Garden Pasta...

...with purple sprouting broccoli. This has been a great addition to the winter garden. The more you harvest, the more it grows back. Beautiful!
Here it is, together with snow peas and broad beans (mostly hidden).
Sauté the veggies with some garlic and (spring) onions, season, add preferred cooked pasta (organic spelt in this case). Then top with generous helpings of fresh parsley, grated parmesan and crispy fried (home-made) bacon. Spring in a bowl! :)

A walk in the spring garden...continued

Are you interested in seeing more of our overgrown garden? Okay, let's go!

The bronze fennel is nice and bushy. It will grow taller and go to seed at the end of summer. Lots of very fragrant seeds to be harvested!
The rest of the post can be found here, on the Adelaide Kitchen Gardeners.

A walk in the spring garden

Spring is such an exciting season! There are tons of trees & plants flowering, seeds are germinating left, right & centre, the hills and paddocks are lusciously green, the garden is overgrown with grass and weeds, but soon there will be a little order in this chaos.
Have a look at the Adelaide Kitchen Gardeners' blog entry to continue the walk through the garden.

Curry feast

We have been experiencing cold days (and nights) again.
What better way to keep warm than having a curry feast at night?!

One of my all-time favourite Indian cookbooks is "India's 500 Best Recipes: A vibrant collection of spicy appetizers, tangy meat, fish and vegetable dishes, breads, rices and delicious chutneys from India and South-East Asia"

Every recipe has worked beautifully so far. Here we have Balti Chicken Pasanda, Spinach Dhal, Garlic & Coriander Naan. Delicious!

Let's panic!

My vegetable seeds are reluctant to germinate! I sowed them 3 weeks later than last year (and that was already late), but thought with the lovely spring weather (warm and sunny) they'd be rushing to germinate. Nope! The buggers are sitting there and not doing anything.
Usually the tomato seeds start germinating after 3-5 days. This one popped up after 14 days!
And there are rows and rows of pots that show no sign of seedlings. Every morning I hope that I will be greeted by dozens (preferably hundreds) of seedlings. No such luck! If things don't change rapidly, I'll be in a real pickle!

Signs of spring #5

Miner's lettuce is starting to flower now, too.

The full blog post can be found over at Adelaide Kitchen Gardeners.

Seedy window

Finally! Most of the vegetable and herb seeds are sown. This is the first time I'm that late. It should be just fine, as I usually don't plant out until mid-late November. This is to ensure a late frost does not kill the lovingly sown and planted seedlings. There are lots of tomatoes and a good number of capsicums, chillies, eggplants, basil, etc. While they are doing their thing (hopefully germinating well), I'll have to get on with weeding the veggie beds.

Signs of spring #4

The spring onions are developing flower buds.

Then bursting open.Developing tons of seeds that scatter and provide next season's spring onions.

Signs of spring #3

The plum trees are starting to flower now, too! Let's see what the plums taste like this year. Every year seems to be different. Last year they were rather bland, the other year they were super-sweet, and another year they were mealy and disgusting. Let's enjoy the flowers first. :)

Signs of spring #2

The 2 young nectarine trees are flowering madly. These are self-sown trees that we dug up and put in the current location 2 years ago. We harvested a few handfuls of fruit last season. They were extremely delicious.

Signs of spring

The elder tree is developing tons of flower buds. The leaves are looking good, too.Soon this tree will be covered in gorgeous flowers!

Home-made chorizo

We sampled the first of our chorizo from our free-range Berkshire pig yesterday.Sliced and fried. With a fried egg.
Delicious! Not as hot as I thought it would be, but still very tasty.
We are still alive - no botulism, etc. So we must have done it right. :)

As long as you get the amount of salt right, you should have no problems. 2-3% of salt. (We added 2% salt.) The sausage mixture was about 70% lean meat and 30% fat. Then you add spices of your choice. We added garlic, smoked paprika, black pepper, chilli, etc.

Then dry at a cool and slightly humid place until the chorizo feels firm.The white spots on the chorizo are not mould, but salt residue from the brine we brushed them with.

Yellow Fields

On the way to Clare you will pass fields and fields of flowering canola. Great contrast with the other very lush, green fields.
Taken from the car on a pretty miserable day.

Watching asparagus grow...

...is not as tedious as it sounds. Once they start - they grow very quickly. You will have to harvest them every day. Can't wait!!

A touch more about our asparagus here.

The BIG cheese

I was told to blog about my BIG cheese.

Here it is:

I used raw Jersey milk from a cow called Chocolate. We love Chocolate!

This is a Gouda and weighs 1.4kg.

Compared with the usual weight and size of my cheeses - this is BIG.

The Gruyere that I made a week earlier with raw Holstein/Frisian milk weighs 650g. This is about the usual weight of my cheeses made with Holstein/Frisian milk. Here they are, side by side.
Both cheeses were made with exactly the same amount of milk - 7.6l.

The Jersey milk is extremely creamy and absolutely delicious. We love to make yoghurt with it as it is very, very thick and creamy. We haven't tasted any of the cheeses yet, but I'm sure they'll be wonderful.