Megan Palmer

Without exception, I always marinate beef, lamb, goat in red wine before cooking whether I am roasting or stewing the meat.

Australian cabernet merlots and cabernet sauvignons are affordable reds that are good for marinades and drinkable.

White wine is used to marinate chicken, rabbit and added to cooked clams, mussels and fish.

For stir fries, I use chinese rice wine.

For baking, I keep a bottle of schnapps or kirsch - not been able to buy pear william for ages so I've been using either a peach or apple schnapps

In our region, there are usually fire bans throughout summer and/or a fire permit is required.

However, we use the criss cross aka top down method in our wood burner.

If fires were permitted outdoors, we would probably use the same method with stones encircling the fire or a fire pit if it was a windy site.

r ransom wrote:

Pretty good, but possibly too spicy.  Something in the rhubarb emphasized the spice.

The flavours will mellow the longer that you store your chutney before eating.

I like a bit of heat in my chutneys so always add more chili than the recipe specifies and it tastes quite different when freshly made compared to two month's later.

Dinner was a one pot meal tonight, a variation of a Maltese dish - lampuki pie.  Instead of mahi mahi, used ling fillets.

Mackerel is also good for this recipe.

I make it with just a flaky pastry top, don't bother with a pastry base.

The pieces of fish are coated in seasoned flour, lightly pan fried to golden brown and placed in the bottom of a casserole dish then topped with a tomato sauce that has chopped steamed spinach, cauliflower florets, olives, capers, sultanas.

My husband's late mother hand wrote notes on the Maltese recipe book she gave me before we got married.

Rest

Chris Kott wrote:

Apart from Chanterelles, there was a slimy-capped mushroom whose english name I haven't been able to find growing to amazing size, some extremely fat-stemmed ones with small beige to brown caps smaller than the circumference of the base of the stem, and that is all I can recall for now. If these sound familiar to anyone, I'd appreciate knowing what they are.

-CK

The slimy mushroom sounds like it was a suillus luteus

https://www.mushroomexpert.com/suillus_luteus.html

The latter, boletus edulis

https://www.mushroomexpert.com/boletus_edulis.html

Both grow under pine.

Next

When we cook our rice for Chinese meals we use the absorption method and have always rinsed the rice until the water runs clear.

As a child, rice was sold in hessian sacks and tasted faintly of sacking if not rinsed thoroughly.

We still buy our rice in 10/20kg bags but they are packaged in a woven plastic coated material that doesn't seem to impart any noticeable smell to the rice.

There are many "feral" fruit trees growing on the walking tracks around the lakes in our district, mainly plums, apples and peaches that most likely sprouted from pits and/or stones discarded by walkers.

The feral peaches that grew on your grandfather's property may have only yielded small fruit if the trees had never been pruned and tended. Had the trees been fed, watered, thinned and pampered, the fruit would likely have grown much larger.

There is a delicious white fleshed peach grown from a stone in our community garden that I planted in 2016 that has crisp crunchy flesh when under ripe that ripens to extremely juicy, sweet fruit bursting with flavour with melting flesh.

There are photos of the white fleshed peach in this post  https://permies.com/t/120/23607/Propagating-Blood-cling-Peaches#1308051

Can you recall the colour of the skin and flesh, texture, whether it was cling or freestone, of your grandfather's peach tree?