Eight Acres

Lately I have been cutting back on eating dairy.  I know, I know, we own two house cows!  But I am trying to heal inflammation (bad skin) and dairy is one of the possible triggers, so as a last resort and after much resistance, I decided I had better try to cut back.  Its been hard because I eat a LOT of cheese, and cook with butter, and love to eat yoghurt ( and have written extensively about making yoghurt ).  I had to just give up cheese completely, switch to macadamia oil and the only yoghurt alternative was coconut yoghurt.  I tried it and I like it, but only a spoonful on some fruit here and there because it is expensive! The brand I can get here is $3 for 200 mL containers.  I was making yoghurt from powdered milk for about 50c/L.  So I was thinking there must be a way to make coconut yoghurt, but I didn't feel like mucking around and wasting heaps of coconut milk trying to get it right....  and then Biome Eco Store sent me a ...

Here's a post originally from 2012.  It is interesting to read this again now, as I've lately been finding that I can grow a productive and varied vege garden for most of the year, so a lot of the veges that I had preserved were not getting used up anyway.  I prefer to use things up while they are fresh, but there are advantages to fermenting food and few things that I do want to use year-round, such as herbs, chilli and garlic, are easily dried.   The first year in our new garden we had so many zucchinis and beans, we were giving them away to everyone.  But we hadn't got to know when we would have gluts and famines, so we didn't keep any for ourselves.  Of course through winter, we had to buy veges again as I hadn't kept any.  A few years on, now I'm starting to learn how to preserve some of our veges so that we will have a supply through winter.  I have been drying herbs and greens, freezing zucchinis and beans, fermenting pickling cucumbers and re...

I haven't shared my bread recipe before, I think because I was still refining it, and then I memorised it, so I didn't really need to write it down!  Also, I'm hopeless at following recipes, so I forget that other people want to use them.  This bread is a "soaked" flour recipe.  This means that you add some kefir or yoghurt to slightly ferment the dough before baking, but it does not rely on wild yeast or a starter like sourdough.  It takes longer than a standard bread recipe, but does not require any "dough conditioners". Soaked flour bread in a bread maker 3 1/4 cup flour (wholemeal wheat, spelt etc, it will rise better if you add some white flour due to the gluten content) about 1/2 cup seeds - sunflower, chia, hemp etc about 370 mL of water (this is why recipes are a problem for me, you just get used to what the dough needs to look like, this will vary with the flour you use and the amount of seeds) 1 Tbsp (i.e. a splash) of kefir or yog...

Kombucha is a fermented tea beverage, its literally made using sweetened tea and a starter culture (called a SCOBY – Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast). Its a bit like kefir, except it forms a larger squishy solid mass that floats on top of the tea. And also like kefir, the origins and exact composition of kombucha are shrouded in mystery ( more info here ). My herbal tea collection because I forgot to take a photo  of the kombucha As kombucha is made from tea and as I don’t tolerate caffeine (it makes me shaky and keeps me awake, even one cup of tea has this effect, that’s why I only drink herbal tisanes), I haven’t been too interested in trying to make it, but I keep hearing about it and I was curious about the taste and I wasn’t sure if it would contain caffeine or not. I bought a commercial kombucha drink from my local vegan store so I could try it out. I would recommend that you do this, just to make sure you like it, before you go to the trouble of trying ...

Since I first recieved my sourdough cake starter "Herman" , I have been enjoying experimenting with using it to make cakes, pancakes and biscuits (cookies).  I can adapt just about any recipe to Herman, and he adds a slight sour tang and creates a light fluffy batter.  Here's what I do to adapt a recipe, just use all the same quantities, but combine them in a different order: Melt the butter in a pot over a low heat.  Stir in the flour, rapadura (sugar), and flavours (cocoa, ginger, spices), and add a slurp of Herman and any other liquids, put on the lid and leave the mixture at room temperature for a few hours (you can start this in the morning and bake in the afternoon, or even put it all in the fridge after a few hours and bake it later the next day, just depends on the outside temperature, in winter you could probably leave it out overnight). When you're ready to bake, add the egg and a good heaped tablespoon of baking soda (leave out the baking powder).  T...

Occasionally we feel like pizza, be we don't like takeaway pizza because we don't really know what's in it or on it and we usually end up feeling ill after eating it.  Homemade pizza is a bit of work, its very messy when we make it (because we usually make a few at a time because when you're cutting up all those toppings you may as well make more than one), there always seems to be flour all around the kitchen when we've finished, but its worth it for all that delicious pizza. I've experimented with a few different bases.  I used to use a simple homemade pastry, which was a nice thin base, but then I started baking my own bread , and now we use the same recipe to make the pizza bases.  I shared my bread recipe recently on Wholefood Mama's blog , for the pizza bases I leave out the sunflower and chia seeds, but I do use some wholemeal flour, as we like the flavour.  One batch of dough makes four pizzas, so we can have pizza for lunch for a few days.  ...

Until recently, we used  balsamic vinegar all the time in cooking and salad dressings, but when I wanted to buy more, I read the labels, and couldn't find a brand that didn't contain added colours and preservatives, so we've been using organic raw apple cider vinegar instead. I missed the taste of balsamic vinegar, so I started to look into how to make vinegar.   Vinegar is just another fermented product.  The acidity of vinegar is acetic acid, which is produced from the fermentation of ethanol, which is the alcohol that we like to drink.  That means that any alcoholic drink can be fermented into vinegar (including beer).  Unfortunately balsamic vinegar is made from concentrated grape juice, which just seemed a bit beyond my capabilities at the moment, but I thought that red wine vinegar was at least close, and easier to make.   the finished vinegar I vaguely followed the instructions on this blog , except that we don't usually drink much wine, so ...

Since I got my sourdough cake starter, I've been having fun experimenting with other uses for it.  I can be adapted to all sorts of sweet recipes, and as we don't eat a lot of cake, that is a good thing! mixing up the dry ingredients, the butter and some starter When I first received the starter it came with all these instructions about how to feed it and look after it.  This included feeding it every few days, not keeping it in the fridge, splitting it after a week and giving most of it away.  Needless to say I ignored these, otherwise I would ave no starter left!  Here's how to actually look after your starter: You can keep the starter in the fridge, in a glass jar - mine has been living there for several months. You just have to get it out every 2 weeks (or so), give it a good stir and tip out half (you can either give that half away, use it in baking or just tip it on the compost) Then top it up with a bit of flour, sugar and milk (or water),...

I’ve never really enjoyed commercial fizzy drinks.  They are usually too sweet and too fizzy for my taste.  Apart from the fact that I don’t actually enjoy them, the artificial colours and flavours in just about every commercial fizzy drink also put me off.  Then I discovered fermented fizzy drinks, more from a desire to use the sour whey from making cream cheese, than wanting to create a fizzy drink.  But now I find that they are very refreshing, and creating new flavours is now part of the fun. Rosella ale ready to drink At first I just made the ginger ale , lemon barley and fruit punch recipes from Nourishing Traditions .  But then I couldn’t get all the ingredients that I needed, so I started to experiment.  I started just using any citrus that was available, and anything else that I had in excess, my latest flavour is rosella ale .  All my experiments are based on the this basic recipe..... The basic recipe is about half to 1 cup...

I first wrote about pickling cucumbers last year, and since then I have made many batches of delicious pickles and I think I have perfected my method, so its time to tell you more. You can pickle any type of cucumbers, but I like to grow the proper pickling cucumber or gherkins.  They grow really well in my garden, even when its hot and dry, they do better than other curcubits.  I usually get plenty from 2-3 plants.  I like to pick them small, around the size of my thumb. Only because when they get too big its hard to fit many of them in the jar!  It can be like a bit of a puzzle fitting them all in. I also grow my own dill to flavour the pickles.  It tends to bolt to seed, so I have to keep picking it regularly and I put it in salad if I have more dill than pickles. I use the recipe from Nourishing Traditions to make the brine for the pickles - 1 cup of water, 4 tablespoons of whey (from raw milk cream cheese), and 1 tablespoon of sea salt. ...

My friend gave me a bowl of sourdough cake starter, called "Herman".  A bit of a google revealed that this cake starter has been around for a long time, maybe not this particular starter mixture in my kitchen, but the idea of this cake starter has been circulating since the 1980s or earlier.  There's actually an entire website devoted to it, as well as lots of newspaper articles and forum discussions.  Have you heard of it before now?  Herman when he arrived - pictured with my Danish bread dough whisk, which was a very cool xmas pressie from a friend, and I've been using it at every opportunity In its current incarnation, the mix is given away with instructions on how to look after it for 10 days.  It needs to be "fed" with flour, sugar and water on day 4 and 10, and stirred on each of the other days.  On the 10th day the started is split into four portions, three to give away and one used to make a cake.  The recipe that comes with Herman is for a...

I don't know if lemon and barley is so common here in Australia, but growing up in NZ, I remember drinking lemon and barley flavoured powdered drinks (I don't know if powdered drinks are even that popular in Aus, seems to be all about cordial here).  Anyway, it goes without saying that I don't drink anything powdered (or cordial) anymore, but when I saw a recipe for barley water in Nourishing Traditions, it did catch my interest. At the time I had no barley, so at the first opportunity I bought some.  Our local organic buying group does quarterly bulk purchases of grains, beans, dried fruits etc, so I ordered some barley.  I accidentally got a carton of 6 1 kg bags instead of 1 bag, so now I have a lot of barley to use. The recipe for fermented lemon and barley is very simple and much like the lacto-fermented  ginger ale and beet kvass fermented drinks that I had already tried.  The only complicated part is preparing the barley.  In this case the ...

Now that we have lots of milk again, its time to make cheese!  At first Bella gave us about 12 L a day, but now Romeo is taking as much as he wants, we get about 2 L for Benny and a little extra for ourselves.  If we want more, we have to lock up Romeo overnight, more about share milking another day, I want to explain a bit about cheese, so just pretend I'm still getting lots of milk!  I use about 1 L a day to make either yoghurt or cream cheese, and we have a kefir smoothie every morning, but when we have more than 6 L in the fridge ..... its time to make cheese! (It you're losing track of our latest cow and calf situation, see my most recent update ). Before we got Bella we didn’t know anything about making cheese, so we bought a few cheese making books and went to a cheese making course .  We were pretty confident about making the cheese, but maturing and storing the cheese was more of a challenge, with some early attempts ending up covered in ...

We always have a problem with breakfast during the winter months.  For the rest of the year, we eat eggs for breakfast, one or two each, every morning.  But when the hens stop laying, we have to find something else to eat!  One thing that we have found is ok is the homemade baked beans that I posted about.  I also enjoy porridge/oatmeal ( Farmer Pete prefers his WeetBix, the funniest thing is that WeetBix have an ad in New Zealand that goes "Kiwi kids .... are WeetBix kids" and the same ad in Australia says "Aussie kids .... are WeetBix kids", so I sing the Kiwi one to Pete when he's eating his WeetBix, hehe ).   soaking the oats in kefir Anyway, I have been using the recipe in Nourishing Traditions and soaking the oats overnight with kefir or yoghurt.  One cup of oats to one cup of fermented dairy.  Then I put it on the stove and cook the porridge (supposed to add one cup of water at this stage, but sometimes I forget and it still works). ...