Slow Living in May

I know it's already almost the middle of June, but I am still going ahead with my May Slow Living post. The last time I wrote a Slow Living post, inspired by Slow Living Essentials, was November last year. I stopped for various reasons...

... My neck pain was prohibiting much time at the computer
... I uncomfortably felt as if my long lists of monthly achievements sounded like bragging and it felt awkward. That is not my intention at all.
... I was very busy with making the most of the summer harvests
... Generally life was exhausting and stressed. It was all I could do to live it, let alone blog about it.
... They may call it Slow Living, but it is time consuming, tough living doing things from scratch.
... Blogger stopped me publishing photos for some reason.


However, more than 6 months later, I feel the need to start journalling my months the Slow Living way again, also for various reasons...

... I have found myself referring back to last year's Slow Living posts, almost like an almanac of what to expect in the current month
... I enjoy keeping records of what I do, so that I can appreciate what happens to my time
... I would love to have a full year of Slow Living posts, they create a lovely picture of my life here
... I miss the friendly monthly contact with the other Slow Living regular bloggers. Ok, ok I do live in an isolated place.
... I do feel incredibly blessed with this lifestyle which I never dreamed I would live
... For some reason Blogger is letting me publish photos again

So here goes for May:

NOURISH

With the weather turning cooler, soups have made an appearance back on the menu. Often I alternate them on a daily basis with salads e.g. Monday soup for lunch, Tuesday salad, Wednesday soup again etc. Our leeks are out in full force, so I have turned to my favourite leek pie recipe many times lately. Now that the fruit harvest is over we have also started tucking into our bottled store of sunshine. We have been enjoying fruit tarts, or fruit on our breakfast regularly. Think peaches, walnuts and honey on oat porridge, walnut and green fig muffins, quince tart. Even the salads are enjoying summer's sun dried tomatoes, pickled peppers and the wonderful walnuts.

PREPARE
I have been thwarting Jack Frost by collecting herbs and hanging them prettily to dry in the sunny kitchen window. May was also a time for collecting and packaging the last of our summer seeds for next year's planting.

REDUCE
There are no oranges growing around here, so I bartered with a friend, swapping our honey and cheese for a whole lot of jars of marmalade and a few other lovely preserves of hers. This reduces the impact on my budget. I love bartering, the month before I swapped honey and cheese for crates of quinces.
We also fixed up our worm composting bin which had collapsed onto the worm-water-collecting-bucket. The worms had been a bit neglected over summer. I gave them a blanket of dried autumn leaves, and now I am feeding them regularly, poor things.

GREEN
Extravagant Dad had a bad cough which kept waking me at night until I made him drink my homemade honey and lemon juice cough syrup. It worked, and I slept.

We collected a little river sand, mixed it with some compost, ordinary garden soil and vermiculite which came from the attic of this house and made our own seedling soil and potting soil.

I also made some Calendula salve using the recipe I found at Slow Living Essentials (see link above)

GROW
The last sad remains of our summer vegetables were pulled out of the veggie tunnel to make way for our winter crops of brassicas, onions, garlic, leeks and winter greens. We planted broad beans, peas, spring onions and radishes. I am still loving the heirloom vegetables grown from a generous seed gift from my brother-in-law.

CREATE
In May we decorated our guest cottage with an African theme. Extravagant Dad painted it white, fixed the plumbing and put up curtain rods and new lights.

I sewed white curtains, made Mandela hot water bottle covers and cushions from shwe-shwe fabric.

 I used a Basotho hat and broom to decorate the wall and put blankets, that the Basotho people wear around their bodies, onto the bed. I hung two African prints from my friend and artist, Thandi, on the wall.

 Then I used typically South African enamel tinware for utensils. It was a fun project. I am still busy completing two more cushions and I would like to keep working on the finishing touches.

DISCOVER
My most exciting discovery in May was Jane's Delicious Garden Planner. I used it for free on a 30 day trial, loved it so much that I have subscribed for a year. You can plot the layout of your garden, plan the vegetables and, according to your area, the program will provide you with a planting guide. They send an email every 2 weeks with recommended planting, harvesting times, garden chores etc. It is also jam packed with detailed information on each plant type. The program also helps you plan crop rotation, as well as calculating how many plants to put in each bed according to their growing requirements. I spent hours in May plotting and planning for the current season as well as next year's growing season. My May layout for our vegetable tunnel is here. If you scroll down you'll see the localised planting schedule for the year as well as buying guides.

My very clever husband, with no official  IT training, discovered how to replace the hard drive in his Mac that crashed. He bravely opened up the computer and figured it out with a little online help, letting our children learn from the experience too. He amazes me at his IT skills, all completely self taught. I think he has become the local Apple expert. He often receives calls from friends and family needing IT help.

I also spent a lot of time in  May gleaning information from my experienced uncle and looking online to learn how to care for foster lambs, or handslammetjies, as we call them here in South Africa. We had two little ones. One died in spite of my diligence.

ENHANCE
I am giving weekly cooking lessons to our two staff. Molly, who helps with the garden, milking and the horses, didn't even know what a cucumber was. He tried to cook the first one I gave him from our garden. The lessons started when he asked me to to teach him how to use a microwave besides just for heating food. I am not keen on the microwave, but I showed him a 7 minute chocolate cake recipe. The following week I taught him and Blantina an oven chocolate cake recipe, and the recipes have progressed from there to jelly and custard, leek pie, roast chicken and pizza. Molly was amazed that one can bake a cake at home and that he doesn't have to buy cake from the shops.

ENJOY
Molly, an ex boxer, has started teaching my son how to box. I love looking outside at the end of the day, seeing the two of them working out at the punch bag. Molly is an excellent coach.

Mother's day was special. My husband and children gave me beautiful cards and gifts, a special breakfast and then later in the day we went out to lunch. Typical of living in the country, our meal was eaten to the accompaniment of bovine bellowing, and cows dominated our view.

My daughter's photography is going from strength to strength. She is more than halfway through her 365 day self-portrait challenge. I snuck this pic of her doing an Autumn self portrait in the apricot orchard. Take a look at her blog to see the resulting self portrait.

Autumn Quinces

It's an Autumn evening, crisply cold outside. The fire is crackling in the hearth. We are watching our traditional Friday night movie as a family. Our bellies are full with dinner cooked by Dad for Special Night. Due to miscommunication, there are two desserts waiting to be eaten, maybe mine can wait until tomorrow. It looks like his choice of sago pudding will be our dessert.

This afternoon I made a new recipe, elastic Mom style , using quinces that were given to me. The recipe for Upside Down Quince Tart came from a delightful South African cookbook, Prickly Pears and Pomegrantaes by Bernadette le Roux. The recipe is a variation of Tarte Tatin, the traditional French caramelised apple tart which I first tasted as a student on the streets of Paris.

I try to cook everything that we eat from what we grow ourselves, but this time I cheated and used a shop-bought puff pastry. The basic concept is so simple and can be extended to any fruit:

Caramelise some butter and sugar on the hob in a glass or metal pie dish, arrange your poached or fresh fruit over the caramel, top with pastry and bake. It is delicious. So simple, but French cuisine at its glorious best.

Making Lemonade from Lemons

 When the sky pelts us with enough hailstones to collapse the extension to our vegetable tunnel, and freeze our lettuce and tomato plants, it's time to make lemonade from lemons.

Gather up a cup of clean hailstones, pour over grape syrup to taste, stir vigorously, and enjoy your hail slushy.

Considering that we drink borehole water, breathe road dust daily, and eat what we grow, the infinitesimal pollutants in the hailstones are unlikely to harm us. There is an Afrikaans saying here in South Africa, 'Wat nie dood maak nie, maak vet'. (What doesn't kill you makes you fat)

A frugally minded friend collects buckets of hail, stores them in her freezer and uses them to ice the vegetables that she is blanching. It saves the effort of freezing lots of ice in the first place. My freezer is too full of garden harvests to do that, but it's a cool idea.

Foraging for Prickly Pears

During his tea break this morning, my ever-helpful son ran up the hill and collected a bucket of prickly pears for me, well, for a bit of financial reward. This interesting fruit has always intrigued me the way they grow on the end of the cactus leaves, like jewels. 

Inspired by my beautiful recipe book, Prickly Pears and Pomegranates by Bernadette Le Roux and Marianne Palmer, I decided that today my family could dine on this sweet, veld delicacy. I spent quite some time peeling them with a knife and fork to avoid the fine hairs that can be as irritating as fibre glass under your skin, and which my boy had succeeded in imbedding in his fingers in spite of the recommended tin-can-and-stick method to extricate the fruit from the cactus.

 

One third were chilled until lunchtime, then enjoyed in their juicy, fresh, unadulterated sweetness for dessert. Their seeds, much like a guava, are very hard, so one has to chew them carefully. 

The second third were cooked up into a translucent syrup with an unusual, tangy sweetness that had me licking fingers and the spoon. This is another pantry treat to be saved for special occasions. I can imagine it poured over flapjacks topped with fresh fruit and yoghurt, dolloped on waffles or drizzled over custard ice-cream.

The final third are decorating our dining table in a beautiful, locally crafted, Mud Studio, yellow pottery bowl.

It is easier to forage in the countryside, but even in the city, there are interesting foods to be found if you open your eyes. Reminiscing back to when we lived in the city, some Cape Town treasures that I can think of are:

Black mussels picked off the rocks at low tide

Mushrooms in the pine forests

Dandelions in the fields

Pears dropping off a lone tree on a popular walk

Friends and family with unused fruit on their trees.

Sour figs that grow wild on the sand dunes and make a cheek-sucking, tart preserve

Eugenia berries in the hedges

Chestnuts underfoot in the older suburbs

Pine nuts if the squirrels didn't get them first

Fennel in abundance on certain pavements I know

Figs hanging over a neighbour's wall

And fish, of course.

And then when we visit my sister in the foothill pine plantations of the Drakensberg Mountains there is hunting, trout fishing, mushroom foraging and berry picking.

What is free for the foraging where you live?

Edited to add:  I have realised that I am one of the 1% of people allergic to prickly pears. Eating them makes my chest tight. The more I ate, the tighter my chest became, and my lips became tingly and numb. I am terribly disappointed, as I had all sorts of plans for prickly pear wine, prickly pear ice-cream, and other concoctions. A bit of internet research also revealed that the leaves are edible, and frequently used in Mexican cuisine. Prickly pears are apparently useful in helping diabetes and high cholesterol. 

Extending the Abundance

My mum-in-law is one of the kindest, most generous people that I know. She has taken the principle of USE-IT - DON'T LOSE IT to far greater heights than I could imagine. 

Here's her story:

"I have spent the last month foraging granadillas, crawling through dense undergrowth and dead spikey shrubs that the granadillas had killed, my arm is permanently bleeding.  Had a great idea to put them up for sale at R1 each in the  front of pharmacy to raise funds for Grace the cleaner who lost everything in a huge fire that swept through Khayalitsha . I was picking up 200 a day (also sold 20 kilos to your friend), well she was given over a thousand rand today to buy little hotplate and oven and an iron and still have change. Also have bags of frozen juice. Hope you can take some back with you!"

I am inspired. What better way to use the abundance that we live with, than to share it with another person, enriching their life and our own. After all, it is far better to give than to receive.

Foraging for wild Mushrooms

While walking in the pine forest plantation behind my sister's secluded home on a rainy afternoon last month, we came across some beautiful boletus edulis mushrooms. They had freshly sprung through the fragrant carpet of needles, as yet undiscovered by the vigilant resident baboon population. We gathered as many as we could hold, mouths watering for the rich feast ahead.

After scrubbing them well and wiping away any persistent goggas (bugs), we sliced them up.

Then we simply fried them in butter, garlic and rosemary, later adding cream and seasoning to the pan.

Tossed with pasta, they made a lip-smacking meal.

The leftover slices of mushroom were dried on a rack in the oven. The weather was too damp to dry them any other way.

By morning we each had a jar packed full of pungent dried mushrooms. A couple of slices flavour a whole pot. My well guarded jar is hidden in my pantry, only to be used on special occasions.

Although we didn't initially set out to find them, mushroom foraging is an exciting activity that involves the whole family TREASURING TIME TOGETHER, provides FREE FUN FITNESS. A true CAREFREE COOKING experience too, considering the current retail mushroom prices. The way we live, eating mostly home grown, local food, mushrooms have become a treat which I seldom buy. In fact, all through Summer, I have hardly set foot in the fresh produce section of our grocery store. We just live off what's in season here on the farm.

What are you currently foraging for where you live?

Leave a comment. I'd love to hear about it.

Slow Living in November

Now that Summer is here, along with the end of the school year, I am barely managing to keep up with this monthly posting with Slow Living Essentials, let alone more general posts. End of year activity acceleration has kept me running in the slow lane, wading through treacle and trudging up shifting sand dunes.

November has brought wonderfully warm days as well as the long awaited, very welcome first Summer rains. The parched earth just keeps soaking it all in. In the space of one month we have experienced impressive electrical storms that shut down the power for days; destructive deluges of hail that shattered my roses, bruised the cherries, apricots and other crops; rip roaring winds that lifted our vegetable tunnel, uprooting my heirloom tomatoes that were strung up (just as they were starting to fruit) and mangled our car port; dusty desperate drought a week ago had the ducks dabbling in the drying mud in the bottom of many forlorn farm dams; then this weekend we sloshed and slid to town as the rain gauges filled and the farmers smiled. On top of this, we have, on various occasions, experienced the muddy Caledon River flowing out our house taps thanks to some befuddled bungling. On other days we had no water at all.

NOURISH
This year's strawberry crop came with a flourish and then stopped fruiting just as abruptly. The last of the strawberries made the most delicious chocolate strawberry ice-cream. So simple really - cream, sugar, cocoa, chocolate and berries, and so absolutely yummy.

I found a wonderful way to prepare asparagus,which we have in abundance: Trim the stalks, toss in olive oil, pop in a very hot oven - 200deg C- for 5-10 min, drizzle with balsamic vinegar and enjoy.

PREPARE
*Cherries in vodka and hazelnut liqueur for next year's ice-creams (How does chocolate, almond and cherry sound?) - one jar
*Cherries on their stalks, in sugar syrup - to top the ice-creams - half a jar
*Strawberries steeped in spirits to make a strawberry liqueur - two jars

*Peach chutney - five jars
*Apricot jam - 26 odd jars
*Rhubarb and ginger jam - 12 jars
*Crystallized ginger - one large jar

*Ginger honey made from the parings - lovely in tea, or for sore throats - one jar

*Ginger beer - 20 liters which turned to real beer before we could drink it all.
*Basil whizzed up in olive oil and frozen - 6 freezer bags
*Basil pesto - 1 jar, already demolished
*Leeks sliced and frozen - 1 bag
*Batches and batches of rusks and market bakes: surplus croissants frozen for future breakfasts.
*Ice-creams, butter and cheeses till the cows come home...

Oh by the way, the beer brewed last month is fantastic, improving as the weeks go by.

REDUCE / RE-USE / RECYCLE
Egg shells, dried and crumbled over my rows of just-planted beans keeps the snails from chomping the new leaves as they emerge.

GREEN
Yay! My beer trap is in my lettuce bed, hoping to catch lots of slugs. So far it has caught one cricket, quite a few slugs and a some poor earthworms.

Comfrey tea is regularly nourishing my fruiting veggies.

Before recycling paper in other ways, all waste paper with a blank side is first used in the school room as my teaching paper instead of a classroom black board, or it is used for my essential list making, or, if my son gets hold of it, for paper airplanes.

GROW

Ooh, I love Summer colour in the garden. Earlier in the month,we were treated to the showy display of this bed of gorgeous poppies.

Now the striking sunflowers have shown their sunny faces. I can't bear to remove the straggling sweet peas, pansies and calendulas leftover from Spring so they are still straggling.

The vegetable tunnel is happily providing the bulk of our meals. We have eaten barrows of leeks (I had so hoped that some of them may prove to be giant garlic). The garden also has some onions, the last of the broad beans, more asparagus than we hoped for, mange touts, sugar snap peas and now some lazy housewife beans. The potatoes are flourishing. We picked a few tiny red carrots, some orange ones, massive turnips, beetroot, two giant parsnips, celery, lettuces, spinach, rocket, radishes, the first marrows and the biggest rhubarb plant we have ever grown. We have rather optimistically planted a cornucopia of pumpkin varieties at the edge of the field, hoping the cattle don't annihilate them. There are also scarlet runner beans waiting to climb the arch, flanked by a few sweetcorn plants.

Besides all the ordinary plants, we have all sorts of wonderful heirloom seeds and seedlings, like salsify, safflower, exotic chillies and much much more than I can list here. Thank you, Guy.

CREATE
I managed to make two teeny tiny gift tags.

DISCOVER
A friend lent me Monty Don's The Complete Gardener. What a wealth of inspiration and information, a feast for the eyes, and a useful reference book. It is now on my wish list.

ENHANCE
The main thrust of the month was the three day Cabin Cherry Festival market that we participated in.

We spent grueling weeks preparing for the market...

...making enough cheese to fill my dairy fridge...

...and french pastries...

...and then the time came to display our wares....

... the whole family helped to make a success of the market, setting up the stall, selling, frying halloumi, printing labels, sewing tablecloths, and at the end of the three days...

... we did well.

ENJOY
Our son turned fourteen and so we had six boys to sleep over to celebrate. He braaied sausages for them as the rain pelted down, then they melted marshmallows over the coals. They made forts in the forest and ambushed each other.

His birthday present was a special-delivery bicycle all the way from Cape Town. Family and friends helped us to spoil him with a beautiful mountain bike. We drove to Bloemfontein to collect the surprise parcel, but he had pretty much guessed what it might be. I am so glad to see him enjoying the bike so much after his last one was stolen.

I feel as if my most precious commodity is time, and that it is slipping away. Just today my son discovered that he is overtaking his sister in height. I feel the urgency to enjoy these special days with them. I love my teens so much. We recently spent a lovely day exploring the countryside as a family, ending the outing with the best burgers in the Free State.