Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet

But the fruit of the lemon is impossible to eat!

I'll beg to differ if you don't mind.

Semi-recently, the fiend and I were in Bendigo to check out what turns out to be a most rad tip shop. On our drive through the suburbs, somewhere near the uni, I spotted a stunner of a lemon tree. Flippin' teeming with glossy yellow fruit. Teeming. And this fruit mind you, was text book quality. Lovely size, not too big not too small, perfume that Suskind would be proud of, and the colour, a divine, sunshine rich yellow. I could go on about the lemons, I imagine I will talk about them for years.



Well we grinned and took a couple. The tree was hanging over a fence. A couple is fine this way I reckon. But considering these specimens we took a chance and knocked on the door...


The gent that lived there was so lovely and so generous! Not only did he agree to us helping ourselves, he supplied us with a plastic bag and scissors. Gave us advice on zinc for citrus plants and said we were welcome to return. For reals.

Such happiness.


A gorgeous big kilo jar of preserved lemons was made. They preen on the window sill, hang out with the trout mug and promise of future middle eastern cooking experiments.



And since we boozed our way through our last lot of limoncello at a recent dinner party, some more had to be made. So yummy, but sampled only during cold months, so I can't wait to have it icy cold in the sheet hot Melbourne summer.



Zesty!

Gleaning is such rewarding and delicious fun, dontcha think? :)

The princely quince, revisited

Well, after the rock hard discontent of last season's quinces (a very unusable paste), I rolled up my sleeves and decided to ignore cooking times and use all the old methods for testing jam set.

Hooray for sheet-test! Hurrah for wrinkle-method! I win! My prize? Five jars totaling around 1.5 kg of quince conserve.

Lovely chunks of fruit suspended in jelly, just as promised by amazing Sally Wise (name and nature!) in her delicious book 'a year in a bottle'. I love this book because she lives in my ex-home state Tasmania and includes lovely home stories with many of the recipes.













See anything interesting in the background? That's another story ...

:)

let's make a dill

Whilst the fiend was doing some painty touch-ups in Balaclava, I had a little wander along Carlisle Street. Having fun ogling a new suburb and its little shops and jealously regarding funky breakfast places that I'll never go to, I happened across a green grocer. And prominently placed, were a pile of pickling cucumbers!

Gasp!

I sidled over and had a closer look. Rare veg! I haven't spotted these little babies in grocers before. I handed over some squids and took my precious cargo along with some dill from 'out the back' back to meet the fiend.


Raised eyebrows.


Not to worry. We'll see later on who becomes enthusiastic all of a sudden they're converted to sweet, garlicky, crunchy treats.

cinnalicious for breakfast

these lovely pears are all eated up now. they were from the lovely greengrocer/florist near the northcote social club, and the groovy italian fella there helped me pick the best pears for bottling. his pear intelligence is to be thanked. no i can't remember what they were. delicious?

























don't they look pretty and pure there in the bottles? the big ol' stick of cinnamon changed all that pretty quickly. soon enough they became a spicy golden colour, the stunners.
what with the cold nights creeping into our little country cottage now, looks like the porridge pears will be making another appearance...

turn the beet around

aren't they pretty? a bundle of beets.

this is a retro post from early summer, when a little visit to south melbourne market gave us these beets.

beet beet. sugar beet. sugar beet. bee-eeeeet.

cooked to be tender and sliced up all deliciously.


we took some straight round to an early summer bbq and delighted in their vinegary goodness.

pucker up!

look below! there's the beginnings of the stained red beet thumb from rubbing the skins off. hee.
don't breathe too deeply over the vinegar okay. it's a bit scary when it gets in your pipes.
aren't they lovely and velvety coloured in their jars, and there are a couple other little jars with diced beets too that would be fun to stir into goat's cheese and baby spinach salads i reckon. yum.

beaver street plum source

so say you are wandering the neighbourhood on your way to a rad thai restaurant to get the banquet option, like always, to overeat and try as many things delicious as you can, and the fiend and yourself come across a gutted house with a beautiful big and prolific plum tree in the front yard... what do you do?

well, the very next day you come back armed to the teeth with umbrella and greenbag and pretend not to look weird in the 30 degree heat with the umbrella. but then, you flip the umbrella to create a catch all, and strip those branches with an impressive and tidy guerilla action and pretty soon whistling away with nearly 3 kg of sweet little red fruits.

they are so yummy that you eat a few handfuls whilst flipping the stack of preserve books you seem to have somehow amassed of late. choose recipe based solely on which one doesn't

require you to pit the fruit first (c'mon they are tiny plums, there is no way i'm doing 3kg of pitting) and settle on Sally Wise's Plum Sauce from A Year in a Bottle. Or, as we call it, the Beaver Street Plum Source.

After snacking on some, there wasn't quote 3kg for the recipe so I had to throw in a couple apples. There are so many ingredients in this, so many lovely spices and bits, and the garlic. Oh the garlic. It didn't make nearly as much as promised, but was a supreme sauce. We ate it that night with roast potatoes done in duck fat (which likely deserves it's own rant) and lamb chops.

since this discovery, we have wandered our neighbourhood and found a stunning array of food growing over the backs of alleyways, the amount of big old fig trees around here is just awesome. grapes, lemons, nectarines on our street, apricots, crab apples, even a rampant zucchini that has draped over a fence. things are going to get good.

how to be a master preserver - lesson one with the mint jelly

i love preserving. i love buying the books especially. i love the pictures of colourful delicious jars lined up. i love opening the cupboard and grabbing a jar of tomato pasta sauce from last summer. so far, it's been a bit slapdash. in a very scientific way though of course. no e-coli for us. but now the number of books i have seems to exceeded the number of preserves i have made, and this my friends is no good. (wonderfully no good).

So watch out beasties because the mint jelly is now lurking about!

but it unfortunately wasn't the most awesome mint jelly. but maybe because i don't love mint jelly? shut up. it was in the easy-get-started-type recipes, and anyway, we had a date for roast lamb the next day.

so here are some pretty picks of my strange coloured jelly, where i refused to use food colouring, and despite issues with pectin (powdered vs liquid) it set to a very reasonable state. instead of using the liquid pectin 'pouch' they had in the recipe (?!) i used about 6gm of powered jamsetta stuff. -side note: keen to also try the homemade pectin from lemon skins. wooooooo

look! this is my pretty new 'water bath canner' with a wacky name and not easy to say quickly. some people even like to call it a 'hot water bath canner'. c'mon you can't even make an acronym out of it.

i am sterilizing the jars. yes indeed.

now i am chopping the mint.
(the mint comes curtesy of the south melbourne markets. not just dim sims i tell you.)

straining the mint! funky pants jelly bag. i am so specialised and awesome.

this how the hwbc looks on my stove. (i.e. excellent)

and this! well this is the end result. it looks more like green tea, eh?

but at least it set right.
thus ends the lesson. if you want it to taste more minty than the bugger turns out, then just chop some extra from the garden and mix it though before the lamb gets involved.

ta-ra!