Sunday dessert.

I love my desserts, so much so that they are a big reason why I got over 20kgs over weight. Way too much dessert, way too often. However, with my 'new lifestyle' I refuse to deny myself important food groups such as dessert and allow something special once a week, usually Sunday night. So this weekend I tried a new recipe from Taste.com.au, I gave their Pecan and Chocolate tart a test run.

I have never in my life made pastry before, this was my first time and after a couple of attempts, eventually worked out how to get that rolled out pastry into my dish. And the best part, the left over bits. This is one of my fondest childhood memories of my Mum in the kitchen. In all honestly, Mum sucks as a cook, but she does do fantastic hearty desserts. We grew up on rice puds, bread and butter puds, apple crumbles, condensed milk tart (god haven't had that one in years!), lemon and orange tarts and may fav, baked cheese cake (with jelly and cream topping). And the best part, left over pastry being turned into jam tarts! How can I deny my children one of the most tasty simple pleasures in life, so here it is, my very first 'leftover' jam tart.

Its meant to be ugly and daggy, but I tell you what, it tasted so goooooooood, and so much like home. And the kids were delighted at discovering something so easy yet so tasty. Chicken in fact stole the last piece before Grumbles could get to it. As they say, you snooze, you lose. ;)

Anyways, after lots of fluffing around, and questions from the kids, the pecan tart turned out an absolute delight.
I know, I know, I should have taken a photo of it sliced and served with a big dollop of gently whipped cream and sprinkled with icing sugar... But that would have taken too long, I was just dying to devour it. It was divine, and rich and a little gooey... And it was imperative that Grumbles takes the rest to work with him to share because I can not be left alone in this house with that tart, ever!

A busy Sunday

Sunday is my typical busy garden day, or morning rather, I try to have everything done before 10am as it gets way too hot. This Sunday saw lots going on.

Firstly I cut my green manure (or rather grumbles got in there with the lawn mower and cut it for me) and then I got stuck into it with the mattock and stirred it all up. It was great to see the original layers of cardboard that were placed directly on the ground where virtually fully decomposed. The next layer of hay was breaking down nicely as well.

I then added lime and a bag of 5 in 1 (seen as I don't have manure in my compost) and transfered my entire pile of ready to use (almost) compost to this garden, and then turned it all again with the fork. (back? what back... no, its not aching at all..... )

So here is is, all freshly turned and looking nice. It'll sit for another couple of weeks, until the seeds I planted yesterday are germinated and grown large enough to transplant. I would like to mulch it next weekend if I can.

The seeds I have put down are broccoli, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, cucumber and onions. We've never tried onions before. I grow shallots, but onions take something like 30 weeks to mature, so it will be a slow but interesting crop.

Last weeks beans have sprouted, well one row of them anyways. There was a second row, but only the odd shoot so far. That's ok, no doubt they are up today, if I went out to check.

My only zucchini is still hanging in there and growing nicely. I think it should be ready to pick by the weekend, if not before.
And my first cucumber is coming along as well. We have got a couple of little new babies come out this week as well.
This one got tangled in the chicken wire on the trellis, but it should be ok, I'll just have to check it regularly so it doesn't get trapped.
And finally our radish. The leaves are being dined on by caterpillars and grasshoppers by the looks of it. However they still seem to be growing heartily. Only thing is, none of us like them. As far as I'm concerned they taste like dirt and onion, they do nothing for me whatsoever. Grumbles spat his out and the kids where horrified at the fact I tried to feed them something so foul. Lucky Gramps (my Dad) loves them, so will send him a bundle when they are ready.

One other thing I have discovered this weekend while doing some research. The little beetle I thought to be lady bugs, the ones that are a 'good bugs' and eat the bad guys (like aphids), well the beetles I have are in fact bloody well leaf eating beetles! No wonder they were doing so much damage to the leaves they were living on!! I have learned lady bugs only have 18 spots, where as the sort I have in fact have 28 spots. So it's a beetle catching I must go over the next few afternoons and see if we can cull their population. This should be fun, and will at least provide a topic for Chickens show and tell at school this week (gotta think positive).

The great pumpkin bake off.

So as you can imagine, with all this talk of pumpkins recently, that I in fact am far from short of supply. The thing is I don't actually 'like' pumpkin. Well not roasted or mashed or as a soup. Doesn't interest me, would much rather sweet potato. However, I do like pumpkin in baked goodies.

My Mum gave me a pumpkin scone recipe years ago when I left home. And it never really worked for me, and quite frankly the enjoyment of flavours was from the jams I used to eat them with. So this time I decided to hunt around and see what delicious pumpkiny baked goodness I could find.

As usual Taste.com.au come up with the goods, with this Pumpkin Loaf , and today I gave it a shot.
This recipe was easy to follow. I used jap pumpkin instead of butternut and found that 650g of pumpkin that is cooked and pureed does not equal 1 cup. I have a 2nd cup in the fridge waiting to be used for something else later. The tonne and a half of brown sugar is a little scary though. I am yet to pop this one in the calorie counter because then it might mean I won't be able to ever eat it again without making sure I sweat it out at the gym for 2 hours before hand.

The smell of it is divine! I just love that freshed baked spicy cake smell in the house, it makes everything feel so homely, especially on a windy drizzly day like we are having. I couldn't wait anymore than 10 minutes before I cut it for Buggles and myself to sample.

Of course it should have butter on it. Why waste a perfectly good opportunity to add butter to a freshly baked loaf of something delicious. And it was delicious! It was sort of like date loaf, spicy and sweet but not as heavy. More flavoursome than banana bread (I'm getting tired of banana things honestly) and definitely something you want to go back for more of. And again, like all things I bake, perfect to freeze and pop in lunch boxes. Just don't tell the kids there's pumpkin in it until after they tell you how yummy it was.

So with Pumpkin Loaf tested and highly appreciated, I did a bit more hunting and popped the word pumpkin in to the search engine at TasteSpotting.com . OMG! This site has you gain weight just looking at the photos. Everything is so ..... droolalicious!

Just a few that I fell in love with at first sight, and some I might just test out are:

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins from Vicarious Foodie
These look similar to the loaf recipe and again would make great lunch box filler, along with the Pumpkin Streusel Maxi Muffins care of canarygirl.com.

However, for something more decedent and for a special occasion, Peabody at Culinary Concoctions by Peabody has the heartwarming and gooey Pumpkin Raisin Bread Pudding with Butterscotch Sauce , and yes, it looks as good as it sounds. She also has Pumpkin Cheesecake Towers. How can this not taste awesome?! I am thinking of an excuse for a dinner party just so I have an excuse to try this one out.

Now, I best go find something to make with that cup of pureed pumpkin in the fridge. And make sure my gym gear is washed because I just know I need to go tonight!

This weekend in the patch

The weekend saw some activity and excitement here in our little vege patch. We have babies!

Our first zucchini for the year! Its about 2 inches long at the moment. Its so exciting. I was out yesterday pottering around and there is was. Finally! Something has grown. :)

And our first cucumber. My mouth watered when I saw it. The fresh crunch of home grown cucumber filled my head. I hope it hurries up, I'm so hungry for it! (sorry about the blurry pic)

And this is just to tease. How yummy do home grown strawberries look!

This weekend I also planted garlic for the first time. I had one clove of S.N.O.G (super natural organic garlic) that we bought from the Eumundi markets ages ago. We held on to this one clove so I could try to plant it and this weekend it went into the ground. I also planted store bought stuff. I am crossing my fingers it will grow but its probably not likely as so many growers now spray so as they don't reproduce. I will give it a couple of weeks, and if nothing happens I will by some seed garlic that I discovered on the net and have a go at that.

I also pulled up my poor weather beaten lettuce. All the heavy rain we had has destroyed my poor lettuce, especially my mignonette's . I dug in lime and compost and a little 5 in 1 (because I don't have manure in my compost) and planted a new crop of dwarf beans. More beans! Yummy. The old crop is just about come to the end of its run. I have a few more to pick, a few flowers left to develop, but I don't expect much more action from those plants.

I also sprinkled a little lime and 5 in 1 about, just to replenshish the soil of nutrients that all this rain has leeched out over the weeks. The zucchinis and cucumbers were sprayed with a 1:9 milk:water solution to help combat powdered mildew.

My next projects are to raise seedlings of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, celery and onions. Also I will be cutting my green manure next week and adding my compost to my 2nd plot. DH has burnt some wood for me, so I also will be sprinkling my lemon and lime trees with potash. That will all be next weekend.

Pumpkin sex for the Goddess

Just for Purple Goddess (who asked about pumpkins in my previous blog), a little bit of pumpkin anatomy. :)

This is what a boy flower looks like. You'll see the long stem and the typical male feature on the inside of the flower.I don't have any girl flowers, as all the very early ones are being killed off by the rain. This is a photo of one at its very early stages, before the flower is finished developing, but I will take a guess I will lose it too with the wet. But you can see the little bulb of the baby pumpkin is formed before pollination occurs.


And here's one we successfully prepared earlier. Pollinated by Grumbles himself, just pull off a boy flower from the vine and poke a girl flower gently, making sure the two parts on the inside touch.

Tada!

15 inches and counting

Yes, thats 15 inches of rain, since Christmas. Not counting the 3 or so inches I can see in the rain guage, and other uncounted rain over the last few days. So as you can imagine I am pretty over it. My yard is a swamp, my seepage trench for the septic is waterlogged and I can't get any washing dry. Not to mention, my poor vege gardens don't actually like that much water. Sad news is, we have a monsoonal low up the coast, and its pouring, and will do for days. Oh yay. :|

Anyways, my poor waterlogged vege gardens. I would have liked to get a closer photo, but I don't feel like getting wet, so here's a long distance shot.


This is plot 1. The oldest garden. Its not that big, and probably overcrowded, but its still nice to have a bit of everything in there. Most of it is still babies. We only just put new lettuce seedlings in 2 weeks ago, the tomatoes are only a foot high, my cucks are only just getting there little curlies onto the trellis and the beetroot have only just popped out there first shoots last week. However, the pumpkin vines have been growing for a while, and they are all over the place. We have them out past the fence so they don't take up all the room, and we are both happy with that arrangement.

Other things in that plot are a few parsley plants, a rosemary plant and radishes. The beans are a dwarf variety, and they have produced really well. The first cop I have picked and eaten most of, and yesterday while out grabbing a handful for dinner I saw all new flowers comeing up, so the next round will be out soon. There are carrots in a cardboard box, its an experiment I'm trying this time, because my beds aren't that deep.

What I shouldn't have done was re-plant lettuce in the same spot as the previous batch I think, but I was stuck for space. Basically I'm waiting for plot 2 to be ready for planting and then I will plant a green manure crop there and let that half of the garden rest for a bit, its had a hard time over the last year.

Behind the garden I have 2 compost piles, one is about 2 weeks off ready to use the other one is just newly started this weekend. And the big mound is a pile of tree chip mulch which we were lucky enough to snavel up when they built the new road running beside our house for free (if you can call listening to house trembling heavy machinery day in day out for 16 weeks straight free!).

Here is plot 2.

Not even fenced yet!

This one was started by laying cardboard and then a layer hay using old bails that had started to decompose. We bought a small load of soil just to get things started and then I have planted it with a green manure crop using a few packets of pea seeds and a few handfuls of guinea pig grain. This is about 3 - 4 weeks on (I'm hopeless with time lines and dates). I will let the peas produce a small crop and then it will all get chopped off and I will then be adding a layer of compost that I have 'cooking' now.

I really should get the fence done. We have the odd night where cows come though our yard and they have mowed my green manure crop once before, and all they left me was one lousy poop!

I'm hoping plot 2 will be ready to plant my winter veges. Broccoli and caulis especially. And I would also like to do some corn. As well a more lettuce, I always want a constant supply of lettuce and salad greens to pick. And I'm also going to attempt the slow growing crop of onions.

This weekend I need to find a posey for garlic. Its time to get that in the ground while its still warm. I'm also going to get Grumbles to do his fav past time, burning stuff! Well, its wood I want. I think my poor old citrus trees need some potash on them. So lets hope this rain will bugger off so we can get a fire happening.

Comfort food

I'm a hormonal cow at the moment. Ideas of murder and gluttony fill my head and the last thing I want to eat is salad.

I want carby goodness. Cakes, chocolate, anything that is loaded with calories and will stick fast to my behind. But I'm trying to to cave so today I adapted a muffin recipe I've been using for a few weeks to see if I can improve it.

Muffins are normally full of butter or oil. The original recipe used to have butter and white flour but I changed it a little, and they come out just delicious!

Wild Blueberry Yogurt Muffins

2 cups SR wholemeal flour
1/4 cup sugar (raw, white - I don't care, I just grab whats handy)
1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Put them in a big bowl and mix them together.

In a jug or a second bowl you want to whisk together,

1 cup of Blueberry yogurt (I use my home made yogurt , flavoured with St. Dalfour Wild Blueberry jam )
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1 mashed banana

Then add your wet ingredients to your dry and mix until almost combined and then add 1 grated apple, and stir through.

Spoon these into your fav muffin tray, which you have greased. Then pop about 1/2 teaspoon of blueberry jam to the top of the muffin and then poke it in a little so it sinks into the muffin. Bake these for 18-20 minutes (for a 12 muffin tray) in an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees celcius.

Only 137 calories each (using my own yogurt recipe, may vary if using higher fat yogurts)

You can use whatever flavour yogurt or jam you have handy. I have tried blueberry and rasperry, the original recipe was apricot. It up to your taste buds and fridge. They also freeze really well for kids lunch boxes, if you and the SAH kids don't scoff them all first. *grin*

Why do I do it to myself!

Nectarines! I love them, my daughter adores them they are delicious.... as long as I DON'T buy them from Woolies. Why do these 'fresh food people' insist on murdering these lovely fruit? They never ripen properly, are devoid of juice and flavour and waste my money.

Note to self : DO NOT buy stone fruit from Woolies. (Actually, must stop buying all fruit and veg I can't grow from Woolies)

I don't know why I did it. I must have been brainwashed somewhere along the line, lost in the convenience of buying all under one roof, gases upon entry to the store. There must be a reason for my lapse in judgement to do something so silly.

I have gotten nice fruit from one of the local fruit and vege stores, and even the IGA has done a better job previously, but for some unknown reason I bought nectarines from here. Silly woman! But never again. Never ever again.

If only I had access to markets where all fruit and vege is local, and handled with care, and of good quality. Some is great, like the local asparagus I bought on Sunday, beautiful, freshly picked, not sat somewhere for a week with the ends shriveled up and dehydrated. I even found a bag of vine ripened, lovely tomatoes (so Hubby tells me, I don't eat raw tomatoes), but so much all comes from the same place, often put in cold storage, gassed or put in packaging. I like to pick things up, feel them, smell them, choose my own pieces. I don't want plastic between me and my capsicums or cucumbers, I want to feel it fresh and firm under my fingers. I want a farmers market like I hear about so often in the big cities and down south! If only there was one nearby. *pout*

What to do with beans.

Disappointing blog this time, no pic sorry 'cos I ate it all!!

So those delicious, fresh, crunchy homegrown beans I had an abundant supply of was getting my brain ticking. I want to cook them, eat them, enjoy their wonderful homegrown-ness. But what to do?

I cruised my fav recipe website Taste , to see what tasty ideas they had to offer. Plenty, but they weren't quite enough. I mean beans with garlic crumbs is ok, but not enough to go beside my yummy piece of fillet steak that I just paid $34/kg for. So after a little searching I come up with a blend of different recipes and it was divine.

What I did was take a spud or 2, sliced it into 5mm thick slices with the skin on, and par cooked them in the microwave for about 6 minutes. I then shallow fried them in a pan (or you could roast with a spray of oil to make it healthier). I boiled my beans for about 2 minutes, and then refreshed under cold water. Together these were dressed in a dressing made up of a crushed garlic clove, about a teaspoon of seeded mustard, and white wine vinegar and oil oil (I used a 1:2 ratio of tablespoon measures - or thereabouts roughly), a little salt and pepper, and I wish I had some flat leaf parsley to add to my salad. Then on top of all that I sprinkled crunchy garlic bread crumbs (process a clove of garlic and a slice of bread or two, then cook in a pan to crunchy). And it was fantastic! Can't wait to try it again. :)

Child free day!

Today is my first child free, work free day since before Christmas. No children in my ear, no work or customers, just me time.

My day started with an easy 3km run, nothing to strenuous, and then I went to the gym for a pump class, a lot more strenuous. Then I come home to this:


A long hot soak in the bath (which I had to fish toys from and clean first) with my delicious Body Shop Shea nut butter bubble bath and body scrub. I soaked, I scrubbed, I buffed, all while being serenaded by Bon Jovi. I sipped on icy cold mineral water with lime juice, I nibbled on yummy chunks of apple and fresh grapes. I relaaaaaaxxxxeed in peace without hearing "MMUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMM" and it was divine! *sigh* I feel so satisfied.

Every Mum should do this.