A glut of chillies (4)

Picked

Pickled chillies (2), this version with wine vinegar

• chillies
• beans
• eggplant
• lemons

Second week in a row Friday afternoon  post-work cooking therapy is required. I decided to pickle more chillies - quick, easy and able to be done before dinner. Last week I did just the same but made a Chinese rice wine version.  Today I decided to use red and white wine vinegar (only cause I didnt have enough of either one to use only one type and so mixed them!).

Pickled Chillies (2)
chillies*
vinegar  -  I used white and red wine vinegar
olive oil
garlic

Cut up the chillies -  I left the seeds in this time! Take the skins off a couple of cloves of garlic. Prepare a saucepan with vinegar and olive oil to about 1/4 of the vinegar.  Bring to the boil , add chillies and garlic and cook for a minute or two. Put into sterilised jars.

Summer summary - '11-'12

Always grow sunflowers

With summer drawing to a close, here are some of my reflections on the season.

On La Nina

• It was unusually wet and cool for a Sydney summer, it came as a huge shock after many many years of drought.
  
• Dorathea McKellar knew about El Nino and La Nina long before  they had terms to describe them (I love a sunburnt country a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges of droughts and flooding rains...).
• La Nina is to be celebrated -  it saves my skin from added skin cancer risk and more freckles and  it fills the tank and means that you dont have to get the hose out and water!

On paying attention

•  My oft commented upon eggplants have been a slighly lighter colour purple this year and have had a soft light and fluffy flesh with few seeds.  I wish I had paid attention to their particular variety -  I want to grow them again. Or was their fluffy seedless flesh because of the plentiful rain?

On pest control  

zucchinis are not pests

• Eradicate the stink bugs when they are green babies and destroy them imediately! Even better, search your citrus for their lovely clear eggs and smash them before they can emerge.This way you might have a lime crop.
• Wear goggles when destroying stink bugs I got sprayed in the eye late last year and had to go to the optometrist to make sure I wasn't in some serious trouble. Tip -  irrigate your eye imediately if you get sprayed and you will save your eye.
• Hosing the aphids off the backs of the leaves of your cucumber works!  It uses a lot of water but it's better than spaying with other things and it's a La Nina year so I have lots of water.
• I now know what red spider mite looks like. I dont know what to do about it...
• Silvereyes (they are very sweet little birds) are great early season pest controllers in your tomato patch.  They search your tomatoes for green grubs and feed them to their babies. They also sometimes take a little nip.  Welcome them with open arms. Even if they nip your fruit. I can share with lovely birds.
• Glue traps work for reducing fruit fly. I love them!
• No matter how many glue traps you have, you will still have fruit fly.

On zucchinis

• Plant one zucchini and one zucchini only. Pick them young and eat them quick while they are at their best and have a miriade of recipes.  I have really enjoyed the ones I have used this year and no longer consider the zucchini a pest.

On tomatoes

• Pick your fruit before it rains lest it split!
• Learn how to eat split fruit in a La Nina year.
• My brown berries are more fruit fly resistant than the red varieties.
• Give up on growing large tomatoes in Sydney -  fruit fly is too much of a problem.



make lemon tarts

• Prune your plants a little in a La Nina  - this will help to ripen the fruit.  Don't prune  in a El Nino, your fruit will get sunburnt. Same goes for your skin really!

On chillies

• Grow them, love them, preserve, pickle, freeze, jam and eat them. They are one of life's great pleasures.
• Next year grow padrons, pick them, fry them and eat them with salt washed down with fino.

On lemons

•  Make lots of Lemon Tarts

On parsley

• curled parsley doesn't like La Nina as much as Italian.

On beetroot

frogs love La Nina

•  Dont be afraid of pickled beetroot.

On sunflowers

• Always grow sunflowers, always.

On frogs

• They like La Nina better than El  Nino.

A garden meal in a flash!

tonight's herbs

Picked

• basil
• chives
• parsley - Italian
• lemons

I got home a little late for my daily ritual of post-work garden adoration. Instead I cracked on with dinner.  What better to deal with the remaining tomatoes and the prolific herbs than version 2 of Tomato Herb Pasta. Here is oven roasted version 1.

Tomato herb pasta 2
This recipe is one of my favourites.  It is my version of a recipe from June 1999 Gourmet Traveller  page 61 and in that publication is called Fusilli with herbs, black olives and cherry tomatoes. * from the garden

pasta -  fusilli or bows or similar pasta
olive oil
a big pile herbs*  -  a mix of soft ones -  I used basil, parsley and chives
Kalamata olives  - pitted and sliced

 Tomato Herb Pasta 2 

cherry tomatoes* - cut in half
2 cloves of garlic -  chopped
1 fresh chilli*  - chopped finely
a few anchovies

Cook pasta until al dente, drain. Toss with olive oil and half the herbs and the black olives.

In a frying pan, heat olive oil and add garlic, anchovies and  chilli,  infuse the oil with the flavours. Add tomatoes and remaining herbs until heated through. The anchovies kind if disappear and just give you a little saltiness. If people dont like then, don't tell then they are there. It's a secret you and I can keep.

Top the pasta, herb and olive mix with the tomato mix.

Not sure that flash photography makes it  look very nice but it was delicious!

After heavy rain

Picked

two of the lovely big brown berries

• chillies  - they just keep coming!
• tomatoes - just brown berries now but gosh they are lovely!
• 6 spring onions - all used in dinner

Despite three days of some pretty heavy rain and flash flooding in some parts of Sydney, the garden is looking great!  It is draining nicely,  I must be doing something right.

broccoli seedling

The broccoli seedlings didn't suffer at all (I thought they would have drowned) in contrast they are booming along.

The spring onions are nice and firm and the beans have started to produce -  I keep picking and eating them in the garden so far none have made it inside.

new spring onions

Amazingly the brown berries didn't split with the rain.  Why is that? When I had the yellow currant ones and the sugar lumps in - they split.  Maybe the soil is better draining under the brown berries? That's my theory anyway.

new baby cucumber

More eggplant on the way -  I will save you from more eggplant pictures today... And, I think I have managed to beat the aphids on the cucmber with my 'spray the blighters off with the hose' trick. And the heavens helped too with a couple of torrential soakings and by filling up the tank after my wasteful use of water pest control method.

Tonight some of the eggplant will be used up in the often cooked Chinese Spicy Eggplant dish.  We cook it so often but am I bored? Not one bit.  David is the  chef!  Mmm can't wait.

The last of the zucchinis

Picked

some of today's eggplant pick

• 8 eggplant

 Pulled out

• 3 tomato plants
• weeds
• 1 cucumber plant that was too aphid-covered to save 

Other

• potted up the finger lime
• turned in the sugar cane straw that mulched the three tomatoes and added 1 bag of manure
• hosed off the aphids from the cucumber plant that wasn't so infested

I pulled out two sugar lumps and one broad yellow ripple currant tomato plant today -  they were getting sad as previous posts said.  The space left had few weeds due to a good mulching and I dug the sugar cane mulch in along with a bag of manure. I will let it sit for a while before planting -  probably fennel and a quick crop of radish and rocket?  We will see what I feel like when I get to it. I have plenty of seeds of both of these anyhow.

I also decided to try to do something about the massive aphid attack on the cucumbers.  One plant -  the older one -  was too far gone.  The other, a younger plant I deemed savable and used a technique I read once in a Jackie French book -  hosed the damn things off from the underside of the leaves.  This is something I wouldn't normally do... but I don't normally have such an aphid attack.  Perhaps it is as a result of La Nina? Lots of sappy growth to tempting for aphids to resist?  In which case then La Nina is the solution as well -  use the plentiful  tank water  to give them a blast!  Let's see if that improves things.  Where are all the lady beetles when you want them?

The extra heat and sun of the day pushed 8 more eggplant into pickability. It will have to be a serious week of eggplant eating to get thru the stash that is occupying  the crisper draw of the fridge.
 
The last of the season's zucchinis were eaten last night in a summer salad that I love. I didn't take a photo of it so you have to look at yet another picture of my eggplants!  I cant resist their purple plump beauty.

Zucchini and fennel salad
This recipe comes from Gourmet Traveller Annual Cookbook 2011 page 171.  I haven't put the exact amounts here for the vinaigrette, I rarely use them anyway going with my palate instead. * from the garden.

plump purple perfection

3 zucchini* (I used 5 small ones)
1 young  fennel bulb
1 spring onion* (the recipe says two but I think one is enough)
fennel seeds
Ligurian olives (I have tried this with other olives but the Ligurian have just the right flavour for this salad)
parsley*
chilli flakes
olive oil
red wine vinegar
lemon* juice

Dry roast the fennel seeds and chilli flakes and then lightly pound in a mortar and pestle. Put in the salad bowl and make a vinaigrette that suits your taste with the oil, lemon juice and red wine vinegar. Add the vinaigrette to the bowl and mix.  Take a mandolin and thinly slice the fennel bulb putting it in the vinaigrette as soon as you can, toss thru.  (I am having a bad week with my hands -  I manged to slice my thumb open while using the mandolin! That added to the chill burns of earlier in the week... I should be banned from the kitchen.) Thinly slice the zucchini and add it to the bowl along with Ligurian olives, torn parsley and spring onions. Toss and serve. This is yummy -  enough to get enthusiastic about zucchini.

We had this with some fillets of my favourite fish in the world -  Flathead.

A glut of chillies (3)

Picked

Some of today's chilli pick

• red chillies and the odd green one- about 300gms
• big pile of eggplant
• some yellow-green chillies

Another sublime day of sun and zephir breeze. All is well with the universe.

I don't normally weigh my pick but as I intend to make what I call, 'rocket fuel' today, I need to know what I am playing with.  Rocket fuel is a chilli paste or sauce I guess but this chilli paste could easily also be called, 'Devotional chilli paste'. You will see why  below - I need to crack on. The newly picked 300gms of red chillies joins two containers of chillies that have been in the freezer from picks earlier this season.  Total - 600grams!


Rocket fuel chilli paste

Today's pick

A friend of mine gave me this recipe some years ago now.  It was given to me as a photocopy from a cookbook and I can't say which book it was from, I give you the original amounts here. The original recipe calls this 'chilli jam', but it should be called what it is -  rocket fuel - its powerful and not very jammy.

A few jars last you forever - or last me forever. The last time I made it was three years ago and we only just finished the last of it a few months ago.

My Malaysian work mate gets thru a jar pretty quickly and says it reminds her of an authentic chilli sauce that goes with such and such a Malaysian dish, I will have to ask her which one and will have to pass her a jar as well.

The 600 gms of chillies makes for an easy calculation - divide by three.

1.5 kgs large red Chinese chillies*, chopped
300g red bird's eye chillies*, chopped
(I use whatever chillies I have) 
8 brown onions, chopped
15 large cloves of garlic, chopped
1 litre vegetable oil
300 mls tamarind liquid (get some tamarind paste and soak it in water until it breaks up and remove the large seeds)
125 g palm sugar, shaved
extra vegetable oil for sealing

Blend chilli, onion, garlic and oil into a smooth paste in a food processor. Be careful when opening the lid in case it splashes into your eye. The smell can be pretty overpowering to, so be careful of your nasal mucous membranes (and other sensitive bits too!).

5 jars of rocket fuel

Cook paste in a wide and heavy pan with a solid base over a very low heat until it turns dark red. This can take some time - the recipe says 12 hours, but from memory I gave up earlier than this the last time I made it and the result was fine.You will need to stir occassionally so it doesnt stick. After 12 hours (or when its redish and you have had enough!) stir in tamarind liquid and palm sugar and cook for another two hours. Spoon into sterilised jars cover with a film of oil and store.  Pop in the fridge when you open a jar. The recipe says it stores for 3 months in the fridge.

What do I use this with? All sorts of Asian meals and I also put just a tiny  little bit into tomato-based pasta sauces.  It adds real depth to the flavour without necessarily being hot.

So here is the result.  After 7 hours cooking I had had enough and popped it into jars. I tasted it and it is just like it was before. Not sure what it would taste like after 12 hours - I guess I will never know!

So far this season, in addition to this recipe, I have preserved the chillies in:

• Tomato chilli jam
• Red and green Thai curry paste
• Pickled chillies

A glut of chillies (2)

As a Friday evening salve to a week at work, I decided to pickle some of my green cayene chillies. I am sure you feel similarly?  Cooking and gardening are like sedatives, calming tonics and antidotes to the rest of the world. And I when you can combine both, there must be an added bonus, right?

Pickled chillies

I used 14 of the 24 long cayene in the freezer to make two small jars. Here they are!

But... I have hot little hands suffering from chilli burns.  The recipe calls for you to remove the seeds.  But the pictures that accompany the recipe are of lovely round sections of chilli. So, following the recipe (or at least the picture) I cut the chillies crosswise into lots of round little discs and then tried to remove the seed. Bad idea! After removing seed from the first 4 cut up chillies, I gave up on the idea of lovely round discs and slashed the side of the remaining chilles and opened them up to remove the seeds.

Pickled chillies

This recipe comes from http://rasamalaysia.com/pickled-chilies/ but I put my version here as well.

10 long cayene chillies (that's what I used but use what you have, the recipe called for 4oz - I didnt weigh)
Chinese rice vinegar - enough to top the chillies when they are in the jars
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of sugar
1 cup boiled water

Prepare the chillies by de-seeding and cutting crosswise.  Place in a bowl and blanch by pouring on  boiling water and steeping for 10 minutes. Drain and discard water. Add to the bowl the salt sugar and vinegar and mix. Stir and then transfer to sterlised jars.