Playing With Water Read Free Page B

paste
    olive oil
    salt and pepper
    1 cup of olives
    Method:
    Fry the chopped eggplant in batches until soft and slightly browned. Place in a big serving bowl.
    Add more olive oil to the pan and cook the celery. Don’t let it get soft. Place this into the bowl with the eggplant. Add a little more oil to the pan and fry the onion until clear but not browned or unformed. Put in the tomato paste and about a cup of water and cook for 3 minutes or so, gently boiling. Add the vinegar,sugar, olives and capers. Bring to the boil and then taste. It may need more sugar or salt.
    Mix all the ingredients in the big bowl. Grind pepper over it.
    Serve at room temperature or warm.
    It is good with bread and fish or chicken.
Thursday, 20th January
    Old white cosmos plants were piled into the wheelbarrow. A stack of weeds too, from the bed at the curve of the path down the outside of the house which leads to the back steps. This bed was like a meadow with old roses and a few pink and scarlet zinnias. All these annuals had been planted in one day from a heady mix. In a hurry, I had soaked five packets of seed and sowed the lot, thinking, ‘Now we shall see what likes it here.’ It became one of the most beautiful beds I have ever grown. I took some plants from this bigger bed and put them down the side path too. The white cosmos wafted its starry flowers above the bright blue cornflowers. Towards the back of the bed, a few zinnias stood and among them some surprising greenish-white ones, stalwartly claiming their space and making the whole beautiful and strange.
    The cornflowers went in later than the packet advised, as they ought to be sown in winter. But still they thrived in the heat and lasted four months. Some are stillflowering among the last of the cosmos, which are not quite done yet either. Behind them, four pink climbing roses have almost covered the side fence since they were planted in June. A Lorraine Lee rose I bought among twenty others from Heynes’ Nursery in Norwood, Adelaide, is two metres tall. There is an Albertine I brought here from Leura in a pot at Easter and two old Rugosa roses my son Hugh dug out from under the big tree, where they languished for years in the summer shade. We call this tree the Mother-in-law tree, as when I first saw it I asked the owners of this house the name. The man told me his wife’s mother had given them it as a seedling so they’d named it after her as they knew no other name. The Eureka lemon tree and the pink crepe myrtle (an advanced tree I got from the Leura Nursery) are also along this side fence. The myrtle has just bloomed and is three metres high. It has doubled in size, as has the Eureka lemon, since they were planted here. It is the good soil and the climate, as well as the blood and bone fertiliser, that set them roaring. When I move house, the first thing I plant is a lemon.
    Not a single basil plant has come up from the seeds I sowed for winter. Terry says that one hot day can kill the lot in the early stages. I thought I had taken care not to let them dry out. They were sown under a sprinkling of old lawn clippings with no soil at all on top, as he taught me.
    My friend Jennifer came two days ago to begin taking photographs of the garden to show whatever happens this coming year. We are full of hope. Anthony, Jennifer’s husband, walked around as I picked the first tomatoes for them to take home, smelling the plants while saying: ‘Tomatoes smell so wonderful; they have an old-fashioned smell.’ There was a plate of Rouge de Marmande tomatoes ripening in the sun on the back table. These were handed over the fence by Terry, who grew them from a self-sown plant that sprang up having fallen from a bush onto the path and been trodden in. If you hold your palm up and turn your fingers in slightly, that is the outline of the shape of this beautiful prawn-pink fruit. Rouge de Marmande tomatoes are good planted earlier than Grosse Lisse and others I am told.
    The genus name