Ginger cake in the Sun Oven

 I made a couple of ginger cakes in the Sun Oven today.  I hadn't baked anything sweet in it before, and with a nice sunny day (amazing how many warm days have had too much cloud cover!), I thought today was a good time to try.  This is when I put them in, it had heated up to 180 degrees celcius!

 This is when they were ready.  I left them in for about 1 1/2 hours, it normally takes about an hour.  You can't burn things in a sun oven, so I was waiting to see if the dips in the middle of the cakes would rise, but they didn't.  Probably because of the moist rather than dry air in the Sun Oven.  A knife inserted into the middle came out very clean, so they were cooked.

And the finished result- a little dippy in the middle, but perfectly cooked otherwise.  Lunchbox snacks done for the week, and one cake for the freezer.

Cooking adventures with a Sun Oven

 I bought a Sun Oven a little while ago, and there have been a few clear sunny days to try it out lately.  Today I blind baked a quiche pastry in it, as well as cooking chicken and vegetable curry with rice.

 The finished curry- 3 hours later

 and the rice

 I couldn't fit the quiche itself in with the curry, so I cheated and cooked it inside (I can see why people buy 2 Solar Ovens).  It is made with homemade spelt pastry (with homemade butter), and the filling has backyard eggs, buttermilk from this morning's butter making session, spinach, chives and parsley from our garden, and Otway free range bacon (local).

And some gorgeous lilac to finish- I get up very early and get some from an empty house in the next street ;)

Making homegrown pumpkin soup

I cut open a homegrown butternut pumpkin on the weekend, it was so bright orange inside.  The photos don't show the intensity of the colour.  We only got about 3 pumpkins off the vine, and this one was the best size, the other 2 are much smaller.  It didn't get much water over the summer, but I saved some rinse water buckets for the vine once it was setting fruit, because it was looking promising.  I think it's the first successful pumpkin growing season I've had, even though the yield was small.  I had better luck with a cold climate tolerant sweet potato, so I'll grow more of those next summer.

Roast tomato sauce

 Tomatoes ready for the oven with chopped garlic, thyme sprigs, olive oil and salt & pepper.  The tomatoes, garlic and thyme are all from our garden.

 After 1 hour of roasting

 After being pushed through a mouli- 900mls!  The recipe (River Cottage Veg) said I'd get about 500mls.

Ready to be frozen in 200ml (ish) portions.  Now I can try out the Roasted Tomato Risotto.

Wood fired lamb roast

 We went to the Bannockburn Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, always a good day out.  I picked up 3 new raspberry plants ($3 each!) to replace those that I drowned when I moved them into half wine barrels.  We also bought some honey, a huge punnet of organic strawberries, and a butterflied leg of lamb from Barwon Lamb.  I don't really eat meat other than chicken or fish, but I will make allowances occasionally when Andrew wants to roast something, on the proviso that it is local, and ethically sourced (and I really don't like beef).  Andrew wanted to try out a roast in the wood oven, so that's what we did last night.  With the addition of a couple of large potatoes I bandicooted from the potato patch, some of our fresh garlic harvested last week, and some organic pumpkin, it made for a very satisfying meal.  We also realised that I was drinking my homemade lemon cordial, and he was drinking his homemade ginger beer with our fantastic meal.

Andrew wanted to make the most of the left over heat in the wood oven, so he and the girls whipped up a chocolate cake, and baked a few potatoes that we'll have with dinner tonight.  What a life!

Wood oven...almost done

 A few weeks ago- brick dome with no insulation

 Yesterday- with a new insulating box built around it, half filled with vermiculite to help keep the heat in.  It needs two more bags of vermiculite, and a roof on top, and a few more finishing touches to be complete.

Man make fire.

Livinia has been asking everyday if we can make pizza for the wood oven, but this is reserved for Sunday nights.  I've been making the dough in the morning, leaving it to rise for a couple of hours, then putting it in the fridge.  The soaking of the flour seems to make it more digestible for me.  And I use half spelt flour.  The recipe is the magic bread dough from River Cottage Veg Everyday, and it's the best pizza dough recipe I've found.

Yoghurt making

I made yoghurt over the Easter weekend. I used the slow cooker method, from Little Poppa, and it was very easy, and worked beautifully. I made lots of dishes (to wash), but I think the hardest part is getting the flavouring right. I prefer my yoghurt plain, in/on a savoury dish, but Liv goes through quite a lot of flavoured yoghurt every week, so we tried out our new stainless steel icy pole moulds. We flavoured them with a little honey, and some strawberry jam. Next time, I'll use a blender, so all the lumps will disappear. Yet another grocery item that is easy to make!

Guacamole and op shop finds

Sideways guacamole picture
My second batch of guacamole for the week, it is sooo good, especially on organic sourdough ciabatta. With a massive amounts of coriander in the garden, I had to find some ways to use it up, it will bolt to seed as soon as the weather heats up. I wonder how long our avocado trees will take to bear fruit? We'll be able to use our own tomatoes and chillies in it soon.

3 ripe avocados
1 red onion
1 roma tomato
juice of a lime
fresh coriander
1 chilli chopped up, or a few drops of tabasco sauce

Andrew will arrive home from USA any minute now, and we'll enjoy our "guac" for lunch

Just a few of my op shop/second hand shop scores this week. Andrew will be right for shorts this summer. I also found him a couple pairs of pants in good condition, as he wears out the inner thighs of his pants by riding his bike to the train station. Even hemp canvas pants! I'm finding it much more exciting and satisfying to shop in op shops these days (you just have to do it regularly), shopping centres/malls just don't do it for me anymore, they seem so artificial, and just reminds me how consumeristic our society is, dragging home bags of crap. If I venture into one of those cheap department stores, I'm disgusted at how cheap and nasty the items are, and I can't stop thinking of the poor people who work in sweatshops to make it all for the western world. "Live big for less", just gets my goat. Well you can live more ethically by purchasing second hand when you need it, or by buying handmade, or from places you know treat their workers well and pay them fairly. Buying second hand doesn't mean you're poor (and so what if you are?), many people can't get past that idea, ingrained from decades ago. I was going to buy Evie a new bike for Christmas, but found 2 matching ones at a second hand shop this week, the 2 for about half the price of a new one. One was bigger than the other, so both of our girls should get a few years of riding out of them, and they were in pretty good condition. By saving a few dollars here, and there, we can spend more on ethical items such as these. Anyway, a mixed up and rambly post that I had to get out of my head. Your thoughts?

Schmancy!

I'm quite impressed with my Christmas baking for the last day of kinder ;) It will be the same for Playgroup Christmas party on Friday, very festive!

From lemons...

To Lemonade! (Lemon cordial)

Recipe

LEMON CORDIAL
8 lemons
2 tablespoons citric acid
1 tablespoon tartaric acid
Sugar syrup - 1.5 litres water + 1.5 kilos sugar, boiled together until the sugar has dissolved.
Grate about 2 tablespoons of rind from the lemons before you cut them.

Juice the lemons - if you put them in the microwave for a minute before cutting them, you'll get more juice.

Add the grated rind and the juice in a large bowl. Add citric and tartaric acids. Pour the hot sugar syrup over the juice and mix well.

Allow to cool and pour into bottles. Stores well in the fridge for a month. Dilute with water to taste and serve with lots of ice.

From Aussies Living Simply

It's here again...

The great annual zucchini glut, that is. Here we have a zucchini slice, we've also made zucchini bread, had zucchini in curry, I'll have to think of a few more creative ways to cook with this prolific vegetable, since I don't really fancy the idea of sitting down to a plate full of it.

This zucchini slice was made with zucchini (obviously) and onion from our garden, organic carrot and local free range eggs.

Baking bread with children

This book arrived yesterday, I had to put it to good use today, so we made.......

Cinnamon rolls (or snails according to Evie)

They turned out pretty well for our first attempt, and they taste pretty good too. I'll try to make them smaller next time I think, then we'll have more :) She was pretty keen to use that nice big knife all by herself. She had a little help from me though. I convinced her to keep her clothes on this time, helps that it's a bit chilly outside.

Hot cross buns

Sultana thief!

Well, my bread machine packed it in a little while ago, I've been a bit lost without it. I'd been looking for an easy hot cross bun recipe to make without the aid of a bread machine, and finally found one. So we had a go today. Only half of them have crosses, as I cut the hole in the piping bag too big, and I'm not very good at that part anyway. They turned out pretty well I think. Yes, that's my naked chef in the above photo, I made her wear an apron though ;)

The finished product

Mmmmm, granola!

Evie's at her Nana's house this afternoon, which makes it a bit easier to tidy up the house and play with Livinia. I made up a fresh batch of granola too. I eat this for breakfast, just dry, no milk or water. It's made with organic oats, almonds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, coconut, cinnamon, grapeseed oil and honey. The honey is from extended family members, (Edmonds Honey) who are apiarists. I get my beeswax for soapmaking from them too.

Gingerbread

Stab wound

Yesterday Evie and I got busy in the kitchen making gingerbread men, rabbits, eggs and butterflies.
I should have tasted the icing pens first, they are awful! Evie makes me take it off before she eats one.

Daddy will be proud of this!

The great zucchini glut

There comes a time every summer in the vegie patch that there will be a glut of something. At the moment in our patch, it's zucchinis. Turn your back and a small one turns into a very, very large one. Now zucchini is not something I'll sit down and eat a plate full of, and neither will Andrew, so we have to be creative and find things to put it into. We've been putting a few into curries and giving some away, but today I thought I'd bake zucchini bread. It's more of a cake, quite similar to carrot cake, very nice. Unfortunately it only used up one large zucchini, not two as the recipe states (2 cups of grated zucchini). The recipe makes 2 loaf sized cakes, which is great when you have a newborn, as one goes in the freezer for later. Zucchini slice will be on the menu this week I'm sure, just as soon as I buy some more (local free range) eggs. On the plus side, zucchini plants provide much produce for very little input, and in times of drought, that's a huge benefit.
Now it might be time to look for tomato recipes, there are a LOT of green tomatoes on our 4 plants, that are starting to ripen, and with this hot weather in Victoria, the ripening will be happening very soon...

Chicken and vegetable soup

I've been waiting for soup weather for a long time now, it seems I will have to wait a bit longer, as the weather just hasn't cooled down much, it just doesn't feel right. I'm used to the change in seasons, which I really like, I don't at all mind the cold in winter, I much prefer it to the heat of summer. Weird, I know, but I just don't like heat. Anyhow, this is the second batch of chicken and vegetable soup I've made this week. I'll just pretend that it's soup weather. Soup is very handy to have in the fridge, you can get many meals out of it. Good timing too, as Evie has just come down with a cold, and I've been sneezing a bit too. Evie will only eat bits of chicken out of it though (if you're lucky). She's a bit interested in chickens and ducks at the moment, so when I tell her it's chicken soup, she says "Bck bck", I wonder if she thinks about how the chicken got into the soup?