Thai (ish) Red Curry Paste

I made red curry paste last week.   I intend to make a few batches of it before both; I exhaust my supply of fresh lemongrass and the thai basil packs it in for this year.  I find you can be fairly flexible with the ingredients of curry paste.  This probably isn’t particularly authentic but to me thats not as important as whether it tastes good.  For instance I would prefer to make my own with fresh ingredients and potentially sacrifice a component or two, (in a ideal world this would have galangal in it), rather than buy a paste that has sat around in a jar for months.

This is what I put in this weeks paste:

Thai Red Curry Paste

  • 2 tspn coriander seeds
  • 1 tsp cumin seeds
  • 100g shallots – chopped
  • 4 large cloves garlic (actually I used about 8 small ones as thats what I have left from my summer harvest) – chopped
  • 5 hot chillies – chopped (or more to taste)
  • 3 lemongrass stalks – chopped
  • 1 tspn chopped coriander root
  • 2 tsp shrimp paste

Roast the cumin and coriander seeds*, then grind.  Place all ingredients including ground spices into a food processor and whizz together with a splash or two of water to make a paste.

I haven’t included ginger in this paste as I usually use this paste to make curry and I add the ginger seperately.  If you are using it for something else it might be worth adding ginger into the above recipe.  Galangal also works really well in this recipe, as do ground white peppercorns.

I use fresh chillies because that is what I have at the moment.  Dry ones are great too – just soak in water first.

*I do this on the stove top in a dry frypan – move them around a lot and roast until they just start to change colour and smell yummy.

I’m sharing this recipe on The Gardener of Eden’s Thursday Kitchen Cupboard , which this week is at Spring Garden Acre and Greenish Thumb’s Garden to Table.

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Top 5 – Ways to Kill a Tomato Plant

OK so the title is a little over the top, but my daughter has been particularly melodramatic of late and I think its rubbed off.  What the post is really about is the mistakes I have made over the years, when growing tomatoes.

1. Insufficient food – I actually think I made this error this year, in my rush to get them in I didn’t prepare the bed as well as I could have.  I added some Dynamic Lifter (pelletised manure) to the soil but thats about it and despite good initial growth the plants just ran out of steam (or more accurately food).  They perked up a bit when I gave them some fish emulsion but it was really a case of too little too late.  Tomatoes need good levels of nitrogen, phosporus, potassium and calcium and I suspect mine ran out of most of these.  This year I will prepare my beds properly with lots of organic matter (manure and compost) and hopefully will be rewarded with stronger and healthier and thus more productive plants.

2. Sowing too early/too late – The old adage is true – ‘timing is everything’.  Plant out your tomatoes too early and they just sit there unhappily and look sad.  Sometimes they never fully recover – especially if you make the mistake of planting out before the last frost and it kills them.  Plant them too late and you could run out of warm weather needed for ripe fruit, or worse still the first frosts arrive before your crops.  Having said all that, I do find that most books on tomato growing in Melbourne err a little too much on the side of caution particularly when it comes to early plantings.  I have happily planted out tomatoes in August before (admittedly in a pretty mild year) and I don’t think their progress was slowed much at all.  Personally I think the key is a slightly staggered planting out (in Melbourne from perhaps September to December) to allow for both early and late crops  – especially if you have room for lots of plants.

3. Irregular watering – Tomatoes like regular consistent watering – but not too much.  Too much water will cause the roots to rot and as a result the plant will be less able to withstand any periods of hot weather.  The signs over watering are very similar to the signs of underwatering as in both instances the plant isn’t able to access sufficient water from the soil – in the case of under watering because it isn’t there and in over watering because the roots have rotted so they don’t have a big enough root system to take up the water.  Other watering issues include: Too much water while the plants are fruiting and the fruit may split and too little water and the fruit don’t reach a nice size.  This year I’m pretty sure I over-watered my tomatoes, they like it on the slightly dry side but that isn’t really what I gave them and they looked pretty unhappy at times as a result.

4. Pests & Diseases – Is there any disease a tomato can’t get?  And why do all tomato diseases look pretty much the same but with differing sizes and shapes of brown spots on the leaves?  And its not just the leaves and stem, from blossom end rot (which may be a sign of a lack of calcium) to fruit fly there are endless things which can destroy your fruit as well.  Good soil, attention to garden implement hygiene, judical pruning of effected branches and the removal of bugs will all help but sometimes there isn’t much you can do other than simply hope for the best.

5. Unsuitable varieties – All tomato varieties are not the same.  There are some which will tolerate far higher levels of humditiy than others.  There are some which will grow happily in colder temperatures than others.  Some take far longer to set fruit than others.  If you plant the wrong variety for your micro-climate it is very easy to have some very sad looking plants.  The early fruiting varieties are generally better suited to cooler areas and equally there are some varieties which cope far better with the tropics than others.  Because temperatures vary from year to year some varieties do much better in some years than others.  This year I found Rouge de Marmande did really well for me but that Purple Russian was absolutely hopeless.  I wonder what will do well for me next season…

So what else could I do to my tomatoes to reduce their productivity?  Any hints you could give me would be much appreciated as I’d prefer not to destroy my tomatoes in any new ways next season…

Wanting another Top 5?  The New Goodlife talks TV this week.

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Monday Harvest – May 14th 2012

Its cold here today (59F/15C) and as a result I don’t know how much longer the summer crops will last.  We are still getting eggplants, a few tomatoes and the never ending chillies.

What we are not getting are decent coriander crops, I pulled up this lot which had bolted before producing many leaves  in order to use the roots in a Thai red curry paste.  The paste also contained the lemongrass.

The below Thai basil, kaffir lime leaves and chilli went into the curry I made with the paste.

I just know that I will be harvesting a bit of silverbeet (chard) each week from now until Spring so I am trying to find new ways of photographing it.  Not entirely sure that this one was that successful photographically but it did taste good in Chicken Saag.

Another thing that I harvest each week and have similar photographic issues with is parsley.  I can’t remember if this lot became stock, was used in bean and chorizo casserole or was simply used in salad.  What I do know is that the lizard didn’t eat it.

The reason why I am trying to find different ways of photographing parsley and chard is clear when you see this next pic – while this picture is fine do you really want to see it every week?  Celery is something that I harvest every week so I need to come up with some new ideas for that too.  Thoughts anyone?  I do like the little spider in the bottom left of the photo though.

Despite the cooler weather I’m still eating a lot of salads – this basket went on to become a Salad Nicoise which I ate for lunch one day last week.

I didn’t only harvest summers crops and greens this week.  More tamarillos hit the basket, I’m up to about 50 so far and counting:

Finally, I decided it was high time I harvested one of our pots of turmeric.  This is what it looked like just out of the pot.

This is what the rhizomes looked like after I’d cleaned then up a bit:

This is a pretty small harvest admittedly but then my climate is really not well suited for growing turmeric and this is really something of an experiment.  This is my second year of trying and I’m learning all the time.  This lot comes from some rhizomes that I left in the pot over winter.  I will be interested to see how much bigger or smaller it is than that from the pot with freshly purchased rhizomes.  My suspicion is that I will get better crops from rhizomes that I either buy fresh each year or lift and store until the next planting season as our winters probably cause a reasonable amount of it to rot in the ground.  But I might be wrong.  I’ll leave my other pot for a few more weeks and then harvest it and compare.

For more harvest related excitement head over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what else is being cut this week.

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The Kitchen Garden in May

Each month during the past year I have written a page describing what I do in the Kitchen Garden in that month.  You will find them on both my side bar and above under Planting Notes.  I have written one for every month except for February and March which I will get around to soon hopefully – or at the very least before February next year…

The information is designed for a southern hemisphere temperate garden.  If you can add any info to my pages then I would love to hear from you.  What do you do in your garden in May (or November for the Northern Hemisphere equivalent)?  What do you/have you planted and what do you harvest?

This is what I have written for May so far:

May, to me, is about watching garlic grow, seeing the broad beans shoot up, wondering whether the capsicums will ripen and eating bowl after bowl of pumpkin soup.

Seeds to Sow:

Broad Beans, Cabbage, Carrot (not all varieties), Chives, Garlic, Kohl Rabi, Lettuce, Mizuna, Mustard Greens, Oregano, Onions, Parsley, Peas, Potatoes, Radish, Rocket, Shallots, Silver Beet, Spinach, Spring Onions, Watercress

Seedlings to plant out:

Bok Choi, Broccoli, Brussel Sprouts, Cabbage, Cavolo Nero, Cauliflower, Leeks, Lettuce, Pak Choi, Parsley, Silver Beet, Spinach, Watercress,

Garden maintenance to perform:

  • Order seed potatoes.
  • Prune Tamarillo, after harvesting all fruit.
  • Tidy up Autumn fruiting plants as they finish.

Seasonal Plants Harvesting now:

Beans, Capsicum, Citrus, Chillies, Eggplant, Feijoa, Ginger, Pumpkins, Sweet Potatoes, Tamarillos, Turmeric, Tomatoes (although mine have usually finished)

The following plants should be able to be harvestable all year round if planted in succession throughout their growing season:

Broccoli (but it is very susceptible to pests during the warmer months), Beetroot, Carrots, Celery, Lettuce, Mint, Parlsey, Radish, Sage, Silver Beet, Spring Onion, Thyme

 

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Growing Sweet Potatoes in Melbourne – Part 2

Look what’s happened to me again.  I say again because exactly the same thing happened last year.  A long forgotten sweet potato decided to shoot while abandoned in the back of my cupboard.  Cool huh?  Like last year I plan to turn this happy accident into a growing opportunity.

My plan is to leave this one in the back of the cupboard until July/August then separate each of the four shoots from the tuber and place them into a glass of water until they form roots.   This worked really well last year.  Roots formed within a week or two at which point I planted then into 10cm pots filled with potting mix.   I can’t think of any reason why you couldn’t skip the rooting in water stage but I do quite like rooting plants in water occasionally so the kids can see what’s happening.  I kept the seedlings inside the house until the weather warmed up in October and I could see roots creeping out the bottom of the pot.  I then planted them in the garden.

Of course relying on lost potatoes in the back of your cupboard for shoots is probably not the best planning in the world.  If you haven’t forgotten to eat a sweet potato but still want to grow them Garden to Wok shows you how to get them to shoot by putting the tubers into glasses of water.  Mine grew from normal supermarket bought sweet potatoes.  I think the variety that are generally sold in Australia are Beauregard so I presume that is what I have been growing.

The other propagation alternative is to grow them from cuttings.  Sweet potatoes strike incredibly easily, in fact mine layered (when the stem puts down roots upon contact with the soil) themselves in many places - where ever they had come into contact with the ground.  At the points that they layered themselves they also began to form tubers – although these weren’t nearly as developed as those at the initial planting site.  Sweet potatoes are pretty vigorous, mine grew pretty much anywhere I let them.  Next year I think I will trail the vine up and over something (hopefully a chicken house if we ever finish it) rather than just letting it run rampant over the ground and up the fence.  Although the below picture doesn’t really show the extent of its spread you can see it both attempting to engulf my lemongrass and heading skyward up the fence.

My sweet potatoes were planted out at the very end of October so they had about 6 months growing time.  They didn’t have anything like full sun but what sun they had was warm afternoon sun, and the place I planted them is pretty sheltered.  Before planting I prepared the ground with cow manure and then mulched thickly after planting.

My understanding is that its best to avoid feeding them with too much chook manure as its high in nitrogen and they will put on leaves at the expense of tuber growth.  From each plant – I only planted 2 – I have probably harvested about a kg of tubers.  Not a sensational return but still pretty exciting.

I have harvested one plant completely but left some of its layered stems in place.  The other plant I have left in after bandicooting a couple of large tubers from it.  Sweet potatoes are perennial but it will be interesting to see how it deals with a Melbourne winter.  My feeling is that; if any remaining tubers don’t rot over winter then there’s no reason why they shouldn’t send up new shoots in Spring.

Normally on Thursday’s I post a recipe but I’m struggling to find the time during the day to both cook and photograph a dish.  Hopefully I will get a chance this weekend and will be back to recipes this time next week. 

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Top 5 – Beetroot Dishes

You can grow Beetroot pretty much all year round in Melbourne, but for much of the year other crops seem to get all the attention.  It is in our hungry gaps – the end of Autumn when the summer crops are fading but the winter ones have yet to begin and the end of Spring where the same thing is happening only this time in reverse, that beetroot really comes to the fore.

Regardless of when you grow it beetroot is one of those crops which it is quite easy to have a glut of, as a result I think it is good to have a few different recipes to cope with those times of the year.  These are my favourite ways to eat beetroot.

1. Beetroot Salad – I absolutely love beetroot roasted in foil and then cut up immersed in dressing and then topped with mint and feta.  The saltiness of the feta works well with the sweetness of the beetroot and the mint adds a lovely fresh burst of flavour.  Just a perfect combination in my book.

2. Beetroot Relish – I make a relish that I serve as a vegetable side dish out of beetroot and apples.  Simply grate one medium to large beetroot and an apple.  Finely slice an onion, fry the onion and when soft add the beetroot and apple.  Cook with sugar and vinegar added to taste.  A really nice way to eat beetroot and at its best served at room temperature.  It goes well with pork.

3. Beetroot Rasam – There are a number of different soups made using beetroot as their primary ingredient, borsht being the most common and popular one.  But my favourite is a south Indian soup called Rasam.  Rasam is made with a wide range of ingredients but I really like this version made with pureed beetroot.  It is hot, sweet and highly spiced.  A really refreshing and interesting way to use what can be a fairly mundane vegetable.

4. Beetroot Chutney – My daughters favourite chutney is beetroot.  This is a fairly sweet preserved chutney with a mellow vinegariness and the warmth of ginger.  I like it with cooked meats and in particular with sausages and coleslaw.

5. Pickled – I am one of those people who will eat beetroot happily out of the can.  Having said that I do prefer my home refrigerator version made with apple cider vinegar a bit of  sugar and spiced up with cloves, chilli, cinamon and a few carraway seeds.

The other way I regularly use beetroot is to add moisture and depth to chocolate cake, but as you can’t really taste the beetroot when its cooked like that I didn’t think I could justify including it in my Top 5.  I would love to hear how you cook beetroot as I can feel something of a glut coming on and I would love to try some new things with it.

If you, like me, are always dying to see what The New Goodlife has written about this week then just follow the link.

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Monday Harvest – May 7th 2012

I seem to have coloured coded my first few photos this week.  Here we have the reds – still more chillies, a few cherry tomatoes from my Tiny Tim plant which is still going strong in a pot and some tamarillos.

Next the greens (or more accurately a single green) – I have been harvesting a fair bit of basil lately and making pesto for the freezer.  My plants are still growing but we’ve probably only got a few more weeks left before the weather gets a bit colder and they start looking very sad and sorry for themselves.

Now for the oranges – the colour not the fruit (I do have some fruit developing but they are small and very green at the moment).  I have really enjoyed growing Sweet Potatoes this year – I will write a separate post about it soon – but this harvest of a kg worth came from one of the plants which I removed after layering some of its stems.  I am hoping the layered segments will get through the winter and start growing again in Spring.

 

I have yet to cook these but the weather is screaming soup at me so I suspect that’s what they will become.

These next few bits look a little pathetic.  I dug a small Kipfler potato plant from my side bed and found these few spuds – summer potato plantings really don’t seem to be worth the trouble here.  I have been harvesting a handful of beans every few days – this looks like one of the smaller harvests but it is the only one that made it in front of the camera.  For the record they were Jade and I ate them stir fried.

This final harvest isn’t something I grew myself, I found them on the footpath as I walked to the shops, in fact I’ve found a few of these everyday I’ve walked down my road in the last couple of weeks.  What are they?  They are feijoas.  Feijoas, for those unfamiliar with them, are a South American fruit which are particularly popular in New Zealand and to a lesser extent here in Australia.  Interestingly when I lived in London I got a weekly Fruit box from Abel & Cole and feijoas featured in that on at least one occasion, so I presume that they must be grown in or near the UK as well.  The plants are often grown here as hedging but the fruit is edible as well.  I really like them they taste a bit like a guava, a slightly perfumey taste with a lightly acidic feel.  If you don’t like guava’s you probably wont like feijoas either, but if you do I think they are definitely worth a try if you can find them.

It will be interesting to see how many more weeks I’ll be able to include colours other than green in my harvest – a few at least but come June it may become more and more difficult (at least until the cauliflowers are ready).

For more vegetable ogling head over to Daphnes Dandelions.

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April 2012 – The Wrap Up

April weather can be quite variable in Melbourne, for most of April this year it was really an extension of summer with temps in the mid 20s.  By the end of the month though you could definitely feel winter coming and temperatures had dropped to the high teens.  The long warm weather has meant that many of the summer crops are still cropping.  I have eggplants still forming on the plants and my chillies are still cropping happily.

 

Its not just chillies that are still looking happy.  My thai basil is still doing very well considering that we are well into Autumn.

   

All this summer action aside the garden is very much in transition at the moment.  I have planted my brassicas, well most of them, but I’m still waiting for a bit more space.  My eggplants are pretty huge and occupy a large part of the bed – I think I’ll have to use this area for onions are I can get away with sowing them in June/July and still get a good crop from them.

I planted my garlic in the gaps created by removing most of the tomatoes.  Most of it is up and looking pretty happy so far.

Aside from a few residual summer crops I find that this time of the year is best for leaves, the first of the Tuscan Kale and a continuing supply of rainbow chard are my garden  highlights at the moment.  I mean this both from a culinary and a garden asthetics perspective.

Fruitwise the month began with figs and ended with the first of the tamarillos.

The figs have now finished but the bulk of the tamarillo crop wont be ripe until mid May.

I just hope the birds and the rodents don’t eat them all first.

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Penne with Broccoli

A bit of cool weather and the winter crops are starting to perform.  Well those at my mum & dad’s are anyway.  My brassicas are either very newly planted or in fairly sunless spots and stunted as a result.   When I was at mum & dad’s during the week I snaffled some of their broccoli crop as they appeared to have more than anyone could possibly use.  At least that’s what I’m telling myself to alleviate any feelings of guilt.  I cooked some today.  I am something of a fan of broccoli with pasta, as long as its also got some chilli and olives with it as well. 

Although I have photographed this with a glass of red, white wine would probably be more appropriate, but I opened the red the night before and…..

Penne with Broccoli (Serves 2)

  • 150g broccoli, separated into florets
  • 1 tbspn pine nuts
  • 50g stale bread
  • 10 kalamata olives – depipped and halved
  • 1 clove of garlic – chopped
  • 1 chilli – chopped
  • 2 anchovy fillets
  • 1 tbspn olive oil
  • Extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
  • 200g dried Penne (or other pasta)

Heat a pasta sized saucepan full of water with a pinch or two of salt in it.  Meanwhile place the chilli, garlic, bread, anchovies and oil in a food processor and blitz until it forms a crumb.  Heat a frypan and dry roast the pine nuts.  Remove and set aside.  Add the crumb to the same hot pan and cook until golden brown.  Set aside.  When the water has come to a boil, add the broccoli.  Once it is cooked remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.  Put the pasta in the water and boil until cooked.  Drain the pasta and return to the saucepan. Toss the olives and broccoli through the pasta and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.  Place on plates and top with breadcrumbs.  Top with parmesan.

I’m sharing this recipe on The Gardener of Eden’s Thursday Kitchen Cupboard and Greenish Thumb’s Garden to Table.

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Top 5: Reasons to have a Kitchen Garden

I feel like I’ve written a few negative posts of late - posts about the down sides of gardening – the pests and annoyances.  Today though I thought I’d look at the up side – the benefits of kitchen gardening.   This year I am keeping a record of how much I spend on the garden and how much I save in vegetable costs.  This record keeping is fraught though as I would love to think I’m saving money but it will take a while to cover the cost of those dwarf citrus….Actually if I don’t include them then  I am currently in the black so far this year but having just come through my most productive time of the year I would want to be.

Just in case it all goes wrong and I actually end up spending more than I save I thought it would be a good idea to re-iterate to myself the non-monetary reasons why having a kitchen garden is a really good idea.

1. Constant access to fresh ingredients – particularly herbs and flavourings:  I am something of a foodie, I enjoy food and most of all I enjoy fresh food.  There are few things I find more irritating* than not being able to cook what I want to, when I want to and having herbs etc in the garden enables me to do that.  For a good proportion of each year I have: Lemongrass, Kaffir Lime, Bay leaves, Parsley, Chervil, Oregano, Thyme, Mint, Thai Basil, Tarragon, Chives, Garlic Chives, Sage, Basil, Coriander and Curry Leaves.  If you add to that the veggies that I tend to grow year round: Beetroot, Celery, Chard & Lettuce then you’ve got the basis for a heap of soups, stocks, and salads ready and waiting in the garden.

*Actually I probably could name quite a few things that irritate me if pushed: queues,  slow internet connections, most people who call in to talk back radio, Sam Newman, not being able to fit into the jeans I wore as a teenager etc etc etc.

 2. I eat more vegetables – My theory is that if I’ve gone to all the trouble to grow it then I will actually cook and eat it - as opposed to it sitting in my fridge until it goes floppy and gets thrown out – which I have to admit being guilty of on more than one occasion.  Having a kitchen garden means that I am more likely to base a meal around a vegetable/s and as a result I eat more of them.   The other advantage is that gluts mean I am constantly widening my repertoire of meals I cook.  Once you’ve made you 2 eggplant recipes and you’ve still got crops coming in its time to get creative and actually try something new.

3. Kids - I always find those sections in books detailing the merits of gardening on children a little cringe worthy.  They invariably use really sentimental language about connecting kids with nature and understanding where our food comes from and all that.  Not that I don’t think these things are important – I do hugely, its just that if I’m honest my kids would gain that knowledge even without our kitchen garden as my parents live on a farm and their school has a veggie patch and chooks.  What they do get out of my garden though is fresh fruit and vegetables (they get very excited whenever they find a ripe strawberry).  But even better they have access to a large variety of bugs, and a mother who is always either trying to encourage more of them (bees and ladybirds etc) or trying to get rid of them.  As a result they have learnt a lot about bugs.  Good bugs, bad bugs, where they live, how to catch them and how to avoid them.

Incidentally while we’re on the subject of children and kitchen gardens I do think that all those people who tell you kids will eat something they’ve grown themselves are speaking absolute crap.  A kid that doesn’t like pumpkin isn’t going to like it because they put the seed in the ground.  They might claim it as theirs, play football with it, or carve it for Halloween but in my experience they still don’t eat it.

4. Sense of Achievement: I am a stay-at-home mum and although that has many benefits, achievements can be few and far between.  Sure I can occasionally get the kids to go to bed on time, or to pick up 3 of the 700 items that litter the floor, or to stop biting other kids at playgroup.  But I tend to think of these things with a sense of relief rather than pride or achievement.  Its just not the same as:  hitting your monthly sales target, getting your online training material signed off, going live with the L&D system or whatever other achievements used to fill my days in those that preceded kids.  I have long sections on my CV detailing them but strangely I can remember very few off the top of my head…..

With gardening you can have achievements all the time though - lots of them; the daily herb harvest, the big pile of potatoes, the happy ever-producing cucumbers, even the almost dead but still going..just…tomatoes.  Sure there are failures but that doesn’t bother me because I still get satisfaction from those that do work.

5. Knowing what goes into & onto your food – I have to admit that when I buy vegetables I don’t usually buy organic ones – although I know ideologically I should.  Growing my own means I get organic without the high cost which means I have one less thing to have parental angst about – which frankly is a huge plus in my world.

And there was my Top 5, and I haven’t even mentioned food miles which is also a huge plus too.  What would you include in yours?

Looking for more 5′s then head on over to The New Goodlife to see what she is thinking about this week.

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