Autumn indolence and fresh feijoas
BEWARE NOT the ides of March but the idleness of May. It creeps up like mould at the bottom of the shower box, like the price of fresh passionfruit, like the needle on the bathroom scales after the first slow-cooker casseroles and autumn fruit crumbles.
In spring and summer, I garden like a superwoman possessed, but come autumn I really can’t be arsed doing anything. May is a month of good intentions. There’s so much to be done but I do none of it, bar paving the road to hell.
Every year I vow to rake up the autumn leaves as they fall, stockpiling vast heaps of carbon for our compost heap, but then I sit on my chuff and watch the driveway turn into triple tracks of sludge.
Every year I swear I’ll sow green manure crops – broad beans, blue lupins or mustard seeds – to sequester the nitrogen in my potato patch before the autumn rains leach it from the soil. Then I lazily let the soil lie fallow until it’s choked with shrewd weeds, before cursing my indolence every spring.
In autumn, I madly order spring-flowering bulbs. This year’s impulse purchases include 100 fragrant ‘Erlicheer’ narcissus, 450 ranunculus, 250 freesias, 200 tulips and 60 sparaxis, even though I still have 120 unplanted anemones sitting in the shed from last year. At least I’ve learned my lesson with tiny crocus. Mice ate the lot before they ever saw soil so I won’t waste my money on them again.
I’m not entirely indifferent to the great outdoors. I’ve saved my echinacea seeds, sown a rainbow of heirloom carrots, put in a bed of beetroot and slipped in some sweet peas and Sugarsnaps for winter, and chopped the last 5kg of blight-ridden green tomatoes into chutney.
I’ve also bid farewell to feijoa season, and not a moment a soon. Like everyone else in New Zealand, I’ve had my fill. I bottled some in sugar syrup, drowned others in vodka and attempted to impress the rest upon our new American houseguest, Lindsay Eller.
I’ve eaten some pretty strange things on my travels – donkey coppiette in Rome, chicken skin chips in Sydney, raw horse in Madrid (‘‘don’t worry,’’ said the waitress, ‘‘it’s just a little pony’’) – and our artist friend from Arizona possibly feels the same about our nation’s most fervently adopted fruit.
That pungent aroma. That impossible-to-pin-down flavour. That phlegm-like flesh, its texture as polarising as a jellied terrine. ‘‘An acquired taste, perhaps?’’ said Lindsay, charitably, though I noticed she didn’t seem too keen to dive back into our fruit bowl for seconds.
At least when you’re sick of fresh feijoas, you can bake the blighters. Use any banana cake recipe, or try this foolproof fruit loaf. In a small pot, combine one cup scooped feijoa flesh, one cup boiling water, one cup sugar and 50g butter. Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes, mash gently, then cool to lukewarm and fold in two cups self-raising flour, one teaspoon baking soda and a lightly beaten egg. Spoon into a greased, lined loaf tin at bake at 180°C for 40-50 minutes. When cool, drizzle with lemon icing.
This loaf is delicious fresh, but even better stale. Cut it into inchthick slabs, splash with peach liqueur and press around the base
In spring and summer, I garden like a superwoman possessed, but come autumn I really can’t be arsed doing anything.
of a trifle bowl. Then top with a jar of home-bottled apricots (or a tin of bought peaches), a carton of vanilla custard and a cumulus cloud of Chantilly cream for a wickedly decadent trifle.
‘‘So good,’’ was Lindsay’s verdict.
‘‘Even better at 3am,’’ confessed my husband, who got up during the night to attend to toddler night terrors and scoffed a second bowlful before returning to bed.