A little harvest

Just a few little things I gathered from around the farm this morning.
A couple of passion fruit, a handful of small feijoas, a few jalapeno chillies, a few cayenne peppers and a small number of tomatoes.
With the tomatoes I've been using them to make a pizza sauce, really easy to do, just wash and slice in half lengthways (I don't bother skinning them), then fry in a little olive oil, with some salt and pepper, a couple of crushed garlic cloves and some fresh basil leaves torn up. Cook on low heat stirring and mushing up the tomatoes until they are all quite squishy and there is a little liquid in the pan (I don't add more as I want a thick sauce for spreading on the base of pizzas). Turn off heat and then whizz or blend to a paste. Freezes well.

Roast chicken

G butchered one of our chickens yesterday and today I cooked it up. It was a young cockarel, 20 wks old, and weighed in at just over 1.5 kgs.
After trussing it, I put the chook in the slow cooker with a lemon in its cavity, a little olive oil on its skin and a dash of stock in the pot, covered it with tin foil and then the lid of the slow cooker. I left it to cook for about 6 hours.
Then I roasted it in the oven for a couple of hours (covering it with tin foil after it had browned so that it didn't dry out) with some additional lemon thyme scattered on top, and some sea salt and pepper. We ate it with some roast potatoes and parsnips and some boiled veg on the side, plus of course gravy. The meat was quite tender and very tasty. Will try this method (slow cooking first) again with an older chook (we have a couple of mature hens to cull) to see what the results are.
Sorry no photos, we were in too much of a rush to eat!

Tropical water lillies

A shot of some of the tropical water lillies in our pond. The variety is 'Black Prince'. I cut a few to put in a vase, as well as looking pretty they have a nice scent.