AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 1
Every year when I was a child my father cleared a piece of scrub land on our farm at the foot of the Bunya Mountains and burnt off the felled scrub, before planting pumpkins, watermelons and other vegetables in the ashes. Years later he asked me if I knew why these crops flourished? By then I had become the gardening guru in the family. Dad said, that if he merely added ash to a vegetable garden he couldn’t get the same healthy result. I explained that not only was he using fertile soil for the first time, but the heat of the fire had killed all the nasty pathogens in the soil which might have inhibited the growth of his vegetables. This is a method of growing vegetable gardens in tropical countries like Papua New Guinea.
When I was a child we never ate baby vegetables like button squash and zucchini. The Acorn Squash and Marrow, as we called zucchini, were rather despised and tasteless vegetables, best hollowed out and stuffed with a savoury meat mixture. It was only after Eberhard and I moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland in 1992 that I came to have an appreciation of Mediterranean vegetables like zucchini, eggplant and capsicums. The Granite Belt has a cool mountain climate and many of the farmers here are descendants of earlier Italian immigrants. Each year this district supplies a huge volume of vegetables and fruit to the Brisbane and Sydney markets.
Disaster struck the Granite Belt community on Christmas Day with a huge hail storm that destroyed or damaged many of the vegetable crops as the farmers were about to commence the seasonal picking.
Hail storm over the Granite Belt on Christmas Day 2008
The farmers had two choices. They could slash their damaged plants to the ground, plough the soil and replant, or they could pay workers to strip from the plants and throw away all the damaged vegetables, in the expectation that the bushes and vines would recover and begin bearing produce again.
At Glen Aplin, directly below Das Helwig Haus B&B our neighbours, Joe and Nerrina, had planted a field of zucchini. They made the decision to try to salvage their plants and were cutting off all the hail spotted zucchinis in their fields when I spoke with them. They invited me to take as many as I could use.
Hail damaged zucchinis
Santo and Nancy sent me capsicums and eggplant from their farm. In my own garden I had fresh tomatoes, carrots, basil and parsley available. A few onions remained in my coldroom. With these ingredients at hand I decided to make up a batch of Ratatouille an Italian recipe.
RATATOUILLE
1-2 eggplant. Dice unpeeled eggplant, sprinkle liberally with salt, set aside for an hour then wash, drain and dry. 3 medium tomatoes. Peel and chop tomatoes. 1 capsicum. Seed and slice capsicum. 2-3 zucchini. Slice. 2 onions. Slice. 2 medium carrots. Peel and slice. 2-3 tablespoons olive oil.
In a large pan stir fry and saute vegetables, one variety at a time.
Lightly fry onions
Layer in a casserole dish sprinkling with remaining ingredients.
Parsley, basil and garlic.
1 tablespoon parsley, chopped. 1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped. 2 cloves garlic, crushed. 1/4 teaspoon sugar, salt and pepper.
Cover and cook at 190-200C for about 1 hour or until vegetables are tender.
Ratatouille ready for the oven.
I took these photographs in March this year when there was a seasonal abundance of all these vegetables. I made up five large dishes of ratatouille which, after cooking, I ladled into freezer boxes for storage. I find this such a great vegetable dish to pull out of the freezer and heat while some pasta is boiling and meat is grilling. It is a way that I can serve a hot meal to my family if I only get home thirty minutes before dinner time.
In 2009 I will be featuring more zucchini dishes in my Abundance series.
