Carl Legge’s Oca pizza recipe

Autumn is approaching, and you know what that means: It’s time to watch (or maybe rewatch for the 10th time) Gilmore Girls, the classic cozy TV show set in charming Stars Hollow. Rory and Lorelai’s lives offer more than just quirky hometown characters, book recommendations, and nostalgic fashion inspiration—you’re forgetting about all of the beautiful settings the show has to offer. 

For my Masters dissertation last year I did some research into gardeners who choose to grow unusual edible crops. I settled on two species to investigate, achocha and oca. In the past I’ve written about how to grow achocha – it’s a nice, easy plant and in a temperate climate you should have no problems getting a significant yield. You may have more of a problem dealing with the glut….

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

I didn’t get outside much over Christmas, as the weather wasn’t really conducive to gardening and we were happy having some quiet time indoors. But as harvesting the oca and ulluco was long overdue, I went out to do it yesterday afternoon. The photo above shows what the bed looked like at the end of August. The oca were clearly happier than the the ulluco by this time; they were always more numerous in terms of actual plants, so they had 2/3 bed.

On the weekend that we had Jus-Rol Cinnamon Swirls as our mid-gardening snack, I also hatched a plan to use up the last of the oca harvest. Oca is Oxalis tuberosa, mainly grown for its edible tubers, which were (are?) a staple crop in its homeland of the Andes. There they have a large number of different varieties, bred for different culinary uses. This far out of its normal range we have a much more limited choice, although there are people working on that. Oca tubers are a bit like potatoes and generally used in the same way, although their flavour is a little different.

The ice cream experiments continue, with a spate of frozen yoghurt trials. I have never been a big fan of chocolate ice cream, but something I read online (and a half-empty jar of Nutella) prompted me to give Nutella frozen yoghurt a go!

There’s a distinctly autumnal feel to the garden now (and high winds over the weekend have made the dahlias all bendy), but it’s still very warm.

A bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet, for a loaf that is about 1/4 wholewheat flour.

A reliable French-style bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet.

Another of my dad’s minimalistic (but tasty!) recipes, for a wartime crumble mix that uses breadcrumbs rather than flour.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

Last year sometime, I found the National Space Centre’s recipe for edible meteorites. We thought it would be fun to give it a go, but decided that making meteorite shapes would be too much of a faff, so we made it in a tray. We liked it so much we’ve made it lots of time since and tweaked the recipe a bit. We call it our rocky regolith, as it’s like Rocky Road but there are no roads in space!