Extending the ‘veggie patch’

Condo living can be a little limiting compared with living in rural France when you want to grow vegetables and so in order to give us more “ground” and provide more room for the lettuce and other vegetables whilst abiding by the strata laws, Tony decided to design and build a couple of planters - tasteful yet functional.  Interestingly, the planter costs $50 in material to construct and $80 in soil to fill - one can understand why not everybody chooses to grown their own vegetables here - it’s like investing in real estate!!

The photos above and below are of the very first planter already filled with little lettuces that we planted from a mixed bag of heirloom lettuce seeds - the lettuce and arugula we’ve already enjoyed grew really well so we got a little carried away and now have close to 100 growing in pots so we will either be on a lettuce cleanse or more likely gifting lettuces to friends and family in the not too distant future!

The tomatoes are doing well and we hope to have our first batch sometime next week.  The aubergines not so well - they keep producing these beautiful purple flowers but they aren’t getting pollinated - not many bees in the area (not a problem we had in France!).  We have discovered that aubergines don’t need another plant in order to produce fruit - they can self pollinate having male and female parts to their flowers.  So, armed with this new knowledge, we are now pollinating the plants (essentially taking a Q-tip and touching both male and female parts of the flower in order to encourage the ‘self pollination’) on a daily basis and hope to see the (aubergine) fruits of our labour before long!  Photo of one of the aubergine flowers below.

Dad arrived in Cayman safely on Friday night and will be visiting with us for the next 2 weeks - splitting his time between me and my sister = photos to follow of the fun and frolics we plan to partake in over the next couple of weeks!

Wishing everyone health, happiness and lots of good food in 2012!

As we woke up this morning to welcome the year 2012 (where did the time go??), it was a lovely opportunity to reflect on the good, the bad and everything in between of years past and think about how new resolutions can be made to shape the year(s) to come to maximise the good, minimise the bad and enjoy everything in between as much as possible.

That said, I’m not such a believer in resolutions but do believe in actively pursuing goals whether the goal might be to enhance the positive impact I may have on those around me (friends, family members and foes alike) by striving to be kinder, more patient, more tolerant and less judgmental, or far more immediately measurable goals (for example I have a couple of professional qualification exams later in the year so do of course have the goal of passing those!).

And so I’m simply thankful to have made it through another year with Tony by my side and friends and family members (both near and far) around me - the time does seem to be flying by so we’re trying to make the most of our moments and always remain thankful for all the times we have enjoyed, are still enjoying and perhaps have yet to enjoy!

It was with the enjoyment of good food in mind that I bought Tony the bread/pizza stone for Christmas and the photo below is of the first pizza we made on the stone - Tony made the dough and I made a sun dried tomato, aubergine, red onion, black olive, basil & feta topping - a spectacular joint effort if I may say so!  Since then, Tony has made lots of bread - loaves, rolls you name it and it’s all been absolutely delicious - photos of some of the bread to follow.

I had thought I might try and start the new year with a few less carbs on my plate in order to shift the few extra pounds that I’ve been carrying - and as if it’s not bad enough that Tony’s taken up bread making, a very good friend bought us a basket of truffle infused goodies (as well as some whole truffles), olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and butter - how ridiculously decadent and how excited I was to start playing with my truffle basket......so, I decided that I might make some fresh pasta using the truffle infused olive oil in place of the regular olive oil and pictured below is the result....

The green pasta was made with the truffle oil and some cilantro that had been blanched and then juiced just to add colour - sadly it doesn’t tend to impart much flavour but the colour is lovely.  The orange one was also made with truffle oil and with carrots that had been juiced and then boiled down before adding to the pasta dough.  With Tony’s help (it would be very handy to have a 3rd hand when it comes to rolling out the pasta and thankfully Tony was happy to be my ‘3rd hand’ in exchange for being the official tester!) I made it into linguine.

In addition to the linguine pictured above, I also made ravioli stuffed with locally stewed beef - it’s tradition in Cayman to eat beef at Christmas and as a result there’s a lot of slaughtering of cows done at this time of year - I was lucky enough to have a friend who had a friend who was slaughtering so managed to pick up 10lbs of good quality, grass fed local beef which I then stewed with thyme, stock, red wine, scotch bonnet peppers, carrots and celery before shredding it and stuffing it into the ravioli packets as pictured below.

So - I’m thankful for the good food I’ve already enjoyed so early on into this New Year and thankful for Tony who never seems to mind my experimenting on him and simply thankful for a happy and healthy start to another New Year.  I don’t intend to make any rigid resolutions that I can’t stick to but I do intend to attempt to remain thankful every minute of every day throughout the coming year and hope that if I can always be thankful, regardless of the wider impact, this will certainly have a positive impact on my life as I venture into the New Year.

I’ve included a photo (above) of me and Tony with our good chums Al & Sarah who also have a place not far from us in France but who happened to be out here to spend Christmas with some other chums - you’ll see from the smiles on our faces and the blue sea around us that it was very easy to be thankful on that particular afternoon - let’s hope that when the weather’s not so fair we can still find that silver lining in the clouds....

Happy New Year!