I wanted to use an Australian Women’s Weekly recipe that’s in their big “COOK” book, but that’s in a box somewhere between San Francisco and here, so I had to go googling to find a copy of it. Here it is.

• 1kg (10 medium) ripe tomatoes, peeled, chopped
• 2 large (400g) apples, peeled, chopped
• 2 medium (240g) onions, chopped
• 1 ½ cups brown (malt) vinegar
• 1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
• ¼ teaspoon chilli powder
• ½ teaspoon dry mustard
• ¾ cup sultanas
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 2 teaspoons curry powder
• 2 teaspoons ground allspice

Throw everything in a big pot and bring to the boil, then keep it going til it reduces in volume and thickens up. I find that’s usually a couple of hours, though that might be in part because I make double or triple batches. A smaller batch in a wider pan will presumably thicken up quicker. (If it’s just not thickening and you’re getting impatient, you can stir a spoonful of cornstarch into a bit of water, then mix it through the chutney.)

Nine jars of tomato chutney; this is a double batch.

I canned my chutney in recycled jars of various sizes, using new lids from Green Living Australia. Because the chutney has so much vinegar and sugar in it, it doesn’t need heat processing. I just make sure the jars are really clean (the dishwasher’s good for this because of the high heat) then when I’ve closed the jars I turn them upside down on the counter and let them cool standing on their lids. The heat of the chutney sterilises the lids, and the poptops on them all popped in like they’re meant to.

If you’re a bit aghast at the lack of heat processing, all I can say is that generations of my family have done it this way and it’s always been fine. In fact, heat canning’s almost unknown in Australia. The worst I’ve ever seen with this method is an occasional batch with mold growing on top (which you should throw out), but I haven’t had one of those in years. Anything that’s heavy on the salt, vinegar, sugar, and/or alcohol should be fine to do this way. It’s only when you have things that you’re trying to keep without these natural preservatives — for instance, tomato sauce, or canned fruit and vegetables in juice or water — that you really truly need to do the heat thing.

(That said, use your common sense and judge your own risks; I don’t want to be sued for giving you bad advice. If you’re wary, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have some good books with details on how to heat can things, and I’ll be doing some of that later in the summer and will post about it here when the time comes.)

The best thing about this chutney? The whole house smelled like I remembered from summers at my Nanna’s house. This is the authentic Nanna chutney recipe, guaranteed. Nanna and Poppa would have had it with sausages or rissoles, but I’ll most likely be eating it with cheese and crackers, or on fried egg sandwiches, all year round.

Preserved lemons! They are amazing things and not well enough known outside Australia. I mean, they’re not all that well known inside Australia, but I can safely assume that anyone here who has even half-assed foodie pretensions knows about them, whereas in San Francisco I once found them in a hip foodie type shop and got all excited only to have the proprietors ask me to explain to them what they were and how to use them, because they’d never encountered them before. Sigh.

Anyway, preserved lemons are salty lemon rindy things that you use as a flavouring in Mediterranean-ish, especially North African, food. They are also a great way to put away a big pile of lemons if you have a productive lemon tree and aren’t sure what to do with them, and they’re one of the absolute easiest kinds of preserved fruit, since they don’t need any special processing nor even a sterile container. (No bacteria would last a moment in this much salt.)

What you need:

• A lot of lemons
• A lot of salt
• A big jar
• Some spices: a cinnamon stick, some peppercorns, a bay leaf or two for example

Choose lemons that have unblemished skins. Dirty is OK, but actually blemished isn’t. Give them a gentle scrub in the sink with some cold water and non-toxic dishsoap (I just use a little squirt of the environmentally safe stuff we wash dishes with) then rinse them well.

Make sure your jar is a) big — a litre/quart or more, ideally, and b) clean. The lid should fit well. If you have a jar with a plastic lid that’s great, because a metal lid will end up rusting and not be any use afterwards. (If you’re OK with sacrificing the lid, then don’t sweat it, and use whatever you’ve got.)

Pour yourself a bowl full of salt. You want to work from a bowl rather than from the bag or jar of salt because you’ll get lemon juice all through it. I prefer kosher salt in the US/Canada, but you can’t get it as easily in Australia, so basically any reasonably fine, non-iodised salt is what you’re going for. You’ll want a lot of it — a cup or two, at least — so buy a big bag.

Next, cut the lemons. The simplest is just to quarter them, which is what I did this time. Start packing them into the jar, and sprinkling a generous spoonful of salt after each layer. Pack them tight, and press them down as you go. Every so often, drop in a bit of cinnamon stick, bay leaf, or whatever spices you’re using. Keep going til you get to the top of the jar, then press hard and squish everything down and keep adding more lemon pieces until you simply can’t add any more.

Squishing the lemons firmly into the jar

At this point, the salt should be starting to draw out the lemon juice, and it should be rising up to the top of the jar as you press. If you’ve got hangnails or cuts on your fingers, you should be feeling it about now. (Ouch!)

When the jar’s as full as it can get, put the lid on.

Lemons in the jar. There's a little bit of air space at the top, but this will disappear as the lemons soften, and no harm done as long as you keep turning them regularly.

Store the lemons in a cool dry place (i.e. the pantry) for about a month, turning them over and giving them a shake every few days, to make sure everything’s well mixed.

When they’re done, the rinds will be soft right through, and you can start to use them in things. At this point, you might want to decant into a few small jars and give away some to your friends (perhaps pointing them here so they know what to do with them). I find that 1-2 small jars are sufficient for my needs for a year, so I usually give away about half of what I make.

So, what do you do with them? Basically, you fish out one lemon-quarter, scrape off the flesh and dispose of it, then chop the rind small and use it to flavour things, such as:

Moroccan chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives: Brown bone-in chicken pieces, add a sliced onion, preserved lemon rind, green olives, moroccan spices, and some chicken stock. Stew and serve over couscous.

Chickpea tagine, ditto: chickpeas, onion, a can of tomatoes, preserved lemon, olives, spices, veg stock.

Lemony tabbouleh: bulgur, parsley, preserved lemon, currants, toasted almonds. You could also substitute other whole grains eg. brown rice, wheat berries, farro.

Spinach: sauted with garlic, preserved lemons, and currants.

With fish: I don’t cook fish often, but this is an obvious companion. You could bake a fish in tinfoil with preserved lemon and lots of herbs.

Marinated olives: take good olives, some olive oil, chopped preserved lemon, and some strong herbs like fresh oregano and leave them to sit for a bit. This would be good with pita bread.

Yoghurt dressing: Greek yoghurt, finely chopped preserved lemon, mint. Use as a sauce for grilled/barbecued lamb.

Tomato salsa: fresh tomatoes, coriander (cilantro) leaves, mint, finely chopped preserved lemon. Serve with chicken or fish.

The last two ideas there are from this list of uses, and there are a bunch of other suggestions there that you might like to try. Looking around, I also found this recipe for lentils with spinach and preserved lemon that sounds like it’d be right up my alley, though I haven’t tried it yet.

Basically, anywhere where salt and lemons would be good, preserved lemons are even better.

If you’ve got other uses for them, let me know.

Planted butternut pumpkin/squash (AU/US) from seed, in two small pots, 3 seeds to a pot. Will wait til they are coming along then discard the two least healthy from each pot, and replant into a big tub. (We have some big tubs from Emily’s parents, too, but need more potting mix etc to fill them.)

Mulched all the pots with lucerne straw.

One tomato plant has yellowing leaves. I suspect early blight (link comes to most useful page I’ve found about it). Immediate treatment: separate that plant from the others, and make sure when watering not to wet the leaves. If it’s still a problem in a week or two, try the baking soda spray listed on that page.

We also have a bit of an epic fruit fly infestation. Between the council’s green bin, our new worm farm, and the tomato plants (which seem to be like fruit fly catnip, even just the leaves right now) they’re everywhere.

To do:

• Move council green bin out the front to the carport, away from vegie garden and worm farm.
• Microwave worm food before putting it in worm bin.
• Set vegemite traps (it’s recycling night, so I should be able to find some empty drink bottles without too much trouble, even though we don’t much use them). Other web pages suggest mixing in honey and/or ammonia (or urine) so those are options for experimentation.
• Use a deterrent spray, such as this garlic-chilli spray recipe.
• Companion plant alliums (most likely chives) around tomatoes (see below).

Our seeds arrived from Eden Seeds (Australian heirloom vegie seeds, they’re awesome, try them!) Those are the pumpkin seeds I planted. I need to plant chives, rocket, nasturtiums, and other greens (amaranth, warragul greens) but we’re all out of containers to do it in. Or rather, we have the containers but no soil in them. So a trip to the shop for more potting mixture etc seems in order.

We have 4-5 enormous and/or just plain large pots available, and a number of middle-sized ones.

• We’ll need two enormous ones for pumpkin, though that won’t be needed for a month at a guess.
• We need a couple of enormous ones for greens, I think. They needn’t be deep but we do need a lot of surface area.
• One enormous one for nasturtiums, too.
• The parsley needs repotting into a large pot (doesn’t need to be enormous, anything bucket-sized and up will be good).
• The mint needs repotting or transferring into the garden. If it were mine I’d bung it in the ground next to the shed, where it’s reasonably shady, but we’d need a little soil prep first. So maybe wait til the worm farm’s up and running well and we can use the output of that.
• I can grow chives in something small (we have no shortage whatsoever of small pots, then repot into medium sized pots and/or as companions to the tomatoes and peppers we have going. They may help with the fruit flies.

I also need to get some of those little stake-label thingies so I don’t lose track of what’s in what pot. Right now the only unlabelled/non-obvious ones are the pumpkins, in two medium sized pots.

I think that’s about it. Phew.

We have 4 enormous tubs, 3 large pots, and a couple of middling sized pots filled with potting mix and/or various vegetable matter. For the big tubs, I raked up a heap of leaf litter and filled them 1/3 with that, 1/3 with chopped lucerne, and 1/3 with organic potting mix. There’s more lucerne left over to be mulch.

I’ve planted the 4 tomatoes, 3 peppers, basil, and thyme into the tubs and the largest of the pots. I’m waiting on seeds to arrive to plant stuff in the other ones.

Our worm farm also arrived today. Darebin (our local municipality) is a Transition Town so they have various programs to encourage sustainability. One of them is subsidised worm farms. Ours cost $60, and I’ll head down to CERES tomorrow to buy some worms to put in it.

Cooking:

Emily was going to make dal saag but she forgot to get spinach, so instead we had fried gnocchi. I threatened to blog her cooking, but she said she’d blog it herself at the food/craft/domesticity blog she shares with our friend Ana so keep an eye out for it there. Suffice it to say that she fried gnocchi in olive oil with vast amounts of garlic, then added kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes, and fresh parsley. We ate it with parmesan sprinked over, and it was amazing, especially after all the gardening work.

(Updated: she’s posted her recipe here.)

Now she’s got some lemon slice in the oven, using the lemons we found in that empty block yesterday. I am looking forward to them so much — that sort of slice is just like Nanna used to make, and something I hardly ever do myself but love intensely when other people do. She’s using this recipe.

Preserving:

There is going to be a lot of food preservation going on around here this summer. I bought an 80s-era Fowlers Vacola preserving unit from eBay the other week, but only after determining that actually, you don’t need to use the expensive Fowlers branded jars with the pain-in-the-arse lids. Seems you can use any jar you want, as long as it is clean and unchipped, and has a fresh lid. Green Living Australia sell bulk lids for standard Australian jars (the ones you find most often in supermarkets, such as jam, pasta sauce, and pickle jars), so I got a bunch of them, and they came today.

Now historically I’ve just re-used the lids that came with jars, but I was usually making sugar or vinegar-heavy recipes (jams, chutneys, pickles) that didn’t really need heat preserving and where bacteria would basically be scared off before they got anywhere near it. This year I want to preserve stewed fruit and passata (tomato sauce) without masses of added preservatives, which means hot water method and being much more finicky about the jars and lids I use.

Anyway, the Fowlers unit should be good for the hot water preserving in the summer, since it is an enclosed container with a lid, that runs on an electric cord (basically like a kettle or an old fashioned hot water urn), and which you can even put outside to run on a hot day, which means the kitchen needn’t get too overheated.

Also from Green Living: yoghurt culture and assorted bits and pieces for yoghurt making. In the past I’ve mostly just made yoghurt from other yoghurt, but I thought it might be worth a try doing it from dry culture for a change. We’ll see how it goes.

Christmas: I don’t think any of us in this house are massively into Christmas decorations, but we do like fairy lights, so we’ve been buying them and decorating the carved woodwork around the house with them. Today I discovered that you can get solar powered LED lights in the garden department at K-Mart for cheaper than the ones in the Christmas decoration area, so we’re going to put some of them over the front door and around the gatehouse. We’ve got the plain white ones and we’re intending to leave them up year-round.

Knitting: It’s warming up but it’s not so hot I can’t knit. Since I’ve been reunited with the bits of my yarn stash I left in storage in Australia, I’ve cast on a few things in an attempt to get rid of some of it before my other stash arrives from the US.

I have several not-quite-a-jumper amounts of 8 ply wool, so I’ve got this stranded yoke pullover (body in an oatmealy colour and yoke in grey-blue and cool brown), and a striped EPS in cherry red and black Cleckheaton Country on the needles. The former of those is up to the armpits and I’ll probably join them tonight and start on the yoke. Unemployment turns out to be good for my knitting productivity. Surprise.

Today Emily and I went to the Giant Garden Centre of Giantness (aka The Greenery, in Bulleen) and got what we need to start a decent sized container-based vegie garden. Our landlords won’t let us dig into the lawn or have raised beds, so instead we’re going to ruin the lawn by putting big containers all over it. (I really don’t understand why that’s preferable to them, but whatever.)

Currently, we have the following herbs in pots:

• Italian parsley
• Sage
• Rosemary
• Mint

Today we bought plants/seedlings for:

• Tomatoes: Grosse Lisse, Burke’s Backyard, San Marzano, and a yellow one I forget the name of
• Capsicum/bell peppers (mixed punnet)
• Basil (Italian style)
• Thyme (common variety, thymus vulgaris)

It’s late to start with the tomatoes so we bought some reasonably advanced plants.

Then I also hit up Eden Seeds and ordered:

• Chives
• Rocket (aka arugula)
• Nasturtiums
• Warragul greens (aka NZ spinach)
• Leaf amaranth
• Zucchini (Fordhook variety)
• Butternut squash/pumpkin

The rocket and nasturtiums are for salads, and the warragul greens and amaranth are both heat-resistant spinach substitutes that will deal well with Melbourne summers. I’m sad to be missing spring stuff (lettuce, radishes, etc) but I’m looking forward to cooler weather, too, and growing kale and beets and things.

Anyway, the garden plan is to put big containers all along the back fence, and put a wire mesh over the fence for things to grow up, and hang some planters off the upper part of the fence for the nasturtiums.

Oh! We also discovered that the big green bushy thing near the front gate is a mulberry tree (Morus alba “pendula”), and that it’s covered in berries which should be ripe in a few weeks’ time. Plums are starting to ripen in neighbours’ yards, too. I need to go knock on some doors and see if I can gather some. And we got a tip-off about an empty block with a lemon tree, so we went and grabbed a bagful of those this afternoon. Emily wants to make some kind of lemon slice for our housewarming.

That’s it for now. I’ll post more as things progress.

I often make stewed fruit, but I haven’t written about it here, yet, I don’t think. I sometimes joke that I have “childhood fruit trauma”, which means that although I like fruit, I don’t much like eating it if it’s been sitting around in a fruit bowl or in the fridge for a while. I have to either eat fruit as soon as I buy it, or cook it into something. So, this is the simplest way I cook fruit for daily use. I buy whatever’s cheap and good at the market, a kilo or two at a time, and stew it in a minimalist sort of way. The results then get spooned over my breakfast muesli, eaten as dessert with a dollop of yoghurt, or used in other dishes (for instance, in baked goods).

When I stew fruit, I don’t add any sugar, so it’s important to use fruit that’s reasonably ripe and sweet. It can have a bit of bite to it, but if you wouldn’t eat it raw without sweetening, this is not the stewed fruit recipe for you. (In other words, don’t try this with rhubarb!)

The recipe is extremely simple:

1. Prepare your fruit in whatever way you want. For apples, I peel then dice them. For small stone fruit like apricots or plums, I simply wash them and halve them, taking out the pits. For peaches, I slice them.
2. Put them in a pan, preferably a heavy-bottomed one, with a drizzle of water. Seriously, just a little drizzle is all you need.
3. Optionally, add some spices. For apples I usually add cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Most stone fruits I leave unspiced, though combinations like peach and ginger, or plums with cardamom, can be nice.
4. Cover them and cook over a low heat, stirring occasionally and carefully so as not to break up the fruit any more than you intend to, until soft. The drizzle of water you added should be just enough to stop the fruit sticking to the pan until the fruit heats up enough to let out some of its own juices. So mostly you’re just cooking the fruit in its own juice.

That’s it. I usually put aside a bowl full in the fridge for my breakfasts, and freeze the rest in little containers. I’m hoping, this summer, to start preserving them using the hot water canning method, so I can keep them in the pantry rather than taking up freezer space.

Related:

• Apple oat crumble

Writing about what I’m cooking is also good for my mental health, I think. I’m a bit screwed up around food, sometimes, and sometimes I just… forget how much I actually enjoy cooking and eating good food. So this helps reinforce it for me. I’m really pleased at the moment that I have a great kitchen, in a house that’s close to good markets and not too close to cheap takeaway food, and with housemates that I can cook and eat with. I’m in a pretty good place, food-wise, and I want to make a record of it.

Anyway! My point here — and I do have one — is that since I’m making a record of what I’m eating, rather than trying to be pretentious and perfect, you’re about to get a recipe for what I cooked the other day when I was dying of menstrual cramps and, for some reason, craving curry. There was no curry to be had, but I did have curry powder in the cupboard, and so, this… a sort of curry fried rice thing that’s not quite kedgeree but is closely related to it.

I first cooked kedgeree after reading about it in Connie Willis’s “To Say Nothing of the Dog”. I mean, I’d read about it before that, but the particular scene in that book — where Ned, a time traveller, comes down to breakfast in a Victorian country house and is disgusted by the devilled kidneys and kedgeree on offer — is what prompted me to actually look up a recipe. Kedgeree’s usually made with smoked fish and hard boiled eggs, but I didn’t have any smoked fish on hand and couldn’t be bothered boiling eggs, so here’s what I did instead.

• 1 cup basmati rice
• 1/2 onion, diced (I didn’t have any, so used spring onions, but would have preferred ordinary onion)
• 1 generous tblsp ghee OR half and half oil and butter (oil for high-heat cooking, butter for flavour)
• 1 heaped teaspoon mild, English-style curry powder (Keen’s, or similar)
• 2 eggs, whisked with a little water, fried as a thin omelette, then cut into small pieces
• 1 small can tinned salmon, drained and roughly broken up
• chopped parsley
• salt and pepper

Cook the rice (or you could also use 2 cups leftover, pre-cooked rice). Make the omelette — I did this in the wok I was about to use to fry the rice — then cut it up into small pieces. Saute the onions in the oil and butter until translucent and just starting to brown. Throw in the curry powder and stir until fragrant, then add the rice and toss it until the curry powder is evenly distributed throughout. Add in the eggs, salmon, and chopped parsley and stir it through. Season with salt and pepper.

It was tasty enough, and it hit the spot, but to be honest the tinned salmon was nowhere near as good as the smoked fish this should really be made with. So I strongly recommend you use smoked fish (I’ve done smoked cod and smoked trout in the past), as well as using chopped hard boiled eggs rather than the quick omelette I made. On the other hand, if you don’t want to go to much trouble, this is quick and easy and only messes up the one pan.

I often crave fish and tomatoes, together, when I’m premenstrual, so when I sat down to eat this, I realised that what I really wanted was a big glass of tomato juice on the side. I didn’t have any, but I wound up spooning a big dollop of tomato kasundi into my bowl and mixing it through the not-quite-kedgeree, and it was pretty damn tasty, so if you have anything of that nature kicking around, you might like to try it.

Related rice recipes:

• Fried rice with kale

Clockwise from lower left: figs, free range eggs, biscotti, cauliflower, salad onions, zucchini, polenta, whole wheat bulgur, cherries, tomatoes, parsley, silverbeet (chard), salad mix, nectarines, baby potatoes, and cheese (maasdam and caprakaas). Not shown: spring onions, whole nutmeg, whole allspice.

It’s the first time I’ve seen decent looking stone fruit in the market, though it’s still early days. These truss tomatoes were $5.99/kg and I saw other decent-looking cooking tomatoes around $3… when they come down to $2 I’ll buy boxfuls of them and make sauce. The potatoes were 79c/kg and should be lovely. Zucchini was… was it $1 a kilo or $2? Either way, worth it. Cauliflower was $1.50 a head. This is why I love Preston Markets on a Saturday afternoon: they’re closed Sunday-Monday-Tuesday so everything is going cheap.

Plans:

• Figs: carrot cake! I tried to make my favourite “dwarf bread” carrot cake a couple of weeks ago and the new oven just didn’t want to work with me, so I’m going to try again.
• Cauliflower: baked, with parmesan and breadcrumbs (recipe)
• Potatoes: housemate says she’ll make potato salad, which was exactly what I was hoping for.
• Tomatoes, bulgur, parsley: tabbouleh
• Silverbeet: with tomatoes and cannelini beans, over cheesey polenta

And a quick tabbouleh recipe, for the record. This is what we had for dinner tonight.

• 1/2 cup whole wheat tabbouleh, soaked in 1 cup boiling water with a pinch of salt, until chewy
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• juice of 1 lemon
• slosh of olive oil
• 2 tomatoes, seeds removed then diced
• scant 1/4 cup finely chopped salad onion
• 1/2 a large bunch of parsley, chopped
• pepper and salt to taste

Mix everything together and let it sit for 15 minutes or so for the flavours to blend. Serve with whatever mediterranean things take your fancy. In our case, we had lebanese bread, hummus, and feta cheese.

Related recipes:

• Herbed couscous with chickpeas and baked sweet potato