early spring - it's getting exciting!

It's early spring here and things are getting exciting. Blossoms are abundant on our fruit trees and the garlic, which we planted in April, is looking very healthy.



We planted two varieties - a "tasmanian" purple softneck and this beautiful, pink, hardneck that we found in amongst some garlic at the greengrocers once.


We bulked it up last winter and this year have planted half of our crop (total of about 600 plants) to this variety because it tastes really good and keeps brilliantly.

At about the same time in April, we cleared up the summer gardens, rototilled them and then sowed the area to our usual green manure - oats, tic beans (small fava/broad beans), peas and lupins.


These survived the really wet weather and are now growing very quickly. I think I'll be slashing these and getting the summer beds ready in about 2 or 3 weeks.
This closes our annual cycle as we started this blog at around this biological time last year

hot sauce

I love hot stuff and have since I was about 5 years old. I'm obviously not alone as the use of chiles spread from the Americas through Asia, Africa and Europe. Just about any kind of condiment that has chile as a central ingredient makes me get really excited and curious. So, it might seem strange that I (and the rest of the family) still like tabasco sauce.

Last summer, we had a bumper crop of super hot chiles.


These were grown outdoors, in soil, with not a shred of plastic anywhere proving that Tasmania must have reasonable summers.

We froze and dried lots and then still had plenty to spare so I decided to try and make something that resembles tabasco sauce so that we wouldn't have to keep buying those dinky bottles in boxes imported all the way from the USA.

Using this recipe -

Ingredients:

1 pound fresh red chiles, chopped
2 cups cider vinegar
2 teaspoons salt

Directions:

Combine the chiles and the vinegar in a saucepan and heat. Stir in the salt and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, cool, and place in a blender. Puree until smooth and place in a glass jar. Allow to steep for 2 weeks in the refrigerator. Remove, strain the sauce, and adjust the consistency by adding more vinegar if necessary.

I made about one litre of this sauce


It's really great and probably even better than tabasco even though it doesn't get the 3 years of aging in oak like tabasco does.

Winter is over and we are still alive.......

Although we haven't posted anything over the winter we are still alive and we have eaten well. It has been the wettest winter here for about 50 years apparently. Much of this wetness came later in winter and so our brassicas established themselves well early on and fed us right up till now. We have been eating heaps of kale (3 different types), broccoli, purple-sprouting broccoli, sugarloaf and savoy cabbages and purple cauliflowers


We also had a great crop of swedes (which I think are called rutabagas in North America), beets, carrots, winter spinach and silverbeet (chard). Together with our stored garlic, shallots, pumpkins and bottled tomatoes, frozen ducks and free-range pork (which we bought as a whole beats and froze) we have eaten really well this winter. Unfortunately, most of this went undocumented mostly because we were slack and partly because it's much nicer taking food photos with natural light. We're only now getting into days that are long enough to eat dinner at dusk.

Here are three random meals that I happened to photograph:

A kind of ratatouille made with the last of our eggplants, capsicums and tomatoes (all roasted first) served with polenta and grilled chicken thighs


A noodle, cabbage and carrot salad - Thai-style - served with grilled albacore tuna


agnoloti stuffed with roasted pumpkin and topped with sage, garlic, butter and parmesan