I’ve been bandicooting the yacon for months now, but this morning I harvested the rest – over 10 kg from about 2.5m2 of garden bed. The tubers are sweet and crisp and very good for you. My grandkids love eating fresh yacon just as is, peeled and eaten like an apple straight from the hand. We adults eat it mostly finely sliced in salads, or as batons in stir fries,…
Tamarillos are like a sweet, tart tomato in a tough skin. If you like tart fruit, they are good to eat just out of the hand. To my mind though, the highest use is for tomato sauce. In the tropics and subtropics, fruit fly make bulk organic tomatoes a bit of a challenge. I grow cherry tomatoes for eating and cooking fresh, but I’ve moved to substituting tamarillos for preserving.
I try hard to avoid gluts. It was always a goal even in rural homesteading with lots of room, but I’m even more motivated now in suburbia, where every glut is using space that could have been saving a trip to the supermarket. But I don’t mind full day in the kitchen every so often if the product is worth it.
My nasturtiums are seeding already. Not all of them – the ones in full sun flower most profusely and set seed first. But there’s enough…
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.
This is straight hot sauce – just chilies, vinegar and salt. Depending how hot your chillies are, it can be anything from magma to mildly spicy. Its simplicity is its strength – you can add it to anything without muddying flavours.
Peeled, the red eggplants work in just about any eggplant recipe. They are a bit more bitter and I tend to pick them green, just as the colour turns for most recipes. Unpeeled and fully ripe, they work brilliantly in an Indian style eggplant pickle.