Strange but Wonderful Green Tomato Saucy Pickle

I'm quite compulsive about not wasting produce. Slightly obsessive, in fact. And so when the lovely Ingrid was turfing the last of her cherry tomatoes at the busy bee last weekend, I couldn't resist setting the plants aside until I (actually, my darling husband) had a chance to pull every last green or orange tomato fruit off the leggy old stems.

My plan was to make green tomato pickle. But when snoodling around on the internet this morning, all the recipes seemed to require allowing the fruit to sit and drain overnight, which was out of the question because today is Sunday and everyone knows, preserving on a Monday is a recipe for nothing but disaster. To get around the problem I tried a search for "green tomato sauce" because then I figured I'd be able to boil the moisture out instead. Anyway, I managed to find a couple of recipes that were a bit inspiring, including this Jamie Oliver recipe. I decided to blitz all my ingredients, then cook them up for a bit before bottling. I set about collecting ingredients and somehow I ended up with a whole lot more (green) things than any of the recipes asked for. Here's the full list:

a kilo of mostly green cherry toms,
a few tomatillos,
two green capsicums,
two onions, 
several cloves of garlic,
a bunch of basil and parsley from garden, stalks included,
two sticks of celery,
a couple of fresh curry leaves,
a lemon myrtle leaf,
a couple of green chillies,
a slice of lime peel,
juice of half of the same lime,
200ml of white vinegar,
70g of brown sugar,
salt,
pepper, 
coriander seeds,
and
whole allspice.

I wasn't sure it was going to work but it seemed worth a shot. So I crushed the coriander and allspice then dry toasted them. Next, I whizzed everything else (in batches) in the blender before boiling it all up for an hour or so. I skipped the step where you strain it to smooth saucy consistency because aside from being a finicky waste of time, removing all the good fibre and making your sauce less healthy seems like a stupid idea to me, but I did push it through a sieve for a bit which may or may not have increased its smoothness.

The result, after all that, was a strange but very lovely, olivey-green, sweetish sourish tomato pickle-y sauce. Perfect, I imagine, for spreading on sausages, fish, roast beef, chicken sandwiches or even eating as an accompaniment with Easter Bunny Pie. I'm very pleased with it but before I declare it a success I'll wait to see what Ingrid says. I've got a bottle with her name on it.

jars of green tomato saucy pickle,
plus chipotle sauce far right and a combo of the two on the left

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!

My Parents' Garden

I went back to my folk's place in Brisbane at Christmas time and their garden was looking fabulous. I couldn't help but take a bucket-load of photos which I've shared here. Sadly, none of them do it justice. It's such a lovely space.

 Both of my parents are active gardeners, each in their own fashion. My dad is a weeder, always has been (good Catholic work ethic, no small measure of martyrdom). The quantity of nut grass he has pulled out in his lifetime would fill several backyard swimming pools. He takes particular charge of the veggie beds along the fence out the back, where the chilies grow, and it's probably not a coincidence that this is the area most prone to weed invasion and most thoroughly exposed to the baking Brisbane sun. 








He also loves to get stuck into overgrown spots around the garden and has got himself into very hot water with my mum a few times for attacking swathes of unruly orange and yellow nasturtiums, pulling them out in their bright flowering prime.

My mum (also a Catholic) is not shy of hard work (or martyrdom) but she also tends to take charge of garden design. When I was a kid, the garden was mostly showy natives, as was the fashion at the time. There are still lots of natives but the style of the garden has changed completely. Not that my parents are at all followers of garden fads. But as the years have passed, my mother has begun to yearn for the old-fashioned Queensland gardens of her childhood. I think you could call her current gardening style, daggy subtropical nostalgia.

We watched "The Sapphires" the other night. It's set in the late 60s and the family house at Cummeragunja Mission is pretty much my mum's dream garden. The verandah is stuffed to overflowing with strange things in assorted pots, urns and old bathtubs while the beds around the house bristle with geraniums and other old-fashioned toughies, no doubt surviving (within the story) on discarded washing up and bath water. I tried to find a picture but you'll just have to look out for it next time you're watching the film. 

My mother now seeks out strange succulents and cruxifix orchids at church fetes and garage sales. She takes cuttings of neon-coloured geraniums, fills pots with bright flowering annuals and she pays through the nose for lovely, heavy, textured old concrete pots (if the peeling paint on the pots isn't to her taste she colours them in with my niece's crayons). The paling fence and the trees drip with orchids and air plants, cacti cluster under the kitchen window (some of them in repurposed olive oil tins) and the patio is lined with tiered pot stands of varying heights and styles. 







Lovely little concrete statuettes, mostly birds, are scattered strategically around the place. My favourite is a swan who sits elegantly atop the concrete drain outside the toilet. Daggy, Subtropical, Nostalgic, Perfection.

A Day at the Water Gardens

Thanks to a tip off from an article in the Gardening Australia magazine, our family took a day trip to Melbourne's east to visit the magical Blue Lotus Farm, a property devoted to the cultivation (and breeding?) of lotus and waterlilies. It really is a wonderland - lake after lake, linked by little wooden bridges, the water surface barely visible under a carpet of leaves and scattered everywhere with flowers. There are the tall, nodding bowl shaped blooms of the lotus, their strange, perforated centers foreshadowing the distinctive, woody pepper-pot seedpods they will become. And, amidst the shiny green lilypads, resting on the surface like floating crowns, the sweet, sherbet-coloured blooms of the waterlilies.  

Inspired by the charmingly ubiquitous water gardens of Bali, I've been dying set up my own bowl gardens at home. And so, after wandering through acres of gorgeous lotus and lilies, snapping heaps of photos, scoffing a delicious picnic and testing to see if saliva rolls magically off lotus leaves the way water does (it does indeed), I bought, from the adjoining nursery, a sweet little pink lotus and a teeny tiny, yellow flowering waterlily, both suitable for growing in smallish bowls.

But it's not just the Balinese water gardens that inspired me. I have to admit that I have a thing for waterlilies. I have had since a year 12 biology trip to Stradbroke Island. As a massive nature nerd, this camp was one of the highlights of my year - tramping around with my friends, staying in cabins and cooking our own food, showing off my knowledge of flora and fauna (I was unbearable), swimming in tea-coloured freshwater lakes, swimming at the beach, collecting data, collecting plants, spotlighting for possums and, so romantic I can hardly believe it happened, walking at night along the beach with the curly-haired, surfer boy of my teenage dreams while phosphorescent waves broke magically on to the shore. On the last day of the camp, the teachers drove us to a swamp that was covered in brilliant blue waterlilies, their mysterious perfume filling the air with an strange, sweet scent. I don't recall what the educational point of the trip was but I do know it involved wading into the swamp, taking some kind of measurements and getting very wet and very muddy. 

Once we'd finished collecting the data, we picked bunches of the lovely blue-purple lilies before emerging from the swamp to discover our legs were covered with blood-engorged leeches. Someone took a wonderful photo of my friend Ruth and I, up to our waists in the swamp, grinning at the camera, our hands full of waterlilies while another friend behind us shrieks her way into a leech-induced panic attack. On the bus and barge home to Brisbane, I sat next to the curly-haired surfer boy, the lilies cradled carefully in my lap and for the next week they sat in the kitchen in a glass of water, opening every morning like glowing purple stars and filling the house with their incredible scent.

testing spit on lotus leaves

A spot of internet research suggests that these magical lilies were probably Nymphaea cerulea, the Egyptian Blue Waterlily, not native to Australia but naturalised along much of the east coast. However, Australia does have native waterlily species (Nymphaea spp.) as well as lots of other wonderful aquatic plants. Click here the link for an excellent summary of native water plants by Nick Romanowski, who's an expert on the subject. Turns out, the lovely sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) which features so prominently in the art and mythology of Asia, is native to Australia as well.  I suspect both waterlilies and lotuses were eaten by Indigenous groups in Northern Australia but a quick Google search failed to reveal any reliable information on this.


Sadly I won't be growing native waterlilies, or the gorgeous, scented blue Egyptian variety. My new lily purchase has tiny, butter yellow flowers that don't really smell. And while my lotus is the same species at those growing in monsoonal lakes up North, it's a specially bred miniature variety without the fabulously weird pockmarked center. However, my enthusiasm remains un-dampened. I wish I could say the same for my shoes.

my little lotus

teeny tiny water lilies

A Garden Wedding!!

So... we had a bit of a wedding!!

See, over the past couple of years, the garden and its surrounds have been the setting for a romance of sorts. It began on the bike path, my true love and I would pass each other on our respective ways to work. We started dating and I would pick a bunch of flowers from the garden on the way over to his house. A little while later he moved into my place with his kids and about the same time we combined our plots into one. We weeded, dug, planted and grew together and one romantic afternoon, last December, were down at the plot, sharing a pot of tea and checking the tomatoes when he asked me to marry him.

And so, the community garden seemed like an excellent place to celebrate our wedding. After the ceremony (at the velodrome across the road) our guests (including friends from the garden) joined us in the garden to stroll amid the veggies and sip champagne. The wind stopped blowing, the sun was shining, the flowers blooming and the corks were popping! It was a cracker of an afternoon!!

Spring Bling

First day of spring and the garden in general is blossoming. The orchard is awash with pink and white with an under-carpet of sunny English marigolds. Brassica and rocket are bolting all over the place in a blaze of yellow and white. Pink pigface spill over and lavender spikes form a cloud of grey blue at the entrance.

Our plot has been soooo slow it's been quite depressing but things are finally starting to happen there too. A few flowers here and there to keep the spirits up... calendula for the most part - I hacked them back today in the hope that they'll bounce back even better in a couple of weeks. Nigella, chamomile and sweet peas are finally getting their act together, the poppies have buds and the broad beans are cranking at last. Cosmos springing up here and there too. Tiny self-seeding speckled lettuce were relocated from the patch where they'd sprung up in a bunch and popped throughout our plot (and the garden in general) to add a bit of leafy colour as well. Fingers crossed for a good few weeks of growing and it might even look good for the wedding on October 5th.