Kitchen Garden: The new breed of kitchen gardeners

Marie-Alice McLean Dreyfus typifies the trend. She grew up in Sydney and moved to Canberra eight years ago to study at the Australian National University for a Bachelor of Arts and Asia Pacific Studies with a major in Chinese. She now works here and, this year, moved into an apartment in Canberra City.

Marie-Alice's mum has a small vegie garden and her aunt is a florist with an oft-visited garden full of vegetables and flowers. However she never thought growing vegetables was something you could do in an apartment.

Marie-Alice read Indira Naidoo's The Edible Balcony" (2011) and watched the author do a presentation in Sydney which was an inspiration. As a novice and still learning, her balcony is a work-in- progress.

Planter boxes were bought from Aldi and soil/compost from Bunnings. Pots are hand-me- downs from Mum. Marie-Alice's boyfriend, who lives in Turner, helped her with construction although they say the planter boxes are easy to put together and would be doable on one's own. A watering can filled in the kitchen is used to water plants and there is a drain on the balcony so excess water can drain away. That makes the balcony dirtier so needs extra attention to regular mopping and sweeping.

All the edibles are grown from seed, purchased from Aldi and Bunnings. Because the balcony is north-west facing and overlooks Glebe Park, it receives sun from 11am to 5pm so beans, lettuce, carrots, rocket and other herbs are growing but get thirsty in late spring heat.

Marie-Alice enjoys cooking. Her father is French so she has grown up with a love of food which was a big part of family life. Looking at recipes inspires her and she could easily pore over cookbooks for hours on end. The most recent addition to her bookshelves is Mountain Berries & Desert Spice (Murdoch Books. $39.99) by Sumayya Usmani who grew up in Pakistan and now lives in Scotland. The author shares family recipes from the Hindu Kush mountains to the fertile Punjab.

However, as Marie-Alice spent two years living in Taipei, her favourite cuisine at the moment is Taiwanese food. It is hard to find in Canberra except at Fun Ma in the City, so she often makes her own dishes and is experimenting with perfecting them. She brought back to Australia a Taiwanese slow cooker and a soy milk maker which grinds soy beans with water and skins are filtered out through muslin.

From How to prepare three dishes in the least amount of time for busy people ed. Zhihua Zhang (Ytower Publishing iNc. 2014), Marie-Alice has translated two bean recipes to share with us.

The secret ingredient

There are more than 140 apartments in the Glebe Residences and, beside the complex is At Glebe, a modern cafe with an attractive courtyard. The owner, Ilija Tomeski, came to Canberra from the Balkans in Macedonia 43 years ago and he is a keen gardener so Marie-Alice has a challenge - to grow tomatoes, chillies, lovage and basil to equal those on the At Glebe deck.

Ilija says the trick is coffee grounds and his son, Dean (a professional footballer when overseas) is the barista who uses Red Brick Coffee from Curtin and Country Valley milk from Picton to make the perfect flat white. The spent coffee grounds are mixed through soil and allowed to 'cure' before plantings take place.

Beans stir-fried with eggplant

200g eggplant, purple thin ones preferred

300g green beans

10g Thai basil

8 cloves garlic, crushed

1 spoon salt (tsp)

1 tsp sugar

3 tbsp oil

400ml water

Wash beans and cut them into lengths, wash eggplant and cut into chunks. Heat the wok, add oil, then crushed garlic and fry until fragrant. Add beans along with salt, sugar and water and cook for three minutes. Add eggplant and cook for two minutes, when eggplant and beans are cooked, add the basil before serving.

"Dry"* style fried beans with pork

200g green beans

30g pork mince

10g crushed garlic

1 tbsp chilli sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp sugar

2 tbsp water

500ml oil

Top and tail beans and remove stringy parts. Heat the wok, add oil and heat to 180C. Add beans and cook for one minute, until the colour is turning slightly golden then remove from pan. Drain most of the oil but leave a little and reduce heat on the wok. Add garlic and cook until fragrant. Add the pork and heat until cooked through. Add chilli sauce, soy sauce, sugar and water and cook until the water has evaporated. Add beans and toss through other ingredients until fully combined.

Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.