Salad season

Tonight's mixed home-grown garden salad, but before we
get to that bit ...

I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoy Saturday mornings, especially ones as lovely as today's, where Sydney is working its way into a perfect, sunny spring day.

The shopping is great, for one thing. It's a 15-minute walk along bustling Illawarra Road to Banana Joes, the fruit, vegie and grocery hub to thousands of locals. Today I lashed out and paid 10 bucks for a kilo of fresh broad beans.

I love cooking something special for Saturday nights, for me it's the perfect way to finish off a day pottering in the garden. Pam sometimes laughs and says I'm a glutton for punishment, with the trouble I go to for some meals just for two, but it's my favourite dish – dinner for two, with Pammy.

And those broad beans will take some preparation, too. One friendly young Vietnamese girl manning the checkouts in Banana Joes sometimes asks me how do I cook certain vegies which aren't part of her mum's repertoire at home. In the past we've had some lovely chats about quinces and celeriac, for example, and this morning she wanted to know about broad beans.

So I explained how I open the big, long pods to extract the beans (gave her a demo on one pod!). Then how I blanch the beans in boiling water and peel them again, to expose the gleaming, shiny inner broad beans (didn't do a demo on that ...). It seemed to her like so much work that she couldn't help laughing a bit, but the old Greek mumma behind me in the queue, who was patiently enjoying the conversation, backed me up and said that's the way she prepares them, too.

That's one of the things I like about Banana Joes and Saturday mornings ... the conversations with the people you meet.

My bought broad beans (didn't grow any this year) will be going into the pot at the last moment, where lamb pieces will have been cooking for a few hours in a Moroccan spice mix, along with some zucchinis, tomatoes, eggplant and potatoes.

On the side I thought I'd offer up a light little salad of home-grown fresh mixed salad greens. With the tomatoey, spicy sauce surrounding the main dish, the salad doesn't need much dressing at all. 

And so that's my home-grown content in tonight's dinner: the salad. What follows is just a few photos of how I am going about making my salads a bit more interesting. 

The pot of 'mesclun' mixed salad leaves is coming along nicely. I just bought a packet of Yates Mesclun French Salad Mix seeds, sowed some, covered them lightly with seed-raising mix and watered the pot with a fine spray (for non-Australian readers, seed-raising mix is a light, fine potting mix that's very like a propagating mix). 

The trick is to keep it steadily moist for the first few weeks. The seeds take about 7-10 days to sprout, then a few more weeks to get to this size. If you're slack about watering pots, your potted salad will probably cark it, but if you can remember to water it most days, it's easy to grow. A liquid feed or two helps a lot. There's all sorts of different leaves in the mesclun seed mix (Yates says it has endive, corn salad, rocket, chicory and lettuce) so if you only have one salad pot growing, make it mesclun and you're in business. 

But we're watching a glutton for punishment in action here folks. Here's a pot of cultivated rocket. This stuff is fabulous as a salad on its own, provided you harvest it very young, like it is now. Later on the leaves will be too peppery when they get bigger. 

Our wild rocket, which is a perennial plant, has awoken from its midwinter slumber. I ended up cutting it almost to the ground in mid July, but with feeding and watering once the weather warmed, it's becoming prolific again. Just a few leaves of this peppery zinger in a salad adds real flavour and character to your bowl of rabbit food.

Adding colour to a salad always helps, and so this red-stemmed baby spinach does the trick. This is a type of spinach called 'perpetual spinach' and it truly lasts for months. In its early days the baby leaves are fine in salads, but once they get bigger treat them like normal spinach and cook with them. 

The old standby of mixed lettuce leaves helps when you're making bigger salads for bigger groups, and I've been a loyal buyer of the 'Combo' lettuce punnets from garden centres for many years. Every now and then I grow more interesting lettuce from seed, but when feeling a bit slack and lazy I just grab another Combo punnet and whack them in the ground. Never fails. 

A few herby leaves never go astray in a mixed salad, adding a lot of flavour – but of course the trick with herbs is not to be heavy-handed. Just a little. My potted chives usually look disgustingly sad in midwinter, so in late July I routinely take them out of their pots, divide the crowded clump into individual chive plants, then I repot them into new, fresh potting mix. Six weeks later, with plenty of water and some liquid organic food applied, they're back in business. We roadtested our chives in last Sunday morning's scrambled eggs for breakfast, and Pammy gave them the tick of approval. 

A little bit of chervil adds an aniseedy tang. Our little chervil border, grown from chervil sprouts bought from the supermarket, is looking truly luscious at the moment.

Slower to get going but now making steady, promising progress, our flat-leaf parsley border (also grown from supermarket sprouts) will also eventually make a contribution to some of our salads.

And it being early spring, there's no better time to grow some salad greens. Summer is a tougher task as it gets too hot, but right now we're truly enjoying our salad days.

Last day of summer? Not here it isn't!

February 28 is, for people who put their faith in calendars, the last day of summer here in Sydney. Tomorrow, March 1, is when autumn begins. Well, I don't subscribe to that faith at all.

I prefer the way that summers end at different times each year, the way the season flickers out like a candle with a few late, warm days popping up to surprise you. And then one day you feel that special chill that says "it's autumn now and winter's not far away" and you realise summer ended a while ago, on no particular day.

So, at this stage of the year our garden is of the opinion that summer has several weeks to go before the party's over. It's a time when herbs like to flower, crops turn to gluts and there's plenty of colour wherever you look. I always like the simple little herb flowers in particular.  

Wild rocket flowers at the tips of its thin, gangly stems.

Broccolini is meant to be harvested before it flowers, but this
one beat me to it. I only planted the seedlings three weeks ago!

Basil mint is a tussie mussie of tiny blooms.

Eggplants show off their potato family heritage in a pretty hue.

And they're cropping now in purpley-white abundance.

Every day I pick a handful of red Serrano chillies that I swear
were deep green only the day before.

As well as all the edibles producing their little spots of colour, many ornamentals are a pleasure to be around at the moment.

New Guinea impatiens, which we've mass-planted under the
grevillea in the hope they suppress weeds better than the thick
mulch has abysmally failed to do. So far so good ....

Frangipani

Grevillea 'Peaches & Cream'

Ivy geranium

More ivy geraniums!

Blue salvia

Deep-fried Quail

Though I've been cooking for 50 years now, it's only in the last 12 months that I have become truly comfortable with deep-frying. Before then I had done it several times (but not a lot) and the results were pretty good, but I never felt truly comfortable and happy working with all that bubbling hot oil. It was just a bit scary, and to my mind cooking shouldn't be scary.

All that changed when I started deep-frying in a wok, and that's because I started cooking Luke Nguyen's Spicy Deep-Fried Quail the way he suggests, in a wok. Much easier.

Deep-fried spicy quail, cooked in a wok.

And so while my garden is almost asleep in this, the coldest winter we've had in Sydney for several years, I'm busy in the kitchen keeping our hard-working artist, Pammy, well-fed while she produces 31 paintings in 31 days for an upcoming group exhibition called – you guessed it – '31 Days'.

For overseas readers, if you are thinking "who is Luke Nguyen?" he is a Sydney restaurateur and TV presenter whose travel and food shows are well worth seeing, especially those celebrating the food of Vietnam and South-East Asia. What follows is his recipe, in words and photos, as cooked by me.

First, cut out the backbone of 6 quail. (These little birds are
most often bought in a 'tray' of 6 birds here in Sydney. One tray
costs $15 in Marrickville, but it might cost more elsewhere.)
Then place them in the marinade for a few hours. Just before
deep-frying, take the quails out of the marinade and pat-dry
with paper towels, as pictured here.

Here's the marinade recipe.

1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon five spice powder
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
2 star anise, crushed (I do it in a mortar & pestle)
1 1/2 teaspoons Shaoxing (Chinese) cooking wine
125 ml water

The Shaoxing cooking wine is readily available in any Asian food store. It's cheap, too. A 750ml bottle is just $1.30 here in Marrickville.

Next, get that oil in the wok up to the right temperature before adding the quail!

I use a temperature gauge (available at cooking supply stores.)
This comes with a long 'probe' that sits in the oil, plus a little
clip that holds onto the side of the pot. There's even a little sliding
pointer that you can move around to the desired temperature
setting. In this case that's 180°C.

For this recipe I use 1.5 litres of Rice Bran
Oil. I prefer this oil as it is one of the few oils
available which is free of unhealthy Trans fats.

I won't bang on too much about Trans fats here,
but they are actually banned in some European
countries, but here in Australia it is quite hard to
find oils which are completely free of them. Have
a look at the labels on all the common cooking
oils next time you're at the supermarket, and
you might be surprised how many have Trans
fats listed. Rice Bran oil is free of them.
What's so bad about Trans fats? Here's a link.

OK, so we've got our ideologically sound oil up to 180°C, next step is to add three of your 6 quail. Woo-hoo! Action!

This is where I  conquered my fear of deep-frying. It looks very
spectacular but is quite stable. Enjoyable in fact. Let the quails
deep-fry for 5 minutes exactly.

As soon as you add the quails you'll notice that the temperature
of the oil drops from 180  down to about 160. Don't be tempted
to turn up the gas flame (or the heat) to compensate. It's okay!

At the end of 5 minutes, scoop out the quails onto paper towels,
then wait a minute or so and the oil will be back to 180°C,
ready for the second batch of quails to be added to the oil.

The quails come out looking lovely. Once the second batch is
cooked, cut each quail into four pieces (two drumsticks plus
the body of the bird cut in two down the breastbone. A Chinese
cleaver does it so easy, but any big knife will do the trick.

Well before you started cooking, of course you were so well
organised that you made the lemon pepper dipping sauce,
whose Vietnamese name is Muoi Tieu Chanh, says Luke. 
(But I suspect there's a few accents on various letters
in that name, so forgive me for not knowing them.)

To make the dipping sauce, combine 2 tablespoons (homegrown) lemon juice with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon fine white pepper. Stir to combine (the pepper can clump up a bit, so stir very well to make sure it is all truly combined). And no, you cannot use black pepper. It has to be white pepper!

Finally, serve the quails on a bed of salad,
with the dipping sauce on the side.

Luke suggests a salad of tomato, Lebanese cucumber and water cress, but I've replaced the water cress with crispy lettuce tossed with (home-grown) wild rocket. (And I'll be doing a blog on that wild rocket soon. Such a good vegie garden plant!).

And so it's thanks to Luke Nguyen and his recipe that I now feel not only confident about deep-frying but actually quite interested in doing a bit more from now on. When you deep-fry correctly, with the oil at the right temperature, the results are not at all oily. The meat is instantly sealed and crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. All the oil stays in the wok and the result is very, very delicious.

The changeover season

Every move you make here in Sydney at the moment, you sweat. It's sticky. On these uncomfortably humid, end-of-summer days, the weather forecasters endlessly repeat their "chance of a shower" chant each morning, and that means it's very warm and humid, mostly sunny all day, then in the late afternoon there's rain or, if we're lucky, a storm as well.

While it's not my favourite time I year (the humidity knocks me around more and more as I get older), I do enjoy this season because it's time for the changeover from the spring/summer crops, to the autumn/winter plantings in the vegie patch. Rip out the old crops, plant new ones. That's what I call fun.

So the garden looks like a mulch farm at the moment, with not much to show for all the effort, but I do like digging soil. That's one of the best bits about gardening. Digging over soil. I also enjoy adding a bit of dolomite lime to sweeten the soil's pH, then working in some cow manure and compost to give the worms and all the other soil-borne critters a treat. At the end of it all, smooth over and level the rich dark soil, stand back and admire your work... 

The digging takes some time, the planting seems to be over in minutes. I've been a bit lazy this time round. Instead of conscientiously raising everything from seed I went down to the garden centre and bought some punnets of seedlings. I've sown seeds, too, but only here and there. Here's how things are going, in the Changeover Season of autumn 2014.

Wild rocket in front, lettuce (raised from seed)
behind. The wild rocket is the serrated-leaf kind
seen most commonly in shops. It's a perennial
plant that should last some time here. It's a much
better bet as a garden plant than the ultra-fast
growing annual type of rocket. Mind you, baby
annual rocket (with the rounded leaves) is still
my favourite rocket to eat, but it's so much work
to sow, re-sow, re-sow, re-sow. Eventually I
tire of the effort, and give it a rest. At least
with this wild rocket you get an easier supply.

Here's the mulch farm. There are spinach seedlings in the
centre, spring onions as well, perpetual spinach on the left.
The perpetual spinach will crop well until spring and is one
of my favourite leafy greens. The English spinach is much
shorter-lived, but it is so nice in Japanese cuisine. The big
leafy greens on the left are more chicory plants, and they are
another excellent leafy green that we turn into Greek-style
horta, boiled greens dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

There is such a thing as too many Thai limes. They're falling
off the tree now. It's a wonderful choice if you're wondering
which citrus to grow in a pot. It reaches a bit over 1m tall
and wide and seems quite hardy, too. Just brushing past the
leaves or the fruit is such a fragrant thing to do.

Huge, green and unproductive. I've tried watering in some
sulphate of potash to stimulate flower production on our
18-month-old passionfruit vine. No luck. Plan B is do nothing
at all. Pretend it's not there. It's a bit hard to do when it
is so huge, so it's now my 'elephant in the room' plant.  

At least the lemon tree is flowering its head
off. It smells lovely in the still morning air,
and hopefully the recent rains and the big
dose of chicken poo I gave it will restore it to
health and happiness.

Have you ever anxiously watched a plant, hoping
it would flower in time for the big Sunday lunch
that you've invited some friends to? Well, our
Tibouchina 'Jules' is letting us down. It has
18 hours left to burst into purple glory by midday
tomorrow. Otherwise it's just another green blob
in our very green blob of a garden. Healthy, yes.
In flower, not yet. 

As for the things I can't show you, I have sown more seeds of collard greens, as these big cabbage-family leafy greens were such a success over spring and early summer. They're meant to be even better in the cooler months, so here's hoping that's true. And I have also sown a few rows of seeds of the love-in-a-mist (Nigella) seeds I collected in midsummer, following the end of its spring flowering. 

The first of the collard green seeds are already up, after only five days in the soil. The Nigella seeds are on a more leisurely schedule. They'll appear in a couple of weeks, and the flowers won't do their thing for at least another six or seven months. I can wait. It's one of the very nice things about growing plants from seed. They offer the chance to share in a full life-cycle, especially if you harvest the seeds at the end of it all. I like that idea.