Nowadays I quite often make a meal that features vegetables as the main, not the side dish, and I very rarely use any water that will be drained off. If you garden, fresh vegetables are so gorgeous that it is hard to improve on just serving them as themselves.
It’s getting a bit cold now of an evening for barbeques, but my partner still loves fishing. Fish soup is a great way to make a dinner party of the catch, and using the whole fish – head, bones and all – I feel like an ethical predator.
If you are new to kangaroo meat, this is not a bad recipe to start out with. The preserved lemon is the interesting flavour in it, and kangaroo is a great meat for a tagine because it is so lean and dense.
I picked some lemon basil, dill and culantro from the garden and blended the herbs with a bit of lime juice, garlic and olive oil to make a thick marinade. We laid the fish on the banana leaves on the hot barbecue plate, spooned the marinade over the top, and put some whole cobs of corn and whole zucchini on the side. Guests arrived, opened the bottle of wine, turned…
I’ve noticed that a couple of corms of garlic that hid in my garden and escaped harvesting have sent up green shoots. So I guess…
Our mangoes are starting to ripen, and this year there is a bumper crop. I remember as a child in suburban Rockhampton mangoes were so prolific in their season that they laid thick on the ground making even the air alcoholic, and even the flying foxes couldn’t get through them. I’m not big on preserves. Many years ago I made a rule that I was not going to preserve anything…