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SN2N: A Luncheon for Visitors

14/1/2018

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We invited some guests for lunch on Saturday, and I decided I wanted to make a really nice summer meal with a variety of dishes. I thought I'd share them to inspire your own creativity :-). Everything was homemade, and the majority of the ingredients were homegrown. 
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Menu:

Potato Salad
Rice Salad
Coleslaw
Mixed Garden Salad
Slow-cooked home-grown corned and smoked lamb
Homemade bread rolls
Cultured butter
Sliced tomatoes and cucumber
Chocolate and strawberry mousse
Chocolate crunch slice
Kombucha
​Fresh fruit (strawberries from the garden, melon the friends brought)
​
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Many of the recipes are linked in the menu above. 
The meat was a leg of lamb that we had asked our butcher to corn for us, but had mistakenly also been smoked (making it essentially bacon). I slow cooked this with some malt vinegar and an onion, the day before our luncheon, and served it cold and sliced. It's really delicious like this! 
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For the mixed garden salad: I took a bowl out into the garden to see what I could forage. I came back with: a couple of young rainbow chard/perpetual spinach leaves, some curly kale, some fathen (weed, also known as lamb's quarters), chickweed, stems of broccoli flowers, parsley, NZ spinach, nasturtium leaves, a few fat pea pods, flowers of calendula, pansy and nasturtium. To prepare, I washed everything, fairly finely diced the chard, perpetual spinach and kale, and tossed them together. I stripped the leaves from the NZ spinach and fathen, and chopped both, and added them together with the diced nasturtium leaves and parsley, and tossed. I then layered on the chickweed, brocc flowers (I stripped them because the stems had become tough, but I usually would add them whole or chopped a bit), and then petals of calendula. I sprinkled on the peas stripped from their pods, and garnished with the other flowers. 
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Bread rolls: I haven't made "normal" (gluten containing) bread in ages. Normally I would triple-rise it for best results, with the first rising overnight, but this time I chose not to. I should have, as the rolls were a bit denser than I would have liked, but tasty all the same. I'll post instructions for bread making soon. These were served with the homemade cultured butter, which was a hit.
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The posy of flowers were mostly edible or from food plants: I just picked bits and pieces in the way of small flowers from the garden. Included are flowers of: chives, potatoes, basil, roses, dahlia, cosmos (this one not edible), oregano, carrot, and some sprigs of mint. 
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Kombucha: My current kombucha is made with green tea, which tends to yield a sweeter result than with black tea. My husband and one of our visitors enjoyed it served hot (mixed with hot water), while I had a cold glass of it. 

Other: Slices of fresh cucumber and tomato rounded out the meal nicely. I could have served various pickles too, but we had more than enough food. It was all greatly enjoyed!

​So nice to share our blessings and bounty with others, and to enjoy fellowship over a meal of good, real food. 
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Is there anything nicer than fresh, juicy, sweet strawberries straight from the garden?
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