Calendula Cheese
This is bright yellow and rather soapy – a sort of crackers and sliced tomato sort of cheese, definitely not for a connoisseur. I am not, and I like soapy cheese.
1 cup calendula petals
junket tablets
milk
Chop the calendula petals and cover with 2 tablespoons of boiling water. Leave to steep for 20 minutes. Strain into a bowl.
Make 2 cups of junket according to directions on the packet, adding the calendula juice to the milk before you heat it. Leave the junket to set.
Now take a knife and slice the junket back and forth till it is cut into as small pieces as you can – but don’t mash it up. Pour into a sieve and leave overnight to strain.
Wrap the curds in a clean cloth (such as cheesecloth). Put the curds and cloth back into the sieve, and cover with a saucer with a small weight on top – this will press out more liquid. Leave in the fridge or a cool larder for three weeks. It’ll be soft but firm. And soapy.
May 24
Large holes dug all around the veg garden fence but Pudge hasn’t got in yet. And besides, the silly twit ate all the carrots when she snuck in as I was mulching. Maybe she thinks they’ve magically regrown. (I don’t suppose you can really expect a wombat to understand the finer points of carrot cultivation.) We’ve left the holes as they are – she’ll only redig them if we tidy them up, thinking she’s found some undug dirt. As Bryan says, wombats have only two neurones, and only one works at a time – the ultimate single-minded animal. It is almost impossible to reprogram a wombat.
Picked the pomegranates today – mostly because I couldn’t resist them – fat and red faced like they’d done something terribly naughty and hoped I wouldn’t find out. I’ve stuck a dozen on the dresser, three in with the fruit on the table (picking out two deceased lemons and a squashy tamarillo), which still leaves a bucket full. Some can go up to the cafe and be decorative up there. The rest need to be used, or they’ll just turn to sludge in the larder and be thrown to the chooks sometime round the end of winter, which would be a waste.
Pomegranate Cordial
The original grenadine, I think. And it’s easy.
pomegranates
caster sugar
Scoop out the seedy pomegranate centre; add an equal amount of caster sugar, leave in a jar for three weeks. By then the sugar will have drawn out the red juice. Strain into a large saucepan, add twice as much water. Bring to the boil over medium-high heat and allow to boil for 5 minutes. Pour into bottles and keep in the fridge. Use a dessertspoonful to a glass of cold water or pour over a glass of crushed ice.
Rose Syrup
From the last of the roses, faded but still fragrant, so you can’t bear to lose them. There are bowls full of petals on every table, and seven pots of this syrup in the larder.
rose petals (the more perfumed the better)
sugar
lemon juice
Jamsetta (optional)
Take a pan of rose petals and just cover with water. Bring to the boil with the lid on, take off the heat at once and leave overnight. Mash the petals into a gruel with your fingers, then strain. Add an equal volume (not weight) of sugar to the water and a squeeze of lemon juice. Simmer till the mixture coats the back of a spoon. (If you want to cheat, add a packet of Jamsetta for every 3 cups of sugar.) Take off the heat, bottle and seal.
You can eat this with toast, but it’s really a jam for scones or delicate pastries with cream.
May 25
I once knew a murderer who sang about lemon trees. At least the jury said he was a murderer. I never believed he was. But that’s another story (though the song was very sweet). This is about lemon trees – and lemons – because I’m writing this sitting lemonless in an airport. And I miss them and wish for the hundredth time that I’d remembered to bring one with me.
Lemons are maybe the most fragrant fruits. Lemon scents are sweet, even if the fruit isn’t. You can tell when the lemons are ripe in our garden. The breeze grows tangy and without knowing why, you dream of sorbets and fried fish.
Once upon a time Europe didn’t have lemons and used verjuice instead – the juice of slightly green grapes, which is exquisite. The only sad things to say about lemons are that their glory has eclipsed verjuice and that you can’t climb lemon trees; they’re the wrong shape and too prickly and the wood is brittle so you fall through the middle and spike your bum on a bit of broken branch. Which is a pity because I think I’d like life up a lemon tree.
The backyard lemon tree used to be where the males relieved themselves after the third cup of tea following Sunday roast mutton. The lemon trees grew all the better because it’s hard to overfeed a lemon – as long as the libation’s fresh.
Actually I did once know an overfed one. It was during the drought and the world was bare and brown, except around the lemon tree, which I mulched and watered. Our chooks sat under the lemon tree from 1978 to 1982, and when it rained again the tree was so surfeited with five years of chook droppings (and the lemons consequently so thick skinned) that I haven’t had to feed it since.
A lemon is the fruit I always intend to take when I travel and never do. If I’d brought a lemon with me the soup I was fed last night would have had a little savour (a dash of lemon adds piquancy to so-so soups) and the calamari I just ate for lunch (it’s hard to believe it was ever alive and swimming gaily in the sea) would have tasted of sunlight and the scents of our garden, instead of washing-up liquid. And I could have slept last night with the lemon beside me on the bedside table, so I could pretend I smelled the orchard instead of the air-conditioning.
When I travel I wish I could also take the lemon tree – to be able to sniff the blossom (that’s one of the glories of lemon trees: you get blossom and fruit at the same time); listen to the insistent peeps of baby birds (there are always nests in lemon trees) – or at least a branch of dark green glossy leaves and hard green fruit, to carry onto the plane like a talisman.
The flight’s been called. An hour and a half’s flying, two hours’ driving and I’ll be home, among the scent of lemon trees.
Verjuice Veal
This is incredible.
4 veal scallops
olive oil or butter for frying
1 onion, finely chopped
1 dessertspoon finely chopped parsley
1 cup cream
1 cup real grape juice (see note)
Bash the veal scallops really thin. Fry fast till brown on each side. Remove from the pan.
Take the onion and parsley and sauté till soft, then add the cream and grape juice. Boil till thick, then pour over the scallops.
Note: To make 1 cup of grape juice, take 3–4 cups green seedless grapes (or pluck out the seeds), whizz them in a blender and press out the juice.
Lemon Cream
Sniff this before you eat it.
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 cup cream
1 cup fresh lemon juice (see note)
3 eggs
Beat the ingredients together. Bake in small cups at 200°C for 20 minutes or till firm. Serve at once with almond biscuits and more cream if you’re greedy.
(You can also bake it in pastry. Lemon-cream pie is excellent cold.)
Note: The lemons must be fresh. If they smell musty as many shop-bought ones do, avoid them.
May 26
Home. Woke up to the cuckoo trilling at first light and the smell of water and shadowed rocks.
Pudge has dug under the gate. There are droppings all over the garden and fresh excavations above the parsnips or where the parsnips were. She didn’t eat anything, except a few square inches of remaining parsnip; but the burrowing covered up all the sweet peas and the beetroot (wombats apparently don’t like beetroot).
Bryan dug the hole even larger and inserted a very large rock, then tidied it all up.
It is very good to be home.
Garry Woods rang this morning, to say he’d burnt a chop. This was an achievement, given tha
t he’d done it on a solar cooker. Usually it takes about two hours to turn sausage a pale shade of grey.
I’d mentioned to Garry that I’d like a solar cooker, when we were at lunch in Canberra (antipasto thick with olive oil – charred zucchini and soggy eggplant and grey olives and sun-dried tomatoes – a standard this-year’s Canberra lunch, with bread that’s not quite as good as it was ten years ago, before the factory started producing it in bulk).
[NOTE FROM 2010: I now use a suitcase-shaped solar oven – excellent. Solar scones or slow-cooked fruit cakes or stews are superb. Who needs electric stoves which turn your house into an oven.]
I’d been pricing the commercial solar cookers – great aluminium dishes that you pointed at the sky – but they didn’t seem very efficient.
Garry decided that there must be a way of doing it better. He had a two and a half metre dish, and a five and a half metre dish – I think it was the latter that burnt the chop. Bryan is going to borrow the smaller dish when he goes up next week with the four-wheel drive (Garry doesn’t think the dish would fit on the roof-rack of his Peugeot), and we’ll experiment down here.
WINTER
June 1
Winter rain starts as mist, almost imperceptible at first, thickening till the white grains form drops and the air is transparent again. The fog rises above the mountains and trickles down into the gullies. The pattern changes every ten minutes. You can spend hours sitting at the kitchen window watching the fog, wandering when or if it’ll turn into rain.
You get misty rain in summer too but summer fog usually comes after a storm, not before. The oppression lifts the hair on your neck and the air closes till you could almost slice it. Sounds stop. After the rain the thunder rolls across the valley and the lyrebirds sing (even in midsummer) and the fog descends for days.
Winter rain is softer. The drops coat your hair and dribble down your neck. You’re wet before you realise it, cold only when you stop moving; wool is warm in winter rain but you smell like a sheep as soon as you come inside.
Winter rain is the time for visiting. Stoves are lit. People cook on rainy days; carrot cakes from frostbitten carrots and vegetable soup from the last of the celery, and bread because it’s a pity to waste the heat of the oven and kitchens are full of the smell of wet socks drying against the stove and the windows fog as the kettle boils.
Winter is a slower time.
You don’t visit so much in summer rain. You’re too impatient to be out, muttering at the unbroken grey and searching for a patch of sunlight. It’s hard to take summer rain seriously. It isn’t cold so you go out in it, get wet and not quite cold enough to make indoors essential and kids run out of dry trousers and you remember the umbrella broke a spike last downpour and you haven’t yet replaced it.
You need a tin roof for rain. Tiles muffle it, make the rain just something that happens out of doors. You’re part of the rain under a tin roof. You can’t speak over the noise in a good downpour but who’d want to; you’re at the window watching the water washing over the paving. The world is grey and what colour remains is changed – strange olive colours, almost-colours, faded under the cloth of rain.
When I was a child I walked in the rain. I still do when I’m by myself, when the rain is right for walking, steady rain, not the sheeting sort that blinds you, not the lightning sort.
Misty rain is lovely, a world of white around you, or the steady rain that seems to part before you, that drums around you, isolating you from the world more than a few metres away. You can believe that frogs come down in rain, like mushrooms or wireworms inching over the wet grass; that mud spontaneously generates, that trees turn silver and the light turns pale.
After the rain is as strange as the time before it – a clarity as great as the oppression earlier. The light is gold suddenly and the sky deep blue and you can see the green swelling even though you know it’s impossible and the air smells like a child that has had its hair washed and you feel like dancing with the grass.
‘Can I wear your gumboots?’ asked E.
‘Why?’
‘Because mine filled up with rain.’
Which means they’ll take a month to dry again, unless we put them by the stove, and they’re almost too small for him already. Kangaroo feet, long and strong.
‘Okay,’ I said. All our boots are left outside the front and back doors (where the wombats occasionally chew a strap or shoelace). Mostly they’re protected by the eaves, but an inch or two either way and they’re sodden.
My boots fit E well. He’s growing.
The pansies in the pot under the kitchen window were all scratched out this morning, limp and dying in the sunlight. The dirt had been scratched out too, all over the paving.
Lyrebird season has begun.
June 3
Warm days with high pale skies – there are still leaves drooping on the peach trees and Noel and Rod are counting hours of chilling – or rather, not counting them because we haven’t had any yet.
Peaches need a certain number of cold hours to set fruit. Normally we’d have had plenty by now; but we haven’t. You feel like tapping the year’s back to say: ‘Hey mate, it’s winter.’
Pudge and friends have discovered the celery (I think it is just Pudge doing the depredations though).
I didn’t think wombats liked celery – and they don’t – just the roots. Which means what was once a patch of celery – not in the fenced-off garden, fortunately – is now a patch of chewed-up stalks and messy holes.
I cleaned it up, gave most to the chooks and kept the best remnants for us and have made them into soup, as a wombat-gnawed celery stalk isn’t really much good for anything else.
Madam Pompadour’s Aphrodisiac Celery Soup
Madame P made this for Louis XV, who drank it with presumably spectacular results, as she kept making it and he kept drinking it. No one told the poor bloke that celery is supposed to be anti-inflammatory.
2 onions, finely chopped
3 tablespoons butter
6 sticks of celery, finely chopped
4 cups good chicken stock
Sauté the onions in the butter on a very low heat till transparent; add the celery and keep stirring till soft. Add the stock and simmer for 20 minutes.
Blend or just mash well – or strain the soup and serve it hot and clear.
King Louis XV’s Ginger Omelette
Made by Madame du Barry this time.
Wombats don’t like ginger, or at least Pudge hasn’t discovered it yet.
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and chopped finely
3 eggs, beaten with a fork
1 tablespoon icing sugar
Heat a frying pan, add the butter and ginger and stir well for 2 minutes. Pour in the eggs and shake madly for another minute, then leave alone till the base is firm and the inside almost set. Sprinkle on the icing sugar. Fold in quarters (the inside will keep cooking for another minute or so) and serve at once.
June 4
The onion patch looked like someone had rotary-hoed it this morning. It’s time to cover the gardens with bird netting and old bits of chook wire.
Each year I hope the lyrebirds might forget; but of course they don’t. As soon as the ground gets winter dry – and probably as soon as they’re nesting and want extra protein, either for egg laying or that peculiar male lyrebird cavorting that they do in the breeding season – our garden is ripped up. And if you think chooks can do damage, you should see lyrebirds.
Lyrebirds have big feet. Very big feet. And big tails too, but they are mostly drooping down in the dust instead of on display – and most are pretty ratty anyway. And they scratch and rip and the mess they leave is indescribable. The first time I saw an orchard torn thoroughly by lyrebirds I thought pigs had been there. But it was only the birds.
I raked the soil back again and replanted the onions that survived. Winter is a lovely time to get your hands in dirt – soil always seems to smell best in winter.
But then I’m fond of dirt at any time.
One of my earliest garden memories is making mud pies. The little boy next door (his name was Raymond and he wore red sandals that I coveted) and I had been given our lunch under the mango tree. Unfortunately it was the wrong time of year for mangoes.
We ate our lunch and then tried shaking pepper on the tails of passing sparrows (my mother had told me if you put pepper on a sparrow’s tail it won’t fly away; I know some people prefer salt – maybe she didn’t want her lawn salinated). But the sparrows were too fast so we made mud pies instead.
They were good mud pies. Gourmet mud pies. I mixed mine with raspberry cordial and he mixed his with…you know, I’d forgotten this till now…he was proud of his equipment though I was unimpressed. And then we mixed in salt and pepper as well and let them dry in the sun then turned them out.
I’ve had my fingers in the dirt ever since.
Dirt is lovely stuff. Good dirt smells like chocolate. Or maybe I just like chocolate as well as dirt so I think they smell the same. I get uneasy when I’m too far away from dirt: more than two storeys up for example or in air-conditioning or anywhere that’s smooth grey walls and carpet – you know the sort of place.
Year in the Valley Page 20