Intro | Wombat news | Book News | New Awards | The October garden | A Few Recipes
Intro
It’s spring: winds, dust and enough blossom to satisfy a million wild hives of bees and at least a dozen sugar gliders. Sugar gliders are messy eaters- the ground is littered with flowers after they’ve been munching. They like the big grevilleas and the avocado blossom best.
The dust started out red and quite pretty, streaking all the white lilies and wonga vine blossom. But the last lot was grey, which is plain dismal. Luckily there are so many flowers you don’t notice the grey splodges on the leaves.
Everything goes crazy here in spring. The lyrebirds are chasing each other, squawking and flapping up and down the road and through the fruit trees. The wombats are snapping at each other; the echidnas following each other, like long echidna road trains; the bees are so busy they don’t even fly away when I cut a bunch of flowers – which means we have confused bees bumping at the window trying to get back to their hives.
There is so much promise to spring. How much of all the apple, pear and avocado blossom will turn into fruit? Are we really going to have 3 million macadamia nuts and ten semi-trailer load of oranges?
I’m pretty sure we won’t. We never do. But just now it all seems possible… and wonderful…
I think maybe I’m feeling a bit springish too.
Wombat news
Bruiser and Mothball wombat are outside my study window looking smug. Bruiser has just eaten all of Mothball’s dinner. Mothball has eaten all of Bruiser’s dinner. Now they are so stuffed with wombat nuts and rolled oats and lucerne chaff that they can’t be bothered looking for their own dinner bowl… but each one is very, very happy that they have stolen the other one’s food.
Bruiser is learning to stand up for himself last. A few months ago even bowerbirds terrified him. Now he growls at Rosie wallaby and even ignores the currawong who pretends to be a vulture outside my study window, hoping to frighten the wombats – or me – into giving him some food.
No hope. There’s plenty of food about for currawongs – including avocadoes. Currawongs love avocado. They peck the ends and then try to carry off the fruit to their nests in their claws, flapping madly. They rarely get very far, but it means we have stray avocado trees coming up all over the garden, dropped by the currawongs.
Latest Books
‘Baby Wombat’s Week.’
At last – the sequel to ‘Diary of a Wombat’.
What is even funnier – and stroppier – than a wombat?
Her baby. A book for every child, and every mum, too.
PS Just like when I first received a proper copy of ‘Diary of a Wombat’, I can’t stop turning over the pages of this book for what must be the 3 millionth time. It’s Bruce Whatley at his genius best. Somehow he captures whatever it is that makes wombats both dignified and hilarious at the same time – and also totally adorable.
Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior’
This is the first in the new series, ‘A School for Heroes’, and it’s funny, made even more so by Andrea Potter’s fabulous drawings of the Ghastly Greedle and Gloria the Gorgeous (Gloria’s not just gorgeous, she’s drop dead gorgeous. Or she was 80 years ago. But, hey, it’s nothing that a bit more lipstick can’t fix.) Andrea’s Dr Mussels – he’s a Headmaster, a monkey and can do fearsome things with a well-thrown banana – is on the cover.
The School for Heroes in located in a volcano, staffed by the retired heroes from Rest in Pieces – old heroes never die, they simply rest in pieces (the heat is good for their arthritis). And for Boojum Bark, student hero and werewolf, there’s a lot to discover.
Where is the library hiding today?
Exactly what is Boo Fu, taught by Mrs Kerfuffle the librarian, who’s deadly with a well-thrown dictionary?
Why does Princess Princess Sunshine Caresse von Pewke get so upset when Boo sniffs her bum?
How do you face giant Rabbits, Trrroooolls, Ogres and other Bogeys armed only with a zombie sausage?
What does the mysterious Yesterday want with the school garbage?
And where do flying pigs get their little jumpers?
‘Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior’ is a big book. There are lots of hilarious short books around. But the trouble with a short book is that just when you are really getting into it, it stops. If kids can find a two and a half hour movie fascinating, why not a big book? Often it’s the big books – the entrancing ones that kids don’t want to stop reading – that really turn a reluctant reader into a book guzzler. A short book can be a giggle for a while – and it’s tempting when you don’t like reading and you’re told you have to read a book. But the books kids read then reread are usually the long ones.
‘Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior’ is crammed full of universes, where Rabbits are deadly predators (almost as bad as budgies) and fairies bite and zombie spaghetti may be the most fearsome weapon of them all.
‘The Night They Stormed Eureka: a fresh look at the history we thought we knew.’
Are the history books wrong? Could the rebels have succeeded? Could we too have seceded 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.
New awards
‘A Rose for the Anzac Boys’ has won Honour Book for the Children’s Book Council 2009 awards for Older Readers. ‘The Camel that Crossed Australia’ has just been short-listed for the Queensland Premier’s Award. ‘The Camel who Crossed Australia’ and ‘How High can a Kangaroo Hop?’ have also been made CBC Notable Books for 2009.
Both ‘The Shaggy Gully Times’ and ‘Pharaoh’ have been short-listed for the YABBA (Young Australians’ Best Book Award). Many, many thanks to everyone who nominated them, and enormous hugs to all who vote for them. (‘Pharaoh’ was also a Children’s Book Council (CBC) short-listed book last year, and also short-listed for ACT Book of the Year.)
Enormous thanks to all who voted for the Koala Awards too- (Kids Own Australian Literature Awards). ‘The Shaggy Gully Times’ and ‘Pharaoh: the Boy who Conquered the Nile’ are short-listed for the 2009 Koala Awards too.
Schedule for the Next Few Months
I’m sorry I can’t accept every invitation – there are always many more than I could fit into a year. But as I have family in Brisbane and Perth I always love an excuse to travel there... or anywhere that might involve a stopover in Perth, too. NSW Bookings are done by Lateral Learning; Queensland bookings by Helen Bain at Speaker’s Inc, and for other bookings contact me at jackief@dragnet.com.au. I can only do one trip away from home a month though, and that includes trips to Canberra, so I mostly only speak to groups of more than 200, and where it will take six hours travel or less each way (except WA).
October 28: Children’s Day, Canberra, workshop at Marymead.
November 15: Open Garden workshops at our place. Contact the Open Garden organizers for bookings, act@opengarden.org.au. If you want to make a weekend of it, there are lots of places to stay, from cheap pubs to luxury B&B’s close by. Look at the Braidwood web site. We also have a cottage that we rent for weekends sometimes – with very limited tank water, a healthy population of snakes and lots of wildlife who’ll ignore you and go on munching.
17, 18, 19 March 2010: Somerset Festival, Gold Coast, QLD
27,28, 29, 30 April: Talks in Brisbane, as well as an address at The 3 R's - Reaching Reluctant Readers Conference. Contact Helen Bain: helen@speakers-ink.com.au.
18-19 June talk with Bruce Whatley, the genius who created those incredible images of the wombat in ‘Diary of a Wombat’ and ‘Baby Wombat’s Week’, at the NSW Children’s Book Council conference, Sydney. That’s also about the time we’ll be launching our next joint book, ‘Queen Victoria’s Underpants’, the almost entirely true story of how Queen Victoria revolutionised women’s lives.
July 14-17 Whitsunday Literary Festival, including a public gardening talk, Mackay Q’ld.
August: Talks in Perth. Contact the Freemantle Children’s Literature Centre for details or bookings.
The October Garden
This is blossom time, and planting time (just cover those early seedlings with bubble wrap or water filled plastic or an old plastic bottle ‘greenhouse’ to protect them from late frosts.
It’s also first snake of the season time – a large sleepy red bellied black snake; first asparagus, artichokes, last of the winter apples and oranges and quinces and chestnuts, the mandarins ripening instead, the cumquats (real sweet cumquats, not the bitter calamondins that have been ripe all winter). The first figs are swelling, and the loquats and banana passionfruit and strawberries and tamarilloes and …
lots of things. Too many to remember, much less write down. Thankfully there are plenty of birds, wombats and wallabies and chooks to eat what we don’t want. But I’m not letting them get any of the asparagus – not yet, anyhow. Rosie wallaby loves asparagus, but I pick all the spears every morning before she wakes up in the late afternoon.
Spring Eating
Now that we can get golf ball tomatoes and pineapples any time of the year, a lot of the old spring foods have been forgotten. Most people won’t eat or harvest anything they don’t recognise from the supermarket – and most of us now prefer much blander foods. Bitter food was presumed to be a spring tonic in both European and Asian folklore.
Many traditional ‘hungry gap’ foods are all good, if now unconventional. Try them before you reject them. If you baulk at eating prickly pear fruit, mistletoe jam or carrot tops, remember that it’s better than an elderly, well-travelled tomato, that wasn’t much good in the first place.
Flowers
It may be a coincidence, but a lot of the early spring flowers are edible. (Others like daffodils may kill you- know what you’re picking!) Flowers are high in both vitamins (especially vitamin C) and minerals: an advantage when a lot of the vitamins had vanished from long-stored spring/winter food. Try: calendula petals, nasturtium, rose petals and heps, sunflower petals, violet flowers.
Winter leftovers
Many vegetable bits that we discard are as good as the main crop. Look for:
Cabbage stalks These should be peeled of their tough skin, steamed, and served like asparagus.
Brussels sprouts or broccoli leaves Shredded and stir-fried, they are also good with sautéed apples in butter.
Leeks going-to-seed Cut off the seed stalk, peel it and chop it into any vegetable dish.
Carrots going-to-seed Grate them down to the tough core, slice it off, then grate the rest. Or add grated tough carrots to egg and wheat germ to make dog biscuits.
Celery going-to-seed Cut out and peel the seed head. Serve it finely sliced, like cucumber.
Brussels sprout leaves Try them shredded and stir-fried like cabbage.
Eating immature vegetables
Carrot tops Chop them finely, like celery.
Young celery leaves ditto
Broad bean tips Steam them like silver beet. This is also a good remedy if they’ve got aphids.
Globe artichoke stalks Peel and steam them.
Beetroot leaves Eat them like silver beet. Don’t use sugarbeet leaves or golden beet leaves: they can be poisonous.
Hop or choko shoots Steam and serve with butter.
Zucchini or pumpkin flowers Stuffed or butter-fried, these are also good dipped in batter and deep-fried.
Garlic leaves Chop and add them to stews or salads.
Tiny radish leaves Can be chopped and added to mashed potato, or dipped in batter and deep-fried.
As for the rest of the garden: try adding young citrus leaves or tiny grape leaves to salads or as a flavouring to custards; pluck bamboo shoots and boil them in salted water till tender; pickle broom buds or hibiscus buds like capers; tap a silver birch or manna gum for sweet sap; stew angelica or hibiscus stalks like rhubarb; bake green pawpaws or green bananas; pickle tiny green apples, chilacayote melon or tiny citrus in a sweet pickle solution and eat them like olives; dig out bullrush roots and roast them like potatoes; and make tea from mints and herbs. You’ll be foraging in the best harvest traditions of our ancestors.
What to harvest now:
Navel oranges, lemons, grapefruit, cumquats, calamondins, limes, tangelo, tangor, mandarin, avocado, small alpine strawberries (not the large new varieties that fruit later), Japanese raisin ‘fruit’, lillypillies, pawpaw in warmer areas, Cape gooseberries if they haven’t been frosted off (autumn’s will mature now), ditto tamarilloes, early loquats and rhubarb.
Jobs for October
Plant, plant and plant. Then mulch, as soon as the ground has warmed up, to stop the weeds growing and the ground drying out and to encourage lots of healthy, vigorous earthworm activity.
Stop winter veg going to seed by mulching heavily while the ground is still cold.
Pick out the long ‘hearting’ stalks of leeks, parsley, cabbage etc as soon as they form. (Eat them: most are tender and sweet.) Dig up leftover root vegetables like carrots and beetroot before they toughen. Store them wrapped in newspaper away from fruit. This will help send them to seed even out of the garden. They will gradually shrivel, but shrivelled carrots and beetroot often taste sweeter than plump ones. Don’t judge them till you’ve had a bite.
Pests
Spring is pests’ big chance: few predators and lots of soft, sappy growth. Try not to water spring crops, and don’t fertilise them till the spring flush is over – and never give high-nitrogen fertiliser.
A heavy mulch now will not only slow down spring growth, but also slowly release the nutrients that your plant will need through the year. No, I’m not crazy: a heavy mulch will cut down both on the danger of late frost and on pest attacks – and the plant will more than catch up later. It also keeps down weed competition, encourages earthworms and stops moisture loss.
Let some vegetables go to seed and let them flower and go to seed around your garden. This is perhaps the most important spring advice there is: flowering vegetables are one of the best ways to attract pest-eating predators. Most adult predators eat nectar from flowers; only their offspring are carnivorous. Happily, most prefer the nectar from the plants their offspring like to forage as pests: your vegies.
Letting vegetables go to seed will also give you a stock of home-grown seed for next year – fungicide free and suited to your area. Over a matter of three or four years you will be able to boast of your own strain of lettuce or rocket – just be a little judicious about which individuals you allow to seed all around your garden – not the first, little weedy plants that bolt from seed to seed in a matter of weeks. When you have a particularly splendid specimen – good sized leaves, excellent flavour (i.e. the flavour you like), great colour – that’s the one to allow to flower and seed and complete its life cycle.
A Few Recipes
The following cake and biscuits won’t kill you with saturated fat, if you come from a family with a history of high cholesterol, like I do. Bryan, on the other hand, eats mashed potatoes rich in butter and cream every night, daily servings of butter rich biscuits, and pours cream over his strawberries…. and still has a low cholesterol. His weight never varies either. (Jealous mutter here.)
Apricot Banana Cake
Note: No eggs, butter, cream etc in this cake
You may need a little extra flour if the mixture looks too wet. It should stand up on a spoon, not dribble out of it.
Time taken: 1 hour
Ease of making: Moderate
Serves: About 15-20 solid slices
1 large extra-ripe squishy banana – don't try this with a hard banana. It won't have the correct flavour or texture
20 dried apricot halves
20 dates, minus stones
2 cups water
½ cup almond meal
½ cup finely chopped walnuts
1 cup SR flour (may need a bit more)
Optional: 1 apple and 1 tsp nutmeg
Boil dates and apricots till soft. You may need to add more water. At the end they should be almost a purée and you should have about 2 cups of mixture.
Turn on the oven to 200º C.
Grease and flour a wide-ish cake tin – this cake needs to be shallow, not deep. You can also line the tin with baking paper.
If you don't have a cake tin, try making it in two empty cans.
Mix in all the other ingredients except the apple. Pour into pan. I sometimes cut the apple into slices and press the slices in to the cake, narrow side down, then dust the top with nutmeg.
Bake for 40 minutes or till the top is brown and springs back when you touch it lightly in the middle. Don't worry – if you're quick you won't burn your fingers. (But don't let kids try this in case they bump on the oven tray – which will burn them.)
Store in a sealed container when cool. Eat within 3 days – it goes gluggy and also grows green whiskers.
Olive oil and Lemon Nut Biscuits
Note: No eggs or animal fats; high in omega 3
Ease of making: Moderate but not suitable for kids
Time taken: About an hour
Serves: About 25
¾ cup olive oil
¾ cup orange juice – not navel as it turns bitter
½ cup brown sugar plus another ½ cup brown sugar
2 cups crushed nuts, your choice – I like a mix of walnuts and pistachios, or macadamia nuts
4 cups SR flour
Syrup
1 cup white sugar
1 cup lemon or lime juice
Mix oil, orange juice, one lot of sugar and flour.
Now mix the nuts and extra sugar.
Take 1 tbsp of the biscuit mix and place a blob on baking paper on an oven tray. Now take a teaspoon of the sugar and nuts and press it into the biscuit. The biscuit mix will close over it, or mostly. Repeat with the rest of the mix.
Bake 15 minutes at 200º C or till pale brown. Take out and cool, then dip into the HOT syrup. Use tongs, and dip QUICKLY, just in and out. Let dry and store in a sealed container. These will keep about a fortnight in a cool place- not necessarily in the fridge.
Passionfruit Shortcake
This is one of the butter rich ones…
1/3 cup butter
2 eggs
2 cups SR flour
½ cup castor sugar
1 cup cream, whipped
Icing
1 can passionfruit – remove seeds, or 6 fresh passionfruit , with their seeds
2 tbsps butter
1 cup icing sugar, or a bit more
Mix well. Add more icing sugar if too runny. Add a tiny bit of water if the passionfruit were dry.
Cream butter and sugar. Mix eggs in one by one. Pour into a greased and floured pan. Bake at 200º C for 35 minutes or till pale brown on top and firm in the middle when you press lightly – see above and don't let kids try this. Tip out of pan to cool. When cool, cut in half. Ice the top of one half with the icing. When the icing is set sandwich with the well-whipped cream and serve within 20 minutes.
Keep in the fridge for up to 4 hours – cream doesn't keep well. The cakes may be frozen before they are iced and the cream inserted. Thaw well before icing. But they are much better made, iced and eaten fresh.
Asparagus Muffins
No, this isn't a waste of good asparagus: not when it's easy to grow and cheap to buy.
Serve with extra fresh asparagus on the side, boiled for 3 minutes with butter (not margarine) and lemon juice or 3 tbsps olive oil to 1 tbsp lemon juice, and a pinch of salt.
Ease of making: Simple
Serves: 4 as part of a meal. Makes about 12 large muffins, or 24 small ones
Time taken: 20-30 minutes to cook, 5 minutes to prepare
Ingredients
About 3 cups of cooked asparagus – lightly cooked, with hard bits removed, and chopped
1 red onion, peeled and chopped finely, or 1 bunch of chives or ½ cup spring onions, finely chopped. The chives are best.
½ cup olive oil
1 cup grated cheese: cheddar or parmesan or a mix of both – any strongly flavoured hard cheese
1 cup self-raising flour
4 large eggs
Optional: ½ teaspoon salt – I find the cheese adds enough salt, but if you eat a lot of processed food you may be used to extra salt.
Optional: 1- 3 finely chopped red chillies
Mix it all in a large bowl. Spoon into greased muffin pans or use the Jade Trantor 'never stick muffin removal device': two strips of baking paper in a cross. You don't need wide strips – just pull the tops of the strips and the muffins slide out.
Bake for about 20 minutes at 200º C or till tops are brown and firm. This may take more or less time depending on the size of the muffins. Eat hot or cold. These freeze okay: reheat after freezing to remove that special 'freezer' odour.
Artichokes and Potatoes
Ingredients
artichokes
potatoes
olive oil
water or chicken stock
lemon juice
salt (optional)
Ease of making: Simple
Ease of eating: Messy
Serves: Depends how big your pot is and how hungry your eaters.
Time taken: About 1½ hours, but only 10 minutes of this is preparation or stirring.
Take any number of small fresh artichokes. If they are big ones you bought at the supermarket, trim off most of the leaves till you have the tender hearts. If they are your own small home-grown ones, just bung them in the (big) pot.
Add enough olive oil to lightly cover the base of the pot. Add about the same amount of potatoes as artichokes. The spuds need to be peeled, and halved if they are large. The only exception is if you are growing your own potatoes. I've been wriggling out some tiny new 'bandicooted' spuds in the past week – I just add them whole but well washed to the pot.
Put the heat on 'low'; let the spuds and artichokes sizzle for about 20 minutes to slightly caramelise. Now just cover the veg with chicken stock or water. Add the juice of 1 lemon or lime for every 2 cups of liquid. You may like to add a touch of salt if you are using water.
Put the lid on the pot. Cook slowly till most of the moisture has evaporated. The potatoes and oil will have thickened the stock into a rich sauce, and the potatoes will taste of artichoke.
There is no way to eat this neatly. Use forks, spoons and your fingers to dismember the artichokes and eat every last skerrick.
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