Some years I don’t bother with European cabbage. My winters are short. The cabbage moths are active right into autumn, and back by mid-Spring. Cabbages take up a surprising amount of room. You harvest them once (unlike broccoli or silver beet) and then they’re gone. And then I have a cabbage year and remember why I love them and vow I will plant cabbages every year.
Imbolc is an old Gaelic word, there in the earliest of writings. It means “in the belly” and it is easy to see why this turning point in the old Celtic and Gaelic calendars was named for it.
The green doesn’t look real does it? But it is, late winter in my garden and skies that look too blue to be real and garden greens that look too green to be real.
It’s hard to do justice to a ragu in a photo, especially when it’s a winter dinner and there’s no natural light. But a ragu in the slow cooker is bliss to come home to on a winter night, and there are a lot more vegetables in this meal than appear.
This is just my Pumpkin and Feta tartlets baked as a pie instead, and with the feta crumbled over the top rather than blended in with the egg mix. And with an olive oil crust, though you could just as easily make it with a wholemeal shortcrust pastry instead. Worth a post though because it was so good.
I love having a craft activity in my life. Simple, repetitive, meditative hand work. Knitting or hand-sewing or embroidery, whittling or sanding or carving, painting or potting or mosaic. You hear so much of how healthy it is to do daily meditation, but I don’t have the self discipline for it. Life beckons from too many places.
This is the boy, and it’s hard to capture his true beauty in a photo. He is a beautiful satiny blue-black and his eyes really are that colour. And this is the girl. She came inside to try to steal tomatoes and couldn’t figure out how to get out again.
Tall climbers planted around the south side of a bed will never shade anything to the north of them, and with roots in newly cleared and fertilised and mulched ground and all that vertical space for sun capture, this is the most highly productive space in my whole garden.
These very inauthentic teff-less injera have become somewhat of a staple in our house, preferred to chapati for going with curry, preferred to flatbread for going with tagines, preferred to crepes for going with creamy garlic mushrooms. And all the better because, if you have sourdough starter, they are practically instant. Recipe:
In our olive tree this morning, no doubt blown around in the wild weather of the last few days. Anyone a better bat identifier than me? Is it a very young, small black flying fox (Pteropus alecto ). It’s the right face and colouring, but it is only about 30cm long and they grow to much larger. And it was all alone and usually they roost in colonies. And it…