We're back!

Well. That was the biggest break from blogging I've had since I started the blog some years back. There have been times in the last 6 weeks where I've wondered if I was going to come back to it. But hey: this thing is a record of our adventures, and the adventuring ain't stopping here. It's a place for us to rant about the things we're passionate about, and we're passionate about a lot. It's a place for us to share stuff and (hopefully) teach or inspire people, and there's a lot to learn. So we're back.

What have we been up to since the canceled party debacle?

Heaps of stuff! And also heaps of relaxing!

We have a little break from chicken farming over the summer because we find the chickens really struggle with the hot weather. Also, chicken farming is bloody exhausting, especially after the year we've had, so we need a break!

Life without chickens is roomy and free and relaxing. There's space for new friends, foraging (blackberries! plums! raspberries! oh my!), baking, crocheting, quilting Australiana-themed baby-quilts, reading, swimming, eating, old friends, bee-swarm-catching, a trip to the big-smoke for circus shows and visiting, and general merry-making.

After processing our last batch of chickens for the year and (happily) providing delicious chicken Christmas dinners to the people of the Bega Valley (and one lady who comes all the way from the Snowy Mountains for our chicken!) we headed out to the coast for a luxurious 2 week holiday with some of our nearest and dearest. It. Was. Amazing. Eating, swimming, reading, crocheting. Repeat. Oh, and we harvested a bucketload of native wild raspberries, which we dumped onto a baked ricotta for New Year's dinner. 

Not a bad spot for an afternoon of foraging

There are no words to describe the deliciousness, but here's a picture...

When we came home to the farm the garden was ridiculously overgrown, but we didn't mind. We harvested and made merry.

Our neighbour called to say there was a late swarm of bees at his place, so we caught it in an esky and installed it in our top-bar hive. We've been waiting for a swarm for 2 years since our last lot of bees got hive beetle and evacuated, so that was a happy day.

Me in my "crazy person" beekeeping 'suit' and Gunnar in his proper suit.

The roadside plums came on, and we had a harvest-and-preserve party with some new lovely friends.

I finished a custom baby-quilt order for an Australiana fan in Sydney. Love this quilting bizzo...

The blackberries have come on, so we're harvesting and freezing daily. When the season's over and we've got our haul, we'll have a massive jam cook up. In the meantime, we pick and pick and eat our fill.

Locavore dinner parties with friends, including plum cakes with Jersey cream!

And in between it all we've been working at our off-farm jobs. I've started a new job at the local wholefoods co-op, which is AWESOME, and of course we've been running and working at our little abattoir, which continues to process for small-scale chicken and duck farmers and backyard growers around the traps. Sometimes, the abattoir cleaning (not processing!!) is a family affair. 

The kids don't mind at all (it's an excuse for us all to hang out together playing with high-pressure hoses, after all), and we feel it's important for them to see us (and share in) working hard for the things we believe in.

Oh and I've been thoroughly enjoying exploring the instagram world. Never thought I would, but there you go. Life's full of surprises, right? 

On the immediate horizon we have another little break and then we dive head first into building and chook-enterprise-expansion and abattoir overhauling and school and uni and show season and roadside-apple-and-peach season and all the other busy-ness that comes with this life we're living. I'm excited.

Blessings on the helpers

When I was having chemo, part of my healing-through-gratitude regime involved making plans and daydreaming about the massive thank you feast we would throw for all the people who helped us out during that supremely crappy time. I felt that even though things were not that awesome for us during those months of treatment, I still had so much to be grateful for, and I still felt super lucky. Maybe even more lucky than I feel normally. It's true I did have cancer, and I did have one of my boobs removed, and I did go through chemo, which was gross. But I have an incredible, strong, kind, compassionate and loving partner, and 2 beautiful kids. I have an extended family who love me. I had an amazing day-bed out the front of our beautiful little house on which to rest, overlooking a sweet little valley farm which I love. I live in a country with (kind of) free health care, which meant I was able to have the treatment I needed to give myself the best chance of survival. I have access to an abundance of all kinds of nutritious foods to heal body and spirit. 

And I found myself among a community of people who helped out in all kinds of ways. There were people who came and helped Pearl move the chicken houses, and to help load chickens on processing day. There were the people who brought us meals. There were the people who put money into our bank account to pay for herbs and vitamins and medical bills. There were the people who processed our chickens the night I had to unexpectedly go to hospital with neutropenia. There were people who bought us massages. There were people who knitted things for me. There were people who gave me Reiki, and people who gave me acupuncture. There were people who brought us firewood. There were people who lent us their showers and spare bedrooms. Awesome, right?

The party planning started off with me emailing one of my favourite artists, Phoebe Wahl, to see if I could buy one of her images to use for the invite. What I love about Phoebe's art is it's warmth and vigour and heart - all the things I wanted for our party. Because she's lovely, she happily obliged.

Food planning involved the procurement, fattening, killing and processing of a lamb, which our friend David took care of for us, other than the boerwurst sausage-making, which was a team effort.
We bought veggies and salad greens from all our friends with market gardens. I, with the help of 2 very special ladies, made 25 litres of rhubarb and strawberry champagne.

For party favours, I lino-cut a 'thank you' stamp and stamped it onto serviettes I'd made, for people to use at the party then take home and use over and over.

My mum and her partner made a dessert, my nana made her signature custard kisses and a 'thank you' fruitcake, and Pearl's mum made brownies.

Everything was set.

And then it started to rain.

Plan B for Bad weather was to move the party to the incredibly beautiful Quaama Hall. Ain't no way 60 people were fitting in the tiny house.

Saturday morning, the hall was booked, as it seemed like the rain would never let up. And it didn't. In fact, by sunday morning, the day of the party, we, along with food enough for 70 people, got flooded in as the river broke it's bank and covered our main road to town with over 2 metres of fast-flowing water.

The give way sign at the bottom of our road, on the morning of the party

Not really the kind of development you want on the day you've been planning for months.

So we sent out texts and facebook messages telling people the party was off. Ironically, sunday turned into a beautiful sunny day, and we cheered ourselves by cracking jokes about it being a beautiful day for a party. My brother, who was visiting from WA got to spend some quality, flooded-in time with the kids. Some also-flooded-in-neighbours dropped by, and we had roast lamb for dinner.

Nice day for a party. Shame that 'lake' is covering the road to party-town

The next day we made 'Canceled Party Pickle' with all the zucchinis, squash and capsicums we'd bought. We preserved most of the harissa we'd made and froze the marinades.

We breakfasted on harissa and labne and cucumber and lettuce and asparagus and roast beetroot for days. It was actually divine.

Luckily, no food went to waste, between the freezing, the preserving, the eating and giving things away to all and sundry. And Oscar was thrilled to have Thank You fruitcake in his lunchbox today.

So what's the moral of this rather long-winded post? There're probably a few. One moral is that flooding waits for no man, and the river and rain don't give a crap about your plans for thanking people.
Another is that a jar of Canceled Party Pickle and a lovingly hand-made serviette, while not the same as an awesome party, is also quite a nice way to say thank you. And yet another is that all exercises in feeling grateful, whether the plans eventuate or not, are good for the soul. Even though we were sad our party didn't happen, we still feel grateful for all our friends, and the things they do for us. One day, that party's gonna happen, and we'll all be glad.

I love eggplant pickle

Today was a perfect early-winter's day. A little windy, gloriously sunny, a little cool but also kind of warm in the sun. I spent the majority of the day on the day bed out the front, resting and sipping kudzu elixir and bone broth, crocheting and willing my body to recover from the annihilation that is chemotherapy. Around me, Pearl and the kids bustled, collecting kindling for our brand new fire, cooking a slow-cooked beef stew, tending chickens, playing, making pancakes, creating, and stopping by my bed every now and then for a story or a cuddle. It was pretty beautiful, and when we did our regular dinner-time round of "what was your favourite thing about today?" there was no shortage of stories and we all had to tell our second and third favourite things too.

Towards the end of the day, I mustered the energy to jar the eggplant pickle I've been working on, intermittently, for the last week or so. Yes, that's right: preserving is still happening, it's just happening veeeerrrrry sloooowly....

For me, there are few things more satisfying than a bunch of hot, upside-down jars cooling (and hopefully sealing!) on the table. They go into the extra-satisfying category when they contain something as glorious as eggplant pickle. Eggplant pickle, if you've never had it, is an outrageously sweet and spicy condiment, which we mostly serve in enormous quantities on the side of dahl and curries. It is insanely good and I love it, and feel very sad when we run out.

Luckily for us, the last few weeks we've been looking after our neighbour's place while they're on holiday - goats, chooks, geese, ducks, a crazy (but cute!) dog called Ollie and a massive veggie garden. It's a nice little ritual to trot down the road each day and tend what needs tending. And here's the thing: the garden, when we took over its care, was fairly heaving with late-autumnal abundance, most notably in the form of eggplants and chillies. I ask you - what would you do with such a gift?

The recipe we used was adapted from Christine Manfield's Fire cookbook. For some reason her recipe is for only a tiny amount of pickle (maybe her neighbours' gardens aren't as bountiful as ours...) so we increased the amounts to accommodate a bucketful of eggplant, and made a couple of other adjustments along the way. This is a delicious pickle, and you should make some, if you can still get your hands on some eggplants. Here's what you do:

In the food processor, pulse about 30 red chillies of various shapes and sizes, 6 tablespoons of chopped garlic, 6 tablespoons of grated ginger, 6 teaspoons of ground tumeric, and 6 tablespoons of black mustard seeds into a chunky paste. If you don't have a food processor, you could just grate or finely chop everything.

Heat about 500ml of oil in a big pot, then add the spice mix and fry it up for a bit until it smells so good you almost start crying, then add a big bowl full of chopped eggplant chunks... Pearl reckons we used maybe 2kg for this quantity of spice.

Keep it cooking over a low-ish heat, and stir it so it doesn't stick.

When the eggplant is soft and has sucked up the spicy oil deliciousness, add about 2 cups of raw sugar, a couple of tablespoons of salt, and a stubby of home-brew-that-didn't-work-properly-and-turned-into-delicious-malt-vinegar. If you don't have the (mis)fortune of having an endless supply of (accidentally) home-made malt vinegar, then shop-bought is probably OK as well... Or you could come 'round to our place and get some of ours. We have a LOT.

Then all you need to do is simmer it up til it's gorgeous and gooey, then seal in sterilised jars. If you're feeling generous, you could even share it with your neighbour.

Peachy!

A little while ago, we went to the Candelo Show. It's our favourite show of the season, and we all had a lovely day watching the woodchop, the dog high jump, eating watermelon slices, putting out fires with the RFS, watching shearing demos,  learning about snakes from the snake man, and jumping on the jumping castle. But perhaps the feature of the day (for me, at least) was finding the most incredibly laden, fragrant peach tree on the side of the road on the way home. Yay for foraged stone fruits! 

As I mentioned in my last post, stone-fruit-and-berry-season is my absolute favourite. Free stone fruits and berries, from side-of-the-road trees and bushes, somehow taste even better than anything you'd ever be able to find in a shop. And you'll usually find more than you can safely eat in one sitting, so in addition to the fresh deliciousness, you also get preserved deliciousness into the coming months. What's not to love, right?

Maybe it's their wildness, maybe it's their freeness, maybe it's just that picking fruit on the side of the road, in a beautiful setting, while happily gorging yourself on the fruit you're picking is just about a billion times funner than going into a shop and filling up a bag. Maybe it's the thought of the abundance, and the preserves that are going to be happing in order to capture that abundance. Who knows? All I know is that I bloody love it, and this peach tree was one of the highlights of my summer. Seriously. 

We couldn't believe that with all that sunset-hued fuzzy deliciousness just sitting there on the side of the road, we were the only ones who appeared to be picking from this tree. Not even the birds had touched it! We filled our bags, and our bellies, and trotted off home, thinking of jam and peaches in syrup, which is a big time treat in our house. I have no words to describe the deliciousness of the syrup that comes out of those jars. I know it probably sounds like I'm a peach-crazy-raving-lunatic, but if you're feeling suspicious about the happiness and yumminess that can come from a mass of delicious foraged peaches, you're just going to have to get out there and find some for yourself. 

And then you can preserve some. What you'll need to do is this:

1. Collect yourself some foraged peaches. I swear they taste better. You can use this exact same method for blackberries, as in the picture above, and probably any other fruit you can find on the side of the road.

2. Pack your fruit into clean vacola jars, or some other (clean) jars you may have lying around. If you want to enter them in the show, pack them in real pretty-like.

3. Pour in your sugar syrup. Mine was a 'light' syrup (if you have super-delicious fruit you don't need a ton of sugar), which is basically a 1:2 ratio of sugar to water, simmered til the sugar is dissolved.

4. Seal your jars, then process them in a boiling water bath for 20 minutes or so.

When they're cooled, they're going to look beautiful, so arrange them decoratively in your house, and enjoy the look of them for as long as you can stand not cracking a jar to taste.

We eat ours usually just served with cream and/or ice cream and/or yoghurt. The fruit is carefully spooned out, so that the precious precious juices remain for drinking. 

4 ways with wild foraged blackberry goodness

I think possibly my favourite thing about eating seasonally, is the way that, when you haven't eaten a particular food for 11 months, it tastes absolutely amazing. About a month ago, when we had our first taste of blackberries for this season, we were exclaiming over their deliciousness, trying to decide if it was because they actually were particularly delicious this year, or if it was just because we hadn't eaten any for so long. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

They are like beautiful, sun-kissed jewels

For the last month or so we've been picking (and eating!) to our hearts' content. This suits me - I'm absolutely a summer fruits devotee - stone fruits and berries all the way. So an almost daily pilgrimage to our beautiful blackberry glen has been absolutely fine by me. 

And fine by the kids too (OK - not fine when they get a leech, which happens...), who have amazing adventures involving cubbies in the blackberry brambles and wild and exciting tree-climbing fantasies involving their trusty 'hunting dog', Bell.

Blackberry gully. The bright green to the left is a sea of wild watercress. mmmmm...

We've been stockpiling them in our freezer, til we had enough to make all the things we have planned - wine, jam, and blackberries in syrup - all the while munching away and enjoying them in all kinds of scrumptious things like baked yoghurt custard and blackberry pancakes. The trick, we've found, with the blackberry pancake, is to drop the berries on before you flip them over. Of course, the purple pancake that results from mixing the berries into the batter is a beauty all of it's own, but this way's pretty gorgeous too.

Blackberry pancakes with fresh ricotta, local honey and pear, eaten in the sunshiny sunshine.

Today Pearl started the blackberry wine (not ready for 3-4 months), which I'm very excited about, and last night we stacked our precious jars of jam and blackberries in syrup up on the shelves, feeling happy at the prospects of some sweet sweet summertime goodness to take us through the winter months. 

Blackberries in a light sugar syrup 

The ol' slide-the-jam-down-a-saucer-to-see-if-it's-set trick

It's a pretty great feeling. And while our days of eating fresh, sun-warmed blackberries fresh from the bush are very nearly over, we have the knowledge that when we taste them next, in 11 months time, we won't be able to decide if they're extra delicious, or if we just missed them.

Who knew that a kelpie's favourite food in the world would be blackberries??

A good lookin' chook, some artichokes and a champion champers...

About a week ago, our preparations for the Bega Show began. We'd gotten the show schedules a few weeks ago, and spent hours poring over them, circling the categories we thought we'd enter: Crochet, patchwork, papier mache, dinosaur garden, flower arrangement in an egg cup, preserving of all varieties, beer, wine, yoghurt, eggs, decorated arrowroots, photography, drawing, a useful item made from baling twine (yes - it's a real category) and, of course, junior soft feather bantam.

We'd resolved that we'd enter in order to contribute to the beautiful display in the pavilion, and that it wasn't about winning... But that didn't stop me from jumping up and down when I saw that my rhubarb and raspberry champagne had won champion wine of the show!!!! 

Wooohooooo!!! I got a ribbon!!!! If it hadn't been locked in the cabinet in the pavilion, I would have worn it like a sash as I walked around the show.

It's true we did have some successes - Pearl got a first for her preserved (home-grown!) globe artichokes, second for her plum jam and yoghurt. I got first for my lager, baling-twine shopping bag, and champagne, and second for my crocheted stubby holder (yesssssss!). 

Fluffy rainbow stubby holder takes the cake in the novice crochet section

Olive's 'baby' Errol, got second in the junior soft feather bantam category, and Olive's papier mache and photography also got some second prizes. 

Olive and Errol in the poultry pavilion. In the words of the judge: "Yeeaaah... He's a good lookin' chook this one". What more is there to say?

Olive's award-winning photo of Oscar, taken on a late-evening roadside raspberry-foraging expedition

Not that it was all winning - we did have some entries that didn't get a mention, but it was really great to see them all there in the display. It's really exciting to walk the pavilion and look at the entries, and check out which friends have won in different categories. 

While it does make an unusual, fetching, sturdy and award-winning shopping bag, crocheting baling twine is not an easy project.

The kids got a real kick out of  seeing their entries, and didn't seem bothered at all when they didn't win anything. They were just excited to be on display, for all the community to see. And one of my favourite things about the show is that it really is pretty much all of the community who get involved. The old farming families, the newbies, like us, the kids from all walks of life all get out and about on show weekend, checking it all out.

But even more than seeing our entries, we all just loved being at the show, meeting up with friends and generally hanging out. The kids made their own fun, running off in a pack and sliding down a grass bank on pieces of cardboard for (literally) hours on end, while we all waited for the grand finale - the smash up derby. We ate (thanks Vickie!) and drank and chatted and laughed and people-watched. It felt like half of Bega was there that night - all the different worlds of Bega, coming together for a very unlikely spectacle. We felt very happy to be a part of it, ribbons or no ribbons.

The kids were super-serious about decorating their arrowroots, and even more serious about eating them after the show.

Home-grown, home-made mustard

Almost exactly a year ago, our dear friends Morag, Louisa, and Huon came to visit. On a whim, we made a garden bed and sowed sunflowers and red mustard, just because we had the seeds hanging around.

Almost a year later, we cracked open a jar of the mustard we made from the seeds we saved from the mustard we grew. It was a massive, epic effort, all for just 2 jars of mustard, but it was super-fun, kind of novel, and freakin' delicious, in the way that only home grown things (involving a lot of love, sweat and dirt) can be.

If you'd also like to undertake a mustard-growing-and-making adventure, just for the fun of it, here's what we did.

First, we made a big delicious breakfast which we ate with our dear friends, then set to work digging out and making a little garden bed. We probably (though I can't really remember) dug in some manure and/or compost, then sowed the whole area pretty thickly with a packet of mustard seeds and a couple of handfuls of sunflower seed.

When it all came up, we enjoyed the sunflowers, ate the mustard leaves, and sold the excess to our local co-op. 

Mustard (it's the purple one) on its way to the co-op with its friends, kale and ruby chard

Mustard leaves, if you've never had them, are a little spicy and when they're big, a little tough, so if you want them raw in a salad, pick them tiny. When they're bigger, they're delicious sauteed with some silverbeet, or finely chopped and stirred through a barley pumpkin risotto. YUM!!! They're super-easy to grow and pretty hardy, and very very giving for months and months, even if you don't want the hooha of saving the seeds, so they're well worth growing. They also self-seed really well, so you'll have a pretty constant supply once you get them going in your garden.

Once the mustards started flowering, we ate less of the leaves, because they got a bit tough, but enjoyed the flowers (the bees did too!) and the amazing colour of the foliage.

Purdy. If you look closely you can see the baby seed pods forming along the flower stems

Mustard seeds like rocket, so we waited for the little pods of seeds to get big and start to dry off, then we picked them all, hung them up to dry some more, then stuffed them into some leftover feed bags (101 uses, I tell you...). We then jumped around on the bags to break open the pods and let all the tiny seeds out.

Once the seeds are out, it's time to winnow. This is actually kind of fun, and good to do with the kids, though it took a long time. I made sure to do it over an area of the garden where I wouldn't mind mustard growing, because I sure spilt a few seeds...

Then, once you have your seeds (you'll be amazed by how few there are...) it's time to make some mustard!! I used the recipe in The Gourmet Farmer Deli Book (bit of a fave 'round these parts), which is super simple: soak your precious mustard seeds in white wine vinegar overnight, puree half the soaked seeds, then mix the puree, the whole seeds and some salt and the juice of a lemon. Seal in sterilised jars and keep in a cool dark spot for a month. It. Is. Delicious. Even if it was a ridiculous amount of work for 2 jars of mustard. It was all fun, and ultimately super-yummy, so who cares, right?

Goes real nice on some sourdough with slices of Bega tasty

A bit of what we've been up to...

We had a little lapse from blogging over the Christmas/holiday/visitor season, so this is a bit of a catch up on what we've been working on/eating/enjoying.

We've been experimenting with new ways to eat eggs for breakfast (or lunch, or dinner...), like in the recipe at the end of this post.

We've been enjoying the very first blackberries, making plum jam, and drying chillies.

We've been eating Autumn Farm chickens for Christmas lunch, making pulled pork in the pizza oven (8 hour slow roast - yeeeeaaaaahhhhh....) and eating it on rolls with home-grown coleslaw. 

We've been building a new rawbale brooder house for our Autumn Farm chickies, and falling in love with our 13 new baby ducklings.

We've been pickling eggs (!) and eagerly awaiting the opportunity to taste them.

We've been feeling inspired by new books like Food DIY, and Practical Self Sufficiency, and trying out new recipes (like pulled pork, coleslaw and pickled eggs).

We've been celebrating old and new years with friends by cooking an enormous wild rabbit, rosemary and almond paella over the fire - YUM! - and drinking copious amounts of home brewed beer and rhubarb champagne.

We've been swimming at the beach and in our dam, fishing, kite-flying, and watching in awe as a pod of dolphins passed us by on their own (far more successful) fishing expedition at Bithry Inlet.

We've been welcoming new babies by sewing onesies and baby quilts.

We've been feeling super lucky to be enjoying visits with friends and family, showing them the wonders of our neighbourhood.

We've been harvesting garlic, zucchinis, tomatoes, beans and zucchinis, and wishing we'd planted more parsley.

And we've been feeling super super grateful for all of these things - and more! - and wondering what the year ahead has in store for us...

And now for a little recipe-sharing, in the form of our new favourite way to eat eggs, inspired by our friend Yotam Ottolenghi and his friend Sami Tamimi and their book Jerusalem.

First up, I fried a chopped onion in some olive oil with a whole bunch of garlic.

Then I added a teaspoon of ground cumin and 2 teaspoons of sumac, a couple of bits of preserved lemon, some finely chopped chard leaves and some chopped tomatoes, and cooked it all up til it was kind of saucy.

Then I cracked in some eggs and put the lid on to let them poach in the sauce.

When the whites were set (yolks still runny!!) I served it up with some of Pearl's flatbreads, some more sumac, and a yoghurt, tahini and lime juice dressing.

It was crazy good, and we highly recommend you give it a go.