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.
If you have a real sweet tooth, crystallised ginger is a good one because the spiciness of the ginger means you aren’t so tempted to overindulge. I’m not much of a sweet tooth, but this ginger, especially covered in dark chocolate, is to die for. And because it is so decadently gorgeous, it would make good last minute Christmas presents.
There’s actually only a small window of the year when rice paper rolls are the perfect thing. Avocados need to be in season, and coriander. You need macadamias and limes for the dipping sauce. Pickled radishes and turnips and ginger are wonderful in them. And it needs to be warm enough for that cool, clean, crispness to be just what you feel like.
My glut crop this week is ginger. It’s roots and perennials planting days this week, and I think it’s time to divide up and transplant the ginger. It still hasn’t sprouted but it is warming up very fast this year.
Kasundi is a good way to make bottling tomatoes good enough for gifts and treats, worth the $5 or $6 a jar they would be worth if you paid yourself for the time it takes. It’s a rich, spicy but not too hot, tomato sauce, great with eggs or baked beans (or eggs and baked beans!), or with dhall or dosa or on bean burgers or kangaroo burgers or a…
I was picking for an Indonesian style curry – ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, chili, Vietnamese mint (and I added – Kaffir lime leaves and garlic as well) and I couldn’t resist the photo. Add this spice base to an oily sauce and you have a wonderful curry sauce for fish or meat or poultry or vegetables.
I spent a couple of hours making corn vadai and azuki vadai and eggplant and beetroot pakora and zucchini muthia, and I really needn’t have bothered cos there were two clear favourites on the platter, and they were the quickest and easiest ones – the muthia and the pakoras.
This Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipe uses egg noodles, which are exactly the same as pasta. I’m a relatively recent convert to home-made pasta and noodles. For years I used to think home-made pasta 1. required a pasta machine, and 2. was just a carrier for the sauce anyway. In fact I was wrong on both counts.
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.
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.