Garlic of Lewisham

Garlic is harvested and ready to go now and if you are travelling between Campbell Town and Ross on the Midlands Highway, take the opportunity to stop in at "Lewisham" and choose from three different varieties that they grow organically.

The ever popular "Tasmanian Purple".

The garlic is crop rotated every year and grown without any pesticides or fungicides (Rae Young's discussions about soil health and microbiome positively make my head spin but excite me at the same time!) and hand weeded.

."Spanish Red"

As you can see from the photos, the Midlands is a very dry area and lends itself to very good bulb growing, however it would be a fallacy to think they don't require any water, and conservation methods are employed on the farm.

"White Velvet"

Shopping this way allows you to

a) choose varieties specifically for your taste and cooking

b) buy enough to store and see you through most of the year

c) perfect for planting if you would like to try some home growing yourself as they have not been sprayed with any sprouting retardant.

d) buy cheaper and save money

and not the least importantly,

e) support a local farmer.

So look out for the bright red garlic sign below the property name. Go through the open gate on the western side of the highway and travel a short distance around the bend past the little cottage, till you see the small tin shed with the garlic sign on it.

There are a couple of ways to pay, you can leave cash or make a direct deposit and all the details are in the shed. 

Once you get your garlic home, keep it in any airey, dry, dark place so it will last for months and months.

Ravioli - A Frugal Meal

While the oven was on all day Sunday I also roasted off the cut pumpkin (see previous post here) and a small portion was devoted to ravioli for dinner the next night. And I really do mean small, a little goes a long way with ravioli.

I googled hoping to find something inspirationally different but was confronted with a hundred recipes for sage and burnt butter sauce....and do you know what....

I couldn't think of anything that does go better with pumpkin ravioli, it's like a law!

So I'm not going to give you a recipe like every other except to say that the pumpkin was roasted with a tiny sprinkle of my home grown and incredibly pungent in it's freshness caraway seed. It was then mashed with feta and lemon myrtle leaf and freshly grated nutmeg. You can simply chose your own aromatics and make it your own. After simmering the ravioli for a few minutes, drain and toss in a pan of "burnt" butter. For the burnt butter I add a large knob of butter and a sloosh of olive oil to allow more leeway in temperature and I add slivered fresh garlic and sage leaves and allow to brown. Simple, nutty, aromatic and perfect with pumpkin.

What I will say is that making your own pasta saves you squillions and makes for a luscious meal even if you don't have backyard chickens. If you do have your own chickens then your pasta will have a bright yellow like mine form those gorgeous free range eggs and if you harvested pumpkins from the compost heap like we did, the cost is next to nix, just some flour.

Would I make this with three little ones under the age of five? Probably not. It does take some time in the kitchen but if you are wanting to spend some quality talk time with a partner or older child, bonus!

I use ordinary flour and generally I use a ratio of one egg for every 100g of flour and the flour component is 1 part fine semolina to 2 parts plain flour. 

A pasta maker can be an investment but it can also be a waste of money if you don't get it out regularly, and that's the key; get it out fortnightly or at least monthly and make lasagne or spaghetti and it soon becomes an enjoyable habit. There is no substitute for fresh pasta and when you compare the costing you will find yourself making very tasty yet incredibly frugal meals.

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REMEMBER

NEVER!!! Wash your pasta maker!

Simply dust it off and brush loose pieces free with a pastry brush.

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Feeding Through The Hungry Gap

Even in the "hungry gap" you can make nutritious meals for less than $2 by growing your own.

In the past I have been a bit anti home growing carrots; they're fiddly and slow and finnicky and lets face it, cheap to buy anyway right.

Craig persevered.

We have tended to take the advice of our Italian friend Lisa who simply sows them in lines and harvests them in lines as she needs them. 

Her words,

 "you take them as they come, as they grow, some are straight, some are small and sometimes they are big, wassamatta? They are all carrots"

freed us from the commercial expectations we had been placing on our crop.

We had been conditioned to think carrots were straight, one colour and one size and we were failures if we didn't produce like that.

You do need to ensure that the seed is kept moist till germination and that the weeds are not too vigorous among them. A good tilth to the soil is helpful but if you are using your compost like you should for all your vegetables your soil will be great anyway. A steady supply of water during their growing is also important, like any vegetable you don't want them to go for days on end without water, it will tell in the taste and texture.

Think about that carrot...

it is essentially a root taking up from the soil and creating it's goodness.

I know farmers who will not eat bought mono-cropped sprayed carrots for that very reason.

Another incentive to grow your own.

One of the best reasons of all I have discovered is it's slowness as it turns out. The late sowing in summer has been steadily feeding us for months and what's more I haven't had to preserve them or store them, they have done just fine in the cool ground. I literally pick them as I need them. Within minutes of them being in the ground we are eating them.

Fresh, chemical free, cheap and versatile.

This week for dinner I slow cooked a whole chicken, one of the roosters we culled a couple of months ago. I based it around the Chicken Soup recipe in Anneke Manning's seasonal cook book.

I used a huge bunch of parsley. I mean a huge bunch like a vegetable quantity rather than a herb flavour quantity as it is about to go to seed and I am using as much as I can of it's lushness. I added a bottle of last seasons' tomatoes from the cupboard and juice from a lemon from the front yard. Next some dried beans (4 different types)  from last years harvest that I had soaked for 24 hrs and of course lovely carrot straight from the patch and some garlic still feeding us from last years crop.

The next night I took those leftovers from the slow cook and strained the liquid from the meat and veg. I added some mashed potato to the solids and baked the mix in a pie for dinner the next night. 

Craig took leftover pie for lunch the next day and I took the leftover "soup" for my lunch.

The chick cost us $5 and the cost of feeding it till dispatch is more than covered by the eggs from the pullets.

All the veg was produced from our own saved seed.

I won't get into a breakdown of energy costs to produce the meals suffice to say the initial cost of the slow cook....around $5 plus electricity

The pie say $1.60 for the butter and flour in the pastry and the potatoes (we've run out)

For a total of $6.60 plus whatever for electricity for cooking I made three meals for us.

It's the end of winter (spring doesn't really start here properly for another month yet) and we are in the "hungry gap" of the garden. We still have perpetual spinach and lettuce, carrots and parsley growing. Lemons are in glut and the chooks are laying. We are on our second last pumpkin and though the Turks Turbans are shocking hard to cut my word they store well!

 We are still using garlic and there is also Tas pepperberry leaves, bay leaves and hardy herbs still for the picking. We are down to our last dozen of bottled tomatoes and haven't run out of paste, sauce or condiments. The dried beans are something else. They are a meal in themselves and a little handful goes a long way. We have just finished the frozen peas and broad beans and green beans. 

Though I am starting to crave fresh fruit (we still have bottled cherries, pears, apple and plums) there is no way we would ever go hungry.

All from a suburban backyard.

I cannot urge you enough, just grow two things.

Next year grow four

Next year you'll never look back again.

In the southern hemisphere sow a couple of rows of carrots and keep sowing a row every month till autumn and you'll be feeding yourselves the whole year through. It is surprising how much you will harvest from a short row so gauge it by your family size.

Using Garlic Scape

For us, this time of year is the gap in the year for garlic. We have used all our stores and the last few corms have sprouted and disintegrated about a month ago, the new crop is still about four weeks away. It's at this time that I eagerly anticipate the small window of opportunity for the garlic scape. It is the flowerless tip that the bulb throws when the garlic (hard neck variety) is close to harvest. If left the scapes would develop a bulblet type growth diverting vigour away from the corm. Cutting the scapes produces bigger bulbs.

The scape is delicious and fills that garlic gap when I am hungering for it so. I take scape to the market and I would say at least 90% of people ask what to do with scape and have never used it. Commonly I suggest chopping it and adding to pasta dishes, quiches, salads or stir-frys.

Here is another fabulous way to enjoy scape...

as stuffing for roast chicken,

Finely chop some scape and add to some roughly chopped Australian Limes. Add a few leaves from a Tasmanian Pepperberry tree, finely chopped and add a generous pinch of salt and a slick of oil.

The Tasmanian Pepperberry Tree produces berries very similar to peppercorns but the leathery leaves are also edible though a little goes a long way, they are very hot and spicey. We have a small tree growing and keep it trimmed to a manageable height. Unfortunately it doesn't bear fruit as you need a male and female plant.

Stuff the mixture into the cavity of a free range chicken and bake as you normally would in a moderate oven. The mixture will get all juicy and flavoursome and combine with the chicken pan juices making a sumptuous base for gravy made in the pan.

For more scape ideas have a look here at 7 things to do with scape 

How do you enjoy your garlic scape?