Summer foods

Parsley, Parsley everywhere

Posted by gardenpathfood on October 9, 2012
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Food, Health, Links to other sites, Recipes, Spring foods, Spring Jobs, Summer foods, Summer Jobs, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

I’m told that you never let parsley go to seed, so every now and again it needs to be cut back, especially in spring.

Tabbouleh using quinoa

So, fighting off the mating brown snakes in the garden, I did that and then decided to make tabbouleh with the cuttings.

I’m not a great fan of tabbouleh usually, especially the commercial variety but I found this recipe  at http://allrecipes.com.au/recipe/4827/quinoa-tabbouleh.aspx

and it is really good.  It uses quinoa instead of burghul and quite a lot of lemon juice.

Parsley has a lot of health benefits including being full of anti-oxidents but you can find them out for yourself by visiting http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/parsley.html

Oregano Invasion

Posted by gardenpathfood on July 16, 2012
Posted in: Autumn foods, Autumn jobs, Eating Seasons, Food, Soil, Spring foods, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Work Season. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

All that is left of the poor old oregano

Three years ago, I planted oregano in the raised garden bed.

Be warned, oregano is aggressive so I would suggest that you don’t plant it in an open garden bed. It had taken over most of the second tier of the garden and was busily trying to invade the top.

My raised garden has been looking a little ragged between the oregano and the strawberries which had both run rampant, with a bit of couch thrown in for extra weeding.  I don’t mind the strawberries being wild, but there is only so much oregano you can eat.

Usually, I can manage to keep the couch in the strawberries under control, but the oregano and couch share a very similar root system and became inextricably entwined.  At last, I decided I needed to get tough and I have dug it all out.  Underneath it, the soil was beautiful with worms and grubs and beautiful texture, so I suspect it has acted as a great soil improver, while providing me with more oregano than I could ever use.

I gave some of the runners to an Italian friend who uses oregano on his magnificent pizzas, replanted some and disposed of the rest where they won’t invade anyone’s garden or lawn.

Real thyme

Posted by gardenpathfood on July 2, 2012
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Food, Health, Links to other sites, Quotes, Spring foods, Summer foods, Winter Foods. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

From ‘In Defence of Food’ by Michael Pollan,   Penguin Books,  p64/65,  2008

‘Indeed, to look at the chemical compostion of any common food is to realise just how much complexity lurks within it. Here’s a list of just the antioxidents that have been identified in a leaf of garden variety thyme: alanine, anethole essential oil, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta-carotene, caffeic acid, camphene  ‘  (You get the picture, there are  29 more).

He goes on to say  ‘This is what you ingest when you eat food flavoured with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others go on to do various as-yet-undetermined things to your body: turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps or intercepting a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell.  It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it might actually do some good ( since people have been eating it forever) and even if it does nothing at all, we like the way it tastes.

Lemon Thyme

Posted by gardenpathfood on June 25, 2012
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Food, Recipes, Spring foods, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods. Tagged: . Leave a comment

Since my original thyme bush was looking a little time-worn, I couldn’t resist this beautiful little specimen of lemon thyme.  It is such an attractive little plant and has that wonderful tangy thyme smell with a touch of lemon.

We have recently filled the freezer with winter whiting caught off the Fraser Coast, and lemon thyme seemed like it could be a great complement to whitefish.  I tried it the other night with a little bit of chives and poached in a white wine stock.

My other thyme bush has come back after a heavy trimming, so I will still have ordinary thyme to use in my scrambled eggs as well.

Lemon thyme and chives for the fish

Lemon Thyme

Past thyme

Posted by gardenpathfood on June 24, 2012
Posted in: Autumn foods, Autumn jobs, Eating Seasons, Food, Spring foods, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Work Season. Tagged: , , , . 3 Comments

Among the perennial herbs I have in the garden is thyme.

This bush was one of the first things I planted and has been there three years, although a month or two ago it was touch and go whether I got rid of it as it appeared to be getting past it’s use by date.

It had become very ‘sticky’ (all stems and no leaf), as it got older and it was increasingly hard to pick a nice bunch for chopping.

So, I took the shears to it very radically and it has bushed back beautifully. Maybe I’ll get another year or two out of it.  It has occurred to me that thyme would be a very attractive small garden bush or pot specimen on a balcony.   It hasn’t been affected by the frost, and it seems to be very drought tolerant, once it is established.