The season cycles past us and spring has gone in a very busy flash of research, firings, workshops, more firings, exhibitions and kiln building. The garden took a back seat and now it’s time for catch-up. We managed to get some time in there, just enough to keep everything watered and growing. In the last week of spring I finally got the time to get in there and do a thorough weeding and cleaning out. We picked the last of the winter veggies, like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

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I managed to preserve the cauliflowers into Mustard pickles.

Take one large cauliflower. It doesn’t matter if it is a bit past its best and starting to ‘burst’. You only need the small florets, add a red and green capsicum and a cucumber, plus a couple of brown onions, all diced pop fine into small bite sized chunky pieces. Soak them in brine overnight of 1/2 cup of iodised salt in 2 litres of water.

The next day, bring this to a simmer and drain off the brine. Rinse and drain again.

Depending on how much you have to do, heat up approximately a litre of vinegar ,add two cups of sugar,  +1 Tb spoon of mustard powder, + 1/2 Tb spoon of curry powder and another of turmeric. Mix it all together well and bring it up to the boil. Once it’s heated, add in 1/2 a cup of flour and stir well until it thickens. Add in the drained vegetable pieces and bring back to the simmer fora minute or two.

Spoon into heated glass jars from the oven and seal with ‘pop’ top lids.

Janine makes cauliflower soup with hers as well as a batch of broccoli soup, some of which she froze. The cabbage went into our own idiosyncratic version of Australian okonomiyaki and the beetroots got pickled and preserved in spiced vinegar.

Although we have planted out all the summer veggies seeds and some seedlings now, it is still too soon to get much return. The tomatoes are flowering  and the earliest plants have set some small fruit. I was a bit late getting them in, so I can’t see us getting any ripe fruit before Xmas. However, now the hot weather is here, along with the regular Monday afternoon thunderstorm and its hail, we will just have to wait and see what fruit we can get. I hope that there isn’t another hailstorm tomorrow. We’ve had enough hail for the time being.

We fill the short days of winter with lots of busy, necessary work. Pruning, preserving and cooking. We are both making marmalade at the moment, in our own respective ways, using the methods and recipes that we have each developed over the years. We have quite enough now to last us for the rest of the year.

Even though the days are short and the weather is cold, the garden is still producing all our  meals. One or the other, sometimes both of us, go out to the garden at dusk and pick what is at its best and just bursting to be eaten. Food is plucked direct from the garden bed, into the basket and is cooked and on the table within the hour. It just couldn’t be fresher, or more rewarding. I have managed to scale and time the plantings through the summer and autumn, so that there is still enough green produce coming through now, even though everything has slowed down considerably.

I collect more mushrooms from the recent fungal blooms. I give them a good scrub with the bristle brush and clean them up and make them presentable. There is always bits of grass and other organic ‘natural’, but unwanted ‘stuff’ stuck to them. I slice them and lay them out to dry.

Once crisp, they are added into our stock of dried fungi in the glass jars on the kitchen dresser. We collect more of them as they appear and have fresh mushroom risottos, almost every night for a week. Each time with a different vegetable from the garden. Broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, capsicums and carrots.

We have loads of golden berries coming on at the moment. Janine makes golden berry (gooseberry) and feijoa fruit mince and uses it to fill a fruit sponge, served with Edmonds custard. It makes a marvellous pudding. It is tangy, sweet and mouth-wateringly luscious and smooth. I have two helpings.

We have spent the last three days pruning the stone fruit trees. Everything is dormant and deciduous at the moment. Except the earliest peaches, that have started to flower already. We work steadily and meticulously. Opening out the centre of the trees, restoring the ‘vase’ shape. Removing the water-shoots, thinning, shaping and pruning to an outward facing bud.

After 3 days of muscle challenging constant work, we are tired, but very pleased with our selves. We have finished pruning our 100 or so trees and spent an equal amount of time dragging all the spent and removed branches down the back to the burn pile and stacking it all up ready to be burnt in a months time, when it has dried out enough to sustain a fire that will purge the pruned wood of any disease and fungal spores that might otherwise infect the orchard trees.

We celebrate with a lovely dinner of wild mushroom risotto, collected directly off the lawn outside the back door, and then a great fortifying breakfast of truffled, creamed eggs. It looks like this will be the last truffle for this season, so we make the most of it.

Now we have past the solstice, we are in the coldest part of the year and that means that the French Perigord black truffles will be ready for harvest from our local truffière. Janine and I planted 8 inoculated truffle trees 2 years ago, one, a holly oak, didn’t like it here and turned up its toes pretty quickly, but the other 7 have survived for two years now. The 2 stone pines inoculated with Italian white truffles are growing strongly. As are the hazelnuts carrying the black Perigord truffle spores. The remaining holly oak is not too happy, but the English oaks are doing OK.

3 Perigord Hazels, A very tiny holly oak, a thriving Italian stone pine and an English oak that has trippled its height and is growing very well..

We don’t expect much from any of these trees, It’s just a fun project on the side. If one day we find a truffle, say in 5 to 10 years time, then it will be a bonus. Growing truffle trees is quite a bit of work and to achieve success, you have to take it quite seriously. I don’t, so our chances of success are greatly diminished.

We live in a suitable climate here, with just the right conditions of light winter frosts and hot summer days, but our rainfall, especially in the hotter summer  months is rather on the low side in most years. Although who can say what will happen in the future, as the climate seems to be changing quite a lot for us here. We are stating to get less winter frosts and more summer rainfall.

Rainfall is not a problem for the serious grower, as piped irrigation is cheap and easy to install. We have dams and pumps and could do this, but for a marginal hobby activity like this it’s still a lot of extra work, not just to install, but to maintain and to remember to put it on when it’s required. I have enough to think about already.

So, all in all, it’s somewhat easier to go and visit the local truffière and buy a nice plump, black, fragrant truffle right now while they are in season. Geordie is going out to pick up the order for the restaurant and he takes us along. It’s a beautiful place. The trees are young and only just coming into harvest in the last few years. Each year the harvest is doubling. I’m a bit dismayed to hear that the holly oaks are the best producers in this area. Regrettably, it is the hollyoaks that are doing the poorest for us in our garden. Not an auspicious sign for us. One dead and the other not even able to grow up to the level of the rabit proof tree guard.

It turns out that we have met the truffle grower many time before in another place. He picks me out. “I know you”. At least he knows my hat. It’s a cold wintery day with light showers blowing in and we are all rugged up. I have on my distinctive large Basque beret. He says “I know that hat. You are a regular at The Royal Society Meetings!”

It’s true, I am. I suddenly recognise Ted, It’s one of those occasions when a face is out of place and suddenly snaps into cognition at the mention of a key word. Ted is on the door at the meetings and we speak regularly, if only superficially. I often wear my Basque beret to the Royal Society meetings on the cold winter nights.

Ted has the record for the biggest truffle ever grown in Australia. 1.173 kgs! The world record is around 1.3+kg for a truffle found in Croatia. The French record is also around 1.3 kg.

He has just harvested and there a quite a few nicely sized truffles to choose from. They don’t do retail sales, so we are lucky to be tagging along with Geordie. However, they do take booked, guided tours on selected weekends through the harvest season.

I pick a nice lumpy, mid-sized one that smalls exotic and deliciously fragrant. What is the aroma of a truffle? I can’t define it. I’ve seen it written that it is like “Old socks and sex. Open the spice cupboard and take a deep sniff. Crush an unpeeled clove of garlic. Find some damp leaves and dig your fingers into the earth underneath (oak leaves are best). Then go for something floral, lilies for penetration, roses for sweetness.”(Australian Truffle Growers Assn.)

Now, I didn’t write that, I lifted it from the Australian Truffle Growers Assn. Website, but I can see what they are getting at. I get the old sox and sex bit. Forrest floor compost and some higher floral notes. I can’t come up with a better description, so this will have to do.

We get our precious truffle home and store it in the fridge in a bed of rice along with 2 eggs. The rice will absorb the flavour of the truffle as will the eggs. We’ll be having lightly scrambled eggs for lunch with a little bit of truffle grated on top. Simple, elegant and amazingly flavoursome. The rice will be used to make a truffle risotto for dinner. That’ll be half of our truffle gone. We’ll replace the rice and eggs while we consider our other possible menu options.

I opened the fridge this morning and the even though the truffle is buried in rice in a sealed container. I can smell that distinctive aroma as soon as I open the door. it’s fabulous!

We decide on the simplest of scrambled eggs for lunch and I grate a load of truffle onto them. I feel generous now while the truffle is still so large. In the past when we have bought a very small 20mm, thimble sized truffle, we have used it all in one meal. No reason to be mean with it. Grate it on and really enjoy it. This is the first time that we have had the luxury to think about other meals to follow.

It is fantastic. This winter treat has been a long time coming. The only thing that can improve on this very basic recipe is a little butter to grease the pan and some real salt to help bring out the flavour.

Truffles really make the winter worth waiting for. One of the great joys of seasonal local cuisine.

It’s quite frosty these midwinter mornings, now that the rain has cleared. I wander out in the frost to see how the gardening is faring. Especially the small new seedlings and emerging seeds. Everything looks pristine and bright. The frost crystals fringe the leaves and make the foliage look so delicate. My fingers are cold, but I go back and get the camera to take a few images.

These cold winter days are so appropriate for minestrone. The Lovely picks carrots, cabbage, leeks and celery from the garden and browns an onion in good olive oil. She gas to climb up onto of the kitchen table to reach for another plait of our garlic that is hanging high in the kitchen ceiling curing. We are more or less half way through the garlic year and a bit more than half way through our supply of last years garlic.

I pick the last of the summers dried beans, still in their pods, shell them and soak them overnight. They make a great start to a wholesome soup base. With the Lady’s magic touch, it all comes together into a warming and nourishing couple of meals.

We are enjoying all the usual winter greens. The Brassicas are doing well just now in this cold weather. We have broccoli, cabbage, Brussel Sprouts and cauliflowers all on the go. A typical meals just now might be fish with 3 veg, but otherwise it’s just 3 or 4 veg.

Tonight we have a piece of fish with twice cooked home-grown dutch cream potatoes. Twice cooking starches converts the starch from instantly available high GI starch and sugar, into slowly digested resistant starch, which is very low GI. I Serve this with Brussel sprouts and kale.

I’ve been trying to find a way to enjoy kale, but it is rather limited in what can be done with it. I persist because kale and all the other older fashioned brassicas. The ones that still have their bitterness still in them, The ones where it hasn’t been bred out yet. These are thought to be very good for you.

Prof. Mark Mattson, of Johns Hopkins University has written a few articles about this. I read one in New Scientist magazine last year. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. To summarise. The bitter principal in these veggies stimulates your immune system and tones you up.  So, I keep trying to make it more enjoyable. I’ve decided that the best that I can do is to slice the leafy material away from the stem, slice it finely and simmer it in it’s rinse water and a little olive oil with loads of garlic. Then serve with a squeeze of lemon and some fresh ground pepper and a little of my fake salt substitute. It’s almost enjoyable. Once I mixed in some Ethiopian Cabbage and red mustard leaves with the kale. It must have been very good for me, because I could only just eat it. It was so bitter.

The best way that I have settled into wit kale now, is to simmer the peeled leaves as above and mix in 100g of diced feta , before serving with the seasoning and lemon juice. Have no more fear of kale. This is lovely. The feta makes it all the more delicious and balanced. The fat content dramatically improves the balance, mouth feel and taste.