Category Archives: Seasonal

Writers Block… Yep got it that is for sure.

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It is not that I have not had any idea’s or even had tales and items to write about but I just cont seem to get them down in words. A couple of times a day I have a good blog in my head and then when it comes to writing it get caught up in whatever else I let myself get distracted with.

I am now just going to sit down and start writing so if it comes out as junk some days so be it you guys can always unsubscribe if it gets that bad 🙂

The last three weeks have been busy and I will write about them as I can. I went on juice diet for 15 days. The diet is a detox diet based around the fat sick and nearly dead documentary. It was a success with me feeling great at the end of the diet. Lost a good bit of weight and my liver appears to be much happier. I have done this last year and had a similarly good experience in regards to weight loss and keeping it off but also in some other health aspects. I plan to also do a vegan diet in spring to get my body working again.

The thing about this sort of radical diet is that it is not that radical. It is in the modern world but in times not so distant fasting and hunger where a part of our lives we are designed for it. And the type of fasting on vegetables is particularly good for us as is gives us a nutrient burst that for times such as spring  allow us to get our bodies functioning and on track.

I still cooked for my family and it is interesting once you are on this diet how you look at food and how our society deals with food differently.

 I eat a lot of good food (one of the reasons I need to fast, one of the reasons most people need to fast once in a while) and most of it is seasonal and cooked from scratch where possible.

The thing that strikes you is the sheer volume of food available and the amount of advertising that goes with the food. It is everywhere and very pervasive and not eating and being aware of it you almost get to step outside the subliminal side of things and see why people are packing on so much weight.

I still did my gardening, did exercise and walked to and from public for work and I didn’t feel weak at all.

Not sure if I will do this diet later in the year. Think once a year about 12 days would be optimal but I am going to do a 21 day vegan diet in spring. This is both an idea that Chinese medicine and also the paleoarchaeology types who study us from a historical point of view recomentd. For both a good amount of bitter greens and a high nutrient low calorific diet in spring helps the liver get back in shape after a winter of stored food (typically comfort foods for us now)

I did get to add in a bit of urban hippieness into the diet. Green smoothee’s of Kale, dandelion leaf, nightshade leaf, mallow leaf, cleavers, nasturtium and even a few of my precious nettles (although they are being saved for soup, gnocchi and pasta) from my back yard made the diet cheaper and easier this time and allowed me a side line of interest to help keep me going.

I am adding more weeds all the time into our diet and this is working well, the kids love them and in our societies nutrient poor energy rich foods, the weeds being the opposite makes for something we should all be eating more off.

FYI the weed walk with Adam Grubb is on for those in Melbourne in a couple of weeks time. Check out the link and attend if you can it is a great walk well worth the money and time. You will never look at a grassy field the same ever again.

making it yourself

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Why make it yourself?

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This is often the question that I get asked?

It has been a busy, busy week. You know when the proverbial fertiliser has hit the wind displacement device when you have to do two weeks of work to be able to take a week off to go on holidays. To say my current work load is unsustainable is to state the bleeding obvious. This is a story for another day though.

Added to that I have had some issues with the second car and we are trialling having only one car and me using public and the bike as my mode of transport to and from work. this is working out well but means I have to be a bit more disciplined and means it requires more organisation.

So that has been the reason for no posts over the last weeks. We have however been trying to keep living the life and to a greater extent we have been.

I have cooked meals for friends and family and we have offered friends to stay in our house rather than paying for accommodation and keep the money go round going. We have carted our kids, and still grown our food and all this with a couple of people working far too long hour’s is it any wonder we need a holiday 🙂

I try to cook our meals as much as is possible from scratch that is not to say that I don’t use some items such as yellow curry, garam massala mixes and items like mustard (although I will be making my own mustard soon enough)

Last weekend I made up a porchetta with fresh herbs from my garden for dinner, pancakes with no mix. We ate veg and salads from our garden including a tomatoes and basil salad with 5 different types of tomato and3 types of basil. During the week we ate meals that we had cooked for lunches and I started the week with $45 in my pocket and ended the week with $43 in it and no sense of hunger or having missed out.

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So why go to the trouble of making our own from scratch especially when we appear to be time poor? Well the cost is a major issue. We don’t work to work, we work to allow us to get ahead and in time. If we work long hours and just waste the money then we are going backwards.

I also like the challenge of doing things from scratch. I talk a lot on this blog about the developing of skills. Making it yourself makes you less of a slave to the system and ensures that if the time comes when you cannot easily buy the service you can always do it yourself.

It also means I know what the inputs into something are, especially useful with cooking and knowing what our bodies and the bodies of our children get put into them.

It gives a real sense of the cost of things to the world. Sometimes it is not cheaper such as the bacon I make. I can buy cheap bacon for much less than I can make. But that would factory farmed pork, in unsustainable practices to a large multinational taking the money of shore. And it does make you wonder what the final cost to the world of such an item really is when you realise it costs me twice as much to make it and I don’t even consider the labour involved.

So it makes you look at the world differently.

It makes you realise what real things should taste, feel and be like. Not the bland hand to mouth no thought I will buy more stuff to make me feel better lifestyle.

And the final reason is that it is interesting and fun. Which helps to keep me sane on the stupid go round that is the culture we often deal with.

As I have said a part of the week as been in seeing if we can cope with out the second car. Our kids love the simple joy of being carted by us in the bike trailer from crèche rather than by car and despite the organisation and discipline the time spent carting the kids has reacquainted me in an odd way with the world around me as I cart the kids or walk to and from the station I check out the herbs. See mallow and mallow cheese in abundance, edible nightshade, dandelion and other ‘weeds’. I also see some interesting things people. Guerrilla gardening, by putting plots in unused spaces, wild harvesting and gathering. Keep an eye out for items I can use later on and the huge waste of space that we have in the cities that could be used to solve a great many of the problems we have from homelessness to growing our own fuel and food to connecting as a community.

 It is also feels a damn side more useful than a lot of people I see rushing home so they can change to go out to do some exercise…

So while busy the week has been good with more time in many ways than most to look at the world and enjoy the time with family and friends.

This week I am in Apollo bay for the week with family for a beach side holiday. Tomorrow we will catch up with Libby from libby cooks for a meal including quite a few foraged dishes and we will then explore the area, hopefully do a bit of foraging and just enjoy the time with family.

If I don’t post I will definitely have to come up with a new excuse other than work 🙂 wont I ?

Homemade Porchetta.

Butterfly a roast and lay flat on a chopping board. I left the roast in the fridge uncovered for 5 hours to allow the skin to dry out to get the best crackling prior to this step.

Dry toast 2 teaspoons of cumin seeds.

In mortar and pestle or the food processor in a pre apocalypse kitchen put together a selection of fresh herbs from the garden, lots of basil (or basil mint as I used in this case) and parsley are a must, as is garlic and some rosemary (not too much) other than that just use what you have. I used oregano, thyme and sage as well and could have added some French tarragon I had if I wanted to. A little bit of salt and pepper and some chilli to taste. Blend with as little olive oil as you can to make a smooth but not sloppy paste.

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Spread over one side of the butterflied roast, grate a little lemon zest on the top and then roll and secure the roast with twine or wet skewers.

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Liberally coat the skin olive oil and salt and fresh black pepper.

Pre heat an oven to 250 degree Celsius

Put roast in for 30 minutes and you should see the crackling start to blister. Drop the heat back t 150 degrees for 2 hours or so then ramp the temperature back up to 250 degrees for the last 20 minutes until the crackling is perfect.

Serve it? We had simple boiled Dutch cream potatoes and other vegetables to go with it.

Any leftover should be sliced thickly and eaten on sourdough for lunches 🙂

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Photos of the making of porchetta below.

A short post tonight as I need to get some sleep.

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As I have stated on many an occasion one of the things we do regularly is cook up meals and lunches at the same time and tonight was no exception.

A quick meal of organic pasta with passata was tonights meal and tommorows lunchs.

It is staple for us with various combinations and permutations and allows me to cook up any excess vegies that happen to be in season and freezes and reheats well for lunches. At the moment we have a major excess of zucchini so I pile these in and they bulk out the meal. You need to use what is at hand no point in wasting it or buying something just to have the exact ingredients you need. Improvisation is the key to eating seasonally and having staples like passata gives you a lot of flexibility to go with it. It is again a skill to look at a pile of food and go I can make X with that and it will be solid but not necessarily blogable meal (or maybe it is 🙂 )

So tonight’s recipe was

  • 500 grams of chicken mince (could be bacon, salami, sausages or any other type of meat, beans or none at all)
  • A lot of zucchini (in this case about 5 large zucchini)
  • Large onion
  • 5 cloves of garlic
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Chilli to taste
  • Bottle of passata or a couple of jars/tins of tomato’s
  • 2 table spoons of homemade pesto
  • Teaspoon of sugar.

Dice onion and brown, add meat and brown, crush garlic and add for a minute or two. Add the zucchini or other season vegetables and passata some water, salt and pepper to taste, chilli and sugar and cook for about 20 minutes giving it a good stir regularly

At the same time boil a lot of pasta. I did a full 750 gram bag of organic whole grain pasta tonight.

Once cooked down and vegies are soft. Turn off heat and add homemade basil pesto and stir through. As I said freezes well and makes a great and cheap lunch

Serve with a nice green side salad.

Taking Stock

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So Today was our famers market day. We go to the farmers market at Bundoora stock up on good meat, small goods, cheeses and a week or two of any fresh vegies that we don’t grow or swap that are on offer.

Today before I headed off I did a fridge and freezer clean out and stock take to check what I needed and to ensure that I did not waste anything, or buy things I already have.

We have some changes coming to our house as we retro fit it for conserving energy and the power will be off for a few days to a week so one of the plans is to clean out the freezer. It will also not hurt to process what I have in there, either by cooking it or it processing it for alternate storage such as bottling/canning drying etc. I like most people can rely a bit too much on the freezer  and while a very useful tool for improving self-sufficiency we should remember that at the end of the day it costs us to run whereas bottled fruit or a pack of dried mushrooms can sit there for a couple of years and not cost me a penny.

It is also going to help our budget as well. The retro fit is not going to be cheap but by my calculations we are pretty much setup for the bulk of meals for the next couple of months.

So it might be a good chance for everyone to see what they have in their larder, fridge or freezer and ensure that all nothing is going to go to waste.

Once done I have cleaned out my freezer I will be putting in a good chunk of a whole pig I am buying in the freezer in May to see how I go with it as my primary source of animal protein for the winter. But I will also be processing some into smoked bacon, salami and prosciutto as I have said I want to reduce that reliance on the freezer and keep it as simple as I can  which will help my budget and hopefully the world at large.

To this end tomorrow I will start to plant my bed in the community garden with winter veg. After all if you can grow and harvest it as you go then you are even better off than storing it in the end.

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But it doesn’t look the same as the bought one…

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Today I went looking for a meal to make. We will be getting the back area shelled in March and I need to clean out the freezer in preparation for this and my pig in the box experiment for next winter. I still had a frozen rooster I had killed dressed a while ago when my father had given me a few more than planned.

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hile I cooked up a Spanish stew of chicken and chorizo (recipe below) and number one son watched me cook as mum and sis where at a party the look of the home butchered chicken caught my eye. Here was no plump rounded chicken of perfect proportions skin snow white and ready to roast. No here was lean rangy bird frozen out of perfect proportions but I knew that this less perfect frozen thing would have a taste that the perfect chicken could never surpass.

It reminded me of an article I had read on the waste of food in the world being as high as 50%. One of the items that caught my eye as a ‘reason’ for the waste was that the food was not perfect or umblemished. What is this word perfect? In a world where we waste 50% of our food on stuff like not perfect I think we need to take a nice big reality check here people. Sadly even those who have  claimed to have grasped the idea have looked at the less than perfect food the carrots not quite the right shape the marked fruit on the trees even the tomato not quite round and perfect and red or even this chicken and turned up their nose. Everyone wants to be good but be able to have their old ways and requirements at the same time. Doesn’t work that way I am afraid people.

But you can’t blame them. You see the celebrity chefs turning out perfect food with perfect ingredients that are same as those you can buy in the supermarket but are better, more organic more local more of everything but they look the same…

If we are going to be living more local then we are going to be eating a lot less perfect food but it will be a lot better for us and damn side better for the earth and the plants and beasts on it.

And the result is below. Tastes fantastic. Still not perfect to most people after all where else are you going to get the neck served up as part of your meal and boy if you have not eaten the neck cooked like this you have missed out.

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Chicken and Chorizo Casserole

  • One chicken cut up or the equivalent in pieces
  • 5 chorizo sliced into pennies
  • 4-5 finely diced onions
  • 5-10 garlic gloves sliced thinly
  • 4-5 carrots diced
  • 4-5 bay leaves
  • 2 table spoons of good smoky paprika
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Chilli to taste
  • Can of tomato
  • 2 cups of white wine
  • 2 table spoons of plain flour in a cup of cold water.
  • Handfull of olives

Fry off chicken pieces in sunflower oil, put aside. Fry off the onions, add the diced carrots bay leaves, garlic and paprika fry until the onion just start to cover. Remove from the pot. Fry off the chorizo and when nicely browned add back in the chicken and onion mix. Add the other ingredients with the exception of the flour mix. Simmer for an hour or so then add the flour mix and simmer for another 10 minutes or so until the flour is cooked off and the sauce thickened. Serve with rice and few olives on top.

Of Mallow and Strawberries

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On Sunday I went and did the excellent Adam Grubb of Very Edible Gardens edible weed walk.

I am interested in foraging and already do some foraging eating nettles and wild fennel, converting sticky weed into bio fertilizer, getting into wild foraged elder and other trees. I have known about dock and dandelion and have eaten them before but wanted to improve my knowledge of the food options that we underestimate and are so widely available. Being self-sufficient is a part of what I am looking at and this is just one small part of the puzzle.

I won’t go into details as to individual plants in this post as this is an area that you are best to go and do a course with or/and get mentored and learn this important skill safely. I have done a courses with Ballarart Permaculture Guild and now with Adam and feel a level of comfort with what I know and don’t know (and have posted on things like nettles) but even then I use a field guide to check things out I am 100% sure of it.

Adam said at the start that you will look at the average plot of grass and weeds a bit differently after the course and yes this is certainly the case and last night I spotted about 5 different edible weeds in my back yard that there was good mallow plant up near the strawberries. So while the 3 year old got stuck into picking the strawberries I picked a handful of mallow buds or mallow cheese as they are known.

They have a nice crunchy texture and taste not unlike edame. So Sabrina and I brought in the strawberries to share and after seeing me eat the mallow she asked to to try it and low and behold she loved them eating them over the strawberries (she can be a strange child at times 🙂 )but she did then clean up the strawberries when the mallow was all done 🙂

Our rule is that you don’t have to eat a meal but you do have to try it and I am glad that this is now coming out in my daughter being willing to try anything.

So go out and learnt some new skills and learn to forage (and do it safely) and if like me you have a family then you might just manage to influence that next generation to something just a bit more sustainable.