Kitchen Maths

Six eggs from three happy backyard chickens...

Plus six fresh homegrown lemons...

Helps to make one very delicious lemon meringue tart.

From the garden

What a quiet couple of weeks we've had.  Here are a couple of photos of some of our home grown produce.

We've had a great eggplant crop this year 

(including a couple of those crazy two in one eggplants).

 

A sweet and juicy rockmelon.

Making a meal of it

We've had incredible rain over the past week.  There has been flooding in some parts of Australia and evacuations in several towns, including a couple of towns close to Canberra.  In Canberra itself there were road closures one day last week and Lake Burley Griffin has a couple of new 'islands' made up of uprooted trees and other debris. 

Tansy was so frustrated at the lack of walks during the days of constant rain that I finally took her out one morning in the rain.  Tansy doesn't like too much rain and I could tell she was sulking about the rain and being so wet, but she was also delirious with excitement at being out and about!

Finally the rain cleared in Canberra on Sunday afternoon so I went out to the garden to pick vegetables.  I gave about 2kg (4.5lb) of split and rotting tomatoes to the chooks and picked about another 2kg for humans.  Then I saw a couple of potatoes poking out of the ground and starting to go green.  All the rain had compacted all the soil and mulch down so much that potatoes were starting to show.  So I had a quick look for potatoes and found a couple more.  I was surprised because of the 39 potatoes that I planted, while they all grew into potato plants, we've had only one set of flowers this season, so I was thinking that maybe we would have hardly any potatoes.  But after finding the first couple of potatoes I decided to get the garden fork and try digging where a couple of potato plants have already died.  And there was a heap of potatoes! 

Canberra has heavy clay soil so with all the rain the soil was really muddy and soggy.  When I dug to about 20cm below the surface the soil was just sludge and water was pooling (like when you dig at the beach).

Today I dug in another part of the garden (when you plant 39 potatoes they end up all over the garden!!) where I saw a couple more potatoes poking out of the ground.  All of these potatoes are just from the top 5cm of soil, some are so big!

We are now very excited about our potential potato harvest and can hardly wait to start digging in a few weeks when all the plants have died back.

Update:  We ended up harvesting nearly 40kg (88lb) of potatoes!

From the garden

How are things in your garden?  We've had a real mix of good and not so good this summer.  One of the good things is that our tomato plants have exploded with fruit.  We have about 4kg (8.8lbs) of tomatoes waiting patiently on our kitchen bench for us to do something with them.  I think we are going to freeze them because we already made some tomato sauce a couple of weekends ago (when we had 2.5kg of tomatoes sitting on the bench!) and there are only so many tomatoes you can eat at a time!  We are growing 7 different heritage varieties this year, so there is a great mix of colours.

We picked our first corn this week - home grown corn has to be one of the best vegetables ever!

And for the first time ever I made a garlic plait - only a small one, but still a bona fide home grown garlic plait!

Keeping busy

Hi everyone, I hope you are all having a lovely summer/winter!  I've been keeping busy with sewing, summer harvests and the general wonderfulness of the season.

No photos this post, just a written update...

Sewing - I've been 'fitting' my husband for trousers.  Some of you might remember last year I 'fit' him for a shirt as part of my college sewing course and he really likes the shirt I then made for him.  Now I'm all set to try making a pair of trousers for him.

I've also been 'fitting' a friend for a dress - she's not sure what she wants, but when I showed her the lovely Simplicity 1291 from 1944 that the amazing Sew Convert made recently, she started to be inspired (and who wouldn't like a dress like that for themselves one day!).

Finally on the sewing front I have been drafting a dress pattern for myself.  I have some very pretty Japanese rayon that I bought last year that deserves to be worn!

Summer harvests - finally the weather has warmed up so our tomatoes are ripening, the eggplants and capsicums are starting and the first ears of corn are almost ready.  We also went wild blackberry picking today.  We picked about a kilogram and it is just the start of the season!

I hope you are all well and have some joy in your life.

Homemade goodies!

Over the past month my husband and I have been busy in the kitchen turning fruit (both home grown and bought at the farmers markets) into tasty treats.

Some of the apricot jam, lemon curd and cherry jam we made.  We also made cordial for the first time - two different types, homegrown elderflower cordial and homegrown rhubarb cordial.  The elderflower tastes just as good as the boutique one from Tasmania.  The rhubarb is really different and tastes great mixed with soda water (and made a nice change from rhubarb cake or rhubarb and apple crumble like I usually make with our rhubarb!).

A couple of years ago we got kilos of free apricots and after we got tired of making jam we made some rustic pies that we froze and then cooked from frozen during the winter.  They were great, so when we had some spare apricots on the weekend I thought I would make another pie.

It is super easy and it is so nice on a cold evening to have a home cooked dessert with no effort!  Make your favourite pasty (I use Stephanie Alexander's shortcrust pastry) line a baking dish with it, sprinkle ground almonds over the base, top with apricots and a sprinkling of sugar.  Finish by folding over the edges of the pastry and freeze.  The next day take the pie out of the dish and seal it in a bag until you are ready to cook and eat it, then just put it back in the dish and straight into a hot oven.  Serve hot with custard or ice cream.  It worked really well for us a couple of years ago so I hope it does again!

We also had some spare plums so I made a plum pie, but used ground hazelnuts instead of almonds.  The plums have a lot more liquid than the apricots, so I'll guess we'll have to wait and see if it works!

Another garden update

Sorry to those of you who are more crafty inclined than garden inclined, but it is spring here and our garden is so thrilling at the moment!  This morning I also noticed a couple of stray potato plants have come up in the garden bed where potatoes were planted last year (I guess digging through that soil twice wasn't enough to get all the potatoes out of the ground!!).

Cherry blossoms

Nashi pear blossoms

Newly planted seeds

The mix of seeds!

It's been a while since there was a gratuitous puppy photo - so here is one!  It is nearly time for Tansy's spring hair cut so she is a bit shaggy at the moment.  (She isn't technically a 'puppy' anymore but we just can't stop calling her one).

Hooray for spring!

The first day of spring on Thursday saw the first spear of asparagus and the first tulip flower in our garden.

We've also been busy preparing the vegetable beds for the coming summer growing season (with Tansy's help of course!).  You can see the bed at the back left is still giving us lots of winter vegetables.

We have set up a dripper hose throughout the beds - with the pink and green buckets collecting the drips between the beds. 

Spring blossoms

Some of our fruit trees have embraced the warmer weather and are dressing up with lovely flowers.

Nectarine

Plum

Apricot

Even the rhubarb (though neither a fruit nor a tree!) is getting in on the action by sending up a flower spike.