We are coming up to the winter solstice in about three weeks time, but until then the days are still getting shorter. So leafies planted now will not want to bolt, but rather wait until their lovely fine tuned endocrine sensing system tells them the days are getting longer, spring is on its way, and it is safe to set seed.
The basis for this is very much like my Everyday Sourdough recipe. The fruit and nuts though inhibit the rising, and I like it best when it’s chokka with fruit and nuts.
I have Oceans Eleven being enacted in my garden. I’ve got just nineteen pea seeds up so far this year! I thought it might be birds getting them before they germinated, so I put some net over the boxes in the shadehouse. But they still got got. So I moved the boxes out into one of my fortress fenced garden beds. But they still got got. So I planted all…
For perfect poached eggs, you need very fresh eggs. You can add vinegar to the water, get it swirling into a little whirlpool, do whatever you like, but you won’t get perfect poached eggs without very fresh eggs. Fresh eggs cook in one little mound with the white all staying together and a yolk that is high and has a glaze of white over it. The white sets while the…
I wonder if you can see this? It was stunning to see but hard to photograph. This is looking from my verandah down at the gum trees in the early morning light, and they are covered in cobwebs! Hundreds of them. There’s a major convention of spiders happening at our place. And we have no mozzies. No sign of the mozzie plague that is supposedly happening all over Australia…
Out in the garden this morning in the rain, little grizzle about picking in the cold and wet, until I remembered – no visit to the supermarket after work, no trying to find parking close enough to avoid getting drenched, no queues of tired and grumpy people. Just this lovely quiet of a misty morning with trees all sparkling with raindrops and happy frogs calling.
If I can keep the routine going, I can harvest a dozen or so carrots pretty well most weeks of the year.
If you want to be voted best cook ever by a five-year-old, give them a bowl of warm mandarin curd and a spoon. It’s not exactly a balanced breakfast but it’s high protein, low sugar and pretty healthy, and oh so good.
This was an accidental discovery. I had some friends coming for lunch and I had baked ricotta with salad in my mind. But I’d forgotten that I’d used the ricotta. Oops.
There is no rule against using a timer though to train your superpower. The trouble is that how long an egg takes to cook to perfection depends on the size of the egg. The little eggs from the Australorp bantams I have at the moment take just over three minutes from boiling water to white all set and yolk just starting to set, the way I like them.