Thursday Kitchen Cupboard – Plums

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Liz

Last time I went up to mum & dads the kids were put to work picking plums, all very well and good except they insisted on bringing all the plums they’d picked, home with them.  This meant I had 7kgs of plums to deal with this week.  7kgs is quite a lot of plums I discovered.  Not as many as the 80kgs  Veggiegobbler had, but it did seem a lot nonetheless.  If I’d been smart I’d have learnt something from her experiences but instead they sat on the bench stressing me out for a week or so.  Just as an aside, committed as I am to making use of all the produce that comes my way I also find it quite stressful when presented with a glut (of something other than tomatoes – those I can cope with).   For this very reason I steer well clear of growing zucchini.  The stress of having to use all that zucchini would probably do me in, either that or I’d feel endlessly guilty about how much ended up on the compost heap…..  Anyway back to the plums, I eventually found a couple of recipes which sounded interesting; I duly made plum squares which were essentially biscuit topped with plum but they turned out way too wet and I would need to play around with the recipe a lot before I could think of posting it.  Wet or not, I did of course manage to eat them all.

I then went on to make Plum Vodka which essentially involves steeping plums in vodka with lots of sugar added for good measure.  I have no idea how it will turn out as it takes 6 weeks to develop but I am hopeful of both a fun drink and some boozy plums to play with at the end.

The kids ate their way through a kg or 2 which left about 4kg left to play with.  Naturally I made jam, plum paste and still had some plum liquid over which I’m hoping will become fruit leather when the weather cools a bit and I feel like having the oven on for a long period of time.

Here is my jam:

I like my Plum Jam without big lumps of skin so I tend to puree my mixture.  Here is my method for making it.

Remove the pips from plums.  Put the plums in a large saucepan or jam pan.  Add a tablespoon of lemon juice per kg of plums.  Bring to the boil (add a splash of water if the plums aren’t juicy but I find theres usually enough liquid in them not to need to add more) Simmer until the plums are cooked and the mixture reduces and thickens a bit.  Puree.  Measure the liquid.  Add a cup of sugar for each cup of plum liquid.  Bring back to the boil and simmer until the jam reaches setting point.  Pour jam into sterilised jars, seal and store.

To see what others are eating or preserving this week head over to the Gardener of Eden.

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Posted in Fruits, Recipes, Summer Harvesting | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

Top 5: Edible Plants for Partial Shade

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Liz

There is nowhere in my south facing back garden that gets full sun.  There are parts that would if it wasn’t for my neighbours huge eucalypts casting their shadow across my garden from about 3:00pm every day.  Well its about 3:00 at the moment, in winter its a lot earlier.  I would love to have full sun.  Veggies, in general, love full sun, but I don’t have it and yet things still grow.  I do think that some plants cope a lot better with partial shade than others.  These are some that do well in my garden.

  1. Lebanese Cucumbers:  

I find I get good reliable crops of cucumbers with about 5-6 hours of sun per day.  I do have some planted in a bed that gets less than that which aren’t doing as well but those with 5 hours plus are rocking along just fine. 

2. Chillies: 

I always seem to be including chillies in my lists, partially because I find them indispensable in the kitchen and partially because they are so satisfying to grow.  Oh and  red is my favourite colour …. Anyway mine get about 4-5 hours sun a day and produce well.  I think the things about chillies is you don’t really need them to crop really, really heavily to be happy with them.  I have no doubt mine would produce more in a sunnier spot but even with the amount of sun they get they do well and the heat doesn’t seem to suffer too much, if at all. 

3. Chard:

You’ve gotta love chard (well provided your enjoy eating it that is).  It seems to grow happily almost anywhere.  I have a plant that looks pretty content with only about 3 hours sun a day.  I do find that the green stalked varieties (they often go by the name Perpetual Spinach) are the most obliging.  I have had problems with mildew on the coloured stemmed ones if they don’t get enough sun but the green stemmed ones seem to resist it. 

4. Potatoes:

I have a bed which gets no sun at all in winter.  In that bed I’ve had volunteer potatoes produce crops (albeit small ones) in winter.  I’m not really recommending growing potatoes in total shade but they seem to do fine in partial shade.  The pots that I usually grow them in get about 5 hours sun a day and they produce pretty good crops from this. 

5. Herbs:

Whilst some herbs definitely prefer full sun almost all my herbs are grown in areas which receive less than 6 hours sun a day.  The ones that seem to tolerate the least sun: ie 3-4 hours per day (or less in some cases) are Vietnamese mint, common mint, parsley and chervil.  My chervil plants would only get a couple of hours afternoon sun a day.  I have had parsley produce reasonable (albeit reduced) crops with only an hour or two sun a day (I think it would appreciate at least 3 hours though) and either type of mint is generally happy with just a couple of hours a day. 

Incidently if you want a plant that is fine without any sun at all and you are in a warmish climate then I would given ginger a try it has produced for me in pretty much total shade and I am at the very edge of climates it would grow well in.

And that ends this weeks Top 5.  I would love further suggestions on shade loving plants, particularly those that will tolerate less than 4 hours sun per day as that is something I have in abundance. 

P.S. – Want another veggie related Top 5?  Check out The New Good Life’s Top 5 performers of the summer season to date. 

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Monday Harvest – 13th Feb 2012

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Liz

After my complete failure to photograph any of my tomato harvest last week, this week I’ve sought to make amends.  Pictured are Rouge de Marmande (the big red ones), Yellow Boy, Black Cherry and at the bottom some Tommy Toes.

This next photo shows some more Tommy Toes with the first of the Black Krims.  I am hoping that Black Krim tastes good as its been a long time coming and there aren’t many more on the plant.  It is interesting how much longer some varieties take to fruit than others.  The seed for this was sown at the same time as other varieties which first fruited in December, a good 8 weeks earlier.  I do think my patience levels are more suited to the earlier fruiting varieties…..  I’m also wondering, and this is pure speculation, if the climate is better suited to the earlier fruiters too as this was may have been put off setting fruit by January’s warm weather.   

I did harvest things other than tomatoes, a typical basket of salad leaves, beans and well…more tomatoes.  I have been really, really pleased with the lettuce I put in my old potato bed, all that manure and pea straw is producing really quick growing lettuce, enough for a green salad everyday.

 

I made a really nice chicken curry this week using chicken thighs on the bone, it was just a standard chicken curry (onion, garlic & ginger base,  to which you add ground spices coriander, cumin, tumeric, chilli & salt then tomatoes) with some cumin seeds and curry leaves tempered and added at the end.  I do like using chicken on the bone it does get more flavour into the dish.  Here are the curry leaves I used, photographed in the only position inside the house with enough light at dinner time to not need to use the flash.  Unfortunately this does mean you also get a glimpse my windows – made filthy by the fingers on Mr 2.  I would clean them but they only return to that condition within days (if not hours)…..sigh – I’m just not very good at housework….

Well…perhaps its not that I’m not very good at housework, more that I am too busy harvesting and photographing chillies, garlic chives, capsicum and strawberries.  We have been getting a few strawberries each week – not many but they are still coming.  This autumn I plan to spend some time sorting out the strawberries to try and get a bigger and better crop next year.  One of the chillies along with the capsicum and garlic chives went into a Beef in Black Bean stir fry.

We also harvested some more Lebanese cucumbers – we didn’t get as many this week – only 4 and all at the start of the week, but there are quite a few new ones coming on so perhaps the lull is temporary.  And it would be remiss of me not to comment on my first passionfruit.  We have now had 3 and there are quite a few more to come.  Passionfruit harvest themselves so its more a matter of picking them up off the ground than harvesting them per se but that doesn’t make it any less exciting.  The kids ate this one about 2 minutes after this photo was taken.

And that is all in my harvest world for this week, but head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions and see what everyone else is bringing in.

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Posted in Summer Harvesting | Tagged | 21 Comments

Growing Curry Leaf Trees – Murraya Koenigii

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Liz

Its Thursday and I feel like I should be doing a recipe but I haven’t photographed a meal recently that I’ve written down quantities and methods for.  We did have a lovely chicken curry on Tuesday (which I should really have phtoographed….) which included curry leaves, so I thought I would write about the plant instead.

One of my favourite plants in my garden is my curry leave tree (Murraya Koenigii).  I am including the scientific name here because there are other plants which are referred to as curry plants but the one I am talking about is the specific type of tree from which curry leaves are harvested to use in Indian and some South East Asian cookery.  Its leaves look like this:

Curry leaves are used a lot in Indian, particularly South Indian cookery.  Generally they are tempered in hot oil to release their flavour at either the start of the cooking process or as an additional flavouring at the end.  They get their name because they taste a bit like ‘curry’ I guess. As a flavour I personally find it quite addictive.  I also think its one that particularly compliments vegetables although they are used in meat dishes as well.

Whilst curry leaf trees don’t neccessarily look that happy during Melbourne winters they do generally survive and come back happily in Spring.  In the colder parts of Melbourne they sometimes loose all their leaves during winter to regain them in Spring.  The leaves on mine tend to stay on the tree but yellow a bit and generally look a bit miserable.  By late Spring though you wouldn’t know it had been unhappy and is generally thriving and full of new growth.  This is my tree in July – mid winter.

Curry Leaf Tree in July 2011

I bought my tree as a very weedy looking seedling from a nursery about 2 years ago.  Since then I have potted it up yearly and feed it monthly during Spring & Summer with Fish emulsion fertiliser.  It does seem to like being fed and watered – but then who doesn’t?  I suspect that if I fed it more (or indeed potted it up twice yearly) it would have grown a bit quicker but as I am now at the point of being able to harvest from it freely I am more than happy with its size.  I also think it would be happier in full sun but as I’m unable to give it that it will have to make do with what it gets – which is about 5-6 hours per day during summer and a bit less in winter although I do move its pot around a bit to try and make sure it gets a decent amount.  Until I included both the above and below photo in my post I didn’t realise quite how much the tree has actually grown in the past 6 months.

Curry Leaf Tree in Feb 2012

To harvest the leaves I either remove a few single leaves if I only want a couple or I harvest whole stems if I need more.  I’m hoping that in doing this I’m encouraging the plant to branch, as pruning often does, but frankly I’m not too sure how successful I’m being.  I haven’t encountered any problems with the tree to date, it seems generally happy and pest free (touchwood).  Curry leaves freeze well and retain a reasonable amount of flavour when preserved in that way.  Harvesting enough in late autumn and freezing them enables me to leave the tree alone to cope with winter and I resume harvesting once I see that it is happily growing again in Spring.

Although I bought this plant as a seedling I believe that curry leaf trees can be successfully propagated from seeds, as you can see in the first picture I am leaving the berries on to form seeds and I will give it a try.

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Posted in Herbs & Spices | Tagged | 119 Comments

Top 5: Flavours that go with Cucumber

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Liz

Out of all the seasonal crops I’ve grown this year cucumbers have been most successful.  As a result I have been busy thinking of ways to eat them.  So here are the things that I like to eat with cucumber.

1.  Mint – I may have mentioned before that I am fairly obsessed with mint.  Love it, love it, love it.  Fortunately it goes well with cucumber, particularly in Middle Eastern dishes.  I’ve recently joined Eat Your Books after a recommendation from Diary of a Tomato and I have to say I love it.  For those who are unfamiliar with it, it is a site that indexes recipe books.  What that means is that once you join – it costs $25 per year – you tell it which books you have and then you can search for recipes within your cookbook library (they haven’t indexed every recipe book but they had indexed enough of mine to make it worthwhile).  I put in cucumber and was reminded that I have a recipe for a fabulous Cucumber, Mint, Feta & Pomegranate salad in the book Saraban by Greg Malouf.  A brilliant combination, especially as Miss 5 is currently very into eating Pomegranates.

2. Chilli – When I was in India I was surprised to see people selling whole peeled cucumbers as a snack food.  This was particularly at bus stations in the south of the country.  Eventually I tried one, when you asked for it the vender got out a little shaker and sprinkled it with a mixture of chilli and salt.  The cucumber was cool and fresh, the salt and chilli gave it an kick.  The result was fabulous, especially on a hot, dusty bus ride.  In fact there are quite a number of Indian and South East Asian salsas & dipping sauces that combine cucumber with chilli and an acid either: rice wine vinegar or lemon juice.  Fabulous, refreshing and a lovely side dish for serving with a large range of curries or fried snacks.

3.  Feta – One of my favourite cucumber salads is the Cucumber & Radish salad with Feta Dressing that I posted a while ago.  I think the saltiness of the cheese really works well with the the fresh coolness of the cucumber.  I have been eating this salad and variations of it that include pomegranate most weeks this summer.

4.Vinegar – Dill pickles, refrigerator pickles, pickled gerkins, bread & butter cucumbers  – all lovely, all with vinegar.   I like pickled cucumbers and eat them quite a lot.   This is in part because I eat my home made bread & butter cucumbers regularly and in part because they put gerkins in the Falafel’s at the The Half Moon Cafe in Coburg Mall.   I go there at least weekly, after swimming, to eat lunch.  If you’re ever in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, hmmm scratch that – no one other than locals would ever be in the Coburg mall, if you’re local to Coburg then I highly recommend the falafel at the Half Moon Cafe, only you do have to ask for chilli sauce as they don’t automatically include it.

5. Yoghurt –  Throughout the Middle East & Eastern Mediterranean they make dips or salads with cucumber and yoghurt and usually flavoured with lemon juice & garlic.  They also tend to include herbs but which herbs seems to vary according to region.  Some include dill, others dried mint, still others fresh mint, or indeed a combination of all three.   Whichever way you make it it it is delicious, refreshing and a lovely dish for a mezze or to accompany cooked meats.

I was going to put a photo of some tzatziki here, only I ate it all before I remembered to photograph it.  Oh well you’ll just have to imagine its silky loveliness…..

And that is this weeks Top 5, I would like to that every one who commented on last weeks – I really appreciate your thoughts and solutions to my gardening questions.  I think I will write a follow up post at some point highlighting what everyone said – particularly about pruning tomatoes & Diggers club.

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Posted in Cucurbits, Top 5 | Tagged | 20 Comments