Just because I’m feeling proud, here is a picture of some of our home-grown Roma tomatoes.
Since this photo was taken last week, our harvest has zoomed along, and there are bowls of Romas everywhere. Gotta love a glut – it makes a girl feel sooo agricultural.
Posted in growing food, summer food, vegetable | Tagged home grown, Roma tomatoes |
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Love & Hunger: Thoughts on the Gift of Food is a book about the emotional & symbolic meaning of cooking for people you love. It's a distillation of everything writer Charlotte Wood has learned over 25 years of home cooking, about the pleasures of simple food well made.
"Wood writes beautifully about food. Partly it's because she has something to say about life, not just about food ... Wood's nimble food writing shifts seamlessly from the hotly contested topic of table-setting on one page to grappling with hunger on another. No philosophy, snobbery, one-upmanship, no competing with restaurant cooks. Just a lot of honesty and admission of failings, mistakes, triumphs and pleasures.
- Helen Greenwood, Sydney Morning Herald
"In this wonderful cookbook-cum-literary memoir, novelist Charlotte Wood evokes memory and emotion as she explains why she loves to cook and what it means to her. Slotted in among the reveries are recipes as diverse as an Elizabeth David-inspired milk-cooked pork and the hedgehog slice of a childhood in Cooma. It's a book that's satisfying to mind AND stomach."
- SBS FEAST magazine
"Charlotte Wood writes so openly about her cooking habits and history and her thoughts about the ethics of good eating that it’s impossible not to be swept up in her enthusiasm. Novice and experienced cooks alike will find something to inspire them here, as Wood has included a range of wonderful, tempting recipes. Reading Love & Hunger is like being invited into Wood’s home, seated at a table crowded with delectable dishes and encouraged to eat until you burst."
- Kylie Mason, The Newtown Review of Books
"This book has the power to reignite a passion for life, friendship, food and the everyday. Part memoir and part recipe book, Love & Hunger can be read cover to cover, as I did, just like a novel, or can be dipped into when the moment requires. Charlotte's unusual cook book is the wise friend many of us do not have ready at hand 24/7. Love & Hunger is a guide, an encouragement and an inspiration.
- John Purcell, Booktopia
"Love & Hunger manages to be a cookbook for the kitchen, a gentle read for the bedside table and a positive affirmation of the pleasure of cooking for family & friends ... This collection of 27 essays gently and sensitively explores the rich complexity and spiritual sustenance that good food with family & friends imparts to our lives. Each chapter explores, a different aspect of ‘the gift of food’ with a number of recipes ‘attached’; all of them good, none of them complex and many wonderfully comforting. There were many moments when reading, we nodded in heated agreement with the almost commonsense views espoused. As one other reviewer noted, it’s rare for a cookbook to move you to tears; be warned you may succumb. ... If there is a criticism to be made, we would only want more…"
- Tim White, Books for Cooks
"Author Charlotte Wood writes like a dream, wrestling with some of those common cooking conundrums, such as dealing with 'polenta paranoia', getting back your kitchen mojo and pondering just what the difference is between a chutney, a relish and a pickle. Her blog is also packed with scrumptious recipes - beetroot palak paneer, anyone?"
- MasterChef Magazine, June 2011
How to shuck an oyster
These smell so good. Congratulations farmer Charl. Will they be annointed with basil and buffalo mozzarella, or scoffed as is?
I was glad to hear the local council dropped that allegation about use of human waste for cultivation.
Yes Charlotte, congrats etc. Now tell us what you’re going to do with them! Are you talking a serious glut? Like the kind that would require a drive by from me to help alleviate?
Love a good glut. Well done, Charlotte, they look great. Of all the tomato varieties, Romas are some of the tomatoeyest tasting, if that’s a word.
Jules, I know your council on The Right side of the bridge is very lax on ‘composting’ rules but over here our cultivation practices are a little more sophisticated I’m pleased to say.
And hmm, I may have exaggerated the gluttiness, Empress. Sadly it requires no drive-by – but when my next crop comes on, fingers crossed I will need to give you a call…
Jamie, I have some baby heirloom seedlings on the go – do you reckon it’s too late for me to get a harvest before autumn? They’re only about two inches high.
Charlotte. Get the seedlings in now and they should produce the goods. Feed them up every fortnight early on (liquid foods) and provided the weather is merely normal (which is a big ask these days) and you have two gluts in the one year.
Handsome buggers, aren’t they? Well done you!
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