strange beast

Lots of posts from out the back at the moment. It's all really happening out there. My true love has been building stuff at his work bench which he followed by a big clean up and all of a sudden it's a gorgeous place to be.

We had a little darts session out there with friends who are visiting from interstate. The orchids are throwing up new shoots, mouse melon is climbing all over the place (though sadly not fruiting), the lemon myrtle is flowering and so is this weird little cactus. The strange flower looks like something from a rockpool but smells like rotten meat. Fly pollinated, I'm guessing. Awesome.

Breakfast for two

I've never been lucky enough to grow a prolifically fruiting eggplant bush. The bloke a couple of plots over seems to have a knack for it. I shall never forget the gorgeous plant, more like a tree, he grew a couple of years ago, covered for months in glorious pale purple flowers and long skinny purple-black fruit. Awe inspiring.

I have no such luck. After an optimistic burst of growth early in the season, my eggplant plants tend to stay fairly stationary for most of the year, producing a scattering of flowers and if we're lucky, one, maybe two fruit. And it's tricky to know what to do with a single eggplant. 

Now hopefully, things will be different this season. It's been a slow start but the other day we got our first fruit. Just the one, there are others but they're a while off yet. And rather than buy some more eggplants and spoil the specialness of eating our homegrown fruit by mixing it in with the others; or wait for the others to ripen and risk having the first one spoil, I decided to find a recipe I could make with just one eggplant.

And I came back to a recipe I made sometime last year. Smoked eggplant salad. From Turkish Flavours by the intimitable, Sevtap Yuce. You should get her books, they're delish. The salad uses two eggplants, and serves four. So one eggplant - breakfast for two!

The recipe is simple: toast the eggplant on the stovetop until the skin is crispy and burnt and while it cools, chop a handful of parsley, a garlic clove, a tomato (I used a handful of yellow cherries from the garden, quartered) and a small green chilli. Peel the burnt skin from the eggplant and chop it too. Throw it all in together and season with salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice. Mix it all up. Serve it on crusty bread.

Everything but the garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper came from the garden. And it was perfect - I can't bloody wait for the next ripe eggplant.

January moments

Cornflowers in the kids' corner.

Self seeding tomatillos to share.

Garden art.

And backyard lotus, one year on.

allium and roses

The gorgeous globes of the leeks have blammed into bloom. They're busy attracting insects and looking divine. I'm not sure why you'd want to pull them out before they flower. Unless it was to make something delicious, of course.

And here is a little something I threw together. Supermarket roses, sweetpeas and love in the mist seedpods.

And on the way out...

super quick summer bean pasta

The beans are going, um, bananas, down in the communal bed at the moment. A great double sided frame of them, practically spitting beans like a crazy, jack-potting pokie machine. Amazing. We've been using them at our house to make iterations and variations of super easy-peasy quick, summer, bean pasta. Here it is, in all its simple but delicious glory.

Ingredients

a bunch of beans,
a coupla shallots/an onion,
4 cloves of garlic,
olive oil,
one small chilli (totally optional)
salt,
pepper,
a glug of white wine or vermouth 
plenty of parmesan

All you do is....

Wash, top/tail and chop the beans into thirds. Put the pasta on to boil. Finely chop the onion or shallots and garlic. Pop it into a frypan with generous oil and the sliced chilli. Saute at low heat until soft and slightly golden. Splash in the booze and allow it to sizzle off. Just before the pasta is ready, add the beans to the onion pan and (lightly!) saute (you want them to soak up some flavour but stay crunchy). Drain the pasta. Combine with beans. Add lots of parmesan. That's it!

The Height of Summer

It's been a couple of months now that we've had the new plot the new plot and after two weeks away (thank you, kind watering friends), things are really cranking. We've added a trellis for the cucumbers, the cosmos, French and English marigolds and long-awaited dahlias and  are flowering, first batch of lettuce are going to seed, second batch are just putting their roots down, bean pyramid is up, eggplant is finally putting out pretty mauve blossoms, tomatoes are covered in unripe fruit (c'mon!) and the tomatillos are laden with little green lantern-like cases which house the developing tomatillos (hola, salsa verde!). I've been very happy to see aphid eating insects like ladybirds and solider beetles patrolling the plants and the thick mulch seems to be keeping the weed seed bank at bay. So far, so good...

 

 

Here's a bit of a sequence of the changes over the last few weeks.