Russell's Leftovers

Day 231

Russel's Leftovers Feed Us!

Aarod works at Russel's Pizzeria in Willunga most Saturday nights and sometimes we are lucky enough to have some leftovers brought home. Above are delicious meatballs and below is the pizza dough made into a lovely loaf of bread!

We still had more, so we made scrolls with home made lemon curd and home made pesto.

scrolls cooling - they were a bit over cooked!

Michael also made a meat pie

 Roast Lamb from Phaedra in the crockpot with potato,onion, rosemary from the garden and garlic from Farmer's market.

 Venison

Michael chops up the venison, a very welcome gift from Jason (Phaedra's husband). The meat is so incredibly lean and fresh. We were very pleased that Jason dropped in after his successful hunting weekend!

Spaghetti bolognaise made with venison mince and home made tomato sauce.

Preparations for the Tassie Trip

Dehydrated bolognaise sauce for my hike in Tassie in October. I have been invited to go along with the year 11 class from Willunga Waldorf School on their Overland Trek. I have started getting my food ready, and Aarod's food for his canoe trip next month. I have made an executive decision that not all of the food that we take on our trips will be local. Phew! too hard. We will take some milk powder, some scroggin, some noodles, and probably some dried fruit and chocolate! - need to keep the strength up somehow!

one of my favourite simple lunches - pasta with garlic, olive oil, and Finniss River Romano cheese (I spent my teenage years living in Finniss, so this cheese has a historical attraction for me). - it is a little less salty than Parmesan cheese, so I add a bit of salt too. When I have them available, I add chopped sundried tomato, basil, and anchovies, one or all of these. Yum. 

The second harvest of asparagus this season - it is a bit early, but very welcome at my table. This is the largest spears we have had yet -about as thick as my thumb!

Butter Shortage

Day 230

Making Butter

The Farmer's Market still has no Biodynamic butter, apparently they don't have enough milk to make it. When they have plenty of milk they make skim milk and use the cream to make butter. So they were out of skim milk too - the two products are linked. In desperation I bought 2 tubs of cream and decided to make my own butter!

Paris Creek Biodynamic Cream

I simply added the cream to my food processor with the plastic blade not the metal one.

Wizz for ages untill the mix looks like scrambled egg. At this point the curds and whey separate -

 (I remember that from little miss muffet)

I used wooden spatulas to squeeze out the excess liquid

This takes a bit of patience, it is a bit tricky but not hard, doesn't take that long.

  

It is so satisfying to see the end result - it looks just like the butter from the shop!

You end up with butter - on the left, and butter milk - on the right.

The butter milk is actually quite creamy still, and I just add it to pancakes. The butter tastes great, but it has started to smell slightly off - like smelly cheese... So I am keeping it in the fridge to hopefully prolong it's shelf life. I am not sure how long the cream was in the fridge before I made the butter. I guess it's important to use fresh cream = sweeter smelling butter.

Haloumi, from Fleurieu Farm, farmer's market mushrooms, and olive tepanade, with garden salad.

Scrambled egg with parsley, coriander, tomato, and greens from the garden. (The tomato was picked green and has been on the kitchen bench for weeks, and finally it is red and delicious).

Breakfast Pancakes

Pancakes made with the buttermilk from butter making, Paris creek milk, our eggs, Lauke's flour and farmer's market LSA mix.

Pancakes served with Mark and Lisa's pears marinated in lemon juice overnight, topped with pantry icing sugar - (that was lurking undetected for a while)

Served with Muntries jam.

Pears and Phaedra's home made yoghurt - what a treat!

Stir Fry Dinner

Bamboo shoots top left, lemon grass top right, ginger bottom right, all home grown and ready for the stir fry.

We had to dig up our neighbour's bamboo that has taken over our vege garden , so to make it more positive, we decided to try eating the bamboo shoots. But they are evil looking critters - see top left of cutting board. They look like little horns, and are tender in the centre but hard as laminate on the outside.

The lemon grass I purchased from the farmer's market, and is the first time I have used this from my garden, it is now of a size that is able to be harvested.

Galangal root from Steve Poole's garden - it tastes and smells like a very mild ginger, but is much tougher to cut, it does not have the same spicy heat that ginger has, but unlike ginger, it will grow well here, I have planted some in my garden.

Stir fry end result.

Fruit Trees, Grafting, Seeds

Day 248

Grafting

This is an Espalliared Plum rootstock that we bought 2 years ago from the rare fruit Society. The graft did not work so we were left with a very vigorous very spikey tree. Apparently plums do very well in this environment, so it is a good rootstock, however, you can only graft plums or apricots onto it. Neither of which I particularly wanted in the garden now that the village farm has so many plums and apricots; (We chose this before the farm orchard was planted) so I asked the rare fruit experts for grafts that will give me something unique. Above is a pic of my first ever graft, a double header - Mystery and Plumcot - Interspecific plum x apricot. These are a cleft graft mainly because I could not get the grafting knife I bought from Green Harvest to cut (very disappointing) so I ended up using my trusty stanley knife. This was the best cut I could manage, also the rootstock is very large, so I bodged it really, but I did make sure that the cambium layers of the rootstock and the scion were aligned, (aren't you impressed with the jargon) and because there was so much trunk exposed, I decided to spray the exposed areas with steri prune just for good measure - to keep out infection. (the black stuff).

This is another 2 year old plum that I cut back and grafted with a yellow fleshed plum - Coes Golden Drop. Grafted the same way.

Here are the two cuttings I bought at the Rare fruit Society a -  Fig - Preston Prolific (amber flesh) and a Grape - Himrod Seedless - pink flesh. Hopefully they will have grown some roots by Spring, and I can plant them out.

 

Here is one of the three bare rooted fruit trees I bought at the Rare Fruit Society for $6. I bought a peach, quince, and a nectarine. They don't look like much at the moment.

 

While I was taking the photos I realised that the poor olive tree (To the right of the insulation) has actually survived the constant attacks by the weevils. These small  shoots were protected by the yoghurt container, and out-lived the weevils (I think they die off in winter) I am inpressed by the tenacity of the tree!

 

I also discovered this proof that the insulation barrier does work - see the weevil hanging on to the left hand side of the cuff. It looks like it got stuck in the fibres but maybe the cold killed it??

Seeds

some seeds I potted up from Green Harvest

The seeds in this nifty seed raising box - from Cheap as Chips for about $7

Dinner

Dinner of Angelakis Bros. local Garfish served over (Byron Bay) brown fried rice.

In the kitchen with Aarod

Day 247 The Hunt for Butter

For a couple of weeks we have had no butter, as the Paris Creek dairy has run out, and I have tried all of the local supermarkets. I was excited to find another butter from the Fleurieu, and goats milk haloumi, and yoghurt; at Goodies and Grains at the central market.  Hindmarsh Valley dairy in Victor Harbor as far as I know, is the only other brand of local butter available (apart from Paris Creek) all other commercially available butter comes from interstate!

Teenager in the kitchen

 

Aarod 

 cooking onions - he is home from school for the day and is still complaining of "boring lunches and no food in the house" He tries to persuade me to buy him something from the Willunga bakery while I am there. So I bring him home some mince and chopped steak from the butcher, and teach him how to cook pies and pasties. It is a miserable wintery, overcast, windy, day, we spend the whole afternoon with the oven on, in the kitchen, creating. He actually enjoys himself, we keep the house warm, and use up all of the butter!

Aarod's almond biscuits

Pies and Cornish pasties

Cutting out my pastry

Cornish Pasty filling - Farmer's Market root vegetables, celery from my garden, mince from Willunga butcher.

cornish pasties into the oven

Meat pies with potato mash topping

and grated Paris Creek cheese ontop

pies and pasties cooling

more pies ready to be filled

 home made lemon curd

My sister Lisa and Aarod's friend Lilly, provided us with lots of  lovely lemons, so we set about making everything we could think of, made from lemons. Here my trusty Farm House Cook Book came in very handy.

The rest of the lemon curd, made with 5 eggs, 225g of butter, 450g of honey, juice and lemon zest of 4 lemons. Warm in a bowl, over boiling water then add eggs and gently cook stirring until the mixture thickens. then jar up into hot jars.

juicing lemons - much easier in the juicer attachment of my pood processor.

frozen lemons - the recipie suggested freezing the lemons overnight to soften the skins.

lemons and salt, the lemons need to be packed in tight, with no air gaps, covered with salt and lemon juice. I put them into jars heated in the oven, they should keep this way for a few months, and longer in the fridge.

preserved lemons

lemonade with the left-over lemon juice I did not have all of the ingredients (Tartaric acid or citric acid) so I just added honey (instead of sugar)  lemon zest, hot water, and poured it into hot bottles.

Capping the beer bottle with this great bottle capper that I picked up at the Willunga Lions Auction last week.

Lemonade -actually more like lemon cordial. Note when heating up the bottles - don't do what I did - I did not think that the cap on the larger bottle was plastic! I melted it in the oven.

 

melted plastic cap - what is left of it! - just as well i had a few spare bottles, and I could remove the cap to replace it.

 

plastic on bottom of oven....oops! - luckily it came off easily...phew!

A well earned lunch! Including home made sauce and greens from the Farmer's Market.