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By clare, March 27, 2010 10:03 am

It occurred to me that it might be helpful to other tropical home kitchen gardeners and cooks to share some of the great online resources that I tap into when researching ingredients, so here is a start to some of the sites I visit:

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/

Home page for the Purdue University New Crop website which has an enormous amount of information and links, some of which are below.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/parmar/index.html

An online copy of the Indian book Wild Fruits

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/index.html

An online copy of Julia Morton’s classic reference for tropical and sub-tropical fruits, Fruits of Warm Climates

http://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/documents/Research/Qld-Tropical-Fruit.pdf

A downloadable PDF by the Queensland Government with a nutritional summary of a range of tropical fruit.

http://www.rirdc.gov.au/

If you have an interest in in-depth information on particular tropical food plants, both introduced and native to Australia, it is worth searching through the reports and publications produced by RIRDC.

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By admin, January 23, 2010 3:44 am

Perfect pastry for the tropics © Clare Richards 2009 - 2010

Pastry can easily be a very ordinary thing. Too hard, too soft, too stodgy, too thick when cooked; the dough too sticky and wet when mixed, or too liable to melt on you when rolled out. Add to that the very different cooking conditions of tropical climates, with long periods of the year with consistent heat and humidity, and it becomes even more difficult.

So I’ve been trialling and researching, and have come up with a recipe that is dead easy to prepare, works consistently, works on a hot or humid day, and produces a pastry that can be rolled thin, that melts in your mouth, and yet holds firm when filled and when cut.

It’s so good that you’ll have to wait until my cookbook Tropical Cuisine: Cooking in Clare’s Kitchen comes out mid 2010 to get the recipe. For now, here’s a photo of a durian tart I made with the perfect pastry for the tropics.

© Clare Richards 2009 – 2010