My invoice from Daley’s fruit tree nursery says that on 28 October 2019, not long after we started our retrosuburbia journey, in the midst of a drought and just about to be thrown into the worst bushfire season ever, I bought a whole batch of fruit trees for a verge planting. Patience has never been my strongest virtue.
Sunlight in my basket. Limes, lemons, mandarins, oranges. So many of them that I am making salted limes for adding to summer soda water and salted lemons for that little salty sour-sweet note that lifts so many dishes out of the ordinary. I’m making lime syrup for cordial, but not being a real sweet tooth, mostly for Asian style dipping sauce for things like rice paper rolls. I’m making Indian…
The low-light photo doesn’t do it justice. Usually I don’t post something the first time I make it, but this will be the last time for the season too. Enough pickles on the shelf, and no tahini in the pantry for baba ganoush, and a batch of chick peas cooked for felafel. So I tried something different. And now there are no more eggplants till next year to do it…
No doubt this recipe is not authentic, and I would love anyone who has a real Vietnamese grandmother to share the authentic version. But one of the nice things about multicultural Australia is the cross fertilization of ideas, in food as in everything else.
All in about an hour. I couldn’t bear the amount of citrus sitting around so I found an hour this morning to make preserved lemons (on the right), lime pickles (back left), lemon cleaning vinegar (at the back), lemon vinegar (tall bottle), and at the front, kumquat marmalade.
The dip is really simple – just avocado blended with lots of coriander leaf (more than you would think) and lime juice and salt to taste (not too much of either). The chips though are a really good invention.
My glut crop this week is sweet corn – the last round of sweet corn for the year. Sweet corn is one of the trickier crops for a home gardener. What goes wrong?