Lady Lunchalot

Seeing as spring is here and I can’t eat anything fun at the moment, I thought I’d take you for a bit of a tour in my garden.

My ANZAC peach tree. She is having a little bout of peach leaf curl right now and isn’t looking her best. But she’s already got about a dozen peach buds on her that won’t be lasting long once they ripen.

This is the first strawberry of the season!

I bought this bay tree as a tiny seedling last year. It’s still no giant, but is growing strong. I love putting fresh bay leaves in bolognese, or any hearty sauce.

Most of my herbs grow in a half wine barrel by the kitchen door. I haven’t managed to get any new herbs in the soil yet this spring, but the rosemary, sage and dill from last year is still going strong.

Kalamata olives! Well, no olives yet, but one day maybe.

My lemon tree is almost as old as the house. This grand old dame just keeps pumping out these beautiful golden gems month after month.

This is the first ever blossom on my pink lady apple tree. I can’t wait until she grows up and starts producing some gorgeous apples.

Just over five weeks until D-day. I’ve managed to drop a few kilos, but five weeks is just enough time for me to billow back up to my usual size before the wedding, so culinary fun is still severely curtailed. I’m now surviving on a diet of rice cakes and cottage cheese.

However I have enjoyed one shining star in the dark night of dieting. The other night Zoeball, my bridesmaid, friend of 28 years, and partner in gastronomic crime, made a beeyootiful tom yum soup and mango salsa salad. I had given in to a curry at lunch, so was feeling suitably restrained in her amazing dinner.

Zoeball is a master of Asian cuisine, which definitely belies her Polish/Russian heritage! With just a few deft flicks of the wrist she can toss together incredible combinations of chilli, ginger, coriander, mint and whatever else is at hand to make some amazingly light, tasty, summery treats.

Like our personalities, our cooking styles are polar opposites. I love European food, she loves Asian. I cook wintery dishes, she does summer. I’m a meatlover, Zoeball is vegaquarian. I do pasta, she does rice. I am herby, she is spicy. Come to think of it, it’s amazing we can even agree on anywhere to eat, let alone remain friends since we were two years old. I guess opposites attract.

Thank you, Zoeball, for making me such a yummy dinner that was so considerate of my waistline!

Zoeball’s “favourite person”/significant-other-but-not-really (long story) is an expert in the field of marine biology. He was telling her about the real reason that we should buy Australian grown prawns rather than the cheaper imports from South East Asia. It’s not just to support the Australian prawn farmers - apparently prawns from Vietnam, Thailand etc are often farmed in vats of… well… let’s just say that it’s the same brown smelly stuff that used to be pumped into the ocean off Bondi a few years ago. The prawns are then stuffed full of antibiotics, processed and sold.

I don’t know about you, but I like to keep my toilet business completely separate from my dinner plate, and I will definitely be paying the extra few dollars for home-grown prawns from now on.