another bountiful harvest

Last week I had another great harvest; my third zucchini, more tomatoes and my first two chilies. 

There are plenty more chilies where that came from but most of them are still green.  This lot got thrown together into a prawn fettuccine.  Looks great but it was actually a bit bland.  Needed more oomph, maybe more garlic.

Still, it's great being able to eat from your own garden.  This is the last big harvest though; the tomatoes are slowing down and there's no sign of another zucchini.  The growing tips got hit hard by aphids, it's amazing how fast they can suck the life out of new growth.  It'll be a while before it recovers and by then it might be too cold. It's still February but I feel like the real warmth of the summer has well and truly passed.

february harvest

This is one of the bigger harvest for this year.  I've got another zucchini ripe, the tomatoes are going crazy, and of course some herbs.  The broad ripple yellow currants are producing like crazy, but to be honest I find them annoying because the tomatoes are so tiny.  You can't even cut them in half, they just splatter.  Next time I think I'll go with a slightly larger cherry tomato.

In any case, I turned this harvest into a dinner that came almost entirely from the garden!  The zucchini was sliced and dusted with cumin and smoked paprika before grilling.  The tomatoes were cut up and tossed with parsley and chickpeas.  The mint went into the yogurt with some garlic and lemon.  And on top, some fried haloumi cheese.  Seriously tasty.

It's not often I harvest enough to really plan a meal around it, so I'm pretty proud of this one!

jam ... again!

I found out on Monday that a colleague of mine is having a birthday and decided to make her some strawberry jam.  It's actually a lot simpler to make than the peach jam I made on the weekend.  And this time I took more pictures along the way!

Step one, trim 500g of strawberries, break them up with a potato masher, and mix in 350g of sugar.  I used the vanilla sugar my mother in law gave me from real Tahitian vanilla beans!  I don't know if you'll be able to taste it but I thought I'd give it a try.

Some recipes say to let the strawberries macerate overnight, some don't, but since I did this step as soon as I got home I decided to let them sit until after dinner.

Step 2, add some pectin.  Pectin is the stuff in fruit that makes jam firm and not runny.  Strawberries don't have a lot of it, so I added the juice of 1/2 a lemon.  Just to be safe, I wrapped the seeds and some of the rind of the lemon in cheesecloth like I did with the apple in the peach jam.  I sat this in the mixture whilst it macerated.

Step 3, slowly heat the mixture until the sugar dissolves, then bring to a roiling boil.  This foamed up a lot more than the peach jam did, so make sure you use a big pot!  Look at it go!  That pink blob in the middle is foam, which you should skim off so the jam doesn't go cloudy.

After boiling for 10 minutes, test some jam on a plate you've kept in the freezer.  If after a minute the jam is still runny, boil for another few minutes.  If it's a bit wrinkly and firm on the plate, it's ready to bottle up.  A lot faster work than the peach jam, which took 30 minutes of cooking before you added the sugar and another 20-30 minutes after adding the sugar.

Once again I tried putting the lid on the jar and turning it upside-down to sterilize the lid.  Once again, it threw up on the benchtop when I did that (my poor oven mitt is now coated in two layers of jam).  I got this jar from the supermarket, it's obviously not a very good lid!

In any case, as long as you sterilize the jars beforehand, keep it in the fridge, and eat it pretty quickly it's not a huge deal.  I just hope my work colleague enjoys the jam!  I kept back just a tiny portion to try later.

jam!

Making jam has always been one of those things I felt like I should try, but never actually got around to. I just all sounds complicated and a little scary, mastering setting points and making sure the jars are sterile. But this weekend I finally decided to try it out. None of it's from my garden but I thought I'd share anyway.

This is my nectarine and lime jam. I think it set properly, I tested (and tasted!) a bit on a cold plate in the freezer to see if I could run my finger through it and leave a trail (I could). I'll find out tomorrow how it is on toast but the little taste I had sure was good!

To sterilize the jars I boiled them in a pan half-full of water with the lid on for about 20 minutes. The cellophane on the right is the one I'm going to store until I'm ready for it, I'm told the cello forms a very good seal. The one on the left is just a coffee jar so it's not a great seal, but I'll eat that one first.

I now feel like I've ticked another box on my list of culinary challenges!

Sunday edit: I had the jam on toast this morning, it's seriously delicious! You can't really taste the lime which is fine, it's meant to balance the sweetness a bit. And it's equally tasty with a bit of soft goat cheese on toast. Yum!

an august harvest

Despite my enthusiasm for growing fruit and veg, my harvests are usually very small - a lemon here, a handful of lettuce leaves there. But today's dinner is a celebration of spring and called for one of my largest harvests.

I'm making lamb with prosciutto with a salad of peas, broad beans, rocket, snowpeas and radish with a mint dressing. The rocket is mine, those are my Oregon Spring snowpeas, and a slightly nibbled radish. Along with the mint I'm going back out for thyme and chives later.

It's so satisfying!

p.s. I almost forgot, my cherrytime capsicums have sprouted. Took two weeks, and they're going really slowly, but they're going! The tomatoes are coming along too.

Update: here's a snap of the salad I made from this harvest.

I made fresh bread to go with it.  My first free-form loaf was an Italian bread back in May that came out like this - it didn't rise properly so it was tasty but dense.  I tried the same recipe again and it was like night and day, I didn't realise just how light and wonderful it was meant to be!  It's my best bread yet, if I do say so myself.  It tasted as good or better than bread from a bakery, pillowy soft on the inside with a crunchy crust.  Still soft and delicious the next day, too!

about those chillies...

Well whodathunkit.  I picked all those chillies green and looky here.  The smaller ones ripened up!  I wonder if the bigger ones will too.

pumpkin soup recipe

I thought I'd share my recipe for pumpkin soup, since it turned out so well. I got it off the internet and it's a pretty standard recipe that you can easily modify to suit your taste.

Pumpkin soup

2T olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 leek, white part only
1 garlic clove, crushed
herbs or spices of your choice (see below)
1kilo (just over 2 pounds) pumpkin, peeled, diced
1 large potato, peeled, diced
1L (about 1 quart) chicken stock (I use powdered stock! and it tastes great)

Slice the leek in half lengthwise and rinse well between layers - leeks are very sandy and you don't want that in your soup. Thinly slice across the leeks and heat in saucepan with oil and onion over low heat for a few minutes until softened but not coloured. Add garlic and herbs/spices and stir through for 30 seconds. Add pumpkin, potato and stock and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low, cover and simmer 30 minutes. Allow to cool slightly then blend in batches.

As I said this recipe is easy to modify. Pumpkin can be matched with many herbs spices - a bay leaf is a good basic start. Rosemary or sage are lovely, as is a bit of nutmeg. Or you can go exotic and use cumin, coriander or even curry powder. Just don't over-do it, 1/2t dried or 1t fresh at a time is plenty. I used a smidge more garlic than the recipe called for, plus 1t chopped fresh sage and it was divine.

For the pumpkin, whatever you do, don't use American-style jack-o-lantern pumpkins, they're watery and tasteless. Look for a cooking pumpkin with a really thick layer of flesh, or if in doubt use butternut squash (but not acorn or spaghetti squash), though butternut is a sweet pumpkin. You can even replace the potato with a sweet potato but again, it'll make a fairly sweet soup which wasn't to my liking when I tried doing that.

You can also fry up a bit of chopped bacon or pancetta at the start, though personally I dislike using the whole "bacon bone". You can also add a bit of cream either at the end to thicken, or a dab of cream or yogurt when you serve.

Oh by the way, peeling and chopping up 1 kilo of pumpkin takes FOREVER.

pumpkin soup

I cooked up one of my pumpkins tonight to make pumpkin soup.  The last one I picked a little before it was ready and it was a bit bland.  But this one had an extra month on the vine, a few days curing in the sun, and a week in the cupboard.  It still wasn't sweet like a butternut pumpkin but personally I don't like pumpkin soup made with sweet potato or butternut, I prefer the more rich and savoury types of pumpkins. 

I can safely say it was the BEST pumpkin soup I've ever made.  Unfortunately I ate it before I could take a picture so you'll just have to imagine how tasty it was.

ok i lied

I said in my last post that I was going to stop posting photos of figs.  Well.  I lied.  Yesterday I picked TEN figs.  Ten figs people!  Look at these beauties!  Who wouldn't want to show them off?

I had to bring them to work to share them.  What a wonderful dilemma to be in.

pumpkin harvest

I've been agonising for about a few weeks over my pumpkins, wondering if they're ripe or if I'm meant to leave them for longer.  Now it's the night before we fly to the US for two weeks, and I still faced the dilemma: to harvest the ripest one or to leave it?  What if I left it and it's left too long and rotted?  If I pick it, you're meant to "cure it" by leaving it in the sun for a few days before storing ... but I wouldn't want to impose on our house sitters to worry about that.

And so I decided on the third option.  I picked the ripest one, chopped it up and ate it!  At long last.

It is such a beautiful little pumpkin!  Well not really that little, it still weighed several kilos.  It's certainly bigger than my goal of "small enough for meat to eat it all in one go."


And look at all of that rich, thick flesh and fat little seeds.  It actually was just shy of ripe, some of the seeds were a tiny bit green at the base and I saw one hint of green through some of the flesh.  Ah well, now I know better for next time, and I certainly didn't pick it too early (unlike the continued miscalculations with the figs).

I chopped up about 1/3 of it and roasted it with a bit of garlic, sage and rosemary.  I toasted up some garlic bread and cracked open a cold cider to go with it.  A lovely autumnal dinner, even if it isn't autumn yet.

The texture once roasted was incredibly light and fluffy inside, and savoury rather than sweet (which I prefer in a pumpkin). However it wasn't a very rich flavour, but that may be because it picked a smidge early and not cured, I hear that the flavour improves after a bit of storage.  I'll be able to find out after I get back!

And in the meantime, I hope my house sitters like pumpkin ...