty well any time of the year, and making not-jam is so much easier. Mulberry not jam, followed by strawberry, then peach and nectarine and plum, then mango, then…
I’ve just moved the chooks into a new bed, and they are feasting on broccoli that is well past bearing human food. They like the cabbage white moths and grasshoppers on it the best and have lots of fun hunting them.
This is the lettuces for April and May, planted on the leafy planting days last weekend. These are my own seed so they are free and bountiful. But still there’s no point in planting more than a pinch of them. We take lunches and lettuce is in it practically every day when it is in season, and we would have a salad for dinner a few times a week too.…
This year’s Hot Mango and Tomato Chutney is in the jars. I make some version of this every year around this time, when mangoes, tomatoes and chilies are all available in glut proportions.
It’s a too early yet for onions and garlic, but I’ve planted the first round of parsnips for the season. I had left a couple in the garden to go to seed (that’s the picture), and they reckon it’s the right time to plant seed. Parsnips are from the umbelliferae family, and like the rest of that family their flowers are good for attracting predatory insects like tachinid flies, assassin…
Bunya nuts are in season, and it is easy to see why aboriginal people arranged festivals around bunya season. I took these to a party last night. I actually took a couple of dipping sauces. The mayo and harissa one was very good, and lemon butter with parsley is nice, but this was the one that won the day.
Since I’ve discovered roasting the chilis and garlic first, harissa has become one of my very favourite things to do with the summer chili glut. It’s fast and easy to make, and though it’s spicy hot it’s not raw – it’s also complex and interesting with lots of depth.