A Change of Season

Wow, how time flies.  I've been busy doing who knows what, but the garden has kept me in focus and helped me adjust to the change in season.  Summer was a wonderful season for fruit at my place with abundance shared and preserved.  Fruit leather has to be the number one favourite for preservation in my home at present, the kids can't get enough of it.  I finished baking my last leather just last week, a quince and apple leather.  The fruit was cooked until soft, pureed, sweetened as required with honey and spread thinly onto baking paper lined trays.  It was then set in the oven at 60c until it was no longer sticky.  This took anywhere from 8-14 hours. I store the fruit leather in a sealed container wrapped and rolled in clean baking paper and the children just cut a strip off whenever they want it. 

The quinces this year have been superb and our family has discovered a love for quince paste.

It has been taken on picnics and there is plenty sat in the fridge waiting to be shared with friends and family.  Quinces are magical things.  The aroma they fill the house with, the colour they become after hours of cooking and the fragrant taste is divine.  In fact, I am lucky to have discovered my quince tree as for 10 years I have believed it to be a guava tree and I have admired it, but not taken much notice of the fruit.  It was my very smart niece that alerted me to the fact that I indeed had a quince tree not a guava.  So I have been watching the tree more carefully.  Watching and waiting and researching when to harvest the quinces, then what to do with them.

Again cooked quinces in a light syrup with natural yoghurt are perfect for breakfast or an easy dessert.

 

It has been a bountiful season.  The beetroot has been sweet,

the zucchinis barbecued to perfection and life has passed by over the summer in a haze of long evenings and new food adventures.  As Autumn arrived I embraced the change of season enjoying the rain and freshness that has brought with it.  The fire has been lit and adds a cosy feel to our home each evening and we devoured our first casserole of the season at the weekend, with dumplings!  The garden has been planted out with some of my autumn seeds and seedlings including broccoli, parsnips, carrots, cauliflower, cabbage, swede, rainbow chard and more beetroot.  The sprouts were delayed and are growing in the mini greenhouse.  I'm never sure what will grow despite my efforts so it will be interesting what I manage to harvest.  Sometimes I'm lucky and sometimes I'm not. 

My new crop of garlic has also been planted

and the green leaves are already standing tall in the veggie garden.  I think that garlic is one of the best things to grow, its easy and looks beautiful braided and hanging in the kitchen. 
Perhaps that's where I've been, busy gardening and cooking!

And also, if you were interested to know, I did manage to harvest just a few ears of corn

and it gave me great pleasure to eat them, although next summer I may try a new variety.
Hope you are able to embrace the new season wherever you are.
love
Emma
x

And Then There Were Apples!

Well, the pear season has come to an end in my backyard, yielding around 50kgs of delicious pears that were stewed, preserved, made into pear and almond cake, baked with dried apricots and almonds

and many frozen for delicious breakfasts of stewed pears with a dollop of local, organic natural yogurt, that will feed us well into winter, yum!
Feeling exhausted from the pears it is with a little trepidation I am eyeing the bounty of apples about to arrive in my kitchen.  My son & I harvested just a few of the early ripe apples a couple of days ago filling two large bags.  Out of interest and for my new record keeping project I weighed this first harvest at 16.5kgs.  Again, I feel delighted that we are able to produce such a bounty of fruit with really very little effort on our part, however I brace myself for more hard work.  I've researched apple recipe ideas and I will make more fruit leather,
try dried apple rings in the oven, make a chutney, stew many apples for breakfasts to eat with yogurt or stir stewed apple into my porridge and I'm sure there will be an apple pie or crumble mixed in there somewhere.  I also found a recipe for apple and blackcurrant gin but as I am not a gin drinker I wondered if the recipe could be adjusted just a little to replace the gin with vodka!
My tomato harvest has begun to arrive too,

although this year there doesn't seem to be quite as many.  However, there are still plenty for ratatouille (which also uses zucchini from the garden), sauce for our Friday night pizzas, and plenty to pop into lunchboxes to delight the children at lunch as they pull the bright red fruit from their bag, pop it in their mouth whole and explode the tomato with a bite.  It doesn't get any better than tomatoes direct from the garden.

The biggest surprise of my week was finding sweet corn growing on my sweet corn plants!  Now, you would think that this should be a given and an obvious place to find ones sweet corn, however as I mentioned in my last post I have grown sweet corn for two years with no success, or so I thought.  I did think that the plants were starting to die, they had grown very tall and flowered at the top but the bases were looking dried out and brown.  What a waste of effort for a second year I mused, but cheered myself with the thought that at least I had persevered.  I was tempted to just pull them out, but didn't and how lucky I was as when I went into the garden to water during last week I saw with great excitement the corn growing from halfway up the stems.  See, I said to myself, you just never know.  I've done quite a bit of reading but nothing is quite the same as doing it for yourself.  So if you are growing corn and feel disappointed you didn't get any corn cobs, just hold out a little longer and your wish may come true too.

Now I just need to know the correct point to harvest.  I can't wait to bite into the corn just cooked quickly in boiling water, left on the cob, drained, a knob of butter melted on top with a twist of salt and pepper.  That will be a triumphant day for me, for I will have conquered the mystery of the missing corn - it was called more patience.
Love
Emma
x

Passion

I recently went to see Maggie Beer, our great South Australian icon, talk about good food for all, about everyone having access to fresh, home cooked, nutritious food.  Maggie's focus was on providing food that not only looks good, but tastes good, is fresh and nutritious for people in elderly or dementia care homes or receiving meals on wheels.  It was her passion for this that infected her audience and I'm sure inspired most to go home and research a little more on this topic, because let's face it, if we haven't got family or friends needing care, we may one day need it ourselves and the thought of spending my last years eating grey, tasteless mush doesn't fill me with much joy!
It was Maggie's passion for her subject that was so inspiring.  It got me thinking about my passions and what drives me.  In the description of my blog above I used the word passion to describe how I feel about gardening for my own culinary purposes and baking for my family.

Then my train of thought progressed to where this passion came from.  It probably amuses most of my family that I would describe myself as having a passion for any part of the kitchen, except for eating!  You see, I used to despise cooking.  Cooking and baking is something that chose me rather than I chose it as a focus for my current life.  It is my passion to put good, nutritious food into our bodies.  Food that has been grown in my garden without chemicals and cooked from scratch. 

I know what is in my food.  Again we had food withdrawn from our supermarket shelves this weekend due to a risk of contamination.  This isn't our first scare of contaminated food and I'm sure it won't be our last.  So it gives me satisfaction that I have been able to provide my family with some of our own fruit & veg from our garden.  It's passion in life that can drive what we do and bring us so much satisfaction.  It's not only the end result, a healthy home grown meal, but its the process in learning, trying, our thirst for knowledge that inspires us to continue to learn, keeps our drive and satisfies us.  Having a passion in life is so important, it gives us a sense of purpose and hopefully a little happiness that we are achieving something personal to us.  It delights me when I harvest from my garden,

but sometimes things don't grow as I had expected (I have no corn on my corn for a second year in a row!).  And once I have eaten a delicious meal cooked in my kitchen, from scratch with family and friends I couldn't be happier.
Love
Emma
x

Pears

Growing and harvesting your own fruit and veg means living in harmony with the seasons.  It means that right now it is pear season at our place and we have been overwhelmed with hundreds of pears.

It's raining pears, well that's what you would think as you stepped outside and saw the carpet of pears that lay ahead of you.  With this gift of many pears comes some hard work.  I have spent many hours harvesting, peeling, cooking, sterilising jars, reading and researching recipes to make the most of this bumper crop. 

 

The pears were jarred in a light syrup and delicious.  In fact, my husband came down with a sore throat and this morning took the remedy of a gently cooked, perfectly soft but still firm, chilled pear to cool the infection roaring in his throat.  The smoothness of the chilled pear giving temporary relief.

Many pears have been frozen (I ran out of jars!).  There has been pears packed into lunch boxes with exclamations from the children 'not more pears'.  Recess was a slice of homemade pear and almond cake, delicious beyond words and there were many pears shared amongst friends.  The sheep were lucky to receive barrow loads of pears not deemed suitable for human consumption. 

Our free ranging chooks also got in on the feast as pears fall from heights I can't even reach on our tall ladder.  The worms in the worm farm are enjoying the pile of peel coming from our kitchen and the compost heap did not miss out.  I like to think of our glorious pear tree (yes, this abundance comes from one tree mainly) giving to us through the winter each time we open a new jar of pears in the light syrup, or take them from the freezer, when I shovel compost into the earth of our veggie garden in preparation for the next crop, as I pour the worm tea onto my tomato plants in the near future.  This cycle of the pear from fruit, to food, to fertiliser, to a new crop keeps me grounded in the cycle of life.  It's why we are here, to experience the seasons, to be part of this planet and give back to the earth, so that the earth can continue to give back to us.  We need to care for our families, our food, our soils and all these things will care for us.  How lucky we are to have such things to delight in . Let's not forget this cycle of life and maybe we can live more harmoniously on the earth.  All this philosophy from just one pear tree!
Emma
x

Hello!

This is a blog about my home and garden.  I am a mum.  A mother of three young children and I have a passion for all of our futures.  I care about what we put in our mouths and where our food comes from.  Therefore this is a blog of passion about my garden, turning what I grow into delicious, healthful meals, about cooking and baking from scratch.  My blog is about slowing life down, about tending to our home grown fruit and veg, learning about what works and what doesn't, outside and in the kitchen.  I want to share with you some of my life, things that work for me and things that don't so we can learn together.

I have been growing vegetables for a few years, sometimes more successfully than others and I have found that sharing information has been my best support.  I hope to share with you the things that I learn and photographs from my home.

In my world it is currently summer, albeit a very mixed sort of summer with rain, cold evenings, interspersed with very hot days.  Its a summer where I have harvested pears before tomato's, where an unexpected few days of heavy rain caused squash end rot (squishy at the end) zucchini.  But with these surprises there has also been bountiful supplies of large juicy grapes, copious amounts of pears raining down from our pear tree and finally zucchinis that fill the children's bellies with zucchini slice at school for days on end.

I hope you enjoy sharing the exploits of my home, kitchen and garden.