chokos

All posts tagged chokos

Squish Squash, Eggplant and False Teeth

Posted by gardenpathfood on December 17, 2012
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Food, Recipes, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I would have to say that squash and eggplant were not vegetables I was introduced to when I was young, and it has taken a while for me to learn to cook with them and even longer for my husband to learn to eat them.December harvest

This photo is my harvest for December and you will see both eggplant and a giant squash. These really should be only about 8 cm across, but mine are like small pumpkins.

They are extremely edible though, rather like young choko, and like choko, they only take a few minutes to steam. I suspect they go completely to mush if they are cooked much longer, which is probably why a lot of people hate them.

I have come to the conclusion that the previous generation’s tendency to cook vegetables to mush was probably because so many of them had false teeth and hate chewing.

Eggplant is one of the most versatile vegetables out and the newer varieties don’t need to be salted to get rid of bitterness the way some of the older one’s did.  I still do though, just putting the sliced eggplant in a dish with salt for 1/2 an hour or so and then washing it off before I use it.

The night this photo was taken, I had cooked it by rolling it in egg and rice crumbs, then frying (yes frying) it with crumbed whiting. It soaked up the oil and the fish flavour and was amazing.

I also often use it in rissoles or tacos or spag bog, any mince dish, to reduce the amount of meat and improve the texture.

Spring has sprung

Posted by gardenpathfood on September 23, 2012
Posted in: Spring Jobs, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

It looks like the frosts are over are spring has arrived in a big rush.  It was 34 degrees yesterday and we’ve had our first thunderstorm of the season.

In one month we’ve gone from a frozen solar hot water system to thunderstorms and sunburn.

The good thing about this time of year is that the babies are out in the garden in full force.

The water chestnuts are poking their heads above water, the watermelon are up, and those tomatoes and capsicums I’ve nursed all through winter are well and truly producing.  Best things of all of course, are the strawberries and asparagus.

Those capsicum seeds that I sprouted in the worm farm have become two leaf plants in the garden and look quite sturdy, while the choko vine is already 1/2 metre tall.

Now, the greatest problem will be keeping the water up to the little plants.  They don’t need very much but they  need it fairly often as evaporation is pretty high and usually we are out of the habit of watering the garden as regularly as it suddenly requires.

I am off to build some little shade structures to try to stop my lettuce, spinach and cabbage going to seed quite so quickly, to transplant some very large tomatoes in to the garden from the pots they’ve been sheltering in all winter and to plant some corn.

It’s all in the eyes

Posted by gardenpathfood on August 3, 2012
Posted in: Food, The plants in my garden, Winter Jobs, Work Season. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

There was a douzy of a frost this morning and for the third morning in a row, no hot water, since our solar hot water system had frozen up again.  The gentleman of the house went off to work smelly and not particularly happy.

Potatoes and chokos getting ready for spring

This is the reason I don’t plant out potatoes early in the year in this place. Further north I could get two crops in by planting in March and September but here, I buy the seed potato when I can get it and leave it in a basket in the shed, along with the sprouting chokos until the frosts are almost gone.

I should be able to plant soon though, as a good layer of hay and soil over the sprouting potatoes will protect them until the frost is gone.

In fact, each year I do have a little crop which sprouts from volunteers left in the ground from the year before so I spend the winter anxiously covering them with mulch every time it looks like the frosty mornings are back but it is worth the effort, as I love those little baby potatoes that you get with your own crop and which are never the same when you buy them.  They are like tasty little soft nuts and are wonderful in a stew or casserole, or served with butter and herbs.

The Dreaded Choko

Posted by gardenpathfood on June 21, 2012
Posted in: Eating Seasons, Food, Spring foods, Spring Jobs, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Although I live in a frost prone area, I manage to get chokos on the vine every year, just before the frost starts.

Next year’s choko vine

Yes, I can hear you saying, ‘I hate chokos’.

These are a vegetable that is not worth buying in the shop and really they do have quite a short season.  In season, young and fresh, they are tasty and sweet just steamed by themselves, but if you try to use them when they are older, they are truly worthy of their bad reputation.

The best thing about them is that they take so little care and are so easy to propagate.  Even when you are picking fresh ones to eat, there will be one or two on the vine that are busy sprouting.  You can save these sprouting chokos for ages.  Just leave them sitting on the bench or in a basket and they will produce quite long runners all by themselves.

Either you can keep them until the frost season is over, then plant them out or do as I did last year, plant them out and cover them completely with hay for protection and then forget about them except for a very occasional drop of water.