Burgeoning diversity in the Aztec maize

Last year’s Aztec maize saw only a few cobs saved for seed, and these had largely red, yellow and white seeds. Yet this original ‘corn’ plant – the forerunner of all the maize and sweet corns now propagated throughout the world - has all the genetic codes built in to produce a rainbow of colours when harvested, which happened here yesterday just before the rains began.

This year purples and browns have appeared. Now who would like some seeds? And what will the cook make of this product of the gardener's whim?

Radish salad

I get to claim that I’ve been gardening for over fifty years on a mere technicality; as a small boy, my father let me use a patch of his garden to grow easy vegetables like beans and radishes. About every two hours, I would go down to the house and get Mum, urging her to come and look how big my radishes were, then dawdle back up the yard to give them a chance to grow just that much bigger before we’d arrive to inspect them.

Back then, all radishes were ‘French Breakfast’; small rose and white spheres about three centimetres across that seemed to live their whole life in the space of a few short weeks. After that they turned to wood. In more recent decades, I grew ‘White Icicle’ radishes, all of which met a similar fate of fossilisation if left too long between visits by the cook.

After much mucking about, I discovered Japanese ‘Daikon Radishes’, and the love affair between us has seen off all competitors. Not only are they huge (yes, that’s a dinner plate in the photo above!) but they are a pretty plant with the exquisite patience of the Japanese themselves; these radishes don’t seem to turn woody, and can be left in the ground for longish periods. Their only downside seems to be their size – they can take some digging out if left to go too deep!

 

A simple dish of radish salad is a fine peppery condiment to accompany all sorts of meals. Just peel a single radish with the potato peeler, grate it coarsely and add chopped chives (or any other oniony material) and add balsamic vinegar and olive oil, then serve.

A walk in the veggie garden

Word of warning - if you like a neat garden, do not go any further! You will see plenty of grass and weeds, amongst the veggies.

One bed with cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, parsnips, lettuces and *miner's lettuce as living mulch. *I let that go to seed every year and it comes up with a vengeance with the first rain. It's a pretty ground cover, and easy to rip up, if you need to plant something. It's lovely in salads, too.
A carrot patch. With plenty of miner's lettuce as weed suppressant.
The Egyptian Walking Onions, surrounded by lush grass.
Time to harvest the Golden Nuggets. They were really prolific this year.
The leek bed. I usually just cut the leeks, instead of ripping them out of the soil with their roots. They re-grow nicely. Also, I always let a few go to seed, ensuring self-sown leeks.The other half of the bed is taken up by Red Russian kale (self-sown), rapa, some other kale (too lazy to look up the variety name), and Komatsuna. All lovely greenery to ensure a healthy diet in Winter.Here is a view of the whole area. In front you can see the leek and greenery bed. Behind that the Golden Nuggets. To the right you can see the tomato beds. They are still laden with green and nearly ripe tomatoes. The first frost a few days ago hasn't managed to kill them.
The garlic is looking good!
So are the broad beans.And the grass in this veggie bed.

Roast chestnuts, boiled chestnuts and red cabbage dish

Autumn is deepening here on the Adelaide Plains and night-time temperatures have fallen to around 10 degrees C. Loud bangs outside in the darkness signal yet more chestnuts falling onto the shed roof and bouncing onto the driveway from the magnificent Italian chestnut tree that overhangs our fence. Come morning, we roll these prickly ‘tennis-balls’ underfoot to release the chestnuts without getting spiked, and the chestnuts quietly build-up in the cook’s pockets and so find their way to the dish on the sink.

It’s the gardener’s job during the colder months to keep the home fire burning, bring up kindling and mallee logs, light and maintain the fire in the centre of our home, and to take out the ash.

But it’s not all work; a dozen chestnuts wrapped in silver-foil and dropped into the glowing ash of the fireplace make a hot TV snack better than any bar of chocolate. Peeling off the inner and outer skins of knife-scarred boiled chestnuts is another fireside job; these will be frozen and used in dips and soups as winter moves on.

Boiled chestnuts also make a tasty addition to a dish of thinly shredded raw red cabbage, honey, salt and grated Granny Smith apple that is let stand overnight. The next day the cook fries onion, cloves, juniper berries and bay leaves together, then adds the red cabbage and meat stock before simmering gently until tender. Only when this is all done are the boiled chestnuts added.

How to pickle eggplants (aubergines)

After World War II Australia set up a large-scale program of migration to bring out some of the millions of displaced people of Europe. During this time in Australia there was a desperate shortage of labour and a growing belief that substantial population growth was essential for the country's future. Since then, some seven million people born overseas have made their home here.

My own Irish ancestors arrived in South Australia over 160 years ago during the Irish potato famine, and I can still recall the sense of ‘foreignness’ that we felt towards the largely Italian communities that settled around us on the eastern side of the Adelaide Plains. We rather admired the way they took over bricklaying, concreting and masonry jobs in the building industry, while laughing at the handkerchiefs tied around their heads, their poor but lilting English, and the strange foods their children had stuffed between enormous slices of crusty bread in their school sandwiches. We drank tea, not coffee! We’d never eaten pizza! We certainly would never eat pickled eggplants and capsicums!

Looking back now, I find myself with a real affection for these small nuggetty people who showed us how to grow fruit and vegetables in our own backyards, who made their own wine, pickled olives, made sausages, hand-rolled pasta, baked wood-fired bread and pizza, and who kept rabbits for eating and chickens for eggs. Most notable of all was their powerful sense of community and their rich connection between garden and table and family life. Their children have blended into the population, speak with Aussie accents, but can still be spotted among the polyglot suburban Australians by their dark hair and Italian names. Best of all, they have contributed to the Adelaide ‘coffee culture’; hardly anyone drinks tea socially anymore, and we think of pizza and bruschetta as ‘regular’ food.

One of the last remnants of these older post-war generation of Italian immigrants in our street is an old Italian lady who lives over the road; this is her recipe for pickling and preserving eggplants (aubergines), as passed along to my wife.

Peel the eggplants and slice them thickly.

Place them in layers in a stainless steel colander, which itself sits in a stainless steel dish of similar size to collect the fluid pressed out of the eggplants. Coat each layer generously with sea-salt.

Put another stainless-steel dish on top of this assemblage, and put a few heavy house-bricks into this dish to add pressure. Leave stand overnight.

Next, boil the eggplant slices in a pungent mix of 1 cup of water and 3 cups of white vinegar for a few minutes, then lay them out between clean sheets (folded over) to allow the slices to shed excess water.

Now mix thoroughly with olive oil, chillies, garlic and dried oregano. Lay the sliced eggplant flat in layers with the spices in between.

If this mix is not refrigerated, but stored instead in jars in the cellar, it needs to be covered with olive oil.