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.

This could actually be the most perfect early Summer meal...

We have been eating very very well lately. Lots of very local meats and cheeses, vegetables and Summer fruits. The best way to eat. Very real, very delicious. Meanwhile we've embarked on our own little lifestyle project which is about committing to primarily eating our own produce or that which we have bought (or traded) directly with the producer. We're a ways off yet. And really, we're not sure we'll ever get there entirely. But that's ok, it's the striving we like, and the thrill when we hit the locavore jackpot. We've discussed this here and here and here and here and here and more... Ah yes it is a bit of a recurring theme. Our little life goal is made all the more easy by the fact we grow our own pastured chickens now so we have a ready supply of delicious meat we can eat or trade with other pasture-based meat producers. 

Actually on the subject of pasture raised animals, since we've been lucky enough to raise our own or eat those raised by others we know, I have been enjoying a new kind of deliciousness. It's the sweety sweetness of the pasture raised. It seems the better the life the animal has had and the less stress on its "one bad day" then the sweeter the meat. By golly, this has transformed my understanding of just how very wonderful, some food can taste. 

We're not so caught up with the notion that we need to raise and grow and make and produce everything ourselves. To a large extent, yes, we are energised and inspired by developing new skills and learning about new ways of feeding ourselves. However we also relish being a part of our local economy and helping to strengthen the interconnectedness within our community so we enjoy supporting and sharing with other growers, producers, makers... 

As I was saying, we have this guiding ethic but we don't always succeed and to be perfectly honest sometimes we don't want to succeed. For example, the other night we ate duck. It was prepared from a recipe provided by our friend Niki. She said it was the taste of her childhood. Really, it was freaking delicious in its sweetish soy, tamarind, coriander goodness. We stir fried beans from the garden and had it with big mounds of soft steaming white Jasmine rice. We could have avoided the soft whitey rice from Thailand. Yes we could have stuck firm to our ethic-in-progress but the meal wouldn't have been the same. That rice was the best damn treat ever and went so frikkin well with our local duck and our local garlicky beans. What's my point? Sometimes we "fail" because we have little choice and sometimes we "fail" when we have all the choice in the world and we just want that delicious thing from overseas. We are human after all. I just read a nice little piece by Milkwood on a similar theme - The Ethics of Almost. 

Oh but I digress, the intention of this post was to discuss the amazingly triumphant meal we made a little while back. It was a triumph in flavour, joy and eating local ethics. 

We got a little bit Maggie Beer with one of our pasture raised chickens. Have I told you how delicious our chickens are? Yeah they are seriously good. The seriously good chicken was cut up and mixed with olive oil, salt, rosemary, our own pancetta and preserved lemons and baked. Everything but the S & P was local as... Then we dug up a couple of handfuls of potatoes and par-boiled them, rolled them in olive oil and added them to the crispifying chicken pancetta goodness. 

For the salad we cooked up some wonderful beetroots from our friend Thea, mixed them with greens from the garden, toasted sunflower seeds, lemon juice , balsamic reduction and a little bit of labna that I'd made that afternoon. Gosh, how I love yoghurt cheese. 

All in all, a truly splendid meal. In fact I do believe it was early Summer far south coast perfection. 

"Is this meat?"

We've been doing a bit of meat processing of late - pigs, lambs and, of course, chickens. The kids have been with us all the way, interested and enthralled by the process, and it's prompted them to become quite engaged with the question of what meat actually is. Oscar in particular went through a process of trying to discern what else in his life might be considered a meat possibility. Pointing at the dog: "Is this meat?" Pointing to his cheek: "Is this meat?" The answer to his question, of course, is that what can be considered 'meat' is completely subjective and socially determined.

Slow-cooked Spanish style wild rabbit stew, made using home-cured chilli pancetta, served with soft polenta. A 'normal' kind of 'meat', but why?

Oscar,  having not been at all socialised to reject certain kinds of meat potentials, is all for considering the possibilities. For this reason, he was the only person in our family to try the lamb's tongue. He loved it! Gulping it down from a little yellow tea cup while watching Gourmet Farmer on DVD.

Oscar enjoying his cup o' tongue

He was also the one who prompted me to consider the meat potential of chicken necks, which I regularly bring home from the abattoir for making stock, which we use in everything, but most deliciously, in congee. 

One day, after the stock was done and packaged and safely deposited into the freezer, Oscar came upon the colander of chicken necks, onions and celery tops. "What's this? A sausage?" he asked, holding up one of the necks. "Yeah, kind of." I replied, at which point he started chomping on it. The upside to his adventurousness is that he now has a super-nutritious snack of 'neck sausages' every time I make stock, and I discovered that necks actually have heaps of meat on them. So now, when I make the stock, I spend 10 minutes or so afterwards stripping the necks into a neat little parcel of beautiful, cooked chicken meat for sandwiches or soup or whatever. Yum!

When we recently processed our lamb, I was keen to make use of the lamb's head, which I knew would contain quite a bit  of meat - too much to discard, for sure.

The lamb's head. Most of the meat came from the cheek areas

The answer came in the form of a Iranian breakfast soup called Kaleh Pacheh, which is traditionally made with the head and the hoofs of the lamb. For some reason the hoofs were fed to the dogs, so I just used the head. I used the recipe in the link above, though I added some apple cider vinegar to help get the goodies out of the bones. We cooked it (overnight!) in our pizza oven, so it was a nice long, slow cook. Next day, I stripped the skull of all its meat and stirred it through the broth.

Kaleh Pacheh - served with a squeeze of lemon and a freshly-cooked home-made flatbread

The resulting soup was a gorgeous green colour, not too chunky, herby, and quite rich. It's got an interesting flavour, and though I don't mind having things like congee with poached eggs for breakfast, I don't know that I'll be rushing to have Kaleh Pacheh first thing in the morning, though it made a delicious light lunch.

Leftover congee with poached eggs - possibly my favourite breakfast

Despite my attempts to challenge my "is this meat?" socialisation, I didn't taste the tongue, and I didn't put the eyeballs in the soup. Which made me realise how strong and pervasive this socialisation is. Here I am, philosophically and ethically completely in favour of eating all bits, and I still had insurmountable "ew" about the eyeballs and tongue. Interesting.

Next stop on our "is this meat?" adventure is my Oma's braun, which we are making from the head of our pig, which is safely waiting in the freezer. I'm excited - I know it will be delicious - but also apprehensive about overcoming my 'ew' enough to use and eat the tongue, to get all the hair off the pig's head, clean out the ear wax etc... But I'm up for it. We have to be, because we all waste so much, and a socialised 'ew' to perfectly good, readily available, local food is something worth challenging.