Top 5 – Kitchen Utensils

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Liz

My first ever top 5 post was on the Kitchen Gadgets I thought I might need.  Since writing that in January I have actually acquired 2 of them – a microplane and a salad spinner.  Thank you to everyone who recommended them as I love both.  This weeks Top 5 is about things I actually own – my favourite utensils.  The rules are: it has to be a manual device and it has to have a kitchen gardening related use so as much as I love my food processor and my eggbeater they were ineligible- the food processor because it electric and the eggbeater because we don’t yet have any chooks.

So what did make my Top 5?  These indispensible items did:

1. Spoons – Where would we be without the good old wooden spoon?  Or without a serving spoon?  A slotted spoon?  A soup ladle?  Spoons are incredibly useful when you think about it.  How cool is it that Simply Self-Sufficiency makes her own?

2. Graters – I use graters a lot, my current favourite being my newly purchased microplane, but I also use conventional graters as well as a small plastic one my mum got for me in Vietnam which produces those longs shreds of carrot.  Really useful.  The main things I use graters for is: zest, cheese, carrot, ginger and garlic (when making curry if I’ve got the grater out for the ginger I just grate the garlic cloves as well).  Given there are very few meals that I cook that don’t use zest, cheese, carrot, ginger or garlic I find that I use a grater most days.

3. Juicer – I love my little silver juicer.  Yes I know I could strain lemon pips out with my hands like Jamie Oliver but it gets juice all over them and then you’ve got to wash them and that involves getting the water temperature right (or be left with cold and clammy hands) and all in all it just seems so much easier to just get out the juicer and get on with it.  I use it for all types of citrus and I like citrus, my usual salad dressing uses lemon juice as its acid,  so I use my juicer a lot.

4. Strainers – I am a big fan of strainers and colanders.  I love how useful they can be.  Anything boiled goes in the colander.  Any stocks go through the strainer.  I find the fine mesh ones the best for straining things like stock (although I’m not super particular about getting every little impurity out).  Teas go through the little one, so does gravy which I seem incapable of making without lumps in it.

5. Garlic press – Garlic presses seem a little bit out of fashion at the moment.  There was a time when every recipe you read called for crushed garlic but now its more likely to be chopped.  I do actually chop a lot of my garlic and indeed grate it as I mentioned above, but where a really good solid garlic press comes into its own is when you’ve got lots of tiny little garlic cloves.  I do find I often grow garlic heads with a fair few small cloves (although this year WILL be different….) and rather than skinning them completely, which is really fiddly if they’re small, I just top and tail them and put them in the press with the skin on.  You have to have a really good solid press to do this – it would break a lot of the flimsier presses but if you’ve got a decent press it should work fine and give you lovely crushed garlic without having to peel the cloves.  As Jamie would say Result!

And that is this weeks Top 5.  Have I made any glaring omissions?  What would you not be without in your kitchen?  Already I’m thinking maybe I should have included my morter  pestle and my….and my…..and my…..

While you’re in the mood for Top 5s head on over to see what the New Good Life has for us this week.

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Monday Harvest – June 10th 2012

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Liz

Today is a public holiday, for the Queen’s birthday no less.  I’ve always found it mildly amusing that we get a day off here, in the colonies, but they don’t in the motherland.  Shame, he he he….  Actually I used to be something of a republican but to be honest I’d don’t feel strongly enough about it these days to even call myself that.  Besides I would miss the holiday…. we could rename it Snow Day I guess, as this weekend is also the opening of the Ski Season here in Australia.  If you’ve been skiing elsewhere in the world then skiing in Australia is something of a disappointment – very short and limited runs – but if you haven’t then its fun to play in the white stuff, as long as it stays on the mountains and away from my garden that is.

Speaking of gardens, I guess I should actually tell you about this weeks harvests which have been rather fun.  Anyone who read yesterdays post will know I harvested ginger:

I also harvested turmeric:

And continuing the root theme I emptied the horseradish pot:

I used some of the horseradish in a horseradish and yoghurt dressing I made for a beetroot salad.    I also used some of the ginger and turmeric in a South Indian chicken curry I made this evening.

I did a fair bit of gardening maintenance this weekend, including finally pulling out the eggplants, which although they may have given me another eggplant or two, were casting too much shade on my brassicas.

Pictured with the eggplants are my second ever orange and some absolutely tiny raddichios.  I was hoping for much bigger heads but the outer leaves had started to rot and I was concerned the whole lot would be ruined it I didn’t pull them now.

Aside from the ever present silver beet – which I have failed to photograph this week, my most regularly harvested crop was parsley.  This week I used it in stock, salads, pasta sauce and a pie.

Fruitwise there were more tamarillos:

And greenwise there were herbs, celery

and loads of lettuce:

 Thats it for me this week, but others will have more, lots more, so head over to Daphne’s Dandelions and have a look.

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Posted in Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 49 Comments

Growing Ginger in Melbourne – Is it worth it?

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Liz

I harvested some more of my ginger today.  One of the plants in the pot was dying back and I was dying to see what lay beneath the soil.

So I dug it out, leaving the remaining green plants in the pot.

This is what I got:

And this is what it looked like after I’d cleaned it up a bit:

Beautiful isn’t it?

The dark brown section on the right of the photo near the gloves is the original rhizome I planted.  The rest is new growth.  The new growth weighed just over 100g.  At the moment ginger is $11.88kg at my local supermarket.  So my bit of ginger is probably worth about $1.20, perhaps a bit more if you consider that its organic.  I paid $6.95 for the original organic ‘seed’ rhizomes of which there were 6.  So presuming I get similar results from the other plants in my pot I should just about break even this year (except of course if you factor in the cost of the potting mix and fertiliser in which case I’ve made a small loss).  This loss is due in most part to the price of the seed ginger which going forward I wont have to pay.  I have cut this section off, which as you can see is just starting to shoot and I have repotted it and I will keep the pot inside for the winter.  Hopefully that way it will start its growth phase a lot earlier than if I stored the rhizome for planting in Spring.  I will store some bits of the remaining crop for Spring planting though.

Another method of overcoming the cost of seed ginger would be sprouting some bought for culinary purposes but not having tried to before I am unsure of when the best time of the year to attempt it would be.  My early Spring planted ginger has tended to appear in late Spring/early Summer so my feeling is that it would need to be started sometime in Spring.  Has anyone done it successfully?  And When?

All in all I do think its worth attempting growing ginger in Melbourne (the cost of seed ginger aside).  Apart from anything else its fun.

Thus far my experiments have suggested that pot grown ginger; grown in potting mix fertilised with slow release fertiliser and then given liquid fish fertiliser fortnightly yields better results than ginger grown it straight in the garden.  I think this is largely because you can more easily control the amount of food and water it gets and ginger likes lots of both.  Where I previously planted it in the garden it has had a fair bit of competition for both water and nutrients and it hasn’t really appreciated it, if you could isolate it in the garden a bit it may fare better.

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Posted in Herbs & Spices, Spring Planting, Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 35 Comments

May 2012 – the Wrap Up

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Liz

I’m a bit late with my end of May post, my excuse is that I’m doing quite a bit of paid work from home at the moment and unfortunately it needs to take precedence over blogging.  A sad state of affairs indeed.  What were neither sad nor sorry were my fruit harvests in May.  Loads of tamarillos, some feijoas from footpath, my first ever orange and my first ever lime all made for a very happy month on the fruit front.

        

Then there’s the potential.  Not only are there: more oranges on the tree,  meyer lemons which are almost ripe and more limes to come:

There’s also the promise of berries. This is lovely new growth on my most recent fruity acquisitions – 3 blueberries that I am growing in pots.

May saw the end of most of my summer crops but I do still have a couple of eggplants producing – I doubt they will last much longer though.

As far as winter crops go: the garlic and broad beans are both up.  The peas have emerged and the shallots have sent their shoots up above the pea straw mulch.

The brassicas are starting to look promising: The broccoli is heading up and the raddichio is hearting nicely.

   

But its the red cabbages which I always enjoy watching grow the most.  I really like the colour of their leaves and stems – very pretty.

It will be a long while before these are ready though.  What’s growing well in your garden at the moment?

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting, Winter Planting | 36 Comments

Value Space Rating – Autumn Top 5

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Liz

About 3 months ago I wrote a post about the value space rating of my summer crops, you can find it here.  Value Space Rating is basically a way of determining the value of growing a given plant.  If you are interested in how I weighted the ratings then its worth having a look at my previous post.  If you just want to see what Autumn’s top 5 rated plants were then read on.

1. Herbs – Herbs won this reasonably easy, and in fact if viewed as individual plants then basil, parsley and lemongrass would have all made the Top 5.  For me herbs will always feature highly on my VSRs because I not only eat and harvest a lot of them but the convenience of having them readily available means I give them lots of additional points in that area.

2. Tamarillo – Tamarillo makes the Top 5 due, in part, to being a very heavy cropper as well as being quite expensive to buy at the supermarket (I use Woolworths online to source fruit & veg prices).  I must admit I’ve loved having a constant supply of fruit.  Great for lunchboxes and snacks and as Tamarillos don’t mind a bit of shade the space they do use is far from the most valuable in the garden.

3. Silver beet – Yay for silver beet, always ready with fresh leaves.  The rainbow ones look pretty and I find it really versatile to cook with.  The fact that it costs about $4.00 a bunch helps its VSR no end.  If you like silver beet it is probably the first vegetable I would plant in any garden.

4. Chillies – Ah the benefits of productive plants.  Most of my plants were in their second year and considerably more productive as a result.  I was so pleased with all my chilli varieties this year but from a VSR perspective the winner was probably the Scotch Bonnet as that had the heaviest fruits.

5. Figs – this is cheating a bit as its not even my tree, but the branches do come into my yard (they grow under the fence from next door) so I do get to harvest the fruit.  As it can be difficult to buy them they score well on that basis, as well as the benefit of having them fresh.

Honourable mention – Eggplant.  Eggplant came 6th on the list and if you discount the fruit they would have made the Top 5 along with beans.  If I could get my plants to fruit earlier I think it would feature higher.  I am planning on sowing my seed earlier this time to see if that helps.

Note: The results may have been quite different had Mr 2 not decided to do some ‘weeding’ thus creating havoc in my lettuce bed and setting cropping back by quite some weeks.

This week The New Goodlife talks about the Top 5 things she has learnt about cooking from scratch.

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting, Top 5 | 23 Comments