Eat My Garden

Summer Harvest

2009-04-05T13:23:00.001+10:00

On account of my slackness, here's the abridged version!

Cucumber pickle

2009-01-06T10:33:00.009+11:00

This pickle is exciting for a couple of reasons. When I was in England recently, I bought the National Trust's Good Old-Fashioned Jams, Preserves and Chutneys by Sara Paston-Williams, and it finally arrived off the boat this week. Naturally, I've been itching to get into it. The other reason is that it's made with cucumbers from our garden. Our very first home-grown pickle, although I did have to buy the onions and capsicum, since the birds pulled all my onions up almost before they'd bulbed, and the capsicums aren't quite ripe yet.

So, last night I sliced up two onions, a green capsicum, and just under a kilo of cucumbers using my new favourite device ever, my new V-slicer. Took me around three minutes to slice the lot of 'em!

The veges all went into my medium ceramic bowl, with a good handful of salt, to sit overnight and draw out any excess liquid. I covered the bowl with a tea towel and let it sit on the shelves in my dining room where it wasn't going to be disturbed.

Came back to it this morning and poured around half a litre of liquid out, gave the veg a good washing, and rolled it in a clean tea towel to wring the last of the water out. I left it in the tea towel while I prepared the vinegar.

Cider vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds and a little bit of ginger. That's it. Very simple.

I heated the vinegar, sugar and spices until the sugar dissolved, let it come to the boil, then emptied the veg out of the tea towel into the saucepan.

It's important not to simmer the veg for too long, or else you end up with a slimy heaving mass of greyish ooze, rather than lovely crisp green veg. Around five minutes should do it, and in my case, worked perfectly.

The tricky part was getting the pickle into jars. Because it is essentially vegetables in vinegar, it's important to get a good balance of veg and vinegar in each jar. Inevitably, the vinegar all rushes out leaving all the veg behind, leading to a scooping rather than pouring motion being required.

These will sit now for a couple of weeks to mature before being opened.

More harvest

2009-01-04T16:35:00.003+11:00

As we suspected would happen, now that the tomatoes have started to ripen, everytime I go out there, there's newly ripened ones on the plants. Today, I have harvested 2 cucumbers, 55g of snow peas, and around a kilo of tomatoes. This brings the total current harvest to:

5 cos lettuces
5cucumbers
4 strawberries
6 carrots
1.6kg roma tomatoes
455g snow peas
The little tomato in the photo above is supposed to be a Lemon Drop, but despite being the right shape, never showed any signs of being yellow.

I did notice while I was out there just now that the first mini capsicum is starting to darken from green to brown, so hopefully there'll be capsicum soon too. The corn is all flowering, and the beginnings of what I presume will be the ears of corn are starting to form too.

First harvest...

2009-01-01T21:13:00.005+11:00

Very exciting, our first big harvest. We've had almost all the lettuces out, and about half a dozen carrots, but I went down to check the state of things this evening, and found the following ready to come inside:
The tomatoes are not overly ripe, but the few that had ripened on the plants had been eaten by birds - they eat away at one side, eat the middle out, and leave the rest, like this:Not impressed. So as soon as they start to turn reddish, we're bringing them in to ripen in a paper bag somewhere dark. Not ideal, but at least we don't have to share with the birds.

Current harvest to date:

5 cos lettuces
3 cucumbers
4 strawberries
6 carrots
650g roma tomatoes
400g snow peas

Given we only planted nine weeks ago, I'm pretty happy with this. There's capsicums on the plant, but they're not ripe. The eggplant is flowering. The pumpkins are taking over the world, as is their wont, and there's about a dozen baby pumpkins on the vines. The corn is as tall as the fence now, and the flowers have formed, so ears shouldn't be too far away now. All in all, going swimmingly.

Chooks!

2008-12-08T09:59:00.002+11:00

We finally got up to Michael's sister's place last night to visit our chooks. She has six chooks in the pen, two for her family, two for Michael's parents, and two for us. We share the cost of the chook food between the three households, which means it's costing us around $10 a month for all the fresh eggs we can eat, and in fact sometimes more than we can eat. I will never buy an egg from the supermarket again - these actually look like eggs, and taste like eggs, rather than the insipid mess you buy at the supermarket. The yolks are bright yellow, and so tasty.

Garden Update - 25 November

2008-11-25T13:51:00.006+11:00

I was out in the garden this morning with the camera again. I can't believe how things are coming on. Lots of flowers and baby fruit - more photos ;)

Cherry tomato - this is loaded. There's no red ones yet, but they're growing bigger.

Lemon Drop tomato is flowering

Pajero strawberry - this clearly loved being put in the ground, there are these two strawberries, plus about a dozen that are just starting to develop.

Watermelon is starting to flower - it's pollinator plant died, so I'm not sure if they'll actually turn into fruit or what the deal is with that, but we'll see soon...

Pumpkins - they're going gangbusters, one or two are starting to flower

The cornfield is coming along nicely, most of them are around knee high now

Cucumber flowers

The miniature chocolate capsicums are growing - there's these two that are huge, plus around three or four more just starting to grow

The snow pea mess. I've given up on trying to keep them from growing up each other, just trying to stop them trying to grow up the lettuce at the moment. Most of them are starting to train themselves up the fence of their own accord though, so that's good.

Roma tomatoes - some of these are getting enormous, can't wait for them to start to ripen

Even the baby lime is flowering, and forming tiny limes. I'm not expecting a crop this year, but we'll wait and see what it does. It's still putting new leaves on and growing up, so I'm not too concerned about it.

My wild mint patch has gone crazy again - it's spearmint.

Next thing on the list is repotting this lot out - zinnia, nasturtium and marigold, for insect control. Every seed I planted germinated, so we've got plenty.

My salsa capsicum - I thought I'd killed it, but it seems to have revived nicely. Lots of new leaves, around a dozen flowers and at least one tiny little chilli growing...

Live Journal Feed

2008-11-24T12:35:00.002+11:00

EMG is now syndicated at live journal. Because I can.

Tomato sauce

2008-11-24T09:09:00.013+11:00

Tomatoes. Is there anything better? There's a nice man at the market from whom I can buy a case of tomatoes at a time. This month he had romas by the case, around 10kg, for $12. Can't sneeze at that, when they were going for around $3 or $4 a kilo everywhere else. The catch is that they are uber ripe, and some are already over the line - I got 9.5kg of useable tomatoes out of this weeks's box. That's still an excellent price. But it means you pretty much have to use them straight away. Since we're still swimming in tomato relish from the last time I couldn't walk past the nice tomato man without buying a case, I thought I'd have a go at a tomato ketchup.

As luck would have it, I'd been watching one of Jamie Oliver's shows during the week, in which he made a fabulous looking ketchup. I'd recorded it because I had a feeling I might want another look at it at some point. Copied out the recipe best I could, and had a go...

The first step was to make some passata - essentially, tomato puree with some onion and spices in. I cheated a little and bought two bottles of passata at the supermarket to get things started. I put the bottled sauce, and around 4kg of tomatoes into a saucepan, over a medium heat, and cooked for around an hour, until the tomatoes had broken down. I then added onion and spices, and since I would have to blend the ketchup later, elected not to blend the passata now, purely for labour saving reasons.

While the passata was cooking, I chopped the other 5kg of tomatoes. Not a pleasant exercise when the hands are showing the signs of the kitten teething - tomatoes being acidic and all, the juice doesn't half sting in little scratches.

I then chopped around 4kg of onions. Actually, that's a total lie. I put 4kg of onion into the food processor, and whizzed them. I hate chopping onions more than almost everything else, ever.

I sweated the onions in a little bit of olive oil, for about 10 minutes rather than the 15 suggested. If I had've left them any longer they would've burnt.

Meanwhile in the mortar and pestle I whacked some fennel seeds, coriander seeds and powder and cloves and gave them a bit of a stir. These were added to the onion for the last couple of minutes of cooking.

The onion and spice mixture was then added to the passata which by now was finished. This was followed by the chopped tomatoes, a bit of salt and pepper, ginger, chilli, basil (just the stalks, the leaves came later), some red wine vinegar and brown sugar.

It was round about this time that it became obvious I'd made an ocean of ketchup - that's my 15 litre stockpot in that photo, full almost to the top. Oh well.

I then brought it to the boil, no mean feat taking into account the volume, then reduced the heat to medium and cooked the ketchup for about half an hour, adding the basil leaves right at the end so that they don't just wither and disappear.

And then, the real fun began. Jamie makes it sound really easy on the show - whack in blender, push through sieve, bottle. The reality is an awful lot of buggering around, and ketchup absolutely EVERYWHERE. That was even without having a blender lid accident. Also, blending 15 litres of ketchup 500ml at a time to prevent afore mentioned lid accidents is nothing short of tedious.

Luckily Michael was on hand to take photos. Or something. Once the ketchup had been blended, I used a collander to sieve out the skins and the bulk of the seeds, since my sieves are too fine, and were just letting tomato flavoured water through.

Fortunately, not only have I been hoarding empty jars, but so has my mum, so I did manage to have enough jars on hand, although that did include two huge V8 juice bottles! You can see some of the tomato-flavoured devastation here, all over my stove.

A very, very messy production, but so worth it. Despite having produces gallons of the stuff, I can't see it lasting long. You can use it in place of tomato ketchup, but also as a base for pasta sauce, or probably on its own in pasta. Next time, however, may make smaller quantities at a time!!

Spring!

2008-11-11T11:59:00.005+11:00

So, I've been a little lax in updating here, although my excuses involve an overseas trip and a feline bereavement, so give me a break :)

It's well and truly Spring here in Melbourne, and despite the cosmos doing its very best, we did manage to get some planting done. I'll make some retrospective posts with some photos of the early process later if I remember. But we planted three weekends ago, and here's the most exciting parts of our progress, as of this morning (11th November).

Flowers and two fruit on the miniature chocolate capsicum

I had to have a stern conversation with the snow peas this morning, and explain to them that none of them were going to grow if they just twined themselves around each other. This one was long enough to reach the fence, but it looks like I'm going to have to keep an eye on them for a couple of days until the rest are long enough to train up the fence.

I put my strawberry plants in the ground this weekend, to get them a bit more sun and a bit more space than they were getting in the pots. They're loving it. Here's the two newest flowers, this plant has around ten flowers, and even the other runty one was two or three.

The first roma tomato - we planted six of these before we went away in late September, and they're loaded with flowers. There's around ten or twelve tiny little baby roma tomatoes on them today.

My Tiny Tim cherry tomato is absolutely loaded with green cherries. I've put a stake in it today, as it was starting to bend under the weight of around twenty or so developing tomatoes.

Here's the Tiny Tim after staking.

We inadvertently ended up with two punnets of corn seedlings, so we're busily growing our own horror film set. I've been telling Michael I'm going to buy him a scarecrow for Christmas to complete the look. It's hard to see from the picture, but they're a little taller than ankle high.

Second only to the corn, is the pumpkin patch. We'd bought a butternut seedling, and Michael's parents bought a pack of four different varieties for us for his birthday. So we've got five pumpkin plants in at the moment. Seperate from everything else, obviously.

And to finish with, some general state of the nation type shots:

The tomato bed - six Roma, five Grosse Lisse, a Lemon Drop, a Black Russian, a Mortgage Lifter (rumoured to be able to produce tomatoes up to 1.8kg - can't wait to see that one!!), a Green Zebra and one other variety I can't remember right now - will have to check when I get home.

Hanging baskets, or at least some of them - basil, curly parsley and pennywort.

Pots, some of which are out in the sun - Tiny Tim tomato, garlic, chilli, mint, a selection of cat grass/ cat mint/ catnip which the felines ignore, and the marigold, zinnia and nasturtium seeds I'm growing for bug control.

And out in the patch - only a partial shot, the others weren't so good... cos lettuce, carrots, bok choy, mini capsicum, eggplant, celery, corn.

So, the current contents of my garden is:

Mint
Sweet basil
Curly parsley
Two flavours of lemons
Limes
Kumquats
Tiny Tim cherry tomatoes
Chillis
Garlic
Onions
Roma tomatoes
Grosse Lisse tomatoes
Lemon Drop yellow cherry tomatoes
Black Russian tomatoes
Green Zebra tomatoes
Mortgage Lifter tomatoes
The other tomatoes - maybe Tigerella, will check
Snow peas
Cos lettuce
Roly-poly carrots
Bok choy
Mini chocolate capsicums
Eggplants
Corn
Celery
Jap pumpkins
Butternut pumpkins
Queensland blue pumpkins
? another pumpkin - gold something?
Strawberries

Eggs

2008-09-03T13:02:00.005+10:00

So, in quite exciting news, we have our first eggs from our chooks. They live with Michael's sister, since she lives in the really truly country and doesn't have cats to contend with, but it's very exciting none the less. We have two, and Michael named them Eggman and The Walrus.

Photos of the chooks themselves will no doubt follow when we get out there to see them.

Gratuitous Picture Post - Third and Final Part

2008-09-01T15:02:00.005+10:00

And now, for the finale, the current progress pics.

About an hour and a half of weeding with my hands and a claw-thingie (metal note to self - learn the words!!) yielded around this much exposed dirt. So not impressed. I think I'm going to have to get Michael to get into it with his big tough boy fork of doom and turn it all over so all I have to do is pick the weeds out, or else I'm still going to be weeding it at the next planting season.

Standing just outside the vege patch fence, looking in. We got around a third cleared back to soil, but more importantly got rid of some of the particularly nasty weeds that had sprouted - including something with the most vile spiky pods that someone told me was a thornapple, and a serious weed.

Same thing, just from standing in the vege patch somewhere.

And a bonus shot of the weird uninvited plant growing out of my compost heap. As I write this, I wonder if I haven't already posted this photo, but oh well. I'm going to trim that tree that's growing over from the other side of the fence, since it makes actually getting to the compost a bit of an effort if you won't want to get smacked in the head by bits of tree.

Gratuitous picture post - part the second

2008-08-31T14:33:00.004+10:00

So part two of the gratuitous picture post brings you the back yard of chez moi. We're lucky to have such a fabulously large yard, and the previous owners were pretty damn green-thumbed, so we've got a good beginning to work from. They were also keen vegetable growers, which has made it much, much easier for us to get started this planting season.

I've always had a bit of a dormant obsession with growing my own vegetables. We had a go once when we were kids, and managed to produce one lettuce that ran very quickly to seed, and a couple of very peculiar looking carrots, that had somehow grown out rather than down, and therefore looked rather like orange turnips. Not a crashing success.

Right, picture post, less rambling... on with the pictures, then.

The West Indian Lime planted and watered into the citrus circle. I'm hoping it will have enough room there between the lemon tree and the edge of the patio, time will tell I guess. I have vague plans to prune both the lemon trees at some point since they are a little unruly, so I suppose we can always make it more room that way if needs be.

First and foremost, I'm a crazy cat lady. No post about my yard could possibly be complete without the inclusion of one of our little darlings. This is Maddy supervising Michael in the vege patch. She quite likes to just sit there, so I think we're going to have to watch out for her when we actually plant. She doesn't use it as a bathroom or dig or anything, just sits there. But I can't see the veg liking that too much.

Michael showing the weeds who's boss. Once he got into it, they seemed to come up pretty easily, and the soil beneath them is pretty nice - as I said before, we're lucky that the previous owners were also vege growers so a lot of the hard stuff is already done for us! On top of that, the area we live in was a combination of orchards and grazing paddocks before the houses were built in the late 1970s, so its land that has been used for cropping of one kind or another for around 100 years.
This is where I'm going to put my tomatoes in, as the wall retains a lot of the heat from the full sun it gets, and we can grow them up a trellis attached to the wall which is a bit more attractive than stakes. Those two plants on the right of the bed are going, and this whole bed will be devoted to tomatoes, and possibly basil, if I can prove what I was told today that they like to be grown together. The edging around the bed was unfortunately not dug in at all, just sort of placed on the surface, which means that the grass has invaded over the winter. That nasty grass with the great big runner roots. Grr.

View from the vege patch back towards the house. You can see what is going to become the tomato bed on the left against the wall. The sticks in the top left will become some kind of ornamental grape the neighbours have kindly decided to share with us, and the monstrosity in the middle that consists of a dog kennel with some kind of shrub grown over the top will also be going. I may end up extending that bed out a little further once that happens, we'll see.

In Part Three: Progress made.

Gratuitous picture post

2008-08-31T10:15:00.006+10:00

A trip to the nursery and the first of the slightly warmer weather yesterday led to a flurry of activity. Here's some pics of the day's labour.

First, a trip to the nursery for seed-raising mix and a new watering can. Of course, like always,
I was unable to resist the idea of more plants. We came home with the following:

West Indian Lime - we'd been after a lime to round out the citrus circle, and this one screamed 'take me home, take me home and plaaaaant me!!!!!'. Like they do.

Roma tomato seedlings. These will go into the tomato bed when I finally get all the grass out of it. They're hanging out here in the meantime.

Tom Thumb cherry tomato. I'm planning to grow this one in a pot, at least for the time being. It's already flowering, which is nice, so we'll see if anything comes of them.

These will be tomato seedlings, I hope. The last time I planted seeds they didn't sprout. When I emptied the seed tray out, I could only find two seeds. I can only deduce something et them.

Brown onions. Again, I intent to grow them in a pot. I'm not sure whether this one will be big enough in the end, but it's a good place for them to start.

Next: The gardening part.

Blood Orange and Orange Juice

2008-08-17T22:03:00.004+10:00

There's really very little to say about this, but I just wanted to share the fabulous colour of this juice. Again, another market find, around 1kg of blood oranges to 2kg non-blood oranges (I'm pretty sure they were navels but I'm writing this after the fact so I'm not 100% sure). Enough chat, look at the pretty...

Fruit cut up and ready to be juiced. I'm so glad we found the juicer attachment for the food processor.

The slushy pulpy bits. Even they were pretty.

Around a litre of juice...

... fit nicely into my old V8 bottle.

Also, this was damn tasty juice.

Corn Relish

2008-08-17T22:02:00.010+10:00

Corn. The Wonder Fruit. What can't it do, really. We're big fans of corn in our house, and although that radioactive yellow goo they sell in jars in the supermarket under the name of corn relish does have a special place in our hearts, I thought I'd have a go at a slightly more wholesome variety.

Once again, unfortunately, I did not grow any of the veg I used in this relish. We make a monthly trip into the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, and this month one of the stall holders had corn for $1.20 an ear - what was I supposed to do!?

The photo above is of Michael using my mum's very nifty corn removal tool, me having silly girly hands and all. It's basically a set of metal jaws with handles, that strip the kernels off the cob. However, as you can see to the left, we had a bit of trouble getting it to take the whole kernel off, and wound up having to remove the remainder of each kernel with a knife. Oh well, now we know for next time!

Once again, the fiddliest part of this relish was all the chopping veg - aside from the corn, there was celery and two colours of capsicum to dice, plus onion. Once that was done, yet another easy peasy relish. (I should apologise but I can't locate the source of this recipe - I scrawled it on the back of an envelope off the internet, but now I can't find it. I will continue to search and update when I find it though).

1. I first boiled vinegar, salt and sugar in a large saucepan, until the sugar dissolved and the mixture was boiling.

2. In went the vegetables, and spices, and I reduced the heat and simmered the relish for around 10 minutes or so, until the veg got soft and the liquid absorbed. Again, due to my paranoia about sticking things to saucepans, I stirred it more or less constantly during this time.

3. Into my brand new spiffy jars, and voila!! The colour of this relish is incredible, and as it sits in the fridge the flavour is intensifying.

Tomato Relish

2008-08-17T22:01:00.006+10:00

Again, a disclaimer. I did not grow these tomatoes, but they had ripe tomatoes for $1.50 a kilo at the Vic on the weekend, and being as my whole family is massive fans of the old tomato relish, I thought bugger it, why not.

So, courtesy of my good friends ABC Tasmania, here we go...

1. Chop tomatoes, apples and onion into small bits. I got quite carried away and diced them right up fine. Two kilos of tomatoes will take longer than you imagine to chop.

2. Into a big saucepan goes the tomatoes, apples, onion and garlic along with the vinegar, sugar and spices.

3. Bring it to the boil, and stir it enough to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. In my case, since I'm quite well known for the variety of things I can stick to the bottom of a saucepan, I stirred it until it boiled.

4. The mixture then needs to boil for around one and a half hours, during which time I perched on my barstool in front of the stove and multitasked - periodically stirring the relish, as well as watching the league on the tellly, and peeling the onions for the pickled onions.

5. I then mixed the cornflour into a bit more vinegar and added that to the pan, leaving nothing left to do but to stir until thickened, then bottle.

This relish is ready to eat straight away, and has been a hit with the entire relish-loving family. I'm just looking forward now to when I can use my own tomatoes to make it :)

Pickled Onions

2008-08-17T22:00:00.009+10:00

I love pickled onions. Which is weird, because I hate onions. With a passion. But just try keeping me away from pickled onions. I have, however, been disappointed with the quality of the jarred pickled onions in the supermarket of late, and when I saw pickling onions at the market the other day, I thought I'd better have a go.

So, in the interests of full disclosure, I did not actually grow these onions, but they are from the fruit and veg market at the Vic.

This jar I bought in Kmart for around $8, the obviously saw me coming since I later bought a similar sized jar I intend to make another batch in for around $2 at the local $2 shop.

Anyway, first things first, since I only had the one large jar, I figured a good place to start was with finding out how many onions would fit in the jar. I bought around 3kg of pickling onions, because they were cheap cheap cheap and, as I already might have mentioned, I love pickled onions! As it turns out, approximately 1kg or so fit in the jar.

Once the onions had been peeled and top and tailed, which was a laborious job I managed to acheive whilst supervising the tomato relish, they were left to soak in a bowl of brine overnight. I made the brine by heating water and a handful of salt until the salt had dissolved, then allowing to cool before adding the onions.

In the meantime, I prepared the pickling vinegar. Into plain white vinegar I put a tablespoon each of coriander seeds, cloves and cardamom seeds, a couple of cinnamon sticks and a few bay leaves, and brought it to the boil. The vinegar was then left to steep for about five hours, before being sieved off and stored overnight until the onions were ready to bottle.

The next day, I drained the brine off the onions, and rinsed them well, then laid them out on a paper towel to dry off. When they were dry, I put them into the sterilised jar, and discovered that I could have fit a few more in, once I had removed the peel and ends. Not to worry.

I then sieved the vinegar again to remove all the gunk that had settled to the bottom overnight, mostly clove dust as far as I could make out, then poured into the jar over the onions. I folded up a bit of greaseproof paper and stuffed it in the top of the jar to stop the onions floating, at least for the next couple of days until they have absorbed enough vinegar to stay submerged.

These will be ready to eat in around three weeks, but I'm intending to leave them a little longer than that.

Preserved Lemons

2008-06-09T19:49:00.002+10:00

As previously mentioned, we're absolutely drowning in lemons at the moment. From somewhere, and I honestly couldn't tell you where, the idea of making preserved lemons appeared. Never mind that I had not idea how they happened, much less what to do with them. Give anything a go once, right?

So, armed with the very simple recipe above, away I went. Now, I didn't actually read the recipe very well, so here's what I did...

1. Take largest jar I could lay my hands on - an Indian sauce jar, big, but not the litre size they suggest. Probably just as well.

2. Raid lemon tree for the smaller lemons, as they'll fit happily into my jar. Also for approximately five nice big lemons for the juice.

3. Wash and dry lemons.

4. Ignoring the part about cutting the bottom flat, I cut each lemon into quarters, without quite cutting all the way through.

5. I then proceeded to stuff the lemons with coarse rock salt, a messy process and one not helped by the fact my hands are covered with small cuts after the rosebush wrestling the day before. Ow.

6. Cram lemons in jar, I made three fit which is plenty for something I'm not actually sure how to use.

7. Cover with more salt, and fill jar with lemon juice.

8. Seal, label and store. Seeing as I neglected to naff about freezing and thawing the lemons before I dunked them in the jar, it seems it will take about 3 months for them to soften, which I presume is the aim.

So now, I have three months to work out what to do with them. Preliminary investigation suggests that it's the skin I'm interested in, not the rest. I have no clue.

Lemon curd

2008-06-09T19:48:00.010+10:00

Lemon curd. When I was a kid, lemon curd in the fridge meant that it was around a week after the Church fete, since that's as long as it ever lasted.

We have two lemon trees in our backyard, and they are absolutely chock full of lemons at the moment - one of them is literally bending under the weight. The photo at right is the best one I can find of it, that's just a tiny little section, and as you can see covered in lemons rapidly ripening.

So, obviously, it's time to make the lemon curd. Now, there's some awfully complicated recipes on the internet, and I think I will in future simply work from a ratio - one block butter, half a bag of caster sugar, and 4 each of eggs and lemons. That makes around a litre of curd, and I can scale up or down as necessary.

The instructions make it sound dead simple - whack it all in a saucepan and stir it till its done. Like all things, it's not that simple. Well, it is, but you have to stir it *constantly* to avoid it burning to the bottom of the saucepan. You need to make sure it doesn't boil, since apparently that can contribute to the white egg floaties. Although I'm not sure about that, since this last batch didn't boil, and it still had white egg floaties. Perhaps they would've been worse had I let it boil. Who knows. But in reality, what you're in for is a fairly uneventful 20 minutes and cramp in your arm, while it thickens.

I had intended to make half the batch lemon and passionfruit curd after discovering a back of last summer's passionfruit in the freezer, but having dissected half a dozen of them and sat the flesh and seeds in a bowl to defrost a bit, I promptly bottled the curd and completely forgot. Oh well, next time.

Due to the concurrent glut of kumquats we're experiencing, I'm toying with the idea of having a go at a lemon and kumquat curd of some kind. Not sure though, suspect you would need to up the sugar, as the kumquats are quite tart - too much so to really eat them raw. Some other time, when I'm feeling a bit more confident, I think.

Mint jelly

2008-06-09T19:48:00.009+10:00

We discovered this weekend a sizeable crop of mint growing in the back corner of our garden, ostensibly through the fence from the neighbours. Closer inspection, okay let's be honest, the fact that it made my fingers smell exactly like Extra spearmint gum, made us pretty sure it's spearmint. A quick trip to the Font of All Knowledge, aka Wikipedia, makes me suspect we're right - it matches the picture of spearmint.

It was actually my mother's bright idea to make mint jelly, well, her idea was to make mint sauce but I always preferred the jelly, myself. So, away to the internet, and bless the ABC in Tasmania, because here we are again - mint jelly.

I pretty closely followed the recipe in this one, hacked up the apples and boiled them in the vinegar. I used honey apple cider vinegar, since that's what I had in the cupboard. The apple didn't puree quite as nicely as I'd hoped, but it's actually ended up giving a bit of texture to the finished jelly so all's well. I upped the mint slightly, to maybe 6 tablespoons, and I added a few drops of green food colouring because the weird brown colour it turned offended my delicate sensibilities.

Kumquat Brandy

2008-06-09T13:23:00.011+10:00

I have an enormous kumquat tree in my back yard, which is absolutely laden with kumquats. Reportedly, according to the former owner of our house, it is the best kumquat tree in the district, and will fruit all year round. A couple of months ago, when it started to look like this might actually be the truth, I raced off to google to try to work out what the bloody hell I was going to do with the inevitable 12 tonnes of fruit. At the time, the options seemed to be kumquat marmalade, or kumquat brandy. Now, let's be honest, there's only so much kumquat marmalade the family can eat. So, I decided to have a crack at kumquat brandy.

The very simple recipe I found on the ABC website called for 500g kumquats, 500g sugar and a bottle of brandy. I decided to use a flagon I had sitting around, and double the recipe. The basic premise seemed to be shove kumquats into flagon, add sugar, brandy and shake. Things, of course, are never that simple.

The kumquats all had to have their skin pricked with a darning needle, or similar. In my house, that "similar" would be a fondue fork. So there I am, spraying kumquat juice right left and centre, pricking kumquat skin. That, it turned out, would be the easy part. With the exception of the very smallest, actually getting the kumquats through the narrower-than-I-thought neck of the flagon proved to be a bit of a problem. Nothing a bit of brute force wouldn't see to, but it took me a lot longer than I expected, given that I had to cram every little fruit through the neck of the flagon individually. But success was finally mine. Onto the next step. Inserting the kilo of sugar into the flagon would've been much easier if I could've only found my funnel. But no. I first thought of a sort of impromtu funnel made out of kitchen roll, which would've worked had not the flagon been covered in kumquat juice, as what I ended up with was a sticky mess. Writing this a few months after the fact, I honestly do not remember how I managed to get the sugar in, but I suspect there was plenty of swearing involved. Follow the sugar with two bottles of cheap brandy (not that cheap brandy is all that cheap, as I found out), and voila!

The flagon required "shaking", or in actual fact wiggling around a bit, for the first month or so while the sugar dissolved, and then every now and then after that. In practice, it sits on the bar in the dining room, and I give it a swish around every time I walk past it. The brandy will be ready to drink approximately six months after the sugar and kumquats are added, which in this case will be around the middle of September. Stay tuned.

Since I last went looking for kumquat recipes, this site has appeared in my google results. While I'm not sure about some of them, there appears to be some good recipes for sauces and bikkies and thing on there.