cooking

I'm making much better use of my vegetable garden this year. I bought two cookbooks - a Stephanie Alexander one for kids and a French cook-book that featured in the film Julie and Julia (didn't like the film but love the cookbook!) and they both have lots of recipes that rely heavily on one vegetable - perfect for vegie gardeners with a few hundred silverbeet plants or several kilos of potatoes to use up! I could write a book now '101 ways with silverbeet' as it's self-seeded in my garden. I'm finding I can either hide it in normal recipes or make nice ones that feature silverbeet - a vegetable I wouldn't normally eat.

As well as tailoring our cooking to what's in the garden, I'm buying a preserver, a Fowlers Vacola, which will only preserve high-acid foods (fruit and tomatoes) but that's mainly what I want to keep. It's also cheaper and more easy to use than a more versatile 'canner' and seeing as I'm running around after an 18 month old, I need things to be as easy as possible. I dream about one day getting a canner when my child's at school, if I'm still into all this housey-stuff.

I've bought an Easiyo machine, only $20 and you can make home-made yoghurt (yum!) at half the price of store-bought yoghurt. I can buy flavoured packets or make up my own flavours! I'm also making bread more often in the bread-maker. As much as I'd love to make bread and yoghurt from scratch, again with a young child it's just not feasable at the moment. I'm also cooking biscuits - after eating a bought and home-made biscuit one after the other recently, I realised how much nicer home-made ones are. I've actually dug myself into a hole - the other day we ran out of bread, yoghurt and biscuits and my husband was very unhappy as the bought ones taste horrible in comparison! I had to get on and make some quickly. I have to point out here that he also makes bread, cooks dinners sometimes and helps out in general, I'm not a traditional house-wife; if I'm cooking, he's baby-sitting or vice versa.

I've also been experimenting with making my own vinegar. My red wine vinegar is very mouldy and is obviously not working, but the pineapple vinegar is fizzing and looking very interesting - hopefully in a good way!

I've also started selling some biscuits, herbs and other bits and pieces. I was extremely surprised when I went to the local op-shop at the end of the day to collect my biscuits and found they'd all been sold! Same with my jam and most of the herbs. It's just pocket-money but seeing as my new lifestyle requires lots of setting-up costs (although it's much cheaper in the long-run) even pocket money is good.

The chickens have grown and are eating us out of house and home, but haven't laid eggs yest and I'm getting impatient! They're very entertaining for my son, who is now feeding them loads of silverbeet every day so they're not entirely useless, but I use at least a dozen eggs each week in cooking and it would be nice to get them for free!

That's all for now, hope you try some of this stuff. I'm happy to give recipes or instructions for any of this stuff if asked - and I got it all on the internet myself so you can just look up anything you like and get advice.

Wash wash wash

I am changing the way I do things, and it's working! I started with making my own soap - I am a redhead with 'sensitive' skin, and I wasn't that happy with what I was using anyway. I made a batch which my husband jokingly said would last a year, and I think he may be right. Although I made a few mistakes when making it (you need precision and I'm not a perfectionist), it worked out OK and I'll know how to make it better next time. We're using it now and I LOVE it.

My husband asked me to look up home-made deoderant and the simplest one I found was just bicarb of soda. People use it as a cleaner and odour neutraliser for other things, so it makes sense. He's a PE teacher so he needs a decent deoderant and I have to say he was very skeptical about this but once again, he's been soooo happy with it, every day he comes home and tme how great it is and tells me how good it is and that he can't believe it!

I've made my own cleanser too - the bought ones, even the 'Ph neutral/very gentle/sensitive skin' ones still made my face so dry, I needed 4 applications of moisturiser just to feel normal. My home-made one is just ground oats and natural yoghurt mixed into a paste. I keep it in the fridge and use it each day. It's beautiful and my face feels clean but not dry. I've been using it for 2 weeks and my skin is much better. It's hard to wash off with your hands as it's a bit gluggy, so I.....

knitted my own face-washers! I think the commercial ones are too big, so I knitted my own, just plain stitch with 4 ply cotton, and once again I'm amazed at how good they are. I just made two, and swap them on washing day (ha ha, as if I have one of those!) The face cleansercomes off easily, and the rest of me is exfoliated gently too.

While I was at it, I knitted a dish-cloth too. I made it in 8-ply cotton and it's great too. I only have one, I'm still knitting the other, but the idea is that they're washed in the machine when dirty and re-used. I don't have to buy sponges any more, and they have a bit more texture so they get dirt off better than the sponges I used to use.

I've made my own washing liquid for the washing machine, but I only made it yesterday (after I finally finished the old bought one) so I'll see how it goes. I'm looking for something else to use with washing dishes but I haven't found anything yet.

I've also changed all my bathroom-cleaning products, using things made from borax, vinegar, bicarb, etc. They're going OK so far but I'll need a few more cleans to see if they're working as well as the bought stuff.

I'm happy that my cleaners are more natural (I'm not as scared of my baby getting hold of them, although things like borax are still poisonous) and because I'm making them myself, there's less packaging. It's also a lot cheaper and more fun (if you're like me and get a kick out of doing it yourself).