Quotes

Blown out of the Water..

Posted by gardenpathfood on October 2, 2013
Posted in: Community Gardens, Links to other sites, Places to Visit, Quotes. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

I have just spent the last three days at the Queensland State Landcare Conference and this was the best collection of speakers I have ever seen at a conference and I’m not saying that because I had a little hand in the organisation. The quality of the speakers and the relevant information on a range of topics from technology, indigenous fire and land management, future trends, broad acre cropping, soil sciences, koala research, flood recovery, the grazing industry and landcare integration, Integrated pest management, insects, mining, vegetation laws, organic farming and food miles was extraordinary.

Well done to Headwaters Landcare Group.J000466_LQ-ENews-Header_chosen_1

There was a panel session at the end of the conference in which Minister Andrew Cripps volunteered to  join as a panellist (this certainly increased the panel’s effectiveness) and one of the other panellists was Ray Palmer who runs and organic farm near Stanthorpe, with his wife Sam who is also driving the Regional Food Network. What a passionate and committed couple and you can follow their facebook page on https://www.facebook.com/pages/Symara-Organic-Farm/140139666043803 or check out their website at  http://www.symarafarm.com.au/.

Ray and Sam sell from the farm gate or by produce box or the Northey Street Organic Markets only and were the first Australian Farmers to participate in La Via Campesina, the International Small Farmers movement. They encourage buyers to visit them on the farm to see where the produce comes from.   One of Ray’s quotes is ‘They is Us’ which refers to the fact that we should not wait for ‘them’ to do anything  but that the ‘them’ we are waiting for is in fact ‘Us’.  In other words ‘Get in and take responsibility for improving our climate situation. Don’t wait for a mysterious ‘them’ to do it for us.’

Bliss Bombs

Posted by gardenpathfood on April 18, 2013
Posted in: Eating Seasons, Quotes, Spring foods, Spring Jobs, Summer foods, Winter Foods, Winter Jobs, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

There is nothing like a homegrown tomato for intense flavour!

As Mario Batali, Italian chef and multiple restaurant owner says

‘You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook’s year. I get more excited by that than anything else.’    Mario Batali

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/

mariobatal215356.html#4lmD58wfCTL0uDTP.99

This year, I have the most beautiful tomatoes. They started producing early,  in late spring with the cherry tomato I had nursed through the winter, then the Romas came on and now I have tomatoes from one of the larger varieties. This year they have all been perfect and lots of them.

I don’t very often try to keep any of my produce any longer than the season. We eat it and then wait until the next year for more, however, having lots of lovely tomatoes and a taste for Italian food, I decided I would keep some for later.

Feeling a bit lazy, I simply boiled down the tomatoes, blended them and then froze the result in muffin trays, storing them individually in small sandwich bags ready for use as a tomato base.  Tomato paste bombThe smell of these little bliss bombs is absolutely amazing and like the tomato chutney I made a year or so ago, will remind me of what tomatoes should taste like during the year.

Since tomatoes can sometimes be a bit tricky if you strike a bad year for fruit fly or disease, and I don’t use non-organic sprays or fertiliser, I sometimes get a little equivocal about growing them, but when I have a good year there is no doubt in my mind why I persist in planting them every year.  I always have cherry tomatoes though,as they insist on planting themselves and do tend to be fairly disease resistant.

I’ll leave you with the quote below which aptly sums up my feeling about store bought tomatoes.

The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can’t eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as ‘progress’, doesn’t spread.

Andy Rooney

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/andyrooney194051.html#OMHkhq4feTMlKxep.99

The Love of Gardening

Posted by gardenpathfood on September 23, 2012
Posted in: Quotes. Leave a comment

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.
Gertrude Jekyll
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/gertrude_jekyll.html#GsziALPo6uml4B9z.99

Gertrude Jekyll was an influential 20th Century landscape gardener

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.