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.