Using it all up: apples

I bought a whole bunch of organic, locally-grown apples at our Wednesday markets a few weeks back and the last few were still hanging around slightly mushy. 

I decided to make a German apple cake, which sounded delish, and was left with a whole pile of apple skins and cores. After a bit of Google browsing I decided to make my own apple cider vinegar using these easy instructions. 

The cake was delicious and moist with all those apples in there; the vinegar I won't know about for approximately 2 months.

There are so many uses for apple cider vinegar, it's a bit like bicarb for household uses.

I've just made up a batch of my own rosemary hair rinse, using Christine's easy directions here on her Slow Living Essential's blog (which is a great read btw!) and have the shiniest hair I have for a long time!

Other uses for apple cider vinegar include:

• as a face toner
• weight loss / detox
• repelling fleas
• relieving sunburn
• removing stains from teeth
• reducing body odour
• treating age spots and acne
• fighting allergies
• reducing dandruff
• plus heaps of uses for cooking

On a completely separate note, the Queen decided to visit little old Brisbane recently and I had a great view form my 33rd floor office

Pity my phone camera doesn't have such a great zoom.

Hope you're having a great week

Kim :)

Make your own.. NAAN BREAD!

What's an indian curry without naan bread? Not as satisfying I tell ya!

So one rainy night last week when Lyndon (my personal chef!) and I decided on a curry we thought we would try our hand at making naan bread to go with it.

Why?

a) naan satisfies my carb cravings ;)
b) it goes oh-so-well with curries, and
c) IT'S SO DAMN EASY TO MAKE!

So after a quick google search on my phone (how much has our lives changed since the invention of google, and internet on your phone!) I had a recipe in hand - one that didn't include eggs (watch out for my next post on a funny story about why!)

With my phone propped up against the microwave I proceeded to make yummy, authentic-looking naan

Easy Peasy Naan Bread 

from here

Ingredients:

2 cups plain flour

1/2 cup warm milk

1/2 cup yoghurt - thank you Rhonda for the recipe to make my own!

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

pinch baking soda

chopped herbs/garlic/sultanas - anything else you want to put in your naan

butter for frying

Directions:

The directions on that website above are very particular, but here is what I did and it turned out great - 

Mix the dry ingredients together then add the wet (save the butter)

Let sit for a few minutes (until the curry is about 15 minutes off being ready)

Knead the dough for a few minutes

Cut into 8 pieces and flatten each VERY thinly - you can see in the pic above how thin the uncooked ones are

Melt the butter in a pan and fry up your naan one piece at a time

You will start to see it bubbling in sections - usually after a minute or two

Flip over and brown the other side also

Warning: these are very filling!

ENJOY!

Busy, busy, busy

I have been so busy productive this last week, it feels fabulous! You've probably noticed from all my posts! I know Hazel has :)

I have now been on my 'home holiday' for 2 weeks now.

In the first week it was a very different story, I barely got anything done.

You see I'm a list person. And when I started these holidays, I thought relaxing menat doing without my lists, becuase they mean work don't they, things to do. So I had all these great ideas for the things I'd like to enjoy, learn and make on my holidays, but because there were so many things I was like a deer in spotlights! I had no idea where to start and I was quite overwhelmed.

So out came the lists again.

I have a list for the christmas presents I'd like to make
I have a list for what odd-jobs need doing around the house
I have a list for what personal things I need to do, e.g. dr appt, dentist, optometrist, etc (those things you put off when you're working!)
I have a list for what things I'd like to cook/bake
I have a list for what blog posts I will write about
I have a list for day trips/places I'd like to visit
I have a list of things I want to Freecycle/declutter

That looks a little daunting doesn't it? Well there isn't a whole lot on each list and I absolutely love that feeling of crossing each line of lists. Yes I'm a little weird! This is what I am enjoying doing on my holiday, when I could be doing ANYTHING! Well that's how I work and it took me about of fluffing about to work that out.

Now that I have these lists I am on average half way through them all - see how productive I am with my lists!

Now don't worry I'm not overdoing it and not enjoying my time off. I'm just not a person that can sit around all day. I love doing things, especially things I enjoy - gardening, sewing, baking, visiting.

So now I'm off to check on the scones in the oven, see if my berries have defrosted for some jam making for gifts, quickly sew up a pillow insert for a pillow cover I made for my grandparents who I'm driving 4 hours to visit on Friday, create a tag for another gift for a friend I'm meeting for lunch tomorrow and check out campers for sale on line, all before going out for dinner tonight with some people I've worked with in my short term job these past 2 weeks.


I'm so happy!

Using up a glut of fruit and vegies

I have barely left the kitchen today!

We have ended up with a glut of carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, oranges and a range of other fruit and vegies that we need to use up VERY soon.

So far I have made:

• orange and lemon cordial (3 jars full) - I use my own recipe - juice your fruit, put in saucepan and add sugar to taste, warm until sugar has dissolved then bottle, easy peasy
• pumpkin loaf
• Lady Flo's pumpkin scones
• another loaf of bread
• roast pumpkin slices, for salads and sandwiches
• carrot cake as a loaf

We have to many sweets in the house and I am (only just) sick of licking the bowl! hehe

We have also been cooking up soups and roast vegies to get through it all.

This is what happens when you go to the country and come aross a quaint little farm stall! Be warned! hehe

:)

Kim

Christmas cherry ripe biscuits

You have got to pop over to Cityhippyfarmgirl's blog right now and check out her recipe for Chocolate cherry biscuits! Here is the link, don't waste any time go now!

Don't they just look and sound absolutely divine!

I have renamed mine Christmas cherry ripe biscuits, and I think they would go perfectly in my christmas gift hampers I am creating full of home-made goodness for this years presents.

But before any of that, I must taste test them of course. Mine are just about to come out of the oven......

;)

Pumpkin Pie!

Recently we have had an excess of vegies that we have been trying to use up before they go bad.

Using an altered recipe from an op-shop plate that I picked up, we made Pumpkin Pie. It turned out fabulous! I can't believe I've never had pumpkin pie before. I guess it is more an American thing but I'm certainly a convert now!

Couldn't even get a shot of it before being eaten!

I think it was the condensed milk in the recipe tht makes it taste so damn good!

I'm off too make another one now, because we finished the first one quick smart. Lucky we did too because the recipe is on the plate so now I can give it to you so you can try out this delicious pie yourself

"Op Shop Plate Pumpkin Pie"
Combine 1.5 cups steamed & cubed pumpkin with 3/4 cup sugar and 2 slightly beaten eggs.
Add quarter teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, half teaspoon of ginger, and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg.
Add two-thirds cup condensed milk (yummy!) and three-quarters cup water, mix thoroughly.

Pour into uncooked pastry shell (made yourself or shop bought if you're short on time).
Bake in 220 degrees celsuius oven for 15 minutes then reduce heat to 170 degrees celsius and bake for 4 minutes more

Enjoy!

xx
Kim

Starting to think about Christmas gifts

I try to stay away from the shopping centres as much as possible, but grocery shopping once every fortnight/3 weeks means I am witness to the onslaught of plastic christmas-themed stuff popping up already.

At least it gets me thinking early about what I can sew, bake and make for this years frugal and meaningful gifts.

At the moment I am thinking a hamper type thing as a gift for my family with:

• homemade jams & cordials
• a sewn gift (apron, baby things for my 7-month pregnant sister - baby shoes look very cute, other ideas appreciated!)
• homemade crackers and dip (my partner made some fabulous crackers the other day but now we are having trouble finding the recipe, don't you hate that!?) and maybe cheese if I can get all the stuff in time
• a seedling or plant of some sort

Another idea would be putting everything in a reuseable sewn draw string bag also, might be a bit hard with the goodies though at least it will look like a Santa sack!

I'd love to hear if you make you gifts and what you create.

x
Kim

The best lunch!

I had the best lunch I've had in a long time today!

Why?

Well
1. The festival is over and I have my weekend's back and this is the first one where I have just sat and relaxed!
2. I used bread that I had baked myself (this was one of my pledges to learn before the end of the year, see my post about it here)
3. I used lettuce, tomato and basil that I had grown myself in my new garden beds without any pesticides
4. I used butter. Real butter. See my next post about using real foods
5. It tasted damn good!

Unfortunately it tasted so good I didn't have a chance to get a photo so you'll just have to believe me.

Now I'm wondering did it taste better just because I knew I put the effort in to grew those ingrediants myself or because homegrown produce has a better flavour? I think a combination of both.

What has been a dish you've cooked that has tasted great from homegrown ingrediants?

PS. it's good to be back! I've had a hiatus for a while dealing with work but now I am back and determined as ever to continue on my path to living simply

Using it all up with mangoes!

Last weekend at the farmers markets I couldn't walk past the fabulous aroma of MANGOS!

To my they epitomize summer in Brisbane. Yep I know it's not summer yet, but that beautiful tropical smell is hard to walk past.

I bought a couple and after having one with ice cream (best combo ever), I made up some orange and mango cordial.

Very simple standard recipe that you can use on any mix of fruits that I read on Rhonda's down to earth blog.

Juice your fruits and weigh. I lined a bowl with muslin cloth and scrapped all of the mango flesh into it, then squeezed all the juice through the cloth into the bowl. This left a lot of the flesh in the muslin cloth.
Make the same weight of sugar syrup (which is a mix of half sugar, half water heated on the stovetop until the sugar is dissolved)
Then just mix them together and pour into sterilized jars.
The cordial will stay fresh for at least 1 week like this, otherwise add a little citric acid (which you can easily find in the  baking section of the supermarket) to keep the flavours fresher for longer.

I used the juice of 2 mangoes and 1 orange, and this gave me about 500ml of quite nectar-y tasting cordial, very delish!

But then I had the leftover mango flesh that I didn't want to just throw out. So I whipped up a mango cake to use it up! I didn't follow a recipe. Just added flour, sugar and milk until it was the right consistency and poured it into my ring tin then into the oven until it looked just about right. Easy, no fuss!

All that was remaining of those mangoes was the skin and seeds, into the compost and each and every part of those mangoes was used productively.

Do you have any great recipes for 'leftovers'?

Homemade ricotta

I've been a little silent here over the weekend as we were moving into our new house! So very exciting, but I'll share those details with you another time. It's just too exhausting thinking about what still needs to be unpacked and put away that I've decided that this week I am not going to think about it at all!

Last night in our new kitschy 50's kitchen I decded it was time to get back into experimenting with making things myself (and ignore the boxes and mess around me. I am VERY good at procrastinating).

I read on a few blogs that making ricotta was quite simple, it has been on my to-do/learn/master list of simple living skills for a while.

So here is the process I used (I found it online, sorry I don't have the link, I'm really bad for writing down a recipe and forgetting where I saw it to link to and reference)

Pour 1L full cream (preferably organic) milk into a pot. I used Barambah Organics milk, which is pretty local to me.  Add 2 1/2 tablespoons of white vinegar.

The milk will start to curdle straight away after putting in the vinegar

Bring up to a slight boil and boil for about 30 seconds.

Curds and whey seperating even more after boiling

Take off the heat and let sit on the bench for approximately 15 minutes. This will result in the curds and whey seperating even more and allow the mix to cool down so you can squeeze it later.

While the pot is sitting, set up a bowl with muslin cloth over it (I also used a strainer between the two to catch any bits that escaped the cloth, but later realised this wasn't necessary)

After the 15 minutes is up pour the mixture through the muslin cloth, being careful to not allow any of the curds to fall into the bowl. If they do just scoop them out and put them back in the muslin cloth.

Ricotta mix in muslin cloth

Then gather and lift the muslin cloth, and squeeze out any excess moisture.

What's left in the muslin cloth is your yummy fresh ricotta!

1L of milk made this much ricotta

We mixed it all through a fresh basil and tomato pasta that we'd cooked for dinner. YUMMO!


And what's left in your bowl is whey.

VERY nutritious and useful, especially in bread making. We used it in little scones. But you can use it anywhere that asks for buttermilk or replace any liquid in baking (pancakes would be yummy!). Some people swear by drinking it straight!

Nothing like playing around in the kitchen to take your mind of the household duties!

:)
Kim

Lots n lots n lots o' LEMONS!

This past weekend was absolutely FULL of cooking and baking. I received a huge bucket of Bush Lemons (about 50 lemons in total!) and about 12 limes from Freecycle (it's a bit like ebay, but where everything is free). You can see the huge pile of them below in the picture (on the way to get the lemons I did get sidetracked a little and visited a garage sale and an op shop and picked up the books, kitchen gadgets and patterns all for $3 BARGAIN!)















So when I got home with my bounty I had a thousand things I wanted to make with it all.

So far I have made:

• lemonade (of course!)
• lemon curd (for on toast and in tart fillings - that's to come)
• lemon and lime cordial
• lemon cake, where you pour a lemon syrup over the cooked cake, makes it sooo moist! Here's the recipe
• Lemon and basil risotto YUM!
• Fixed my previous attempt at orange and grapefruit jam, by adding the pectin from soaked lemon seeds, lime juice and rind, passionfruit and apple. Now it tastes much better and isn't overpowered by the grapefruit taste.

But I still have about 15 lemons and 10 limes left.  So I'm thinking about a lemon and lime marmalade (MORE JAM!), maybe a sorbet, and then probably just freezing the rest of the juice for use in future cordials and lemonade.


So I have been a little carried away this past weekend, but don't worry I haven't forgotten about my pledge I made for the new financial year.

So just to update on where I'm at with those pledges

• Not to buy any new clothes - so far so good, I haven't even tempted myself by going to any shopping centres. Actually come to think of it, I haven't gone to any shopping centres, except for grocery shopping once a fortnight, for months!
• Master baking bread and making my own bread starter - ok this one I haven't even looked at yet, BUT I have started growing my own ginger beer plant! It's so simple. I'm following the instructions on Rhonda's down to earth blog.
• To keep my plants alive and make my own fertiliser and pesticide - plants are still alive and I just saw that the cherry tomato tree I bought a few weeks ago has it's first little tomatoes appearing! So exciting! I did a little dance on my balcony when I saw them (3 in total!! tomatoes that is not dances). Must be that worm wee fertiliser I'm using on them. I have also almost made my homemade white oil with oil, detergent and water (I say almost because the oil is in the sparayer and that's as far as I've gone!)
• Make my own dishcloths - haven't started this yet, but our current store-bought dishcloth is looking pretty manky at the moment so it is spurring me on to get started on making them, hopefully by next week!
• Make my own liquid dishwashing detergent - nope haven't even looked at this one yet
• Stick to my new budget - well I'm happy to report that this fortnight is almost oer and I have stuck to my new budget to the letter (or number I guess!). It's great to see the balance in the savings account going up and up and up!

Well that was my weekend roundup. What did you get up to? I'd love to hear if you got up to anything new relating to living simply or learning new skills.

Have a great day!

x
Kim

Television

Stop watching television, now. Just do it as an experiment. Give yourself a week of no TV and see how your life changes.

I think this was my first step to living more simply that had a huge difference on my life. It lead me to talk more to partner, give myself more 'me' time, have time to learn how to crochet, read books (about everything!), rediscover the joy of baking, get enough sleep, use less electricity, relax more, appreciate silence, learn new board games, have time to write a blog! The list goes on, but you can see where I'm going can't you?

My partner and I stopped watching TV about 6 months ago and really re-connected with ourselves and each other. We then fell back into the trap of coming home from work and turning on the box, unsurprisingly we started to drift apart from each other a little during this time. About a month ago we once ago went back to either having music on in the background in the evenings, or just silence, and we have really reconnected again because we've had to talk to each other again. And I'm not just talking about "How was your day honey?", "Yeah my day was crap as well", etc talk. You will have those converstions in the first few days of not having the TV to distract you because it takes a bit to recreate that connection with your partner where you talk about the deep, deep stuff that you just can't in the ad break of a sitcom.

I've also felt that I have re-connected with myself more as well. The down-time we have in the evenings really allows for more personal reflection on where we are in life, where we want to be and how we are feeling about it all. I also feel much more rested because my mind has quietened and hasn't had the stimulation that TV forces on it. And I love that I have found a few more hours in my day where I can actually be productive - even if that is sitting in bed crocheting, cup of tea by the bedside, bliss!

So just try it, like I said, as an experiment. I would love to hear your experiences!

x
Kim

My new financial year pledge

I've finally slowed down and focused myself enough to work out my pledge for the next 6 months, being prompted by Sam's pledge for the new financial year here in Australia (funny how I'm actually at work when I choose to slow down and focus on something that isn't work! Hehe).

So here it is. My pledges for the 6 months to help lead me down my path to living simply.

1. I pledge, along with Sam, to not purchase any new clothes. I don't have a sewing machine nor know how to sew too well just yet, so I will limit my clothes purchases to only second-hand clothes from thrift shops, etc (except knickers of course, but I should be good for these for the next few months)
2. I pledge to master the perfect loaf of bread, that is good enough that I am happy to replace store-bought bread with it and to also make my own bread starter. I've seen this on quite a few blogs and it doesn't look too difficult at all, it just takes a little while.
3. I pledge to keep all of my current plants alive! and to make my own organic fertiliser and pesticides. Fingers crossed this doesn't ruin my pledge and actually kill the plants!
4. I pledge, to join Sam, in making my own dishcloths. I will look at crocheting mine, whereas Sam will be knitting hers. I saw a great post (I can't for the life of me find it to link to!) about using twine to crochet dishcloths that are a bit more gritty and good for pots and pans.
5. I pledge to keep trying to make my own dishwashing liquid that doesn't glob up and add more oil to my sink than the dishes do! I've seen a few recipes online but they all include glycerine, and glycerine is really expensive where I've seen it so it's not cost effective at all. Please, please, please tell me where you get your glycerine from or if you have a dishwashing liquid recipe that doesn't use it.
6. I pledge to stick to my newly-edited budget, which will net me savings of $7200 by the end of December. I will post about my budget changes shortly, so stay tuned if you'd like to see how I can manage to save $600 a fortnight!

Well those are my pledges for this coming 6 months of the new financial year. I'm looking forward to hearing about your pledges and also hearing your comments about what I hope to achieve. It will be interesting to look back in 6 months and see how far I have come in achieving those pledges.

x
Kim

In the kitchen...

Hello hello

The last week I have been busy, busy in our little kithcen practising baking and making jams. I've felt like a right housewife and having a ball!

I have been doing lots more also, like checking out other people's blogs (I love doing that, especially at work, shhh!), thinking about the pedge I will make for this new (financial) year (have a look at Sam's here, we are going to encourage each other over the next 6 months), working of course, and getting ready to go to the flea market this Sunday!!! I am so excited to clear out all of our stuff, it's going to feel great driving home afterwards with (hopefully) an empty car boot. I'll update you about the flea market next week with lots of photos (warning: they won't be pretty, we have to be up at 4am!)

So here are some of my finished products:

My first bread baking experience turned out pretty well. I don't know how we will go replacing the bread we get from the shops, we like this bread so much we go through it much more quickly!! The aroma's that filled the house while I was baking the bread were so mouthwatering too, this is my second favourite thing about it. I've seen on a few blogs about making your own yeast, I definitely want to try that as it looks pretty easy and will help me in maximising things I can produce myself.

The jam above the bread is my first jam made by myself! Everyday I walk home from work I pass the neighbours FULL cumquat tree with all the fruit just going to waste. So the other weekend I went up to ask them if they minded if I took some to make some jam. I knocked and knocked on their door for about 5 minutes but no one answered, so what did I do? I very sneakily grabbed a whole bunch and creeped home! I didn't take too many that's why there's only about half a jar. I have this great old preserving book that I picked up from the Lifeline Bookfest the other week (absolutely loved the Bookfest, we got over $100 worth of books, and thats a lot because they were soo cheap!) and copied the recipe very diligently. Next time though I won't cook the jam for so long because it's pretty hard/set.

I baked this mandarin cake after seeing it on Rhonda's down to earth blog here. So so easy to make. I was going to make the orange cake that Rhonda made but this is why I couldn't:

Eww gross I know, and I only had two mandarins left but they did the job wonderfully! I have never really needed a food processor before. Weird I know but I have made do with our blender or beaters. But with this recipe I really needed the processer to mix up all of the mandarin into a mushy mess so I could mix in the flour, etc. So I had to think a bit laterally. First I tried the old faithful blender. But all of the mandarin just stuck to the outside in big clumps, barely processed at all, just out of reach of the thrashing metal blades. I was pretty stumped after that and was searching in my cupboard knowing a food processer would be oh so handy right then. Then I stumbled across my large Breville juicer that was hiding in the back of my cupboard (don't use it nearly as much as I should, when I have fruit trees it will be a different story!). And bingo, problem solved! I fed the mandarins through the juicer and then put all of the fleshy parts (that are normally thrown out when you juice) and the juice that came out of the spout into a mixing bowl and added the other ingrediants.

This is how it turned out. I love the little face that formed when I started putting icing on, I just had to take a photo!

While my mandarin cake was cooking, I started on a batch of orange marmalade. Because it was only an after thought and this was a Sunday I hadn't soaked the skin and seeds in water over night to release the pectin. I have now realised I just need to follow recipes and not get so cocky thinking I know what I'm doing. Even after cutting up the rind and adding it and the seeds to my cheesecloth and have it cook with the flesh of the orange and grapefruit for over an hour the result was more of a syrup than a marmalade, because of the lack of pectin released I'm assuming. So I continued to jar it up and when it cooled I tasted it and it was terrible! The grapefruit flavour had taken over the entire jam/syrup and it was extremely tart. I've left it sitting in jars on my bench for a week now thinking about what to do with it. I am now thinking I will re-heat it all back up and add in some apple and passionfruit for sweetness, and some SOAKED orange rind and seeds for the pectin to help it set a bit more. Hopefully I can save it. I will update you on how it turns out.

Here are my finished products. Look at all that jam I have to 'fix'! You can tell I was overly eager to get the icing on while the cake was still a bit warm, it ran all over the sides of the cake and underneath it. It still tasted yummy though!

So some lessons learned from this baking experience:

• Just follow the recipe - no Kim you don't know what you're doing, stop being so stubborn and just follow that darn recipe!
• Grapefruit is gross. Period.
• To make the cake cool down more quickly (so you can get ice it and eat it more quickly) put it in the freezer for a little while !! Hehe