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.

Community food continues

It's been a  month since we started our Community Food Challenge in earnest. I'd say we're going pretty well! During the last month, in addition to challenging ourselves in the food ethics department,  we've also had some adventures in mushroom foraging, a mastectomy and some time in hospital, many many helpful visitors (bringing delicious, nutritious, local treats like oysters and foraged mushrooms), we've processed a batch of Autumn Farm chickens, and Pearl, with the help of our visitors and local helpers, has done an amazing job of maintaining the farm as I recuperate from my surgery. So yeah, it's been a busy, emotionally crazy kind of time.

In the food stakes, we've revelled in the joys of our community food endeavours, but we've also broken our own rules a few times. The culprits? Nori (the kids love it and it's REALLY good for them), raw organic cacao and coconut butter (it's delicious and has anti-oxidants in it... I know.... weeeeak...), and I believe Pearl at some point bought some discount corn thins for the kids while she was in the supermarket getting toilet paper.

I actually feel OK about these slips, and we're certainly not beating ourselves up about it. We're too busy enjoying the deliciousness and satisfaction of the vast majority of the food we're eating. Here's a little bit of what's been on our plates:

Home-made pork and fennel sausages with locally grown red cabbage and mashed potatoes, with lentils and herbs.

Home-grown eggs scrambled with home-grown leafies and herbs, sliced, just-picked tomato and foraged mushies courtesy of our mate Liz.

Eggs poached in home-grown tomato stew with herbs and local jersey feta.

Eggs poached in home-grown tomato stew with herbs and feta

The kids, Gab and I also had a rather successful mushrooming haul a couple of days before I went into hospital (much more successful, but no less fun, than our mushrooming ventures of last Autumn). It was a drizzly saturday when we all set off for the pines, to see if we could nab ourselves some pine mushrooms. We only found 2 of the pine mushrooms (Gab had them with poached eggs on toast), but we did find 2 baking trays full of slippery jacks!

I've never had slippery jacks before, and some of the accounts I read online weren't too enticing. One writer even went so far as to write that given the amount of time it takes to prepare them for eating (you have to peel off the top slime, and some people recommend peeling of the pores from the underside - I did both), and their kind of bland, slimy texture, they're not really worth the effort. Here, I have to disagree. I reckon they maybe just weren't cooking them to their best effect.

A little more research revealed that this kind of mushroom isn't the kind you just fry up and eat by the truckload like some other kinds. It's most commonly revered by Eastern Europeans, who like to cook them up into a stew. So Pearl fried ours up with some home-cured bacon, home-grown eschallots and garlic, and then used that as a base for a pearl barley, beef bone broth and rosemary stew. Nothing short of amazing and definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt worth the peeling. Not to mention the fun we had picking them, in a beautiful setting, with beautiful people, which was worth all the work just by itself!

Happy kids and their mushroom haul

The bone broth we used in the stew was something that had been cooked up to assist with my healing after surgery. A few days before I went into hospital for my mastectomy, we started cooking up a bone-broth of certified organic pasture-raised beef bones, courtesy of our friends the Thompsons at Symphony Farm. We cooked it over the fire for about 12 hours, then again on the stove for maybe another 12, to draw out all the super-goodness. While I was in hospital, Pearl continued the brew, adding veggies and garlic and tons and tons of kale. It. Was. Delicious. And nutritious. Luckily for me I was allowed to come home the day after my surgery, so I was able to enjoy this as my convalescing food for the days after my surgery, as opposed to the nutritionally devoid and most certainly not local (processed, packaged and frozen in Goulburn, in fact) hospital food. Perfect.

And I'm pretty sure that the setting for the cooking of the bone broth also contributed to its awesomeness. I was also really glad to be home, healing in my own place, with my loved ones nearby.

Have you had any fun, satisfying, delicious community food adventures lately?

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??

Hilary's growing frock and spiced mandarins

Yesterday was a beautiful day. It was sunny, but not too hot, and I spent the morning sewing and preserving. What fun!

Preserved mandarin segments in spiced syrup

First up was a dress for Hilary, who needed something to see her through all the gigs she has booked in the lead-up to the birth of her second child.

She was after a simple A-line dress with capped sleeves that she could wear on stage, sometimes over jeans, and then layer up as the weather gets cooler. Oh, and of course the dress needed pockets, as all the best frocks have.

vintage floral pockets

The result is a bias-cut A-line dress, cut extra wide in the front, but with a tie at the back so that it can grow as required, and then be pulled back in once the bubba is born. The brown spotty is the last of a queen size quilt cover I picked up at some stage, that has seen me through quite a lot of sewing projects. I love the irregular polka-dot! The dress has doily cap sleeves (thanks Zara!) and pockets from a vintage floral print. 

doily sleeves and stripey bias binding

Turns out that Hilary and I are exactly the same size, so I got to try the dress on to make sure it was alright. I checked I could fit a pretty big bump in the front (yes!) and then contemplated keeping it for myself, as I very often do when I make something I particularly like for a similar-sized lady. 

Tie at the back to make it just the right size, all through the growing

Once the dress was all done, I set to work preserving some mandarins that came our way recently. Last week sometime we came home to a big bag full of mandarins sitting on our outside table. We had no idea where they came from - there was no note or signal of any kind - but we were grateful nonetheless and immediately ate several each. A few days ago Oscar and I were across the road picking native raspberries (yes! It's that time of year!! I love that we can tell the date by what we're picking and eating off the side of the road) and our neighbour's dad came up and asked us if we'd like more mandarins. Mystery solved and yes please! But what to do with them all? While they are tiny and delicious, there's only so many a family of four can put away. I thought some preserved segments in some kind of sugar syrup would make a pretty great winter dessert teamed with Tilba Jersey cream, so here's what I did:

First up, I sterilised my jars in boiling water. 

While they were boiling away, I peeled the mandarins, getting rid of all the white stuff. That stuff is the pits, though I did force myself to eat it when I was pregnant because apparently it has something good in it... 

Then, I made my sugar syrup, which was about 2 parts sugar to 5 parts water. I added to this a couple of cloves, a star anise and half a cinnamon stick, which I fished out of our chai mix for extra tastiness. 

When the sugar was dissolved I packed the mandarin segments into the jars, poured over the syrup, then closed up the jars and boiled them in a water bath for 20 minutes. 

I haven't tasted any yet (gonna wait 'til fresh mandarins are all gone and I'm hankering for some sweet citrus) but they sure do look purdy.

A little bit of Spring

A little bit of Spring bounty..

We've had some sickness in our tiny house lately. Weeks of it. Fluey, pneumonic kind of illness. Consequently, things have been slow in these parts as we've all been decrepit. Yet despite the decrepit, we have managed to observe and celebrate the advent of Spring. 

Cause for great celebration has been the big rain we've had. Joy oh joys. Bloody great. I laugh at myself a little now when I think about how obsessed I am with checking the rainfall. It never would have occurred to me when we lived in Sydney. Now I talk to everyone about it, which works fine when talking to people around town. But I must admit I do get a little self conscious when I catch myself recounting our rainfall in mm's to our Sydney friends. However when you've just planted 800 native trees and shrubs and you rely on tank water and you have year old fruit trees that you are hoping to see some serious growth on this Summer and you have vegetables to grow and Summer time garden beds to create, well rain does become all. 

One recent Sunday, before the big rain, we'd had a little rain (25mm in case you're curious). Our coughs were almost gone, the air was mild and the raindrops in the trees were glistening in the morning sun. It felt good. We'd just noticed the globe artichokes were coming on and the broad beans were standing to attention. Huzzah! Let the Spring eating begin. Excellent. We've probably talked about it before, but there is real joy to be found in eating seasonally. Not to get too ranty, but we just don't need tomatoes and watermelon in July. We just don't. They don't taste good, they'e come from far away and it's so weird, this concept that we can have what we want whenever we want. Not to get all Socialist mumma on you, but I can't help but feel that this devastating sense of entitlement will be our undoing. We've been eating a lot of kale, cabbage, root veg, chard, pumpkin (still working our way through our Autumn haul)and leek lately so the growth of the broad beans and artichokes is cause for some joy. New flavours, new recipes, new eating, new ideas, new conversations.... what could be better? 

Beautiful sight of the artichoke

Meatballs with broad beans and lemon

I had been waiting for the broad beans because I was wanting to cook the meatballs with broad beans and lemon from Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's Jerusalem. They suggest it makes a perfect Spring supper, and we'd have to agree. Truly truly delicious. This is my favourite kind of food. Food that is rooted in the seasons, real food with real flavour. It's easy to make with what's fresh in the garden and the spices in the cupboard. We will eat it many times this Spring but only while the broad beans and spring onions flourish in the garden and local lemons abound. 

There were about six globe artichokes ready for the picking. Just six. There are many more to come but as you'd probably know, you can't wait for the littlies to be ready because in that time the artichoke heart will turn to flower. Beautiful purply blue flower but heartless flower nonetheless. So while it felt a little ridiculous to be processing just six artichokes, preserve them I did. We'd been studying Preserving the Italian Way for pig recipes. Yes, pig. We bought a pig from a friend and made many wonderful things with it (yes this will be a post, soon) But of course preserving the Italian way is about more than just the pig, so we turned to it for artichoke inspiration. It's very simple really. You peel the artichokes back to their heart, leaving them in floury water (to stop them browning) while you peel the rest. Then boil them up for 5 or so minutes in a mix of water, white wine vinegar, lemon juice, cloves, bay leaves and garlic. Then leave to cool and drain for hours and hours. Then put in a jar with some olive oil. One jar is all we got, this time. But this week there'll be another seven artichokes and a few weeks later there'll be more and so on. By the time Summer hits, we may well have stocked up on several jars and they will provide some good eating on pizzas and in salads this Summer. 

The first jar

Apparently you can preserve scotch thistles in the same way as artichokes. Have you ever tried such a thing? Of course, they are related but little did I know you could eat an actual thistle. Apparently you need to catch the thistle just before it flowers. Annie and Olive and Oscar traversed the land in search of some scotch thistle at this very juncture in its life cycle. Strangely they only found a couple. I gave it a good try, carefully peeling back the prickly "leaves" but ended up with a thistle heart so small it made no sense to preserve it. I thought maybe we'd picked it too early? But any later and they'd be flowering. We've got some more thistles, on the brink, so maybe this week I'll give it another go.

in pursuit of the thistle

It feels as though we are a little behind in our summertime garden preparations. Weeks of coughing will do that to you. Weeks of coughing and pigs to process and pastured poultry enterprises to establish and lovely guests to host will all delay the Spring planting... Oh yes, there are plenty more stories to come...

Welcome back, dear stinging nettles

Olive and I were up on the road yesterday, gathering a wheelbarrow full of sand for the base of our wood fired oven, when I noticed some bright green, kind of luscious looking patches in the pasture at the farm across the road.

My hunch told me they were stinging nettles, and closer inspection proved my instinct to be correct. Hooray!

Just one of the many beautiful nettle patches

Discovering the delectable joys of the stinging nettle has been a highlight of our foraging and weed-eating adventures. In the spirit of seasonal eating, however, we haven't had any for a while, so when I saw those sweet sweet bright green nettle plants yesterday, I knew that nettle soup and/or risotto and/or pasta would be on our home menu sooner rather than later. Tonight, in fact!

Collecting nettles is fun, in that forage-y kind of way (goes something like this: Free food! Wandering around some place you don't normally go unless you're looking for free food! Anticipating the deliciousness you're soon going to be enjoying!). A bonus on this particular forage were these enormous mushrooms that were also enjoying the neighbour's cow pasture. 

My complete lack of mushroom-identification skills and a pretty strong desire to not poison my entire family made me leave the mushrooms alone, however. I was content to just give them a sniff (mmm... mushroom-smell...) and have a little daydream about some day in the future when I am a super-competent mushroom-identifying guru. Also, I had a big bowl of nettles to enjoy! One culinary pleasure at a time eh?

The gloves don't come off til the nettles are cooked

The good thing about nettles is that they're so delicious you don't really need to do much to them to enjoy. Here's my method to turn a big bowl full of nettles into dinner for the family and a jar of pesto to give to a friend:

1. Give your nettle leaves a bit of a wash. Ours came from a cow paddock, so I wanted to get rid of any cow poo and wee hanging around on the leaves.

2. Boil them for a few minutes to get rid of the sting-factor. It's not super delicious...

3. Toast some nuts. I used almonds and macadamias and a few pine nuts.

4. Whiz up the nettles, the nuts, about 5 cloves of garlic, some olive oil and some parmesan in a food processor.

5. Stir the nettle pesto into cooked pasta with some halved cherry tomatoes (I know - we're lucky) and some torn basil leaves (yep - really lucky) and feel your heart swell with joy as you watch your family devouring the bowls of super-nutrition you have prepared.

Even the kids love it

Yay!

mushrooms and other surprises

Last saturday the kids and I went with my friend Liz to Rocky Hall. The purpose of the trip was to try to find some pine mushrooms - our very first mushroom foraging adventure! I was pumped. Liz knew a place in Rocky Hall, about an hour south-west of Bega, that was, last Autumn and the Autumn before, covered in mushrooms. She didn't need to persuade me to make the trip out there, either. Rocky Hall is one of my favouritest places around these parts. Not that there's a lot there... maybe that's what I like about it. It's kind of wild... and ancient... and it has a certain feeling about it that I can't at all describe, but that resonates with me somehow. I suppose if I was a bit more woo woo, I'd say I'd "been there before", though I'm not 100% convinced that is the reason. Let's just say I dig it, for no real tangible reason, and leave it at that, shall we?

Aha! A pine mushroom... Apparently the only pine mushroom in the whole of Rocky Hall

On the mushroom front, however, Rocky Hall failed to deliver this particular Saturday. OK... we found one pine mushroom not far from Liz's old house, and we found this cool fungus as well, and there was an offer of a magic mushroom, but the heaving fry-pans full of butter and garlic and sizzling pine mushrooms failed to happen. Most likely, it's because it's not been such a wet season. Other foragers, like the writer of my favourite favourite blog, The Forager's Year, are reporting similar disappointments.

Cool fungus, happily photographed by Olive. If only it were edible...

Not to worry. The trip was fairly awash with consolation prizes, such as a dip in the creek, and big big pine trees to climb, and fairy gardens to discover and lunch at Liz's friend Susie's super-cute little cottage, which is nestled into the side of a little gully, looking for all the world like it's been there for ever. The house itself is not at all dissimilar in size, shape or stature to our own little Buckajo Bothy. When we arrived, I felt like I was seeing the property that's been in my mind's eye since I was about 15 - the kind of place I always thought I'd build - complete with covered gardens and massive fruit trees and eucalypts and slow-burning stove and lots and lots of bush and a gorgeous, rocky, rambling creek. The eery familiarity of the place prompted me to think about our own piece of land, which is so much more open than Susie's gully, and the differences in the houses (hers is red cedar clad, not strawbale), and the beauty of an established garden and a house that's been lived and created in for years and years. The whole time we were there (and for a few days afterwards) I reflected on the differences and similarities, and the ways in which dreams become reality. We are now, quite literally, building our dreams. We're working towards a vision that seems so real and solid to me... But seeing Susie's house made me realise how dreams can also change and evolve, depending on what the world throws at you, which I guess is what makes things exciting. It was a funny, unexpected kind of realisation to have on our failed mushrooming adventure, but I was grateful for it. 

A dip in this creek was a pretty good consolation prize

On the way home we stopped off to take a picture of Rocky Hall Cemetery, which I had fallen in love with, at first sight, about a year ago when I first saw it. Some people think it's weird for me to be thinking about such things, but I knew when I first laid eyes on it that this is where I want to be buried. It's peaceful, and kind of wild. It has a little gazebo and an old 44 gallon drum as a garbage bin. It has a looming rocky, scrubby hill, and there are only about 20 people buried there.

Rocky Hall Cemetery - my final resting place.

Hopefully next time we head down that way, the mushrooming will be more productive. But even if it's not, I know there will be a multitude of other adventures and surprises that will be pretty awesome consolations.

The harvest we almost didn't have

It takes a while for Summer to really hit in these parts. It's not 'til Christmas time that we find ourselves properly immersed in the heat of the Summertime. And it's about this time that we start to see blackberries everywhere, everywhere, everywhere growing fat on their brambles. Last Summer, our first summer here, was also our first excursion into the joys and pain of blackberry picking and preserving.  This Summer we spied the darkening and fattening berries with excited anticipation of true and immense deliciousness. We'd decided to embrace the handy tips in our new bible, The Weed Foragers Handbook to "... stomp down on the highest canes in your path using them to flatten to the ground all the canes beneath them. Do this with each step into the bushes' centre and you'll quickly triple your collecting area..." Ok so we were ready. Then the heat really hit. 45 degree days with hot North Westerly winds do not a happy blackberry make. Everywhere we looked we saw fried dried blackberries and yes, it was a little despondent making. 

Then one day Annie was wandering around our land, down low in the gully and spied a perfect vision across the fence. On the south facing slope hung a wall of blackberries, a veritable avalanche of berries cascading over to a sea of wild growing watercress. Wow. Thank you lush cool micro-climate for saving our blackberry 'harvest'. It is quite amazing how a little less sun and a bit more moisture can result in such a profound change in eco-system, such that the edibles are growing in wild abundance whereas literally a few metres away, it's all dried up and brown. 

wall of blackberries

sea of watercress

We didn't need our handy blackberry picking tip this year as these blackberries literally fall into our hands. We've been picking bowlfuls and jamming up a storm.

Oh the deep purple delight

I used the same recipe as last Summer but have learnt my lesson and now cook it for no longer than an hour. The result is less thick, but better. And yep, the kids love it...

Olive and jam

Huon, Oscar and jam

We've also invented a rather delicious dessert gozleme of blackberries, honey, mint and fetta. It is superb. 

And we've been eating a lot of blackberry breakfast pikelets with locally foraged peaches, Brett's passionfruit, yoghurt and maple syrup or honey. These are also superb and so easy to make. 

This seeming over-indulgence is what I love most about eating seasonally. For us now, it's all about tomatoes, zucchini, basil, corn, beans, greens, blackberries, blueberries and peaches. We're eating so much of it that I won't be sorry when this Summer bounty ends. In fact I will be relieved to move onto the pomme fruit, root veg and brassicas of the cooler months. Then just when I think I can't bear to eat another cabbage or cauliflower we will be in asparagus, pea, broad bean, artichoke and leafy green land and back on the brink of the Summer bounty. And by this time I know I will be seriously yearning for some tomato and basil action. For now we are really enjoying what we have, it feels like true abundance. 

Blackberry breakfast pikelets

(serves 4)

200g flour (I use whatever we have so sometimes it's all white, sometimes a halfy mix of some kind of wholemeal and white)

2 tspns of baking powder

1/2 cup rapadura sugar

2-3 eggs, beaten

400ml milk or buttermilk or a yoghurt milk combo

butter for cooking

Blackberries (also works super-well with other berries, especially foraged ones like native raspberries. They are just tastier when they're free)

Stir dry ingredients into a large bowl and make a well. Pour eggs into the well and then slowly add milk. Depending on the flour you use you might need less or more milk. You want a smooth, not too runny batter.

Heat a heavy based frypan and add butter. When the butter starts to bubble from the heat, drop in spoonfuls, when bubbles start to appear on uncooked side, drop blackberries onto them and flip over. Keep warm until all are cooked.