Elastic Mom Bounces Back

I sat in the dry dirt, hidden amongst tomato plants straggling up their spindly stakes and there I methodically snipped yellow leaves, collected fallen green promises and our long awaited, nurtured from seed since July, first of the season, worm pierced beauties and wept with dry eyes at the devastation. My despairing thoughts drifted over fig trees not blossoming and Job's woe and visions melodramatically burned down the tunnel, sold the animals, sent the boy to school and walked away.

"Though the fig tree does not blossom, yet will I praise the Lord"

I feebly sang a rote-remembered hymn as I gathered up stray cuttings and moped indoors. 

That was yesterday. 

Today, while contemplating the green folds of Purple Calabash tomatoes, the untouched by worm parts, and the unripe marbles of fallen Sweetie tomatoes my tenacious thoughts drifted over movies loved long ago and treasured jars relished a few years back. 

Green tomatoes with nasty bits cut away, sliced up, dipped in beaten egg and then in cornflour, salt and pepper were scrumptious fried in an olive oil and butter.

Nigel Slater, yet again, deserves all the credit for what happened next. Hope wafted through the house on the tangy spicy scent as his memorable Mixed Tomato Chutney simmered cheerfully in the kitchen. 

Tomorrow, we will eat my rather greener version slathered over our very own nine-month mature cheddar on warm buttermilk bread. I know it will be sublime, the sweet tart relish compliments sharp strong cheese perfectly. 

Fast Food: Eggs Florentine

Sometimes I need a night off and really don't feel like cooking. Sometimes that feeling lasts for days. Back in Cape Town we would have bought take-aways for dinner on days like that. Here on the farm, it would take longer to drive to town and back for take-aways than it would take to rustle up fast food Elastic Mom style. Anyway,  greasy take-aways leave me feeling dissatisfied and disgusted after eating farm fresh all the time.

A while back I was having one of those cooking-is-the-last-thing-I-want-to-do moments. A little bit of thought, and I had a nourishing, yom-chomp dinner on the table in 15 minutes flat.

EGGS FLORENTINE
Set a small pot of water to boil
Pop some bread in the toaster
Warm up some leftover cheese sauce
Drop a sealed bag of our frozen chopped tunnel-grown swiss chard into the pot of boiling water and as soon as it has defrosted,  remove the bag and stir the contents into the cheese sauce.
Pour a dash of vinegar into the same boiling water and crack in three eggs to poach.

When the toast pops, plate it and spoon over the cheesy spinach sauce and top with perfectly poached eggs and season. Voila!

My men reacted as if I had made a gourmet meal for them. There was lots of lip smacking, yom yomming through dinner. If I had thought of it at the time, I would have added a classic few drops of Worcester Sauce onto each egg. So there it is, fast food at its best. I know that it required little bags of frozen spinach and some leftover cheese sauce, but that's my point...

We all have something better than take-away that we can rustle up faster than it takes to find the keys on those low-energy evenings.

Use It - Don't Lose it: Loving the Leftovers

So call me weird, but I get a sense of satisfaction from using up leftovers, converting them into a tasty meal instead of letting them become science experiments in the back of the fridge, or tossing them in the compost bin. I hate to see good food wasted, food that cost good money or time. My meals are usually planned around what needs using the most in the fridge or garden. In this way there are no Science experiments in the fridge, the turnover is too rapid.

This weekend we catered for 100 people and had a lot of leftover rolls, potato salad, coleslaw, tuna salad, green salad, dessert and sauces. How does Elastic Mom tackle this problem, you may ask?

Well, firstly I shared out some of the rolls, cheese, potato salad and coleslaw with the farm families. I froze the rest of the fruit crumbles, sauces, rolls and cheese for using at a later stage. We ate salad with the next few meals too.

We couldn't eat the salads fast enough, so I was contemplating what to do. Then I had a brainwave: I tossed potato salad with tuna salad (lettuce and all), stirred in 3 beaten eggs and spread the mixture in a casserole dish. Topped with grated cheese, it was popped in a medium oven and baked. The end result was the best potato bake that I have ever made. It was creamy and delicious.

I made a hot lettuce soup (Ina Paarman's recipe) for lunch yesterday from the half the wilted lettuce, onions and cucumber and some chicken stock and milk. I just couldn't toss out 8 litres of lettuce salad. The soup was ok, but not that exciting, so I gave the chickens the rest of the lettuce. If we had had any more coleslaw, it  could have been used in a winter vegetable-style soup too.

Tomatoes are precious around here, considering my summer tomato crop was a failure, so I picked over the green salad, removing all the tomato wedges, olives and feta.

Last night, for supper, I turned one leftover cooked steak, a bowl of tomato wedges and a handful of olives rescued from the green salad into a very tasty toast topping. I sliced up the steak and fried it in a pan with the tomatoes,  garlic, some horseradish sauce, some monkey gland sauce, a splash of gluhwein, and with the olives tossed in, it was lip-smackingly delicious. Decadent Dad yom-chomped his way through the meal.

In all the busyness of preparing for the catering, my fridge got a little too cold in the bottom drawer and froze up the last few precious cucumbers from our garden, and some green peppers too. This evening I made a ratatouille from the rest of the salad-rescued tomatoes, the half-frozen cucumber and green peppers, some garden-fresh brinjals and one of Decadent Dad's salami-style sausages that is half cured, not ready for eating raw, but tasty sliced up for cooking. I tossed in the last of the macaroni from the pantry and, voila, dinner. Delicious again.

Tomorrow, for lunch, I plan to make quick pizza  rolls
topped with the last of the ratatouille and olives, some peppers from the garden and our home-made feta rescued from the salad. I couldn't bear to toss those hours of hard work.

So there you have it... Elastic Mom... stretching those resources big time.

Decadent Dad's Charming Charcuterie

 Decadent Dad has ventured into the realm of charcuterie and all things smoked and cured in the meat realm. This is the next intriguing step on our journey in  self sufficiency. His bacon (above) and pancetta (below) are so beyond delicious.

His latest experimenting is with sausages. Yesterday he made a paprika and fennel pork sausage. It was amusing to see my men learning to use the sausage machine.

After watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Pig in a Day, he mastered authentic sausage tying first time. Sometimes I find the ease with which he does whatever he puts his hand to astounding and sometimes irritating. I would have had to follow slow motion instructions on You Tube at least ten times to get this right. 

The sausages turned out beautifully.

We cooked a few fresh sausages for supper to test them. spanish style bangers and mash... the sausages were so tasty, really good for a first try, and perfectly complemented by my green tomato ketchup sauce. 

The remaining sausages are in the cold smoker, slowly turning from spicy fresh sausages into cured and smoked chorizo. They will hang in there for a few days and then mature for at least 20 days. For someone who never liked sausage much, it makes a difference knowing that the finest ingredients went into them and that there are no artificial preservatives. 

I can't wait to try them. 

Slow Living in February

 

February has been a month of bringing my heart home, here on the farm. After last month, I have needed to draw in and find my rhythm again. It has taken almost the whole month to settle back into comforting routines, and find our way with my diligent son's schooling. The chockablock full days have flown as we've studied new subjects, added to our menagerie, and dealt with the unabating harvest from garden tunnel and the farm. I have fallen into bed every night only to be woken at sunrise by our pup, calling me to let her out. Join me, along with Slow Living Essentials as I appreciate the blessings that came our way in February. 

NOURISH

What a thrill to sit down to breakfast made from scratch where everything, or almost everything, was homemade or home grown.  

Tomatoes grown in the garden, eggs freshly collected, bread baked using our buttermilk and the most delicious bacon cured by the talented Decadent Dad. 

Just picked ripe figs and Jersey yoghurt on Decadent Dad's fluffy flapjacks, drizzled with his runny honey and almonds.

Organic oats (bought not grown here) dolloped with our Jersey yoghurt, then sprinkled with walnuts from the old trees on the other farm, the few gooseberries that I beat the birds to, and grapes from the verandah then drizzled with fig syrup.

Lunches and suppers have been pretty much the same... fragrant lamb and pumpkin bredie (a slow simmered spicy stew) served on mashed potatoes with green beans and carrots, all raised and grown here... home baked bread with our farmhouse cheddar cheese and dilly pickles... heirloom beetroot, cumin feta and sweet cured bacon salad alongside sweetcorn cobs dripping with farm butter. 

I never dreamed that this would be my life, nor did we plan it to be this way, yet we sit down daily to gourmet meals purely because of the incredible abundance of fresh, seasonal bounty. And when we give thanks for our food, we sincerely mean it.

PREPARE

I made Jamie Oliver's tomato ketchup using different colour tomatoes from the tunnel. It is delicious, but tastes all wrong because I substituted white pepper for black, and it is a lot stronger in flavour than it should be. The yellow tomatoes made a pale green ketchup, and the black cherry tomatoes made a brown ketchup. Had I known of the impending tomato death, I would probably have rather frozen the tomatoes whole. 

Pickling, drying, freezing and preserving is the order of most of our days at this time of year:

seeds collected and dried: dill, coriander, celery, tomato, bean, leek, walnut

herbs dried in bunches: thyme, oregano, sage, dill

figs: green preserve, syrup, dried and jam

beans: dill pickles, and frozen

apples: apple cider vinegar 

green peppers: marinated peppers

cucumbers: dill pickles

tomatoes: ketchup, sauce, dried, frozen

sweet corn: frozen

beetroot: pickles

And of course, we continue to make cheese daily. 

Decadent Dad also managed to collect his annual honey harvest with minimal stings in the process. His smoker  ran out of puff just as he opened a rather aggressive hive which proved  fairly challenging for him. He came away with a year's worth of honey for both us and the other farm household. 

GREEN

I regularly use vinegar instead of rinse aid in the dishwasher and it works just as well.

GROW

It's harvest time in the tunnel. We are pulling out potatoes as we need them, gem squash (all these from two plants, and last year we picked a total of about six squash), purple carrots, green peppers, mild chillies, courgettes, lovely sausage-shaped orlando aubergines, and we picked most of our strawberry popcorn crop which is drying along the windowsill in the sun room. 

I have also started sowing winter crops such as brassicas, leeks and onions into seed beds and beds that empty up as we harvest their current crops. 

REDUCE / RE-USE / RECYCLE

I was hoping to do a big clear out and tackle decluttering after we returned from Cape Town, but facilitating my son's education has demanded the majority of my waking hours. We did resurrect my husband's ancient drawing board and some of my engineering drawing instruments, from more than 20 years ago, for our son to use for his engineering drawing studies. That saved us many hundreds of rands.
Instead of tossing out some too-sour-for-the-market cream cheese, I turned it into pastry along with butter and flour.

CREATE

I picked up on the sock I am knitting after I inadvertently pulled out one of the needles and dropped heaps of stitches more than a year ago. The yarn is very fine and the needles thin and I must confess that I am enduring rather than enjoying this project. I have always wanted to knit socks, however, not being the most co-ordinated person around, I am finding it pretty fiddly. I persevere because I like to keep my hands busy on long car trips, and in the evenings as the weather cools. I wonder if I will finish the pair before the end of winter. 

DISCOVER

In search of harvest recipes I have spent many moments trawling through my recipe books, and rediscovered the delights of our Reader's Digest South African Cookbook. This beautifully illustrated, 400 page encyclopaedic tome thoroughly covers almost every possible locally available ingredient and presents all the classic, tried and true recipes for South African cooking from Malay bredies and African putu to Afrikaans vetkoek and British shortbread. It has been sitting on my shelf for years, handed down from my mom-in-law, but only now am I really appreciating this bountiful book.

ENHANCE

Our farm art group met at our house this week. Inspired by the sunflowers in the fields, they painted their own van Goghs. The diversity in style and  choice of colour was delightful. 

ENJOY

This week a tractor arrived to plough the field next to our home. I am super excited, as this means oats for winter grazing.

In February we were blessed with the birth of a little bull calf, Rumble. 

At sunrise one morning I woke to find Joy in the garden and already in labour (see first pic in this post). I watched her for hours as her labour progressed and then almost missed the delivery which happened very fast. What a privilege to sit beside them in the long grass as the calf wobbled onto his feet and then persevered, with many rests in between, until he found her milk. Over the next few weeks he has grown stronger and now frisks around his momma in the field.

Decadent Dad treated me to a romantic picnic on the hillside above our home on the 14th... my Facebook status the next morning...
"When he was up past midnight the night before, chasing thieves in the dark; and drove three hundred kilometres in the heat that day; and was going to wake somewhere in the wee hours to bake an order of croissants; and had eyes drooping with exhaustion; he thought of me. 

When storm clouds were gathering; and I had snapped at him the day before; and complained about the wrong shoes; and pitied our boy watching a movie eating pizza alone; he silently walked me up the hill at sunset.

He laid out a blanket and we sat. He poured me wine. He spread selected delicacies. He kissed undeserving me. He smiled.

We feasted. We watched the cows grazing below. We saw the grasses waving, silhouetted in the breeze. We heard the frogs. We heard the distant rumble of thunder. My heart stilled, and filled."

This is a beautiful time of year, with balmy days and evenings, and I am enjoying farm living. If only I was able to spend more time outdoors. 

Slow Living in December

December, being holiday month was filled with festivity, family, friends and fun. It was also the beginning of harvest time in our tunnel, and our daughter's last month on the farm, so every day was jam packed with activities. hustle and bustle. Slow living at a fast pace was how December rolled. Come and join me, along with Slow Living Essentials as I reflect on the month that was.

NOURISH

We ate a lot of peaches in December. The first peaches of the season are dessert peaches, best eaten warm and juicy off the tree. I poached some in a light sugar syrup with a cinnamon stick, a few cloves and some brandy. The were magnificent served with cream as dessert. I used the last spiced, brandied peaches in our Christmas Trifle… Layers of sherry-soaked boudoir biscuits, said peaches, custard, cream and topped with candied cherries and slivers of almond. We had peach smoothies for a few breakfasts, and sliced peaches on muesli and oats porridge. 

PREPARE

Even more than preserved fruits and jams, I love pickled garden veggies and chutneys. I grow dill purely so that it is always available for Dilly Beans, Refrigerator Cucumber Pickles and Pickle Packed Beets, all of which I made this month. They keep about three months in the refrigerator and add a great zing to summer meals on the verandah. Our heirloom yellow french beans (Roquefort) are producing prolifically, as are the scarlet Runner Beans, so we have started blanching the surplus runner beans and pickling the french beans, that is after using them in many meals and sharing too. Decadent Dad had a great time making pancetta with his home made cold smoker. The results are brilliant and could prove to be a potential source of extra income, another item to add to the cheeses and croissants at our market stall. 

GREEN

I am interested in herbs as a form of natural medicine, and hope to explore this avenue more in the future. In the meantime, I use what I know. When a rash appeared on my arm after picking gem squash I rubbed it with the gel squeezed out from the fleshy leaf of a bulbinella plant. It worked well, soothing the itch rapidly.

GROW

Our veggie tunnel turned jungle when my back was turned. All the back breaking composting has paid off. The Summer rains have helped too. I have never before seen asparagus fronds reaching the netting over the top. The stepping stones between the beds are hard to find. The tomatoes have turned triffid along with the pumpkins, gems and beans. All the planning and preparing has started to pay off as the fruit is bursting forth in abundance. We harvested onions, garlic, beans, mange tout peas, the last of the broad beans, cucumbers, our first green pepper, a few courgettes, gem squash, lettuce, borage and nasturtium flowers, swiss chard, carrots, beets, parsnips, potatoes, one raspberry, a couple of gooseberries and two massive pumpkins. We have food for our family, food to share, food to preserve and food to freeze. 

REDUCE / RE-USE / RECYCLE

Christmas wrappings in our house are almost always recycled paper, ribbons and decorations from previous years. 

CREATE

Decadent Dad, ever creative, has created these beautiful rolling pins. He likes them sturdy, man-sized, and ready to roll out giant pizzas or batches of croissants without bashing knuckles on the table. 

DISCOVER

We discovered a new place to walk on our neighbour's farm, complete with stream, old stone ruins, grassy fields, and a sense of a time gone by.

ENHANCE

I am doing my bit in the community by adopting a puppy. Little Kariba, Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy on the left, will join our family at the end of January. I have visited her regularly and I am smitten. 

ENJOY

What better way to enjoy the festive season than with family and friends. We had visits from my old school friend and her husband, my sister and brother in law, my niece and her friend. Our home was filled with laughter, fun, and good food. Everyone was game for joining in, whether  the occasion was applying face masks from our Christmas stockings, washing mountains of dishes, churning out a tower of waffles, or swinging at the old barn.

SMOKIN' !

We are anticipating some pork later next year. My sister and her husband are raising two piggies called Hamlet and Bacon. We were going to raise our own and feed them all the whey from the cheese making, like parma ham, but have decided to wait until next Spring to get piglets.

In the meantime, we are educating ourselves in all things pig. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a very educational dvd called Pig in a Day, which covers everything from caring for pigs, to butchering the meat and processing it. After watching it Decadent Dad decided to try his hand at making bacon. This is something he has wanted to try for a long time.

He salted some pork belly for most of last week. The only ingredients added to the meat were slat, bay leaves and some spice. Then, being an all-or-nothing kind of guy, he built an ingenious cold smoker. The smoker funnels the wood smoke from wet wood chips that are heated by a gas burner, into a sealed wooden box where the meat and cheese are hung.

 For two days he smoked the meat along with one of my freshly made gouda cheeses, an onion, a beetroot and some halloumi. He used just-chipped cherry wood which imparts a mild, sweet flavour.

It was a great success. The bacon is very salty, not really breakfast rashers, but rather the kind that you would hang in a cool place and then one would cut off a slice or two for flavouring stews and soups. The flavour is remarkable. The meat loses weight during this natural process, rather than commercial bacon which is often injected with water and chemicals for flavour and volume.

Once hung for a few months more, the meat will become more like a panchetta. In the meantime, it still needs cooking before eating. 

Once the cheese had been smoked, I waxed  fragrantly smoked gouda and it will need to mature for a good four months before we try it. 

I made a superb grilled peach, smoked bacon and halloumi salad for supper last night. Inspiration for the salad came from Jamie Oliver's "Grilled Peach Salad with Bresaola and a Creamy Dressing".

It was really simple. Just a bed of mixed lettuce leaves topped with grilled peaches, crisply grilled bacon, golden smoked halloumi and some grilled smoked onion. I drizzled over a dressing of vinaigrette whisked up with yoghurt and some tarragon.

If this is a taste of things to come, then let's get smoking' again.

Apricot Season

The thing about harvest time is that ripe fruit or vegetables wait for no man, or woman busy about her business and trying to be on holiday. The strawberries came and went. Asparagus season is over, and now we have apricots and peaches.

I have already made pots and pots of apricot jam….
… standard apricot jam, 25 litres, sadly one 10 litre pot burned a little, but it's still edible.
… apricot and ginger jam, 10 litre pot
… vanilla apricot jam with 1kg apricots
… apricot and lavender jam with 1kg apricots

The last two jams were experiments, hence the small quantities. I was trying recipes from my lovely new Salt Sugar Smoke book by Dianne Henry. I am pleased to say they are both delicious.

I've also made a double batch of apricot chutney using the old Kook en Geniet recipe and some very ripe apricots. Delicious.

Then, keen to try more apricot recipes, I went trawling through my recipe books. I found my Aunty Leslie's Lamb and Apricot Stew recipe which made a fantastic slow cooked meal. I made Fresh Apricot Ice-cream from David Lebowitz's, The Perfect Scoop. I have the makings of his Apricot Sorbet chilling in the fridge. I also sold Vanilla Panna Cotta with Apricot Coulis at the food market. It was a great success.

Today I started the making of Apricot Schnapps and Apricot Liqueur, both recipes from Salt Sugar Smoke. 

Then I made an apricot cheesecake from my Eating for Sustained Living recipe book by Liesbet Delport and Gabi Steenkamp. I have two friends coming for tea this afternoon. They are both diabetic, so hopefully this low GI treat is not too decadent for them.

Yesterday I turned some of the burned jam into a none-the-wiser jam tart which was gobbled down with great gusto.

I still want to make David Lebowitz's honey roasted apricots, and my mum's apricot cake.

Oh yes, I bottled some perfect apricots, 4 litres, but got distracted while they were cooking and overdid them until they were squishy. I froze 12 bags of whole apricots and dried 2 trays worth. In between I nibbled a few fresh ones.

You know what I always say, USE-IT-DON'T-LOSE-IT. So if I didn't make the most of the apricots now, then we would lose out for the rest of the year.

I still want to dry a whole heap of them, and make some cordial. I also plan to turn the apricot syrup leftover from bottling into a refreshing iced tea.

As far as the peaches go, we've had them chopped onto breakfast oats, in a curried lentil salad and mostly just eaten them in their unadulterated fuzzy, juicy glory.

Slow Living in September

photo by Paige

September was a full to bursting month filled with people and celebration. This helped to lift all our spirits as the drought dragged through the month, and flu came to visit. Warmer weather along with with a few spittle drops from the mocking clouds has turned our world a teensy greener, and even slightly greener grazing shows in our cows' butter which has turned from white to a more buttery colour. Rosie Cow is steadily gaining back her health too. Join me as I reflect on the month that was along with Slow Living Essentials

NOURISH

Asparagus spears peeping out their beds announced a shift towards all things spring-like in our diet. Just picked, steamed green asparagus is deliciously fresh and zingy served with a cream cheese dip made with a squeeze of lemon juice, a sprinkle of lemon rind and  a generous grinding of black pepper. A huge batch of cream cheese was turned into pastry dough, pie fillings, cheesecake, pasta sauces and all sorts of party dips. We ate more salad than soup in September, and more muesli and yoghurt instead of oats porridge. Birthdays meant birthday ice-creams of choice: Malted Ice-Cream with crushed Whisper chocolate balls for Decadent Dad, and Mixed Berry Ice Cream for my Gorgeous Girl.

GREEN

Yay! My aphid spray worked. Finally the purple sprouting broccoli is sprouting as it should. Now I just need a solution for brassica-eating black beetles. I currently knock them off the plant into a tub and feed them to the hens.

Every month I plan to make soap and every month I make cheese instead, so when my step-mum-in-law, Barbs, asked for beeswax for her soap making, I arranged a barter: her lovely luxurious handmade soap for our beeswax, and we both were happy.

REDUCE / REUSE / RECYCLE

I have four used animal feed sacks behind the kitchen door. One each for glass, tin, paper and plastic. When they are full I cart them to town and drop them at a recently established private recycling business. It's a bit of a schlep but not too bad. Our kitchen waste goes into the bunny bucket for the chickens (there were once bunnies to feed - long story) and this gets tossed onto the compost heap which is in the chicken yard. They peck up what they like, including any bugs that come and the rest decomposes. Any other rubbish has to be burned or buried here on the farm, or taken to town to be burned or buried at the dump.

Decadent Dad also delivers sawdust from the workshop to the stables where it is used as bedding. The manure rich bedding is later piled up in a heap to decompose.  This month he filled up the empty sawdust bags with beautiful manure compost for our veggie tunnel. The sawdust is a great weed suppresser on the pathways too.

PREPARE
I turned some bartered lemons into a deliciously tart lemon curd. We have eaten it on croissants and sandwiched with cream on a vanilla sponge cake, and just in spoonfuls snuck from the bottle.

After many sparse months, the hard cheeses are starting to line up as they mature in the cool cottage kitchen. We have made farmhouse cheddars and gouda. We also have a few batches of halloumi, and as always, the softer cheeses: feta, cream cheese, ricotta and chabrie.

GROW

My two men very kindly set up new irrigation drip lines in the side extension of the veggie tunnel.
They also dug many back-breaking bags of compost in so I could start setting out some of my carefully nurtured seedlings. I chose to plant them the day the frost chose to return for one last bite, so we lost a few, but thankfully not all. I kept some seedlings back to stagger their planting just in case.
The first broad beans and mange tout peas thrilled me with their arrival at the end of the month. It can only get better from here. The "hungry season" of early spring's few pickings is over. Hooray!

In spite of us, our lambs are growing fatter by the day. Fat Lamb is turning into the Gruffalo. Baby Lamb is an expert escape artist, and is regularly found grazing the verge outside our gate. All we have to do is shout, "Sheep!", and he scampers back through the barbed wire fence.

CREATE

Does a hand stitched heart and my daughter's name on her birthday card count? Or an orange chocolate flavoured birthday cake decorated with colourful dots and a Rubick's Cube on top for her 80's themed party, or red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing and red hearts for my man? Or how about shimmery 80's eye shadow for a giggle of girls getting ready for the party?

photo by Paige

Or Rambo and Rocky face paint for the young men?

photo by Paige

DISCOVER

photo by Arran

A surprise book arrived in the mail, a gift from the UK, from a dear friend's sister. Her words were, "... when I read this book and then read your blog some more it seemed like a heaven-made match..."

Well, she couldn't have been more spot on. I have been drooling over this book, Salt Sugar Smoke, and can't wait for summer to come so I can try out some of the tantalising recipes. Diana Henry, the author, has now joined the likes of Nigel Slater, Skye Gyngell, David Leibowitz and Bernadette le Roux, in the list of my favourite food writers. I love experimenting with adventurous flavours and unusual taste combinations, and Diana Henry does just that in this beautifully presented book. Living here in this place of bounty, I have access to almost all of the wonderful ingredients in her recipes.

So my dreams are filled with white peach and raspberry jam, moroccan spiced apricot chutney, purple pickled eggs, eastern spiced rhubarb relish, rosehip syrup and such delights... I feel like Clara from the Nutcracker. Thank you Kerry

ENHANCE

We hosted a lunch for the local garden club. Twenty ladies filled our sitting room and listened as I gave them a cheese demonstration followed by a talk on our adventurous journey from  quiet suburban city life to this crazy busy farm life and all the growth that has happened along the way. Living mostly from what we grow has become our way of life. I decided to use this as a theme for the lunch. Almost everything that we made was home grown. This was a challenge because the tunnel was rather empty in September, but the lunch was a success. Here's what we made:
Leek pie (lots of leeks in the tunnel)
Mini Quiches: purple sprouting broccoli and potato with sage, spinach and feta, Tuscan kale and bacon (eggs, spinach, cheeses and kale kept us going in September)
Curried peach, lentil and toasted macadamia nut salad (preserved peaches, and gifted macadamias begging to be used)
Warm yeasty breads baked by Decadent Dad
Rocket pesto (the rocket nearly took over the tunnel)
Salad of winter greens and herbs with sliced radish and cubed chabrie cheese (more rocket and leafy chicory formed the base for this salad)
Coriander dressing (yoghurt, mint and coriander all easy access food)
Drinks: Iced tea (flavoured with peach syrup), Iced coffee (use up that milk), Lemon mint and lavender water
Desserts: Milk tart (milk and eggs again), apricot cake (preserved apricots), mini croissants (lots of butter), preserves (clearing that pantry), lemon curd and cream
We also sold honey, jams, cheeses mini chocolate croissants and mini Lawrence Buns

Our kids joined in a community mural project, enhancing the town with a call to community spirit.

Our son helped to train a friend's horse who is new to jumping and, in exchange, received some training himself.

ENJOY

We had Barbs and  her friend, Carol, visiting us for a weekend at the beginning of the month and my children's two special friends from Cape Town staying for the two weeks of our school holiday, as well as my daughter's friend from KZN for two nights. It's always a blessing having visitors on the farm, and lots of fun was had by all.

Our daughter had an adventurous 4x4 weekend with farm friends. Rather her than me. Scary stuff.

photo by Roné

Decadent Dad's birthday started with breakfast rolls on the mountain and ended with sundowners on the verandah with our farm friends.
 There were also three more farm birthdays to celebrate, and we missed two important birthdays in Cape Town. September is definitely birthday month around here. We were also blessed to briefly see our friends from Ethiopia. 

Our daughter's 18th birthday 80's party was the highlight of the holiday. The kids decorated the room with streamers, balloons, mini disco balls and old cassette tapes hanging from the ceiling. Everyone dressed up and joined in the fun, dancing to the old hits from my teen years, eating hot dogs and lollipops and having an AWESOME time.

Life is life, nah nah   nah nah nah!

photo by Paige