Relishing green tomatoes.

.Southern Australia has a wee problem with Portuguese millipedes, as mentioned previously. Among the favourite foods of these smelly critters, is almost ripe vegetables in the garden, or so it seems. It is somewhat distressing to have been watching a particularly large tomato, or perfectly shaped strawberry, waiting and waiting for it to be ready, to suddenly find a multitude of millipedes curled up inside it, chomping away. They are the reason we picked our rock melon early, and why we took about 2kg of unripe Amish Paste tomatoes off the bush. 

But, you know, just because something isn't ripe, doesn't mean you can't still eat it, and what better to make with green tomatoes than tomato relish? (*Recipe at end*)
You need to give them a very good wash first, and try not to be too grossed out by the millipedes which drift to the bottom of the sink.

 Then you cut them up into rough hunks, taking out the dodgy bits and the bugs. If desired, you can be a bit silly and arrange them from ripest to least ripe across the chopping board for a funky photo.

Also cut up one onion, some of the capsicum floating around in the bottom of the fridge, and a handful of chillies from the garden, maybe only a couple of chillies if you don't like things hot. 
Bring some vinegar and sugar to the boil, then pile in your chopped vegetables. I recommend choosing a bigger pot than I did.

But even if you have misjudged the vegetables to pot size ratio, don't worry, let it sit and simmer gently and the tomatoes will quickly break down and begin to release lots of water and not threaten to overflow anymore. Over time, the tomato mixture will reduce down to about one third of the original volume.

When all of the excess water has gone from the mixture and it is quite thick, it is ready to be used. It's very rich, tangy and delicious. Excellent as a condiment for sandwiches, or on meat, or on top of leftover lasagne as I have been eating it. You could probably sterilize some jars and store it for some time, but at the rate it's being eaten in this house I'm glad I didn't bother and settled for a glamorous Ikea container instead.

***
RECIPE
Tomato Relish
(Recipe from Chef D)
Adjust quantities to suit what you have available.

In a saucepan, mix together 1/2 cup brown sugar and one cup of white wine vinegar. Bring to the boil, then simmer gently.
Add 1.5kg of chopped tomatoes, 1 chopped onion, 1 chopped capsicum and fresh chopped chili to taste.
Stir all together, then simmer gently until it is well reduced and the excess water has gone. This will take some time, perhaps 1-2 hours depending on how slowly you are cooking it.
When it has cooled, it is ready to eat.
Enjoy!

April Harvest (2)

We made a visit to our little house the other day and found that there is still lots of edibles in the garden. The corn looked as ready as it was going to get, I peeled back the layers and had a look, poking it with my fingernail and the juices were foggy and yellow so I took the plunge to pick. The smaller patch had small cobs (although not as much as a failure as the back patch which had nothing!), the bigger patch had nice big cobs, almost supermarket-worthy. I gave half of it to FIL, payment for his excavation work so far ;-)
There were also a few long but thin Lebanese eggplants, and a couple of the 'Fairy' type which I picked even though they seemed quite hard. There were even a few purple capsicums ready to go. The capsicums and eggplants have all gone straight into a big pot of bolognese sauce for lasagne.

While I was picking the corn, I found a surprise! Here I was thinking that the rockmelons were a total flop, and yet, there, hidden amongst the corn was a fruit! I wasn't sure if it was actually ripe, the vine was still pretty green (though the leaves are just starting to yellow), but the millipedes had found it and were gnawing, creeping and crawling all over it, so I thought it best to pick it before our one and only rockmelon became food for legions of Portugese pests!

It wasn't bad actually, it weighed almost 1kg (2 pounds) and was very edible, though a little on the bland side. I think it just needed more time.

I pulled the last of the tomato plants from their pots because they really were just looking too shabby to go on with. They've been hung in the shed, a bit experimentally, because I've read that you can ripen late tomatoes that way. Besides, I want the big pots!

And out there, still growing surprisingly well is the pumpkin plant I thought wouldn't set fruit at all, and the rainbow chard which is so pretty and bright even though it's sorely neglected.
 

 

 

Min-ga-la-ba!

That's 'hello' in Burmese, the only word I could ever pronounce. Burmese was such an awkward language, it did not trip lightly off my tongue at all (as opposed to, say, Japanese, which is relatively easy to pronounce but was virtually impossible for this chickadee to remember any of). We spent a few weeks in Burma, travelling around the tourist-acceptable diamond-shaped route (the rest of the country being inaccessible to all but the most intrepid and daring of visitors). Burma has a special place in my memory. It had the most friendly people we've yet met, the most interesting temples, the most salty food, and the most smiley kids. It was the spikiest, prickliest, dustiest, grubbiest country to date. It has been the only place we've ever visited where it really did feel like we'd stepped back 60 years in time. I'd recommend anyone to visit Burma, with the proviso that you spend your money very carefully and thoughtfully with the locals.
Off we go!

(Thank you for visiting. Click on the 'Burma' tag to see what I wrote at the time we actually went.)

Bagan

Bagan: cactus

Bagan: Temples as far as the eye can see

Happy kid

Bagan: temple interior

Bagan: pensive

Lantern pods

Burma: the land of teashops

On the way to Bagan on the river.

Inle Lake

Moulmien temple tiers and palms.

Moulmien pup

Could be anywhere...

Yangon

Inle Lake: tall grasses

Inle Lake: roadside stupas

Inle Lake: silk work

Honeymooners

If you ever feel like reading a bit of travel writing, you will find that I recently imported all my old travelling posts into this blog to keep it all together. You see, D and I have a serious travel bug. We've travelled to various parts of South East Asia half a dozen times, as well as living in Japan for a few months. Not a week goes by when I do not find myself looking up flights to exotic destinations (usually around midnight after a rough day), daydreaming about where we'll go next, doing my sums and sighing in despair. It's been a mental battle since I was 17: the question of how to keep travelling the world, and put down roots at the same time.
In one week exactly, D and I will have been married for six years, which gets me thinking about our honeymoon and looking back at some of my favourite photos of that time. In December of 2005 (about 8 months after we married) we left on a 10 week trip to Malaysian Borneo, Brunei, Mainland Malaysia, and Burma with a brief stop in Bangkok. Although I blogged about our trip at the time I never included any photos, so on this rather miserable and cold Sunday afternoon, I thought I'd do it now and over the next few days as there is too much for just one post.
The original photos were taken with a film camera, the last trip we made using this medium, and the first where we started to take better photos. This is when I started to work out what I liked to take photos of: plants, food, movement, worship and spirituality, colour...
Today I'll show you from Sabah in Malaysia Borneo, to Sarawak (also Malaysian Borneo), through to mainland Malaysia and Bangkok in Thailand.
So here we go...

Plant life. Sabah, Borneo.

Night Market. Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

Sabah: Flooded forest frogs

Sabah: Flooded forest frogs. One of my favourite photos of all time.

Sabah. Flooded forest

Night Market. Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

Night Market. Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

Sabah plant life

Sabah. Flooded forest.

Sabah. Flooded forest.

Kuching market. Borneo.

Kuching temple candles.

Kuching temple candles.

Butterfly. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur.

Cheong Fatt Tze House, Penang, Malaysia.

Khao San Road, Bangkok, Thailand.

Next time: Burma.

A Room with a View.

We are being treated, D, SP and I, to a view out of our bedroom window of the slowing-down garden. As I rocked my babe to sleep in my arms this quiet and drizzly morning, I couldn't resist taking a shabby phone-photo to show you the little tree in the front dressed in it's brightest yellow foliage, the English box hedges behind ringing the garden bed and the tree ferns all shaded by the giant gums.

It's a thinking kind of day today.

"Let yourself go. Pull out from those depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them."
EM Forster. A Room with a View.

The Rug WIP continues...

Just a little update tonight on the progress of the knitted cot-rug. I have completed five lovely colourful whole rows, only another, oh, 20 or so to go. You see, the size of each row is random and determined by my feelings about the project at the exact time I cast-on each new row. Do I feel like taking it slowly and making my 'squares' nice and wide? Or do I want to whip through colours with abandon? Therefore I know I have done about 1/5 of the total rug, but not how many rows I have left to knit. It's making knitting mysterious...
SP likes to 'help' me, looping the wool through her hands and around her shoulders, or upending the bag with all the wool skeins and distributing them around the room. She gets most upset when I won't let her run away with the needles (and half completed rows) because I don't want her to skewer herself with them. Ah, toddlers!
I have set a date for completion of the rug now, too. I'm hoping I will be all finished in time for winter.

April Harvest

The Summer vegetable garden is slowly drawing to a close. Yesterday I pulled out the last of the zucchini plants and most of the tomato plants. Only the Amish Paste tomato is still going strongly now. I also took out the entire northern section of corn (flop!) and the remains of the butternut pumpkin plants (almost a flop: I got one lonely, very little baby butternut from them). The veggie patch is starting to look a little bare now. The Lebanese eggplants are still ticking along, and we ate our first broccolini recently, although some of it was so insect infested I had to throw it straight out.

Yesterday we also harvested our last pot of potatoes. They are Desiree, and were planted way back in Spring last year. I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the leaves to die down, but they were showing no signs at all of doing so and I was impatient for the big pot (so I could plant my kiwi-fruit into a bigger pot), so we upended the pot onto the lawn, and look at them all! OK, so perhaps not so impressive to seasoned potato growers, but I was very happy with our little harvest, almost 1kg worth (2 pounds). Next year I will plant more, all into pots (to avoid another in-ground failure), Kipflers maybe, and those purple ones Digger's sell....

Speaking of Digger's, my seed and garlic order arrived the other day so I got cracking, planting lots into where the old lawn was. Lots of broad beans ('Aquadulce'), peas ('Greenfeast'... and then I read the label properly and realised they're supposed to go in during Spring. Oh. Oops! An Out-Of-Season trial?). The Garlics I bought were 'Early Purple' (a hardneck variety) and 'Early White' (a soft-neck variety), I have never grown garlic before but how hard can it be? (Say she who can muck up with peas!)

And the Piece de Resistance: Our Watermelon!
It was a potted variety. The first time I planted it, it was promptly eaten by a marauding creepy-crawly, so I tried again. It made a lovely big plant, but only one watermelon ever grew properly on it. This is one expensive melon! I will try again next year, but make more of an effort to hand-pollinate it (I did this year, but only half-heartedly). The plant had shrivelled and wilted to naught, so we picked our melon and admired it;

We felt it's hefty weight;

We cut it open with an old knife, on what was once the foundation of the laundry wall;

Tasted it, and deemed it delicious!