Over 40ºC (104ºF) again yesterday, and it looks like it will get up there again today. But meanwhile, if life gives you lemons a good permaculturist makes lemonade. So if life gives you a heat wave, a good permaculturist forgets making tomato passata and puts all that lovely solar energy to work making sun dried tomatoes instead.
There have been several disparate themes mulling around vying for attention as my focus for 2013. I’ve been thinking about packaging, community, and how sharing food is so central, and I’ve been thinking about the conversation that is surfacing in permaculture circles lately about the misconception that permaculture is about self-sufficiency
Now how do you do justice to a tomato like this? You can stuff up beautiful produce by overelaborating. It’s hard to go past just a slice of sourdough toast, a drizzle of olive oil, and a beautiful, vine ripened Brandywine tomato in thick slices with salt and pepper. Tomato on toast for dinner – if you have real bread and a real tomato, you could elaborate a great deal…
You need real tomatoes – sun ripened, in season, varieties bred for taste rather than transportability and artificial ripening. For real decadence a few different varieties so you can savour each kind.
wasn’t going to post until the new year, but my love for patterns got in the way, and it seemed a pity not to make it a clean sweep – a Breakfast Challenge recipe for every week of the year.
The longest day, the shortest night, the night of midsummer dreaming. Happy solstice everyone! Today is the longest day of the year in the southern hemisphere and the shortest in the northern hemisphere, and it’s been a traditional festival for a lot longer than 2011 years. For me, it marks the start of holidays, a few weeks with some time with family, community and friends, some time visiting, some time…
Australian salmon are not a salmon at all, but a sea perch, and though sustainable, they are notoriously not a prized table fish. If fresh caught, bled, skinned, and filleted to remove the dark “blood” meat, the flavour is good – strong but good. The texture is more the problem. They are a bit chewy and soft at the same time. Only one way to honour the life of an…
Five serves of vegetables a day doesn’t seem like that much. I love vegetables and eat lots of them. But it’s amazing how easy it is to miss a day or two.
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.
The kangaroo stuffed peppers were so successful that I decided to try the same stuffing with squash, which is also at the peak of its season.