A Plethora of Pomegranates

When you have a garden, you often experience either feast or famine conditions. The year we first moved in I pruned the pomegranate tree away back. Admittedly, I didn't really know what I was doing but I'd been been told by a reliable source (Google!) what to do and how to do it. Maybe I pruned it a bit too much, because the following year it only produced 3 fruits. Albeit 3 massive fruits the size of my head!

In the years that followed, I've laid off the pruning and only cut back where the tree grows across the path. Every year, we get a tonne of enormous  pomegranates from a tree that never gets watered. That's not just drought tolerant - it's downright drought friendly!

Pomegranate and Butternut Squash harvest

So what can be done with all these beautiful fruits? Well a lot of them I give away to my friends. Pomegranates take a horrendously long time to process! The biggest ones can take me 20 minutes each to just peel and extract all the arils - the fleshy eats that you eat.

So at the weekend I set aside an hour and tried to get through as many pomegranates as I could. My Husband was convinced that there must be a more efficient way, so he spend a bit of time on YouTube researching de-seeding pomegranates. To begin with, I believed this time would have been better spent just helping me seed the damn things but, low and behold, when he tried to test out a few methods he came across, we discovered that he is super fast at seeding pomegranates. Not all of the methods proved useful, and even those that did, only for some of the time. If the fruit had grown in a perfectly symmetrical way, great - but most don't, so he was soon down in the trenches with me picking out arils one at a time with his fingers. He was still faster - processing 5 fruits for every 3 that I did - I rejoiced! No excuse for not asking him for help in this chore ever again.

So working together, we got a big bowl of seeds and put them through the juicer, careful not to spill any. Every seed is precious! (Is that from the Catechism or Monty Python?)

It took us over an hour to make enough for two glasses of pomegranate juice, from picking the fruit to drinking it.

It tastes so good even if it does looks like blood. Quite apt, since it was Halloween. In fact, the whole kitchen looked like a crime scene, juice on the floor, countertops and even splattered up the walls. CSI eat your heart out!

We were a mess too. Our fingers were stained purpley-grey and we laughed at the splotches of juice smeared across each others faces. No point is cleaning up until we'd finished the whole basket. A couple of hours later we had enough juice to freeze and even a little to experiment with.

I decided to try Pomegranate Scones.

This recipe is adapted from one I use from Delia Smith. (The same basic recipe is on the back of the packet of self raising flour too.) And yes, I can use grams or cups - I'm bilingual that way!

Ingredients

40g butter (I use Kerry Gold - Irish butter is the best)
225g self-raising flour
1½ level tablespoons caster sugar
110ml pomegranate juice, plus a little more (if needed)
Juice of one lemon (My addition - I think it helps with raising the dough)
One beaten egg
1/2 cup of dried cranberries (you can substitute with walnuts, raisin, chopped figs, choc-chips etc)
A little extra flour for rolling out
Pre-heat the oven to 220°C, gas mark 7

Equipment: A baking sheet with a non-stick liner, and a 5cm plain (or fluted) cutter

Method

• Rub the butter into the sieved flour using your fingertips
• Stir in the sugar and dried cranberries followed by a pinch of salt. 
• Pour the lemon juice into the pomegranate juice to mix it
• Use a knife to mix in the pomegranate/lemon juice 
• Knead the mixture with your hands to a soft dough (add more juice if it feels dry)
• Roll out dough to a thickness of 3cm 
• Without twisting the cutter, cut out the scones and put them on baking sheet
• brush some beaten egg over the top 
• Bake near top of oven for 12-15 minutes

I loved that the dough was pink!
 
When they’re done they will have risen and turned a golden brown, but there will still be pinkish purplish hues coming through - perfect for Halloween or even Valentines day - especially if you were to use a heart shaped cookie cutter.

Full disclosure - I'm not great at baking, but I am a top notch experimenter! And sometimes it works out - I should have a separate blog for all the ones that don't...

These scones were so delicious that I didn't even have to put butter and jam on them, but peach and lavender jam would have been wow with them - If I'd had any left from last year.

Leave a comment and let me know if you do try any of the recipes or have any other interesting  tweaks for them.

Byddi Lee

Flashes of red

I'd never even seen a pomegranate until the Autumn of 1997. Granted that is 14 years ago, but to me it still feels relatively recent.

Then, when we moved into this house, pomegranates were the first things that we harvested from our garden.  You know it's time to harvest again when you see the red fruits amid the yellowing leaves.

Pomegranate popularity practically exploded when anti-oxidants became the big thing. They are good for your heart, a great source of vitamin C, in fact, there are a gazillion good reasons to go through the tedious process of seeding them if the taste alone doesn't grab you. So whats not to love?

The staining factor for one!  Last year my Mum was visiting during pomegranate season. She  loved to prepare them for My Husband to eat because traditionally, Irish mothers do not believe that men can do anything for themselves with respect to food, and in extreme cases, with respect to anything at all. It explains a lot about our culture!

It was dark outside, so the white kitchen blinds where pulled. I was preparing veggies for dinner on our white Hanstone counter top. Mum was scared to squirt red pomegranate juice on the white leather chairs at the dining table, so she set up shop in the kitchen sink. Things were awfully quiet as we each bend our heads concentrating on our tasks. Until I glanced over at Mum and shrieked (in a totally Ned Flanders kind of way)!

The kitchen sink was right below the window and the blind resembled a scene from CSI, with pomegranate spatter halfway up the once immaculate white blind. Poor Mum was so upset.

"Don't worry, it will wash off," I said as I scrubbed at the blood red spots with a damp dish cloth, trying to keep upbeat and cheerful. "All this white stuff is amazingly resilient."

The red spots were turning a mauve grey color, something similar to the tone in my stricken Mums face! Was it only a matter of time before she'd recover and launch into a lecture on my color choices for my furniture and decor?

But to give Mum her due she just contined to apologise and accepted responsibility for the mess. This was harder for me to deal with than the "Well, what do you expect when you have all this white stuff?" line of defense.

I felt so bad for her being upset that I brushed it off and laughed, saying something along the lines of, "That's payback for all the times I spilled stuff growing up." But I couldn't even bring a specific example to mind. And then I realized that it was not because I hadn't spilled anything but that I didn't have a memory of her making me feel bad about it, though I'm sure she might have scolded me at the time.

The spots dried out a pale, barely noticeable grey. And we forgot about it. I figured that someday I'd get around to replacing that blind or cutting off the damaged part.

Today as I washed a pomegranate in the sink I looked at the white blind, and then I realized that it was white. The grey spots had completely faded - probably aided by the sun that blasts in there in the early mornings before we get up and pull the blinds. And I thought - that's what families should be like, mishaps occur but we move on so that the sheet gets wiped clean by forgiveness and acceptance.

Byddi Lee

Did my garden miss me as much as I missed it?

Judging by the growth spurt - no! Okay, so maybe it's an illusion. I go out every day and peer closely at my plants to see if they have grown any in the last few hours - seriously mad, I know, but I can't help myself. So you can imagine what joy it is to see my garden after three weeks. Things have really got growing out there.

I was greeted first by a profusion of flowers in the native garden. I arrived back after dark and they seemed white in the moonlight, but the next morning the Hookeri Evening Primrose (Oenothera Hookeri) flaunted her full glory.

Considering this was six inches tall when I bought it last October, it's simply stunning. And close up you can see how beautiful the blossoms really are.

The coyote mint ( Monardella villosa) has also blossomed. As well as having perfumed foliage, the purple blossoms are attracting the bees.

The old plum tree in the front yard, one of three non-natives spared in the conversion, is rewarding us for our mercy with bough breaking loads of fruit. Delicious! I see plum jam in my immediate future!

 

The pomegranate has blossomed. Hopefully, it will produce more fruit than it did last year -a grand total of three pomegranates! Perhaps that extreme pruning the year before last has paid off.

In the succulent garden, most of the plants are happy and some have even sent up blossoms. What a big turn around from the days when I seemed to kill every succulent I looked at!

 

Some funky things are going on with my vegetables. I have several squash volunteers. They sprung up in the mulch under the fruit trees. Before the mulch went down, I used everything in my compost bins to provide a layer of compost whether it had composted yet or not.  My guess is that these are from a butternut squash we'd eaten a while ago.

Why is it that volunteers seem to grow better than the ones I carefully tend to?

While I was in Ireland it rained here. This patch of unseasonably (though I've yet to figure out just what seasonable means in California!) cool weather brought a few surprises. The late peas, that I had given up on and hadn't gotten around to pulling, took off. Back to having mange-tout and sugar snap peas for dinner again - yipee!

After reseeding my parsnips several times I eventually got them to germinate. And now look at them.

I'd tried and tried to get kolrabi, the space ship-like brassica, to grow. Again I'd given up, had noticed unidentified brassica leaves growing amonst the peppers and decided to leave it until I came home. I was astonished to see a beautiful apple-sized kolrabi - ready to harvest.

I sliced it and stir-fried it with the peas and carrots I've been harvesting.

I've also been harvesting French round carrots. These are excellent for stony ground or containers. I was growing them for fun and because I got a free packet of seeds. Now, I'd grow them for taste. They have a lovely aniseed aftertaste. I steamed these ones.

The pole beans are living up to their name and growing nicely up the poles.

In the foreground you can see potatoes that are ready to harvest, and which I actually have harvested since the picture was taken. I love the maths of gardening - I planted 3 potatoes here and dug up 16 of at least the same size, if not bigger. On the topic of potatoes - my bags of spuds have really taken off.

 

It won't be long before I'm harvesting them.

My last garden observation involves alcohol. I have sunflowers planted in two beds. One of the beds is orderly and quite regimented. I can watch as these little sun soldiers stand up tall and turn their faces to the sun, all facing the same way.

The other bed is the one where I carried out my beer experiment on the slugs. I did spill some, but oh boy, those sunflowers have really been partying! Can you tell which bed is which?

Byddi Lee