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.
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.
We arrived home yesterday and I am working my way through the washing.
We had housesitters staying here while we were away so naturally I left the house clean and tidy for them and they did likewise for our return. Nevertheless, it is really interesting to come home and look around the house after having been away.
It is 2 years since we moved here and it is mostly set up the way we want it. Our home is definitely not cluttered but there are still some spaces that have too much stuff or are not adequately organised for my liking. Other spaces tend to become a bit of a dumping-ground so I need to be more vigilant about leaving things where they should not be. I have returned with renewed enthusiasm to sort out some things. As always, one thing tends to lead to another and can turn into a bigger project than planned. A quick tidy up can become a major rearrangement of storage options but that is OK because it usually has a better long-term result.
Here are a few photos of some things I want to tackle. I will share how I do it and the results in future posts.
The guest bedroom. There is nothing desperately wrong with it. The bed needs to be remade and I really need to sort out what bed linen is required at the moment for both this bed and ours. I find this time of the year difficult as the overnight temperatures vary widely. The other thing that is bothering me about this room is the bed. We chose to buy it from the previous owners and while it is a good bed in excellent condition, I can honestly say that I hate it. The storage drawers are useful but not having any space underneath increases the difficulty of making the bed. The wide timber surround is also unhelpful. So, I am determined to search for a more user-friendly bed secondhand. The trade-off will be the loss of the underbed storage but although I do have some linen in the drawers it is definitely not essential.
The 3rd bedroom which is still trying to work out what it is but otherwise known as a junk room. It tends to be a collection of things that I am certain do not belong elsewhere. The wardrobe in this room is wine storage, suitcase storage and some items belonging to a community group where we volunteer. I do intend to set up the exercise equipment better so that it can be used more readily.
Our walk-in wardrobe. This is not a massive space since we purloined half of it to extend the pantry. We only recently added the shelves and hanging space and it is more than adequate for our needs. The box on the floor is administrative stuff for our volunteer work which I put here while we were away. That is overdue for sorting and rearranging and it needs to find a permanent home in the 3rd bedroom. I also want to look for a small seat which would be useful when putting on shoes and socks.
Chest of drawers. We do not have a dressing table as such as I use the large mirror in the adjacent ensuite bathroom. This large chest of drawers is shared by GMan and me. Our folded clothes are in the drawers and the top is a shared dressing table although it can be a bit of a dumping ground. Time for a clean up and decide what belongs here or not.
These jobs will take some time but I will share my progress of each space in upcoming posts.
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.
I have spent most of today decluttering but I have very little to show for my efforts.
This is the view of the storage in our office and it looks exactly the same as when I started.
The reason is because I sorted out some of the paperwork which lives in one of these drawers. Some might say that it is not clutter if it fits neatly in a drawer. However, these are papers that are no longer required for a variety of reasons so I shredded them.
The drawer now looks like this. There are now 6 cardboard folders for different categories – 2 were discarded as the contents were all obsolete. It is hard to believe that we once had a 4 drawer filing cabinet.
I ended up with half a bag of shredded paper.
So, why bother doing this when I have plenty or space to store it? The documents I shredded are entirely obsolete and/or I have digital copies. They included tax returns and bank statements more than 5 years old and the like. I generally clear these things out every year or so. By having less it make the important things easier to locate when required.
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.
Although I often post about the significant and eventful happenings here, there are many days that just hum along as we do the things we do. I find this particularly so during autumn as the extreme heat and occasional storms of summer are behind us.
Autumn weather brings a benign mildness as the leaves begin to turn and we continue to harvest the last of the summer produce.
An outdoor view.
Picked from the garden.
The tomatoes I grew were from gifted seedlings from 3 different sources. I am not sure of all of the varieties but some were definitely ‘Beefsteak’ which is now my favourite tomato. So, when I discovered that one of these tomatoes had been attacked by some wildlife I decided that it was the perfect specimen from which to salvage some seeds.
Tomato seeds drying on some paper towel.
I did two loads of washing which included our bed linen. I remade the bed with the freshly laundered linen after it had dried in the warm sun and breeze.
We have plenty of plans for developing various aspects of the garden further but in the meantime we are pleased with the parts which are established.
GMan recently participated in a one-day workshop on pruning techniques and more particularly, the benefits of summer pruning of fruit trees. He has since purchased some new equipment and yesterday he applied his newly-acquired knowledge and pruned our 3 espaliered fruit trees. There are 2 Nashi pears and a nectarine.
Meanwhile, I have planted a punnet of pea seedlings.
The summer garden continues with tomatoes and zucchinis ripening and ready to pick every day or so.
I have at least a dozen packs of grated zucchini in the freezer which I can use to make zucchini quiche throughout the year. Of course, we have had fried tomato and zucchini as a side dish with plenty of meals recently.
The tomatoes have been especially prolific. I used 6kg to make sauce and there is more than enough to eat with almost every meal. There is nothing like the flavour of homegrown tomatoes.
This is what is on a rack on the kitchen bench at the moment as I constantly use some then add more from what I harvest almost every day.
It seems like forever but in reality it is a bit less than 6 months since we emptied and dismantled our walk-in wardrobe in preparation for the extension of the pantry. This post from October last year explains our plans.
Once the pantry was finished GMan still had to do some finishing filling of gaps and nail holes then he painted the whole wardrobe area and then it was time to decide on the fitout. After researching several options we decided on the Boaxel range from IKEA. It is very similar to the system we had installed in the wardrobes in our previous house. Unfortunately, the shelves we wanted were on backorder so that added quite a delay.
However, we picked up the remaining components on Tuesday when we went to Melbourne and we have spent the last couple of days working on assembling it.
The size of the reduced wardrobe is 1800 x 1800mm (6 x 6ft). It is not huge but definitely enough for our needs. We have a total of 3.2 metres of hanging rail as well as several shelves for shoes. I have a couple of handbags which will live on the shelf below my shirts and tops. The high shelves will be for a box of beanies, gloves and winter scarves as well as hats and a couple of small backpacks. The hooks at the end hold belts and dressing gowns.
We are really pleased with how it has turned out.
The view from the doorway.
My clothes and shoes as well as longer coats and suit bags.
It is over 4 months since we made our first enquiries to get some screens and curtains. You can read about the initial contact and see the curtain fabric sample here. There have been a couple of significant delays. The fabric I chose for the curtains was not in stock and secondly, we changed our minds about the screens for the existing large doors in the front lounge as we decided to change the doors and therefore, the type of screens required.
The new doors were installed about a week ago.
The old ones being removed.
The new doors with the curtains drawn back. The configuration of the doors are the same, however, they are aluminium framed rather timber framed. This means they a much easier to slide, screens were simpler to fit and of course, there will be no constant maintenance of the timber. This is a significant issue as they face north and receive the full force of sun as well as wind and rain. Finally, I was actually surprised at how much more light is let in due to the narrower framing.
Here is a view with the curtains drawn.
And a close-up of the fabric.
I have made curtains before but I was not prepared to tackle a job on this scale. I was very happy to leave it to the professionals to make and hang these.
There is one more job to be done before these room is totally finished. There is a small window in the other corner which we having replaced with louvres to maximise the ventilation. That will installed later next month then I will order a new blind. I am thinking of choosing a plain colour – possibly a darker blue as seen in the curtains.
organised castle 