So today I hit 42. On some levels I feel the age (and a bit more) on others I feel a lot younger.

So did I have a big party, grab lots of presents, head for my nearest mid life crisis (hell I have one of those most weeks 🙂 ). Nope I had the best day I could think of given the last few weeks of business and chaos in my life and the planning for the next week of craziness running around Japan . A quiet day.

I had a sleep in which as any parent of two children under 3 would know is a priceless gift. Then spent the day with A. and the kids.

Sabrina and I made purred pears for her brother (Sabrina told me which pears where best) then a nice big batch of pumpkin soup for the family while I am away.

Sabrina is really getting into the cooking and crèche have told us that she cooks for her ‘boyfriend’ in the home corner but has a habit of putting the baby in the oven …

She spent all morning sitting there talking to me about things as I cook. I am hoping this will lead her to learn the value of cooking as it has taught her how much fun gardening is. At the end of the day I can only guide.

On the issue of present s I have avoided them for the last few years. Probably after having been traumatized when A. made me get in a 6 meter skip in to clear out space for when Sabrina was born. I think there is enough crap in the world and at the end of the day I have so many things, I just don’t need anything and the best present is for me to have my family around me on day like this.

So we finished the day with a nice simple meal at a great family run Lebanese restaurant. Nothing fancy just good simple affordable food. And you know it is a family restaurant when your 3 year old has an accident on the seat at the table and the owners just go ‘ we all have kids’ as they just smile and bring out the plastic covers.

I hope that you all had as good a day as me. Remember life is to be lived.

Yesterday I made a sunny meal and today I did a couple of quick batches of winter comfort food in the form of soups. We often have soup for dinner on those busy week nights when pulling it out of the freezer is about as excited as you can get. It is also great for lunches

I have discussed the idea of spending $50 to $100 for lunches a week seems such a waste when a little planning can reduce this and having small packs of frozen soup with a bit of bread make a good fallback position if no left over’s from last night are available.

In addition to being delicious these two recipes are great in that they use simple inexpensive ingredients that might otherwise be wasted.

A leek and potato soup with the rinds of your parmesan that would otherwise be thrown out used to make it super creamy with that lovely undertone flavour of parmesan to it.

And a soup that uses an ingredient that most people say “you can eat that” a radish leaf soup.

Both turned out very well with the dinner being the being the leek soup, topped with crispy bacon and fresh sourdough (our life is so hard here as urban hippies). The three year old went back for thirds so can’t have been too bad. I will be writing a bit about not wasting items and using things to their full potential over the next few weeks as it is something close to my heart.

Hope you enjoy.

Leek and Potato soup with Parmesan.

• 3 large leeks
• Olive oil
• 500g floury potatoes (I used Dutch cream)
• As many parmesan rinds as you have minimum 2 or so (parmesan rinds freeze well)
• 1½ litres water
• Lots of Sea salt to taste
• White Pepper to taste
• Bacon crisped up to add on top
• 1 cup fresh parsley leaves shredded as a garnish
• Cream or Sour Cream or even some natural yogurt.

Slice up the white part of the leeks and add to a heavy based saucepan with the olive oil and cook on a low heat until soft. Add the diced potatoes and heat for a few minutes then a teaspoon of salt, the water and the rinds. Cook for about 40 or so minutes at a low simmer. Remove from the heat, take out the rinds and use a stick bender to puree til smooth.

Fry bacon until crisp and add to the top of bowls with a little cream and some fresh shredded parsley (got to love the parsley growing wild down the side of the house)

 Radish Leaf Soup

• 3 large onions diced
• Olive oil
• 4 cups washed and trimmed radish leaves
• 6 -7 peeled potatoes diced (depending on size) I used Dutch cream again
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 2 cups of water
• 1 tsp of salt
• Additional Salt to taste
• Cream.

Dice onions and sauté in olive oil until golden. Add the radish leaves until they have wilted, add stock, water, salt and add diced potato and simmer for 20 -30 minutes.

Use a stick blender to puree and add additional salt and pepper to taste.

Dollop of cream on top and enjoy

I am a great believer in gathering new skills. I remember when I saw an article on Africa and they were talking about educating children. The teacher spoke of the fact that you can take away their home, drive them from their country but the education and the skills that is theirs for life.

In my country we do not live in such dire situations but the basic outcome remains the same. Get what skills you can these are yours for life. As I have stated before I work on the philosophy that each dollar you earn is a little bit of yourself sold on so if you can do some stuff yourself then you reduce your dependence on the external world and the variegates that this can lead to.

Don’t get me wrong for some jobs you get the people in who know their stuff. When we took out a wall at our small house to make the living area liveable I worked as a labourer for a friend who was a builder. I learnt a lot and reuse those skills all the time, But some of it such as bridging a gap made by the removal of load bearing wall I would never try in this world. I pay and am happy to pay for the artisan skills that are artisan rather than ‘buy it in China’ and ‘stick it in’.

The skills for my job are pretty esoteric to be honest and have limited use outside of very small corporate circle almost to balance this out, outside of my job that I have focused in on skill that give me real world skills. Things such as growing food, preserving, basic building and repairing, cooking, brewing, foraging etc. I have also learned some basic masonry skills for making garden beds, paths, retaining walls etc.

What I have often failed to see is the value of artisan skills. Focusing instead in on the practical. A couple of weekends ago I did something different. A stone carving course and I would have to say I truly enjoyed it.

Working with such a medium as stone is slow and steady work even with the advantage of modern power tools. It is work were you have face, ear, breathing and eye protection and as such tends to isolate you to the medium and the work. The group I did the course with where very different, a female business owner, a caravan restorer, a retire and myself an IT geek and sometimes urban hippie. While it is not easy to be social At times when we needed a break we would all wander down and see what the others were doing. Everyone was positive.

The weekend went very quick in its own way and left me a good mind set both in regards to the learning of the skill and also forced me to look at the world through a different lens as I have discussed in a previous blog.

It has also given me a new set of skills to play with a different way to look at projects such as my bluestone retaining wall at the back.

A. has been looking at glass blowing course and I can only support her in this. Even if at the end of it she only comes out with something for the house and new set of skills then it will have been well worth it.   

My advice to you all is to go and learn a new skill this year. You can only benefit from it.

Winter here in southern Australia is looking to be cold and wet this year. Nowhere near as cold and wet as our American or Northern European friends winters but still cold enough to easily end up falling into the bad habits of greasy stodge as comfort food. Don’t get me wrong you need this at this time of year but it can easily lead to unhealthy food over a long period of time. This year the plan over winter is to get some sunny food into our diet preferably from the garden and ensure that we get as many micronutrients as we can in to keep us healthy.

So tonight I noted that the boutique smoked ocean trout we had in the fridge was getting close to its best by date. We choose the ocean trout as this is a sustainable wild fish, caught locally rather than the farmed fresh salmon you can buy here in Australia. The process of farming salmon is not a pretty process and in many ways the outcome is very ,very bad for your health.

So add a little lightness and sunshine in your week and make sure you get those micronutrients all year long.

Smoked Ocean Trout and Pasta.

• A smoked fillet of ocean trout
• Spanish Onion
• Capsicum
• Two Handfuls of fresh rocket leaves
• Handful of green olives
• Pasta (I used Penne)
• 250 grams of mushrooms
• Olive oil
• Parmesan cheese
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Salt and pepper

Put the pasta in salted boiling water.

Slice onion, capsicum, mushrooms and garlic and pan fry in butter an olive oil till soft. Add shredded smoked ocean trout and olives and heat through. Add some pasta water to the mix and allow to warm through and thicken. Throw on rocket leaves and allow to wilt. Drain and mix through pasta and added salt, pepper and grated fresh parmesan.

We were lucky all our ingredients came from our garden, weekly organic box from Ceres and the boutique smoker that we have access to. If you can’t get smoked fish use ethically pole fished tuna or ethically caught first world wild salmon as a substitute.

A. is on a local contact list that is run by one of the local young ladies in the area. I am not always a fan of these groups as they can easily lead to some serious cliqueness and an almost elitism attitude in people. To her credit this young lady has done a fantastic job of running the group.  Having met her she is very down to earth and easy going which I am sure helps. While I am interested in the list it is primarily a women’s list which has probably worked out better and allowed for the socialising that has been destroyed by the modern world. So far it is a success with A. pointing out new stuff that she thinks might be of interest and generally getting to interact with the local community.

The notices range from people with excess olives, lemons (A. put out a request for bottle for her wall) and the other day with a local person whose retired father is backyard producer of honey in a suburb not far from here.

A. asked would we like to buy some?

Hell yes put us down for a couple of kilograms was my response. I am working on honey mead and fruit and honey mead at the moment at the worst I can make it into that was my thought.

The pickup was an honesty system which I am fond off as we used to have them up country all the time. They indicate a sense of community so basically grab the honey, cross your name of the list and put the money under the door. At $7 per kg it is a bit more expensive than the supermarket honey and bit cheaper than the local produced ‘bee sustainable honey’ we purchase nearby.

Today my daughter asked can I have red jam please? Pointing at the honey.

So we had local honey and sourdough bread for breakfast. A nice strong coffee for me and a little bit of mascarpone on my bread then some of the honey, my daughter just went for honey and bread and some milk in ‘her size glass’

They honey was very tasty. Filled with flavours from eucalyptus trees and a real mix of other flavours. Just what you would expect from honey in semi urbane environment near a creek and parkland covered in native trees.

Destined to be eaten not end up as mead (although I may get some more for making homemade pear and honey mead)

As you all know I personally think we need to have more of this sort of thing. I have written in the post The Cheese Coop that this is the sort of think we as society need to get back to. In this case there was real win, win for all. 20 odd people get great and very, very fresh produce. The bee keeper gets some spare cash in his retirement, the people in his local area and the bush gets pollination from bees, the community gets together just a little more and the poor old earth gets a break with the honey not being transported half way across the world.

We can’t do this for everything, some things have to be monocultured in large volume. Some things are better shipped in than produced locally some things won’t grow locally. Where they can and it is better for the world, then we should support the local production

OK and someone did lose out. The big supermarkets. But hey that is a good thing too.

And me I get to eat a simple tasty breakfast with my gorgeous daughter. What more could I ask for?

So A. and I and the rest of the family have been out of action today with some bug or another the kids have brought back from crèche, Add to that it is a public holiday and the weather was rather wet cold and unpleasant we could have been excused for just parking our tails and not getting much done. And for part of the day this was true.

But it is harvest time and we still needed to get some stuff done and keep the kids amused.

I managed to process around ½ kg of chestnuts into a very nice chestnut past as per a recipe I found on the net from a gentleman called Eddy Van Damme.

http://www.chefeddy.com/2009/12/chestnut-paste/  

I am going to try a sherry, chocolate chestnut cake in the next day or so if A. doesn’t eat it all by then.

A. did a couple of loaves of bread even having to create a super bowl for all the dough as it rose having brought her starter Marvin back to life it is nice to be eating her sourdough again. She also had a crack at persimmon jam. She was not happy with the outcome. Finding it a tad astringent to say the least. Me I look at it and think how that astringency will cut nicely against greasy doughy doughnuts in winter. Another project for another day.

So why push ourselves when we felt like death warmed up at times? Well not out of masochism or a desire to be seen as somehow great it is out of necessity more than anything else.

Remember we have two little ones and the three year old can be a handful. I would like to blame her mother for this but it is my personality coming out big time in the cute little thing. But she does love helping her daddy in the kitchen and this helps to keep her amused peeling chestnuts with me, better than putting her in front of the TV to while away a rainy day. Her brother just likes to looka t laugh at the both of us. There is also the fact that even sick time travels faster if you do stuff. The final reason is that we had items we had to process. I am conscious of what my friend had to say on permaculture

‘The problem with permaculture is it is the realm of the middle class and when things get tough they just buy their way out.’

So we could have left it, I could have bought bread, or persimmon jam or chestnut paste no problems but we have made a decision to try not to fall back and let stuff go to waste. Call it our little attempt to balance out the other wasteful choices in our life.

Well off to bed to see if I can sleep off the lurgi and hopefully stop feeling like the living dead.

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At the moment it is autumn here in Melbourne which is harvest time. In between processing about 30kg of chestnuts we wild picked, drying apples, making cider, and bacon, freezing and bottling fruits. Getting the winter garden in and preparing the mushroom boxes I was given a box of prickly pear.

I processed most of the fruit into syrup. Froze the rest as either juice or in packs of 10 for later use.

But I had something special in mind for the last of them.

I am lucky I have travelled a lot over the years and so has my family and one of my uncles and aunts had come back from a trip to Malta raving about the local liqueur made from these delicately flavoured fruits.

So I spent about an hour trying to find a recipe for bajtra liqueur. And to my surprise I was unable to find a recipe for it … Something had escaped the power of Google. Shock horror. All I could find was references to it being made with local wild sage honey. I did however find a recipe for prickly pear liqueur made with sugar syrup so thought hell why not try a variant.

Basically I put a bottle of vodka (about 750ml) and 15 peeled and chopped prickly pear into a bowl. Covered it in several layers of cling wrap and left it for 15 days. At the end when I opened up the wrap the vodka had taken on the flavour of the pears but was over powering their subtle musky flavour.

I made up sugar syrup mix and a honey syrup mix and combined them with the vodka as shown below. The flavour was greatly enhanced the muskiness came out with the sweetness and as my neighbour and I sat and drank a few of these over some goats cheese and locally smoked Croatian prosciutto we decided that yes this was definitely a drink ice cold on warm afternoon. My favourite was definitely the honey syrup variety but both are very, very good.

The only thing I am trying now is to put some orange rind into a bottle as when I made the prickly pear syrup I used a little citric acid to enhance the flavour and I am hoping the peel will have a similar effect. I might also try some cointreau with it as a cocktail. Lots of options.

Oh and I will get back to everyone on how adding orange peel goes with the both types. If nothing else it will give me more reason to drink some more. It is only experimenting I promise you…

Recipe.

Soak is a bottle of vodka (750ml or roughly 3 cups) and with 15 or so prickly pear for 10 -20 days. You will end up with around 6 cups or so of flavoured vodka at the end.

Drain the mix through a fine sieve leaving the pulp to drain for a few minutes then using the back of the spoon to get the last of the liquid out.

Make up a sugar  syrup being 2 cups of water and 2 cups of white sugar heated until the sugar fully dissolves . Allow to cool.

I made up a honey syrup by mixing 1 cup of honey with one cup of water heating it until the honey is fully dissolved. Allow to cool.

Mix every cup of the vodka solution with a cup of sugar syrup or a cup of honey syrup. I made up 4 cups of vodka mix with my sugar syrup above and made 2 cups of the vodka mix with two cups of the honey mix. Stir so it mixes lightly and put into sterilised bottles.

Serve as chilled as you can without freezing.

A short post as I am just trying to get the last o the 30kg of wild harvested chestnuts processed before they go bad.

I am a big fan or repairing stuff rather than throwing away something damaged and buying new. Good for the world good for my pocket. And let’s face it I am no oil painting so my old work clothes are for comfort rather than looks. I have to wear the corporate uniform each day to work so comfort out of that time is 100% of my requirments.

So when my favourite couple of pairs of Macpac paints had tears in them again A. groaned as she feels she has spent her life repairing these paints. In my defence these pants have history I have climbed in Tibet and Nepal and hiked thousands of kilometres in them.

Up until now she has used another old pair of climbing pants to repair. This has meant i have been able to keep my machismo, just being a rugged repair focused individual soul here nothing else to see. ..

But today she got me…

Retro the repairs are indeed! But what can I say they serve the same purpose and are still the most comfortable paints I can find.  No I wouldn’t wear them out for dinner at a restaurant but I think people get a bit over involved in having the right gear you get them turning up for something like a permablitz with the latest tools gear and clothes. If you want to buy the image that is fine but don’t kid yourself this is how you save the world.

At the end of the day the $200 for a couple of new pairs would be better spent on my mortgage or better still not having to be earned so I can spend more time with my family which is worth way more than a anything else in my life. It is also better not going into making something new and leaving my kids with that legacy. Because at the end of the day what you do good or bad even the small stuff ends being the legacy of those you hold most dear.

And hey I suppose it fits that urban hippie image. Tough girl that A. at times…