Pea and ham soup success!

After the Christmas ham is finished, the traditional next step is to make pea and ham soup. Every time I have ever made pea and ham soup it has come out thick and gluggy and yuck. So this time I really really wanted it to work! I followed both the recipe here and the recipe for lentil soup in Nourishing Traditions, and I ignored Edmonds cookbook for once. Following an actual recipe has got to help, right?

I soaked 3 cups of split green beans for 8 hours in a pot of cold water and 2 Tsp of whey

simmered small ham bone in a big soup pot for 2 hours

added drained peas and cooked until peas were totally dissolved (about 2 hrs)

sautéed onion, carrot and silver beet stalks (had no celery!) and added to soup

cooked it all for a bit longer and then blended soup with stick blender

crossed fingers that this time it would taste nice! And it did, but I have no idea why it worked this time because I can't remember what I did last time. I suspect that I used the "quick method" to prepare the peas, lesson learnt, never ever use a quick method, it will not be as good as the proper method. I will be following this method again in future. Husband was amazed that it took ALL day to make the soup while he was being so productive at work (just jealous that I had a day off), although much of the time I wasn't actually physically involved in the soup making, just waiting between steps. Anyway, I now have several litres of delicious soup in the freezer, which should be very nice in winter.

Do you make pea and ham soup? What's your secret?

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What to do with eight acres

Behind the scenes of my blog I can see the search terms that led people to find my blog. It can be quite interesting to look through them occasionally and see what people are looking for. Most of them involve chicken tractors, but another question that comes up regularly is “what can you do with eight acres?” or “how much land is eight acres?”. Today I will try to answer this question.

Of course it is a very broad question, there are lots and lots of things you can do with eight acres, but I’m going to assume that you want to live there, feed your family and maybe make a little extra money. I make that assumption because that’s what I know about, if you want to do something else with your eight acres, you will need to look somewhere else.

If you haven’t chosen your land yet, here a few things to look for. Focus on the things you can’t change and try to choose the best property you can find in your price range. Look for clean water in dams, bores or wells, either on the property …

Growing and eating chokos (chayotes)

Cooking chokos (not be confused with another post about cooking chooks) has been the subject of a few questions on my blog lately, so here's some more information for you.
Chokos - also known as Chayote, christophene or christophine, cho-cho, mirliton or merleton, chuchu, Cidra, Guatila, Centinarja, Pipinola, pear squash, vegetable pear, chouchoute, güisquil, Labu Siam, Ishkus or Chowchow, Pataste, Tayota, Sayote - is a vine belonging to the Cucurbitaceae family, along with pumpkins, squash and melons, with the botanical name Sechium edule.

The choko contains a large seed, like a mango, but if you pick them small enough it is soft enough to eat. If you leave the choko for long enough it will sprout from one end and start to grow a vine. To grow the choko, just plant the sprouted choko and give the vine a structure to climb over. In summer, the vine will produce tiny flowers that will eventually swell into choko fruit. The vine doesn't like hot dry weather. And it doesn&#…

Making tallow soap

For some reason I've always thought that making soap seemed too hard. For a start the number of ingredients required was confusing and all the safety warnings about using the alkali put me off. The worst part for me was that most of the ingredients had to be purchased, and some even imported (palm oil and coconut oil), which never seemed very self-sufficient. I can definitely see the benefits of using homemade soap instead of mass produced soap (that often contains synthetic fragrance, colour, preservatives, and has had the glycerine removed), but it seemed to me that if I was going to buy all the ingredients I may as well just buy the soap and save myself all the hassle. For the past several years I have bought homemade soap from various market stalls and websites, and that has suited me just fine.
Then we had the steer butchered at home and I saw just how much excess fat we had to dispose, it was nearly a wheel-barrow full, and that made me think about how we could use that…

Eight Acres

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