I picked my first bunch of rape during the week. It’s a green leafy vegetable known by many names and equally loved by the Italians and Chinese. It’s cooked by both cultures in a similar way. Blanched and then stir fried in oil and garlic. Olive oil for the Italians and a vegetable oil like peanut for the Chinese. It has a light bitter flavor which I just love. My mum used to squeeze lemon juice over it and eat a whole plate. I can easily do the same. I also add it to pasta by making into a kind of cooked pesto sauce. To do this you chop it in to small pieces before you blanch and saute it and then just add it to the boiled pasta. This is a typical Sicilian dish–simple but full of flavour. If you want more information on rape check out Maggie Beers info page at–

http://digital.gardeningaustralia.com.au/gardeningaustralia/200809/?pg=12#pg12

Okay, I haven’t transplanted the capsicum yet, hence no photo of it. However, here are a few photos of my garden from the last few weeks.

Our little lime tree seems to produce an endless supply of fruit. We were trying to think of ways of using them beyond G & Ts when we came across a TV show on Caribbean cooking. The cool Jamaican host seemed to use them in most of his recipes. One of the things I took away from the show was how to use limes in marinades and dressing. He made a marinade of olive oil, garlic, lime zest and fresh thyme, which he kept inside what he called his sunshine box. He then marinated langoustine in the mixture. I remember having langoustine on the Isle of Skye about 6 years ago and they were divine. As we don’t have langoustine in Australia yabbies or prawns will do just fine or lobster if you’re feeling extravagant. We tried prawns on skewers and then cooked them on the barbeque. We also squeezed lime juice over them while they were cooking. They were so delicious we tried the marinade on skewered chicken as well. I also used lime in a salad dressing I poured over my curly endive and avocado salad. It was a very limy and yummy meal. One thing I love about television is how it revels in the domestic, reworks it and gives it back to us. Cooking shows are the best at this. We watch a lot of them in our household. In fact I can hear my partner watching River Cottage right now.

Poppet has a thing for limes. He just loves them. A few weeks ago we had lime halves on the dinner table which we were squeezing over our fish. He wanted to do the same and got it all over his hands. Soon he started licking his hand and this turned into sucking on the actual limes. Then he rubbed his eyes and well you can guess what happened. Lime in the eyes. Stinging eyes. Screaming, crying and rushing to the bathroom to wash the little face. Two nights ago we squeezing lime halves at the table again. He he started with, ‘I want to do it’ ‘I want to do it too’. So we said okay but just a little squeeze and don’t put it in your mouth. Baba offered Poppet the lime, who carefully took it and immediately put it in his mouth and started sucking on it. Then it was a struggle to get it off him.

Okay, so it was time to make to use up some of those abundant basil leaves and make my Pesto, but to be honest I felt like eating sashimi for lunch today. It’s good brain food and I need some of that right now. So I made the pesto for poppet and sent Baba and poppet off to the fish markets to pick up some fresh sashimi. I decided to use Chinese noodles for the pesto as they come in these great little bundles for one. In any case, as they are egg noodles, they aren’t that different to pasta. So poppet was glad to have his pesto, which he mixed with the occasional pickled ginger and salmon sashimi and we had sashimi with the occasional bite of Pesto.