Spring 1st

The view from the kitchen window

In this picture there is grass.  Finally, grass!  Tomorrow is the first day of Spring and with it the promise of new growth.  Platitudes aside we are very pleased to now have at least patches of our place that are dry enough to move the cows on to.  I think Gen ate solidly for two hours - they've been eating hay and baleage but clearly there is nothing quite like grass.  Six lambs and two kids so far with many more to come.  The does each had a pedicure today - the constant mud does nothing for their hooves, imagine keeping your hand in the dishwashing liquid for several weeks and you get the picture.  It (thus far) hasn't been a very cold winter and, while it has been wet, it has felt like Spring for a while.  The hens are in full lay and the citrus trees in the Food Forest are covered in fruit.  The rhubarb plants have leaves about two inches long and there are two marigolds out.  Two almond trees are flowering and there are several plum trees about to burst into blossom.  Even a crazy feijoa bush has a flower.

Our desserts are frequently based on lemons and eggs at this time of year.  Lemon bars are sooo scrummy and (too) morish.

Lemon bars

3/4 cup white chocolate buttons or bits

1/2 cup butter (half fill a cup with cold water and use Archimede's principle to fill the cup with butter)

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup lemon juice

1  3/4 cup flour

Icing:

2 cups icing sugar

1/3 cup lemon juice, more-or-less

Grated lemon rind

Pre-heat oven to 175 deg C.  Greae a 20cm by 20cm baking tray and line with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate and the butter in the microwave or in a pot over boiling water.  White chocolate is very easy to burn so watch carefully.

Allow to cool slightly.  Lightly beat the eggs and add them to the chocolate and butter mix.  Add the suar and the juice and stir until well-mixed.  Add the flour and stir until the ingredients are just combined.  

Pour the batter into the baking pan, smooth and cook for between 25 and 30 minutes until a skewer comes out clean when inserted in the middle.  Allow to cool.

To make the icing:

Whisk the icing sugar and the lemon juice until smooth, adding more juice if necessary.  

Spread over the slice whilst still in the baking pan.  Sprinkle grated lemon rind over the icing.  Refrigerate for at least three hours - overnight is better.  Cut into pieces and enjoy.  This is a good recipe to freeze.

You have got to be kidding!

Emerald with her brand new kids

Our first kids for the season greeted us when we got home tonight.  Emmy was the second Saanen goat we bought in 2011.  She was very shy when we got her but over the years she has become very tame.  Baby goats have got to be one of the cutest baby animals on the farm.  Our six black lambs are cute (with their white tails and white noses) but goat babies are just special.  To us they really announce Spring, so we're hoping for a spell of nice weather so that a few more are born.  These littlies have fresh straw in their house and will no doubt be tucked up with several of the other goat "aunts" tonight and be snuggly warm - it feels like there will be a frost tonight, but at least it is not raining.  Yay!!!!

Since I spent much time outside at dusk, sneaking cuddles and spraying navels (with iodine to keep out the nasties that hide in the mud) and generally praising Emmy, dinner was, of necessity going to have to be something quick. That was the plan anyway.  We had left-over Bolognese sauce, some home-made feta cheese and had harvested the first mesclun salad from the greenhouse.  I was also making tortillas.  This was the slow bit and I should have made them much earlier.  But, they were the best tortillas I have ever made!  Some of them weren't pretty and their rollability was a little dodgy but yum yum yum.  The ones that were a little holey were stacked - perfect solution.

Tortillas (makes 16, so freeze some)
6 cups flour
1t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 a cup of butter, cut into small piece
2 1/2 cups of warm water

Place the flour, salt and baking powder in the bowl of a mixer.  Unless you have a very large food processor, you will find it too small.   Add the pieces of butter and run the mixer with a k-beater until the mix is like breadcrumbs.  Slowly pour in the water with the motor running and leave it beating on slow for about a minute and a half.  Remove all mixture from the bowl and place on a floured board.  Very lightly knead the dough with a little extra flour if necessary so that it is no longer sticky.  Cut the dough in half and leave in a warm place for about half an hour.  Cut each half into eight and either roll into little balls or cubes.  Rollout thinly until each piece is  the size of a frying pan.  Stack them, interleaved with greaseproof or baking paper and leave for another 15 minutes.   (You can see now why it was a little slower than I had planned).  Fry them one at a time in a frying pan - I used oil but butter would also do - for a few minutes on each side.  They will loosen from the bottom and bubble when a side is cooked.

Depending on how well you have managed to get the tortillas into the frying pan roll them with a meat or chicken sauce filling, salad vegetables and crumbled feta (or some grated cheese) or stack them on a platter with the fillings between the layers.

Over the weather - or under the weather?

Black currants are so easy to grow and freeze (the picking not so much).  We have recently moved many of our bushes to the Food Forest and sold the remainder to those willing to come and dig them out.  The later diggers found it much more difficult than those who came earlier - the suction power of water has to be seen to be believed.  No sooner were the bushes out of the ground than the holes filled up with water.  Dragging the bushes out of the currant garden to the trailers and cars waiting was a mission through the bog that the area has become.   When it dries out, the ex-currant garden will become another paddock for grazing in our quest to be totally self-sufficient and sustainable.

After a week of being in the company of coughing and spluttering students I thought I should try and boost my immune system with a little extra vitamin C.  I say a little extra because heat destroys vitamin C pretty quickly so it's more of a comfort than anything else.   Writing this in the middle of winter means that there are no fresh currants but the frozen are just as good.   If we are going to use currants (red or black for juice or jellies) the fruit is just bagged, tagged and frozen.  If we want to make jam then the process is a little more careful - de-strigging red currants is easier if the fruit is frozen first and sorting the black currants is best done with company!

Making cordial is a good thing.  If you want less sugar, you can use less sugar.  If you want more lemon juice, you can add more lemon juice.   You can use red or black currants for this recipe or as I did in today's batch, use both.  The recipe is easily halved or doubled.

Currant cordial (PdB)

1 kg currants
500g sugar
500ml water
Juice and skin of 2 lemons

 Peel the lemons with a potato peeler and squeeze the juice into a large pot.  Add the currants, fresh or frozen, the sugar and the water.    Bring to the boil and simmer for about 5 minutes.  Add the peeled skin and the lemon halves themsleves.  Bring back to the boil and simmer for another 5 minutes.  Depending on how much time you have, you can let the mix cool, then run the juice through a jelly bag.   If you are in a hurry, you can carefully strain the fruit through a sieve.  If you are not too pushy, the reserved fruit can be saved to serve with yoghurt or added to apple for a pie or a crumble.

If you are pushy and push the fruit through the sieve until you can get no more juice, the resulting cordial will be thick enough to serve over ice cream etc.
However you strain it, use a funnel to fill sterilised bottles and seal.  You will need to keep the bottles in the fridge.

Pumpkin Pie - no, make mine a gnocchi

On the garden front the seedlings are popping up.  The small greenhouse we purchased is keeping all our babies snug - kale, broccoli, cabbages and two types of lettuces are up are all doing well,  The cabbages are now about 1cm tall and growing!  This is the first year that we have had a plan, a written down plan of what we need to plant and when.  I worked backwards from Labour Weekend (traditionally THE gardening weekend in NZ) and worked out germination times, so I knew when to plant the seeds in relation to when I could plant seedlings out in the garden.  The pumpkins and squash will not be planted for some weeks but we still have stored pumpkins.  We have only recently been able to harvest carrots, and with the corn long finished had been relying on the pumkins for our yellow/orange vegetable in our "eat a rainbow a day" regime.  After a while it becomes difficult to think of how to serve them that is a little different.  We also still have a good crop of sgae growing in the garden.  Pumpkin Gnocchi will convince non-pumpkin eaters to enjoy them.

Pumpkin Gnocchi (KB)

These quantities will serve 4 but are easily extendable.
1kg pumpkin, peeled and cut into 3cm cubes
Olive oil or cooking spray
salt and white pepper to taste
1 - 1.5 cups of plain flour
1/4 cup pecorino (or parmesan), finely grated
125g butter
1/2 cup sage leaves
Extra pecorino to serve

Preheat the oven to 200 deg C.  Line a baking tray with baking paper.  Place the pumpkin on the prepared tray and spray with oil or cooking spray.  Season with salkt and pepper.  Roast pumpkin for 30 - 35 minutes or until soft.  Transfer to a large bow and mash the pumpkin until smooth.

Stir the flour into the pumpkin.  Add the first measure of peccorino.  Stir until well combined and a soft dough forms (the dough should not be sticky).  Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and lightly knead.  Roll the dough into 4 30cm-long rolls and cut each roll into 5cm pieces.

Bring a saucepan of salted water to the boil over high heat.  Add a quarter of the gnocchi and cook for two minutes until they float to the top.  Cook for a further 2 minutes.  Remove them with a slotted spoon and transfer to a large bowl.  Cover to keep warm.  Cook the remaining batches of gnocchi.

Meanwhile, to make sage butter, heat the butter in a saucepan over medium heat until sizzling.  Add the sage leaves and cook for 2 minutes until the butter turns golden.  Put the gnocchi in serving bowls.  Spoon over the sage butter and season with salt and pepper.  Sprinkle with the second measure of peccorino and serve.

Eggsactly! When is an egg not an egg?

More to the point, when is a free range egg not a free range egg?  I understand that the "definition" of a free range egg is that it is laid by a hen that is free to range outside as opposed to being in a cage or a barn.  In reality this means that there is a door (about the size of a cat-flap) that the hens can go out through if they choose.  To my way of thinking by the time the several thousand queue up to get out it will be time to queue up again to come back inside.  The American term pastured hens in some ways sounds more healthy but then some people think it means that the hens must only be fed grass.

For us free range means that the hens are free to be hens.  We describe our hens as happy hens and they are free to range over about an acre.  They still are contained because we value our vegetable gardens too but an acre is a large space for the 28 hens that we have (and the ducks and the geese mind).   There are large plantings of flax for them to hide under when a hawk lies overhead, tall trees for shade and lots of grass and dirt and stuff.  We shut them up at night in houses - to keep them safe and warm and so that we can easily collect the eggs.

Take a look at this raw egg.  See how the white has stayed together rather than spread over the plate.  This is the mark of an egg that has been out eating the right amount of grass.  Chefs prefer eggs like this as they are much easier to poach.  Chlorophyll, the green in grass is a very good detoxifier and this is one of the reasons that small operation truly free range hens lay eggs that keep much longer than the other sort.

One can artificially cause the yolks to go orange but ours are just as they come.  Again, allowing the hens to eat grass and weeds and vegetables such as silver beet guarantees yolks so orange that they are off the scale of yolk colours!!!!  This is not to say that we only feed our hens grass.  We feed them laying pellets as well and they reward us by being friendly and healthy and providing many eggs every day.  We sell as many as we can produce and have a waiting list - testimony to our happy girls.

Just say'n - it's wet here!

In a pickle!

Everybody is in a pickle.  Even Jamie Oliver is in a pickle.  It has become very fashionable to seve pickles with all sorts of meals.  Some restaurants even have a pickle section in their menu.  Jamie Oliver suggests it as a way of preserving those lone carrots and bits of onion that are left in the fridge at the end of the week.  Bread and Butter Pickles are very pretty either in the jar or on the plate.  A deliberately made pickle is even better.  

After six years our citrus orchard is doing its thing and we have limes.  Admittedly (because we only have 3 bushes) the limes are more special than the other fruit which we can pick by the crateful and not notice where we've been.  Though Bill suggested that he would like them all for putting in a gin and tonic I froze them for use later.  They freeze so easily - I pop them into a plastic bag, suck out the air and they're done.  I make Lime Marmalade with limes directly from the freezer.  For Kent's Lime pickle I thaw them sufficiently to be able to cut them and remove pips.  Ours don't have many so it is not too difficult.  This is a good recipe for the home grower as it only takes a small quantity of limes.

Lime pickle (KB)

7 limes

1T salt

375g raisins

1t chilli powder

4 cloves of garlic, crushe

1 1/2 T fresh ginger, crushed

500ml cider vinegar

500g browm sugar

1T of fresh horseradish (or 4t preserved horseradish)

Segment the limes (as best you can if they are frozen) and remove the pips.  Sprinkle with salt and leave(covered) for 48 hours, stirring occasionally.  Add the limes and all the remaining ingredients to a pot (including all the juice that has formed) and cook on a rolling boil until thick.

Put into hot sterilised jars, removing any air bubbles with a knife.  Seal with sterilised lids.  LABEL!