Almost a year ago now, on a blustery morning last autumn, my neighbour George stopped by to deliver 30 litres of fresh apple juice. He'd just crushed it himself, made from a ute load of golden delicious apples picked from a mate's old tree.
Showing posts with label real food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label real food. Show all posts
Almost a year ago now, on a blustery morning last autumn, my neighbour George stopped by to deliver 30 litres of fresh apple juice. He'd just crushed it himself, made from a ute load of golden delicious apples picked from a mate's old tree.
Abundance is the word that sums up this time of year. Even though the days are starting to get noticeably shorter, in the garden and in the kitchen it's bursting with delicious things to eat. There are tomatoes of all shapes and colours, a glut of zucchinis and the stone fruits keep on coming.
The cherries are finished, must be four of the saddest words in the English language. The end of the all too brief cherry season always leaves me feeling a little downhearted that there will be no more scoffing bags of roadside stall purchases and spitting the pips out the car window.
Which is why we stuff ourselves silly on the juicy purple fruit for the few weeks in summer we get to enjoy them. We make them into jam, dehydrate them, pickle them and plonk them into jars of brandy, to quietly do their thing for a few months before opening on a chilly midwinter night.
The temperature has been steadily dropping over these last days of autumn, and today the mercury didn't reach double figures, languishing around the eight degree mark. With winter on the doorstep, it's perfect weather for curling up in front of the fire. But the lure of one last fruit picking adventure was too hard to resist. Especially one as clandestine as scrumping, that is fruit looting, or ahem, stealing apples off the trees without permission from the owner.
Up into the hills and along an old dirt road stands an overgrown abandoned apple orchard. There were hundreds of kilos of apples rotting on the ground, with plenty more still stubbornly clinging to the gnarly, moss covered trees. Despite the steep hills, thick grass and lots of brambles we had to battle to get in there, the prize of biting into those cold apples in that fresh mountain air was utterly delightful.
We picked at least 20 kilos of granny smith's and tiny golden delicious, and would have picked more if we could reach the higher apples. We hauled our heavy baskets back down the road, whilst we stuffed our faces with crunchy sweet apples.
Tomorrow I'll make apple sauce, apple jelly and apple butter with the loot.
Apple scrumping, stealing perhaps, but a late autumn activity of the very best kind.
The night before we left for camp, I googled "camp food" for some inspiration on what to take with us. I was a bit taken aback at the results :: suggestions of cup noodles, dried soup, instant coffee sachets and weetbix with UHT milk capsules left me shuddering. I'd rather stay at home than eat that stuff thanks.
The best part of camping for me is the food. Sure, cook simple food, but I think you can still eat well without resorting to such extreme measures. It still has to be real food. And a little stove top coffee maker doesn't take up much room. If I was short on space I'd ditch the tent before I ditch mine.
On this trip I also fancied a spot of fishing, but my vegetarian daughter put a stop to that idea. So we stuck to foraging for some greens instead. After getting advice from local friends (and borrowing a frypan, because I, ahem, left ours at home) we were given some tips on where to find samphire, a native coastal succulent.
We picked a couple of handfuls, happy to have a chance to use my lovely new knife, a Christmas present from my love. Back at camp kitchen, I simply soaked it in fresh water, then fried up some home grown potatoes and tossed through the samphire until it started to colour.
It was totally delicious, and the crunchy salty samphire was a perfect contrast to the soft starchy potatoes. I loved it and so did the peeps. Real food that's easy to carry, easy to make and easy to eat. Perfect camp food.
The next morning, with bacon and eggs for breakfast, there was one sneaky camp food trick that a friend told me about that I did indulge in with my coffee, I know it's not strictly real food, but it was only because the fresh milk had run out...
Taking over the kitchen
cooking, friends, good things, holidays, Kitchen, markets, real food, tasmania
I love it when guests take over the kitchen. I really do. I love the sharing and talking, the tasting and the excitement of eating something new when people come in the kitchen and cook.
On the weekend there was plenty of that. Foraged mussels steamed with garlic from the garden, just-caught fish, steamed and stirred through just-picked garlic scape soup. Slow roasted juicy pork ribs from a friend's pig and fresh new pink eyes fried crispy in a pan, washed down with cider from down the road and gin from across the peninsula. Food we had grown, caught, foraged ourselves, or knew who did, was prepared, shared and eaten. It doesn't get any better than that. I love that.
There was also a dog named Henry, I think I loved him the most.
These past few months as I haven’t had a regular income, I’ve had to be really inventive to make those
proverbial ends meet. We’ve
had to be more resourceful about how we shop and what we eat.
Last night
we made pizza for dinner but we had none of the traditional toppings in
the pantry. No mozzarella, no tomato,
no mushroom or ham. Normally I would make a dash to the shops to buy the missing ingredients but instead, I used what we had on hand. Plenty of milk, ingredients for dough and a garden full of
herbs and garlic.
First I made cheese with the milk.
A soft farm house cheese like a bit like this. We made the pizza bases and topped them with garlic, olive oil, herbs, smeared some with nettle pesto, dolloped the fresh cheese and finished them all with a
generous grating of parmesean. The children loved them. Best ever pizza they said. Win.
Today I stirred finely chopped chives, thyme and parsley through the rest of the cheese and served it with a loaf of Irish
soda bread - baked using the whey leftover from making the cheese. Add radishes and lettuce from
the garden, some pickled olives from a friend's tree and lunch was complete.
So simple and
so delicious. Peasant food it may be, but I couldn’t help but think that we eat like kings.
It was a lucky escape for the three roosters who chose to sleep high in the wattle tree. For the other five, asleep on the roost, it was not so lucky.
It was a job we were dreading, but eight roosters in the coop is just too many. Just ask the hens. Or ask me for that matter, that pre-dawn chorus was getting too much. It was time for them to go. So once the boys were asleep on Saturday night, we caught five of them and gently put them in a small pen 'til morning.
Early Sunday morning the preparations began. We made a little camp fire and set a large pot of water to boil, grabbed a trestle table and sharpened some knives. Then I made a batch of brownies. Because I think it is necessary to have something sweet to counter the unpleasant task of the day.
Good friends arrived with more experience in these matters, to lend a hand and share their knowledge. And the job of the day got underway. Chopping, dunking, plucking and cleaning.
Once all five roosters were dispatched, cleaned and dressed, it was time for lunch. We took the hearts, marinated them for a while in olive oil and garlic before cooking them over the last of the fire's coals. They made such tasty morsels. The livers were pan fried to make something like this pasta recipe, washed down with a very fine riesling from France. It made a fitting accompaniment to those five young roosters.
Did you know that supermarket chickens are around six to nine weeks old when they're killed? Our roosters had a much happier and longer life of five months filled with sunshine, pasture and plenty of worms. And one bad day.
Today is a good day. We have a freezer full of meat that we reared and processed ourselves. The hens look happier and can rest easy without being hassled by too many roosters.
What's left of the soft rooster feathers flutter around the garden in the gentle spring winds. They collect in the corners of the porch, where they're promptly collected by small birds who take them away to build their nests.
