Salads in pots

Everyone I greeted on my usual Saturday morning walk up to Marrickville Road and back seemed to be of the opinion that today's weather is just about perfect. A beautiful day, a Goldilocks summer's day. Just right. Not too hot, such a gentle breeze you hardly notice it, and the shade of buildings and trees feels as cool and refreshing as a drink of lemonade. Shame it isn't like this every day of summer, so all you can do on a day like this is enjoy it while you can.

The problem with summer here in Sydney is that these lovely days are outnumbered by the hotter days, the searing days when the moment you step outside you can feel your bare skin slowly burning. 

Sadly, this hot season isn't a great time to grow salad greens. That's ironic, as it's the ideal time to enjoy light meals of a grill with a salad on the side. My usual sunny vegie beds are just too hot for salad greens to last long in summer. Forget to water them just one day, or believe the morning weather forecasts of 'showers' and not bother to water the garden on a day that turned out to be dry and sunny yet again, and salad greens soon wilt and die. If they survive, they get through their life-cycle in what seems like a fortnight, shooting to seed in no time.

And so, the solution I use is to grow small crops of salad greens in pots, and put the pots in spots which get nice morning sun, then little or no sizzling afternoon sun. It works, but the trick with salads in pots is to water them every day, and don't trust the weather people. 

This is the basic set-up for two, a pot of rocket in
front, and some mixed greens at the back.
Apart from watering daily, the other trick is light
liquid feeds, especially after you've harvested
a big swathe of leaves.

This is a pot of radish seedlings, a new addition to the mix.
I love the way radish seed sprout in 4 or 5 days.

These are red and brown mignonette lettuce seedlings, which
also came up from seed in just four days. They need mollycoddling
in this heat, so I'm keeping them in a cooler spot to let them
grow up to about 7-10cm tall, then I'll cram the healthiest
healthiest half-dozen seedlings into a wide, shallow pot,
mixing up the two leaf colours for a nice looking effect.

Finally, a little experiment. Hopefully you can see the little
ruby coloured seedlings in the photo. These are a new idea
from Yates seeds, sent to us by the lovely Judy Horton of
Yates to try out. It's a new range called Microgreens, quick-
growing salad greens which you harvest when they're baby sized.
So far so good, they've come up quickly, in five days.

Judy sent us four packets to try. Our little red
babies are the 'Cabbage Rubies'. The idea is
that you sow about half a whole packet of the
seeds in a small (10cm) pot. You can grow
them indoors, on a windowsill, but I'm
growing ours outside. As the seed packet
says "pick in 2-3 weeks". That's what we'll do.

Some seed packets give you too little growing
info, but Yates can't be accused of that. There
are enough instructions here to give even the
most basic beginner some confidence.

 So, if your salad greens in the garden bed are having a tough time of it here in Australia right now, you're not alone with that problem. My tip is to go potty until autumn. I prefer a mixture of leaves, so those 'mesclun' mixes are perfect for pots. The one great thing about pots is that you can move them to the 'perfect' spot that gets the right mix of sun and shade in summer. The problem with pots is that they're a bit more work, but all that really means is daily watering, before you head off for work.

Catching dewdrops

Whoever thinks we only grow vegetables in order to harvest and eat them is missing out on a lot of fun and pleasure. Sure, I eat the crops I grow, but in many cases I spend weeks just admiring them as plants well before their delicious grand finale in the kitchen. And this morning the Florence fennel was doing what it does best: catching dewdrops.

It didn't rain last night, but the sky was clear and our little
digital thermometer said it was 5.9°C around sunrise, which
is very cool for Sydney. After breakfast I headed outside for
my regular 'lap' of the 7m x 9m Ponderosa I call Amateur Land,
and the fennel was caught in two halves. On the shady side,
pictured above, all the dewdrops turned the plant into a green
sparkly candelabra filled with crystals. On the sunny side,
pictured below, it too was green, but misty, fuzzy and sun-loving.

Here's a flavour combo to try both in the kitchen
and outdoors. One green strappy leaf in front is
garlic, the pot in the middle is of freshly trimmed
thyme, and behind them is the florence fennel.

The fennel bulbs are finally getting to a useful
size. When small their flavour is softer, much
more pleasing than the pungent over-muscled
whoppers so often sold in the shops.

I like the way fennel cooks and changes in a similar way that onions do: if cooked long enough both onions and fennel sweeten and caramelise, changing flavour entirely from their startling raw bite. Pammy likes to slice fennel finely and mix it with fine potato slices, olive oil, salt and pepper, then bake it slowly until it's like a gratin that can be scooped out with a big spoon. It's sweet and delicious, just right for these cooler months. I also like to see fennel as a bit like radish, as a salad vegie, using just a little bit very finely chopped or sliced and tossed into green salads, to add a bit of bite. Not too much, but just enough.

Here in the garden, the main growing tip with fennel is to start it off from seed, in autumn preferably (here in temperate Sydney), but depending on how warm or cold your climate, that sowing time might vary. But the one thing that won't vary is the need to sow it from seed. Fennel belongs to a big bunch of fuss-pot vegies and herbs (carrots, parsnips, parsley and chervil most notably) which do best from seed, hate being transplanted, and which perform erratically at best if planted as seedlings bought from a nursery. 

Aside from the flavour of fennel in the kitchen, the other great reason to grow it is to admire its beauty, and on mornings like this there are few prettier dewdrop catchers in the business.

Tummy time USA (8)

Woo hoo! We've made it to the East Coast. Savannah, Georgia, one of the most beautiful cities you could hope to walk around, but more of that tomorrow, once we've finished all the walking and been to every neighbourhood. After all the deep-fried southern soul food we've enjoyed over the last few weeks we were actually craving something lighter, fresher and, yes, healthier. Here's how we went.

OK. For starters, one classic Savannah, Georgia photo to set the scene. This really is a town of a thousand delightful neighbourhoods.

In the centre of town, however, the Jepson Art Gallery is an equally wonderful modern space, and it was in the cafe (from which I took this shot) that we enjoyed a much healthier lunch.

Pammy would like you to know that this photogenic Biscuits with Tomatoes, Swiss Cheese, Basil Aoli and Salad was a truly impractical thing to eat. As mentioned several Tummy Times ago, biscuits are a baked thing rather like Aussie scones, but often a bit wider and flatter than scones. When used here as a substitute for a bread roll, they collapsed into half a dozen little bikkies after the first bite. This is a classic of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'. It passed the taste test (nice) but it didn't exactly shine in the 'pleasure to eat' department.

I had a saintly salad. Well, actually, no I didn't. I had a chicken salad, which featured halved seedless red grapes, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion, cold cooked chicken blended with a herby mayonnaise, Cos (romaine) lettuce and a basil vinaigrette. What a mouthful of a description, but it turned out to be a pleasant mouthful for lunch. All it lacked was crunch...

So I ordered a half-plate of grilled ciabatta bread drizzled with olive oil and scattered with herbs.

After lunch we went exploring the amazing streets of Savannah and along the way we spotted this missed opportunity for Tummy Timers, the 'Shalom Y'all' Festival of Jewish Food, advertised outside the local synagogue. Sounds both fun and yummy.

Last night we dined out at what turned out to be a much more flash restaurant than we expected, but it was a night of interesting food served in a beautifully restored old house. The restaurant is called 'The Olde Pink House' and it's inside an historic mansion fronting Reynolds Square, on Abercorn Street. Somehow I was so keen to get stuck into our entree of a shared plate of a dozen oysters natural that I forgot to photograph them, but you know what oysters look like. The oysters were from just down the coast in Florida (not on the Gulf Coast side) and while, quite honestly, they weren't as good as creamy, superb Sydney Rock Oysters they were still the cleanest, freshest flavour (with a squeeze of lemon) we had enjoyed in weeks. After that fab entree, Pammy ordered the grilled salmon with dill cucumber salad, and they cooked the salmon the way she likes it: rare.

I had a crab-stuffed black grouper, with lightly steamed string beans on the side. Please note, that in Savannah they pronounce the name of this fish 'group-er', and not the Aussie way of 'grope-er'. I did notice the waitress twitch just a fraction when I placed my order. Oh, and it might not be all that photogenic but it was deliciously crabby, with the grouper a mere casing for the crab main, flavour-wise.

As so often happens with goody-two-shoes diners, by the time they have had salad for lunch and fish for dinner the danger period is desserts, and we both succumbed, I am happy to say. I had a key lime pie (not my first this trip) and this one was up there with the best of them, but all of them have been of a high standard.

Pammy lost her head for a moment and blurted out "I'll have the Chocolate Oblivion Torte, please" but she recovered beautifully when this relatively restrained, but deeply chocolatey little slice appeared. She approved on all counts. Got her chocolate fix, didn't overdose.

One cute note to finish on is the dessert menu, or more specifically the dessert drinks menu. We both loved the way they listed all the liqueurs as 'cordials'.

We'll tell you a lot more about this truly beautiful place with a blog posting tomorrow, but Savannah is well known for its food and it's living up to its reputation. On our first night here we were too tired from driving down here to venture far looking for a restaurant, so we went to a local pub, the Crystal Beer Parlor, and even there the crab cakes I had were light and full of fresh, real crabmeat, while Pam's lamb rack was cooked pink, how she likes it. Shame I didn't take the camera, but we didn't think pub grub was going to be all that enthralling. That's a mistake I keep on making on this trip. I forget to take my camera when I dine out and then I wish I had. Just goes to show you that the food here continues to be full of pleasant surprises.

My short-term future

Barring the possibility of random meteor strike from outer space and other unexpected bummers, I have a fairly good idea about at least a small part of my short-term future. Lots more salads. I'm on a diet.

I'll have to get a bit more energetic than this, as this is actually a photo of a pot of mixed lettuce from last year. But my current crops of lettuce are all uninspiring baby seedlings set against a background of dull, brown earth, and they wouldn't do to illustrate this little blog posting which is a bit more about weight loss than it is about gardening (although we are back into prime salad greens growing weather for the next couple of months).

I have known for at least a year that I was carrying too much weight. My doctor told me, for one thing, but she's one of those tall, healthy, clever Whippets who has no credibility at all when talking to the overweight. What I needed was some inspiration closer to home.

The first dose came last week, when Pam and I got together with an old female friend of mine (not a girlfriend) who is only a year younger than me yet looks 20 years younger and is still in great shape. In her case that's thanks to lots of Salsa dancing (and presumably chasing all those young Latin lads around the dance floor).

The next, and decisive, dose of motivation felled me. I was shopping, buying clothes, trying them on in the changing rooms at David Jones, a major department store in the city. I am sure they install special unflattering lighting in those rotten change rooms full of mirrors. It wasn't so much Baywatch as Whalewatch. Enough! Enough! I give in. OK, I'll diet, I'll lose weight.

I've done it before (ie, lost 10 kilos in a few months, then put it all back on over the next two years). And I'll do it again...

And so that's why I think a photo of salads is appropriate. I'll be eating more of them I am sure, but that's no hassle as I've always enjoyed a good salad. The problem for me is that I also enjoy a good bottle of wine, a roast of lamb or beef or pork or chicken, lots of potatoes, all sorts of vegies cooked all sorts of ways, plus bacon, cheese, pate... this list of sins never ends.

And so here's my magic diet, which has worked well before, and I hope works just as well again.

1. Healthy breakfast, every day.

2. Healthy lunch, every day.

3. Whatever I like for dinner if I cook it myself (or Pam cooks), but if I eat out I stay on alert for the healthiest option.

4. The only snacks in between meals are fruit.

5. No more than 2 glasses of wine on any one day, and a couple of grog-free days a week thrown into the mix as well.

6. Daily walkies, at least half an hour, preferably more. Not strolling. Proper walkies. (I get asthma if I run further than 25 metres, so I'm a walkies boy.)

7. Tell people you're dieting, as with secretive dieting it's far too easy to surreptitiously decide to go 'bust' without anyone knowing you busted!

My first target is to lose 5 kilos, but I really need to lose 10 kilos to get my weight down to a truly healthy level for my height.

I'm sure carrying less weight will have a miraculous effect on my back problems. It's not a dodgy back I have, it's a dodgy front!

And so that's my short-term future. Lots of salads, more exercise, avoiding saturated fats, eating more fruit. At my age, this is actually all about my long-term future, too.

Tossed salad

Within the confined spaces of my little garden it's just not possible to put home-grown vegies on the table every meal. But with salads you can get pretty close to that ideal with everything in the salad bowl being home-grown, most of the time. It always feels nice to say "yes, all the greens are from our garden." And with the wonderful variety of salad greens that you can grow here in Sydney virtually all the time, this is one of the best backyard crops we can grow.

Right now it's the delicious "anything grows" spring season. This is just a punnet of mixed lettuce sold as 'Combo', belting along nicely. I like this selection because of the variety of leaves it offers. Every now and then I don't get my act together with the seed-sowing routine, so I play rapid catch-up with a punnet of seedlings. Easy.

And over the other side of the path is an English spinach patch which has astonished me with its speed of growth. I wonder if the secret is that it's not in full sun? The leaves went from the crop of little 'baby' spinach leaves I had planned on adding to salads to rapidly becoming large, adult spinach leaves. Yet such has been the quick growth that the leaves are still soft and tender, and if torn-up a nice addition to a garden salad of mixed greens. The rest I'll harvest and cook soon enough.

And here are 'spillover' pots of spinach and lettuce that I couldn't find spots for anywhere else. I'm plundering these for fillings for sandwiches at lunchtime.

And here's the next generation of green and red lettuce seedlings popping up now. By the time they'll be ready to transplant some of the current crop will be past its best. I often get the timing wrong on these replacement crops, but sowing another batch at around monthly intervals is what works well most of the time.

One of the secrets of an interesting garden salad is a good variety of leaf shape, colour, flavour and texture. I find that a good selection of salad seeds can last a whole season or more, given the small crops that I sow. And the huge selection of seeds available gives you so much more variety than you can buy at the seedling section of the local nursery.

Here's a nifty bit of info I picked up courtesy of the Australian consumer magazine, Choice. They road-tested balsamic vinegars and this was their bargain best buy. It's less than $5 a bottle at our local Woolworths store.

The really valuable info from Choice is that there is an official rating system for balsamic vinegars run by the people in Modena, Italy, where the best balsamics come from. This is the back of the label. It says 'Consorzio Aceto Balsamico di Modena' and that shows that it's authentic Modena balsamic. Apparently, not every Modena balsamic maker is part of this rating organisation, but here in far-off Australia it's a handy thing to know about when you're browsing through a dozen different brands of balsamic vinegar and don't really know what to look for, apart from price.

And this is the all-important 'leaf' rating symbol to also look for. Four leaves is the top rating they give for thick, sweet balsamic suitable for drizzling on strawberries or ice-cream. One leaf is for the thinner stuff that's fine for salad dressings. However, I've tried the different ones on offer and I always buy the four-leaf.

The other thing I have learned recently is that one of the most important things in choosing a nice olive oil for a salad dressing is its freshness. In another recent road-test by Choice magazine, the local Australian olive oils scored very well in a blind taste test by experts, and they say the reason for this is freshness. Many moderately priced olive oils from Europe spend a long time in storage and transport before they ever make it to our supermarket shelves, and their flavour is often poor as a result. By comparison, the fresh local olive oils are often superior to the cheaper European oils because the local crop is this year's, not last year's.

I haven't yet tried the Australian olive oil pictured here. It's a gift from my mother-in-law, after her recent driving holiday through olive oil growing districts of Australia. But mixed with some genuine Modena balsamic vinegar, I am sure it will do my home-grown salad leaves justice.