Since I’ve been making sourdough, over a year now, I haven’t bought bread but I also haven’t bought crispbread. Crisp, seedy biscuit topped with cottage cheese and salad used to be a really regular lunch for me. So I’ve been playing with a homemade sourdough based version, and it’s joined the list of things I like homemade best.
It’s not as photogenic as it was delicious. Green beans in a creamy, nut based mild curry sauce.
I only half believe that plants pay any attention at all to a lunar planting calendar. But humans are another matter.
Rice has long been one of those foods I’m conflicted about. Mainly because of the environmental ethics. I’ve always thought I didn’t have the right conditions for growing it, I didn’t want to contribute to the degradation of the Murray Darling basin by buying Australian rice, and imported rice really isn’t in any version of a 100 mile diet.
We’re picking the very first of the limes, which opens up a whole batch of central American recipes. They’re still a bit green but juicy enough. And the third round of beans for the season are now bearing, so I also now have so many green beans of various kinds that even my favourites – the snake beans – are being allowed to grow out to mature for shelling. So…
The big thing I’ve learned in 30 years of gardening is that if you have a good design that uses the permaculture idea of stacking functions, and you get in a nice rhythm, you can keep a kitchen garden producing really well with amazingly little time or work. The other thing I’ve learned is that if you lose the rhythm, and the stitches in time start missing out on saving…
This year’s sweet corn has been less than exciting. First it was mice. Then it was weather. Some years there is so much sweet corn, I am using up all my repertoire of corn recipes. This year, half the cobs were missing kernels. I’ve had to actually choose my favourite recipes to use it on. This one made it.
Tromboncino is my new favourite vegetable. I got my seed from Diggers and I think they will displace zucchini in my garden. They grow like a very rampant cucumber, and by using lots of vertical space they conserve my precious intensively fenced ground space.
My partner is a chili fiend. He would eat chili beans for every meal if he could. We compromise. But I do make chili beans quite a lot. He’s a big bloke and he needs a lot of fuel. But, like me, he alternates between being very physically active and spending too much time doing sitting work. So the perfect fuel is very filling but low calorie, low GI, high…
Chooks and vegetable gardens are such an elegant arrangement. I’ve tried lots of ways of combining them, from domes to compost making down a slope, but I’m really liking the current solution.