This is the last of the potato based Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipes for this year. We’ve had a nice month of eating new potatoes most days and the basket is getting low. From now on it will get too hot, particularly at night, for potatoes to crop well here.
We are coming up to the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. It’s really a very noticeable change if you are in the mood for noticing it. Our ancestors did – all the traditional festivals in most cultures (Easter, Halloween, Groundhog day, Christmas, Mayday) are held on these day length marker points , and plants most definitely notice. Most garden crops are highly sensitive to this cycle of lengthening and…
Kirsten at Milkwood wrote a post this morning about the cost of producing good, clean food. I started to reply in the comments, and got carried away. This is something that I have been thinking on for many years. In fact, this article is an edited version of one I wrote for Permaculture International Journal over a decade ago.
It must be the moment in the year when eggs and potatoes both peak together to create the perfect seasonal food moment.
I have a simple, fast, comfort food dhal recipe in my Breakfast Cereal Challenge series from last year – Breakfast Dhal. But I actually managed to harvest some pigeon peas despite the parrots best tries to get through them all, and that was worth a super dhal recipe.
Sourdough naan are superfast and easy, except that, like all sourdoughs, you have to think ahead. If I think to feed the culture the night before, and spend 5 minutes making the dough in the morning, I can make naan to go with dinner just by multitasking while dinner is cooking. And fresh, hot, soft naan turn a curry or a stew into something special. The Recipe:
I’ve started harvesting the new potatoes, and I had all sorts of recipes in mind for them. But then, with them actually out of the ground and lightly scrubbed (they come out from under the mulch almost clean), I couldn’t think of anything better than just to boil them and eat them as they are. Sometimes I think you can overelaborate cooking. Parsley and Mustard Hollandaise Recipe:
My kale is starting to flower, so it was time to finish it off. This hot weather will bring cabbage moths and aphids around anyhow. It has been really hardy and trouble free, and has borne really well for months now. I’ve used it regularly at least a couple of times a week.
This year’s soap is made and maturing in the cupboard, hopefully safe from the mice who think it is literally good enough to eat. It will go whiter as it matures, and by Christmas it will be hard, white, fine grained soap with a nice clean smell and good bubbles. So nice to have so much of my Christmas shopping done already!
The first of the season trombochino, just picked and went into a Green Green Polenta. The first of the season cherry tomatoes, just picked and into soft boiled egg and tomato on toast for breakfast. The first of the season capsicums – these ones are Hungarian Wax.