The backyard deli

I've come to love the way gardeners write about cooking, and share recipes. There is very little "exactly this amount of this, and that quantity of that"- it's all "a handful of this, an armful of that, a few of these (or substitute this other thing if you find yourself a bit short)". Because when you grow things to eat, and eating out of your garden comes to significantly replace what you used to buy at the supermarket, there is no such thing as exactly 1KG of carrots or a punnet of cherry tomatoes. There's this slender handful of beans, that overwhelming quantity of silverbeet, a pocket-and-a-half of tomatoes, three strawberries, and as much thyme as you could ever imagine needing. And if your tomatoes are bright yellow, your zucchinis are round, your strawberries are tiny and sweet, your beans are purple and you tend to think of anything in the brassica family as 'random green thing #43*', what you cook and how you cook is different.

And when I'm thinking of what to cook it's not some abstract instruction from a recipe book I'm guided by, it's what's happening in the garden. Oh look, more cherry tomatoes than I can handle- right, then, roast-cherry tomato pasta. The rocket's getting a bit spicy, best turn it into pesto. Need to thin the radishes- stir-fried radish leaves! Lots of zucchini flowers right now, but that's OK because they taste great tossed sliced and tossed in pasta. It is such a fucking joy to come home and know that as long as I can pull out some pasta or grain-thing to be the base, I can gather everything I need for some randomly-created, generally-fantastic meal in the produce section that is my backyard. What's not to love? The price is right**, the convenience can't be beaten, and this stuff is pretty goddamn gourmet.

*: Random Green Things appreciate nitrogen, pretty much reliably. Fruiting-flowering things like potash. Everything likes worm wee. This is what I've learnt about fertilisers, so far.
**: Sure there's set-up costs, but I'm pretty sure that I've made it back already in food I haven't had to buy. Also, entertainment value.