Eight Acres

Do sometimes find yourself with a glut of something that you need to use up?  Or with a little bit of left-over something?  I was sent a book to review by Wakefield Press called " Making a Meal of it" , by Jane Willcox and Rosemary Cadden, and they really have thought of a lot of ways to make meals that prevent food waste.  Its not just about veges either, they also include meat, cheese and eggs. This is relevant to the permaculture principle I reviewed earlier in the month, produce no waste .  Food waste is a massive problem.  Not only is the food wasted, but also all the energy used to produce and transport the food.  One of the main ways we can reduce this waste is to eat locally and seasonally (more here ). This book is full of useful information, here is just a selection of the things I learnt or used from the book so far: some varieties of apples keep better than others (buy/grow the good keepers such as Granny Smith) avocado, eggs and lemo...

Pete and I don't get to take many holidays, we just have too many animals to organise!  Knowing that Bella was due to calve in mid-September, we had decided to take a week off work in August as there would be no trips away after the milk started flowing again.  We were planning to travel "out west" to see central QLD, but then we bought all those Braford cows the week before, so we didn't want to be too far away from home in case they misbehaved.  We spent most of the week doing odd-jobs at home and in the end we had two days and one night on the Sunshine Coast, which is about 2 hours drive from Nanango. When we do get to go on a holiday, it usually centres around food, our favourites being cheese, smoked sausages and beer (yes, Germany is on the wish-list!).  See our travels in NZ for another example.  This time we left early in the morning and started off at Maleny Cheese Factory .  Its just a small operation, which specialises in cheddar, feta, soft ...

I know I'm not the first to say that we only appreciate what we have when its gone, but it certainly applies to us with produce.  When we first got Bella our house cow we had so much milk we didn't know what to do with it all, the dogs even had some with their breakfast and we got to experiment with cheese-making .  We had Bella artificially inseminated  (remember Kaptain Nightcrawler?) in early December and she hasn't come back on heat, so we expect that she will have a calf in mid September (279 days gestation for a Jersey cow).  Its best to dry her up (stop her from producing milk) about 3 months before she calves, so that is mid June.  We were a bit worried about how Molly would feel about being weaned, but I should have worried more about how WE felt about being weaned!  After having fresh raw Jersey cow milk for a year, to suddenly go without is pretty distressing!   In order to dry Bella, we have to separate Molly and continue milking...

As much as I try to include real food in our life, we keep buying bread from the supermarket.  Every time I buy bread I think "I should really be making this", but still nothing changes. The main problem with bread from the supermarket is all the unnecessary ingredients.  The only bread that we ever buy is a decent brand, but it often contains soy flour and a huge list of ingrediants.  And now the govt has legislated that all bread must contain folic acid.  While I think we should all get our vitamins, I would prefer to get mine from natural sources, rather than so called "fortification" of other foods. For a long time I had this idea that if I was going to make bread myself, I should make the best possible bread. I felt bad using bread mix, white wheat flour, bakers yeast or a bread maker with a teflon bread tin, as I wasn't producing the best possible bread for our health.  But this has caused a state of paralysis where I just keep buying bread beca...

A few weeks ago I started a review of Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig ( part 1 and part 2 ).  I've been a bit slow to continue the review because I've got up to the chapters that I haven't found very useful myself! After finding the Introduction and "Mastering the Basics" chapters extremely valuable, and having implemented many of the ideas in our everyday meals, the next chapters on "Great Beginnings", "The Main Course", "A Catalogue of Vegetables" and "Luncheons and Supper Foods", have been less relevant.  There are a few recipes that I've tried and a few more that I want to try, but on the whole, I haven't needed these chapters as I've just adapted my own recipes to incorporate the recommendations in the first two chapters.  It is worth writing a brief summary of the useful and interesting bits of each chapter, as some people may benefit from an overview more than I did, and then I will ...

I had been thinking about trying sprouting after I read about the benefits in Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats , but I hadn't got around to doing anything about it, until I saw a few posts on Craving Fresh , in which Emma raved about how easy and yummy they were. I bought a little kit from the Nanango Markets, you don't have to get a kit, I've seen some other posts with some great simple systems ( here and here ), but I liked the idea of this kit and it was only $15.  I also bought some seeds to sprout, I like to support local stalls. Anyway, the kit is a glass jar with a plastic lid that has drainage holes and a little stand so you can lean it facing downwards to encourage drainage.  For each of the seeds I soaked them first (overnight for the large ones and a few hours for the small ones) and rinsed them twice a day until they were big enough to eat, then put them in the fridge and started a new bat...

Yoghurt is very good for your digestion (more here ), but the supermarket products are expensive and high in sugar.  They often add all sorts of artificial flavours, colours and thickeners, which are completely unnecessary.  I make my own yoghurt using an Easiyo kit.  This is still kind of cheating and I should really just use local milk or milk powder (as the Easiyo packets come all the way from New Zealand) and yoghurt culture, but this is so easy (foolproof!), I've been too lazy to change so far! Here's what to do: 1. Put about 1.2 L of water in the jug to boil. 2. Half fill the plastic container with cold water and add the Easiyo packet.  I use natural, as its milk powder and bacteria only, no additives! 3. Stir in some honey, about 3 'fork-fulls' will do!  And stir it all up.  Then top up the container with cold water. 4. Pour the boiling water into the insulated container and put the yoghurt container inside.  Screw on the ...