In the later Manila years, the gloss of ex-pat life dulled a little at times. Ten and a half years is a long time to be away from home – especially when you’re lucky enough to call an incredible country like Australia home. Without question, our overseas adventures afforded us the most marvellous opportunities and I’m not sorry for a moment that we seized the break when it came to us in the mid-2000s. We travelled extensively, we met interesting people – many of whom have become firm friends – we enjoyed ventures that life at home would never have put in our way, including the chance to live inside another culture (two, in fact). It was fantastic … for the most part. But towards the end, a deep and powerful longing for home set in which became more and more difficult to shake. At such times, the MOTH and I would spend long hours musing on “when we go home”. In particular we pictured a place in the country, where we would grow vegetables, raise ducks and chooks, and read books.   This dream sustained us when our home-coming seemed ever distant.

This week, with our first half year at home having flown by already, I’m happy to report that we’ve been hard at work making a reality of the vision that kept us going during those times of acute homesickness. The chooks are still to happen a bit later in the year – and we haven’t had any concrete discussions about ducks at all, as yet – but the reading is coming along nicely and the veggie garden is booming! Fond visions of growing and preserving our own produce are becoming a reality, as we meander through our first season of abundance. The warmer months have been conducive to a successful season in our existing, modestly sized veggie patch. While we have plans for a more expansive kitchen garden, the current set-up has still enabled a rewarding start to our efforts in moving towards some self-sufficiency.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve revelled in the productivity of the kitchen, turning some of our yields into goodies that will last beyond their natural season. You’ll recall from my earlier ramblings that the birds around here clearly didn’t watch the Sesame Street episode on sharing.  They’ve practically annihilated our already meagre fruit crops this year and didn’t intend leaving any for us! And while we’ve accepted that this year’s orchard yields are yet another moveable feast, I did make one last-ditch effort to save a few dozen apples from the thieves of the sky 🙂  This meant picking under-ripe fruit that wasn’t ideal to eat so I’ve been finding ways of turning it into palatable end products.

Some sugar to sweeten, and a dash of lemon, produces pie-ready fruit for the freezer; apple-scrap vinegar and apple jelly join the strawberry jam, rhubarb chutney, tomato relish, and cucumber relish and pickles for the pantry shelves. A local blueberry farm recently sold its harvest at the farm door so blueberry jam has joined the other jewel-coloured jars; bags of snap-frozen blueberries are nestled in the freezer, along with pots of blueberry compote – fantastic on Greek yoghurt for breakfast! There’s also chopped rhubarb, zucchini slice, and blanched tomatoes waiting to be turned into sugo to use in pasta sauces and on pizzas.

Our new electric dehydrator has been whirring away almost constantly in the laundry and has produced an array of delicious dried goodies, as well as the most incredible aromas when you step in to put on a load of washing. Home-dried raisins have graced a cheese board, dried mango, banana, apple and pear will make scrumptious snacks, cereal toppings and cake ingredients. Veritable seas of parsley, sage, mint and oregano sway in the veggie patch and these have also dried beautifully, creating a collection of jars filled with multi-hued green piquancy that will last long after the frost finishes off their living relatives.

But perhaps my favourite experiment in this preserving paradise has been the dried tomatoes I made last week. In deference to space limitations, we planted only three varieties of tomatoes this year, just a couple of plants of each: Sweet Bite, a beautiful fruit that lives up to its name, sized somewhere between a cherry tomato and a small regular tomato; Italian Heritage, a good looking ribbed tomato with rich flavour but which hasn’t been as productive as the others – in part due to the soil still needing more work; and the old-fashioned favourite Grosse Lisse, which produces large, juicy tomatoes of the kind that were once the only type you could buy in Australian shops.

The Sweet Bite, when sliced in half, semi-dried beautifully in the dehydrator. Since it isn’t totally dried, I’m storing zip lock bagsful in the freezer and jazzing them up just before we want to eat them. Using only instinct as my recipe, I served up a small bowl of these incredibly tasty morsels the other night when friends came to dinner and the verdict was unanimous – simply the BEST semi-dried tomatoes any of us has ever tasted. It’s easy: bring the tomatoes to room temperature in a shallow-ish bowl; pour a little extra virgin olive oil over them – don’t skimp on the quality! You want enough oil to generously coat the tomatoes without them swimming in it. Add a little freshly crushed garlic – not so much that you overpower the sublime flavour of the fruit – along with a little crumbled, dried oregano (from our garden of course but failing that, some chopped fresh oregano or basil would be preferable to the commercially dried stuff, which is too pungent). Season lightly with salt & fresh ground black pepper and gently toss everything together. Let it all macerate for about an hour and …. rapture! I don’t ever want to go back to the bought variety but until we have our much bigger tomato patch next year, eventually we’ll have to buy or do without.

I’d best be off now … black grapes were on special today at the produce market and they’re waiting to be turned into raisins. It’s exhausting, this retirement business. But it tastes so good 🙂