We have had a week of swelteringly hot days, all up in the high 30s. Yesterday was 39oC way too hot to work out side, so we got up very early and got started working by 6am. We gave up and came inside at 11.00 am. It was just too hot. We have been watering the vegetables morning and night, but they are still suffering. Many of the plants like beans, celery and  cucumbers have dead, dried patches on their leaves.

But at least they are still alive, so that is success. I gave the sweet basil its first hair cut. I tip pruned all the florets that were trying to flower and filled a large basket with the leaves. I like to make a kind of pesto-like paste. to go into the freezer, so that there will always be basil to add to sauces later in the year. We also make real pesto with garlic, pine nuts and parmigiano cheese, but what I’m making here now is just basil, garlic, a little salt and olive oil paste. It freezes well and keeps all year, so that when I need some basil flavouring in winter, I can open the freezer and take out the tub of this frozen basil paste, tap it upside down to drop it out of the container and then slice off a block of almost fresh basil concentrate. Beautifully green and flavourful. The rest is returned to the freezer for later.

I’ve been known to make up to six or seven of these half litre containers during the summer. As long as I never let the basil flower and keep pinching out the growing tips, the plants seem to thicken up and keep producing more leaves. Once you let them set flowers, they stop growing.

This stuff is fantastic. I love it. It’s one of there few things that we keep in our small freezer section of our fridge. Because it isn’t cooked, we can’t preserve it any other way, other than drying the leaves, which I have also done, but dried leaves are different. This stuff is magic. So intense. The little bit of garlic and salt really brings it to life. And it is surprisingly easy to slice from the block when frozen. Having very little water content and being mostly oil, it doesn’t set hard like ice, but more sort of leathery?

All the mid season peaches are now gone. We only have one tree of late peaches yet to come on. It is netted and we wait for them to ripen. All the berries are now over with over 20 kilos picked this year and safely all preserved, vacuum sealed and stored in the pantry. This recent heat wave has brought on the plums and they are just wonderful, sweet and tangy with that fabulous combination of acid and sugar that make your mouth water. We eat the first of them straight from the tree. Such a great taste, warmed by the sun, the juice trickles down our chins. They are mouth waveringly good. There are too many ripening all at once, so Janine has been stewing them and we have them for breakfast with a little yoghurt.

We are in direct competition with all the birds at this time of year. The Lovely and hard working Janine has been moving the nets around and bagging some of the fruit, keeping one step ahead of the birds, while I have been so busy with orders. It’s a lot of work, but worth it. Having beautiful fresh, organic, clean food that we have grown ourselves, is a major part of our enterprise here.

We work outside very early and then again in the late afternoon and evening. Working inside during the heat of the day. Janine has mown the stone fruit orchard and I have mown the citrus grove and vegetable garden. Everything is looking good and now the heat is over for the time being with a cool change arriving and bringing with it some beautiful, cooling rain. I emptied the rain gauge this morning and we have had 33 mm. Just enough to flow down and top up the dam for a few more weeks of hand watering. The combination of cooler temperatures and soaking rain will bring all the plants back to life and put on a growth spurt.

I bought a kilo of live mussels from the fish-truck man, so we are having mussel and vegetable soup for lunch. I usually just do the simple favourite, mussels in white wine, but as we have so many beautiful vegetables at the moment, I make a combination of green peppers, green and yellow zucchinis, red shallots and fresh sweet basil sauce. I bring it all to life with a jar of our preserved tomato passata concentrate from March. This batch was made with tiny yellow tomatoes, onions, capsicum, garlic and olive oil.

I cook it off and add the mussels to the boiling broth. It fills the kitchen with its steamy fragrance. It’s a great indulgence, but we  have earned it. Everything except the mussels from our own labours in the garden.

As we have an excess of fresh garlic just at the moment. I decided to make aioli sauce as the accompaniment to the steamed fish and new potatoes that we are having for dinner.

Aioli is a very ancient form of sauce, a bit like mayonnaise, but flavoured with garlic. It’s a great addition to lots of meals. Tonight we are having fresh ‘Ling’ off the fish truck that comes up to the Highlands from the coast, 3 days a week. He arrives at 6.00am and is sold out by 1.00 or 2.00 pm. I get there just in time to get the last piece of ling and some fresh mussels.

I decide to steam the Ling with a few drops of olive oil, to stop it sticking, then add a few fresh leaves off the Kaffier lime tree on top. I deglaze with a crisp white wine and serve it with our steamed new potatoes and  zucchini, picked fresh from the garden.

We have both green and yellow zucchinis at the moment. They are the first of the summer vegetables to come into full production so early on the  the season. It’s still late spring. It isn’t even summer yet, but we have just had our first 40+oC day for the season. It forces us to be out watering both morning and night to keep the young summer vegetables from drying out and being set back.

I peel and then crush the cloves of one small knob of our fresh garlic, then add the juice of half a lemon, one egg yolk from our son Geordie’s chickens and whisk it all up together into a mucilarge. I then proceed to add just a few drops of olive oil to the mix, a few drops at a time while whisking with the other hand. This continues until a thick white, bulked-up consistency is achieved. It takes quite a lot of oil to bring this about.. Don’t worry if it takes a long time, just keep on adding a few more drops of the oil at a time. Don’t get frustrated and add too much in one go. To make a mayonnaise-like emulsification sauce, you need to be patient. Just add a few drops at a time and keep whisking. It will eventually emulsify.

This is a very ancient recipe, dating back into prehistory. It is to be found all over the south of Spain, France and northern Italy. It was apparently, originally, just a mix of garlic and olive oil to begin with. It was later found that the addition of a little egg yolk, stabilised the emulsion and thickened it considerably. It benefits from the addition of a little salt and some freshly ground pepper to taste.

Rick Stein has suggested that the garlic be crushed with the side of a large chef’s knife and then chopped fine, crushed again with the side of the knife and very fine chopped and worked into a paste. A rather nice craftsman-like way to do it. I like it. For those without the patience or the knife skills, a garlic press works well enough. I actually like  it to be a little chunky and rustic. I also like it to have a lot of garlic in it.

Anyone can buy that anonymous, mild, made not-to-offend, finely milled, bland paste from the supermarket. It has too much salt and is loaded with preservative. What I’m making here is real life food, home grown, home made, organic, rough, chunky and strong flavoured.

However it is made, it is just right NOW at this time of year, when the garlic is so fresh and oily. Later in the year when it dries out and goes rather leathery, it just isn’t the same. At this time of year, aioli is a great accompaniment for lots of things that we grow and eat. It goes very well with fish and potatoes.

Aioli probably lasts quite a long time in the fridge, but we’ve never managed to keep it long enough to find out. It’s deliciously piquant.

We haven’t had any red meat since August, I’m starting to think that it would be nice to have a couple of lamb cutlets with aioli.

We have had a couple of very good week ends of Open Studio, with lots of visitors and good sales. This is the best Open Studio that we have participated in. The Open Studio Trail has been operating now for about 10 years and we have participated in 5 of them. We would have been involved in more of them, but they fell on times when we we’re away or unable to take part for one reason or another . So this has been good for us to see a strong response to our domestic pots.

It has been frenetic, but very good. we are looking forward to a slightly easier and quieter time for the next little while. We have a lot of other small, deferred jobs to catch up on, as well as a kiln to finish building. It has been sitting in stasis for the past two weeks while we concentrated on the pottery.

The Lovely has been busy dealing with the new garlic. We have had it spread out to dry all over the place from in the sun on the front verandah to the kitchen floor in front of the big window. The best of it is all peeled and plaited now and hung up in the kitchen to finish drying. We have 10 plaits holding anything from 15 to 20 knobs and another equal number of knobs that were too far gone to be able to plait and they are currently stored loose in wicker baskets in the kitchen window to finish drying along with the last of the broad beans.

I love the fresh, oily, new season garlic. It just pops out of its soft skin so easily. I have been eating garlic sandwiches, made with heavy, dark rye bread. A dusting of veggie salt and freshly ground pepper and it’s all I need. There is only a month or so where it stays like this, so fresh and wet and oily. Once it dries out and the skin becomes papery, then the magic is gone and it becomes just plain ordinary garlic for the next 6 months, until it declines into its older, leathery dried out state with green shoots. This is when it is time to replant the next crop.

We save the largest and strongest bulbs for planting out for next seasons supply. These go back into the ground around about March, as soon as there is any sign of a green shoot. I usually see a few wild shoots appearing in the garden at this time. Some rogue cloves that have escaped captivity. They set the agenda, when they shoot up out of the ground, it’s time to replant the next years crop. We can still keep on eating the remainder of our stock from the kitchen plaits until it is all used up. We rarely last out the year, usually falling short by a month or two, but this year we made it right to the end by buying a plait from one of the members of our local ‘Seed Savers Group’.

We have had a few changes in the weather with a few warm days following some rain and the first of the spring crop of Safron milk-cap mushrooms (Lactarius deliciosus,) has appeared in the garden. They grow in conjunction with pine trees, and as we have some magnificent Caribbean pines growing beside our house, we get a good supply of these lovely wild mushrooms all through the year, but mainly in spring and autumn. This one may end up in a risotto for dinner.

I have recently been experimenting with making a variation on risotto using buckwheat. I bought a kilo of organically grown buckwheat and have been finding ways of using it. I originally bought it to make my own ‘soba’ noodles. However, ‘buckotto’ has turned out to be my favourite use for it.

We have plenty of beetroot, carrots, broad beans and zucchinis at the moment, so tonights dinner will be pink veggie buckotto. I make it just like any other risotto, by first slow heating some finely chopped onion in good olive oil and later adding some of our garlic. Cooking them though for some time so that they are soft, translucent and glowing, but not browned or burnt. Add a cup of the small triangular buckwheat grains to the mix and stir till coated with oil. I add a cup of white wine and add in the various sliced up vegetables in order of required cooking time, stirring often. Today, I have a pan of fish stock on the go to keep the mixture lubricated. I also have a few jars of our own preserved tomato passata left in the pantry from last summer, so I add in half a small jar of this and a slab of frozen basil pesto from the freezer.

We only have a very small freezer attached to the top of our small domestic fridge. We have chosen not to own a separate freezer to save using electrical power unnecessarily. When we preserve our summer excess from the garden we do it by cooking and vacuum sealing the produce in glass ‘Vacola” jars. Basil pesto of course, isn’t cooked, so it is one of the few things that go in the freezer. I made 7 tubs of the stuff last summer. It’s great to be able to go to the freezer and grab a chunk of distilled summer garden essence and add it to a meal so much later in the year.

I keep the dish moving, so that it won’t stick as it thickens up. it’s a beautiful, rich vegetable flavour with a creamy texture and some chewy vegetable chunks.

A great meal for a late spring evening. Ever so simple. Quick and easy and very tasty.

I believe that it is even quite healthy.

The first of our open studio weekends is over and we were quite busy all day, each day, with only one 10 minute gap between visitors all day each day. Not quite enough time to be able to make and eat a sandwich. We had to take it in turns to eat and go to the loo.

Now that the pressure is off. It is time to lift the garlic crop for this year. As I got them in early, they were ready to be lifted and dried a couple of weeks ago. Now is the first clear space I have had to be able to get into the garden and spend a couple of hours digging over the plot, weeding and sorting them all out.

Janine had managed  to get into the main garden last week and dig up the small plot that I planted out up there. I planted about 100 cloves from our larger knobs in the kitchen. A mix of all the different types that we have collected over the years. Red, white and pink varieties in both hard and soft stem types. She managed to find the time to preen them and spread them out to dry, before plaiting the largest of them and hanging them up on the kitchen wall by the wood stove chimney to finish drying. We have 3 plaits of about 15 knobs each. With another 50 smaller knobs all cleaned and dried and placed in a large colander on the kitchen bench top for immediate use over the next month or so.

While I dig the garlic, The Lovely gets stuck in at the other end of the plot, up by the patch of English cottage garden flowers that I planted for her as a surprise 2 or 3 years ago. They take a while to get established, but are flowering well now. It bit past their best, but still lovely. A very nice back-drop to our work today. At some point in the future, I am going to reverse these two garden beds and lift all the cottage garden flowering plants and move them to the vegetable end, and vice versa. This will refresh the soil and the vegetables and flowers will both benefit from the change. Janine starts to harvest the last of the broad beans. Pulling out the spent plants as she finishes stripping the last of the beans off each one. It’s nice to be able to spend this time, working together in the garden.

I bought half a dozen ‘new’, named varieties of organically grown garlic and planted them out in serried rows, down here in the Pantry Field garden. They had grown quite well, with some being obviously much stronger growers than others. I bought 3 knobs of each and planted out the individual cloves. These have now grown up into about 150 knobs of differing sizes. It would have been best if we had managed to find the time to harvest them a week or two ago. They had started to dry out and the tops had begun to lean over. Then we got so busy and it started to rain. We had 3 inches or 75 millimetres of rain last week and this was enough to reduce the dried tops to a liquid mush. The earliest varieties had lost their ‘paper’ coating and are starting to ‘burst’ or spread out. They’ll be fine for eating, but without any substantial stem. we won’t be able to plait them and hang them up. So more individual knobs for use directly from the bowl kitchen bench top.

I’m not too sure how this will affect their ‘keeping’ capacity? We’ll find out during the coming year as this hasn’t happened before. I’m glad that we have had this fine, sunny day today, combined with a day ‘off’, so that we could get the crop in and start it drying out. There is a certain sense of achievement, satisfaction and security knowing that we have to years supply of garlic safely in hand.

Some people have asked me what we do with so much garlic. Well, we eat it. We seem to get through the 200 to 300 small knobs pretty easily during the year. What we grow isn’t the largest or most presentable garlic. Not like what you might see for sale in the green grocers. But it is our own, organically home-grown produce, clean and free from any sprays, pesticides or preservatives. That is the kind of self-reliance that our enterprise here is all about, and a day ‘off’, spent in the garden is a good day indeed. This is fun for us. It doesn’t involve going out, driving anywhere, or spending any money. What more could you want?

Our friend Annabelle Sloujetté has turned up from the south coast, bearing gifts of oysters and a couple of beautiful blackfish. I steam them with some of our fresh little garlic cloves, a little olive oil, a couple of sliced large dark field mushrooms, two sliced zucchinis, some pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. A splash of white wine finishes it off.

These fish are a really good size for blackfish, so I choose to cook them in the big rectangular copper baking pan, but it doesn’t have a lid. In the past I have used a sheet of al-foil to cover the pan on occasions, but I really don’t like to use aluminium cooking foil. It’s an environmental disaster, so we rarely use it. I decide to run down to the kiln shed and quickly make up a folded stainless steel, custom-made, lid for the pan. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time now. So now is the time.

I choose a small piece of stainless off-cut, that is almost the right size. I measure it exactly and use the guillotine to slice off a few centimetres, I use the pan break to fold a slight return on two sides to help keep it flat when it is heated, then hand-file and smooth the edges. I measure it so that it will fit exactly between the two handles and sit snuggly on the flat rim.

It takes me 7 1/2 minutes to get it done and I’m back in the kitchen before the others have  finished cleaning the new potatoes that we harvested today along with the garlic and broad beans.

I lift my hand to my face to wipe my brow after I have run back up from the workshop. Ah, Yes! I remember that smell. I have been digging and cleaning garlic all day, so tonight my fingers smell of garlic – again!