Category Archives: Cooking

Labour Intensive

Leave a comment

The last week of May ran away while I wasn’t looking so welcome to a new month and the first official day of winter here in the southern hemisphere.

Towards the end of last year I picked a good crop of garlic that I grew. In fact, I harvested 1.7kg of garlic. I have replanted some, given some away and used it as required for the past 6 months. There was still a substantial quantity left so I decided to make my own garlic salt.

I spent a good few hours carefully peeling and thinly slicing the cloves.

Here they are laid out on the racks and ready to go in the dehydrator.

15 hours later the pieces were dry and crunchy. Here is some of the results.

I then ground the dried garlic pieces to a powder and mixed them with an equal weight of salt.

This is the 300g of garlic salt which I now have ready to use in cooking as needed.

Although it was a fairly time-consuming project, I feel that this was definitely worthwhile.

A Mixed Day

Leave a comment

Like so many days, today was a mix of assorted small jobs that I managed to tick off my list.

The weather was overcast and we even had some very light rain but I had some handwashed items to dry. I used the very convenient extendable rack in the laundry to hang them up.

I also had a couple of cooking jobs. I had cooked some dried Great Northern beans some time ago and frozen them. I thawed them yesterday in preparation for turning them into my version of baked beans. We had some for lunch today and the remainder have been divided into single serve portions and are ready to be frozen. I ended up with 16 portions for relatively minimal effort. The recipe for my baked beans is here.

The other cooking job for the day was to make a slice for a conference we are attending tomorrow. This is the slice before I iced it this evening. It is easy to turn into a gluten-free option with a straight substitution of gluten-free flour for the regular wheat flour. The recipe is here. I added some cinnamon and ginger this time to spice it up and the icing was made with lime juice and the addition of more powdered ginger.

I am feeling rather accomplished because as well as things I have mentioned here, I have also taken up a new pair of trousers and mended a pair of jeans – both for GMan and ironed a few items from the washing of the past couple of days.

It is good to have everything pretty much up-to-date before we are in Melbourne over the weekend.

Ready to Roast

1 Comment

It almost 2 years since I wrote this post with a recipe for pumpkin soup. After a long, hot summer we are finally experiencing some slightly cooler days.

Like all of my cooking escapades there is plenty of room for variation. A couple of days ago GMan was baking a couple of loaves of sourdough bread so I decided to make use of the oven being on to roast the pumpkin while the oven was heating up to the temperature required for the bread.

Pumpkin wedges brushed with a mix of balsamic syrup and olive oil.

After roasting the skin peels off easily.

A pot of deliciousness.

We had soup for dinner and there were another 10 serves to go in the freezer for future meals.

It was a productive kitchen day as I had also made a new batch of spreadable butter, deyhdrated the pumpkin seeds and some root ginger which had been in the freezer for a couple of years and GMan made the bread.

Rhubarb Is Ready

Leave a comment

I have been away from the blog this past week as other things have taken precedence. We have enjoyed visits from two groups of guests. I has been a delight to show them around our town and the surrounds.

Here are a couple of photos taken from the summit of Mt Tarrengower which overlooks the town.

An almost full moon as we looked east towards the town.

Sunset in the opposite direction.

Our house guests of the past few days departed this morning so I need to get back to some food prep and meal planning. The first step was to cut a generous handful of rhubarb from one of the clumps which are happily growing near the back fence. We usually have some stewed fruit on our cereal each morning so I chopped and stewed the stalks and have containers of stewed rhubarb ready to go in the freezer.

Netted Nashi

Leave a comment

I showed you a few months ago in this post that we had netted the entirety of our three espaliered fruit trees – one nectarine and two nashi pears. That decision proved to be really successfully with us not losing any fruit to the birds and other wildlife.

We have removed it gradually as the fruit ripened on each tree. First, were the nectarines, then one nashi and a couple of days ago we removed the netting completely and picked the nashi pears from the last tree.

There were well over 100 fruit.

GMan had stewed and frozen all of the fruit from the first tree and did about another 40 of these. I am now experimenting with dehydrating slices of them for snacks and have given some to the Community Pantry.

The next job was to fold the netting up and put it away for next season. We spread it out so that we could remover any leaves or debris and it noticed a jagged hole of about 8cm across in the middle of the netting. I am not sure whether it was caused by an errant branch growing through or a possum munching through it.

Anyway, I decided to mend the hole before packing the netting up. It is nothing fancy but will work well.

A few days ago I saw an ad on Facebook for a hands-on workshop on ‘Summer Fruit Tree Pruning’ in a town about 45 minutes from us. This seemed like a perfect opportunity so GMan has signed up and is going along on Friday. Hopefully, he will be able to apply his new-found knowledge to our trees.

Stocking the Pantry

Leave a comment

Today has been a mixed bag, as usual.

Bed changed, 2 loads of washing done, some volunteer admin work and visitors this afternoon for wine, cheese and chat.

Somewhere in between all of that I made time to make another batch of tomato sauce for the pantry.

We have almost finished the last bottle from last year and this is the first time in several years that I have almost run out. I am hoping to make more batches to stock up.

I had less tomatoes than the recipe so I did some quick calculations to reduce the other ingredients proportionally. I took a fairly easy option by chopping the tomatoes and onions in the food processor before simmering them with the sugar, vinegar, salt and spices. You can find the actual recipe here.

We are expecting tradesmen tomorrow to remove and replace some doors and windows so I will hopefully have interesting before and after photos to share before too long.

Acquisitions

Leave a comment

I have had my head down working on an admin project for a volunteer job that I am doing so there is not too much to report on the home front just at the moment.

However, our next door neighbour kindly dropped in a box of home-grown tomatoes and a zucchini a couple of days ago. I plan to make some more sauce with the tomatoes and the zucchini will be used in a meal in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, I took a break today and we went to Castlemaine to do a couple of things and I had time to pop into one of my favourite op shops. I found these small glass serving plates for $1 each. There are 7 of them and I will use them at a function next week at the local film society. Other than that, I think they can live in my sideboard and certainly get some use. They could be perfect for those occasions when a huge serving platter is not really required or appropriate.

The other thing to note is that we are finally enjoying some more moderate weather than the heatwave conditions we have endured recently. In fact, the forecast for tomorrow is only 17C which is much better than 37C (or more). The next 7 days are looking rather pleasant though some rain would be nice for the garden.

Processing Plums

Leave a comment

It is that time of the year when everything seems to be ripening at once. I have a nectarine tree but no other stone fruit, however, there are plums aplenty around town and I have received some from 3 different sources in the last week so today I made jam using 3.4kg of plums.

This is the result.

These were the first batch of plums I was given. They don’t look much but have a lovely flavour and beautiful deep red flesh.

Since having an airfryer I have discovered that it is a relatively quick and easy way to sterilise the jars and lids rather than having to turn the oven on. That is definitely a consideration on a day like today when the forecast temperature was 37C (98.6F).

However, it was not all plain sailing as I had a calamity with the second batch of jars. Thankfully there were only 4 of them but they came to grief when I managed to catch the handle of airfryer with my oven mitt and send the contents flying across the kitchen floor. One jar broke but that was all. GMan kindly swept up the broken glass while I retrieved the remainder and the lids, re-washed them and started the process again.

The other job was somewhat simpler than jam-making as I had some gifted oranges to juice. It is the first time I have had fresh orange juice since we moved here which has been a bit of a shock after having what seemed like an endless supply from the 3 trees we had in our previous garden.

Finally, we were delighted to record 42mm of rain in a series of thunderstorms overnight. It has given the garden a welcome soaking during what has been several weeks of fairly hot, dry weather.

Kitchen Additions

Leave a comment

Making sourdough bread is entirely GMan’s domain and he has been working on perfecting his technique for about 7 years now. These days he does not generally have any catastrophic failures, however, there is no denying that some results are better than others. Like all artisans, he is constantly striving for perfection – whatever that is.

A couple of weeks ago he decided to purchase 2 rectangular cast iron dutch ovens. They duly arrived and were washed and seasoned as per the instructions and readied for use.

This is a view of the inside and the lid.

Here is the result from the baking done this morning. He is very pleased with the consistent shape.

A Quick Quiche

Leave a comment

This is a long-forgotten ‘recipe’ that pops into my head occasionally. Instead of using pastry for a quiche base this uses rice.

QUICHE BASE

2 cups of cooked rice
1 egg, beaten
Salt and pepper

Place the cooked rice in a bowl. Add the beaten egg and combine quickly. Season with salt and pepper. Spoon the mixture into a quiche dish or pie plate, spread evenly across the base and side pressing in place with the back of a spoon.

QUICHE FILLING

The filling for a quiche is one of those things that can be pretty much anything you want it to be.

Tonight it was:

1/2 onion, finely chopped
2 large leaves of silverbeet (chard), stalks and leaves finely chopped
Small piece of capsicum (red pepper), finely chopped
1/2 tin of tuna, drained and flaked

Lightly saute the vegetables.

Add the tuna. Spread the mixture over the rice base, add a small amount of grated cheese.

Finally, make a mixture of eggs/milk/cream. Once again, this is very forgiving and you can use whatever you have to hand. I generally do not have cream available so I often add a spoonful of powdered milk to the regular milk to make it a bit creamier. However, tonight I did have some cream that I had bought marked down earlier in the week.

3 eggs
100ml thickened cream
100ml milk

Beat the eggs/cream/milk thoroughly then pour carefully over the filling. Bake in oven at 180C for 30 minutes or until firm to touch and golden.

I had started cutting the quiche before I remembered to photograph the finished product.

And dinner is served.

The first slice is always a bit tricky to get out, especially when it is warm but it still tasted great. In fact, this is equally as good hot or cold so that is our lunches sorted for the next couple of days.