enamel

i love enamel cups..

and i have 78 of them..what do i do with them i hear you ask..well..sometimes they become window sill displays in colour order or mixed up..sometimes they have matching enamel teapots to keep them company..the unchipped ones i use to make pies or puddings or to serve sauces and salsas and they go on picnics and bushwalks for cups of tea..and the others make good vases for flowers..what do you collect? jane

dinner with my bairns

even though my children have left home we have dinner together at my place each wednesday fortnight..it's a time when we catch up with each others news and if one of us has a pressing issue the rest offer support..i am continually grateful for the close bond that we have established and for the opportunity to cook for my children on those wednesdays..if time and circumstances permit i like to extend my culinary repertoire..last wednesday fortnight i made nettle pasta for the first time and it was a much greater success than my nettle gnocchi..i made a sauce with home bottled tomato puree, homemade chicken and bacon stock, fresh red chilli, capers, kalamata olives and i garnished it with parmesan and wafer thin crispy free range bacon..

bacon was put on after the parmesan

and for sweets i made creme caramel..

and meringues..

and i served the creme caramel with the meringues roughly broken in four..

and quarters of a homemade candied orange slice..

and a good dollop of cream..

by the way my other daughter's mia because she was the photographer.. 

last night's menu consisted of a beef and guinness pie which i'd never made before..and i made short crust pastry for the top..

there's a bird in my pie!

and the accompaniments were petit pois, mashed potato, that my daughter and i took turns to push through a fine sieve, with garlic infused olive oil, butter and cream and mushrooms with garlic, a couple of pinches of powdered coriander and finely cut parsley..

rustic plating!

and sweets this time was a lemon and passionfruit delicious with cream..

and today i had enough beef and guinness and pastry left over from making yesterdays pie to make a pie in a cup for dinner..

and i reserved a couple of pieces of potato from those i boiled yesterday for the mash and today i put it into this loaf of sourdough bread..

it's darker in real life

what's happening in your kitchen?..jane

i'm celebrating..

the purchase of my first digital camera and achieving another of the goals i set out in my inaugural post with a big cup of tea..

and i thought i'd show how my pear vinegar experiment is going..

some activity in these pear scraps 

and how i have managed to use at least some of the huge bag of home grown oranges i bought from an op shop for $2..jane

orange cordial bottled in old woodroofe lemonade bottles 

candied orange slices

so good it should be bottled

my parents bought their first home just after the second world war when returning service men and women were granted reduced home loan rates..one of the first things my parents did when they moved in was to plant fruit trees around the whole perimeter of the back garden..there was a grapefruit, valencia orange, mandarin, navel orange, apricot, white peach, yellow peach, almond and an angelina plum..and out the front grew a jonathan apple..if as children we requested something sweet after a meal we were invariably directed to the fruit trees in the garden or we were offered bottled apricots, plums or peaches..as a real treat in summer my mother sometimes made the most delicious apricot ice blocks..apricots can sometimes be sour but these ice blocks never were because she would use the ripest fruit and bottle those we didn't eat fresh..

one of my very early culinary childhood memories is of helping my mother and grandmother pack homegrown plums, peaches and apricots into preserving jars and filling them with a sugar syrup and then putting them into the empty cauldron..that huge metal fiery monster with the thermometer in a channel on the side was an awesome thing to me as a child once it was boiling on top of the gas stove and we were remonstrated to keep away from it's terribleness..the cauldron though produced dozens of beautiful jars of preserved fruit that were lined up on shelving, especially made by my father, in the kitchen of my family home..

image from web of an early vacola kit and caboodle

 i have a copy of this early fowler's vacola instruction
 manual that i bought from an op shop for $0.20

the newer versions of the fowler's vacola are more user friendly because they are electric.. i place mine strategically on the draining board of my kitchen sink with the drainage outlet over the sink so that when the processing has completed i can just turn the tap to dispose of the boiling water..the older vacola had to be placed on a gas or electric stove and then it was a matter of taking the bottles out of the boiling water and either waiting for the water to cool and risk having a huge pot of dangerously hot water sitting on the stove for hours or the other option was to bucket the boiling water out incrementally which was also very hazardous..

of the two newer vacola units available i purchased the 'simple natural preserver' which included some jars, lids and rubber rings and cost $165..it's really simple to operate because all you do is put the bottles into the unit, fill it with cold water, plug it in and after an hour it's done..

the vacola system has been designed so that the temperature of the unit and the heating time sterilize the contents of the bottle and so that surplus air is expelled..this is achieved because the lid is held in place by a metal spring clip..as the contents of the bottle are heating, the spring clip allows the lid to lift slightly so that steam can escape and as the bottle cools down the spring clip holds the lid firmly in position until the vacuum seal has formed..this vacuum also acts to prevent entry of micro-organisms..

the vacola is only recommended for preserving fruit though because the high acidity levels in fruit helps to control those micro-organisms that might grow in improperly preserved bottles..

image of the newer vacola kit and caboodle
courtesy of the 'bake and brew' website

last year i processed 16 bottles of tomato puree using the above method and all winter i have been using the puree in pasta sauces, soups, for pizza toppings and so on..it has a remarkably fresh flavour, more so than store bought puree, and because there are no other ingredients included it's really versatile..i've bottled tomato puree before with some italian friends and while we had access to some amazing equipment i found that using the same method of skinning and deseeding the tomatoes that we had used that i could puree the tomato as effectively using my food processor..i also processed about 8 bottles of apple quarters from apples that i had collected from apple trees growing by the roadside during drives into the countryside to go bushwalking and blackberry picking..and of course one aspect of yesterday's post was about my bottled pears..

my pears are enjoying their notoriety!

oh..and by the way i have no foul deals going on with mr fowler :) ..it's just that i had a couple of responses about the vacola and i also thought it would be good to share my love of the new and updated version of an iconic aussie product..jane

frugal friday..

preserved pears

i bought four kilos of pears this week for $0.80 cents a kilo..i peeled them, cut them into medium dice and poached the dice for 2 minutes in a light sugar syrup with a vanilla bean, a couple of cloves, a small piece of cinnamon stick and an allspice..then i bottled them adding the poaching liquid and processed them in my fowler's preserver..

pear vinegar

inspired by 'old days old ways' recipe for fruit scrap vinegar i kept the pear peelings from the pears i bottled and added 1/4 cup of sugar dissolved in 1200 mls water to the peelings..i'm really looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few days..will i be having a lovely pear, walnut and rocket salad with my own pear vinegar this summer?..if it works i am going to celebrate with the purchase of some roquefort to go with that salad!

crabapple butter

on wednesday i made a little jar of crabapple jelly and i was left with the pulp after draining the liquor and today i was left with some pear poaching liquid..so i put the pulp through a sieve and added it to the poaching liquid and cooked it down into a crabapple butter..

tofu, vegetable and brown rice soup

this week i made a large pot of stock after roasting some bones and meat trimmings with a few aromatic vegetables..this was all then boiled gently with celery, parsley, a strip of lemon, a fresh chilli and salt and pepper..today i removed the fat and strained it through muslin and made a simple soup with onion, celery, carrot, more fresh chilli, home bottled tomato puree and half of the stock..at the last minute i added batons of organic tofu, that i had bought at half price last week, and celery leaves cut fine..i cooked brown rice separately and added a few spoons to the soup bowl before adding the soup (i do this with pasta and rice)..i then grated myzithra over the soup..

sultana cupcakes

i was left with an egg yolk and half an egg white after making the candied violets earlier this week so today i made half a dozen sultana cupcakes..the bit of missing egg white means they are not quite as perky as usual but i'm eating one as i write this and taste wise they are the same as usual.. 

an accidental tea rescue

i was given a packet of english breakfast tea by a dear friend for christmas and because i don't like to have lots of packets of similar teas on the go i poured the gifted tea into my very large tea canister to join a couple of packets of a similar blend..i didn't notice though that the tea i had added was flavoured with vanilla until the next day when i made a pot of tea..now i love vanilla but not vanilla flavoured tea and the vanilla had permeated all the tea in the canister..so for quite a while now that large quantity of tea has been languishing in the canister..i can't drink it and i can't throw it out..anyway this morning the only tea i had left was a packet of earl grey tea and the vanilla tea and i'm not a huge fan of earl grey either but i do like a little mixed with a less aromatic tea occasionally..but today if i wanted to have a cup of tea and i didn't want to mission to the shops at 6.30 am i had no choice..so i popped a bit of 'earl' in the pot and in a rash moment added an equal quantity of 'vanilla'.. to my great surprise the combination works well..especially with the sultana cupcakes..jane

a culinary day in honour of my mother..

when i was planning my garden after i moved into my new house 3 years ago i decided to plant productive trees only..but i decided on those trees where the fruit is not readily available in the shops..among the trees i planted were a pomegranate, a cumquat, a feijoa, an elderberry and a crabapple..

in those 3 years my dear little crabapple, 'malus gorgeous', has battled through 2 years of drought..with the temperature reaching 48 deg centigrade on the 7th feb 2008..

it was on this day that i had organised my mother's 80th birthday celebration at one of her favourite restaurants with family and friends in the dandenongs (a range of low mountains about an hour from the centre of melbourne)..while we were celebrating we were aware of bushfires because we could see smoke in the distance but we were unaware just how serious the fires were..we only learned when we arrived home and heard the devastating news that whole townships had been completely razed by bushfire and that many people had tragically lost their lives..

this winter has been kinder to victoria because we have had quite a lot of rain..and for the first time i have had a crop, albeit very small, of crabapples..i left them to sit on the tree for months to enjoy the little ruby jewels but today i picked them in order to make a small jar of crab apple jelly..i did so because i wanted to have a culinary day that reflected some of foodie things that i associate with my mother who died 2 years ago today (five months after her birthday)..

crabapple recipe

i washed the crabapples, removed the stalks, and placed them in a saucepan with water and the juice of half of a lemon just to cover and cooked them until they were quite soft..the pulp was strained, without squeezing, through 4 layers of muslin..the resulting juice was measured and placed back in a saucepan with an equal amount of sugar and heated until the sugar dissolved..it was then boiled until it set which occurred within 5 minutes of it boiling..then it was poured into a sterilized jar and sealed.. 

ruby jewels from 'gorgeous'

'gorgeous'  pink crabapple juice

crabapple juice and sugar

'gorgeous' ruby jelly

the violets i now have growing with exhuberant fecundity in my garden come from my mother's garden..and today i made candied violets as another culinary journey in honour of my mother..

candied violet recipe

i picked the violets early and tied them into a bunch to facilitate washing them (much easier than trying to wash them untied) and then i cut the heads from the stalks..i then put them into my dehydrator on 35 deg c for 2 hours..once they were dry, using tweezers, i dipped each violet into beaten egg white and then into castor sugar..i then put them on a fresh plate of castor sugar to dry..

fuzzy violets

a lovely bunch of violets

washed and drying violets

violets in dehydrator

and they actually are purple still!

sourdough loaf number 2

and while i was making the jelly and the violets i made sourdough loaf number 2 from my sourdough starter..it's an improvement on the first loaf..and it goes really well with the crabapple jelly..yum..

sourdough loaf no 2 from sourdough starter

and by the way those violets are going to adorn some cupcakes i plan to make in a few weeks time for a going away party i am hosting for a family member..jane 

what is it about hexagons?

i'm having a love affair with hexagons at the moment..i'm putting them on cards as well as on the tea towels that i blogged about earlier..i am using recycled vintage dressmaking patterns that i source from op shops as the background paper avoiding the folds..then i:

• paper piece the hexagons using vintage fabric to get a crisp shape
• iron them
• remove tacking stitches and paper
• sew a vintage button in the centre using embroidery floss and tie it at the front for extra detail
• adhere the hexagon to the card..

phone camera quality photos!

i will be offering these for sale at the same market where i am hoping to sell the tea towels..i am also making teacup, cupcake and bird cards..busy days ahead! jane