SN2N: Day 42

A bit spendy this week, as there were some things we needed....but quite a lot achieved. Read on.... 

In the Kitchen...

I turned one of my newly made jars of pasta sauce into a small batch of spaghetti bolognaise. Oh my word, that stuff tastes soooo good! (Completely forgot to take a pic, but the ones on the recipe page will give you the idea). This time it was just 400g mince, a half-size agee jar of pasta sauce and some home made tomato sauce, served on spaghetti pasta. Optional sprinkle of cheese on top.

I cooked up some kohlrabi in a delicious kohlrabi and tomato recipe - a simple dish with garlic, onions, basil, tomatoes and kohl rabi - creamy and delicious, and especially nice with some chicken. 

Served it with cooked, cold left over chicken, Curdito and pickled cucumber. 

Don't have kohlrabi? Check out the recipe anyway, as there's a bonus recipe idea at the bottom of the page :-). 

I rummaged under a couple of potato plants, and pulled up some spuds to roast for dinner....LOVE new potatoes! 

Served with lightly cooked stringless runner beans picked moments earlier, and homemade sausages loaded with herbs straight out the garden too, and homemade tomato sauce. Mmmmm....food from garden to plate without delay - fresh, nutritious, yum!

I made some Mexican Chereezo Vegenut Stuffer - a raw food blend of carrots, nuts, onion, spices etc. I used some of the almond left over from making almond milk for this batch - so I've had double mileage out of those almonds! :-) 

I used the vegenut stuffer to stuff fresh cabbage leaves - can also roll up in nasturtium leaves, blanched grape leaves, or blanched yacon leaves, or lettuce leaves. 

Together with some rice crackers, Curdito, and pickled cucumber, made a yummy lunch! 

The vegenut stuffer can also be used as a dip etc - I spread extra on my crackers. Added some pickles - yum! 

I had a hankering for burgers, and fresh bread, so made up a batch of bread, partly wholemeal, and turned it into a plaited loaf and some burger buns. The burger buns got tucked in the freezer for a few days until we had homemade burgers one night (below). 

First slices of fresh bread (was hard to convince my husband to wait a few minutes after the loaf came out the oven lol), spread with home made (of course!) apple jelly and plum jam. Mmmmmmm

With one day's pickings of tomatoes from the garden, I made a big batch of tomato soup - this one is delicious! Served some for lunch with fresh bread, and put the rest in the freezer. I don't usually remove the seeds from the tomatoes (and there's no need to peel), but decided to deseed these ones for two reasons - I had just read how the seeds can add a touch of bitterness to tomato soup, and also these were Silvery Fir heritage tomatoes, doing better for me this year than ever, and I wanted to save the seeds anyway. More on that below in the garden section. 

Here's a dinner one night from the fridge when I didn't feel like cooking as such (and why bother with such a feast on hand?!) - vege nut stuffer, cabbage leaves, Curdito, pickled cucumber, fresh tomatoes, pickled cucumber, and a bowl of reheated left over bolognaise sauce, mixed with the scrapings from a can of tuna, and rice crackers to dip it up with. The flavours! The textures! Sometimes real food just makes you want to drool! ;-) 

I wanted to use up some old carrots and celery from the fridge, and clear more bones from the freezer, so made up two big batches of rich, flavoursome stock - one in the crockpot overnight, and the other on the stove for about 4 hours. I was in the kitchen making the tomato soup at the same time...man it's hard to describe the aromas of fresh bay leaves, oregano, thyme, parsley, and basil from the garden being prepared or chopped, alongside of the garlic and onions, tomatoes and other fresh veges. Cooking real, fresh food is so much more than just making a meal - it's a smell and flavour explosion, a complete experience for all of the senses from start to finish. And I reckon all that freshness and fragrance as well as flavour actually is healing for the body and mind in a way beyond simple nutrition, though that's also at it's peak with these foods!

When I was in the mood for a little baking, I made a some Amazing Tea Loaf - this super simple, easy and really yummy loaf is a great stand-by for hungry kids or to take to a bring-a-plate occassion. I made one last week using my gluten free flour mix, and it tasted fine, but was a bit crumbly. Need to work on that. This one is made with regular flour, and was perfect! Delicious thinly sliced and buttered. 

Burger night! Homemade buns, homemade Best Beef Patties (they're AIP, so NO allergens in them), some sliced young rainbow chard for greens, grated carrot, sliced tomatoes, pickled cucumber, pickled beetroot, homemade tomato sauce, and some honey mustard dressing, plus fried onions. MMMMMMM! 

Wrap your laughing gear around that! :-)

Tonight's dinner, something fairly quick and simple after being out all day - baby new potatoes, baked in a little chicken stock, homemade sausages, sweetcorn, Curdito, leftover carrots and tomatoes from burger night, and my tomato sauce. YUM! 

In the Garden....

These are the potatoes I dug up with my hands on night. I put aside the largest of each variety to replant. Why do most people plant tiny seed potatoes, and then expect a large harvest? Because that's what the commercial companies have convinced us is normal, since they want to sell us little wee "seed potatoes" at inflated prices, ones that are too small to sell for other purposes. But there is a law of sowing and reaping - "As you sow, so shall you reap." If we sow sparingly, we will reap sparingly, but if we sow generously, we reap generously. The seed potato is what feeds the new plant as it grows and begins to reproduce. The more food, the better! If you want bigger crops, trying planting bigger potatoes. (Though, yes, it is possible to grow potatoes from small potatoes, potatoes cut into pieces, and even potato skins). All my potato crops this year are grown from potatoes I replanted from last year; last year I planted some new varieties from purchased seed potatoes. They didn't do particularly well, and psyllid was a big problem. I replanted the best of them, and this year's crops are much better. Even more interestingly, psyllid appeared on a couple of plants, and I expected it to sweep through the rest in short order. But instead, they disappeared. These potatoes were dug up from under the psyllid-affected plants, and as you can see in the pic above of them cut up, they were undamaged! 

The Damson plums are ripe....my small tree is in it's second year of cropping - it was grown from a root sucker gifted to me. It's proved to be an excellent cross-pollinator for our other old, and until last year unfruitful, tree. I was told Damsons are only really suitable for cooking and jam making, being quite tart, but if properly ripened, I find them sweet and delicious! They are small plums, with a yellow flesh and small stone. I've saved some stones to grow and produce new trees to give to friends.

Blueberries, strawberries and runner beans are in fairly constant supply at the moment. I out-clevered myself with the beans this year though - remember those sunflowers I planted? I sowed them next to a trellis so they'd be easy to support, and planted beans under both, so that the beans could climb the trellis and the sunflowers, giving them extra climbing space. My sunflowers don't normally get much over 2m, so easy to reach for picking. But this year the sunflowers grew to nearly 4m, and so now the beans have too! I can't safely get a ladder to them, and no way can I reach that high! Ah well, the upper beans will just have to dry and be used for dried beans and/or seed. I'm growing Blue Lake Runner (green) and King of the Blues Runner (purple), but stringless and sweet - yummy raw or cooked.

My double batch of tomato soup called for 10 large tomatoes, so I used this bowl full of various sized Silvery Fir Russian heritage tomatoes. A determinate but quite fussy plant, it doesn't usually do all that well for me, but this year I'm growing them under mesh, and they are doing very well! To ensure a sweeter soup, I de-seeded these tomatoes, and then fermented the seed to save for next year's planting. To do that, I cut the tomatoes in half horizontally, scooped out the seed with a teaspoon into a seive over a bowl. I then used a wooden spoon to squeeze as much juice and pulp as possible throught the sieve - which was added to the soup pot. The remaining seeds were put in a jar with water and given a shake, then left on the windowsill to ferment for 2 days. They are then poured into the sieve and rinsed throughly, and as much pulp removed as possible. The seeds are then spread on paper towels to dry (any remaining flesh just dries out with them and is fine; it can be picked out later if desired). 

Despite the storms and gales we've had blow through, my sweetcorn is still upright :-). I put steel hoops over the bed when I planted it, with bird netting to keep the birds off. When the plants got tall enough to be vulnerable, I added some soft-tie around the outside and through the middle of the hoops, to give some gentle support. These plants are also well rooted - they were planted in firmed soil at a depth of at least 5cm, and watered deeply no more than weekly, to encourage strong, deep roots. You can feel how firm they are compared to normal when you shake a plant. The more mature half are now in the process of pollinating the forming cobs. Roll on new sweetcorn! 

And I finally finished trimming the grape vine and got nets up on it! 

One of the things I love seeing most in the garden is a vista of different foods growing in a pleasing array, interspersed with flowers. In this pic there are yacon and dahlias in the foreground, then cosmos, marshmellow, and sweetcorn at the rear. There are also cornflowers tucked around to the left, and potato plants self sown among the yacon. 

I know I posted a pic of my lemon bergamot last time, but it's so pretty, here's another :-) 

This Sunday I spent a pleasant couple of hours with fellow gardeners from the Manawatu Gardeners group, an offshoot of the NZ Vege Gardener's Facebook group, which is THE best FB page ever! I joined as the 500th member about 3 years ago - and there are now over 55,000 members and growing! Growing your own food is certainly alive and well in NZ, and folk are keen to learn from each other and share knowledge. A very supportive, fun group. :-) Our local group try to get together from time to time and visit each other's gardens, share seeds and plants, and have a good chat. Thank you Michelle for sharing your wonderful lifestyle block and gardens with us this time! :-) 

This Week's Spending....

With preserving season in full swing, I'm going through quite a lot of onions, celery, garlic and sugar. I also needed more green tea for making kombucha, and there were a few other things I wanted to add to recipes and experiments. So this week I bought:

4kg carrots
1 bunch celery
3 bottles milk
3 kg onions
6 cobs corn (on special, 60c each)
6 garlic bulbs
3 packs rice crackers
800g bacon to add to various dishes
Pack green tea
5kg white sugar
Maize cornflour
Brown rice flour
Red sorghum flour
2 council rubbish bags (they'll last me a month or more)
Total cost: $89.74

Balance forward:        $122.46
This week's budget:     $50.00
This week's spending: $89.74
Balance:                      $82.72