Bay of Plenty

Purple and yellow beans, tomatoes, bananas, sweet corn, apples
leeks, lemons, passion fruit and chilean guavas

After a week of awful weather and not daring to enter into the wet world of our soggy-bottom garden, I finally ventured out on Saturday and was rewarded with this great bounty of produce!  Eeeek!  Blessings always come in disguise.  Big bounty always means big processing marathon!  So I spent much of the afternoon creating several vegetable pies (5 to be precise) of different layers and sauces.  One was scoffed last night, the other 4 are frozen meals for later.  It is ironic we live in the Bay of Plenty!!

A lovely bunch of bananas fattening up....

I also made 2 bottles of passion fruit syrup for drizzling over puddings and ice-creams in winter, to evoke that memory of summer.  Our main passion fruit vines were culled because of a fungal disease but I have several vines planted all over the garden in haphazard spots, and we have been gathering these fallen fruits of the gods with much appreciation!  Thought we would have missed out on the taste delight of passion fruit, so am very grateful for our fence-hugging specimens out there.

1 cup of sugar boiled up with 2 cups passion fruit pulp.  Voila!

During this mammoth food processing session, I managed to blanch and freeze a bag of fresh green beans,  peel and freeze about 3 dozen small home-grown bananas for later baking sessions, as well as making 3 bottles of lemon curd or lemon honey.  I decided to use up our bantam eggs as we had collected 17 eggs over the last 3 weeks!!  Liz seems to do most of the laying and brooding, while Spence, the insectivorous terminator does most of the work tilling and scratching.  As the eggs are tiny, I substitued 2 of the yolks to every 1 recommended in the recipe.  So here it is:

Lemon Curd or Lemon Honey

6 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

grated rind and juice of 4 lemons

100g butter, cubed

Mix the egg yolks and sugar together in the top of a double boiler or a bowl over simmering water.  Stir mixture until it thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon.  Mix in the lemon rind and juice.   Add butter gradually to the lemon mixture, whisking each time after an addition.  Pour mixture into hot, clean, dry jars and seal when cold.  Store in refrigerator.  Makes about 2 1/2 cups.

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezie.

A stainless steel bowl over a simmering pot of water becomes
a double boiler.

Simple ingredients:  home-grown lemons and home-laid eggs!
Add in some organic sugar.  Lemon Curd delight!

Lizzy, our egg-layer eggs-tra-ordinaire!

So apart from Kitchen Warfare (you shoulda seen the state of the kitchen after all the preserving!!), it was a very productive weekend!  We managed to pull out our elderberry, after much deliberation.  We decided that the size of the elderberry didn't warrant the harvest potential.  My daughter was not happy with the decision, having read that elderberry wine was the most heavenly experience!????  But now it has created a big space for us to plant our extra blueberry plants, which I know will be prolific in 2 years time!  Bring it on!!  Life is Change.  No better place to experience it than in the Good Food Garden!  Landscape changes and shape-shifts continuously as one crop grows and crowds out the space, then pruning or culling brings about a sense of emptiness again.  Our wildflower sowings have bloomed and died, and now the asters and dahlias are dressed in their finest colours, attracting the visitations of wonderful nectar and pollen gathering creatures.  It seems like we need an Air Control operating in our garden at the moment.  The air is full of buzzing, flitting, gliding, jetting, weaving winged creatures.  It is amazing to sit still and observe!  I want ot burst into Louis Armstrong's song:  "What a wonderful world....."

Monarch on dahlia

Bee on aster.

And now for more shitty conversation.  Toilet paper.  Australia's Totally Gourdgeous (all the musical instruments in this band are crafted from gourds) penned a song: "Do you put your toilet roll, paper over, or paper under, it can be a major blunder, it could split the world asunder..... if the toilet tissue issue drives you up the wall, it's neither better or worse, it's just different that's all"  I have been on a mission.  First I bought bulk toilet paper which was supposed to be made Eco-friendly.  Problem was, it came packaged in a HUGE tough plastic outer, and each 6 rolls were encased in further plastic outers.  An awful lot of packaging waste if you ask me.  Even cheaper supermarket versions had 12 to a plastic outer, better odds than the eco-stuff.  Then I tried buying bulk from our kindergarten cleaners and at $1.10 per roll, it was a good deal, came in a cardboard outer, no plastic at all.  The cardboard became part of our ongoing renewable mulch in our garden.  Then I found an ad for Green Cane toilet paper.  I bought 48 rolls for $52 delivered to my home and I am excited.  It came in a recyclable cardboard outer.  4 toilet rolls are wrapped in a 100% compostable paper wrapping.  The paper is sturdy but soft (everything you want in bog-roll) and has 30% more paper than supermarket rolls.  It is made with sugarcane's fibrous reside waste leftover after the sugarcane has been crushed and the liquid extracted.  It also has bamboo added to the composition, another renewable resource, so no trees have to be sacrificed in the love of clean bottoms!!  And no, I don't get paid to advertise them!!  I simply like to share information on stuff that works for me and for the environment.  

Toilet paper Tissue Issue

So hand me another Blog Roll please..........