Most Anticipated 2012 Harvest

I would like to introduce you to our anticipated harvest of this year Abbiyana Ariel born on 9th August 2012 at 2 PM through waterbirth normal delivery. She is our biggest harvest for this year but she only weight 2.99kg at birth. Four hours after birth we went home. Abby face resembles her brothers when they were babies. She is the reason why there are no posting in this blog for a while. Her father wanted to name her Abigail which means a father joy but I was not keen on it. Because my husband hometown family will pronounce the name different as suppose to be due to the dialect going to sound very weird. Abbi means a father's joy. Yes, Abby father is really happy now he has a baby girl. Her middlename is Ariel is not because she was born under water and related to Disney little mermaid is just a coincidence. But Ariel was chosen as her middlename from one of the archangels. Her brothers middlename are also from one of the archangels ~ Mikhail and Haniel. According to Chinese calendar this is the year of water dragon, born in water she enjoys her bath very much.When she demands for her feed she sounds like a little dragon as well ...hehehe...

September is really a busy month for harvesting and sowing seeds. I am very behind with the sowing schedule due to postnatal birth confinement and care and could not keep up with edibles need to harvest ASAP. 

Main harvest for this early spring month from our garden are broccoli and carrot. I am hoping now that we entered spring this year carrot won't flower that quickly for us to enjoy them.

Although, we have only one Italian sprouting broccoli plant, I cannot keep up harvesting the shoots. The plant is very generous providing so many shoots to harvest continuously through this month.  I keep on giving-away the harvested broccoli shoots because we can't finish them and I can't managed time to blanch and freeze them. While I am writing this I think maybe I should make broccoli puree and frozen them for Abby when she starts to try solid food. A few of chillies were picked half ripe and brought inside to ripen them up.

Totally forgotten to harvest one Kent pumpkin last autumn. I found the pumpkin amidst the weeds at the back of our backyard fence last week. Fortunately, it was in good shape. Kohlrabi also needs to be harvested this month before it starts to flower. Noticed how long the grass on our backyard.

Autumn-sown radishes need to be pick quick this month as many of them are starting to give the sign of going to flower soon, Peas are also one of the main harvest this month, a luxurious fresh snack while in the garden. Self-sowed celery plants are abundant for picking as well.

Cherrytime capsicum and self-sowed yellow currant cherry tomato are also available from the garden.

We also have spinach and Touchstone Gold beetroot readily available from the garden this month.

This early spring is our chamomile peak harvest season. Nice to have fresh chamomile tea to make us feel more relax. I am just a bit concern whether chamomile tea is fine for breastfeeding mother.

Last Saturday, while cleaning up one of the neglected patch fill with weeds at the back of our backyard fence found some potatoes and leek. I was pruning some of our over-wintered bonica brinjal plants, surprisingly found some small fruits on the plant. We were also clearing up some containers and harvested some unnoticed bush peas and cape gooseberries. Its like treasure hunting for goodies this month with the weeds going wild everywhere.

Another face of a month old Abbiyana Ariel.

I am enjoying motherhood at the moment.
Thinking whether I should give her a first hair cut now that her hair is passed her shoulders.
Join in Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday.

Early winter harvest

Its officially winter here and we are still lucky to harvest some warm-loving vegetables at this early week of winter. The warm-loving vegetables does take such a long time ripening but the vegetables taste excellent. I guess things that have to wait for, sometime worth the wait. Its fun to see other gardeners harvest basket around the world, so come and join in Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday.

We had some eggplants and enjoy it as eggplant fritters. I grew several variety of eggplants each year as I found that each year some does well and some does not, most importantly the weather effects the flavour of certain variety. This year the best performer in our garden was Bonica eggplant. I did not like the flavour of Bonica eggplant very much last year but this year it tasted much better and was the most prolific as well. The bonica eggplant is growing in partial shade and the fruit is protected from the harsh sun. The bonica eggplant tasted good not bitter at all and the flesh was nicely soft. This is the 3rd year we grow eggplants, the first year our eggplant award goes to Early Long Purple, 2nd year best performer was Lebanese eggplants and this year Bonica. This year I grow Early Long Purple and Lebanese eggplants in a location which they received full sun almost the whole day, so the fruit could not grow well and it tasted somewhat bitter when previous years it tasted good. We also harvested some rainbow chards, carrots, golden calwonder capsicum and a yellow crookneck squash.

Snail and slugs are getting active at night now and attacking our Da Cheong Chae green leaves as seen in the photo. Harvest the first biggest watermelon radish in our garden. I wanted to let it grow bigger but was worried that it will become hotter. But surprisingly, it was sweet and no hotness like other radish sometime if you let them grow older. The watermelon radish goes into the chicken tom yum my husband made. Fresh chillies and cherrytime capsicums freshly available in the garden at the moment for picking. We finally cleaned up and disposed end of season cucumber plants today. Only a few cucumbers were left on the plant to harvest. I will sorely miss cucumbers until the next season come again for us.

We harvested our first broccoli for cool season this year, rather small head. Its the first time we managed to harvest broccoli this early, we usually start to harvest broccoli for cool season at the end of July. After 3 times re-sowing 'Jack Be Little' pumpkin seeds because the heat wave kill the plants, we finally harvested  2 pumpkins today. The first sowing was mid-spring, second sowing early summer and the third desperate attempt was end summer. There was no problem with seeds germination. The problem was that the adult plants from the first and second adult plant batch were not able to survive the extreme heat. By the time the female pumpkin flower from the third sowing start to bloom, the weather was getting to cold. The first week when the female pumpkin flower bud bloom it managed to open and be manually pollinated. However, the week after that because of the cold weather none of the female flower bud bloom. It was risky sowing the seeds at the end of summer and we were just lucky to get some pumpkins. For the cucurbits family perhaps the last sowing batch will probably be mid-summer in our garden. I was trying to extend the cucurbit family season this year but I think I extend it too much by sowing seeds until end summer.

Summer Veggies Continue...

Oppss...who was lazy leaving the eggplant at the partial shade corner not stake?

I did.

So when I finally attempt to stake the branches that were on the ground last weekend, I found 2 bonica eggplants hiding beneath foxglove foliage. One of the eggplants were bigger than my palm and very heavy for an eggplant. We had very warm days a few days ago which causes our eggplants that were growing in sunny position has wrinkle skin and not growing much. So I have to harvest them when the fruits are tiny or they stop production/flowering. Lebanese and early long eggplants are not usually bitter but due to the weather causes them to be bitter. There were many angled luffa female flower last week but not a single male around for successful fruit.

Some alpine strawberry fruits ripening in the garden this month.

The only photo taken.

They are fresh snack in the garden so photos of them are very rare.

Our first soy bean harvest from a plant.

This is my second year attempt trying to grow them.

Not easy to grow here because of dry hot weather in summer.

Soy bean like heat and humidity I think.

I tried growing them in different season and location in the garden with not much success.

How did I get them to produce this time?

I sowed soy bean seeds in the container which I prepared for a sweet potato plant.

I think the sweet potato plant crawling veins help keep the soil moist and act as a natural mulch.

Boiled the beans in salted water for snacking.

Sweet potato shoots.

Cleared up sweet potato plants that were growing in one corner in our garden.

It has been mice sanctuary.

Most of the sweet potatoes were eaten not much left for us.

We harvested spaghetti squashes before the rain comes. Left them curing naturally outside for a long time until the whole plant has actually dried off. A very tiny watermelon and cucumber were also harvested last weekend.

Cleared up the neglected patches along our driveway shared with neighbours, got some spring onions. Some capsicum were also harvested last weekend.

Visit Daphne's Dandelions to see different kind of harvest came from different parts of garden all  around the world.

Small Sugar Pumpkin

We grow small sugar pumpkin variety for the first time last spring. This pumpkin variety is suitable for small garden. We direct-sowed the seed last August and harvested the first fruit in December. It took less than 4 months to harvest the first pumpkin. This pumpkin variety fruit in diameter average size is about 20cm. The photo shows female flower with a small fruit attached at the back of the bright yellow flower. The pumpkin female flower really beckons or attracts the bees with its big bright yellow petal which is hard to miss when bees flying pass to help her pollinate with its mate. Well, we usually try manually by hand to pollinate the female pumpkin earlier than bees so it won't cross pollinate with different variety of pumpkin/squash. But it was easier this time around to avoid cross-pollination because it was the only cucurbit plant that was already producing flowers. To avoid confusion, the pumpkin veins or leaves is similar with other pumpkin, in the photo  leaves with red veins are beetroot leaves. Moreover, beside the yellow flower you can see beans dangling. You can inter-plant beans with pumpkin.

Because December we don't have many rainy day here so we can be lucky to avoid powdery mildew. I always find that when the pumpkin fruit is getting bigger its better when there is not much rain or humidity is low so the plant don't get disease easily.

Pumpkin growing bigger still immature with green skin.

Make sure to leave a long stalk on the ripe pumpkin when harvesting.

So it will store well for several months.

Cure the pumpkin before storing it on a dry place.

We usually put it beside a sunny window for several days or weeks. 

A ripen small sugar pumpkin.

The pumpkin keep well until we decided to enjoy it after harvesting it for more than 4 months.

If it is cure and store well, perhaps it can stay good for more than 6 months after harvest.

Any ideas on how to enjoy this pumpkin?

I am a bit lazy in the kitchen these days, just slice and roast them.

What pumpkin variety are you growing this year?

We are waiting for our spagetthi squash fruit to ripe this month. 

40 degree Celsius Baked Veggie Harvest

From the previous post, we mentioned that we lost many plants due to the 40 degree Celsius hot weather that we had at the closing of year 2011 and starting of 2012. Almost all of our pumpkin/squash plants died and we only managed to get a pumpkin each from the spagetthi squash and small sugar pumpkin plants that we were growing. The thelma sanders sweet potato pumpkin plants gave us a second one before it also died due to the hot weather. I am not sure whether we will be able to get any more pumpkin for this year, although I did sow some pumpkin seeds last weekend.

Many of the root vegetable top were burn and some don't even have a trace so I had to dig blindly to harvest those root. This is how some of those harvested roots look like before they got a scrub. Some chilli fruit were also scorched by the heat.

Above harvest after some scrubbing...

Many of the root top parts have to be cut because blackish and dehydrated.

Pak choi leaves were also scorched but I have taken out the dried leaves. Tomato fruit skin also turn brownish at the side that facing the sun.

Carrots harvested from containers because they have no more top leaves.

Visit Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Monday.

It will be awhile before I can blog visit again because something suddenly came up and I have to go to Malaysia for a very short trip today. It has been 3 years since I have not been back. I will drop by and reply any question if any after everything settles down.

Prawns and Pumpkin In Coconut Gravy

As year of 2012 is getting closer, Adelaide temperature is soaring and we probably lost many vegetable plants due to the extreme heat. Several of our plants had perished this week. New Year day is predicted to be more than 40 degree Celsius. We probably lost many tomato plants this week and when their fruits are just starting to get bigger or ripen. Many warm loving vegetables flower bloom this week but they won't set any proper fruit at all. During Christmas week, many of our plants at the back of our backyard fence were being eaten. However, we caught the culprit now. Well Rayyan stumbled upon him nipping our cabbage leaves while Lenay was watering the plants. Never did I taught that the culprit was a big male rabbit. I think he was someone pet before and was abandoned. Not sure whether it was purposely left near our garden though. Don't think he was given that much vegetables before perhaps more on pelleted food. He is very tame. In the mean time, he has been taken inside the backyard garden and treated like a pet. Feel really bad leaving him outside without any source of water especially when we have extreme weather at the moment. He probably came out of thirst each time after we watered our plants previously to lick water from the plants.

We harvested our first Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Pumpkin and shallots this month. Garlic are drying in the shed at the moment. I found this interesting recipe that I can use from our fresh harvest of pumpkin, garlic and shallot from 'The Best Of Chef Wan A Taste of Malaysia' recipe book. Chef Wan is the most popular Malaysian Chef.  A celebrity chef that was once in his early career an accountant. I recommend this book if you like Malaysian food. 

Prawns and Pumpkin In Coconut Gravy

Ingredients:
300gram pumpkin, peeled and cut into large chunks
500ml/2cups coconut milk (or extracted from 1 grated coconut and 500ml water)
1 Turmeric leaf, finely sliced, if desired
200gram prawns, cleaned and shelled
Salt and sugar for seasoning

Pounded Ingredients:
2 Tablespoon Dried prawns (shrimps) , soaked and drained
3 Shallots, peeled
1 clove garlic, peeled
5 red hot chillies, if desired

~Put the pounded ingredients, pumpkin and coconut milk into a pot. Bring to boil and simmer until the pumpkin is soft.
~Add the turmeric leaf and prawns and cook for a further 3 minutes.
~Season with sugar and salt. Garnish as desired and serve with warm rice.

A Happy New Year to You!

Talam Labu/Sweet Potato

I was really hoping that this weekend it will be sunny and I can complete the task that I set this week in the garden. However, it rain in the morning. So we decided to make Malaysia traditional cake~ kuih talam labu (pumpkin) or talam keledek (sweet potato) while waiting for the rain to stop. Talam in Bahasa Malaysia means tray. What interesting about this recipe that it can use either pumpkin or sweet potato as its main ingredient. Since we still have some pumpkin that we harvested from last autumn and recent harvested sweet potato we decided to try both. I got this recipe from Iyajuyi author of ARAH blog.

Ingredients :
For the bottom layer
300gram sweet potato/pumpkin (boiled/steamed and mashed)
75gram rice flour
75gram tapioca flour
150ml coconut milk + 150ml of water
200~150gram sugar
1teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanila essense (optional)
colouring (optional) the pumpkin one I did not use any colouring but for the sweet potato I added colouring for the layer which contain only coconut milk. Sweet potato did not give any colour. But pumpkin has its own natural colouring.

For the Top layer
100gram tapioca flour
200ml coconut milk + 200ml water
2Tablespoon rice flour
1Teaspoon salt

Preparing for the bottom layer:
Mix well rice and tapioca flour with coconut milk. Then sieve.
Blend all the ingredient together including mashed pumpkin/sweet potato.
Put the mixture into a pan and stir until it gets concentrated at moderate heat.
Pour the mixture into a container that fit your steamer with half fill in the size of that container. Beforehand, brush the container with very little oil. Steam for about 7 minutes.

Time to prepare the top layer which is the similar process with the bottom layer.

Pour the top layer mixture on top of the bottom layer. Steam for about 10 minutes.

Let it cool. Then cut and its ready to serve.

It actually will look much more prettier if I have an artistic talent on how to cut and make it more presentable. But it tasted very good. You have to take my word because I usually got C in art class. The bottom layer is sweet potato which does not have any colour add on. 

This is talam labu (pumpkin).

The top layer are pumpkin which does not need to add yellow colouring, it is on its own natural colour.

I prefer talam labu more.

How about you?

Hope you had a great weekend.

Linking with Wendy's Garden To Table Challenge.

Massey Pea First Harvest

Main harvest for last week was mainly chillies, tomatoes and giant purple mustards. I tried to pull out one carrot to see how much the oldest sowed-batch have grown. The upper part of the carrot is medium size but still very short. I think one of the main reason is the carrot roots are having a hard time to push into clay soil. We harvested our first Massey peas last week and the boys were so excited. Kept asking for more. See Rayyan hands reaching for more peas while the photos are being taken.

Found some self-sowed tomatoes has ripen in winter and some does not look that good. But they tasted good. Pruned some laksa leaves (Vietnamese Mint) to cook with sardines.

Last sunny Saturday we finally tidied up and organised all our backyard garden containers. Summer plants which are no more productive were pulled out. We got to harvest 2 pumpkins that were grown from containers. This is the first time we harvested Queensland Blue pumpkin, although it is smallish compared to the shops. Found 2 inches of fresh ginger rhizomes from one of the containers. We grow turmeric for it leaves as well, so we freeze some leaves to use later to make rendang. Starting from early June, we had a new target trying not to buy any potatoes from the market. Thanks to Berry Gnome for the pink fir-eyed? seed potato we received a few months ago, we got to taste our first home-grown pink-eyed potatoes last week. We saved some of the potatoes to plant back and some were used to make beef korma. We also cut some rainbow chards stems.

Snowball turnip is not something that I can grow well because I don't lavish them with enough water. Yesterday, we harvested a yellow bell pepper and our first cherrytime capsicum. We waited that cherrytime capsicum to turn red since last April. All those red chillies were given-away to my husband friend for the nice traditional cake that were shared.

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday and see other gardeners interesting harvest all around the world.

Pumpkin Rice and Pumpkin Soup

Although I harvested a pumpkin last weekend, I still have not use it. I am trying to finish up pumpkins that I got from our local fruit and veggie swap earlier this month. It was cold and raining heavily yesterday so I had some time in my hand to search for pumpkin recipes that I can make with things that I have in my fridge and pantry. It has been such a long time that I have not spent much time in the kitchen experimenting, all thanks to the rain yesterday.

Our weekend harvest were sweet corns, chilies, beans, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, baby beetroot, snow peas, first harvest of snowball turnips and might be the last okra burgundy for this year. See what other gardeners from all over the worlds are harvesting this week in Harvest Monday hosted by Daphne's Dandelions.

With all those chilies and tomato harvest, we had sambal belacan everyday. Hope it keeps the flu bug away from this cold weather.

I have to say that I don't grow up eating pumpkin that much. I rarely saw pumpkin in my mama kitchen. I know she probably used a lot of pumpkin for puree and feeding me when I was a baby like I do with my sons. But other than that it is very rare that we have any dishes with pumpkin on it or I was not fond of pumpkin during my childhood and teens. I gave some pumpkin to my vegetarian friend and she said she used them for pumpkin soup. She says her mom used to make pumpkin rice. So I decided to have a go of making pumpkin rice when I remember that A Nyonya' s Kitchen...for all seasons blog shared her pumpkin rice recipe, end last month. This is not vegetarian dish but Ilhan likes to eat chicken nowadays so perhaps I can coax him to have a taste and he won't have a big fuss. Petite nyonya used dried scallops, shitake mushrooms and teriyaki sauce but I don't include this because it was not available in our pantry. Furthermore, we used 2 cups of rice instead of 3/4cup rice .This is because instead of small bowl diced chicken meat, someone use big bowl. I skipped the 'small" when I was reading the ingredients. We add in sliced capsicum, turnips and snow peas into this dish. I like this dish it was easy and did not take much time prepare because the rice cooker will help with the cooking afterwards.

I have always wanted to make western style vegetable soups but I always don't have some of the ingredients in our kitchen when I have the time. For example, for a South-East Asia kitchen any kind of cream, sour or full or light is not a common thing that I would have in the fridge except if I have been planning ahead for some certain dish, this include natural yogurt for cooking too. Sometime I buy them on impulse, maybe this weekend thinking I can try new dish...most of the time it got expired. While waiting for Ilhan selecting his books at the local library, I saw one of Masterchef judge new book~ Gary Mehigan's Comfort Food. I borrowed it for Lenay because she likes to watch Masterchef. I took a peek when we are back at home, Gary's pumpkin soup recipe ingredient are things that we have in the kitchen. So my mission for Sunday dinner preparation was making pumpkin soup.

Gary's pumpkin soup is for 4servings (I only made for 2 serving half of the ingredient below. But it was still too much and we even freeze half of the cooked soup).

Ingredients:

~1X1.6 kg jap pumpkin, peeled, seeded, cut into manageable chunk for grating (I used 3 different type of pumpkin because I am trying to finish off the pumpkin we got from the swap JAP, butternut and that giant pumpkin. Moreover I cut it into small chunks and did not grate.)

~125 g unsalted butter, chopped.

~50ml vegetable oil

~1 teaspoon table salt

~1 litre milk

~Freshly ground black pepper, crusty bread or garlic toasts to serve.

Heat butter and oil over medium heat. Add the pumpkin and sprinkle with salt. Cook the pumpkin, covered, gently over low heat for 8 minutes, stirring occasionally until it is soft. Stir in the milk and bring to boil.

Blend the pumpkin mixture in a food processor or blender until creamy and smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

My first home-made pumpkin soup. I am participating Wendy's Garden to Table Challenge.

Another few days, it will be officially winter here. Do you think two of our pumpkins down here will make it until they are mature enough to harvest?

I don't like or hate pumpkin. I don't know much about cooking pumpkin. So I need some motivation and learn more about pumpkin. I know it is a very healthy and nutritious food. Any advice on pumpkin?