Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

Spring!

17 September 2009 | 1:18 - By Phil Lees

vegetable garden with cabbages in foreground

The winter of  gardening discontent is over. Spring is off the hook. The gardener emerges from  their homes, blinking in the sunlight like a freshly unearthed mole.

As you can see, the cabbages that I previously complained about are now growing out of control, so I'm looking forward to yielding about twenty kilos of Savoy. Enough to complain  about. Expect cabbage recipes aplenty in the coming weeks of this blog, or  alternately, is there some sort of festival that involves cabbage that is worth  celebrating?

There are doubts  that sauerkraut could be prepared in time for Oktoberfest. The beetroot harvest  has started in earnest and I haven’t planted nearly enough of them. The celery  grew, despite being planted at completely the wrong time of year: every time  that I grow it, I feel that I have done something wrong. The tactic for eating  seems to be picking the outside stalks as needed and working your way towards  the centre but even this does not feel quite right - celery does not look like the sort of vegetable that should be available on an on demand basis.

Nectarine flowers

Every fruit tree  in the yard has gone into flower in an act of absolute simultaneity, acting as  the first grim warning of the plum onslaught that awaits in summer. Beneath an  ancient and woody daisy in the front yard, a pomegranate was submerged; a last  artefact of food history left behind by the house's previous  owner. It was hidden in its entirety by the more vigorous plant and there had been a single leaf on the entire pomegranate visible. Once cut free, the  pomegranate flowered immediately.

Despite  appearances to the contrary, I only have the vaguest idea of what I'm doing,  which is one of the great traits of gardening. Like cooking, it is fairly  difficult to make disastrous mistakes and the outcome is mostly edible.

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Comments (2)

06 Oct 2009 11:20 AEST

penny aka jeroxie

From:

memories

I miss my old place that had a nice little spot where I can grow herbs. Love going into the backyard and smelling the herbs, taking care of them and then cooking with it. Everything tastes so much better.

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18 Sep 2009 4:40 AEST

HML

From: Wodonga

Harvesting

I couldn't agree more Phil. I think like you the harvesting and cooking of ones own vegetables cannot be matched.

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About this Blog

A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.

 
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