Category Archives: in the kitchen

Last week of Autumn

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In this last week of autumn, the days are noticeably shorter the weather is so much cooler, and the frosts have started. The tomatoes are dead, but wait. What’s this? Still just a few green tomatoes in among the undergrowth and weeds. AND, 3 red ripe ones!

We are picking plenty of broccoli and cauliflowers. Winter is almost here.

There are just a few very small zucchinis still on the bushes. I need to pick them before they get frosted again and go mushy

All the apples are finished and we have just picked our last pear. We have started to pick the winter citrus. All of the citrus trees were badly burnt in the fire, as they were growing along side the pottery kiln shed wall. The closest ones were killed, those further away got badly scorched, but with a severe pruning away of the dead wood, fertilising and watering. Then planting new trees in the vacant spaces. We have a citrus grove once again. Because many of the trees are still very young, just two or three years old, We have a lot less fruit to look forward to. We are almost through the Japanese seedless mandarins. It was a small crop of 30 or so. The tree is still very young and this is only our 2nd crop, so not too bad. The Japanese yuzu has just two pieces of fruit on. This is its first crop. The kaffir lime trees out the front of the house got very badly burnt, but are making a come back with a lot of pruning and TLC. The stronger of the two trees had over 60 fruit on this year. We only grow it for the leaves, so the fruit is picked off to allow the tree to flourish.

I don’t like to see anything wasted, so I decided to juice 20 of the kaffir limes and make lime juice ice blocks for next summer drinks. I think that it might go well with tequila? It’s a quite sour and bitter form of lime juice perhaps best suited to cocktails?

We have also picked up a fallen grapefruit off the ground, our first, which was very tart and sour. Plenty of room for improvement there as the frosts and winter sunshine sweeten them up.

The other fruit that is plentiful at this time of year is Australian native lilli pilli. This tree survived the fire in behind the house, away from the heat and flames, but it’s a very tall tree and the top branches that extended above the roof got burnt off. It is doing well now with a good crop of pink berries. You can’t eat them, they are only used to make jam or cordial.

I got up on the tall step ladder and picked enough to fill a basket, once I sorted out all the leaves and twigs, there was sufficient to fill the big 10 litre (2 gal) boiler. Simmered for half an hour and then the fruit is discarded and the liquor left to simmer down to a concentrate of about 750 ml, a bit more than a pint. Quite a big reduction to concentrate the flavour. It needs half a cup of sugar to make it desirable.

We had to light the wood stove in the pottery for the first time this year. The pottery is so well insulated, that just keeping a small fire ticking over in the stove heats the throwing room area to a gentle comfy warmth. It’s a very nice place to work, great light, comfy warmth, plenty of space.

What more could you want?

Nothing is ever finished, Nothing lasts and nothing is perfect.

Bush Tucker, Safron and More Tomatoes

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This week we have been hard at it everywhere, in the garden, in the pottery In the kitchen.

We thought that we had harvested the last couple of wheel barrows of tomatoes, but then we looked again and there were more.

Janine made two seperate 1 gallon boilers of passata, which I put through the mouli sieve and then reduced down to 1 gallon, or 4 1/2 litres of fine liquid, which Janine then reduced down further on the wood stove each night progressing a bit at a time until we had just 2.5 litres of dense concentrate, down from 11 litres of initial pulp. It takes a couple of nights to get through it all. It’s better than trying to find the non-existant intellectual shows on the idiot box.

While the wood stove is hot after dinner is cooked, it’s a shame not to use up all that potential heat embedded in the stove. It not just cooks the dinner, it warms the house and heats the hot water tank. So to get an extra bit of benefit from it is very frugal and efficient. F@#k the gas companies and energy retailers, gouging excess profits from the misery of war and bad forward planning. We are very lucky here to have been through a terrible fire that has left us with thousands of dead trees in our forest that I couldn’t have ever brought myself to cut down in their prime. But now that they are dead from the bush fire they need to be cleaned up to make the place safe again. Fuel for the rest of our lives. As I said, very lucky. You have to look on the bright side.

We were a bit shocked when Janine had to re-arrange the pantry cupboard to fit these recent jars in. We discovered that we now have 79 jars of passata. We could easily go into business selling this stuff. It’s not as if we are not eating our fare share of tomato and egg for breakfast, tomato salad for lunch, tomatoes in ratatouille for dinner, as well as giving away tomatoes to everyone who calls in and visits

But still they come ripening, even now in this cooler weather. However, they must come to an end soon, as the night time temperature is dropping rapidly down to 3oC this week. Soon there will be frosts again and that should put an end to it.

I was so looking forward to the start of tomato season back in November/December. I could just brush the young leaves and smell the tomato fragrance that promised so much. Now I don’t want to touch the leaves so much any more. I’ve had my fill. This is the reality of living with the seasons. The promise, then the first taste — so good, then the glut, and now enough.

I’m sure that we will appreciate the bottled tomatoes over winter in all manner of cooked dishes, to add and extend flavour to almost anything. Passata is a useful and flexible as chicken stock. We have some of that in the freezer too.

We have already picked another few baskets full of prime ripe red produce to make the next batch. Anyone want any tomatoes?

In the pottery, I cleaned out the small Venco pugmill that I use for porcelain. It was starting to allow a few small bits of dryish crumbs through the screens and into the extruded pugs. It has been a year since I last cleaned it out. Unless you use it every day or at least every week. Bits dry out inside the barrel and eventually cause trouble. I hadn’t pugged any porcelain since last year. So now is the time to deal with it. Starting out fresh for the coming work load through till Xmas.

I have found that it is easiest as a two day job. Strip it down last thing in the afternoon, Scrape off all the easily accessible plastic clay. Leave it over night to dry out, then scrape off all the dry clay, and finally sponge it until it is all clean, then reassemble, first thing in the new day.

I have been throwing some gritty clay, making some rough textured bowls for the wood firing. 

I have also been making some porcelain dishes for the wood kiln as well.

Back in the vegetable garden we found a great surprise! Our first crocus flower. Janine picked out our first two saffron stamens. We ate one each, just to see if we could taste the fine flavour. We couldn’t. But we did get just a little hint of orange colour on our tongues. Hopefully there will be more to follow, as we have 20 crocus bulbs in the garden. We might double our harvest each year? We might eventually even get enough to be able to taste it.

I made a bush tucker pie for dinner from our massive crop of wild warrigal greens – native spinach. It turned out really well. Cooked with 3 cheeses and one egg to bind it. Not a tomato in sight!

Cheesy grins all round.

March is peak tomato season

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Autumn is peak tomato season. The crop starts to ramp up in February, but really hits its stride in autumn. We are picking a couple of baskets full of red, ripe tomatoes twice a week, with smaller picks in-between for lunches and salads as needed. The big pick goes straight into the large 5 litre copper boilers on the stove with herbs, onions and garlic, to be reduced down to pulp and preserved in sterilised glass jars as tomato passata for use throughout the year in all sorts of meals from pasta sauce to a lovely flavourful addition to soups and stews.

I always start with good olive oil, onions and garlic. I can’t think of anything more delicious than the smell of hot olive oil, and then the salivating addition of the onions and garlic heating and lightly browning as I toss the pan to keep it all moving so that nothing burns. It’s like foreplay. It fills the kitchen with such a wonderful aroma. When Janine comes in from the garden, she always comments how delicious the kitchen smells, and it’s true. I remember years ago when I used to work at the National Arts School in East Sydney. I would cook lunch for the students on Fridays. It was the only day that I came in as a part timer. All the full time staff took their rostered day off on Friday to get a long weekend. They all taught Throwing and hand-building, all the easy enjoyable subjects. So I got the day to teach all the difficult stuff that nobody else wanted to teach, like kiln and firing technology, glaze technology, clay body chemistry and OH&S.

I attempted to make the day more enjoyable by cooking lunch for them, otherwise, many of them wouldn’t bother to turn up at all. I had to keep to a strict budget of $1 per student or less, as no one was funding this exercise. I also noticed that some of the younger student were running perilously short of money by late in the week. So had to resort to going to the Hari Krishna’s in the evening and sit through an hour of indoctrination, so as to get a free veggie meal at the end. That was the real incentive to start cooking for them. One really good cheap brown rice and vegetable meal each week to make sure that they got some proper food with minerals and fresh vitamins. It was fresh, filling, tasty, and free. So they nearly all turned up, as did some of the staff from the library and office on occasions.

Art students don’t usually enrol in Art School to learn technical stuff. They want to express themselves creatively. My subjects weren’t that popular. They mostly turned up because they wanted to get a pass mark. But there were a few quite keen ones. One day while starting to cook lunch, we had a famous chef and restauranteur as a student at the time and he stuck his head over the upstairs rail from the room next door and yelled out how delicious the smells wafting up to his studio were. He offered the analysis that he might be detecting truffles sautéed in cultured butter with thyme and bay leaves. I said NO. Then he suggested some other exotic combination. Again, NO!

I told him that it was just olive oil and garlic so far, nothing else added – yet. He was amazed. It really is that flavoursome.So that is how I start most batches of tomato passata, once the onions are just starting to brown, I add the garlic half way through so that it doesn’t burn. I add in the basket load of tomatoes. It takes about 30 minutes to chop my way through two basketsful of soft ripe tomatoes. Once they are in and heating up, I add in the chopped capsicums, a chilli, pepper corns, loads of sweet basil, a couple of bay leaves, some thyme and or sage and or marjoram, even parsley, whatever is in abundance.

Once all the boilers are full to the brim, I let them simmer for half and hour, to make sure that everything is very soft, as the next step is to pass it all through the kitchen mouli sieve. I wait, usually until the next evening, when its all cooled down before attempting to sieve it. This removes all the herb stalks and tomato skins , etc. 

What is left is then reheated on the stove on a low heat to simmer and reduce by about 1/4 to concentrate it. Once this is ready, then I wash and sterilise the glass jars in the oven and bottle the sauce while it is still very hot. If the hot jars are immediately sealed with ‘pop’ top lids that have also been simmered for a few minutes, then the jars will self vacuum seal on cooling  and the sauce will keep for a year or more without any more energy needing to be applied to it. They never last a year. It’s too delicious.

It’s been a very good tomato crop so far this year, so we have already bottled about 30 bottles, our best ever harvest, and still a long way to go. We are already giving away our excess when people call in or if I go out visiting, I take tomatoes as presents. We will soon run out of the ’normal’ glass jars that we have collected over the years, so we will start to use half size jars.

We get about three to four 700 ml. jars of concentrated passata from each basket full of fruit, and a basket fills a 5 litre boiler with chopped fruit, so 5 litres of boiled pulp is reduced to about 2 1/2 litres of concentrate.

I always look forward to making passata, but at this stage the initial novelty of the cooking and preserving of tomatoes is starting to wear off. However, I still really enjoy it. It’s why I live here like this. To live out of our garden for most of the year. Preserving excess is essential to providing our own food for the entire year.

It’s Post Modern Peasant 101.

Clay and Soufflé

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We are finally back at work in the pottery. Proper work.

There was still so much to finish off in and around the pottery. We have been trying to achieve the impossible. 

To rebuild in a few years what it took us 40 years to build up over a lifetime of potting, collecting and restoring.

There is still a lot to do, but most of all the pressingly urgent stuff is complete and in place. The extraction hood over the electric kilns was the last really necessary thing.

I am currently working part time on a flame combustor, spark arrestor and scrubber for the top of the wood kiln chimney. That will be completed in the next few months in time for the cooler weather and the first wood kiln firing of the season.

This week I made up a batch of rough stoneware body made from crushed shale. I had to spend some time crushing and sieving the shale. I have had this stuff for some time. It had come through the fire and is full of charcoal from the fire. It wasn’t too arduous, as it was only through a coarse mesh.

After mixing the two x 125 kg batches of body, we pugged all the clay twice. Once all through the pug and then stacked on the pug table in a pyramid stack. We then cut off all the ends of the sausages and re-pug it all another time, such that each sausage that comes out of the pug is comprised of a mix of all the previous pugs of clay. This is to ensure that there is very little variability from the first to last sausage of clay.

After finishing up, the pug mills and tables are all washed and wheeled out of the way and all the floors are wet scrubbed and mopped to clean off any small amount of clay that finds it way onto the floor, which it inevitably does. The floor is scrupulously clean all through. All the clay is bagged and boxed. Everything ship shape.

This is the best pottery workshop that we have ever had. Having been burnt out 3 times over our careers. I have designed and built this 4th workshop/studio with every piece of equipment on wheels to facilitate flexibility and cleanliness.

We have been picking lots of food from the garden, then cooking and preserving all the excess. We are up to our 5th batch of tomato passata.

Oven baked pumpkin is great on its own and can be used up all week in all sorts of ways from frittata to salads.

Tomatoes, basil, capsicums, chilli and pepper corns go into the passata.

We had an over ripe banana and a few eggs, so I made us a banana soufflé for desert. It worked out really well.

All part of our attempts at self-reliance. It seems to be working out OK.

Fence Work and Garden Produce

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We have spent the past week continuing to work on the new fence.

The fence is now finished the construction phase and we have been getting on with cutting up the dead trees that had to be removed to clear a straight line for the fence.

I had to have a few days off to rest my back and forearms that got a bit over worked.

I estimate that I have now cut and stacked 1200 to 1500 billets of timber. Enough for 2 years firewood, if not more. Of course some of them are only small, down to 50mm dia.

But some are up to 450mm dia. I cut up the whole tree. Nothing wasted.

All the felled trees that were within 50 metres of the house are now cleaned up, cut to stove lengths and stacked near the wood shed, ready for use in the winter.

The other trees that were felled are all still stacked along side the fence line. I may get around to getting out there, right down the back and cutting them up. 

However, experience has taught me that by the time I have used up all these stacked timber billets, All the logs laying on the ground will have been degraded by the white ants.

There are still so many standing dead trees within just a few metres of the gateway through the new fence that I will most likely be choosing to work on those trees.

Each morning we get up early and do a few hours work wheelbarrowing broken bricks down the back to fill in the deep gaps under the fence.

This is to stop animals from shinnying underneath the fence in the lowest spots. We have almost finished this job. Maybe just one more cool morning’s work.

Once all the gaps are filled with brick bats and rubble, I start carting some left over crushed gravel from the pottery site footings, down to the fence line.

This gravel and dirt mix will cover the crushed bricks and level out the surface to make it easier in the future to keep the fence line mowed and clear of re-growth.

After lunch, it’s too hot to work outdoors in the full sun for us oldies. So we retire indoors to work on other projects in the shade.

I’m currently working on welding up a set of 3 gates to complete the fence line securely. Our neighbour on the back fence line saw a full size stag in his yard the other day.

I really need to get this unscripted and unfunded crisis done and dusted as soon as I can, so that I can get back to my real work in the pottery.

In the evenings we make Tomato passata, Plum sauce and Onion jam. These all need to be made and stored away for later use to make the best of our excess produce.

Bottling tomato passata

Plum sauce bottled and cooling.

At this time of year every meal starts to take on a certain ratatouille aspect. Tomatoes, basil, capsicum, zucchini, and squash.

Summer garden Ratatouille with steamed fish and hand picked capers in a white wine reduction.

Garden beetroot, home made onion jam, and 2 cheeses tart.

Desert is freshly picked blueberries baked into a tart. We are picking 3 kgs every few days at this time of year. Some get preserved for later in the year. Some eaten fresh for breakfast, some are used in cooking like this and the rest are given away to neighbors and friends.

It’s a tough life, but we just have to work our way through it.

Sunday, Our Day of Rest :)

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It’s Sunday, the day of rest. So I’m taking my rest in the vegetable garden doing a little bit of weeding and planting out some seedlings that I bought yesterday.

I usually prefer to grow nearly everything from seed, often from our own self saved seeds, but when we came home from our little break away down the coast, I found that the lettuce seeds that I had planted a few weeks before had mostly all dried up and shriveled in my absence from lack of water and too many hot dry days.

I gave in and bought a punnet of seedlings. I don’t like to buy seedlings unless there is a very good reason. In this case it is because we will run out of lettuces for our salads in a month or so if we don’t have a follow-on crop coming along. So I planted out the seedlings and sprinkled out a few more seeds alongside to come up in the same bed and take over the spaces as the seedling crop is harvested as sunlight and space allows the the new seeds to flourish in the same spot.

I often do a mixed planting of lettuce and radishes for the same reason, as radishes are such a quick crop, they mature and are removed as the growing lettuces need more space and light.

I also spent an hour plucking out small emerging grass seeds from the leek bed, the carrot bed and the beetroot bed. All these three beds were planted out at the same time about a month or so ago. But the grass seeds germinate so quickly and grow so much faster that if I don’t get down on my hands and knees this weekend and pluck the little buggers out now, with my finger tips, they will out grow and crowd out the vegetables. Pulling them out later, when they are bigger, isn’t an option, pulling them when they are larger and more established with a larger root system will disturb the soil and lift out the tiny, fragile vegetables seedlings in-between them. It’s a job that just has to be done NOW. So it’s done, early on, before the sun gets too hot. I also whipper-snippered the edges and mowed the centre of all the paths. I feel proud of my effort when it’s all done. It’s looking good and loved, well cared for and productive. A great way to begin summer.

We spent a bit of time before lunch picking blue berries and young berries. We will have the blue berries with our yoghurt for breakfast and I make a agreeable fruit tart with the youngberries.

I remove the blind-baking beans along with their crushed baking paper, and fill the pastry casing with the fruit mixture, then 20 mins or so in the oven @ 180oC. See recipe previously published here; <https://tonightmyfingerssmellofgarlic.com/2021/12/02/some-r-r-as-the-kilns-cool/&gt;

We now have our breakfast berries picked and in the fridge, our dinner of zucchinis and squash picked, and now desert is taken care of. Time for a little afternoon nap.

There are still loads of weeds germinating in the paths in-between the rows of veggies, but they can be dealt with using a hoe at a later date. That’s a job for another day.

Tiny basil seeds just germinating.

Small parsley seeds germinating and just showing their first leaves. Sown in-between a few purchased early seedlings.

We have new plantings of Sweet basil seeds, coriander seeds and curly parsley on their way. They all need to be precisely finger tip weeded to allow them to thrive. Just a bit of TLC goes a long way. We all need it to thrive. Even me.

The Birds have eaten all the Mulberries

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During the week between the two Open Studio Weekends, I ventured out to check out the mulberries. The crop wasn’t good, but there were quite a few coming on. Possibly ready to pick in a week or so once they ripened up a bit more.

After the last weekend sale, when I found some time to get to the orchard again, I realised that the birds had eaten all the mulberries. ALL THE MULBERRIES!

Recently, we have had quite a good number of wattle birds, Dollar birds, Frier birds and the constant regiment of endemic bower birds

There were just a very few immature pale hard berries left. So no mulberry tarts this year.

Instead, I decided to make a youngberry tart, using last years Youngberries that I preserved and bottled on the 4th of December ‘21.

It’s a lovely tart. It isn’t quite so good as when I use fresh berries, as fresh berries retain a lot more texture and structure to the substance of the tart.

This years berries aren’t ready yet, but the pantry has a few bottles of last years berries that have survived the hungry gap. Principally because we are trying to cut down on our sugar intake.

I don’t add any sugar to the preserved youngberries. They are sweet enough, and every little bit of sugar adds up. But they are wonderful, so rich, so lively with that special mix of acid and sweetness. I love them. They are so special, really unique to this time of year. I really look forward to their season. They follow the mulberries and preempt the cherries.

I couldn’t net the mulberries, the tree is too old and too big, so they are all gone, but I can net the youngberries, as they grow on canes at ground level. 

I blind-bake the pastry first to cook it through and then add the fruit, and bake it again to set the fruit.

As soon as we could find the time, we were out in the garden and netted the youngberries. Safe for this season now.

The chickens come out to see the new Tesla Battery. Perhaps they want to know what it is like to be a battery hen? They don’t appear to be very impressed. Battery hens! What’s all the fuss about?

In the garden, we have picked the last globe artichokes. They are a bit past ‘best’, so need to be cut in half and have the ‘choke’ taken out.

I cut them and trim them down to the essential core of flavour and drop them in lemon juice acidulated water, eventually to make a pasta sauce out of them with our home-made tomato passata sauce from last summer and some little zucchinis and broad beans from the spring garden.

I stuff the zucchini flowers with broad beans, olives, cheese and some chopped gherkins. Not my filling of choice, but I am committed to use what we have in the garden and live with the seasons. We have a lot of broad beans at the moment, and

the last of the winters cauliflowers.

We eat the cauliflower raw with just a little bit of mayonnaise. It makes a lovely entrée.

Do Us a Fava

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This time last year I wrote ‘Give Peas a Chance’. This spring it’s all about broad beans.

Peas and beans are the same family of plants, legumiosae.

Broad beans are also called Fava beans and have a long history of cultivation. My ‘Oxford book of food plants’ tells me that it is one of the most ancient of all cultivated vegetables, and traces have been found among Iron age relics. Fava beans have been found in Egyptian tombs, so we have been eating them for a long time.

Ezekiel mentions them in the Old Testament (Ezekiel 4:9) as Pythagoras (570BC) does also, he hated them. Pliny the Elder also talks about them saying that they are as good for the soil as manure. One of the earliest realisations of nitrogen fixing properties of legumes? He recommended ploughing them back in as a green manure crop.

Eating raw fava beans can be highly toxic to some individuals – even fatal! About 30 million people world wide suffer from a disease called Favism. They suffer a specific genetic trait where they are deficient in a gene that produces an enzyme called D6PD. Just inhaling the pollen without actually eating the raw beans, cause the rupturing of red blood cells. However cooking them neutralises the G6PD enzyme and other toxins that are present in the raw beans.

Thousands of years of careful plant selection by farmers have reduced the levels of the more harmful toxins, so todays crops are less toxic. I love eating them raw out in the garden as I work, just as I can’t resist shelling a few peas while im walking past them.

Apparently, there is a genetic recessive disorder known as ‘Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydronase Deficiency’ that causes favism, and it is the result of an evolutionary development in some humans for resistance to some types of malaria. Which may be why it is most commonly prevalent in people from countries where this disease is endemic?

Maybe Pythagorus suffered from this disorder, such was his distaste for them. There is an account of Pythagoras being pursued by his enemies, who were out to kill him. He had the chance to run through a crop of broad beans to escape, but instead decided to turn and face his attackers and was slain. Bad bean!

Maybe his attackers were the first fauvists?  🙂

I love to eat them raw straight from the pod with a glass of chilled dry white wine while I prepare dinner. The season is so short that I can’t help getting stuck in and enjoying every last little bit of them while they last. This year I planted two types, ‘Windsor short pod’ and ‘Early long pod’. The flavour doesn’t vary much. I try and plant at least two different varieties of vegetables each season just in case one of them isn’t suited the vagaries and challenges of the climate.Who can tell if we are about to get huge deluges of rain or a hotter, dryer spring 4 months in advance? Right at the moment I’ve planted out 6 different varieties of tomatoes for the same reason. Some will do better than others. I’m just maximising my chances of getting some sort of crop in return for all my efforts.

Tonight we had tiny 3rd pick shoots of broccoli, sauteed in a little olive oil with ginger and garlic, served with a dash of fish sauce and lemon juice, along with pan fried flat head fish fillets dusted in a little semolina to crisp up the skin. But the star of the meal for me were the broad beans quickly stir fried just until they were warmed through, but not really cooked. If the skin starts to break open, then they are over cooked. I dress them with a pinch of our dried, powdered chilli. A tbsn full of last seasons dried sweet basil and a grind of black pepper. This is my absolute favourite way to eat them – after raw in the garden or course. I used to cook them in butter, but with my advancing years and rising cholesterol levels, these days I use EV olive oil.

Fish and two veg, quick and simple, couldn’t be better.

4 wood kiln firings in 4 weeks

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We have been hard at it in the pottery preparing for the Arts Trail – Open Studios and the TACA Open Studios weekends coming up very soon. It starts next weekend.
We have just managed to squeeze in one last wood kiln firing. But this will be the last for some time. Mainly because I’ve just about run out of dry glazed pots, but also, because from now on the weather will be getting too hot for safe wood firing over the summer.

This firing seemed to go very well, just 11 1/2 hours to cone 10 down, not quite so hot on the top back shelf with cone 8 over, but cone 10 just starting to bend. Probably cone 9, close enough.
I changed to pack again this firing just see if I can get a better understanding of how this kiln responds to subtle changes of setting. Life is endless learning.

I got a very good control of the ember level with this firing. I’m pleased about that. We have been getting rather too much ember build-up towards the end of the firing in the last few firings, so I opted to open all the mouse holes right from the start. I can’t remember ever doing this before, but it was just right and worked well, kept everything under control. I’m a slow learner, but I get there in the end.
I recon that this wood firing lark is quite good fun. I’ll probably have another go at it 🙂
We’ll see how it has turned out in a couple of days.

We have also lifted the 2nd planting of garlic. This bed of garlic was planted at the same time as the previous batch that had split into individual cloves. This variety has taken a few weeks longer to mature and has stayed as complete bulbs. This bed of garlic has delivered around 50 knobs. The last bed lifted out 45 split knobs. We still have one more double sized bed to go, maybe in a few more weeks? It may have up to 100 plants, but we’ll have to see what matures and lifts and dries successfully. Not all our garlic plants mature to a full supermarket size. We get quite a few small knobs that are a bit tedious to peel, but the flavour is still all there.
We can get through up to 300 knobs of various sizes of garlic in a full year, and that isn’t always quite enough to see us through till next years harvest. This year we ran out of our own home grown organic garlic about a month ago and had to buy 4 or 5 knobs to get us through to a time when we could start to ‘snaffle’ or ‘steal’ a few very early plants from the edges of the first bed.
I love fresh, wet, early, fragrant garlic. I have to have a couple of cloves sliced on my homemade rye bread, with a twist of fresh ground black pepper and a tiny sprinkle of salt. Tonight it’s just not my fingers that smell of garlic. Keep your distance!

The first lifted crop is now all dried, plaited and hung in the kitchen ready for use.

Mustard Pickles

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Because there has been absolutely nothing worth watching on the idiot box for the past week. It was like ground hog day. So I have spent the evenings cooking.I have been using our vegetable excess to make a batch of mustard pickles. I make pickles like this almost every year to use up our excess and preserve it for later.

To preserve the vegetable mix, I first need to make up a pickling vinegar using 1 litre of cider vinegar with 13g of sliced of ginger, 13g of salt, the tip of a tsp of cayenne popper, 3 tspns of whole cloves, 3 tsps of pickling spices, 13g of whole pepper corns, and 1 tsp of mustard seeds. I also add 1/3 cup of sugar.

I boil this for 15 minutes to bring out and meld all of the flavours, then sieve out the spices and keep on ‘mijoteur’, at a very low simmer.

While this is boiling, make up a paste of turmeric powder, mustard powder, etc.

I use half a cup of flour, 2 tsp of powdered mustard, I tablespoon of turmeric powder, tip of a tsp of cayenne pepper, 1 tsp of mustard seed and 1 tsp of curry powder.

I add in some of the pickling vinegar slowly while stirring, bit by bit, until I can work up a smooth paste. Then I mix them both together and bring the mix to the boil for a few minutes.

Drop in the vegetables and stir well to cover them all in spiced vinegar. Keep at a low simmer for 5 mins to amalgamate the flavour into the vegetable pieces and until it thickens.

Spoon into sterile glass jars, and seal. Over the next 10 to 15 minutes, you will hear the metal lids ‘pop’ as the mix cools down and vacuum seals the jars.

Great with cold meats, strong cheddar cheese or just as a side pickle.

You can start to eat it straight away. I do. But it will also keep for a couple of years if you have sterilised the jars properly. 

However mine never gets a chance to wait that long. It’s pretty yummy.