Saturday, February 14, 2009

An organic Valentine :)

Worried about being stiffed with overpriced roses, chemically enhanced and flown in from halfway across the world? There is a solution :)

Find a few blooms in your garden


put them on the breakfast table and say


I love you :)

Dedicated to WW - my love for ever xxx :)

PS: Check out the Organic Consumers Association for more ideas.









Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Cooking organic sweet potato leaf

We harvested our organic sweet potato today (there are a couple of more detailed recipes on that post too). One lesson to be learnt is that it needs a climbing frame - it was crawling all over the ground looking for something to climb up; also, the leaves of one of the plants were all small and not a deep green - I think there was too much shade.

We didn't get a lot out of it...


I separated out the older leaves, those with holes and browned edges, and kept only the tender stalks - about enough for one portion. All the rest went to the vermicomposting box.


It's often cooked with garlic and lard: we don't have any lard so I tried with some chopped chinese sausage, couple of cracked garlic cloves, and a dried chili. Fried that in oil for a while then threw in the leaves


Added some chinese wine and soy sauce. Too much soy sauce! You always have to watch out in stir fries not to overdo the soy sauce...


Well - it was not really a success :( Too oily and too salty - but the basic principle of the recipe was good. But the sweet potato leaf was still good - tender and pleasantly non-bitter (not exactly sweet though, if you see what I mean).