Basil pesto that breaks the rules

Is there any food that better sums up summer than homemade pesto, made from fresh-picked basil, with a good kick of garlic and the decadent, melt-in-your-mouth flavour and texture of pine nuts.
 

I’m obsessed with pesto. This year I’ve grown six clumps of basil so I can make enough pesto to last for months after our frosty Canberra nights wipe out the poor plants. That said, not a single jar has lasted more than a couple of days so far – it’s just so good; on pasta, on home grown tomatoes and by the spoonful.
 

The recipe is spectacularly simple. Fill your blender with basil, chuck in a couple of handfuls of pine nuts, and add one to six peeled garlic cloves depending on taste and likelihood of breathing on another person after eating said pesto. Season to taste with salt and pepper then pour over a seriously good glug of extra virgin olive oil. Blend for a minute or so, scraping down the sides if needed until you’ve got your preferred consistency.
 

At this point you’ll usually lightly stir in a handful of parmesan, but I no longer bother as (le mie scuse più sincere to Italian readers) I’ve decided that pesto is far better without it! With so much good fat in the form of the pine nuts and olive oil, a parmesan-free pesto is just so much creamier but lighter.

If worried about the cost of pine nuts, you can use other nuts like almonds, macadamias or cashews. You won’t get the same divine result but it will still make a great sauce. I picked up a kilo of pine nuts without having to re-mortgage my house by buying them from an online Australian company, vastly cheaper than those tiny packets found in the supermarkets.
 

Any Italians still reading may want to look away now, because here comes confession numero due: I prefer pesto on zucchini pasta more than pasta tradizionale – and this comes from someone who’s eaten pesto spaghetti in the mother country.

Zucchini pasta is made by putting a fresh zucchini through a spiralizer, a gadget

that turns it into ribbons. You can alternatively shave the zucchini with an apple peeler, or just dice it. Fry it for just a minute or two in olive oil so it doesn’t get soft, toss the pesto through and it’s ready to serve. The flavour and texture are entirely dissimilar to real pasta but give it a chance – zucchini pasta is nutty and satisfying without weighing you down.
 

If that’s too much too bear, try spooning the pesto over the largest, reddest, meatiest tomato you can find. Whether the tomato is raw, roasted or grilled, the pesto will bring out the sweetness and flavour like nothing else.

I’d love to hear from you – how do you like your pesto?

Delicious dealings with the great tomato glut

February and March are what many gardeners know as the time of the tomato glut. You’ve gone from squirting juice and seeds down your front as you munch on tomatoes while standing in the garden, to trying every tomato recipe under the sun, to sighing at that last five kilo box of tomatoes on your floor that’s attracting an unholy swarm of vinegar flies.

For me, this means hosting my own miniature La Tomatina festival in my kitchen as I squish, crush, blend and spatter tomato into various forms that can be enjoyed throughout the year.

There are various ways to preserve your harvest, including:
 

Freezing: simply enclose several tomatoes in a zip lock bag and pop in the freezer. Once you defrost them, the skins will simply peel off and the tomato will be perfect for cooking.
 

Passata: there are a thousand recipes out there but my way is possibly the laziest easiest. I blanch, peel and de-seed the tomatoes by hand, then cram them into jars, screw the lids on tightly and boil them for a while in a large saucepan of water to cook and preserve them. That last part is important – the first time I made passata I left the tomatoes raw. Three days later, they had forced off the lid and a pongy liquid was found foaming its way across my pantry.
 

Pasta sauce: I love making my own pasta sauce – it’s organic, tastes so much better and is so much healthier than commercial varieties, and I can up the garlic quotient as much as I like. Some commercial pasta sauces have up to nine teaspoons of sugar per jar – my recipe comes in at under a teaspoon per jar. Roma and San Marzano are the traditional choices of tomatoes but anything home-grown will be delicious. If you can’t grow your own, loiter around your local markets near closing time and you’ll probably be able to pick up a few kilos at bargain basement prices.

Diana’s spectacular roasted tomato sauce

Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius (fan-forced).

Halve the tomatoes and lay them skin side down on baking trays.*

Drizzle extra-virgin olive oil then lightly sprinkle a pinch of sugar over the top of the tomatoes to counter the tomatoes’ acidity and boost their flavour. I use coconut palm sugar as it has an amazing caramelly flavour, but brown or white sugar will do. Scatter dried herbs over the top – I use my own oregano and thyme – then toss several unpeeled cloves of garlic into each tray.

Roast for around 45 minutes then let cool. Set up a large saucepan, and a sieve over a bowl.

Peel the skins off the tomatoes – they should just slip off – and toss the skin in the sieve and the tomato in the saucepan. If you don’t want the seeds in the sauce, just empty them into the sieve as well. Squeeze the lovely, mellow caramel insides of the garlic cloves into the saucepan and discard the peels.

Pour any excess liquid into the bowl, and squeeze out the tomato skins in there as well to get the last of the juices out before you compost them. What you now have in the bowl is a gorgeous, rich, clear(ish) tomato stock; the perfect base for soup, risotto, quinoa, or just about anything else you use stock in.

Mash the tomatoes - I like my sauce chunky so I usually use a potato masher, but a stick blender gives a great smooth result. Bring the sauce to the boil.

Ladle the sauce into clean glass jars, right up to the brim, and tightly screw the lids on. At some stage during the next couple of hours you may hear a satisfying pop as the vacuum kicks in and the lid depresses, but don’t worry if you don’t.

* If you have a glut of any other summer vegies, add them to the sauce too. Just roast and blend them along with the tomatoes. Last year I made a fantastic sauce that also included eggplants, capsicum and zucchini. This year my eggplants barely qualified as a crop and I’m yet to taste my first capsicum, so it's strictly tomatoes in the sauce.

This sauce will last for at least a year – I’m still eating last summer’s jars – if not more. Store it in the pantry and enjoy with spaghetti, in lasagne or whenever the excuse arises.

Two batches of sauce - one with and one without seeds - and a bottle of the magical tomato stock.

My 70-year-old tomato and other treasures

Summertime for a gardener is synonymous is amazing Mediterranean crops – basil, eggplants, capsicums, and above all, tomatoes. Once you've tasted home-grown tomatoes, you’ll never want to buy a commercial tomato again – I know I haven’t bought a single one in three years.

From left to right - A Roma, from a plant that produced only grape-sized, flavour packed tomatoes; self-sown cherry tomatoes; the stunning, early-harvest Violet Jasper; one of my favourites for flavour and versatility, the Jaune Flammee; normal-sized Roma’s; Mortgage Lifter, and the amazing 1944 Bullheart tomato.

I cropped over 100 kgs of tomatoes last year, which was far, far too much. I force-fed kilos of tomatoes to my colleagues, friends, and neighbours, and still have a dozen jars of 2014-vintage passata and pasta sauce in the pantry despite using a jar every week or so throughout the year.

So late last Winter, I promised myself I’d grow eight tomato plants, max. I sowed the following seeds:

• A 2014 self-seeder - Roma or perhaps San Marzano – a great sauce tomato anyway, with tiny unobtrusive seeds.
• Violet Jasper, a stunning dark maroon tomato with green stripes – not the best for flavour but a very early and enthusiastic cropper – from seed saved from a friend’s 2014 crop. 
• Jaune Flammee, a spectacularly zesty flavoured tomato that’s great raw, in soup or sauces – from my own saved seed.
• Opa’s Brandywine – mega, meaty tomatoes, the seed given to me by Sue Parsons, garden columnist for the Canberra Times. My largest Brandywine weighed in at a whopping 445 grams, although the fables tell of a 673gm tomato grown by a Canberran last year.
• Gold Fleck – seed saved from a Big Red tomato plant grown in 2014 that produced amazing gold-flecked tomatoes. Big, fruity tomatoes with metallic-gold shooting stars across the skin.

The gorgeous Violet Jasper.

Forty-six tomatoes seedlings grew, and suddenly colleagues, friends, and neighbours found themselves being strongly encouraged to adopt a plant or three for the summer. I planted ten plants into my community garden plot.

But still more tomatoes came my way, including the imaginatively named Mortgage Lifter from another local gardening guru met through the Canberra Organic Growers Society. Two more tomato plants appeared of their own accord in the plot, producing cherry tomatoes and sweet round tomatoes the size of golf balls.

Suddenly, I had 13 tomato plants – more than last summer! But the milder summer produced a far more reasonable  crop, around 70 kgs. Many kilos were eaten or given away, and many more were bottled as passata or an amazing roasted pasta sauce (recipe in my next post!).
 

But it wasn’t over yet. In mid-summer, I was absolutely privileged to be gifted with seeds from a Bullheart tomato plant that grew from a 70-year-old seed, the single successful germinator from an envelope of seeds found in an box of black and white photos; a true heirloom. I raised 11 seedlings, gifting nine to other gardeners who would appreciate the significance of the plants. I planted the remaining two in my backyard where they’d be less likely to cross-pollinate with other tomato varieties. 

When they finally fruited, the 1944 tomatoes were stunning – around 500 grams each, heart shaped, and almost all flesh with few seeds. They were quite literally a rich, dense, filling meal in themselves. They were the last seedlings to be planted by several weeks, and are now the only plants still producing fruit. I haven’t yet cooked any as I’m too busy enjoying them raw, sometimes with a dollop of home-made pesto.

A mid-summer harvest - who needs the supermarket!

I'd love to hear from you - what are your favourite ways to eat, cook or preserve tomatoes?

Breaking the rules for purple broccoli

There are some hard and fast rules when it comes to gardening in a climate of extremes like Canberra's:

• don't plant tomatoes before the Melbourne Cup
• don't leave your agaves outside at -7 degrees Celsius unless you'd like to see a plant melt
• don't try to grow sub-tropical fruit
• a week of 41 degrees Celsius will mean you spend more time holding a hose than seeing your loved ones.

So it was with a horror that only a mildly obsessed gardener would understand that I opened my Canberra Organic magazine on Saturday and read: "March: it's too late to grow brassicas from seed". It's important to understand here that I happen to grow a spectacularly sweet purple broccoli, so genuinely delicious that I haven't been able to stomach the store-bought variety for years. Broccoli and other brassicas are best grown for a winter crop, as it will be far sweeter, less sulphurous, and definitely far less riddled with the voracious caterpillars of the dreaded white cabbage butterfly.

It's also important to note that I'm the kind of Canberra gardener who bends the rules:

• I plant my tomatoes in late October
• I have a kaffir lime, chocolate mousse plant, and avocado tree, all of which are sub-tropical to tropical plants
• I have a stash of blankets with which I meticulously rug up my agaves and aforementioned sub tropical trees every winter
• good thing I like standing outside at 6am watching the sunrise - there's no getting around watering in that kind of heat. 

And given there was still one whole day until March, gosh darn it, I was going to sow some brassica seeds! Broccoli and other brassicas have tiny seeds, so they're best propagated in pots before planting into their final destination garden bed or pot. I'm trying a slightly different approach this time, swapping the usual seed raising mix for coir: coconut fibre that comes in a dry compacted block. I crumble some into a bucket with plenty of water and a dollop of Seasol for good measure. Five minutes later it's ready to spread into a shallow well-drained tray.
I've decided to plant broccoli, cauliflower, cavelo nero kale, and some white onion seeds as (Handy tip #1:) growing onions and other alliums near broccoli makes it taste sweeter. I use my own seeds, saved from previous crops, and originally sourced the seed from The Diggers Club – a treasure trove of heirloom vegies.

Kale and broccoli seeds - separated at birth

Handy tip #2: label, label, label. Broccoli, cauliflower and kale seed are identical, as are their seedlings, and nobody's memory is that good two months after sowing. I cut rectangles out of margarine containers and write the names on with permanent marker - it does fade in the sun so I refresh the text every couple of weeks. 

They're all small seeds so I sow them on the surface of the coir, then cover with a layer of vermiculite - a super lightweight mineral that helps retain moisture but doesn't stop the tiny micro-greens from pushing through to get that critical first dose of sunlight.

Bitter experience has taught me not to just plant a few seeds as you may end up with no plants at all. Besides, seed is far cheaper than buying seedlings, particularly when it's seed you've saved from last year's crop.

I sow the seeds thickly; if they all germinate I'll have enough kale to feed a small African nation, but I'm happy to gift excess seedlings to fellow green thumbs at the community garden, work, and in the family. The seeds need to be kept damp and warm in order to germinate. Given the nights are getting a little chilly, these babies are going to come inside each night so that the germination process stays on track.

In a few weeks' time, the first two tiny leaves will poke through the vermiculite, followed by the first "true" leaves that actually look like what the plant will grow into. When the true leaves appear, I'll use a skewer or fork to prick out the bubbies and transplant them into small pots, so they have room to grow to a size suitable for planting in the garden - about 15cm tall.
My purple broccoli will be going in the backyard rather than the community garden plot this year, as part of my crop rotation plan. And you won't believe it but (Handy tip #3:) even with broccoli, one of the great joys of home gardening is being able to wander out the back door, snap off a floret and munch down on this amazing living food.