>August harvest

>August is such a wonderful time of the year in the garden. The tomatoes, peppers and aubergines are all established and growing well. They need to be watered every day, but otherwise the main work is the harvesting. Our friends arrive to spend their holidays with us and we spend hours, long evenings, lazy lunchtimes eating meals in the garden with them. We’ve set up our various irrigation systems so that the garden is watered while we do other things – like eating. So the following is just a taste of the last few days here.

Olives

On Sunday we went to Salasc market and bought olives, pickled garlic and tapenade from this lovely stall:

Seafood paella

We ate seafood and green pepper paella cooked over charcoal in the garden: encornets (squid), onions, sliced green peppers, garlic, sautéed in olive oil. Add paprika, saffron, rosemary, salt, pepper, paella rice, lemon juice, chopped tomato, water to cover. Simmer in a wide paella pan until the rice is cooked. Add mussels for the last couple of minutes.

Aubergine dip

Another evening I made an aubergine dip:

Bake a whole aubergine or two small ones in the oven until soft. Peel and put the flesh in a blender with a spoonful of honey, garlic, paprica, mint, salt, pepper and olive oil, until smooth. Add lemon juice and serve with slices of cucumber, green pepper or other raw vegetables. We opened a bottle of chilled muscat sec from Domaine des Pascales in Gabian to go with this.

And every day we pick more than we can possibly eat, of tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes ….