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...

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!

update on the pickled garlic

it's yum! i wasn't sure it would be you know. because one of the jars mayn't have sealed properly and the cloves seemed to glow green internally. weirdos.

but we opened a non-green affected jar and included some on an antipasto platter with friends the other night to great acclaim. then next day worked some chopped into a nachos salsa. winner.

FAIL - his royal highness, the princely quince

well a colleague was lovely enough to give away quinces at work recently, and once i managed to get my head out of the bag and stop smelling it, i made quince paste. or tried to.

it is princely, but it is also punishing. it sticks like concrete to the dishes and burns you if you touch it.

a labour of love produced four jars.

four jars of rock hard quince. woe betide the servant of quince! fool to temperature and timings. swoon and utter abject misery.

banished from the kingdom of sublime scent. unrequited cheeses, all doomed...

the sad thing is, i shy from failures, i likely won't try it again. there are too many other preserves to try. if i had a quince tree of my own, yes i would toe the princely line, but nope.

hark, i hear there are some pomegranites on the horizon...

Hugh F-W our hero, and garlic in a jar

i bought this awesome book. it's loveliness is endless. it's country as, progressive in a way of c'mon get with the times and eat local, slow food etc. i love it.

i immediately pickled some garlic and fennel in jars, which we have been fortuitously been putting aside.

the best thing is that the guy behind it all is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Whom we love. Doesn't he have a dreamy name? Dreamy dream, River Cottage is our dream.

Pink peppercorns have a certain style. See.

and those are the olives that the fiend bought and has been processing slowly with water and salt and we will have delicious olives forever more.

jam to day ratio = high

These are just some of the jams of Tasmania.

We've come back from a lovely break away to my island home.

Foodies paradise. Classy cool climate grapes into pinot noir, beautiful plentiful diary farms yielding cheeses like you wouldn't believe, oysters farms and wild apple trees.

the fiend and i had to buy another suitcase to fit our accumulated winey and preservey delights. oh dear, but it was worth it. we actually bought a wheel of cheese. almost three kilos of sheepy milky goodness.

go to tasmania now. drive amongst the pristine small town wonder of it all. stop and sample. chat and chomp.

we heart fowlers

the fiend boyfriend managed to get a hold of a whole bunch of fowlers jars. do you know about these? they are (were?) a wondrous home preserving system, with a very cute and domestic lady in the manual.

and you get to preserve all the wondrous foods of the rainbow, from everyday fruit and veg, to soup and meat and cooked spaghetti (!)

we're starting small. 5 litres of tomato sauce.



stay tuned.