In this very hot weather, we don’t feel like eating much. Extreme heat kills apatite, but while we are wilting, the garden is flourishing. Yesterday, in the afternoon, we got a terrific storm and for 15 minutes, we got 15mm of rain. It came down hard and fast. All the gutters over flowed as the rain couldn’t get into the down pipes past the mesh sieves quickly enough. The fierce flow of water washes gum tree leaves off the roof and into the gutters and these end up blocking the sieve. If it rains steadily, the water can get through, but not as fast as this today. I clean the gutters regularly, but it takes too much time the sweep all the roofs, so we put up with the leaves in the gutter sieves. It works most of the time. Anyway all our tanks are full, so we need not worry about this small loss of water.

Now that it is a bit cooler, momentarily, We feel like eating something nice for dinner. I decide to make a vegetable pasta. We have lots of things coming along in the garden besides fruit. Today we have a load of capsicums and tomatoes, so pasta sounds good.

I brown an onion in olive oil and then add in a small knob of garlic, roughly chopped. What an amazing smell this is. It smells good enough to eat just by itself. next the 4 different types of green peppers. We have round bell capsicums, long thin yellow banana capsicums and two different long tapered green ones. I also finely slice a couple of huge green 7-year beans. They look a bit rough, being coarse and a bit hairy looking, but taste delicious. We eat them whole, raw or cooked, like French beans when they are young, slice them like this when they are full-sized and leave a lot on the vine to dry for use in bean stews over winter. They are a perennial bean, re-shooting from the root in the spring. I can’t say that they last 7 years or not. I think not. But at least half of them seem to come back to life each year. We move the bean tresses every few years anyway to spread the nitrogen-fixing capacity of the beans around the garden. SO I end up replanting a few each year. They grow from seed as an annual crop just like any other bean.

As all this simmers down into a sauce, I add in some chopped preserved lemons that I made just a couple of months ago, and then de-glaze with a large swig of good red wine. right at the end i throw in the other half of the garlic, so that it remains a firm and retains some pleasant crunch.

I garnish this simple passata sauce with some sage leaves fried in butter. These just take a couple of minutes. We use Australian grown but Japanese style soba noodles. These just need a few minutes to soften in boiling water. I don’t use salt in the water, nor do I cook with salt either. As a result Janine and I both retain our youthful low blood pressure.

Served with a sprinkle of parmesan and a glass of chilled white wine. it tastes delicious. and it was nearly all from our garden just hours earlier.

I bought in the pasta, olive oil and the parmesan cheese. The rest is all our own work.

Best wishes from the Post Modern Peasants