toilet rolls

A practical way to recycle toilet rolls...

A beautiful way to recycle toilet rolls...

Anastassia Elias


Yuken Teruya

A fun way to recycle toilet rolls...

 Vlijtig

 Alisa Burke

 

Free Kids Crafts

 

DLTK Crafts for Kids

christmas apricots and cucumbers

I love being back home at the farm. This Christmas we were busy harvesting and processing mountains of food from the orchard and vegie garden. It is the most satisfying feeling seeing the pantry selves stacked with bottles of home grown food.

One late night was spent bottling apricots picked that day... something very familiar to me from my childhood. Baskets of ripening fruit, licking sticky fingers with sugary syrup, vacola bottles and the old hand made copper boiling pot.

Mum has perfected her pickled cucumber recipe...

Salt cucumber slices and allow to drain in a colander for 12 hours. Sterilise the glass jars with boiling water. Loosely fill jars with the cucumber. Make a combined mixture of:
apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, tumeric, sugar, pepper corns, mustard seeds, dried dill.
Bring the liquid mixture to the boil and pour into each jar of cucumbers. Immediately close the jars tightly and turn upside down to allow the boiling liquid to sterilize the lids. Allow to pickle for a couple of weeks.

Anthurus archerii

Beautiful but grotesque. I'd never seen anything like this fungi before, the Octopus Stinkhorn. It is growing in a damp shady corner in Mum's garden. The fungi starts growing as a grey/brown ball or egg before splitting open and unfolding into a red star. The olive green centre is the spore. The revolting part of this fungi is, as it matures it stinks of rotting flesh, oozing slime and attracting blowflies. Not the best thing to have growing right near your front door. The blowflies are swarming and have spread the spores, so now little brown fungi balls are popping up everywhere.

time for vegetables

Hannah is getting big and so is her appetite. We had to start her on solid food quite early. Just rice porridge in the beginning, but it is time to mix it up with a few vegetables. Pumpkin from our garden is the first.

vegie patch to vegie bake

The zucchini have grown prolifically and the squash have become enormous! Loads of sheep poo, blood and bone and juice from the worm farm have turned our previously struggling vegie patch into a productive green haven. There is nothing better than cooking with organic home grown vegetables. We had such a good harvest of zucchini and squash we needed to find new cooking inventions to make sure we didn't get sick of eating them and use them all up.

The lovely Ailee made this for an afternoon tea party we had in our garden in early summer. It was so delicious it disappeared before I could try any, so she gave me a copy of her recipe... The perfect recipe to use up loads of vegetables. The recipe makes one small vegetable bake, but for big families double or even triple the quantities.

Vegetable Bake
5 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 1/4 cups self raising wholemeal flour
1 zucchini, grated
1 carrot, grated
1 red capsicum, chopped
nuts, chopped
2 onions, chopped
cheese, grated
mix of fresh herbs, parsley, basil, chives
salt and pepper
optionals : corn kernels, squash, green peas, tomato, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, bacon, tuna or anything really that takes your fancy.

Beat eggs with oil. Add flour and mix well. Add vegetables, nuts and seasoning, mix well. Pour into a baking dish and bake at 180 degrees C for 1 hour.