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.

Foraging in the fields. Tuesday, March 31 2015

Last week we had a nice drop of rain and I noticed a few white spots in the neighbours paddock as I drove past. So on the weekend, I went a-wandering around a few of the paddocks here, hopeful that I might get lucky and find some mushrooms. Well find them I did! For the first time in about 5 years, I found lots of them! I think it must be a combination of conditions. Perhaps a long dry summer with early autumn rains when the daytime temperatures have still been reasonably warm.

On Saturday I picked a dozen or so in the paddock where I last found them in abundance in 2010. Then on Sunday I tried another paddock where the dairy effluent spray has been going and I picked over 2.5 kg! Yesterday in the late afternoon, I went and had another look in the same paddock and picked another 800g! So this week we are having mushrooms in many incarnations for dinner. Beef stroganoff, mushroom and broad bean pilau, mushroom and tomato frittata so far. I also cooked up quite a few and have frozen them for other meals in the future. Yum!

Can't beat the taste of fresh mushies!

Just Peachy. Tuesday 24th March 2015

Last weekend I was finally able to start my harvest of a laden peach tree in my orchard. I have been watching eagerly for several weeks, waiting for them to colour up and soften. I noticed that. Birds or possums were starting to have a nibble on some of them so that was my cue to start the harvest.

First up, out came the preserving unit and by the end of the weekend I had bottled a dozen big jars.

Then I stewed some peach slices and puréed them. This lot was turned into peach leather and a little experiment as dehydrated cooked peach slices.

I also tried some dehydrated raw peach slices which took much longer than the cooked ones and didn't have nearly as much flavour. In the end my taste tester Max and I decided the leather was a better end product.

With more purée, I made a peach ice cream. It lacked a bit of flavour so I added some passionfruit pulp and vanilla essence. This was a custard based ice cream and in hindsight, I think a yoghurt base would have given it a better flavour. There are plenty more peaches on the tree so that can be next weekends experiment.

Then on Sunday, I stoned and chopped about three kilos and made a big batch of peach jam.

There are still plenty more to harvest so I think I will bottle some more last weekend, stew some for the freezer, and of course eat some fresh ones. 

A busy morning in the Patch Kitchen. Sunday February 15, 2015.

Just thinking I would finish off pipping all the Damson plums that were left in the bucket, somehow I got sidetracked. I have ended up with fresh bread, plum and cinnamon muffins, a slow cooking Chilli con carne, preserved Damson plums, zucchini pickles and a Sparkling Plum drink brewing. And that is to add to the Plum leather I made yesterday. 

I haven't made Sparkling plum today but am following the basic principles of making sparkling drinks like Elderflower. 875g of pipped plums, 750g of sugar ( less than the recipe for Sparkling rhubarb which I tried once before and found a bit sweet) 18 cups of water, 1 chopped lemon and 200ml of cider vinegar. Mix the lot together and let sit for 2 days before straining into PET bottles. Leave for at least two weeks for the drink to ferment and create bubbles. Let's hope it tastes as good as the elderflower as we are down to the last of the big batch I made for summer.

No room left on the bench so it is time to quit!

Tantalising Tzatziki. February 7 2015

Two posts in one day to make amends for only one in January.

I have just been making some Tzatziki dip to have a lunch time and thought I would share. Grated cucumber fresh from the garden mixed with crushed garlic, homemade yoghurt, olive oil and fresh dill are all mixed together with a bit of salt and pepper. How easy is that? And how yummy does it look?

Plums plums plums. Oh, and more plums! February 7th 2015

I haven't done very well with my New Year's resolution for writing this blog more frequently have I? Oh well, life gets just too busy sometimes. 

The fruit crops are bountiful this season so just keeping up with them has taken up a lot of time. Last weekend I made some Plum cordial from the lovely Angelica plum which for the first time had a decent crop. I also made a Plum cinnamon ice cream which tasted like a frozen version of my plum cake was gobbled up in a few days.

           

The Damson plum is absolutely laden but not quite ripe yet so soon it will be full speed making of jam, cordial, Worcestershire sauce plum leather and whatever else I can think of! They are not so nice for eating fresh but are very flavoursome when cooked.The Satsuma plum didn't fruit very well as in 2013 we lost its Santa Rosa cross pollinator so now have to wait until the new one bears enough blossom.