We have 4 enormous tubs, 3 large pots, and a couple of middling sized pots filled with potting mix and/or various vegetable matter. For the big tubs, I raked up a heap of leaf litter and filled them 1/3 with that, 1/3 with chopped lucerne, and 1/3 with organic potting mix. There’s more lucerne left over to be mulch.

I’ve planted the 4 tomatoes, 3 peppers, basil, and thyme into the tubs and the largest of the pots. I’m waiting on seeds to arrive to plant stuff in the other ones.

Our worm farm also arrived today. Darebin (our local municipality) is a Transition Town so they have various programs to encourage sustainability. One of them is subsidised worm farms. Ours cost $60, and I’ll head down to CERES tomorrow to buy some worms to put in it.

Cooking:

Emily was going to make dal saag but she forgot to get spinach, so instead we had fried gnocchi. I threatened to blog her cooking, but she said she’d blog it herself at the food/craft/domesticity blog she shares with our friend Ana so keep an eye out for it there. Suffice it to say that she fried gnocchi in olive oil with vast amounts of garlic, then added kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes, and fresh parsley. We ate it with parmesan sprinked over, and it was amazing, especially after all the gardening work.

(Updated: she’s posted her recipe here.)

Now she’s got some lemon slice in the oven, using the lemons we found in that empty block yesterday. I am looking forward to them so much — that sort of slice is just like Nanna used to make, and something I hardly ever do myself but love intensely when other people do. She’s using this recipe.

Preserving:

There is going to be a lot of food preservation going on around here this summer. I bought an 80s-era Fowlers Vacola preserving unit from eBay the other week, but only after determining that actually, you don’t need to use the expensive Fowlers branded jars with the pain-in-the-arse lids. Seems you can use any jar you want, as long as it is clean and unchipped, and has a fresh lid. Green Living Australia sell bulk lids for standard Australian jars (the ones you find most often in supermarkets, such as jam, pasta sauce, and pickle jars), so I got a bunch of them, and they came today.

Now historically I’ve just re-used the lids that came with jars, but I was usually making sugar or vinegar-heavy recipes (jams, chutneys, pickles) that didn’t really need heat preserving and where bacteria would basically be scared off before they got anywhere near it. This year I want to preserve stewed fruit and passata (tomato sauce) without masses of added preservatives, which means hot water method and being much more finicky about the jars and lids I use.

Anyway, the Fowlers unit should be good for the hot water preserving in the summer, since it is an enclosed container with a lid, that runs on an electric cord (basically like a kettle or an old fashioned hot water urn), and which you can even put outside to run on a hot day, which means the kitchen needn’t get too overheated.

Also from Green Living: yoghurt culture and assorted bits and pieces for yoghurt making. In the past I’ve mostly just made yoghurt from other yoghurt, but I thought it might be worth a try doing it from dry culture for a change. We’ll see how it goes.

Christmas: I don’t think any of us in this house are massively into Christmas decorations, but we do like fairy lights, so we’ve been buying them and decorating the carved woodwork around the house with them. Today I discovered that you can get solar powered LED lights in the garden department at K-Mart for cheaper than the ones in the Christmas decoration area, so we’re going to put some of them over the front door and around the gatehouse. We’ve got the plain white ones and we’re intending to leave them up year-round.

Knitting: It’s warming up but it’s not so hot I can’t knit. Since I’ve been reunited with the bits of my yarn stash I left in storage in Australia, I’ve cast on a few things in an attempt to get rid of some of it before my other stash arrives from the US.

I have several not-quite-a-jumper amounts of 8 ply wool, so I’ve got this stranded yoke pullover (body in an oatmealy colour and yoke in grey-blue and cool brown), and a striped EPS in cherry red and black Cleckheaton Country on the needles. The former of those is up to the armpits and I’ll probably join them tonight and start on the yoke. Unemployment turns out to be good for my knitting productivity. Surprise.

I often make stewed fruit, but I haven’t written about it here, yet, I don’t think. I sometimes joke that I have “childhood fruit trauma”, which means that although I like fruit, I don’t much like eating it if it’s been sitting around in a fruit bowl or in the fridge for a while. I have to either eat fruit as soon as I buy it, or cook it into something. So, this is the simplest way I cook fruit for daily use. I buy whatever’s cheap and good at the market, a kilo or two at a time, and stew it in a minimalist sort of way. The results then get spooned over my breakfast muesli, eaten as dessert with a dollop of yoghurt, or used in other dishes (for instance, in baked goods).

When I stew fruit, I don’t add any sugar, so it’s important to use fruit that’s reasonably ripe and sweet. It can have a bit of bite to it, but if you wouldn’t eat it raw without sweetening, this is not the stewed fruit recipe for you. (In other words, don’t try this with rhubarb!)

The recipe is extremely simple:

1. Prepare your fruit in whatever way you want. For apples, I peel then dice them. For small stone fruit like apricots or plums, I simply wash them and halve them, taking out the pits. For peaches, I slice them.
2. Put them in a pan, preferably a heavy-bottomed one, with a drizzle of water. Seriously, just a little drizzle is all you need.
3. Optionally, add some spices. For apples I usually add cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Most stone fruits I leave unspiced, though combinations like peach and ginger, or plums with cardamom, can be nice.
4. Cover them and cook over a low heat, stirring occasionally and carefully so as not to break up the fruit any more than you intend to, until soft. The drizzle of water you added should be just enough to stop the fruit sticking to the pan until the fruit heats up enough to let out some of its own juices. So mostly you’re just cooking the fruit in its own juice.

That’s it. I usually put aside a bowl full in the fridge for my breakfasts, and freeze the rest in little containers. I’m hoping, this summer, to start preserving them using the hot water canning method, so I can keep them in the pantry rather than taking up freezer space.

Related:

• Apple oat crumble

Writing about what I’m cooking is also good for my mental health, I think. I’m a bit screwed up around food, sometimes, and sometimes I just… forget how much I actually enjoy cooking and eating good food. So this helps reinforce it for me. I’m really pleased at the moment that I have a great kitchen, in a house that’s close to good markets and not too close to cheap takeaway food, and with housemates that I can cook and eat with. I’m in a pretty good place, food-wise, and I want to make a record of it.

Anyway! My point here — and I do have one — is that since I’m making a record of what I’m eating, rather than trying to be pretentious and perfect, you’re about to get a recipe for what I cooked the other day when I was dying of menstrual cramps and, for some reason, craving curry. There was no curry to be had, but I did have curry powder in the cupboard, and so, this… a sort of curry fried rice thing that’s not quite kedgeree but is closely related to it.

I first cooked kedgeree after reading about it in Connie Willis’s “To Say Nothing of the Dog”. I mean, I’d read about it before that, but the particular scene in that book — where Ned, a time traveller, comes down to breakfast in a Victorian country house and is disgusted by the devilled kidneys and kedgeree on offer — is what prompted me to actually look up a recipe. Kedgeree’s usually made with smoked fish and hard boiled eggs, but I didn’t have any smoked fish on hand and couldn’t be bothered boiling eggs, so here’s what I did instead.

• 1 cup basmati rice
• 1/2 onion, diced (I didn’t have any, so used spring onions, but would have preferred ordinary onion)
• 1 generous tblsp ghee OR half and half oil and butter (oil for high-heat cooking, butter for flavour)
• 1 heaped teaspoon mild, English-style curry powder (Keen’s, or similar)
• 2 eggs, whisked with a little water, fried as a thin omelette, then cut into small pieces
• 1 small can tinned salmon, drained and roughly broken up
• chopped parsley
• salt and pepper

Cook the rice (or you could also use 2 cups leftover, pre-cooked rice). Make the omelette — I did this in the wok I was about to use to fry the rice — then cut it up into small pieces. Saute the onions in the oil and butter until translucent and just starting to brown. Throw in the curry powder and stir until fragrant, then add the rice and toss it until the curry powder is evenly distributed throughout. Add in the eggs, salmon, and chopped parsley and stir it through. Season with salt and pepper.

It was tasty enough, and it hit the spot, but to be honest the tinned salmon was nowhere near as good as the smoked fish this should really be made with. So I strongly recommend you use smoked fish (I’ve done smoked cod and smoked trout in the past), as well as using chopped hard boiled eggs rather than the quick omelette I made. On the other hand, if you don’t want to go to much trouble, this is quick and easy and only messes up the one pan.

I often crave fish and tomatoes, together, when I’m premenstrual, so when I sat down to eat this, I realised that what I really wanted was a big glass of tomato juice on the side. I didn’t have any, but I wound up spooning a big dollop of tomato kasundi into my bowl and mixing it through the not-quite-kedgeree, and it was pretty damn tasty, so if you have anything of that nature kicking around, you might like to try it.

Related rice recipes:

• Fried rice with kale

Clockwise from lower left: figs, free range eggs, biscotti, cauliflower, salad onions, zucchini, polenta, whole wheat bulgur, cherries, tomatoes, parsley, silverbeet (chard), salad mix, nectarines, baby potatoes, and cheese (maasdam and caprakaas). Not shown: spring onions, whole nutmeg, whole allspice.

It’s the first time I’ve seen decent looking stone fruit in the market, though it’s still early days. These truss tomatoes were $5.99/kg and I saw other decent-looking cooking tomatoes around $3… when they come down to $2 I’ll buy boxfuls of them and make sauce. The potatoes were 79c/kg and should be lovely. Zucchini was… was it $1 a kilo or $2? Either way, worth it. Cauliflower was $1.50 a head. This is why I love Preston Markets on a Saturday afternoon: they’re closed Sunday-Monday-Tuesday so everything is going cheap.

Plans:

• Figs: carrot cake! I tried to make my favourite “dwarf bread” carrot cake a couple of weeks ago and the new oven just didn’t want to work with me, so I’m going to try again.
• Cauliflower: baked, with parmesan and breadcrumbs (recipe)
• Potatoes: housemate says she’ll make potato salad, which was exactly what I was hoping for.
• Tomatoes, bulgur, parsley: tabbouleh
• Silverbeet: with tomatoes and cannelini beans, over cheesey polenta

And a quick tabbouleh recipe, for the record. This is what we had for dinner tonight.

• 1/2 cup whole wheat tabbouleh, soaked in 1 cup boiling water with a pinch of salt, until chewy
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• juice of 1 lemon
• slosh of olive oil
• 2 tomatoes, seeds removed then diced
• scant 1/4 cup finely chopped salad onion
• 1/2 a large bunch of parsley, chopped
• pepper and salt to taste

Mix everything together and let it sit for 15 minutes or so for the flavours to blend. Serve with whatever mediterranean things take your fancy. In our case, we had lebanese bread, hummus, and feta cheese.

Related recipes:

• Herbed couscous with chickpeas and baked sweet potato

My photography is not really up to Heidi's standards. Check out her poached eggs over rice for a similar recipe with a gorgeous photo, and pretend mine looks like that.

Red rice is available in good Asian grocery stores. It’s a whole-grain rice with the brick-red husk left on. It cooks faster than most brown rices, though — only about 20 minutes — and has a great flavour.

• 1 cup Thai red rice
• 1.5 cups water

Dump these in a rice cooker and cook til done. If you prefer to cook on the stovetop, put them in a small lidded pan, bring to the boil, then simmer gently with the lid on til almost all the water’s absorbed, then turn the heat off and allow the rest of the water to absorb by itself.

You can also use leftover rice. Of course, leftover rice is best for fried rice when it comes to texture, but when working with non-glutinous wholegrain rice I find this is less important.

Meanwhile:

• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 spring onions, cut thinly on the diagonal
• 1 tsp chillis in oil
• slosh of grapeseed oil (or other high smoke point oil)

If you don’t have or can’t find the chillis in oil, you can substitute any other kind of chilli you like: sambal oelek, fresh chopped chilli, red pepper flakes, etc. I like the chillis in oil for this recipe, though, because of their dark toasty flavour which goes well with the red rice and kale.

Quickly stir-fry the onions, garlic, and chilli in oil in a wok. Once all that’s fragrant and before the garlic browns, toss in the cooked rice and rapidly stir-fry, breaking up chunks as you go. Add:

• 3 cups chopped kale or other sturdy greens (eg. chard)
• light soy sauce, to taste

I gave it a few good shakes of the soy sauce bottle. Don’t bother measuring, just shake some in, stir fry, taste, and add more if you want. Keep stir-frying and heating everything through til the kale wilts.

I served my fried rice with a fried egg on top and a dollop of sambal oelek for extra kick. If you didn’t want to do the egg thing, you could stir-fry some cubed tofu or add in some nuts (raw cashews, maybe?) after the onions and garlic and before the rice.

Previously, in Asian cooking:

• Spicy Asian greens with tofu

1/3 fuji apple, thinly sliced
a few thin slices of red onion
butter
3 eggs
handful grated cheddar
sprig of parsley, minced
a few sage leaves, minced
pepper and salt

I sauted the apple and onions in a little butter until both were soft and the apples were a little brown, and set them aside. Then I mixed up the eggs, sage and parsley, pepper and salt, and a tiny drizzle of water in a bowl. (The water helps the eggs break up better. I don’t know where I learnt this but I’m a firm believer in it.)

When I make an omelette I always fry it in butter, not any other kind of oil. To my mind, the flavour is better, and I like the way it browns the outside of the omelette. Anyway, if you don’t know how to make an omelette, I’m not going to give you particular instructions. I’m not really an expert.

I wasn’t even going to take a photo because my omelettes are always so unphotogenic, but I figured it couldn’t be too bad before I attempted to fold it, right?

Anyway, this was exactly what I needed: a bit salty, a bit sweet, interesting but not too challenging. I don’t care if it’s weird.

Previously, with eggs:

• Potato frittata
• Things I’ve learnt since moving to California

I’ll mention a few other variations below, but for now, here’s the soup I most recently made. In terms of flavour, I was aiming for somewhere around North Africa, but this is by no means an authentic recipe, hence the generic “Mediterranean” in the title. You can adjust the spices if you prefer to take it more Italian, Spanish, or whatever.

• olive oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 bulb fennel, quartered and thinly sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1 can diced or crushed tomatoes
• 1 can chickpeas
• 1/2 cup red lentils
• 500mL good vegetable stock
• 1L water
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 bunch greens (kale or silverbeet would be best, I think; I used cavalo nero), chopped
• salt and pepper
• pita bread and plain yoghurt, to serve

In a large soup pot, saute the onions and fennel in olive oil until translucent. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and stir until fragrant, but don’t let the garlic brown.

Add the tomatoes, stock, chickpeas, lentils, turmeric, cinnamon, and about half of the water. Bring to the boil then simmer until the lentils are cooked (about 15 minutes). Add the greens and cook a further 10 minutes (assuming sturdy greens like kale or chard), or less if using less sturdy greens (eg. spinach). Add more water if soup seems too thick.

Adjust seasonings to taste. Serve with a dollop of yoghurt or, if you prefer, a squeeze of lemon juice.

I mentioned some variations, so here are some of my other onion-tomatoes-legumes-greens recipes. Generally these start by sauteing onions and/or garlic, adding a can of tomatoes, throwing in beans and greens, and serving with some kind of grain.

• Cannelini beans and kale, and optionally add mushrooms, served over cheesey polenta.
• Chickpeas, diced tomatoes (or use fresh if you’ve got them), arugula/rocket or parsley, cooked quite dry and tossed with linguini. You can shave some parmesan over the top if you like.
• Saute an onion and add some curry powder, then add canned tomatoes, red kidney beans, and turnip or mustard greens. Serve over rice.
• Leek and bacon, sauted, then tossed with cooked green lentils, fresh or oven-roasted tomatoes, fresh baby spinach, and a mustard vinaigrette to make a salad. (Onion works fine instead of leek, of course.)
• A wet, wintery, soupy version of the above: leek and bacon, canned tomatoes, stock, lentils, and greens of your choice. Season with thyme and serve with crusty bread.

Chickpeas, previously:

• Chickpea, pumpkin and Israeli couscous stew
• Herbed couscous with chickpeas and sweet potato
• Chickpea, pumpkin and spinach curry

1/2 bulb fennel, very thinly sliced
1 orange, peel and pith removed, quartered, and sliced
2 large handfuls rocket/arugula
1 dozen high quality black olives
white wine vinegar
olive oil
pepper and salt

I threw together the fennel, orange, rocket, and olives, and then dressed it with a simple vinaigrette made with the vinegar, oil, and seasonings (I also made sure any remaining orange juice on the chopping board wound up in the dressing). Served with pita bread and eggplant dip, this was dinner for two moderately hungry people.

Salads, previously:

• Oven roasted tomato and puy lentil salad
• Asian chicken and mango salad