Chicken with tamarillos

2 chicken fillets
1 ts garlic chopped
1 ts ginger, chopped
1/2 ts turmeric
1/2 ts chopped chilli (fresh or dried, to taste)
2 Ts soy sauce
(up to) 6 tamarillos, halved and skinned

Mix together all ingredients.
Bake for 45 minutes at 200C or until cooked.

Serves 2.

We have a tamarillo tree and this is one way to use up the excess.
Tamarillo is otherwise known as 'tree tomato'.

Gnocchi with zucchini, green tomatoes, and olives (gluten free)

Serves 2 for a main course

Gnocchi:
1 small tub of ricotta cheese
1 cup besan
1/2 cup cornflour
1/2 cup glutinous rice flour
1/4 cup grated parmesan

Mix all together. Roll small handfulls into long sausage shapes about the width of fingers and cut into pieces 2 cm long.

Sauce:
1 zucchini sliced with a vegetable peeler into long strips
18 green cherry tomatoes halved
10 large pitted olives quartered
1 ts garlic
1/2 ts sambal oelic
pancetta chopped
olive oil

Place all the sauce ingredients on a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes at 160C
Meanwhile bring a saucepan of water to the boil.
Add the gnocchi to the boiling water a few at a time and when they rise to the surface remove them with a slotted spoon.
When all the gnocchi is cooked empty the saucepan, add the sauce ingredients and the gnocchi and mix together over the heat.
Sprinkle with parsley.
Serve

My husband described this as a $25 pasta dish in a restaurant.
The green tomatoes and parsley were freshly picked from the garden.

Thai chicken and tamarillo salad.

Serves two

1 chicken breast, (cooked in garlic, ginger and soy sauce) shredded
3 tamarillos halved and warmed in the microwave for a minute
2 green onions, chopped
shredded lettuce to serve

Sauce:
grated peel from 1 lime
juice 1 lime
1 ts sugar
1 ts fish sauce
coriander, mint, parsley, chives (1/2 cup of each)
1 ts sambol oelek
1 ts sesame oil

Heat fish sauce, sambal, sugar.
Mix in rest of ingredients.
Serve on shredded lettuce.

Thai mussells with veggies.

1 kg mussels, scrubbed and de-bearded
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 ts ginger,
1 stalk lemongrass, crushed
1 leek, cleaned and sliced,
1 choko sliced thinly
thai basil,
two handfulls cherry tomatoes,
2 kaffir lime leaves
1/2 cup white wine or stock
1 chilli chopped - or to taste.
basil.
sprinkle soy and fish sauces.
oil

Put leeks, garlic and ginger in a pot with a little oil, cover and put on a low heat to soften the leeks. Add the veggies and white wine or stock and cook until soft (10 minutes).
Add the mussells and other ingredients and cover until the shells have opened.

Serve with pasta, rice or bread to soak up the juices.

This tasted wonderful. All the veggies and herbs were fresh from the garden, so was very healthy, too.

Carbon Tax

So there is another scare campaign on again. The Liberals are very good at that.

The proposed carbon tax is NOT on households but on the big polluters. Ordinary households will actually benefit as they will be recompensed for their electricity usage. Why oh why are the Liberals claiming otherwise? And the shock jocks are at it too, pushing the line that we will all suffer.

Well I think we will all suffer far more if we don't start to reduce our greenhouse emissions. The climate is changing. I am a gardener, and it is obvious. Fruit trees don't know when to flower any more. They are both fruiting and flowering at the same time - both apples and plums have been affected in my garden.

What are you doing to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions?

We have fully insulated our house, added solar hot water, solar panels and installed a ventilation system to keep the house warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Our combined gas and electricity bill for the last six months was for -$200. We do not have airconditioning, but our house has not reached over 26 C this summer. We do not have central heating, but our house didn't fall below 13 C last winter. So we are warmer and cooler at the times we want. An added benefit is that the ventilation system is keeping our house humidity free as well, so when it is humid outside I do most of my work at home, where it is much easier to think.

Sustainability part 1

Time to get serious about climate change. The local experts suggested that the first thing to do was to get rid of the electrical hot water system. Because our roof is not quite true north, I decided to go with a more expensive solar hot water system - evacuated tubes. All fully installed, they are not cheap.

I spent ages trying to understand how it worked. Every time we used hot water inside the house the gas booster would come on. Even when it had been a very hot day and no-one had been at home to use the hot water. I contacted the supplying company who told me that there couldn't be a problem - no-one else complained about this. The installing plumber told me that it was my fault that I didn't understand the system: everything was correctly installed, and I was a bit stupid. He arranged a time when my hubbie would be at home with me to come and explain how it all worked.

The day before the plumber was due to arrive hubbie and I both stood outside marvelling at this system that didn't make sense: the hot water tap was running, the gas booster was going full pelt, it was late on a very warm and sunny Sunday afternoon, no-one had been home all day, so the system should have been heating the water and there should be no gas boost. Then for some reason my hubbie decided to touch the electrical plug that the pump ran from. The pump sprang into motion instantly.

It turned out that the whole system had not been plugged in properly, so of course the pump wasn't working, and without that there could be NO hot water from the roof, and that was what I suspected was actually happening.

The plumber rang a short while later saying that he had checked the system, that it was working perfectly and that he would be there the following day to explain it to us. I told him not to bother, but to check that he had plugged the pump in fully before he left his next installations!

Sometimes it pays to be curious about how things work! It could have been years before we discovered that our solar hot water hadn't been plugged in.