On My Mind..

 Today we went to my favourite piece of open ground. I took the kids to the veggie garden first and was so happy to see them pointing out the ones that we also have at home. Pretty good for 4 and 2years!!

 This big bertha of a ginger plant was flippin' amazing! It must be so old. Taking cuttings isn't too bad... is it? Na!

 DS1 and his Easter egg basket. 3 picture shrink wrapped hard boiled eggs in a woolly nest.

 Gorgeous Autumn day. We napped well!

Eat that Yellow Dragon (and Hooley dooley)

Well here's a pic I forgot to put on before. (I think). The wiggly zucchinis from my neighbour down the street (who has a mandala garden like this one but way better). These are vertically climbing zucchinis that grew so many that she gave me about 3 kilos and then more. So what else but rabbit bread and the fluffiest, most moist and yummy zucchini lemon scones (yes they worked!).

Wiggly zucchini scones:

1 cup finely grated zucc

bit of lemon zest

1cup unbleached flour

1 tablespoon butter or coconut oil to rub into flour

1 tsp baking powder

That's it! rub in butter to flour and baking powder, add zucc and lemon zest and you're good to cut and bake. I think I baked at 170C for 15/20mins. Can't quite remember. Until golden anyway. YUUUUM.

Eat that Yellow Dragon... Fruit
 About a year and a half ago, we went to the Qld/NSW border for a holiday. What luck to find a place called Tropical Fruit world!!!  Steve rolled his eyes the whole day, "did you see that guy taking pictures of an Avocado on a tree?!" my response, "Why weren't YOU taking pictures?!"
Anyway, we got to try all the lovely tropical fruits and this one I've finally seen in the shops. I don't like the red one.

 This one has the texture of a soft ripe pear, seeds like a kiwi and tastes like.... erm.... water. Maybe with a teeny tiny after taste of tapioca, but mostly just juicy water. HA! Oh well. Good for us I'm sure.







Hooley Dooley.. This bread is really olive oil bread made into mini burgers. I forgot that at such a high temp (220C) this kind of bread creates lovely air pockets. Olive oil bread by Richard Bertinet is simple. Flour, water, salt, olive oil. It's so fluffy and crisp it's delightful. NOT the ideal think for mini burger buns...

With sourdough starter the bread doesn't rise as fast BUT in the oven they really pop up.








Lucas loved stuffing carrot sticks through the holes and eating his that way.






These are the little guys. The burgers are made from left over red salmon, small kidney beans and sweet potato from the previous night's dinner. They SCOFFED them down! Woohoo!

 p.s. I was out of carrots, zucchini and sunflower seeds.. oh and sultanas. So this is renamed "bird bread" with pepitas, raisins, currants and dried banana coins. I didn't let it rise over night, just 4 hours so it's a little dense but soooo nice and we love it.

The best kind of post, pear crubmle and a whoops.

EDIBLE GIFTS!

I received my long awaited birthday present last week. Nice!
FREEEEE from Anathoth. How lovely




If it's not home made and very good, then just go out and buy Anathoth jam. It's from NZ.

Another six jars of jam to my store cupboard plus the home made plum jam from my bro's small holding, makes at least a year and bit's worth of jam. Nice!

...Speaking of food

Success in the (bought a) glut of fruit and using it department. I got about 4kilos of really ripe pears for a dollar YES! A DOLLAR! shared them, and then used my share to make pear crumble PROBLEM, no oats. So I used my home made raw muesli (rolled oats, sunflower kernels, date, sultanas and pepitas) mixed with unbleached flour, butter and a bit of sugar for the topping.


The filling is raw sliced ripe pears with about a half cup of frozen raspberries ontop before the crumble mix.

 

The kids ate it for dessert and breakfast. ;o)

Woops.. I made some Richard Bertinet style olive oil bread rolls the other day - gorgeous flavour. Lucas helped... burnt them. grr!

 

you get a round of dough and cut it with a credit card and turn them inside out. Fun.. if you get to eat them afterward. They were rock hard with my overcooking.

Cin sourdough/End of season/dehydrator

Well.. it burnt. Stupid computer. The crust was nice and thin (as you can see) but it was totally burnt so I cut it all off!

The inside was lovely and fluffy, soft and tasty. Albeit rather small slices.

So I stuck some more bread on to do the long rise and used the last bits of produce from my garden to make a lamb shank casserole. I use Patritti to drink and cook with as I'm Tetotal. It's delish and really adds that depth of flavour you need with some dishes.

The next day my lovely neighbour came around with some zucchinis she'd grown. Wiggly ones!!
I totally forgot to ask her what they were called. They're climbers.

Then I got a bargain at the shop. Dried them and packed them away. I think I'll grind them up for a tasty flavour additive to soups or.. just make it all a soup!

 Still on a roll I made very very bad jelly with agar agar. As you can see - spoon standing.. blurgh! haha!

Meet Jabba my pet bacteria..

Well I know you've all been waiting for the unveiling of Jabba 
(son of Fred) and here he/it is:

This is after two weeks of using and feeding my little pet. I have a couple of ladies at pilates and a bloke at church after a piece of Jabba so I'm having to up the feeds.

Below is the before pic. I'd just taken some to make the rabbit bread (below) found in the Good Life Bread Book (starring me and mum). I'd added the same weight of water to it and double of organic unbleached flour. Over night in the fridge and it turned puffy and light (above pic).

It's definately a hand smushing job.

Side view of the over night rise pic. Nice and fluffy and stretchy. Done this way the starter only needs feeding once a week or even once a fortnight.

 This is rabbit bread that I converted to a sourdough. I find it so much easier to use the water from a recipe and smush and dissolve as much of the starter as I can in that, then add all the other stuff. I used about 1/4 cup (heaped) of starter sponge.

Here we have 2 grated carrots, 1 large grated zucchini, 2 handfuls of sunflower seeds, 2 handfuls of sultanas and about a quarter of a cup of honey.

Totally went overboard from the original recipe  (1 of each and no zucc) and so glad I had!

Risen for about 6 hours and plopped into an oiled and floured tin for another 2. Hottest oven ever and some water tipped into a tray at the bottom and a quick spray of water on top and the oven door closed. Then turned down to 180 for about an hour.

 

 It looked rather unimpressive and dense. BUT once I cut into it I found a soft, moist (but not too moist) tasty bread. I cut the loaf in half then sliced ready for freezing.. didn't get to the freezer.

 For the initial feed to the kids it had butter and honey drizzeld ontop. Then they didn't care about that.

Through our church meeting today they were like crazed and starved rabbits wanting their food.

The sunflower seeds and sultanas made such a difference and the smell of the sourdough was homely and actually sweet (not a honey kind of sweet).

My next experiment is a basic sourdough recipe that I'm proving over night. It's a cinnamon toast recipe made up my moi.

As you can see sourdough is alot wetter and stickier (actually so is french made bread Richard Bertinet's book is soooooo worth it. You'll never look at bread making the same again and you'll never knead as much or in the same way again.)

Ironically sitting over night to prove on top of my not so used bread maker and not so eaten loaf of shop bought bread :o)

ACTUALLY on the subject of sourdough in the bread maker. I tweaked Richart Bertinet's

jam doughnut recipe to make it with a sourdough starter and it was GREAT. The regular recipe is still good to eat the next day if not sugared, whereas the sourdough version needs to be eaten straight away.

LOW GI HEAVEN!!!  I used Tasmanian raspberry jam made by Sam Sullivan's Grandma's fair hand to stuff inside and vanilla or cinnamon sugar on the outside. MUST re-do that one and take pics.

Here's the basic recipe. This recipe is bread machine friendly.

New friends, Old Fred.

 I made some friends the other day. I was popping over to give the lady some samples for a new co-op bulk buy and ended up staying for hours and chatting our heads off. Her husband is in IT and has just started his own business.

 They're into organics, preserving, artisan bread making, growing vegies etc etc



 This is some lovely jam the lady gave me, it's organic peach.











 This is a slice of the regularly made bread by her DH. It was SO GOOD!










.....and this is FRED. The 12 year old sourdough starter culture. Hereby renamed Jabba (the Hutt). I must feed him at least once a fortnight.

Fred's owner will willingly do a class on artisan bread making or beer/wine making. I'm teetotal so that's so not up my ally. BUT he leant me one of his great books to have a go.

Beans, Toms and Dinner

Well last month it was my birthday. I had this humungo birthday cookie and had to slop the icing on in a rather 6 year old fashion to prevent the kids from eating it all!
Who cares?! It tasted yum.

 Butter beans from the garden. They grow so fast! I've been picking twice a day. They're the perfect thing for a kiddy garden and perfect to grow with runner beans as they take longer.

The boys tucked into Dad's massive roma tomatoes.

 These were the ones I planted. The big stripey ones are Russian Purple. So soft and tasty even with the green stripes. The little ones at the top are .. er.. forget the name but they're so gorgeously super sweet! Heart shaped on a truss. More on them later. The ones at the bottom are regular cherry toms from a tumbling bush I put in a pot. Same old.

We had leftovers for my birthday dinner - YUM! I put the ham and cheese with a quick white sauce into some puff pastry, the others are left over beef stew.