anna_wing

A friend brought me some green lotus pods, and showed me how to eat the seeds. I've had them dried of course, and cooked in various ways (stir-fried, in stew, in sweet soups, as lotus paste for mooncakes and pancakes) but this was the first time I'd had the raw young seeds. They're edible and tender about a week or so after the flowers, and once the pods have formed, but will quickly get harder. Once they're nearly ripe they will be like rock and you'll need to soak them, or crack them like nuts. But right now all we had to do was pop them out of the pods, slit the soft, green outer casing with a thumbnail and eat the white seed inside. They're very nice, fresh and crunchy and just a little bit sweet. Very seasonal, of course.

https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/360000/velka/close-up-of-lotus-pods-and-seeds-background-15946634883za.jpg

A friend gave me a princely gift, a whole lot of top-grade black cherries. They were far more than I could possibly eat at once, so I gave some away, froze some, ate some, and finally, cooked some. The initial plan was for cherry pie, but all the recipes involved cornstarch for "cherry pie filling", which in my experience long ago in New York, results in a repulsively glue-like texture. In the end, after discussion with Housekeeper, she sprinkled a bit of brandy on the cherries, left them overnight, and then made a superb cherry crumble. Perfect. It freezes pretty well, too.

Cherries are my favourite temperate-climate fruit, after apricots, and good apricots are almost impossible hard to find, unless one lives somewhere where one can have a tree. Whereas good cherries come from Australia, the US and Chile, very reliably, depending on the time of year.

- The dragonfruit plants are fruiting again! Two from one of mine, and so far, four from the one in the office garden.

- The spirit-occupied mango-tree also produced some very good fruit this year. It needs pruning, so I was asked by the staff to explain things and ask them not to take offence at the gardeners, which I duly did before witnesses. So no problems are expected.

- A friend with interesting multi-stem papaya plants in his garden sent me some of the fruit. It's not bad, so we'll try growing the seed. Papayas are fussy, conventional wisdom is that the bird-sown ones that grow by themselves in random parts of the garden are always the strongest.

- I've also got seed for a nice double Clitoria ternatea in a lovely royal blue from my family's garden, which are now with the gardeners. There's a fashion for using them in tisanes, which I find vaguely amusing because they have no taste whatsoever. I grew up only knowing of them as a food dye. But if you put them in hot water to extract the colour, and add lemon or lime juice, the beautiful blue colour turns into a very pretty purple. So colour-changing lemonade is now popular in restaurants.

- My yellow Marvel of Peru/Four O'Clock Flowers (Mirabilis jalapa are blooming very well, and they have a lovely scent (moth-pollinated). I love them, they're so good about seeding and so easy to grow.


I have been very annoyingly ill off and on since April. Shingles, COVID, a really nasty cough that has lasted months (charmingly referred to by my GP as "Oh yes, the 100-day cough, it's going around"). The sole vaguely positive thing about this is that I have lost 2.5 of the 5 kilos that I need to lose to get to the middle of the lowest-risk BMI category, and through nothing more than being not very hungry. I might as well have been on a GLP-1 agonist for free. I have high hopes that maintenance will be easy, because if I can get to my target weight with just the current effortless adjustment to my daily calorie intake, it should stay effortless once I can get back to my regular exercise schedule.

I still have work-related meals, far too many this week, so next week meals at home are going to be chicken sandwiches or oden. I have now found a source of decent tofu, yay. Our version of oden is made with a couple of dried shiitake mushrooms, since I don't like bonito flakes, or occasionally chicken soup, and chunks of carrot, white radish, tofu, cabbage and the mushrooms, since I dislike konjac. It's particularly nice now, in the rainy season. I'll get Housekeeper to try cabbage rolls next.

Housekeeper saved a baby sparrow which fell out of the next and couldn't fly because it had some sort of fungus growing over one eye. She made a little nest for it, and its mother kept feeding it. eventually Housekeeper just picked it up and very carefully wiped the whatever away, and it flew off! So that was good.

The best part of rainy season is that both the nights and the days are cool, and the cats spend the evenings sharing a mat in a cat heap.

It's watermelon season. We have smallish, elongated oval, smooth, green-black ones with red flesh, roundish, green-black, loosely ribbed ones with golden-yellow flesh and huge oval dark and light-green striped ones with red flesh. All crisp, sweet and delicious. I am currently stuffing myself with this very simple salad:

As much watermelon as you want, cubed
As much feta as you want, crumbled
As many shelled walnuts as you want, roughly chopped
A few leaves of whatever basil you have, shredded.

Mix in a bowl, eat. I find dressing unnecessary. For dinner, I might add a nice slice of home-made toast, buttered. Housekeeper makes it with a mixture of regular bread flour and atta (Indian wholemeal) flour.

Yum.

To my massive annoyance, a whole row of roselle plants (Hibiscus sabdariffa) picked up a virus due to the unduly prolonged monsoon season, just as their hips were ripening nicely, and the whole lot of them had to be pulled out and disposed of. We couldn't even use the leaves for soup (they make a nice sour soup, in the same way that sorrel does in temperate climates).

The papayas look all right so far, fingers crossed and I would have expected them to get sick more than the roselle, because they are dreadfully finicky. An interesting, small, roundish fruit, rather than the long ones I'm used to.

The office garden passionfruit did well. There're some new yellow hybrid ones in the market, from Thailand, so we'll try those out. And multiple packets of different sunflower seeds and one of a spectacular white Strelitzia from Australia, which may or may not grow, but seems worth trying.


We have started feeding a little ginger and white female cat who hangs around outside my gate. She is clearly the offspring of one of the neighbour's garden cats, and was presumably chased out by bigger relatives. Cat 4 cannot be adopted, since the Beastie Boys would have conniptions (they are 10 years old and set in their ways), so we are trying to get her tame enough that she can be handed back to neighbour, possibly as a new house cat. We are currently feeding her the expensive cat food that I bought to try to replace the brand that stopped production, and which the Beastie Boys disdained. When that runs out, we will move on to the freeze dried venison which was likewise rejected. She already knows mealtimes.

The intense blue flowers of Clitoria ternatea the Blue Pea, are used in island Southeast Asia as a food dye (soak the petals in hot water, and the blue comes out) and in mainland Southeast Asia to make a pretty, pale blue drink of no discernible flavour. However, if you squeeze lime or lemon juice into it, it turns an equally pretty pale purple colour, basically purple lemonade, but it's quite fun to watch it happen. One could presumably get a nice little science lesson for children out of it.

There are white and pale blue cultivars, and a very rare lilac-coloured cultivar, but obviously those are of no culinary significance.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=clitoria+ternatea&atb=v385-1&iax=images&ia=images

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/aug/23/how-to-make-the-perfect-strawberry-ice-cream-recipe-felicity-cloake

"Perfect strawberry ice-cream

Makes About 1 litre, to serve 8

500g ripe strawberries, hulled
150g white sugar
50ml lemon juice
350ml double cream
150ml condensed milk
A pinch of salt

Cut the hulled strawberries in half, then put in a bowl with the sugar and lemon juice, and stir until the fruit is well coated. Cover and leave to steep for at least two hours, and longer, if possible, until the strawberries are sitting in bright red juice. Puree the fruit, leaving a few small chunks if you like… then add the cream, condensed milk and salt. Stir well, then chill thoroughly for at least an hour.

Churn the mixture in an ice-cream machine and serve at once."

This is quite similar to the gelato recipe that Housekeeper uses, except that we use regular milk, rather than condensed, and single cream. I dislike the high-fat, high-sugar style, which I find too sweet and sticky for my taste (if I want sweet and sticky I will get baklava). And obviously we use frozen strawberries, either from Thailand or from the local bakery supplies wholesaler. Cheaper than fresh, especially out of season, and just as good for culinary purposes. Plus the good Japanese/Korean/Thai varieties are better eaten fresh anyway.

I try strawberry ice-cream whenever I come across it on a menu, the way I do Apple Crumble, just to see if it's better than mine...

The people who come to my family's Christmas lunch are old family friends. We are all quietly aware that there is no guarantee that everyone will be there next year, so it's a poignant joy. One couple brought their visiting daughter (whom I've known since we were children and am always pleased to see) and her 17-year old grandson, a very nice boy.

Lunch was:

Mulligatawny soup with rice on the side
Nasi ulam (Malay herb and rice salad, the full traditional recipe involving dried prawns and more than ten different herbs, made by the traditional Lady Down The Road)
Several racks of lamb
Ham
Three gigantic salads brought by one of the guests
Poached salmon, with brown bread and butter
Trifle with raspberries, one with sherry and one without, for the non-drinkers
A fig and walnut cake brought by another guest, soaked with brandy to the point of being pudding
Champagne

It was all very nice, people dropped in after lunch, some people left, the remnant stayed for tea, I stayed for dinner (leftovers), and read the Economist Christmas/New Year double issue and FT Weekend. It was cloudy and cool and pleasant.

I will pre-cook the filling of a pie if it's something like beef or chicken stew; anything involving meat or fish, basically, that's just regular food safety, and also, any stew tastes better the day after it's made. But if it's fruit or vegetable, I actually don't see the need. Most recipes I've come across ask you to cook the vegetables or fruit beforehand, after which they are subjected to another half hour or so of baking. This tends to turn everything into mush, especially things like apples, or courgettes, which can cook to a level of agreeable toothsomeness in about a minute at the correct heat. Even the root vegetables like carrots or radishes don't need much pre-cooking; I find a bit of brief parboiling more than enough, especially if they're cut into small pieces.

I never knew that special cooking apples existed until I went to school in the UK. I'm used to using regular eating apples for pies and crumbles, and they hold up much better to heat. Apples that collapsed into mush when heated were a rather nasty shock (like most of the food in my boarding-school(which I would not have fed to a compost-heap, and which to this day makes me ineligible to donate blood, for fear that mad-cow disease will eventually turn my brain and the brains of all recipients of blood, into Swiss cheese).

In the last few years, I've had to adapt all the quince recipes I was using too, since the local variety (which I suspect may be Chaenomeles not Cydonia), does collapse into mush after about 10 minutes high heat, rather than staying iron hard for geological ages like the Mediterranean quinces I struggled with elsewhere.

I had it in a restaurant more than fifteen years ago (now closed, sadly, they also did the best cheese straws), and have eaten versions of it ever since. It is very simple:

Warm cooked beetroot, chopped into cubes, crumbled feta cheese (or any crumbly cheese, it's nice with Wensleydale too), walnuts, and an orange, peeled and segmented (two, if they're the little peeling oranges). The original had arugula, but I don't usually bother. I might add shredded mint or basil leaves. Peeling oranges are more convenient, but segmenting a regular orange is fine too, and gives you more juice, which mixes nicely with the crumbled feta, to basically form a dressing. A bowl of that with a slice of buttered, toasted home-made bread, and fruit afterwards, is a perfect meal, and never fails to cheer me up.

The farmers were selling quince wine this year, so I bought a few bottles and distributed them as gifts to various people hwho expressed interest. It's actually very nice. Sweet, but with a nice sour tang, good fruit flavour, and stronger than it tastes. Would be great in cakes and mixed with fizzy water. I have a bit of a bottle left, and HOusekeeper will use it in the next batch of Queen Cakes for the freezer.