What to do with too many chillies

Everyone loves a bargain, and the closer you get to paying almost nothing, the better the buzz. Bargains are different from freebies, of course. For a bargain, you have to pay at least a few cents, and today's gardening bargain probably has cost me at least 25 cents. I'll be coming back for more.

Way back in 2016, this little gardener bought some of his favourite largish red chillies at the supermarket. I saved the seeds from one of them, popped eight plump seeds into a punnet of potting mix, all eight came up in a week or so, and now, a few months later, I am harvesting my bargains.

I like these bigger than average chillies (they're about 3 inches long). They still have a chilli kick but it isn't too savage. And as I think I've mentioned before in this blog, I like to just toss a whole chilli into a tomato sauce and let it slowly infuse what the Italian restaurant menus like to call "a touch of chilli". Civilised heat.

I've always been fond of growing chillies, and if you are a beginner gardener they are one of your best bets for success. Chillies love life, and most of the time you should succeed in getting a colourful crop.

Yes, they do need a sunny spot, and yes, they like some fertiliser and a steady supply of water when they are young plants. The only extra care my chilli bushes received was the support from a garden stake. As the fruit grows, the plants can become top-heavy and blow over easily, so tying the trunk of the bush to a sturdy little stake will let the bush get on with the business of producing a bumper crop of fruit.

I love how chillies turn from green to red, almost in the blink of an eye. A few days ago all my chillies looked like this: very green.

And now they're turning into that vivid red. This one would have been green two days ago, and tomorrow it should be entirely red.

So, what do I plan to do with my glut of chillies? They keep quite well in the crisper section of the fridge, for a week or two, so some of them will go there for general use in all sorts of meals. 

Another big batch will become my "Sambal Ulek" chilli paste, which is an Indonesian basic ingredient (alternatively spelled sambal oelek).

At its simplest, Sambal Ulek is just minced chillies, preserved with some salt and vinegar. Whizz it all in a blender, pop it in a clean jar and it keeps in the fridge for several weeks at least.

If you go searching for Sambal Ulek recipes online you'll find people adding in extras such as garlic, ginger, lemon grass, shrimp paste, fish sauce, vegetable oil and sugar (as well as the salt and vinegar).

And opening up the spice-stained pages of my beloved bible of Asian cookery, Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook, she suggests substituting tamarind liquid for the vinegar, but her recipe is just salt, vinegar or tamarind liquid, and chillies. Nothing else.

However, to keep things basic, try this Sambal Ulek for starters. Aim for 2 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon sugar per cup of chopped chilli, and enough vinegar to turn the fairly stiff chopped mixture into a paste in your blender (so just add a tablespoon of vinegar at a time until it's a paste — for 1 cup of chopped chillies this should be 1-2 tablespoons vinegar). Oh, and whatever you do wear disposable gloves from beginning to end when handling big amounts of chilli. They prevent regrets.

Some people add a surface covering of peanut oil to the paste in the jar, to help seal it up. Of course store it in the fridge at all times, and if it ever changes in the way it looks, that's your big signal to be sensible and throw it all out.

Inconvenience foods

It's peak season for my two favourite inconvenience foods – persimmons and quinces. 'Inconvenience' foods? Yep. These babies aren't quick and easy to eat. You have to earn them, you have to wait and, best of all, they're available for just a few months every year. After the season is over, you have to be patient... and wait ... until next year. I like that!

This dome-shaped person is an astringent persimmon. Should you foolishly attempt to eat this thing while firm and unripe, I have been told your mouth will pucker instantly with the bitterness, and stay puckered for ages. And you'll never do that again, either. Fortunately for me I was forewarned and I did what everyone should do: I waited until it softened, and softened some more, then finally arrived at the "I'm about to disintegrate with softness" stage. Then it's ready to eat. It's my favourite breakfast during its season of autumn and early winter. I like to think of it in an anti-marketing way as "Cereal with Disintegrated Inconvenience Food Collapsed over the Top". Catchy name? Yummy, I say.

On the left is the astringent persimmon, the one with the dome, and on the right is the modern convenience food type of persimmon, the non-astringent type, the flatter one, also known as Fuji, Kaki and various other names. The non-astringent types are much more sensible things. You can eat them crisp like an apple or let them ripen until softer and eat them, say, like a ripe pear. They're nice, and they are of course much more popular than the highly inconvenient astringent persimmon. But I like the weirdo on the left more because, in the end, it wins the big prize: it tastes better.

As this is a gardening blog most of the time, I should pause for a moment to say that no, I am not about to tell you how I grow persimmons here, because I don't. I could keep a persimmon tree alive here, sure, and collect some fruit each year, but I don't think it wouldn't be a completely happy person. Persimmons like a mildly chilly winter as a part of their fruit-making cycle, and the mild, coastal part of Sydney where I live can't supply that. My area is also just a touch too warm for raising successful crops of my other favourite fruits such as apples, nashi pears and quinces, so I don't bother growing them, either. And so I content myself with letting other people in the right climates grow quality crops of the fruits I love, and I'm happy just to buy some, to keep them in business doing what they do so well.

Edit: not long after posting this here today, Lanie at Edible Urban Garden, who lives just 5km from me, did a posting on her beautiful persimmon crop, so what do I know about growing persimmons! Check our her blog!

Did I just mention quinces? My other favourite inconvenience food. They're in season now, and I love them as much as I love persimmons.

Bought this one yesterday, and it's wonderfully inconvenient too. And seasonal as well. When fruits are available for just a few months each year they remain special. As soon as the modern world decrees that the spoilt child known as the average consumer simply insists on having their favourite fruit for 365 days a year, then the poor fruit loses some of its charisma. Absence does make the heart fonder for fruit. Such a thrill to see the first quince of the season each year, and to know what lies ahead for the next few months.

I love this part of quinces, the soft downy bloom which appears on the skin. It's harmless and rubs off or washes off (or disappears in the peelings anyway) but I have seen people in shops almost recoil in horror when they discover that there is "something" on that fruit! So many modern fruit shops, with their gleaming over-polished apples and art-directed displays of coordinated colours, are almost sanitised in their drive for visual perfection. And then over to the side, away from the main show, there are the quince trays, fluffy with down and looking like a bunch of unshaven hobos needing a wash. Often I think they're the only truly natural looking thing left in some modern fruit shops.

As soon as I finish writing this blog this little quince is going to be peeled, cut into chunks, sprinkled with sugar, sloshed with water and tossed into a covered small baking dish, along with a cinnamon stick, to slowly turn bright, bright red and become yet another cool season breakfast treat. It takes three or four hours for the flesh to change from the original off-white to this wonderful colour, and while that happens the house fills with the aroma of the quinces meeting the spice of the cinnamon. It might take a while, but the inconvenience is always worth it.

Thai lime time

Pammy came home yesterday with a lovely present from her old friend Antonio – these amazing looking Thai 'kaffir lime' fruits. Antonio and his wife Louise live just around the corner from us and they've become keen, and very good, gardeners in recent years. Antonio has always been a brilliant cook long before he became a qualified chef in recent years, and so they love to grow their food plants: citrus and herbs in particular. And haven't they done a wonderful job with their Thai limes!

These limes are not so hot for squeezing. Juiciness is not their thing. Instead, it's the fragrant skin which you grate or zest which is what's valued with this wrinkled fruit. It's also really the foliage of the plant which is what most cooks use from this tree most of the time. The leaves are finely shredded and added to salads, soups, stir-fries and dressings, and they really are one of the signature flavours of Thai cuisine, right up there with fish sauce, chillies and smelly old shrimp paste.

I had always intended to buy a Thai lime tree to grow in a pot, as a few years back I nursed back to health my sister-in-law Laura's potted Thai lime tree, which had endured a bad winter on a shady apartment balcony and had been turned into bare (but thorny) sticks. In my sunny backyard, with some TLC it bounced back beautifully and returned to live with Laura once more. Antonio's gift of these fruit spurred us into action, and so this morning Pammy and I went to a big, flash garden centre in northern Sydney and picked one out from the good selection there.

Here it is, just a tiddler now, but that's how I like to start with potted fruit trees: not too big, so they haven't become pot-bound and unhappy at the garden centre. This one was $35, but you could buy advanced Thai lime trees there, with fruit on, for $200, if you were silly enough. Thai limes (Cistrus hystrix) are probably one of the best potted citrus, as the tree is naturally small, only 1-1.5m tall at best. Its only drawback is that it's a thorny thing, but if you harvest either fruit or foliage with both care and respect you should survive unscathed.

And for readers not familiar with Thai limes, here are their wonderfully distinctive leaves. They are called 'waisted' leaves, as they look like two leaves but in fact are one, with a 'waist' in the middle. I always have Thai lime leaves on hand in my kitchen, but that's only because they freeze brilliantly well, and thaw out in less than a minute. So, I buy them fresh at the local Asian stores, and put the unused ones in a Tupperware container and freeze them. Maybe that 'frozen' discovery is what has made me a bit slow to get my own supply of fresh leaves. But when I saw Antonio and Louise's glorious fruit, that was it. No more procrastination, boy. Buy a Thai lime tree this Saturday, you slacker!

Speaking of slackers, this is what I fully intended to buy and plant this time last year: an edible fig tree, destined for a large pot. So, today we also bought a 'Brown Turkey' fig.

Tomorrow is planting day, and then we wait. The figs have finished fruiting in Sydney (or are winding down over autumn) and they'll be bare over the winter. That first shoot of spring will be a thrill, and it's almost odds-on that eagle-eyed Pammy, who doesn't miss a thing out in our backyard, will be the one to come bounding in with that "guess what I spotted" gleam in her eyes.

As for the Thai limes, we fully expect our latest addition to get growing straight away and never look back. However, we'll have to wait till this time next year for the first of those wrinkly wonders to be ready for zesting.

Lebanese eggplants

"That's a nice plant to grow in the garden just for its own sake. I think I might do a painting of that one," said my wife Pam this morning. Though it isn't bearing any fruit at the moment, our Lebanese eggplant has begun to flower, and it's a handsome plant, worthy of an artist's attention.

There's a lovely purpley-pink tinge to the flower buds, flowers, the stalks and the central veins of the broad leaves of this Lebanese eggplant.

The plant label promised that it would reach about 1m tall, so it's halfway there now. I planted some little annuals called Gomphrenas at the same time as I planted the eggplant seedling, as I thought a pinky purple scene would look pretty. So far so good!

The flowers themselves point down towards the ground, and hopefully some long, thick, sausage- shaped, purpley-black eggplants will be dangling from this spot sometime in late January.

Turn a flower up for a peek and it has that tell-tale look that other members of the Solanum genus, such as potatoes, have. It's a simple bloom that has a brief heyday of beauty, but with that colour it's a class above a humble white spud flower.

As I mentioned earlier there's a purplish tinge to the dark veins that run along and across each leaf. They're a big part of what makes this plant such a handsome thing. Growing it isn't too hard. It's the usual story of give it fertile, well-drained soil, lots of sunshine and regular water. The plant label says to give it an extra feed when the fruits start to swell, and avoid over-watering as the fruit nears maturity. In a typically wet Sydney summer, that might be where I come unstuck!

Pam and I are not big eggplant eaters, but we do like them occasionally. I just like to grow all sorts of vegies, just to see how the plants grow and look. I'm sure we'll find some new ways to enjoy our home-grown eggplants. I am rather fond of the dip called Baba Ghannouj, so here's the recipe I use (it's based on the one from the Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook, by Tess Mallos, but not so garlicky).

1 medium sized eggplant, about 375g

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/4 cup tahini (a sesame paste product used a lot in Lebanese cooking)

1 clove garlic

salt to taste

1 tablespoon olive oil

Pierce the eggplant all over with a skewer (to stop it bursting), then place it on a rack in a 180°C (350°F) oven for about 35-40 minutes, turning it once or twice to ensure even cooking.

Remove from the oven and let it cool slightly, but do peel off the skin while it's still very warm. Discard the skin, roughly chop the flesh, then put the flesh in a blender, along with all the other ingredients, and whizz till it forms a paste.

Use it as a dip with flatbread or crisps, or serve it as a side dish in a spread with cooked meats, salads, flatbread etc.

Note: if you can be bothered to cook the eggplant over a smoky char-grill, the eggplant will take on a smoky flavour which some people say is the hallmark of a great baba ghannouj. I'm not wild about smoked flavours myself, but there you go.

Finally, if you enjoy Lebanese food too, there's a great food blog by a Sydney-based Lebanese cook that's well worth visiting. It's called The Food Blog and right now, today, he's making pistachio ice-cream.

Crunchy munchies

My girl Pam likes her healthy snacks: carrot sticks, celery sticks and cucumber sticks. (I think all this health food puts the cosmic balance of our house out of whack, so I balance things out with Peanut Butter on toast.) Simply because I have never grown cucumbers before, I decided that I would have a go at providing Pam with some home-grown healthy crunchy munchies in the form of some Lebanese cucumbers.

Now, before you start hitting the comment button with "you're doing it wrong, Bozo" comments, yes I know I should be growing them up a trellis of some sort. The problem is that I've run out of space for trellises, and my vegie growing books say you can grow them along the ground, if you plant them into a raised mound. So that's what I'm doing. After a slowish start in October, rainy November has been just what the cucumber plants wanted.

The first of them is almost ready to harvest already. Naturally enough I've sown the cucumbers into soil enriched with a stack of home-made compost and generous handfuls of pelletised chicken manure. Cucumbers love their 'good going' so I hear.

While not spectacular the cucumber flowers are plentiful, cheerful and a pleasing sunny yellow for the brief time they appear.

Behind most of the flowers you can see the baby cucumbers already forming. No doubt we will end up with a glut, and so anyone coming over to our place will probably find some Greek-style Tzatziki dip on the table (for the recipe, see below).

"Where's my trellis, man?" asks the seeking tendril. Sorry bud, hit the low road, you're a groundcover plant this time round. While growing cucumbers on the ground definitely isn't recommended, I think I should be able to keep the fruit looking good by being attentive to keeping fresh straw mulch beneath the developing fruits. We'll just find out whether this works or not over the next few weeks, I guess.

While the wet weather is a blessing at the moment, it also threatens the usual curse of powdery mildew fungal attack which affects all the cucurbits such as cucumbers, zucchinis, marrows, squash, melons and pumpkins. This time round I'm using a new organic product called Eco-Fungicide. As far as I understand it, it's basically glorified bi-carb soda, but I've been told it works. You need to mix up a batch and use it all that day (it doesn't store), and that means adding a spoonful of the powder to water, along with a thimble full of vegetable oil or horticultural oil. So far so good - no powdery mildew on the plants, so it seems to work well. Last year I used the home-made organic solution of watered-down milk sprays, and these worked fairly well but you had to respray constantly, and it was a bit of a hassle to stay on top of the problem.

Finally, a recipe. Tzatziki for cucumber gluts.

1. Peel, deseed and grate 1 cucumber. Leave the grated cucumber to drain in a colander for 15 minutes, then squeeze out any remaining juice in your hands.

2. Mix the drained cucumber into 250g thick Greek plain yoghurt, then add 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint, crushed garlic to taste*, salt and pepper to taste.

Tzatziki is nice as a dip with bread or crackers, but it's also great dolloped on the side when serving barbecued meats, seafood, chicken etc.

* As for 'garlic to taste', real Greeks would add at least 4 cloves of crushed garlic to their Tzatziki, while lots of non-Greeks would think 1 clove of crushed garlic is probably a bit too much. So I'll leave the exact amount of crushed garlic up to you. I'm a 1 clove wimpy Anglo boy myself. I find too much garlic ruins the refreshing zing of this dish, with its tangy mint, vinegar and yoghurt flavours. But try to tell a Greek that too much garlic ruins it!

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

We're having lunch with some friends today and Pam had a lovely idea for a little gift for our hostess, the charming and beautiful Zora: a posy of poppies, plus a bunch of fresh herbs from the garden – parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. And as two of these classic herbs are in bloom now, and the other two just powering along as usual, it's time I celebrated these worthy runners-up in this year's Herb of the Year awards.

The sage is in full bloom now and looking better than ever (click on the photo to make it look bigger). And I mean 'better than ever'. It seems to me that each year this herb is liking its sunny home more and more. In previous years after it finishes flowering it has always looked exhausted, and so I cut it back, and it bounces back. But the year it's just looking great in leaf and the flower show seems better than ever. I can take no credit for this improvement, either. I never feed it and never water it. Whatever falls from the sky waters it, and whatever fertiliser run-off which flows down from nearby plants is all the food it gets.

While I was griping recently about holes in my parsley borders, other sections of the border are belting along in the spring warmth. This looks a bit scrappy just because I keep on cutting off handfuls to use in the kitchen. And it looks a bit dense and lush because I keep on cutting off handfuls to use in the kitchen (get my drift?).

Stately rosemary rises high and has just finished flowering, but apart from that it's looking and smelling wonderful.

I was just lucky, I guess, but the plant I bought at the nursery about 10 years ago is an oily one. You can feel the oil in your hands as you harvest some more, and the scent given off by this rich rosemary oil is heaven. The only trick is never to use too much of it in cooking – it's powerful stuff!

The thyme is in full bloom this morning as well. Fortunately there are some little sections here and there where I can harvest just the leaves for Pam's posy, but most of it is in bloom, and as I've mentioned a few times before here, most of the plant is sitting on top of the pavers, not on top of soil. I guess my pavers are a pretty good substitute for the rocky boulders on sunny Mediterranean hillsides where thyme likes to grow in the wild.

I have virtually given up trying to photograph thyme flowers. They are so tiny that they always look like clouds, rather than flowers. I guess that isn't so bad, as they do look like clouds of colour when you're standing next to them. They have a pinky tinge, but I'm not sure if they have a scent, as the scent of the thyme leaves is what intoxicates you as soon as you come close.

So we're looking forward to this lunch with Zora and her partner Sean. They don't live far away, and so we're catching the bus to see them. If you're on the 423 from Marrickville into Newtown this afternoon and see two passengers cradling bunches of poppies and fragrant herbs, don't worry, it's just a mad old gardener and his gorgeous wife on their way to a lovely barbecue in the spring sunshine.

Parsley in a Jiffy

Oh drat! Some of the flat-leaf parsley border is going to seed, rapidly, and so that means a few gaps in the line of plants need to be filled. But I have a cunning plan this time round.

Seedy parsley, fine of leaf, getting taller by the day, ready to flower, useless in the kitchen anymore. Yank it out, toss it on the compost heap, then start up some new plants. That's the problem. I never find parsley seedlings do all that well here. They start of well for the first few weeks then the first hot day they cark it.

Parsley definitely does better when started from seed. That's easy enough if I dig up a whole bed of it and sow a row of seed, but plugging gaps in an existing parsley border is more of a problem to get the babies established from seed in amongst the adults (and the weeds). That's where my cunning plan came into being. If I use Jiffy pots to start the parsley seedlings, I don't need to 'unpot' them and transplant the seedlings. I can just pop the seedling in its Jiffy pot in the ground and it should grow on, none the wiser that it has just been transplanted. Well, that's the theory.

I've known about Jiffy pots (deydrated compressed peat pots) ever since my student days in the early 70s, when various flatmates took up marijuana growing, and they invariably started up their illegal crops with good old Jiffies. The packaging is snazzier now, but the product is the same as ever.

They're a bit expensive: 24 Jiffies for about $8. I could make up my own biodegradable pots from simple newspaper, but Origami and I have never been on speaking, or folding, terms.

Like magic, just add water and the packet says they'll swell to seven times their original height.

One minute in and there's action aplenty.

Five minutes later and several are ready, but there's a few stragglers.

After about 10 minutes they're ready to go. "They look like little chocolate puddings," chimed in Pam as she wandered past.

My plan is to sow three plants notorious for hating being transplanted as seedlings: flat-leaf parsley, curly parsley and dill.

I haven't mastered the art of doing photography with my new microscope yet, but these parsley seeds are heavily ridged little tough nuggets under a microscope. No wonder it takes three to four weeks for water to penetrate and set off germination. However, I did soak the seeds for half an hour in hot water, and that's said to help speed things up. We'll see if it works or not in due course.

Dill seeds are larger. I've never had much luck with growing dill here, but I keep on trying. Fortunately, my local area has a big Greek population and every greengrocer has fresh dill. It's lovely with fish, or with baked vegetables, but it is a herb which needs to be used judiciously rather than generously.

Once all the Jiffies were fully expanded, I pulled back the fine fabric covers at the top, and planted the seeds. The dill seeds went in 10mm deep, the parsley seeds just 3mm deep.

As well as sowing the dill and parsley I also sowed two more punnets of shallot (ie, scallion or green onion) seed. We constantly use shallots here, they're one of my favourite backyard culinary plants, always very handy. I don't always grow shallots from seeds – shop-bought seedlings are just as good, but as I have some packets of seed here it seems silly to not use them. This little humidicrib cost less than $10 at Bunnings (local mega-giant hardware outfit) and it has worked a treat in raising all sorts of plant babies here. The green things on top slide, to let you adjust the amount of air inside.

So that's it so far. The shallot and dill seeds should be up in a week or so, but the parsley will take longer. I think the Jiffy pot idea will work, and it'll be a good way to plug a gap in a row of plants. Naturally enough, I'll report in on how the whole thing went when I know, in a few months' time.

Playing catch-up

Let's not beat about the bush. I've been neglecting the garden lately, by my standards. Mind you, I freely admit to being a bit of a gardening nutter, yet lately I've been anything but that, a disgrace to the nutter-hood. However, the prospect of an old gardening friend paying a visit next weekend has propelled me back into full-blown nutcase mode again. I just spent this whole weekend playing catch-up, and here's how things are going.

For starters, I would like to say a heart-felt 'thank you' to my old mate Huey, the weather god, for laying on one-and-a-half days of mild, sunny weather ideal for gardening, then completing the deal with not one but two good showers of rain on Sunday afternoon, to wet the newly-laid mulch and water in the fertiliser. Thank you Huey. But now, on with the show. The poppies needed no attention at all. Well done, chaps.

Oh goody, the hellebores have decided to bloom. They should be looking good in a week's time.

Purple alyssum needs no encouragement or attention, and the succulent patch, under the wise leadership of the Mayor of Succulent City, Mrs Lithops, is ready to receive visitors.

No doubt ready to perform splendidly over the coming months, the first of the calendulas is sending up flowers. As these have been grown from seed, I am claiming bonus points!

In the vegie patch all is coming along nicely. Here, the baby beetroots are throbbing with colour.

Nearby, the coriander patch is thriving, partly because I am constantly snipping off leaves with scissors to take inside for cooking. Each snipping seems to match the patch lusher within a week. Regular organic liquid feeds don't do any harm, either. Behind the coriander patch, that's a pelargonium which nominally belongs in a pot, but which escaped from that little prison long ago and is now master of its own domain and a terrible bully to all its neighbours. If it wasn't for my secateurs the whole garden would eventually be one big pelargonium patch!

I haven't harvested any of these leaves yet, but they're ready to be used now. This is a new addition to Amateur Land. It's called the celery leaf plant, and it's closely related to celery but doesn't form those robust, crunchy stalks. It's low and leafy. I use traditional celery all the time in cooking in the kitchen, and I often use the leaves of celery bunches. So when I saw the packet of 'celery leaf plant' seeds in an Asian supermarket in tropical Darwin earlier this year, I had to try them.

One of the unsung heroes of my garden is the rosemary bush. This healthy person was grown from cuttings and is about three years old. As for the cuttings, I did what an expert gardening friend, Cheryl, said to do, which was: "Just poke the cuttings straight into the soil - most of them will grow just like that." And so they did. And my how they've grown!

The rosemary is just starting to flower, and it smells absolutely wonderful when you get up close to it to take yet another stalk or two for the kitchen. It really is one of the most fragrant things in this garden.

Finally, Mrs Agave has delivered two gorgeous children, as she likes to do most years. Both mother and children are doing well.

While everything else is now in much better order, I am afraid that the real work done on this lovely weekend of sunshine and showers hasn't rated a mention yet, mostly due to the lack of suitably nice photos.

I just couldn't manage a lovely photo of weeding, yet three or four hours yesterday afternoon were spent pulling rotten little weeds out of the ground. And the photos I took of newly mulched beds look far too mulchy. You'll just have to take it from me that there is mulch almost everywhere now. Same goes for the trimmed hedges out the front. Ramrod straight now. And the fertilising, too. Did lots of that, but I don't think I could manage a nice photo of chicken poo (in fact I didn't even try). But the air is currently wonderfully fragrant with that classic farmyard aroma. So Pam and I are going to do what we always do when I fertilise everything - that's right, we're leaving home for a few hours and heading off to the movies!