Garden Party

Since work has gotten busy again (evidenced by my paltry posting), the last thing I want to do is spend hours in the grocery store. I'm still happy to hang out in the kitchen for hours, but something about fighting the crowds under artificial lights as terrible music floats through the air just doesn't appeal to me! So while we are of course still shopping for things we need, we have been making serious use of the garden whenever we can.

Here's our garden looking particularly lush after 200 mm of rain.

I'm not sure if you can make out the mulched garden bed in the middle right-hand side. It used to have a big cherry tomato, some dying kale, and a fruitless watermelon. Andy decided to clear the bed, put some compost in and let it rest for a few weeks before we plant again. So we harvested all the cherry tomatoes and made spaghetti.

Cherry tomatoes, olive oil, basil and garlic. Yummm.

With some lentil balls, in the background.

Our eggplant bushes fruit prolifically, and the skinny fruits are delicious cooked on the BBQ in a mixture of soy sauce, chilli and brown sugar. On the side, some malabar spinach - a tropical vine that grows well in the humidity. (And some no-fu love loaf.)

 Our basil plants are another fast-grower, and we have made a few batches of pesto. Unlike last year, now that I have a grown-up-sized food processor, pesto is a snap.

It might seem from this post that we eat an awful lot of pasta. That is correct.

Pesto pasta with eggplants and olives.

We've also, though, taken to making bowls of whatever we can gather, plus what we have from the markets. In this peanut-lentil stew, we have eggplants, cowpeas (aka black-eyed peas, but when they are still green in the pod), and garlic chives from the garden, plus some sweet potatoes from the market and a tin of tomatoes. Served over rice, with a big squirt of sriracha, this was a delicious rainy-day meal.

The garden has also thrown up some curry-related delights. On Sunday I picked a big handful of green chillies, some lemon grass, and some lime leaves, and blended them up with dried spices to make 6 dinners' worth of curry paste - green and jalfrezi - to have throughout the next few weeks. I filled the jars just a little, with one meal's worth of curry paste, so that we can store them in the freezer until we're ready.

We haven't yet tried one of these in an actual curry, but I prefer them to store-bought because it means I don't have to go to the store!