Summer Tomato, Basil and Feta Salad

After a slow start our tomatoes are finally starting to ripen. You can not beat home grown tomatoes - they just taste and smell incredible. A tip I have been told  is to not put tomatoes in the fridge as they loose their flavour. I'm not too sure how scientifically based this is but through trial and error this seems to be true.

The best salad I have come across to accentuate the tomato flavour is also one of the easiest and tastiest salads I make. This is the salad that we take 10mins to make, take to everyBBQ and get the most comments about. You can adjust the amounts of ingredients according to the amount of tomatoes you have.

Summer Tomato, Basil and Feta Salad

approximately 1kg of tomatoes - we used a mixture of our own and some fancy heirloom cherry tomatoes from the grocery store

zest of 1 lemon

handful of basil leaves

enough olive oil to coat the tomatoes

salt and pepper

approximately 200g of feta

Chop the tomatoes as chunky or as fine as you would like. Place in your salad bowl. Add the lemon zest. Coat the tomatoes and lemon zest with the olive oil. Mix in salt, pepper and basil. Top with crumbled feta.

Its also the perfect salad for a summer picnic!

Fresh Spring roll of herbs, cos lettuce and cucumber with a peanut chilli dipping sauce

I made these to take to a wee New Years shin dig. We make a similar thing at work. They are nice a fresh tasting and go well with the spicy peanut dipping sauce. You can add poached shredded chicken to the mix or poached prawns, sticky beef or if you really want to step it up a notch Confit duck!! The Cos lettuce, Vietnamese mint, Thai basil and chives all came from our garden.


Fresh Spring roll of herbs, cos lettuce and cucumber with a peanut chilli dipping sauce

12-14  large rice paper wraps
1 cup coriander leaves
1 cup Thai basil leaves
1 cup mint leaves
20 Vietnamese mint leaves
a small bunch of chives, cut into 5cm lengths
1 small cos lettuce
half a cucumber, seeded and cut into thin batons

First pick all your herb leaves and place them in a bowl. Wash the lettuce and finely slice, prep the cucumber and cut the chives. Mix together in a bowl.

Boil the jug and fill a large bowl. Dip the rice paper wraps into the boiling water for about 2 seconds, drip dry and place on a clean surface or a chopping board. Place a small handful of the salad herb mix on the rice paper. Roll in the bottom then the sides and then keep rolling up to seal the herbs in.  Repeat until you run out of herb mix.

To serve cut diagonally in half and arrange on the platter with the dipping sauce.


Dipping sauce

1/2 cup boiling water
5 T coconut sugar
5 T fish sauce
3 T lime juice
2 T rice wine vinegar
1- 2 T Japanese soy
1 T Hoisan sauce
1 red chilli, seeded and finely chopped
2 T coriander stalks, finely chopped (from the leaves you picked for above)
1/4 cup finely chopped roasted peanuts

Place boiling water and sugar together. Mix and cool. Add remaining ingredients.
This dressing is also nice for a Thai beef salad but just put the peanuts through the salad at the end.

Potato Harvest

We have just done our first harvest of potatoes. It is so satisfying digging through the soft dirt and finding little (sometimes huge) potatoes. There is always a slight competition as to whose potato patch will have the most and the biggest potatoes.
Growing potatoes is so so easy. They are especially good to grow if you don't have much space. We grow our potatoes in a stack of tyres. Although there has been some talk that perhaps the tyres might leach heavy metals into the soil. You could also use a large pot too if you didn't want to use tyres. Or you can plant them straight into the garden.
We brought seed potatoes a number of months ago, just from the local garden store. You then place the potatoes in the dirt placed in the bottom tyre or pot (or you can plant them straight into the ground).
As the potatoes sprout and you see the green shoots starting to sprout through the dirt you top up the tyre/pot/garden with more dirt - ensuring that you cover the green shoots. You keep doing this until you have a stack as high as you like. We usually have a stack of tyres between 2-4tyres high.
Once the stack has reached as high as you want to go you just leave the shoots to grow. Make sure the potato plants have plenty of water and sun. You should also give them some regular liquid fertiliser to help get a bumper crop.
Once the shoots start drooping and turing yellow you can start harvesting. If you want smaller potatoes you do it early, if you want larger potatoes you leave them a little bit longer. You can get some new potatoes without disturbing the rest of the crop too much. Just scrap away the top layers and pull out the small ones.
When you want to harvest the potatoes you basically just sift through the soil and pick out the potatoes. Don't use a fork or spade as you could accidentally stab your potato, ruining it. You can buy fancy little potato harvesting scoops from garden shops and online but we just use our hands. They are just as effective.
Store your potatoes in a dark, cool place. We generally keep ours in a hessian or cotton bag at the back of the pantry.

Lets Make Some Seeds!

Now you may be forgiven for thinking that we have terrible design skills at our house if you judge us by this photo! However, we are collecting seeds...kale seeds to be exact.
We had a bumper crop of kale this year. We had three different kinds on the go - Tuscan Kale, Curly Leaf Kale and Purple Kale. The purple kale is still going strong, however the other two types went to seed a while ago.

Purple Kale

Since we had such a great crop this year we thought we would attempt to catch seeds for next year. It is extremely simple to collect seeds and is very satisfying when your caught seeds turn into produce. You really feel like you have grown the produce from scratch. Furthermore, if you collect seeds from a strong crop you are more likely to get a strong crop the year after as well. So how to collect seeds...

1. - Let the kale go to flower in the garden.

2. - Continue to let the kale flower and then form seed pods.

3. - Allow the seed pods to dry a little on the plant.

4. - Pull the plants out of the ground and place them upside down in an old pillow case. Hang the pillow cases up somewhere dry and out of the direct sunlight. Once again our verandah was perfect. At this time of year our verandah doesn't have room for humans with all the drying of veges and seeds going on!

5. - Allow the seed pods to dry so that they crack open and let the seeds fall to the bottom of the pillow case. This can take a few weeks. To help this along you can gently hit or shake the pillow cases.

6. - Collect the seeds, store them in a paper bag (a small envelope works really well), and have them ready for planting next year.

You can also do this with herbs and instead of using them for replanting you can use them in cooking. For example, you can do this with coriander, fennel or dill, just to name a few. Instead of keeping them in a paper bag keep them in an airtight container. To get the best flavour use the seeds within 6 months. Imagine how much better your cooking will taste with home grown, fresh seeds!

Tis almost the season of fruit!

The feijoa is flowering and the apples are growing. It won't be long now until we can harvest and gorge on some delicious fresh fruit! These are two of my favourite.

Harvest Time

We harvested our red onions today. We have been using them straight from the ground but its time to use the ground for other veges and we also don't want the onions to rot. We will leave them outside under the verandah for a few weeks to dry out. Then we will trim the roots and cut the leaves off. After drying to keep them as long as possible we keep them in a woven bag in a dark cool place.
You cannot compare fresh, home grown onions to store brought. The flavour is so much better. Once you have grown your own you will never buy onions from the supermarket again!

Broad Bean Hummus

We have had a decent crop of broad beans this year and so every broad bean recipe known to man has been tried in our household.

After a day at work I got home to a note saying 'harvested the broad beans today and made some hummus' and a couple of containers of the broad bean hummus were waiting for me in the fridge.

So far this is definitely the winner of the broad bean recipe participants! Its made just the same as regular hummus but you replace the chickpeas with blanched, de-skined broad beans instead. Make sure you add lots of lemon juice as it really enhances the broad beaniness. Its delicious on everything!