tastebud burst

This is the first fruits from our garden - one big, fat zucchini.

How good does that look?! OK, so I hid all the bird pecks away from the camera's prying eye, but still...

More importantly, how good did it taste? Delicious. Our very own organic, spray free produce.

I have a sneaking suspicion we have planted five too many zucchini plants! The six of them are growing bigger and bigger and bigger, overrunning the whole patch, and producing fruit galore. I've heard you can also eat the flowers, so I'm going to experiment with a sweet potato stuffed version that I found here. Should be interesting.

Another vegetable attempting to take over our garden by storm is a gianormous rhubarb plant. I swear this thing is over one metre across! Every time I hack a few stalks off, they replace themselves in a trice and the plant is bigger than ever.

We love rhubarb and so do the earwigs - there are dozens of them hiding in the damp environs of curled up leaves. I'm pleased to report, after a rather hurried internet search, that earwigs are entirely harmless and only turn their pincers on ants who attack them from behind. What a relief that is - though I still prefer Frank to dispose of our unwanted leaves, just in case those pincers turn on me!

Rhubarb triggers off a wealth of wonderful memories in my mind. Four years ago I travelled to Tajikistan. I stayed with a wonderful Tajik family who opened their home and their hearts to me.

They also introduced me to the wonders of Tajik cuisine. Including rhubarb.

Tajiks don't eat rhubarb like we do. I cook it up into Rhubarb and Coconut cakes, or stew it with sugar by the cup full. Frank then eats it on his cereal, or with yoghurt or icecream. That wonderful blend of ascerbic and sweet flavours is a delight to the taste buds.

But the Tajiks don't eat it like that - oh no they don't!

Every spring the rhubarb bursts into life. The locals harvest it and cart it along the streets on small trolleys. Anything edible has the potential to create income in a country where income is hard to come by. I have vivid recollections of rhubarb trolleys rumbling past me on sun dappled footpaths, the purveyors doing their best to bring in a dollar - or a Somoni in this case.

Rhubarb is something of a delicacy in Tajikistan, and once purchased it is quickly consumed. The stalks are cut up into small pieces, dipped in salt and eaten raw. It sounds perfectly awful, but it really doesn't taste so bad! Tart, but refreshing and invigorating as well.

I can't chop rhubarb now without popping some of it into my mouth, raw. As the flavour bursts onto my tongue, my mind explodes with a myriad of memories. Memories of beautiful people with sunny smiles; of women and old men cutting grass in curbside flower beds; of old women selling pumpkin seeds by the roadside; of children playing in the streets; of flowing dresses and head scarves; of bed bugs; of feeling like a queen as they treated me like royalty.

Tajikistan openned its heart to me, and I will never forget it. Long may the rhubarb in our backyard flourish and soon may Tajikistan prosper in the same way.