The Indira Challenge

via Sydney Morning Herald

Indira Naidoo is my role model.

I remember watching her when she was an ABC TV presenter, and I'm not sure whether she was ever a BTN presenter, but whether she was or not, she was a role model of my youth.  Even if it was just as the weekend newsreader for ABC.  I thought she was completely and utterly awesome, and still do think that.  And now I have her garden-and-cook-book.

Anyway.  (Should that be my catchprase?)

Anyway.

Indira set a challenge in her awesome book about her balcony garden: try to include something from your garden in every meal.

I'll focus on evening meals (I suspect Indira meant the same) and I know we don't manage to include something from the garden in every single evening meal, but I am going to try.  Particularly this summer, but from now on I'll be looking at Indira's book, Stephanie Alexander's book and the classic Yates Garden Guide, and doing my best to
plan ahea
d
(inside family joke)

and work towards having a four-seasons garden if we possible can.

That's the next goal.  The current goal?  The Indira challenge: use something from our garden in as many evening meals per week as possible.

Dinner - and a plan for summer

We decided tonight that we wanted to have salad for dinner rather than the pasta we had planned. The temperature reached 28.5 degrees today, which is nowhere near the highs we will get later in the year, but we declared it too hot to cook.

Anyway: the salad includes: lettuce, rocket, spinach, mint, coriander (all from our garden) as well as brie, walnuts, onion and bacon.  We also had garlic bread, which could also have been turned into croutons and this is what will happen next time.

It was totally delicious, and so much of it was from our garden!

This is something we really need to keep doing this summer: lots and lots of salads.  We still have cos lettuces that haven't got to the point of picking yet, as well as baby spinach we planted in The Wall this week.  I may separate out the lettuces from the first 6-pocket to the top two of the second six-pocket just to give them a little more room to grow.  'Cause we want lots of lettuce this summer.  And other things, too!

Veggie Loading

One of our favourite/most-used
cookbooks

You may have heard the suggestion that we should all be eating at least five servings of vegetables and two servings of fruit per day.  I am bad at this.  (Particularly the two servings of fruit.)  But one of the things we do is what I call Veggie Loading: adding as many vegetables as possible wherever we can.

Okay, it's not always successful.  I added carrot and zucchini (grated) to an attempted Mexican lasagne, but I didn't cook it as specified and it didn't end well.

But we do still try to add veggies to pretty much everything we can, and as much as we can.  Because the more serves of veggies we can add to a single dish, the fewer dishes we need to wash.  And fewer dishes is a good thing.

Carrott, zucchini and mushrooms are our most frequent veggie loads, although I'm perfectly happy to put red capsicum, snow peas, broccoli/broccolini, cauliflower or beans into anything where they work.  Also spinach (I love spinach) - which is an easy veggie load, and asparagus (when it's cheap) - which is not an easy veggie load.

Anyway, I can guarantee that there will be more posts on this topic anon.

The two Jamies (and the one and only Indira)

Yesterday afternoon was a tale of two Jamies; Jamie Oliver and Jamie Durie.

We went out in the afternoon to Trade Secret to pick up the Jamie Oliver 3-in-1 peeler (with julienne and soft-fruit blades) which we'd been looking at for a while and finally bought because summer is coming on and we want to have salads to eat during the week etc).

We also went to Big W to buy an additional wall planter, having bought two Jamie Durie 3-pocket planters on Saturday and planted them up early Sunday afternoon.  They look and seem to work well (so far), and we were impressed enough to decide we wanted another one.  Knowing that we eventually want to move back to a city at some point in time, and knowing that we're both happier in Inner City rather than suburbia, I'm keen on thinking about gardening in small/confined spaces.  It's not as though we've got unlimited space now, of course.  Comparatively, we have a fairly small growing space (although it's a lot more than we had when we first moved in - a story for another time) and these 12 (two 3-pocket and one 6-pocket) planter pockets give us more herbs (mostly) than we could otherwise have.

So, to keep up the garden stocktake begun in this post - we've now added (in the Jamie Durie wall planters)

The first two Jamie Durie planters,
hung from our fence with hooks
from Bunnings

• Vietnamese mint
• Chives
• French tarragon
• a Strawberry plant
• two petunias
• two nastursiums
• lettuces
• marjorum
• chives (transplanted from last year's attempt at home-made wall planters - I think that deserves its own post)
• mint
• coriander

The six-pocket planter.

I must point out that part of the inspiration for our wall-hung gardens came from Indira Naidoo, who I remember as a newsreader from from my youth.  I thought she was awesome then, and now that I have her cookbook/patio garden book, I only think her even more awesome.  She'll no doubt feature later in this blog (we keep saying that we'll choose a feature cookbook each week to menu plan from, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.)