Have you ever bitten into a strawberry and feel your entire mouth start to smile? A smile that starts as your lips feel that first drop of strawberry juice and extends upwards and upwards as your teeth close together after the last bite.
That is what these strawberries pictured taste like. Strawberries that you are eating mere hours after they have been picked. Strawberries that you have seen grow and grow since they were first planted a few months ago. Strawberries that are sweet but with a slight tang and the texture is just right.
This is what strawberries should always taste like.
I started writing this post a few weeks ago but I didn’t get a chance to take the last photo for the post till today. So now I present a tale of Cherry Tomatoes. At the moment, each time we visit the farm one of the things that I do or I do with Mum is pick the Cherry Tomatoes and now I give you a photo-documentary of the process.
Picking the little red balls. Some weekends we do this in near dark other weekends like yesterday we did it in the winter sun. When I took these photos we had not picked the tomatoes for three weeks we had a bounty on our hands.
We pick the reddest, ripest tomatoes we can find, knowing that they will pack a whole lot more punch when they are dried.
After filling our buckets and trying to avoid the cobblers pegs and pea weed, it is time to clean them. The sink is filled with water and the tomatoes are poured in, washing off the dirt.
We stand there, on either side of the sink, methodically picking up a tomato, plucking off the stalk and putting the tomatoes on a rack to dry.
After they have tried it is on to the fun stuff. Cutting each and every tomato in half and placing it on the rack to go in the food dryer.
Then they dry and dry and dry some more till we have little red discs, typically a bit smaller than a 5c piece. Then we feast on them in salads, pasta, dips, cous cous, sandwiches etc or take photos of them in a vase on the balcony….
Yesterday was the Queen’s birthday public holiday and I spent most of it at my parents sewing, I have finally finished the top of my 21st birthday quilt. I turn 23 in September…… IT looks so good and I can’t wait to see it on my bed.
Today is Tuesday and I flexed the day off to give me a four day weekend 🙂 What a day I had, I started off with a long list of jobs to do this morning and now at 21:40 I can cross most of those jobs off. I have changed the address on my drivers licence, bank account, organised insurance (I’ve only been here a month and a dew days…..), re-arranged my wardrobe, did some shopping, took a bunch of cracked lids back to Tupperware for replacing. The only thing I haven’t done is my ironing which I am about to do and to process the photos from the two most recent gigs I have gone along to.
Tonight for dinner I made a delightful salad. It was fennel, salad leaves, beans, carrot, dried cherry tomatoes, some lightly fried capsicum and toasted walnuts with a lemon and Shiraz vinaigrette and a rasher of bacon. It looked good and tasted good, the only thing I might have added was some apple for a bit of sweetness. Since moving out I have experimented a lot more with my cooking as if is a flop it is only a flop for one person or maybe two if Andrea is eating with me. The pork/ginger rissoles were not the best but the dhal I made last week was soooo good. Andrea commented tonight that I am so good always making dinner and as I said to Andrea, it is just because I am too cheap to buy takeout. Friday night I made a tasty apple and walnut loaf which I will make again in the coming days and tweak the recipe a bit before posting it here.
I am very slowly getting used to having the internet again. It is not weird I just don’t have the desire to check out all the sites that I was checking out before I moved out.
Oh I also should probably mention I got my hair cut two Wednesdays ago, I had about 3″ taken off it, about half my hair or more thinned out and I have a bit of a side fringe. It is so weird, my pony tail is sooo skinny compared to how fat it used to be. I like it just not used to having so much lightness with this sort of length.
An overflowing container of cherry tomatoes, a visit with the most treasured man in my life, getting covered in Cobblers Pegs as I lift up the vines gently plucking each little red ball off the stalk, dicing a handful through tuna mornay for dinner. A family table; laughs, love and the hope of tomorrow. Just another afternoon at The Farm. That was how I spent my May Day afternoon.
The other weekend when we were coming back from Gumbarra, I got lucky 🙂
We had driven to Cunningham’s Gap to pick Mum and two other walkers who had walked from Sylvester’s lookout to the gap along the top of the Main Range Escarpment. Mum had gone to the toilet to freshen up and on her way back had gotten talking to a Land Crusier full of Italian men who had taken a one day holiday to pick the olives for the year. Whilst talking Mum had mentioned to the blokes that her daughter would love to pick some olives and could they tell me where they picked up, the answer was a hearty no but we will give her some olives. I came down with Mum’s hat and I skipped back to the car with a hat full of olives and a smile that didn’t leave my face for a good 48hrs. I also came back with tips on how to best cure them. You need to rinse them in water for a week said one. The others said no, just straight into salt water in which an egg will float with a little bit of garlic and a chopped up lemon. They all nodded and said yes. Then another adds, you must put in a little bit of wine vinegar and change it every so often.
I know have a container in the cupboard with olives curing in and you have no how idea how big a smile that puts on my face.
Now I just have to play the waiting game.
I have been talking about making a trip out to QLD olive country since probably September last year, as we are smack bang in the season at the moment my talk ramped up a couple of weeks ago. I only wanted a small amount to play with. Mum sort of talked me out of it – You want to drive 3 plus hours to pick perhaps 2kg of olives and how much do you even like olives Helen? Next year after this batch have worked out I’ll be there. I am also very interested in having a going at pressing my own oil, I understand the science of the matter and have found a few little notes on extracting olive oil yourself which I will keep in mind next year.
I have long been intrigued by these jewelled fruits. I have pomegranate molasses which I often use in cooking (makes a mean roast chicken). The price of fresh ones though and that they always seemed to be USA imports had put me off actually buying one. Last Saturday though whilst at the fruitshop I noticed they were selling Australian pomegranates and at $2.49 each they were not too bad in price. I racked my brain trying to remember what I had read on the net about picking one. Not been able to to remember much I went for the normally fail safe of picking fruit that is heavier than it looks.
It sat in the fridge for a week before I was game enough to decide break it open. I was in the middle of baking a yoghurt cake to take to meet a prospective flatmate and thought mmm I could add some Pomegranate to this. I cracked it open and carefully picked out one little jewel to taste. That first little jewel knocked me over and I instantly declared my love. Instant Love.p
I think I might be buying more of these in the future. I tried talking Mum into planting a tree in the back yard. She said no before I even finished the sentence. One day I will have a garden with a pomegranate tree. One day.
And in other news (said in my best news reader voice).
Since coming home from work on Friday I have not worn my ankle brace at all. Which is good. I know my ankle is healing as I find my self doing things that I wasn’t able to do before. Like sitting on my ankle when I tuck one leg up or walking down steps almost normally. All about going forward.
