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

For the love of Lucien

It's amazing how when you really love someone, you love their baby, even before you've met them. You may remember a while back I made a couple of preggo skirts for my dear friend Niki. Well, she has since hatched her baby - a little Lucien - and though I haven't met him yet, I am besotted. 

I was lucky enough to see Niki for a flying visit just a couple of days before she gave birth. It was beautiful seeing her and her partner, but I was secretly hoping the whole time that she'd go into labour and have a really quick birth so I'd get to meet her bubba before I had to go home. It didn't quite happen like that, but it sure was lovely having a visit, and it was also great to be able to personally deliver the quilt I'd made for little Lucien. 

The baby-quilt-that-doubles-as-a-playmat has become something of a tradition for the very nearest and dearest of babies in my life. I love love love the process of selecting the fabrics and laying them out, incorporating all kinds of bits and bobs to entertain the little bubba (flags, ribbons, tags and the like), and also reflecting a little of what I know of the baby's parents, and what I hope for the baby themselves. And then, of course, I spend hours and hours sewing the whole thing up, imbuing every stitch with a whole lotta love for parents and babies alike. 

In the case of the quilt I made for our friends Ally and Rich's baby, Annie, it was a whole lot of biodiversity and veggies that made the cut, being as they are permies extraordinaire.

For little Mr Lucien, I wanted to incorporate lots of bits of us because I know that, in spite of the love I feel for the little fella and his outstanding mumma, I'm not going to be as present in his life as I'd like, given the tyranny of distance. So I used bits of our clothes. Bits of favourite Olive and Oscar clothes, scraps of fabric from tops and skirts made for Pearl and I, and the back of the quilt is made from a patchwork of flannos - ex shirts and PJ pants for that one-of-a-kind pre-loved snuggliness.

Lucien, I hope your quilt keeps you warm little fella. Can't wait to give you a cuddle x.

Life and Death

Born again farm cat, watching over her veggies

A few months back, my fellow chicken grower/abattoir worker and general farming mentor Mandy said to me "Farming's really all about loss". This seemed like a dire assessment at the time, but I figured she'd know - she and her lovely family run Symphony Farm, which is an amazing, integrated, certified organic property in Tilba. She's been farming her whole life, as has her husband and all their (now grown up) kids.

The last week, we've learned first hand a little bit about what she meant. It's not so much that farming is all about loss - see our last blog post, for an example of the joys - more that your farming life is kind of defined and ruled by loss and the avoidance of it.

A week and a half ago, our then-week-old chicks started dying. They basically haven't stopped. After talking to experienced chicken farmers and hearing the findings of my mum's thorough research, we thought we'd narrowed down the cause of the fatalities to the new rawbale brooder house. Turns out there is a condition affecting young chicks that can be caused by spores that grow in strawbales. We decided this was our problem, so dismantled the brooder house (a humbling experience) and hurriedly built a new brooder out of corrugated iron. The deaths slowed, but still haven't stopped, despite the 2-6 day incubation period having passed.

We've also had days and days of hot weather, which gives us the challenge of keeping the chicks within a safe temperature range - lots of wet towels and water dishes around the place is pretty much the best we can do.

We know some other people who got chicks from the same batch from the hatchery, and they are also having problems. It's not so much that there is a single lot of symptoms affecting all the sick chicks, more just that the chicks seem to be very weak, not resilient, and lacking an appetite. It's upsetting, to be sure, and frustrating because we have no idea how to help the situation and make it stop. All we can do is take extra care (we've set up a little hospital inside our house for the ailing chicks, and have had some success with recoveries) and make sure the chicks are comfortable and eating well - kale, kelp meal, brewers yeast, and apple cider vinegar are all on the menu in addition to their normal rations.

In this midst of all this, we had another, more devastating decline in one of our animals. My beloved cat, Bunn, who has been my cat companion for my whole adult life, went from sleeping a lot (kind of OK given she's an old lady), to not being able to walk, to barely breathing in the space of about 24 hours. After sitting up with her all night, patting her and crying, I made the agonising decision to have her euthanased. We are all very sad. She's been such a constant in our lives, from inner-city alley cat, moving through all my many and varied share houses in the Inner West of Sydney, to born-again farm cat traipsing through the paddocks and enjoying the strawbale windowsills at Autumn Farm. I'm glad that this is her final resting place. She will be missed.

Bunn's last photo - helping the kids with their camp fire, where they were busy cooking a "buffalo leg"

Red oak lettuces were a particular favourite resting spot

And cookbooks in the sun

The night we buried Bunn, our dog Sock - Mr A1 Fox Chaser here at Autumn Farm - was helping me with the chicken rounds when he ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. He broke his tail, and also his pelvis in 3 places. Euthanasia was also on the cards for him, until the vet reconsidered his age. She said she's seen good recoveries from breaks much worse than his, given 12 weeks of cage rest. So more nursing our very sore and sorry pup, who is to be confined in his cage for the next few months dining on vegetable and chicken broth, and chicken hearts and livers.

Sad Mr Sock in his convalescent cage

It's been a sobering, humbling experience for us. We are still so grateful for everything we have, and we know how minor our losses are in the scheme of what some people experience in their lives and on their farms. 

And we do have some beautiful things to be grateful for in spite of the sadness. 8 baby ducklings, abandoned by their mother the day they hatched are now living with us (in our tiny house during the night, and in our veggie garden during the day) after being brought back from near-death with the help of a hot water bottle. 

The ducklings by day - today they've been feasting on lettuce and basil

The ducklings by night, with their cozy hot water bottle 'mummy'

They're cute little things, and a timely reminder that the vagaries of life on a farm aren't all bad, and that life and death are just all part of the grand scheme.

Autumn Farm in 2014

In my last post I mentioned that we had been working on a new rawbale chicken brooder house. The reason for this is that this year at Autumn Farm we're hoping to slowly increase the number of chickens we're growing for our community. 

Last year's chicken farming was a bit of an experiment, to see how we liked it, and how well it fit into the community's food needs/desires. Turns out it was a perfect fit on all fronts: We're sold on the farming thing, we're sold on being part of a local, co-operatively-run abattoir (I'm the new chairwoman!), we're sold on feeding our community locally and ethically produced whole food, and local peeps seem happy with Autumn Farm chicken being a regular part of their diet. Pearl was even interviewed as one of the 'Heroes of 2013' by the local ABC radio! Seriously, we were so proud of this, not least of all because of the other awesome people they picked out.

So yeah, we're going to grow a little. Not heaps - we don't want to overwhelm ourselves, and we don't want to over-burden our land: the aim of the game's regeneration, not overgrazing yo! We're just going to cautiously and slowly seek the balance between demand and what we can happily achieve. 

Step one in this journey was constructing a new brooder house. The old brooder house looked alright, but it was way too small and not that easy to work with. It had no insulation, and we found that the chicks had grown out of it by about 2 weeks. As we head into winter, they're going to need to be in the brooder for around 3 weeks, so we knew we had to make something bigger and better to keep those chickies safe and warm.

Day 1 inside the brooder house - it was HOT! So I added a paella-pan chick wading pool for them to drink out of while also cooling their tootsies. Newspaper is laid on the ground for the first couple of days so they can easily find their food and grit, which we scatter on the paper. Though as you can see, there are quite a few chicks already in the feeder, where they will probably stay for the rest of their days. Those little guys sure like to eat...

Being as we are super-keen on the strawbale, we decided to have a go at a rawbale (as in, unrendered) brooder house. The top of the bales are protected from rain by the roof, and the sides perform a bit like thatch, shedding any rain that hits the sides without allowing it to penetrate the bale. We're anticipating the house will last us a couple of years. When it starts to deteriorate, we'll dismantle it and use it as garden mulch. It's 2 courses of bales high (laid on edge), with a panelled recycled tin and laserlite roof, which we can take apart and tilt up as needed for ventilation and temperature control. There's a gas-powered brooder lamp inside to keep the chickies warm. The bales are pinned at the corners with star pickets hammered through the bales and into the ground, and the whole thing is wrapped in chicken wire. So far, it's been great!

A typical morning inside the brooder house. Yep. They're cute.

The chicks seem very happy in their new, spacious home, though they're still happy for some outside adventuring, which is a relief. It's important that they get a taste for grass/weeds/bugs/dirt as soon as possible, so they don't baulk at the prospect of eating heaps of greenery when they're moved out to pasture full time.

Autumn Farm chicks, 4 days old, venturing from their rawbale brooder house for the first time

In another week, they'll be moving into their new and improved moveable pasture house, which is moved every day to make sure they have fresh bedding. These houses are enclosed in electric mesh (the total run is 100 square metres for 130 chooks - a tad better than their 'free range' counterparts, who are currently enjoying about an A4 page per chook of dirt/poo inside a shed), which is moved every 3 days, so they have fresh green pick, and to make sure they don't over-excavate our land in their quest for fresh dust-baths.

It's a labour-intensive way to farm chickens, there's no doubt about it. And there were times (like after spending an hour and a half carrying the chickens to bed one night when they couldn't find the door to their newly-moved house) when I could definitely see the benefits to raising chickens conventional-style, in a shed. But the rest of the time, as we watched them on the grass, hanging out, doing chicken stuff, foraging, flapping etc, and then when we tasted them, we knew that labour-intensive pasture-raising is THE ONLY WAY TO GO.

Which is why we're doing it some more.

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.

Ah pâté... Ain't nobody don't like pâté...

I'm not sure when I first ate pâté, but I must have been young. I seem to have many childhood memories of devouring a lot of pâté. I don't know if they're real imaginings or as frequent as I recall, but I can still taste that deliciously unique creamy richness. As a child I piled the crackers high with big chunks of the stuff and this is the way I eat it now. Nothing delicate here. 

Truth be told, I didn't eat pâté for years and years. That stuff with jellied peppercorns atop it in plastic packaging has never really appealed and eating liver from an animal of dubious sources freaks me out. It feels like pâté is pretty much bad fashion on a plate these days, which means we are either very much behind the times or very much cutting edge here because we have been eating A LOT of pâté here at Autumn Farm. And why not? We have access to some pretty delectable pasture raised chicken's livers these days. And to make this story even more feel good, it is said that liver is the most nutritionally dense food you can eat. A-mazing. 

When people buy our whole chickens they can also get hearts, livers, feet, gizzards, necks by the kilo. While lots of the bits end up as pet food, the orders started coming in for the livers with people telling me, 'I'm going to have a go at making some pâté..." Pâté?! Oh wow, that taste of my childhood returned to me and I got a little bit pâté curious. Then I read this lovely post and my return to pâté was confirmed. My childhood pâté memories centre around my parent's dinner parties and family lunches, and then there was that brioche and pâté extravaganza at my mum's 40th birthday party... Annie's childhood pâté memories are of a more Germanic variety. At her Oma and Opa's she ate a lot of liverwurst on black rye with radish or mustard. At home, she ate it on white with pickles. How we both eat it now is entirely influenced by those formative experiences.  

My preferred mode - on toasty sourdough with leaves and tomatoes from the garden

Annie's preference is with homemade pickles

I'm still amazed that something so luxuriously delicious could be so cheap and easy to make. Sadly I think my amazement just reveals how out of touch with eating simply and well we have become in the west. We are supremely lucky in that we have a ready supply of chicken livers we feel very comfortable consuming. Annie's work at the abattoir has confirmed for us just how good our livers are. Our chickens have livers of deep deep red and they smell sweet. Some other chickens that have consumed a different diet and lived a different life have livers that appear, well, sick and pale browny coloured, and they smell yuck. I know I know, some of you may be wondering where you can get these sweet smelling livers from? If you don't live in the Bega valley then I cannot really say. You need to find yourselves a butcher who can guarantee the provenance of the meat they're selling you. If you're in Sydney, you would want to try these fine fellas. 

The pâté recipe I have been using is a little fusion of what we have at home + Emily's + Matthew Evans + a little bit of internet searching... and it goes a little something like this - 

250g butter (Bega butter of course!)

2-3 brown onions, finely chopped

3-4 garlic cloves, crushed

5 sprigs of thyme

2 sprigs rosemary

a small sprig of sage

500g chicken livers

a splash of red or white wine or port

Slowly cook onions in the butter until onion is soft but not brown. Add the herbs and garlic and cook a little longer. Add the livers and cook for 15 minutes until livers are cooked through. Add a splash of wine or port and cook for a few minutes more. Add a little salt and pepper to taste. Then blend in a food processor until smooth. 

How easy is that?!

I read somewhere that it freezes and thaws really really well. I ask you, can this story get any better?

Basically we have had a continuous supply of pâté the past four months and we're so not sick of it yet. We've had many visitors from Sydney and I've fed them all pâté. I like to think of it as a little something special we can offer our friends from the big smoke. It's true, we don't have fine theatre or cinema or very much hustle bustle but we do have very fine pâté. And we also have very fine beaches and what could be finer beach food than pâté on sourdough, with a little home grown cherry tomato chaser? Seriously good stuff, the kind of stuff that makes my heart sing.   

Eating pate' while gazing upon this feels pretty good

A graduation dress for Carly

Last session at Uni, I had the absolute pleasure of having my friend Carly in my class. Not only is she an awesomely funny, dynamic and lovely person, but she's also the smartest person I've ever taught. This was good - smart people are always great to have in class - but also intimidating and challenging, though ultimately rewarding.

When Carly came to me with a request to make her a dress for graduation, I was thrilled and honoured. She brought a dress for me to copy, which she'd found at the op-shop, and we picked out some fabric from the stash (the last of the Temora Hospital nurses' quarters curtains, also seen here and here), then Carly went home and left me to it.

When I pulled out the dress and actually looked closely at it, I completely freaked out. It felt way too hard, way beyond my capabilities, and way more tricky than anything I'd ever made before. There were too many different kinds of panels, in-built pockets with pleats and a split up the back. I had the phone in my hand to text Carly to tell her I couldn't do it, when I thought, "What the hey! I'll give it a go! The worst that'll happen is that it's a major disaster and I've wasted a bit of fabric, but I can always chop it up and make something for the kids."

So I put on some music and sat down to (carefully!) cut out the dress. I took my time and concentrated, I used mathematical trajectory calculations (kind of..) to work out all the pieces, because I wasn't allowed to take the original dress apart to make a pattern. And then I sewed it all up and tried it on... 

And  it was lovely!!!!

Carly was stoked, and looked frikkin gorgeous in it, so was (appropriately) the star of the Uni of Gong's 2013 graduating cohort. I felt proud of Carly, and proud of myself for rising to the challenge of not piking out on the dress before I'd even started. Thanks Carly for giving me the opportunity to challenge myself both in the classroom and at the sewing machine: You're a rock-star, lady!!!