A great new idea for excess zucchini....not mine. Sunday April 12 2015

I was watching a cooking show on SBS TV the other night featuring an English young lady with bright red lipstick. She was touring the Amalfi coast in Italy and gushing over all the simple Italian family cooking with all the local produce. Beautiful scenery, good food. But then when she came to make something for the people she had visited, she came up with a brilliant substitute for pasta. Ever tried julienned zucchini briefly cooked with a tomato sauce? Sounded like a great way to use up some of the last of the summer's zucchini  that I have left in the garden so last night I gave it a try.

Simply julienne zucchini lengthwise through a mandoline and there you have the basic strips of " pasta" only this is just vegetable nothing else. 

Make up a sauce of sautéed onion garlic and tomato. Add the zucchini for the last minute or so of cooking and voila! Bellissimo!

Tonight I am trying it with a mince sauce.

A peck of Peppers. Easter Sunday April 5th 2015

I have no idea how much is a peck. Neither are these pickled but they are peppers. Tasmanian native peppers that is. Tasmannia lanceolata. There is a bumper crop this year and we have just been to our mountain hideaway for a couple of days where there are thousands of pepper bushes. Only the female bushes fruit so this has been a good time to identify some that are female for taking cuttings to propagate in the future. This tree was not far from our hut and absolutely laden with big berries. Lots of the other bushes had smaller fruit.

So it didn't take me long to pick this lot. Now they are in the dehydrator, drying out so that they keep for many months. Yesterday I chopped up a few to have in our lunchtime omelette. Not too many as they are very HOT.

I like to put them in my Pyrenees pepper cheese when I make it so that will have to be on the agenda sometime soon. Otherwise they can be used as a substitute for ordinary black pepper. A slightly different flavour but tasty all the same.