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

Slow Living in June

I am not so sure why it is called slow living. Cooking from scratch, growing the food, crafting and living purposefully keeps me busier than ever before. I suppose food grown and then cooked is slow food rather than fast food, but I am moving faster to do it all. Coaxing milk into cheese is tediously slow, but in that, my appreciation of the final golden block is heightened as I value the process to create it. For what it's worth here is my June Journal, inspired by Slow Living Essentials

The month of June brought us a day of snow falling on the farm and covering the distant Maluti Mountains in white. It had all melted here by the following morning, but the mountains are still beautifully iced. Winter days are usually crisp and clear, inviting us outdoors. Icy mornings and evenings call for log fires and steaming cups of tea. June also heralds the winter school holidays, a welcome relief form the study routines, and a chance for a change of pace.

Nourish:
This past month we have moved away form the warm porridges and have mostly had delicious muesli breakfasts instead. My creative husband has been experimenting with making his own muesli, possibly to sell, and we have been the grateful recipients of the best tasting muesli I have ever had. Summer's bounty graces our bowls of muesli in the form of golden honey and a choice of preserved apricots, peaches, pears or apples topped with a dollop of fresh Rosie yoghurt. This is slow living at it's best with this wonderfully nourishing breakfast each morning.

I
t's potato harvest time, and so I have included many different forms of potatoes in our meals, from gnocchi, to mashed, baked, boiled, and layered potato pies. This winter potato salad was a variation on Barbara Kingsolver's recipe, using what was available here: feta, ricotta, green tomato preserve, rocket and boiled eggs tossed with the potatoes in a mayonnaise and yoghurt dressing.

Prepare:

One way of storing the extra cream that we have around here is to bake it into rusks. These keep well and make a fantastic any-time snack. The recipe is super easy:

Warm one liter of slightly sour cream and stir in 1 1/2 cups of sugar until it dissolves.
Mix 10 cups of flour (assorted types if you like) with 2 1/2 T baking powder, 1/2 t salt and 10 ml cream of tartar.
Stir in your choice of raisins, coconut, seeds and nuts. Mix everything together and bake at 180 degrees C for one hour. Cool, cut into squares, lay them on racks. Dry overnight at 100 degrees C.

 Our first successful batch of apple cider is finally bottled, and although meant for long term storage ... there are eight green bottle sitting in the fridge... and if one green bottle should accidentally go, there are seven green bottles....

The cheese making is continuing with new trials of Monteray Jack, Farmhouse cheddar, Raw Milk Tomme and another gouda all maturing in a cool room alongside some of May's cheeses.

Reduce, Re-Use:
No citrus peels make it into the compost heap around here. Dried and chopped, they add wonderful flavor to my man's fabulous muesli. The rest of the skins are slowly tuning into citrus cleaner.

Old cardboard boxes cut up and folded made perfect envelopes for posting computer discs. A pretty sticker, some string and a little melted wax crayon made for attractive parcels, ready for posting to someone special.

Grow:
 Most of our vegetable garden is dormant during this heavy frost season. We still have some spinach, cabbage and rocket for harvesting. I am using the garden rest period to focus on a few structural changes to the beds.

Create:
I have been blessed by my husband's creativity this month. He used old ceiling boards and made me some chalk boards for advertising my cream cheese at the farmers market.

He built me a shelf for my sewing area, helping me to create some order.

He cleverly made a bracket for my cream cheeses. It attaches to the burglar bars that swings up and out of the way when not in use. He also created some straining bags using old sheeting and some fabric from my stash. Not bad for re-using and creating at the same time.

Discover:
I am reading a book called Earth Artist written by one of my classmates from high school, Jenny Louw. This book challenges my approach to gardening, encouraging the use of weeds as pioneer plants and taking biodiversity to a completely new level.

Enhance:
My emerging cream cheese business has been enhanced by a large weekly order from a local restaurant. (A bit of reversal here as I am the local being supported) This greatly helps me to use up some of the 100 liters of milk that Rose produces a week. I was able to give crochet lessons to some little people one afternoon this month. My son earned a little extra income by caring for a friend's dog while she was away. Jack, the bull terrier usually is kenneled while his owner is away, but the kennel is almost an hour's drive from here, so this arrangement was mutually beneficial.

Enjoy:
Happy times this month included....

... a little girls birthday party on top of a koppie with a 360 degree view of the countryside.

... a short but sweet visit from my in-laws en-route to a wedding.

.... another special family visit from faraway cousins that included a farm tour where the city kids dug up their own potatoes.

I feel as if I have hardly done justice to the month of June, just superficially touching on some highlights of our wintry days. Time marches forward into July with its slightly shorter, but much colder nights. Who knows, we may even see some more snow. Now wouldn't that be something.

Valuable Surplus

On a recent decluttering frenzy, I was surprised at my inability to toss or give away certain items that I no longer needed or used. This led to an assorted collection of books, toys, outgrown ballet clothing and other miscellaneous items collecting in a box in our study. A table at the local farmer's market proved to be the perfect outlet for these goodies and resulted in a few jingles in our pockets. The market bug bit, and my mind started whizzing at how I could exchange our unwanted excess for money in my pocket, preferably without spending a cent in the process.

Here are a few of my subsequent market makes from the past few months:

Cream cheeses made during our milk flood and marinated sundried tomatoes, all prepared and ready for a Valentine market, when deluges muddied the farmer's road resulting in a canceled market, and a delicious picnic for us. The only cost to me was the price of the tubs, and my time. Once Rosie has calved and is providing milk again, I hope to sell more of my cheeses.

Vigorous strawberry runners captured in recycled tins, then decorated with paper scraps look so pretty. Total cost for this venture was zero.

The options are as varied as my imagination and creativity.

I have some ideas for selling knitted items using wool scraps, but I am hesitant to compete with the grannies from the old age home. Their colour choices leave a lot to be desired, and I know my items would be popular. I just would feel awful if I stole their business.

I am thinking homemade soap, lip balm, and other delectable honey and beeswax cosmetics, or how about pickles, patés, breads and bakes. Fabric scraps could be turned into cushions, kids clothes, bags, beanbags, toys...

Toddler's dress made by my daughter

My daughter has also jumped on the market bandwagon with her delightful tutu's.

Enticing ideas leap into my mind, all I need to do is put them into practice. What do you have that is waste or excess to you, that will delight someone else? It doesn't have to cost you a cent, except your time.

The Dairy Dance

My children run over to collect a bucket of milk, and the Dairy Dance begins. The sequence of the steps depend on my mood, but the dance is choreographed to use every last drop of the milky goodness. My Elastic Mom philosophy of USE IT, DON'T LOSE IT is all about milking every lost drop from my resources. This time it is literally milking the milk. 

 We are blessed with buckets of creamy unpasteurized, unhomogenized jersey milk. When a fresh bucket arrives, I stand it in the fridge for a few hours to allow the cream to rise to the top. Them I skim off the CREAM to use for butter, whipped cream or ice-cream.

Butter is so easy to make, even without a churn. It took me a year of farm living to even give it a try. Now I wonder why i waited so long.

Here's how I make BUTTER:

1.  Beat the cream in a food processor until it forms tiny yellow globules floating in a whitish fluid, buttermilk.

2. Press the globules together with a wooden spoon, and pour off the buttermilk. A bit of ice in the bowl helps the butter to stay in a lump.

3. Work the butter on a wooden board with a wooden spoon. Press out every last drop of buttermilk which can make it go rancid. Rinse repeatedly under a running cold tap.

4. Add a pinch of salt. Then press into a dish and refrigerate your butter. 

As for the BUTTERMILK, I USE IT within a day. I doesn't keep well. It is delicious in baked goods, such as buttermilk rusks, flapjacks, bread and whatever you like. 

Then there is ice-cream. My generous husband gave me an ice-cream machine for my birthday. 

Here's how I make ICE-CREAM:

1. In the morning - Make an egg custard on the stovetop with milk and/or cream.

2. Stir the cooled custard into some fresh cream along with pureed fruit or your favourite flavouring.

3. Chill the mixture all day.

4. Pour the well chilled mixture into the ice-cream machine, and run it for around half an hour while you are eating dinner. Serve the soft ice-cream immediately and hope there is enough leftover to keep some in the freezer. 

If you don't have an ice-cream machine, then freeze the mixture, beating the crystals down every so often while it is solidifying.

Now that just about completes the the cream part of the dance. If it happens to go sour before I can use it, then it goes into my baking, or into a pasta sauce. I make sure not to LOSE IT.

Next it's the MILK. I use it in white sauce, porridge, puddings, smoothies, and in baking too. But the best of all is when my husband makes me a creamy cuppachino with that morning's milk. Hot and frothy foam, sprinkled with cocoa, floating on delicious espresso... mmmm

I make yoghurt with the milk too. It is also really so easy to make, and I wonder why I found the concept rather daunting. 

Here's how I make YOGHURT:
1. Heat the required amount of milk to just below boiling point.
2. Cool the milk to blood temperature. Test it on your wrist, like a baby's bottle.
3. Pour the warm milk into a clean jar, or jars, over a dollop of live yoghurt, from a previous batch, or from the shops to get you going.
4. Keep the jar warm overnight. I have a small warmer, but you could use an insulated box wrapped in towels, or a thermos flask. I have even heard of using a crock pot on its lowest setting.
5. Chill and serve with honey, fresh fruit, or your flavouring of choice.

Then there's my 'CREAM CHEESE':
1. Simply suspend some yoghurt in  muslin / cheesecloth / hessian / clean tea towel over a bowl.
2. Leave it for a good few hours. The contents of your 'bag' become the 'cream cheese', and the WHEY collects in the bowl underneath.

WHEY is protein-rich  and good for us, and so to USE IT, and not LOSE IT, it goes into soups, breads or sauces.

And those are the basic steps of my dairy dance. It is a dance of thankfulness for food on our table, and happy satisfied tummies and taste buds.