food from the garden

so many peas! We picked the same amount again two days later.

It's harvest time around here! The sugar snap peas are going crazy, the asparagus thinks it's Spring, and the lettuce and silverbeet is doing well. We picked all of this to take to a dinner party on Saturday. Wilted silverbeet with asparagus and peas (and homegrown lemon juice and purchased butter); and a salad of homegrown lettuce, grapefruit from dad's tree, pomegranate seeds and chestnuts.

I let the asparagus go for a bit long, I think.

Homegrown asparagus is definitely worth it, and ours are doing very well growing in pots!

A bowl of colourful lettuce.

First asparagus

Last winter I bought two asparagus crowns. Because we didn't have any garden beds ready, I put them in a pot (in a 50/50 blend of potting mix and straight manure) and hoped for the best. Every time I was doing something else in the garden, they got a handful of compost or manure or a bit of seasol. Asparagus are apparently heavy feeders. They did extremely well in their pots! You aren't supposed to eat the spears the first year, so I let them all grow into tall, ferny fronds. More and more shoots kept popping up - even well into early Autumn!

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I decided that the fronds looked dead enough to cut back - as you're supposed to do with asparagus in winter. Only a couple of days later, one of the crowns had some little shoots peeping up through the dirt. It's supposed to be dormant! Well, a couple of days of heavy rain and those little shoots were over a foot long! So I decided enough was enough, and cut two for eating.

We've nibbled on the woody stem end in that photo. Couldn't help it. They taste amazing - like the best bought asparagus I've had, only sweeter. We'll be eating these on pizza, along with the homegrown silverbeet and some brie. Yum.

Conclusion: Perth is quite the place for asparagus to grow.

On pie and DINKs

Image via Vita Arina

So, in Australia we don't really have 'pie'. If you talked about 'pie' people would assume you meant an individual-sized meat pie. I mean, yeah, you can get apple pie and stuff, but I don't think it's such a big thing as it is in the US. Just recently I discovered, however, that you can actually buy canned pie fruit here. Just like in America! I was sooooo excited! I'd never heard of it before, except on American blogs. I found cherry pie filling, but it was $6 a can. So I settled on apples, at $2.35 a can. And felt very superior, as it was 100% apple, no added sugar or filler or anything.

I thought I would probably need to make some pastry to wrap my special canned pie apples in, so while at the (gourmet) supermarket I bought some fancy traditionally churned, locally produced, terribly expensive butter. Got it home and started googling for a recipe good enough for my special pie filling.

Turns out you Americans use canned pie filling as a time saver. Apparently, if I'm going to use canned fruit I'm not going to make my own pastry. And then I thought about it, and realised that I could have bought apples at $2 a kilo, and sliced them and stewed them, and it would be less than half the price of my canned pie filling, and be identical ingredients wise...

And it was then, sitting there with my insta-pie-filling and my boutique butter that it hit me. I'm a bloody yuppy.

Hot Cross Buns

I had a hot cross bun today at work, and god it was delicious! I was going to buy some from a well-known ("delightful") bakery franchise on the way home from work, to eat on Good Friday. On a whim, I popped online to see the ingredients. And decided that I would no longer be buying some commercial hot cross buns on the way home (what is a 'flour treatment agent', and why are two kinds necessary?)


I pondered using this recipe, but BCB convinced me that using the breadmaker was a wiser idea. And the breadmaker recipe was pretty similar, it just used water instead of milk, less spice and only raisins. So I changed all that. If there's one thing I love it's peel in an easter bun.

Now, it might be because I'd just finished watching an episode of The Devil's Whore, and had religion and Olde England on the brain, but I really felt connected to English women, who I imagine have been baking sweet spiced breads for centuries. In medieval England really exotic spices were used in sweet and savoury cooking - I mean, my hot cross buns do have ground coriander in them (in the mixed spice). And the idea of painting a visual reminder of a Christian celebration in flour paste seems a much more appropriate commemoration than having a sweet chocolate egg.


I think, given that I am a lapsed Anglican (can such a thing exist?), making hot cross buns will stand in for the ritual of the church for me.

(Ironically, I just took the buns out of the oven, and my crosses were too dribbly - they have completely disappeared into the bun...).

The most pleasurable way to give yourself diabetes...

I have to make morning tea for a bunch of people next week, one of whom is gluten intolerant. Now when it comes to food choices, I'm a big fan of the masses catering to the minority (well, except maybe for this girl I went to high school with who was intolerant to pretty much everything except brown rice and pears). So I wanted to make some kind of gluten-free snack everyone would want to eat, but also didn't fancy shelling out for gluten-free flour (I find it just tastes yuck). In the end I mashed a couple of similar recipes together to get these Peanut Biscuits. They're insanely rich. One is satisfying, two is mad. They're also insanely easy. Easier than making a packet mix. Here's the recipe I ended up with:

1 egg
1 cup crunchy peanut butter*
3/4 cup caster sugar
1/2 tsp bi-carb soda

1. Pre-heat oven to 180C.
2. Beat egg until combined.
3. Add peanut butter, caster sugar and bi-carb. Stir/ mix/ mash until combined.
4. Roll teaspoonfuls of the mix into balls, and place them on a baking sheet. They'll spread out as they cook, so leave them room. Flatten slightly with a fork/ fingertip.
5. Bake for 10min, or until you can slide a knife under a biscuit and sort of move it about a bit without it breaking up. If your oven doesn't heat from the bottom, like mine, they might go pale golden coloured.
6. Leave to cool on the tray.


(They puff up a lot in the oven, but flatten out when they cool).

* I normally have 100% peanuts peanut butter at home, but I was a bit worried that it'd be too gloopy for the mix. So I got Badly Coloured Boy to buy some conventional peanut-butter, with stabilisers in. Turned out to be reduced fat, added sugar and salt (blergh) Kraft crunchy. Worked just fine, but quite sweet. So sugar-free might be nice.

Christmas, socks, pretty lettuce.

Christmas present. Ashford swift and Royal winder, from Bilby yarns. Given to me because I told Badly Coloured Boy I wasn't knitting his jumper until he bought me a swift and winder, or wound the skeins himself. He's seen me swearing over skein-winding. I hate it. Least favourite knitting-related chore ever. But now it's fun! It's all, like, neeeeeeow! Whoosh! Look at the awesome yarn-cake! I wanted to take an action shot, but, um, I was enjoying winding the skeins too much to pause.
I'm also a weeny bit partial to the swift, because Ashford made the rocking-horse I had when I was a kid. There ya go. Incidentally, I haven't named the swift yet. Any ideas? Or an opinion that naming a swift may in fact be the stupidest thing you ever heard of? The rocking-horse was called Ashley, for what it's worth.


Start of a Charade sock, with Verb for Keeping Warm's logwood dyed sock yarn. More subdued than I normally go for, but pretty, I think. I finished the Red Vinnlands I was chugging away on. Have to admit, I don't especially love them. They'll be the subject of another blog post.


And just because I can, here's what a sink full of radicchio leaves looks like. Must try growing my own radicchio sometime.

How do you like mushrooms?

I have a mushroom glut! Look at them all! Overnight they all just went *pop**ready to be picked now!* And Badly Coloured Boy is away on a filmshoot this weekend, so it's only me to eat them all up. I think tonight will be the mushroom pasta/ beet leaf/ pasta combo again, with thyme or parsley from the garden too. Any other ideas? Especially ones that will be something I can take for lunch during the week.
I was thinking of making beef-free stroganoff, but that will have to wait until next week's groceries to get the sour cream (must remember to get paprika from the wholefoods store too - they have it in the cutest little Spanish tins, and I've been wanting an excuse to buy some forever).

I remember from when I was nine and had a mushroom kit that afterwards my mum tipped all the peat into the garden, and next year a few mushrooms grew. Well, I'm going to heavily encourage that in a sheltered, mulchy spot underneath two pencil pines in my garden. The stem stumps are all being thrown there right now, and I tossed two whole mushrooms in there so they can spread their spores all about.

And in other garden news, my beanshoots are showing! By September I should have broad beans!

It feels like a bit of a cliche to say 'Don't worry, not dead, not abandoning blog, just busy!' but it is rather the truth. Virgin Suicides Collection and Marie Antoinette Collection will be photographed asap, but I really want to put a bit of effort into the MA Collection, so need to wait until I have time for 'proper' photoshoots. I've been working full-time during the week on an internship-placement type thing, while working my ordinary shifts on the weekend, and covering for a staff member who had his wisdom teeth out. All a bit crazy. But I'm loving the internship-type thing to pieces.

I'm also loving our first mushroom. Beautiful, huh? Such a perfect mushroom. When you cut the gills it bleeds sort of pink, a bit. And they're so tasty raw! The bought ones are so yuck raw. I picked this one yesterday. Tonight we had to pick a whole bunch, because they're crowding each other out of the box! The caps were being squooshed into weird shapes, and the stems were fusing! So dinner is pasta with mushrooms, brie and beet leaves from the garden. Pretty special having half our dinner come from our own garden.

potato, banana, potato

Although I've made a few bits and pieces over the past couple of days I'm saving up to blog the whole 'collection', if you will, over next week.
So, to tide you over, here's some Happy Culinary Events from the past few days.


First up, organic black potatoes. Look at the bright purple juice on the knife! My mum had bought them once before from the gourmet grocers behind my work. I was making a beef and mushroom stew, with french bread 'croutons' on top. Needed to bulk up the stew, but didn't want another pale carb. These fit the bill nicely, and (to my surprise, as I'd had them baked before) they imparted this really unusual smoky scent to the stew.


Next up, in my erratic attempt to consume less, I went to make banana bread rather than throw out some old bananas. They became muffins, because I don't own a loaf tin. And I'm really very pleased how they turned out, because I fudged the measurements a bit, and didn't have any cinnamon, and replaced the self-raising flour with flour + baking powder. They'd be better with walnuts in, though.


And finally, I made gnocchi! The moment when they actually rose to the surface in the boiling water was a true joy. I had fears of gluey masses, or disintegrating powders. They were a little bland, but for my first attempt at a potato-dumpling-dough they were certainly quite edible.

What Do You Eat?

The lovely Muerto de Risa linked to this facinating photo-essay, and it got me curious. How would my weekly shop stack up against everyone elses? I decided to give it a go. The result reminds me of 17th century Dutch still lifes.


For the approximate sum of $80 Australian, or $70USD.

Of course, mine's a little contrived. As a rule of thumb I tried to include things if we bought them once a month or more, or a representative. We don't buy icecream or museli bars weekly, but I do tend to put some kind of sweet junk in the trolley on a weekly basis. We don't buy soy sauce or olive oil weekly, but we do use it weekly. Due to my less than stellar composition skills, you can't really see the kumara (sweet potato) or the half a butternut pumpkin behind the colander of potatoes. The can of tuna is a little hidden by dried beans (psychoanalyse that!). My dirty stash of lollies is cleverly disguised as wholefoods (it's next to the craisins in the lower right hand corner).
I forgot to include Badly Coloured Boy's stash of ham, because I never eat the stuff. And there should be another black plastic tray of roo steak, but we don't have any because the supermarket had run out when we last did the shopping.
I'm a little embarassed by the absence of plain milk, but there you go. Unless I have a specific recipe in mind, BCB and I only get the flavoured stuff. Different varieties of coffee flavour made by the same company, no less. Also a little embarassed by the abundance of cheese. In fact, there was also some feta in the fridge, but as the last shop was even more cheesy than normal, I left it out for the sake of representativeness.
Strangely, I think our groceries (on a meat/ seafood/ fruit/ veg/ bread/ things in packets/ sweet things type breakdown) are most similar to the Kuwaiti family! Or maybe the Germans, actually.

It was an interesting exercise. And I'd like to meme it. The Hungry Planet meme. I have no idea how these things take off, but I want to encourage anyone reading this to stack up the weekly groceries (and a representative of any regular takeaway you buy too, if possible) and photograph them. Be as honest as possible. Then tell everyone else who reads your blog to do the same. Let me know if you try it. I'm curious to see inside your pantry.

winter's comin' - news from the kitchen front

I know because even though the days are still t-shirt-warm, I have a hankering to make soup. Witness the Best Soup Ever.


Those vegies are actually all raw right now, they're waiting for the chickpeas to be done soaking. I've never cooked with dried beans (except lentils) before. The little clinking noises the chickpeas make against the edge of the bowl as they expand gives me the giggles.
I don't count lentils in the 'dried beans' category because they don't need soaking. I made a well wicked lentil cottage pie this week. And this week at the wholefoods store we bought dried cannelini beans. Not sure what they'll become yet. I have a hefty suspicion that I may end up shelling out for a piece of free-range speck, to make a speck-adulterated cannelini bean stew. For some reason the start of winter has me feeling like (not so bad as craving) pork.

I also stewed some rhubarb, as part of my plan to eat more seasonally.


Not so appetising, huh? Thing is, only green rhubarb was left at the markets. They say that green rhubarb is exactly the same as red, flavour-wise, but it just isn't going to look so pretty over ricotta (left over from a divine pumpkin, cauliflower, feta and ricotta cannelloni that Badly Coloured Boy and I fudged together between ourselves on Friday).

I also mixed some biscuit dough, and froze it in logs so I can slice it up and have just two warm cookies whenever I want. This recipe for double chocolate worked very well (I skipped the vanilla, because I didn't have any). The slices tend to shatter a little as you cut them (I think because I skimped on the butter a bit too), but can easily be pushed back together. Never again will we need the trans-fat laden supermarket logs of raw dough, which is quite a nice thought.

no martha stewart am i

nor am i belinda jeffrey (she is single-handedly saving the CWA-style slice from extinction), nor even the black apple.

but i did make a cake.


okay. it was betty crocker's, with ready-to-spread frosting. with my own personal touch of strawberry sprinkles on top. it has to live in a soup pot, because i don't have an airtight container large enough to hold (most of) a cake. the gladwrap is underneath the cake and the base of the cake pan, to assist in the removal and replacement of the cake from and into its soupy little home.

it's quite a nice cake. an improvement on other packet mixes.
when i finish the frozen cookie dough log in the freezer (marked down to 20c, because the brand changed their packaging!) i will make my own cookie dough from scratch, and freeze it in a log.