Beat the beet week

Picked

today's beetroot pick

• a big pile of beetroot
• 3 punnets of tomatoes (berries and cherries)
• 2 cucumbers
• handfull of chillies

I had to pick most of the beetroot today. The swollen purple roots were sitting on top of the ground. Had I left them much longer I swear they would have pushed themselves completely out of the ground.  I hope I havent left it too late - will they be too hard and woody?  Or maybe not after the mild summer. We will find out very soon.

I have officially declared this week as 'beat the beet week'. I think we are going to have to be pretty serious about eating them to get the numbers down to a reasonable level.  Tonight I am trying Suburban Tomato's  Beetroot, fetta and mint salad  but think I will use vin cotto (just becasue I have it) with olive oil in my dressing instead of ST's suggestion. Might also be nice with some roasted pine nuts.

Giant bee-eaters

giant bee-eating praying mantis

Picked

• long cayene
• tomatoes - 2 punnets of berries and cherries (unsplit)
• tomatoes - 1 punnet (split)

Planted out

• punnet of baby basil ( raised from seed)

Other

• a tidy up in the patch 

What a beautiful day, warm and sunny, not too hot, just hot enough. A bit of light pottering in the patch was the order of the day.

Some of the tomatoes had sprawled a little too much and I removed the sprawling bits so that other things wouldn't get smothered. Needed to do a bit of weeding, what with the rain things were a little out of contol but soft damp soil made for simple removal.

long cayene

The long cayene needed a bit of staking -  it  too had got a little too leggy and needed some support, but in staking it I accidently broke some branches that were heavy with fruit. Damn! Serve me right for delaying the staking!  Anyway I have saved the fruit and will probably make green curry paste next weekend.  In the meantime they are in the freezer. Its such a shame - I would love to have seen them red.

Today's unsplit  tomato pick

praying mantis in rosemary

More wildlife?  We get the most amazing giant praying mantis in our garden. I saw one again today. One year when the lomatia was flowering heavily I sat and watched a giant praying mantis hunt the bees that came to the blooms. It would freeze near a flower head and wait patiently (what anthropomorphism - how do I know it was patient!) and then stike with its barbed long front legs and quickly snap the bees onto its barbs. It would then eat the bee head first. What would it do with the barb at the end of the bee, we wondered? Surely it would throw that bit away? No -  the praying mantis ate every scrap of the bee.  I watched it facinated for at least half an hour as it, one by one, ate bees.

Since then, each spring and summer we have spotted numerous giant praying mantis in the garden and noticed its egg cases positioned on those plants that have prolific flowers across the garden.

A non-gardening Saturday?

Picked

striped marsh frog from Frogs of Australia website

• 1 punnet of tomatoes
• thyme
• parsley
• chillies

What? A non-gardening Saturday? How can that be?  Yep!  I spent the whole day looking and applying for jobs. Oh well, at least it wasnt raining!

Tank full and ground watered everything is back into growing mode now that the sun has come out again.

With the frogs 'plonking' away in duets and mozzies buzzing my ankles (both have enjoyed the wet season!), I provide tonight's recipe.

Roasted fennel with cherry tomatoes , olives, garlic and olive oil (Hmm one of those ingredient list recipie titles!)

This is 'a Jamie' ( you know who I mean), it is such a favorite that I dont look at the recipe anymore so I  provide my version to share with you. It has a few added extras that I think work (chillies and shallots). It's from the irritatingly titled, "Happy days with the naked chef", but I do like his food and I  remember fondly  how bright and colourful his books looked  to me during our 5 years in England and that makes me feel good about any daft title. Fancy that, a Jamie book is an antidote to seasonal affective disorder. Perhaps it should be prescribed along with sun-imitating light bulbs!

2 bulbs of fennel (I bought these cause mine had all gone to seed)
cherry tomatoes*
shallots (the oniony little ones -  not the spring onion ones)
1 large handful of black olives
1 small handfull of thyme*
2 cloves garlic*
1 chilli chopped (seeds in ok with me)*
Vermouth or lemon juice* or white wine
olive oil

Heat roasting pan  with olive oil in oven. Add peeled shallots and the tops of your fennel -  the stalky and feathery bits and cook for a bit.

Heat water in a saucepan and blanch fennel bulbs cut into quarters. Remove with slotted spoon and add to tray along with tomatoes, garlic, olives and thyme. Drizzle with more olive oil and either Vermouth, or white wine or lemon juice and roast until  everything looks yummy and the tomatoes have started to split and ooze.

I often also pop into the same pan salmon fillets and cook all together.  I make it so often that  I say to myelf, 'come on, surely you could be a little more imaginative?', but then I eat it and remember why it is such a favorite.

Back to the frogs.  I have now found out that our frogs are striped marsh frogs, apparently one of the first to colonise backyard frog ponds and a 'voracious hunter'. Not voracious enough! I wish they would eat the mosquitoes!

Just noticed the similarity betten Harriet and the plonkers? Grey-brown stripes!  Harriet is not a voracious hunter thankfully!

Food quotes

Zucchinis terrific! Like bunnies, prolific!

On cooking and eating

If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn't have given us grandmothers. - Linda Henley

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.- Lewis Grizzard

Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. -  Hippocrates

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. - an American proverb

Worries go down better with soup.  - Jewish Proverb

Soup is liquid comfort.  - Author Unknown

Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn. - Garrison Keillor 

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. - Michael Pollan

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating. - Luciano Pavarotti and William Wright

This cabbage, these carrots, these potatoes, these onions ... will soon become me.  Such a tasty fact! -  Mike Garofalo 

On vegetable growing

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.  - Gertrude Stein

The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes. - Doris Lessing

Ripe vegetables were magic to me.  Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility.  I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green.  To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath. -  Michael Pollan 

On living simply

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed. - Jeanette Winterson

Better to eat vegetables and fear no creditors, than eat duck and hide from them. - The Talmud

On zucchinis

Zucchinis terrific! Like bunnies, prolific!-  Author Unknown

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini.  Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables.  At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt. -  Dave Barry

Quotes sourced from:

http://www.special-dictionary.com/proverbs/keywords/lemons/ 

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/vegetables.html#ixzz1lJJmXwT4

http://www.quotegarden.com/food.html

http://www.gardendigest.com/veget.htm

Look what I've got

Dream come true - padron seeds!

Picked

• 2 cucumbers
• a handfull of chillies
• 1 punnet of red cherry tomatoes (unsplit)
• 2 punnets of mixed tomatoes - cherries and berries (split)

Padron seeds! Shame it's not planting season, but padron are no longer unattainable. I am liking this blogging caper! Thanks to L from 500m2 in Sydney and  her referral to the Italian Gardener. Now I can dream of next spring, look at my packet of seeds and know that  piles of hot pardon with their little green skins all blistered, scattered with a little sea salt and accompanied by a glass of fino is not that far away.

And I am going finger lime hunting this weekend.

Today's two cucumbers

Today our yard was a baby bird creche.  It seems that Laurie and Keats have two babies.  Both turned up today driving their parents to distraction.  The babies were engaging in adolecent risk-taking behaviour. Instead of staying safely up on the balcony rail away from Harriet (who isnt really a bird catcher and who was hiding from the wet weather and nowhere to be seen) they doodled around on the stairs of the deck and grazed on  the grass without a care. Their parents wildly screetched at them while they were doing this as if to say, "what are you doing down on the ground, you are a bird - the cat will get you!"

Then there was a little tribe of silver eyes that swept thru the blueberry ash....

Chinese spicy eggplant

silvereye - not my photo

Tonight it's Chinese Spicy Eggplant for dinner (see Techno bimbo for recipe). Uses lots of eggplants, garlic, chillies and spring onions!

Bad split tomatoes, good split tomatoes

bad split tomatoes - two of many

Picked

• basil
• thyme
• oregano
• parsley

Got home a bit late for the usual garden inspection before dinner, but tomorrow morning I KNOW what I will find. Lots of split tomatoes becasue of too much rain!

It is a tough tomato season in Sydney.  Since planting in early October - a full month later than I usually plant because it was cold  (for Sydney) -  I have had  lots of leafy growth, slow flower set and then flowers that were not pollinated  becasue it was "too cold for the bees" , at least that's what  the gardening show on Saturday morning on 702 ABC  Radio said.  Then lots of fruit  not ripening becaue of no sun and mild weather! While I have been picking, there are still so many  to turn.  And  today, a day of nothing but rain,  means that anything struggling to ripen will have split! That's the bad splitting tomato.


Good split tomatoes? Well that was dinner. Damn! I didnt take a photo!

Tomato herb pasta
lots of cherry and berry tomatoes*
garlic*
fresh herbs, whatever you've got I used basil*, parsley*, thyme*, oregano*
Kalamata olives cut into thin bits
pasta
olive oil
dried chilli flakes

Heat oven. Prepare a baking tray with olive oil. Prick lots of cherry and berry tomatoes and place in the baking tray. Pop in oven until they have started to split and wilt but are still round and juicy.

In the meantime put the pasta on, cut up herbs, garlic and olives.  Heat some oil in a pan and cook garlic a little. Remove and mix all ingredients together (oil, garlic, herbs, olives, tomatoes). Mix through pasta.

Serve with parmesan and ground black pepper and eat. Yum! Good split tomatoes!

New look and La Nina

Picked

smaller chillies

• chillies
• 2 punnets of little tomatoes
• lemons

I had to do it! The former design was driving me crazy, all that sprawling vegetation made a difficult background for text, it had to go.  But I am so sorry if it was pretty crazy for those reading the blog at the time – there were a few of you, I know.  I wonder what the on-screen experience is like for those viewing while I changed the design?  I am sorry if it was too weird! 

But back to the garden…

very long cayene chillies

It’s February!  It’s February? Really?  I don’t know what fellow Sydney gardeners are feeling, but this mild, wet, La Nina year has made the garden lag so far behind where it normally is. In an El Nino year,  February is usually my month for pulling some of the spent and exhausted summer vegetables out, feeding the soil up again, getting in the broad beans, the broccoli and the leeks, etc. Have we gotten used to gardening with the little boy?

But right now, while I am picking tomatoes each day, the plants still have loads of green fruit going nowhere. The chillies too! I am picking but still have so many green chillies struggling to ripen. I am growing two types this year -  a smaller chilli (which I have been picking) and a very very long cayene (which havent ripened yet). Aren't they amazing!

And the cucumber? I have 4 in the fridge and other 4 soon to pick and the plants look like they will produce until after Easter if the cold doesnt get them or if they dont mould up with the dampness!  The trouble is it’s just not the kind of weather where you want to sit down to plates of salad!  We did have one salad appropriate day this week - David made a Chinese cold noodles with cucumber and it was great, but I am really wondering what to do with all these cucumbers in such cool weather.  Anyone got any warm cucumber recipes? Do such recipes exist? Are they edible?