Prawns and Pumpkin In Coconut Gravy

As year of 2012 is getting closer, Adelaide temperature is soaring and we probably lost many vegetable plants due to the extreme heat. Several of our plants had perished this week. New Year day is predicted to be more than 40 degree Celsius. We probably lost many tomato plants this week and when their fruits are just starting to get bigger or ripen. Many warm loving vegetables flower bloom this week but they won't set any proper fruit at all. During Christmas week, many of our plants at the back of our backyard fence were being eaten. However, we caught the culprit now. Well Rayyan stumbled upon him nipping our cabbage leaves while Lenay was watering the plants. Never did I taught that the culprit was a big male rabbit. I think he was someone pet before and was abandoned. Not sure whether it was purposely left near our garden though. Don't think he was given that much vegetables before perhaps more on pelleted food. He is very tame. In the mean time, he has been taken inside the backyard garden and treated like a pet. Feel really bad leaving him outside without any source of water especially when we have extreme weather at the moment. He probably came out of thirst each time after we watered our plants previously to lick water from the plants.

We harvested our first Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Pumpkin and shallots this month. Garlic are drying in the shed at the moment. I found this interesting recipe that I can use from our fresh harvest of pumpkin, garlic and shallot from 'The Best Of Chef Wan A Taste of Malaysia' recipe book. Chef Wan is the most popular Malaysian Chef.  A celebrity chef that was once in his early career an accountant. I recommend this book if you like Malaysian food. 

Prawns and Pumpkin In Coconut Gravy

Ingredients:
300gram pumpkin, peeled and cut into large chunks
500ml/2cups coconut milk (or extracted from 1 grated coconut and 500ml water)
1 Turmeric leaf, finely sliced, if desired
200gram prawns, cleaned and shelled
Salt and sugar for seasoning

Pounded Ingredients:
2 Tablespoon Dried prawns (shrimps) , soaked and drained
3 Shallots, peeled
1 clove garlic, peeled
5 red hot chillies, if desired

~Put the pounded ingredients, pumpkin and coconut milk into a pot. Bring to boil and simmer until the pumpkin is soft.
~Add the turmeric leaf and prawns and cook for a further 3 minutes.
~Season with sugar and salt. Garnish as desired and serve with warm rice.

A Happy New Year to You!

Sayang Kinabalu, The Versatile and Liebster Award

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A Giant Russian Sunflower bloom for us on Christmas day.

Usually at the end of the year my family will usually spend this part of the year on the Land below of the wind which is Sabah one of the Malaysia state that is  one part of Borneo island. My Japanese friends will come and visit Sabah tomorrow and my parents will entertain them as my replacement. I hope they enjoy their visit there very much. The last time we were in Sabah was December 2007 and Ilhan was still a baby learning how to sit.

Bamboo Orchestra- Sayang Kinabalu (Loving Kinabalu)

Tinggi Tinggi Gunung Kinabalu (As high as you are Mount Kinabalu)
Tinggi lagi sayang sama kamu (Higher is my love for you)
Biru biru hujung Kinabalu tengok dari jauh (How sky blue is Kinabalu peak appear from faraway)
Hati saya rindu... (My heart miss you Kinabalu)

Kinabalu dekat di Kundasang (Kinabalu is close to Kundasang)

Banyak sayur boleh pilih pilih (So many vegetables to choose from there)

Apa guna pergi luar negeri (What is the use going overseas)

Naik Kinabalu hati saya rindu... (My heart miss climbing Kinabalu)

Mount Kinabalu is the highest mountain in South-East Asia (higher than Mt. Fuji). Although, it is a few hours drive away from my mama village, we can clearly see its peak on a sunny day. There are many beautiful diving sites in Sabah. My brother obtained his scuba diving license recently and hopefully I get to dive with him to enjoy the ocean garden that can be very mesmerising. He probably has to refresh my memory about diving basic since its been almost 10 years? that I last did scuba diving.

I would like to thank Phoebe from Ballynoe Cottage for the Versatile Blogger Award. Thanks to Jody (Spring Garden Acre) and Lrong (Potager Y @ Japan) for the Liebster Award.

I feel very honoured and humble that our blog was selected.

"Liebster" is a German word meaning dear, sweet, kind, nice, good, beloved, lovely, kindly, pleasant, valued, cute, endearing, and welcome. 

The Liebster is awarded to spotlight up and coming bloggers who currently have less than 200 followers.

Now for the rules (I just copy and paste it):
1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.
2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Copy and paste the award on your blog.
4. Have faith that your followers will spread the love to other bloggers.
5. And most of all - have fun!

So without any particular order, here are some of the blogs that we have enjoyed reading that we like to pass on the Versatile Blogger Award and Liebster Blog:

Angelina~ The Meow Factor;
A cat with her big family which is involved in many different kind of charities and organisation. Ehem... I hope their balcony garden will be fill up with many plants soon. They are very good in Maths. Always wonder how they did they came up with big numbers so soon.

Liz~Suburban Tomato;
She has a very productive veggie garden. She lives in Australia too but her winter is a little bit colder than us. Amazingly, she harvest her vegetables all year round. Check out her nice recipes as well.

Sean L~ Half A Pound Of Treacle;
He writes on a wide range of topics and very thoroughly did  research regarding the topic he posted. I learn many new things from his blog such as about Malaysia native plants, cultural festival, and beautiful places to visit. His balcony is growing with many variety of plants. It must be an amazing sight when people look up to his balcony garden from below.

Sue~Our Plot At Green Lane Allotments;
I learn a lot from her about gardening and I enjoy looking at her nature and wildlife photos too. There are many useful links in her blog for novice gardener on how to grow things. Sue very good at knowing good and bad insects in the garden too.

Lena~Frozen Wings;
Each time Lena posted new recipes on her cooking blog, I am so amazed on how creative she is. One day, I hope she teach me how to bake. I remember how she made our traditional kuih pulut panggang look like sushi.

I hope you visit this wonderful blogs and enjoyed the music as well.

End Year Container Garden 2011

It has been sometime that I have not posted pictures of our container garden. This is because of the cleaning up of winter plants and waiting for the right moment to sow warm loving veggies made the container garden look very not organise and bare. So now some of the containers has filled up a bit. It probably look greenish now but continuous high temperature will make them look very dreadful later on.

From Container Garden

Orange sweet potato veins at this corner of our container garden. They don't follow orders really well so this summer they have been isolated from the rest of the plants. Experimenting in one of the containers is growing soy beans and sweet potato together. Soy bean plants grow straight right up whilst sweet potato leaves will keep the soil more moist as they cover up the soil.

From Container Garden

Growing "Jack Be Little" pumpkin at this corner and this pumpkin plant actually giving some shade to strawberry plants. The strawberry plants is clever enough to send out stalk for the berries to ripen while keeping it foliage out of the harmful summer sun.

From Container Garden

This summer is our first time trying to grow purple skin and white flesh sweet potatoes. I thought it has purple flesh at first but bought the wrong one. Young seedlings of jicama (sengkuang) and Clemson spineless okra sharing the same container. I had some encouraging result growing them together last year so repeating this combination again. Leek and parsnip growing side by side. Dragon carrot growing together with cherrytime capsicum.

From Container Garden

This is a bit of complex situation because that trellis was intended for bitter gourd. But bitter gourd end up sharing that trellis with volunteer tomato plant. The spagetthi squash is also inching its way to the trellis as well. There are one promising (indicate with arrow) spagetthi squash at the moment. We are excited to harvest the fruit cos this is our first time growing this squash and of course will be our first taste of it. Lenay spied one female bitter gourd flower this week and has pollinated it with male flowers. Hopefully the success for the female bitter gourd fruit to grow won't be deterred by the very warm days we are having for several days.

Last year we did not have that much a problem starting cucumbers early. But this year the cucumber seeds seems to be on strike until end of November when those seeds favor to sprout. Its not only one variety playing hooky but all the varieties of cucumber that we plan to grow this summer. So we probably have late cucumber harvest season this summer compared last year if growing them are successful. This corner we grow cucumber "Suyo Long" in container together with beetroot and Topweight carrot.

From Container Garden

At the back row are orange sweet potato and "Royal Blue" potato plant. In the front, angled luffa growing together with "New Red Kuroda" carrot and jicama.

From Container Garden

Another volunteer tomato growing in the garlic container. This is the only garlic that I have not dug out yet. I probably should since all the leaves dried up. But it was too hot this week I simply don't have the motivation. We also grow white sweet potatoes at this corner here. First time growing shallot and I am not sure when is the perfect time to harvest and cure them. I need some advice; from looking at the shallot in the container, do you think it is ready to be harvested?

Hope you have a joyous moments with your love ones during this festive season.

Poppy Candu

I really like poppy in the garden. Looking forward for them to bloom in spring every year. I received some opium poppy seeds from a very generous blogger friend this year. I sowed the seeds at first too early because I was too excited. But the seeds germinate well in May~June.

The opium poppy foliage is different from the Shirley poppy that we usually grow. The seed pods are much larger as well. Wonder if we have volunteers next year.

Bees love them as well.

A shy bee hiding behind the poppy stripey petal.

Hope you get all your festive season shopping done.

Saraba Summer Sweet Corn (さらば夏のトウモロコシ)

Strangely this warm season we have many self-seeded tomato plants growing in containers by itself. A lazy gardener that I am, I did not weed them and I just let them grow in the container. So this week some of the self-seeded tomato fruit had ripen like the yellow pear cherry tomatoes. Not sure what variety the red tomatoes is. The yellow currant cherry tomatoes harvest is more than 1kg every week. 

I thinned out some purple top turnip yesterday as its foliage was shadowing our capsicum plants. We also harvested some beetroots and a Lebanese zucchini before our night visitors enjoyed them. Some of our flowering capsicum and beetroot leaves has completely became bald each day last week. I have not encountered yet "our night visitor" that is enjoying our plants at the back of our backyard fence (council reserve land). But judging on how the plants were attacked it looks like the work of a big animal like possum. In one night, this visitor managed to eat 2 green capsicum fruit and the whole plant leaves. Furthermore, it also enjoyed many of our carrot blossoms that were planned for collecting seeds. Sadly, most of our young capsicum plants has gone missing or without leaves. A new challenge.

We harvested some self-seeded Chinese spinach,a kohlrabi, some baby leeks, eggplants and a sweet corn. I think this is the only decent looking sweet corn that we are able to harvest for this summer. Its hard to grow sweet corn which is a heavy drinker here in the driest city in Australia in summer. After 3 consecutive summer growing sweet corn with unsatisfactory results, its time for me to give up on them. Better to grow sweet corn at the end of summer and early fall which we had good harvest this year.

Therefore, farewell (saraba/sayonara) summer sweet corn.

I sowed sweet corn at the end of August this year and it managed only to grow about 30cm until now. I think it such a waste of water to grow them. Might as well grow other drought tolerant edible plants that does not required too much water. Too much stress for the sweet corn to grow in summer season here.

Visit Daphne's Dandelion Harvest Monday.