Christmas Past | Wombat News | Mine News
Latest awards | New Books | The January garden
School gardens | A Few Cool recipes (and two warm ones):
. The Perfect Boiled egg
. Lemon and Mint Granita
. Pineapple Crush
. Melon with Ginger
. Never Fail Potato Soufflé
. Bountiful Berry Frappe
. The Simplest Orange Frappe of All
I’m sitting here listening to the frogs and the rain. The valley is lush, the grass ankle high, the mist seeping down into the gullies.
Somehow in the past four months it’s rained nearly every day without a flood. The ground is saturated, and any heavy fall would mean a torrent. But the rain has touched us gently this year, bringing fat wombats, not flood.
The same rain that is murmuring above the valley is bringing destruction to so many. I’ve just got off the phone to my father, to see if they are evacuating yet. Other friends and family are cut off, but safe and with full larders- or were, when we last heard, before the phones went off.
It’s been a day of phone calls, the sort that can only say ‘are you alright?’ and ‘we’re thinking of you’, as at this stage there is nothing else that most of us can do.
To all in the floods that’s really all I can say now: ‘are you alright?’ and ‘we’re thinking of you.’
Christmas past
It’s sad to think that most of us get less than 100 Christmases. I don’t think I’ve ever known a bad one.
This one involved laughter, food, sitting by the creek and watching the water slide down the grooves worn by tens of thousands of years in the granite, watching Mothball wombat grab the front door in her teeth and slam it a few times till I brought out her food…all good things to treasure in the memory. The cicadas opened up in full chorus for Christmas day, and the phone calls from more far-flung family were all happy ones.
Christmas changes as you get older. When you’re small it’s a time for yourself. As you get older most of the pleasure is preparing Christmas for others. But not quite all- the eggplant parmigiana this year was made for me as well as the friends who ate it. I adore eggplant parmigiana and Bryan hates it, and it’s so fiddly that you need to make a vast dish of it to be worthwhile.
The family we spend Christmas with mostly aren’t related by blood or marriage. It’s a pity that you can have defacto partners but not defacto sisters, brothers, grandmas, aunts and uncles. Come to think of it, parts of our family have fur or feathers, too.
Wombat news
No, Mothball did not need Christmas dinner. On the other hand neither did I. But we both enjoyed it. Mothball doesn’t take much food from us now. It’s the ritual she likes: bashing the door till I come out and place a handful of food in her bowl, then scratch her rump for a bit then go inside.
If Bryan feeds her she’ll eat two mouthfuls then bash the door again. She likes the power, more than the food. Though the food is good too if you’re an elderly wombat and it’s raining and you’ve had to wade through the creek to get to your human servants.
None of the other wombats are attracted by the food these days, nor the wallabies. There’s plenty of grass and they’ll all fat. But the door bashing and serving of food are important rituals in Mothball’s day. They’re part of ours, too.
News on the Mine
The threat of the mine 4 km upstream from us is worse- the company have announced new gold reserves, and that they’ll be processing silver, copper and lead at the site, too. We will find out on January 10 if the Federal Government will investigate the threat to the area and endangered species there- the spotted tailed quolls, rock wallabies, New Holland mice, Green and Gold bell frog, rufous fantail, satin fly catcher, black faced monarch, Araluen gum, Araluen Zieria, Button Wrinklewort, Grey Deua Pomaderris, Summer Leek Orchid, Majors Creek Leek Orchid, Chef’s Cap Correa, Hoary Sunray and many others, like the Powerful Owls and Barking Owls, Little Eagles, Red Goshawk, Gang Gang cockatoos, grey headed flying fox, listed as endangered by the NSW government but not by the Federal government.
So many species here have never been identified, like the giant python- a dull black, not shiny like a red bellied black snake, as thick as a pergola post. The nearest python habitat is about 60 km away, in very different country and climate down the coast. The pythons there are olive pythons, with strong markings, quite unlike the pythons here.
This gorge has survived drought, the deep pools worn into the bedrock providing water for the bird migrations, the animals who come out at night. The microclimates shelter them through heat and frost; the updrafts have stopped bushfire encroaching. Much of the country is too inaccessible even for feral goats- not while they have easier country to roam. It has survived so much, and will for tens of thousands of years more. But it can’t survive pollution from Xanthates used in processing, or Xanthates and large amounts of concrete used in backfill for the mines changing the water from acid to alkaline. I’ve spent decades watching the local flora refuse to germinate or thrive near concrete walls or paving, or in areas where I’ve adde dolomite. (I’ve stopped bringing in anything alkaline now.)
Sorry- that was the bad news. The good is that the NSW Office of Water has stated that they are unable to support the mine proposal due to inadequate information, lack of monitoring data and uncertainty of impacts.
This is just one of the many submissions criticising the development. Despite this- and the other studies- the minister may decide to approve it.
I think the most common response when I tell people about the mine is ‘but how can they do something like that?’
The answer is: so easily.
Latest Awards
The Night They Stormed Eureka won the 2010 NSW Premier’s History Award for Young People.
Baby Wombat’s Week, co-created with Bruce Whatley, is on the ‘long list’ for The Kate Greenway Awards in the UK… wombat paws crossed that it makes it to the ‘short list’.
The exhibition, ‘The Tinytoreum’, that Bruce Whatley and I created based on the characters from The Shaggy Gully Times has won the IMAGinE Museum Award.
Baby Wombat’s Week, also created with Bruce Whatley, also won this year’s ABIA (or Australian Book Industry Award) for younger readers, too.
New Books
A Waltz for Matilda
This is, perhaps, the best book I have written. It wasn’t quite the book I thought I was going to write, either. Other voices kept intruding, more whispers from the past. Finally the book was twice as long as I had expected, more saga than story.
With the help of Aboriginal elder Auntie Love, the ladies of the Women’s Temperance and Suffrage League and many others, she confronts the unrelenting harshness of life on the land and the long-standing hostility of local squatter, Mr. Drinkwater. She also discovers that enduring friendship can be the strongest kind of love.
Set against a backdrop of bushfire, flood, war and jubilation, this is the story of one girl’s journey towards independence. It is also the story of others who had no vote and very little but their dreams.
Drawing on the well-known poem by A.B. Paterson and from events rooted in actual history, this saga tells the story of how Australia became a nation. It is also a love story – about a girl, and about the land.
Queen Victoria’s Underpants
Queen Victoria’s Underpants should be back in the bookshops – the first printing sold out faster than anyone thought it would.
The revised Chook Book is in the shops too now – twice as big as the original edition and much changed and updated. It’s all you ever wanted to know (and probably a bit more) about how to keep chooks in your backyard or at school.
The last in the Animal Stars series is The Horse That Bit a Bushranger – the true as I can make it account of a few of my ancestors and bushranger Ben Hall, the story of a young convict who rode a giant brumby stallion no one else could tame; who won a race, a farm and a wife… and of what happened next.
Oracle is out, too. It’s the most exciting of all of my books so far; set in ancient Greece at the court of Mycenae, where Nikko and his sister Thetis are acclaimed as the greatest acrobats in Greece, so valued by the High King that they are even sent on embassies to other kingdoms. But Thetis has both a curse and a gift – if she speaks at all, she must tell the truth. And when the walls of Mycenae fall in an earthquake Nikko and the wild horse dancer Euridice must follow Thetis as she finds her true place – as the first of the oracles of Delphi.
Other new-ish books
A Year in the Valley
This is a reissue of Seasons of Content, with a new introduction, as well as a new ‘What Happened Next’ section about our lives in the Valley since I wrote the book – more than twenty years ago now. I wrote it mostly for my own pleasure then and only hauled it into publishing shape on an impulse many years later and sent it to HarperCollins. It is about the Valley – the wombats, our lives and the dances of the lyrebirds. It is also very much about food: the growing of it, the cooking, the sharing with friends, human and otherwise.
The Tomorrow Book
Illustrated by Sue de Gennaro, a look at the paradise we could create, maybe just tomorrow.
This is a special book. It’s closer to my heart than anything I’ve written before and Sue’s work is inspired: funny, whimsical and extraordinarily beautiful. It’s what happens when the King and Queen retire and go off in their campervan, leaving the kids in charge and they find the solution to each of the world’s major problems in their library and create… tomorrow.
Every one of the solutions really does exist – and the possible tomorrows are very, very good indeed.
P.S. Sue created the extraordinary artwork in collage, using materials she found in her kitchen, from tea bags to labels. It is too magic to even have words to describe it.
Dance of the Deadly Dinosaurs
The sequel to Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior continues the crazy adventures of Boo, werewolf and hero-in-the-making!
The Night They Stormed Eureka
A fresh look at the history we thought we knew, and winner of this year’s NSW Premier’s History Award for Younger Readers
Are the history books wrong? Could the rebels have succeeded? Could we too have declared independence from Britain, like the USA?
This is the story of Sam, a modern teenager, thrust into the world of the Ballarat goldfields, with the Puddlehams, who run the best cook shop on the diggings and dream of a hotel with velvet seats, ten thousand miners who dream of gold and rebellion, and Professor Shamus O’Blivion, who tries not to dream at all. But there is a happy ending for Sam, who discovers that when you stand together, you really can change the world – and your own life, too.
Schedule for the Next Few Months
I’m sorry I can’t accept every invitation – there are often two or three invitations to talk somewhere each day and, much as I’d love to, there is no way I can do them all, or even most of them. Basically, I can only do one trip away from home a month, and that includes trips to Canberra, so I mostly only speak to groups of more than 200 and when it will take no more than six hours travel each way (except Western Australia). I’ve also stopped doing early morning and after-dinner talks.
But as I have friends and family in Brisbane and Perth I always love an excuse to travel there... or anywhere that might involve a stopover in Perth, too.
New South Wales bookings are done by Lateral Learning (bookings@laterallearning.com.au), Queensland bookings by Helen Bain at Speaker’s Inc, Victoria by Booked Out, (simon@bookedout.com.au), SA bookings by Carol Carralloe (c.carroll@internode.on.net), WA bookings by the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, and for other bookings contact me at jackiefrench72@gmail.com.
But please don’t use any of these addresses for help with school projects, help in getting a book published, or just to have a chat – again much as I’d love that too, I can’t manage to answer more or, truthfully, even the number I get now. I already spend half my day answering queries and, despite having help in the office, am not quite sure how to cope, as questions come from overseas as well as Australia these days.
There are answers to nearly all your project questions as well as queries on how to get books published on the website, and answers to every gardening question so far received are in my gardening books, which should be in most libraries.
February 17-19:
talks in Darwin. Contact Barbara Hickey at the Darwin City Council Libraries for details of the sessions.
March 1-4:
probably talks in Melbourne. Contact simon@bookedout.com.au if you’d like to make a booking.
March 19-21:
Keynote address at Wombat Conference, Albury. (And if any schools or libraries nearby want talks while I’m there, this is the time to book.)
March 31, April 1:
Newington Literary Festival, Sydney.
May 9-13: I’ll be in Adelaide and country SA, available to talk some days.
May 18 and 19:
Talks at Queensland schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
July 18 and 19:
Talks at Brisbane schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
July 20 and 21:
Cairns Writer’s Festival.
October 24-31:
Fremantle, Perth and Albany WA. Contact the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre for details and bookings.
The January Garden
Summer gardens have their own smell – roses, or ripe tomatoes or maybe just brown lawns. (I love the smell of brown grass, sort of sweet and hay like). And the smell of hot soil as you water it at night, which is the best time to water in summer anyway. Scents always seem stronger at dusk.
January is the best time to:
. Buy a large new sun hat
. Hire the kids to scatter mulch around each shrub and flowers.
. Pick up fallen fruit for stewed fruit or jams (Hire the kids to do that, too)
. Plan a pergola for next year to shade glaring paving or concrete
. But a giant cool looking fern for the bathroom
Watch out for:
. Trees in lawns during January storms. Trees in the lawn get watered often, so they don’t put down deep roots. Which means they’re all too likely to fall down in a high wind! Keep the tops of any big trees by the house well pruned, so they’re less likely to fall over.
. Spiders in shoes and gardening gloves (I stamp on mine each time before I put them on)
. Wasps and bees in soft drink cans
. Too much heat and sunlight!
Plant:
Food garden
Plants: strawberry, sweet potato, choko, herbs.
Seeds: artichoke, asparagus, basil, beans, beetroot, burdock, cabbage, capsicum, carrot, celery, celtuce, chicory, corn salad, cress, cucumbers, eggplant, endive, fennel, kale, kohl rabi, leeks, lettuces (may not germinate if the temperature is over 26º C), melons, okra, parsley, pumpkin, radish, salsify, scorzonera, sweet corn, tomatoes, turnips, salad greens like mizuna and mitsuba, and zucchini.
Flower garden: Achillea, ageratum, alstromeria, alyssum, amaranthus, aster, balsam, Bellis perennis, brachycome, calendula, candytuft, Canterbury bells, carnation, celosia, clarkia, cleome, coleus, coreopsis, columbine, cosmos, delphinium, dichondra, echinacea, echinops, erigeron, euphorbia, foxglove, gaillardia, gazania, globe amaranth, gloxinia, godetia, gypsophila, helichrysum, heliotrope, hellebore, honesty, lavender, marigold, nasturtium, petunia, phlox, Flanders poppy, portulaca, rudbeckia, salpiglossis, salvia, scabious, sweet William, viola, zinnia and snapdragon.
Question of the month:
Q. There’s horrible black gunge on my cumquat tree! How do I get rid of it?
A. The gunge is sooty mould – it grows on the sweet excretions (to use a polite term) of sap-sucking insects, usually scale or aphids that can infect just about any plant, not just cumquats. Use Pestoil to kill the pests and the sooty mould will gradually vanish by itself.
School Gardens
By the time your kids are in Year 12 they’ll have spent nearly 14,500* hours at school. (12 years of 40 weeks a year of five days a week, six hours a day)
But to many kids schoolyards are like prison yards – boring and educationally stultifying.
Kids learn better (and their brains develop better) in an environment that’s both stimulating and the sort we humans like: with flowers, grass, leaves and trees.
Kids need to learn to garden too: it’s fantastic exercise, and a great way to learn that fresh fruit and vegies taste great. Most of all, it’s fun.
School grounds can be places where kids learn the basics of botany, zoology, physics, and cooking, from how to grow your own backyard vegies to making the world’s best olive oil. They are also places where kids can MOVE. So often kids can’t concentrate simply because they haven’t been ‘debounced’. Kids need physical play or they fidget.
So how do you make a school yard a good place for your kids?
The trouble is that so many school gardens are based on backyard gardens. They need a lot of work – and when the inspirational teacher or parent leaves the enthusiasm dies – and so does the garden.
. A school garden needs to be tough.... able to survive with almost no watering, pruning or spraying.
. It needs to be safe... no brittle branches that break when kids climb the trees, or limbs that will fall on passers by.
. It needs to be fun... a place where kids can pretend to hunt dragons or fly to Alpha Centauri.
. It needs to be indestructible... plants that won't be loved to death by too many small hands and feet.
. It needs to be fascinating... so different from the world they know that kids will want to know how and why it works.
. It needs to be flexible... so that kids can keep adding their own plants and ideas.
. It needs to be delicious... so kids can learn how food grows, and how good fresh food tastes
. It needs to be inspiring... because that is what we owe our kids, giving them the hope, the knowledge and the joy to create a future world.
The best school gardens are ones that suit the local climate AND suit the school community.
How do you find out what kids want? Ask them. Try giving kids the ideas below, and see which ones they like. They’ll probably come up with some great ideas of their own.
Some Great School Ground Ideas
1. Outdoor ‘classrooms’
Many kids learn far better out of doors and when they’re moving – outdoor classrooms where little kids learn their letters and arithmetic by spraying water onto walls or bitumen, instead of writing on paper, or play ‘numbers hopscotch’ where you jump onto two numbers then have to jump onto what they come to when added together.
2. A Row of Climbing Trees
A tree can be a castle, or a fort, or a flying saucer. A good climbing tree has to have wide, solid branches, not brittle ones that will break when you least expect it. But DO check trees regularly for signs of rot or wind damage in the trunk and branches, and prune off twiggy branches, too, to make sure the trees are a good climbing shape. Avoid trees with poisonous sap or seeds. Do provide a soft landing space underneath, that’s kept regularly raked. Good climbing trees include white mulberries, Moreton Bay and Port Jackson figs, Japanese maples, Chinese elms, Manchurian pears (the old-fashioned spreading ones), medlars, crab apples, olives, apples, avocadoes, loquats, oranges and lillypillies.
3. Mural walls.
Create permanent murals that each kid adds to, as well as walls for temporary murals that kids can add to, as they like – the only exclusions should be personal comments, obscenity and cruelty. And provide masses of very, very water-soluble paint.
4. A Sport’s Library
A sport’s library has skipping ropes, elastic, hoops, large soft balls, beanbags, yo-yos, and marbles, spray bottles for ‘spray bottle tag’ on hot days. Kids sign out equipment in the morning and have to sign it back at the end of lunchtime.
5. A school ‘cubby competition’
Think of castles made from plastic milk bottles and duct tape; a mansion of Styrofoam boxes and blankets…
6. A School Vegie Garden
The one bit of ‘gardening’ that all kids adore is picking and eating.
Never-say-die school vegies
These are all perennial or they reseed themselves readily.
Amaranth (use the leaves and grain too), burdock, chokos, perennial chilli (to teach kids to ask before they bite), garlic chives, Jerusalem artichokes, rocket, parsley, chives, chilacayote melons, spring onions, warrigal spinach, yacon.
Other low work vegies: cherry tomatoes (less likely to get fruit fly in school holidays),
New veg for kids to have fun with:
Blue or red corn, coloured silverbeet, round zucchini, round carrots, purple carrots, magic beans: purple beans, like Purple King or Queen, that turn green when they’re cooked. Vegetable spaghetti: this marrow has interesting wriggly innards. Call it ‘worms’ and serve with tomato sauce.
7. A Fruit Tree Hedge or School Orchard
Easy-care Fruit Trees for Schools
NB: Choose the ones that do well in your area
Acacia victoriae, almonds, apples – a hedge of dwarf apples that can be netted against pests, avocados, bananas, blackberries (thornless), Brazilian cherry bush, lemon, calamondins (a very tough and prolific citrus most confuse with cumquats), Capulin cherry, carob, cherries – Stella, self pollinating, needs less chilling, chestnuts, cherry of the Rio Grande, Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas), date palm, feijoa, figs Cape gooseberry, Midyim berry, banana passionfruit, hazelnut, icecream bean tree, jaboticoba, Japanese raisin tree, jelly palm, lillypilly, loquat, macadamia, medlar, mulberry – white so they don’t stain, olive, peachcott, peach – dwarf so it can be netted against pests, plumcott, plums – early bearing, pecan, Coulter's pine (Pinus coulteri), Mexican stone pine (P. cembroides), Italian stone pine or umbrella pine (P. pinea) Swiss stone pine (P. cembra), pepino, pistachio, pomegranate, tamarillo or walnut.
8. Class Gardens
Each class chooses its plants and tends them. (They get to eat them, too).
These all fruit during the first year of planting: Raspberries, strawberries, most brambleberries, blueberries from a large bush, limes from a well-grown tree, pawpaw (in warm areas), mountain pawpaw, passionfruit (in warm areas), banana passionfruit (two years in cooler areas), tamarillo, babaco, pepino, melons, cape gooseberries, gooseberries (if the bush planted was well-grown) and rhubarb.
7. A ‘Useful Plants’ Garden
Most kids know that vegies grow in the ground, and fruit grows on trees. But there are many other fascinating uses for plants:
Flax (for weaving)
Papyrus (for paper- wet areas only)
Cinnamon (indoors except in sub-tropical areas)
Scented pelargoniums – at least 12 different scents
Scented plants like lemon and lime verbena bushes, pineapple marigold bushes
Sugar maple – for homegrown syrup
Edible wattles, like Acacia victoriae, for wattle seed ‘flour’
Coffee bushes (High School only)
Paperbark
Gifts to the future
You don’t have to be a parent to help your local school . Imagine if every family in the district gave a tree or a few hours of their time? It wouldn’t just be a gift for the kids – it would be a gift our future, and a gift to the earth.
Not all plants are suitable for schools. But all these make great school gifts:
. A white mulberry tree. They grow in any climate, don’t stain, grow fast and are drought hardy.
. Calamondins: a tough citrus most people confuse with cumquats. Sour, but fun for kids.
. Cape gooseberry bushes: will fruit in six months even in shade, and grow fast from seed.
. Passionfruit, or banana passionfruit in temperate areas, or granadilla in hot ones, to clamber up poles and along chain-link fences.
. Mandarins, except in frosty areas.
. A row of dwarf apples – and fruit fly netting to keep pests off.
. A pair of kiwi fruit, to ramble along a sturdy fence.
. A few bales of mulch – and an hour to spread it.
The Problem of Water
School gardens MUST have an underground watering system installed, with drippers connected to water tanks. Otherwise the strawberries will die in the Christmas holidays- and so will the kid’s inspiration.
Things kids learn from gardening:
. Hard work achieves things
. Patience... those strawberries WILL get ripe
. Fresh food tastes better (but remove the slugs first)
. Yes, you can grow your own
. Real life is more satisfying than TV (except for The Simpsons)
. It’s possible to have a two-hour conversation with your relatives
. Things GROW- without the aid of computers or microchips.
Dangers for kids:
. Steep retaining walls and steps, that kids can fall down.
. Ponds. Small kids can drown in surprisingly little water. Either keep water fenced off from kids, or have a solid reinforcing mesh cage just under the water – or both.
. Dirt. Do let kids get down and dirty, but also teach them that dirt can harbour dangers too. Make sure they wash (and dry) hands before eating.
. Pesticides, fungicides and herbicides – keep them out of the reach of kids and pets – including snail pellets!
. Poisonous plants
A surprisingly high number of common garden plants are poisonous and others can have irritating sap like poinsettia. Avoid plants with tempting but toxic berries, like the arum lilies, melia trees (white cedar), ivy, black nightshade, potato vine, cotoneaster, lantana, buddleia, wallflowers, broom, daphne, delphinium... in fact ANY seed and most berries are probably poisonous unless they're being grown for food!
Some Cool Recipes
The perfect boiled egg
(For hot nights when you want something simple with fruit for dinner)
Place eggs in cold water. Bring to the boil. Take off the heat and leave for three or four minutes. At three minutes the white will be set and the yolk runny; at four minutes the yolk will be just beginning to set.
Cut off the top; add a tsp of light sour cream and one of caviar, and eat with a teaspoon. Or just make ladies’ fingers or toast soldiers
Never Fail Potato Soufflé
Mix
1 cup hot mashed spuds (No milk butter etc added)
4 egg yolks
1 cup cream or light sour cream
2-tb butter
2 tb grated cheddar cheese
1 tb chopped chives (or parsley if no chives)
Now mix in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Place in an oven dish (preheated for best result) and bake at 225C for twenty minutes or until, just set and crisply golden on top. Eat at once.
Melon in Ginger Syrup
Cut water and other melons into bite size chunks. Drizzle with a VERY little green ginger wine (a good excuse to buy some for winter tippling) or combine 1-cup water with 1-cup sugar and one teaspoon peeled grated ginger. Simmer for twenty minutes, and drizzle that over the fruit.
Grown Up Iceblocks
(Pretty fantastic for kids too...and really excellent as a dessert at a barbeque!!!!!!)
1-cup pineapple, chopped
1-cup rockmelon, chopped
1 banana. Chopped
Half-cup cream
Half-cup sugar
Half cup water OR Champagne or good white wine
Juice half a lemon
1 tsp mint, chopped, optional OR 1tsp ginger root, peeled and chopped, optional
Half-cup grapes, optional
half cup paw paw, chopped, optional
half cup strawberries, chopped, optional
half cup lychees, chopped, optional
You will also need: iceblock moulds or plastic or disposable cups
iceblock sticks or teaspoons
Boil sugar and water or wine with the mint or ginger (or no ginger and mint as you prefer) for 5 minutes. Cool.
Add the fruit. You must have pineapple and banana and preferably rockmelon too, but other fruit can be added from the list.
Take long iceblock moulds, or plastic cups or even disposable cups. Pour about tb of cream into each, and then carefully add the fruit mixture, so that the cream stays mostly at the bottom, and doesn't mix through it too much. Poke an iceblock stick or teaspoon into each one; freeze, and eat.
Lemon and Mint Granita
2 cups water
1-cup castor sugar
2 tsp mint, finely chopped
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
Boil sugar and water for 5 minutes. Cool. Add mint, juice and zest; freeze till slushy, or freeze till firm and let it melt a bit while you eat the main course. Serve in chilled dishes and eat with a teaspoon.
Bountiful Berry Frappe
This is wonderful with home grown mulberries, but good with any berries, including strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, or a mix of several berries. Fresh berries are best, especially sun ripened home grown ones. But commercial frozen berries are better than no berries at all!
Ingredients
2 cups frozen berries
1-cup sugar syrup (see below) or apple juice
Blend or mash. Serve the slush at once in chilled glasses so it doesn’t melt too fast.
OR
Roll any amount of frozen berries in castor sugar. Blend- the moisture in the berries will provide the liquid. Eat at once.
Pineapple Crush
3 cups pineapple, peeled and cored
Half-cup sugar syrup
Half-cup water
3 mint leaves
Blend everything but the mint leaves. Place in a plastic container in the fridge and stir well every 20 minutes till slushy…or freeze entirely and leave out twenty minutes before you want to eat it, then mash well.
To serve: place a mint leaf in each glass and pour in the crush.
Glorious Red Cherry Frappe
Ingredients:
3 cups cherries, frozen
1-cup sugar syrup
Blend. Eat.
Adults only Apricot, Gin and Grapefruit Frappe
Ingredients:
3 cups apricots, stones removed
Juice of two grapefruit
2 cups sugar syrup
2-tb gin
Blend everything together. Place the result in a plastic container with a lid and freeze, stirring well every 20 minutes. Serve when just frozen.
If you make this the day before let it partially thaw then blend it again just before you eat it; otherwise the ice crystals will be hard and splintery rather than soft and slushy.
The Simplest Orange Frappe of All
Take a big ripe orange. Cut off the top like a lid- then put it back on the orange. Place the orange in the freezer overnight.
Take the lid off, and eat the contents of the orange with a spoon. The flesh will be soft and sorbet like as you scrape it out ... and for the rest of the school holiday the kids will forget about iceblocks and bung oranges in the freezer instead.
Sugar Syrup
1-cup sugar
1-cup water
Juice of a lemon
Half level teaspoon tartaric acid
Boil the lot for five minutes. Use at once, or keep in a sealed container in the fridge for up to a week, or freeze for up to three months.
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