Copper Polishing Is Child's Play

Copper polishing - Fun for all the family!

You should have seen the boys faces when I explained what their next "chore" was at the weekend.

I want you to take that big bottle of tomato sauce and smear it all over those pots.

They loved the slippery, tactile feel and that sort of forbidden feeling about playing with food.

Then it turned into a science lesson about the acid in the tomatoes reacting with the tarnished coating on the copper. I can just imagine Mr 9 when he gets back to school this week.

The sauce is the perfect medium for being able to lay down an even coat and just sit there a while to do it's job. After a while, a bit of a scrub with a brush and a hose down. Maybe they will need a coat or two more but I'm just pondering how stripped back to shiny I want them, a little verdigris is nice too.

These have come out of old hot water cylinders and boiler washers. They go perfectly with my copper theme for Christmas this year but unfortunately won't fit the tree stand but they'll look nice as planters or maybe present barrels or drinks tubs at family gatherings filled with ice. Wouldn't they be gorgeous overflowing with white petunias and poinsettia? Maybe I'll turn all three into a quirky water feature for the garden.....

Here is some ideas on pinterest

The Pee-Wee Pot

Just Look!

I found a half size Fowlers pot to match my big Bertha one.

I ummed and aahhed about buying it, wondering if I was just bringing more "stuff" into the house but it has turned out to be a wonderful buy.

It is perfect for doing small batches at the start of the season, for instance if I only have enough for bottling six #27 of tomatoes instead of the 12-13 that I can fit into the big one.

It is also PERFECT for processing my #10 bottles which I use for tomato paste, chilli sauce and pickled nasturtium seeds.

And for the height of the season like this morning...

I have both of them going at once!

Tomato Paste for 70 Cents a Jar and Other Savings

My daughter's final weeks of a difficult pregnancy were right in the middle of tomato season so I bottled what I could and made some relish and got the sauce done but the paste had to wait. I turned about 25kg into pulp and then froze it in containers in the freezer till I could devote a day to paste making.

We got a call to say that a sheep was ready and heading for our freezer within the week so it was time to clear it out and defrost ready for the arrival and so the pulp had to be dealt with.

You can read how I make tomato paste here or in the recipe book.

It is a process that takes quite a few hours in the oven so it's good to make economical use of it and bake along.

I had cut a pumpkin a couple of days before and that needed cooking off so I cut the rest up and it went in on trays with the tiniest sprinkle of some of my home grown caraway seed to roast. For lunch we mixed some of the pumpkin with lacto-fermented beetroot (recipe link here) and a dollop of home made yoghurt. The sweetness of the roasted pumpkin goes so well with the salty tanginess of the beets.

After lunch I roasted a chicken which also made space in the freezer. This is one of the young cocks that we raised for meat. We don't raise a lot of chickens but every year Craig gets about 20 day old chicks to raise and usually there is half and half of each sex. We cull the boys at about 14-16 weeks. The meat is amazing and takes me right back to childhood to how birds used to taste. This became dinner and the roasted pumpkin was added to the other vegetables accompanying it.

Some of the pumpkin went into ravioli and the rest went into soup the next days.

THEN,

when I finally turned off the oven I popped in a casserole dish of heated and cooled milk with a couple of tabs of yoghurt to make another batch of fresh yoghurt which was left overnight for a slow ferment and in the morning ready to eat. Yum!

So although I had the oven on for several hours I managed to make economical use of it. It was one of the things drummed into us at school during Home Economics class.

So working on the oven cost of about 35 cents/hour I spent say about $2 for the day but created several meals and ended up with 9 bottles of tomato paste.

I spent a further .30 on water bathing the paste in the bottles and $4 for sealing rings

 so that means I made each 280g bottle of paste for $0.70.

lunch cost about $0.20 for the home made yoghurt

roast dinner cost entirely free except for a tabs of flour and say $0.50 for onions (we didn't grow)

dinner the next night of pumpkin ravioli for 2 was probably no more than $2

Soup cost next to nothing but a few cents for heating

1 lt yoghurt total cost about $2

ALL that food for less than $5.00

and a batch of tomato paste for the pantry that should last us the year through for $6.30

I haven't taken costings to the nth degree like water for the tomato plants and I certainly haven't added a labour cost but you can certainly see how much you save by doing it and growing it yourself. It is without a doubt a team effort with Craig putting in more hours in the garden than I do and while we love making our own pasta I don't know that I could "whip up a family batch of ravioli" if I had a gaggle of young children. You might think it seems like a lot of work but it all unfolded nicely and I had a beautiful productive Sunday. There is nothing nicer than pottering at home, nurturing family, filling the pantry and getting things done. 

Winner Tomato Sauce Recipe

Rich, red, spicey, 

a winner of a recipe from

"Preserving" by Oded Schwartz

This book is more usually sold through those books to buy in lunch rooms thingy.

If you can source a copy DO NOT hesitate, I can't recommend it highly enough for great recipes, clear step by step photos, tips and rules of ALL types of preservation.

This sauce is reduced a couple of times throughout the process but so worth the few hours it will take. Once you've got your big batch done you are all set for the rest of the year and if you've made a really huge batch and followed the instructions properly, this sauce will last on the shelf up to 2 years because of the added vinegar to increase the acid content.

Note the bottom right hand corner of the page....

A Damson variation!!

What a great follow on from the last post about Damsons!

You can see another reason why I love this book. Just look at the way the recipe is laid out with descriptions and tips on the left and important information in point form on the right.

A fantastic book.

I started this post back on the 4th and got as far as the first sentence when I got a text message to say

"Mum they are wheeling me into the labour ward now, get here quick"

So this post may be coming a bit too late for those dealing with piles of tomatoes as they are finishing here now but do give this recipe a try next year.

Julien

7lb 11oz

Tomato Preserving Workshop

This is a shout out to Tassie locals who may not be facebookers....

I will be doing a

 FREE tomato preserving workshop 

to celebrate the Tassievoire Eat Local challenge 

It's tomorrow night

Tuesday 4th March 7-9pm

at

Fresh Cafe

Charles St Launceston

We'll be talking about bottled tomatoes, tomato sauce and tomato paste.

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.

Heirloom Varieties and the Supermarket Hat

This is a Turks Turban pumpkin and it is an heirloom variety of pumpkin from the 1800s. It's not commonly seen on the supermarket shelves and I want to share with you a discussion we had recently at our Living Better Group.

Once upon a time....

there were many varieties of vegetables but the scope has been narrowed considerably and that has been partly due to consumer demand but mostly due to supermarket requirements.

So why do varieties fall from favour?

Someone growing the Turks Turbans might say they would never grow them again because they were full of seed and not as much flesh as a Jarradale or a Jap, but we have to look at the whole fruit.

The Turks Turban does have a lot of seeds but they are delicious. In fact I grow this pumpkin precisely for the seeds. I eat them raw and straight from the pumpkin. The seeds are high in iron, magnesium, protein, zinc and Vit K. They also contain a substance that paralyses and expels intestinal worms. The skin is very hard making this a long keeping pumpkin. 

The supermarket buyers aren't interested in keeping qualities and just want to present an easy to cut fleshy pumpkin and that is what a lot of buyers want too but growers can be far more discerning. 

You might grow some fleshy golden nuggets for their golden soft flesh. They cut so easily and are always round and symmetrical. These would be the first to eat through autumn. Great for cut wedges to bake in the oven with roasts.

As autumn progresses to early winter you might start cutting into these golden giants that you grew. The skin is a medium thickness and they are not terribly fleshy but these giants contain melt-away pumpkin ideal for soups. Their giant proportions are suited for big batches of warming soup.

Then towards the end of winter, you would start cutting your Turks Turban or the Queensland Blue. Their incredibly tough skin makes them keep for months and months, providing nourishment in the hungry time when not much is growing. 

Some people are disappointed with heirloom seeds but I think you have to ask yourself, are you looking at ALL the characteristics of the plant and the produce? Am I judging the plant on it's full merit or just what the supermarket man wants me to see?

It's about perception and convenience.

Take for instance tomatoes. How often we hear people complaining that supermarket tomatoes don't taste like tomatoes did. 

Be honest.

When you go to the supermarket, do you buy the green stripy ones, the black/red ones or do you expect your tomatoes to be rich, post-office box telephone booth red?

Did you realise that after much market research, there is actually an "acceptable" and "desirable" size of tomato? It is the right roundness and right size for sandwich slices. That is the public perception requirements. Then there are the supermarkets requirements. They need a fruit that can be transported and shelved for a period of time. It needs to be robust enough to pass through several hands. They don't want the thin skinned varieties that might mark on the vine and worse, show wear and tear from harvest. They want thick skins that will pass from hand to hand and survive the shelving. They will sacrifice perfect roundness for flavour and they will sacrifice flesh/seed ratios over colour. 

You will not find the Amish Brandywine tomatoes in the supermarket because their skin is too soft and their shape too pendulous and in fact they tend towards a lurid pink rather than a red-red. But my word they are a flesh hearty tomato for bottling and they are easily cut and cored.

So when you are considering the merits of the vegetables you are growing, take off that supermarket hat and those mass buyers goggles. Consider the growing habit and the storage merits. Judge the flesh and the seed and choose a variety of produce to suit your needs, not what the wider perception is. 

Inspiration's Seeds

Our second guest speaker last Thursday night at the Living Better group was David Kenyon from 

Inspiration's Seeds

These seeds are developed in Tasmania particularly for home gardeners in cool districts. Years and years of trials have gone into sourcing and securing vegetable seed that perform well in our short growing season.

David says a lot of people will blame fail rates on bad weather years and fickle climate over summer but he maintains that most of the time it is simply growers not choosing the appropriate variety for their growing season. 

We talked about cross pollination and stable and unstable genes, that is how conforming the produce is to subsequent seed saving and sowing. We talked about hidden genes (the genes responsible for the intangible traits like mildew resistance) and visible genes (the obvious visible characteristics like colour and size) and touched on the politics of seed and big companies and seed ownership. David also spoke about the fashions and fads of home growers. Twenty years ago his seedsmen put a lot of trial and research into cereal crops only to abandon and loose much of the work when it proved unpopular with the home gardener. How things have changed, there is a marked increase in interest now for cereal and grain crops amongst home gardeners such as quinoa.

David also brought along a couple of tomato varieties to taste and the smell was divine. This was my favourite called "Santa" a bright red and very round 4cm fruit that really has that tomato flavour and smell from the good old days. It's great to be able to taste and see and plan for next summer.

Something else that I have never tried is the Black Spanish Radish. David got us all excited by this variety. It grows to the size of a swede and is available to harvest in that hungry time of winter. David recommends peeling it and grating it for salads or adding it to slow cooks. 

So what do we plant now?

 David advises brassicas and silverbeet as well as onions, lettuce, asian style greens, beetroot and carrots.

Here is the best bit...

David brought along seeds to buy and they normally retail for $3.50 but we were able to purchase on the night for $2.50/pkt. I am very sorry for those who missed out and couldn't come on the night but boy did I enjoy myself. 

You can purchase Inspiration's Seeds on line and you will be especially impressed with their range of bean varieties. I am going to have some fun with those next summer for sure.

So if you are in cool districts, now is the second biggest planting time of the year so get cracking.

Why Bother?

The last third of winter is more bearable with bottled blueberries for breakfast.

And that's why I bother....

Green tomato pickles always bring memories of Nan close,

And that's why I bother......

We're enjoying lots of Osso Bucco stews on wet dark cold nights,

And that's why I bother.....

There are a lot of people who will ask you why you would bother, but there is no comparison to feeding yourself good food even in the "hungry season" to buying off the shelf. There will be some who cheer you on from the sidelines so stick to your convictions and enjoy the fruits of your summer labour, enjoy this quieter time with some knitting before it all starts again come spring.

You guessed it, somebody asked me just the other day when they saw me knitting socks....

Why bother?

I think that is something to ponder in a society where the majority seems to ask,

"Why Bother?"

Are we lazy or apathetic or have we just forgotten how good things can be?

Flora Jean's Green Tomato Pickles

Boy oh boy when the weather drops to 0C and the snow is on the mountains it signal an end to your tomato season. By now you will have harvested lots of beautiful ripe orbs and the plants themselves will be looking a bit tired and wan, leaves withering, yet still some smaller glossy green fruit remaining.

My mother came to town and I convinced her to have a day with me making green tomato pickles. It is her mother's recipe we used, where it came from before that I know not for it is a hand written recipe.

We picked yet more tomatoes, this time green. Such a gorgeous colour and vibrancy, as I chopped them I thought of the term "apple green" yet more luminous. 

As we worked she admitted to me how sorry she was she had not asked more questions when her mother was alive, prompted because of the various musings and suppositions we made as we read and re-read through the recipe.

I know Nan used to soak the vegetable over night in salted water but we debated about the validity of the step as opposed to just cooking it all up. Mum thinks that sometimes there were funny theories about such things, like cucumbers and gas for instance. Well we opted to cook without soaking which is the only deviation from the recipe. 

It follows....

Green Tomato Pickles

4lb green tomatoes chopped

2lb onion chopped

1/2 small cauliflower cut into flowerets

1 small cucumber peeled and chopped

1 tabs salt

1/2 cup flour

2 1/2 cups brown sugar

1 1/2 tabs mustard

2 tabs turmeric

1/4 tabs cayenne pepper

1 tabs curry powder

2 1/2 cups of malt vinegar

Place all the ingredients into a large pot except for flour and boil for about 20mins till the vegetables are tender. 

Mix the flour with a little water and add to the pot and boil for up to another 10 mins until the mixture thickens.

Remove from the heat and bottle and seal.

We may have gone overboard quadrupling the recipe! It seemed like a good idea at the time but in hind sight I won't be needing to make pickles again for a long time.

Above is the last lot of tomato relish I made and these #14 Fowlers jars are a great size for relish and pickles. The last of them were used to bottle up the pickles as well.

I love this on warm buttered toast in the morning or with cheese in a sandwich for lunch. It also goes great with cold meats or alongside a salad.

=============================

I would also like to tell you ladies who commented on the last post what a great bunch of girlfriends you are. You helped to give me that push and the impetus to pull that knitting out and wind it back up.

As much as I love the colour, the yarn is just not me. It certainly would not have done the pattern justice.

I have decided to give it to one of the patients who comes into work. She does lots of knitting for charity and I'm sure she can put it to much better uses.

Thank you so much ladies for your kind, caring and considered responses.

xxx 

Tomato Paste

I made tomato paste for the first time this year. 

The crop has been so good this year that I have extra to play with.

It's very simple but it did tie me to the house for hours.

First I washed and wizzed the tomatoes in a food processor and then passed them through a mouli food mill.

I made about 6lt of pulp and filled two baking dishes.

I placed them in the oven at 180C

and reduced, stirring every half hour or so...

Reducing.....darker...thicker...

after about three hours I reduced the heat to 150C as it was coming closer to a thick paste.

Until after another half hour or so I had a nice thick dark firm sauce.

Someone once asked me what I use my smaller Fowlers Vacola jars for and here is a great example.

These are a #10 and perfect sizing for the paste.

Some recipes say to keep the paste in the fridge with a thick layer of oil on top but I processed mine in the water bath at 80C for half an hour to sterilise and seal so that I can have them on the shelf for the year till next summer.

Six jars this size are too small for my FV outfit so the pasta cooker comes in handy. It is just right for the bottles and keeps them off the bottom of the pan. Alternatively, you could use a cake rack inside a stockpot.

Quite a few hours but definitely worth the effort.

Tomorrow is tomato relish day.

Home For A Few Days...

You may have heard about the widespread torrential rain and flooding in Western New South Wales and that means wet sheep so....

my man came home to me for a few days!

That's what has been keeping me (busy) quiet for a few days.

The first thing he did was a blitz on the garden, especially the edges.

Sorting and labelling saved seed is high on the agenda also.

And Tomatoes....

 are a huge preoccupation also.

I spend a lot of time every morning picking and bottle twice a week.

There are tomatoes in baskets, boxes on benches and trays all over the kitchen and the dining room table. 

But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Most people around me are complaining about their tomato crops.

It's been a very, very dry hot year and all I can say is that watering is key.

Water enables the plant to not only drink but cope with respiration from leaf surface area which is large. It also makes nutrients available in soluble solution for the plant to take up.

By watering I mean deep soaking once a week so that the sub-soil is damp. Most people sprinkle for five minutes with a hose every few days and that really isn't going to cut it I'm afraid. You are better off leaving the hose on the root area at a slow drip for hours.

Some people kept praying for rain which didn't come. Well the proof is in the pudding there and you can't blame the tomato variety or the weather. As a suburban grower you are well set up and able to irrigate.

Remember my favourite saying, and you can use it here for sure...

"IF  IT'S  TO  BE  IT'S  UP  TO  ME"

Celebrating Life, Death and Australia Day

It seems very quiet around my blog I know but in the world of real life time its been very busy.

I love the new cups at ut si cafe, they remind me of ripe squash and pumpkins. Their garden is the perfect spot for enjoying the gorgeous summer days of endless blue skies....

and isn't that a double edged sword!

No Rain!

A lot of my time has been devoted to watering.

I have been at the market every Saturday and everything is really growing quite quickly now and thirstily sucking up all the water I can give it as more respiration is happening across the leaves in this weather. A lot of people think a plant is all about the roots but there is a lot going on in the upstairs too.

I have been devoting a lot of time to the tomatoes and this is the first year I have tried the Florida Weave method for staking and I am so far very happy with it. You can read  more about it here on Funkbunny's blog. Although you can't really tell by this photo, I am able to transverse the bed between the plants, they are held quite orderly in their rows and supported in lines. The fruit is still small at this stage and I will be interested to see how this method copes with more weight.

I have been invited to a lot of people's places for dinner. There are so many kind people keeping me busy and filling my nights so that I am not moping and lonely with Craig far from home.

For the first time I went to a Murder Mystery Party and it was so much fun. It was set in New Orleans Mardi Gras time and I was invited to make a Lemon Meringue Pie to take along. I highly recommend this recipe and will be making one of these for Craig when he comes home.

I have been busy with the chickens too as people have come to collect them now they are grown to pullets. As readers correctly suspected there were two roosters and one has gone to a new home in the country by the river. I understand his name is now not Rooster 1 but Lord Pedro of Midworld. As the numbers dwindle so too does the workload and when another 6 pullets go on Sunday, the 2 that I am babysitting go back to their home and the remaining rooster is dispatched for dinner, I will be finally back to a normal flock again. This week I also had to cull the oldest girl from the flock. She was four years old, well past laying and really, really cranky. She sat on the nest all day long, week in week out denying access to any other hen putting everyone off the lay. She pecked at anything viciously within spit distance and when she was off the nest she was denying all others access to the water and the food. The flock has settled remarkably quickly with her gone and I even imagined I could here them singing in munchkin voices "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead"

She is too tough for eating but I will make stock from her today.

It has been a very bust time at work with extra hours and long days, I don't know how the doctors do it.

This week is also the Living Better With Less class week and Perth had their class last night because of Australia Day today. It will be off to Exeter on Sunday for theirs. This month we have been talking about berries; growing, harvesting and preserving and some organic gardening tips for pests and diseases. With the berry prices around $4+ for a 150g punnet, this is one place you can save a fortune by going to pick your own farms or growing some at home. Berries are so packed with nutrition and they should be a significant part of people's summer diets.

After class I was lucky enough to still be in time to catch the Australia Day fireworks from the balcony at a friend's place overlooking the city and the river. It was a spectacular show that I enjoyed while eating Apricot Chicken in the glow.

I am not sleeping very well with Craig gone, in fact one day I was up for 23hrs straight, but I'm sure things will settle and adjust. I feel exhausted but at the same time very blessed to have so many beautiful caring people in my life.

Happy Australia Day everyone, I'll be having a small BBQ dinner with Craig's family, another blessing, and I hope you are also celebrating with your loved ones too.