Author Archive

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Pickled Grapes

Friday, April 17th, 2009

It’s grape season, and I’ve been trying out a new recipe for preserving some of our extra grapes. This recipe suits our situation especially well, since we also have lots of tarragon in the garden at the moment. The recipe comes from Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning. I’ve been curious for quite a while about some of the recipes in this book, but this is the first one I’ve actually tried.


Pickled grapes

Note: The original recipe is called “Bicolored Grapes” and calls for white and black grapes packed into the jar in layers. This sounds very decorative, but unfortunately our white grapes finished cropping quite a while ago now.

I did not exactly follow the original recipe, since I used apple cider vinegar instead of wine vineger, and rapadura instead of sugar.

Here is my version of the recipe:

Pickled Grapes

*Snip plenty of fresh ripe grapes off their bunches with a pair of scissors, leaving a short stem attached to each one.

*Wash the grapes and dry each one carefully with a cloth.

*Pack the grapes into jam jars.

*In each jar, put some bits of fresh tarragon, a clove, and a couple of white pepper corns, plus about a teaspoon of rapadura (dehydrated cane juice). I varied these quantities depending on the sizes of the jars.

*Then cover the grapes with apple cider vinegar, put the lids on the jars, and put them away in a dark cupboard. They are supposed to be stored for about 6 weeks before using.

This recipe fascinated me as I’d never heard of pickled grapes before! The recipe book describes them thus: “Both sweet and sour in taste, these grapes go impeccably well with poultry or game terrines.” Sounds good, but we won’t know if we like the result for a good while yet since they need to be stored before eating! I’ll be sure to report back once we have finally tasted them.

Posted in Food and Recipes | 1 Comment »

Heirloom Tomatoes

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

We tried a number of different tomato varieties this season. One of the local plant shops was selling heirloom tomato seedlings, so we added a sampling of these to the ones that I’d started from seed. My Dad also tried growing most of the same varieties we did, and we enjoyed comparing notes with him. The conditions in his garden are a little different to ours, but interestingly the same varieties did best in both our gardens.


Several varieties of heirloom tomatoes

These are the varieties we plan to grow again:

Moneymaker and Russian Red: hardy, red, medium-sized tomatoes. These have done well for us here year after year.

Green Zebra: Healthy, hardy plants that fruited very well for us this year. The green stripy fruit are beautiful as well as tasty.

Tigerella: Small orange and red stripy fruit with a good taste. These were the first to set fruit in our garden in the cool spring conditions. They produced a great early crop. . . and they are still producing now!

Black Krim: This variety fruited well for us, and did even better in my Dad’s garden. The fruit are absolutely delicious!

J. Walsh: This tomato was a volunteer that a friend identified for me. The healthy vining plant has produced an abundant crop of small to medium lemon yellow roma-shaped tomatoes. They have a thin skin and a pleasing flavour. I’ll grow this variety again if I can find the seed.

Humboltti: This is a yellow cherry variety that I got from Koanga Gardens. It’s hardy,crops well, and the fruit is wonderfully sweet. The only problem for us is the fruit’s tendency to crack.

These are the varieties we probably won’t grow again:

Brandy Pink and Yellow Delicious: These were lovely to eat, but the yield simply wasn’t good enough to justify the space they took up in the garden.

Amish Paste: This was an absolute fizzer in both gardens, bearing hardly any fruit at all. The few fruit we did get didn’t strike us as anything special!

Posted in Garden | 2 Comments »

Onions and Garlic

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

We harvested our garlic crop a couple of months ago now. The garlic we grow is a local heirloom variety, known as “Takahue garlic.” It has a wonderfully strong flavour and tends to have a bit of pinkish streaking in it. Kevin chose a dry and well-ventilated spot under the eaves of our house and hung the garlic up there in bunches. We have had some trouble storing our garlic in the past, so I’m happy to say that it seems to be keeping well in this spot under the eaves. We had a big crop of garlic this year, thanks to some kind friends who gave us some of their seed garlic. On the negative side, this year’s garlic is a lot smaller than the heads we’ve grown in previous years. We planted it in poor soil and it got very water-logged over the winter months. We’ll have to find a better spot next time around.


Harvested garlic hanging under the eaves

We’ve also been enjoying some pungent onions from the garden — Stuttgart Long Keeper from King’s Seeds and Pukekohe Long Keepers from Koanga Gardens. For some reason, lots of the bulbs have divided this year. This didn’t happen last season, even though I used exactly the same seed. I imagine it must have something to do with the conditions. Does anyone know why this might have happened?

In the spring, I replanted some of the best onions from last year’s crop and let them run to seed. I have finally harvested the seed heads. From 10 onions, I got 5 good seed heads, which I’m planning to use for the next season’s onion crop. I’ve never tried saving our own onion seed before, so this will be an interesting experiment.

Posted in Garden | 2 Comments »

Rosehip Honey Kefir Soda

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Here’s one of my favourite water kefir recipes. It makes a beautiful fizzy red soda! I love that it can be made with local honey. I also look forward to the day when I’m more sorted our with my herb and flower gardens and can use home-grown rosehips and hibiscus flowers in the recipe.


Rosehip Honey Kefir Soda

Ingredients:
1/2 cup raw honey
5 rosehip hibiscus teabags
1/2 cup water kefir grains
1/2 a lemon

Method:
*Mix the honey with warm water to dissolve. (Avoid using really hot water, which will kill the enzymes in your honey!)
*Put the honey water in a large jar with more cold water to make a total of about 2 litres. (NB: use filtered water if you are unsure of your water supply. Treated or polluted water can contain chemicals that inhibit healthy growth of the kefir culture.)
*Add lemon half, teabags and kefir grains to the jar and stir gently.
*Cover the jar to keep out bugs and dust, and put it in a warm place for 2 days. The hot water cupboard works well.
*After 2 days, squeeze the lemon half into the liquid, then strain and bottle the beverage. Use sturdy bottles with lids that seal tightly.
*Put the bottles back in a warm place for 2 or 3 days longer before transferring them to the fridge to chill for drinking.
*Open carefully in case a lot of carbonation has built up in the bottle! This drink looks extra lovely served with a wedge of lemon and a few borage or pineapple sage flowers floating on top.

Note:
I use our spare water kefir grains to make this drink, and throw them out after I strain it. I do this because the grains do not thrive best in honey and might be damaged. We want to keep our propagating water kefir colony as robust and healthy as possible, so I don’t risk using them for experimental brews!

Posted in Fermentation, Food and Recipes | 13 Comments »

Goals for the Year of the Ox

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

1. The first goal has to be something for Owen, of course! Go for a walk, or spend time doing yoga or dancing with Owen every day. Owen loves to dance, and has progressed recently from squatting up and down in time to the music to doing cute little moves. We love dancing with him. It’s also neat to take him for a walk and watch him charge through the undergrowth, tackling obstacles headlong. It should be no hardship to reach this goal!


Owen likes to dance

2. Finish setting up chook house and run, and GET SOME CHOOKS! We are well on the way to achieving this one already, but have to keep up the momentum.

3. Install solar hot water.

4. Make camembert, feta, and hard cheese. Also do some goat cheese experiments in the spring.

5. Cure some of our own meat. Specifically, I want to have a go at making corned beef and corned tongue.

6. Experiment with cooking corn and amaranth.

7. Start milking the goats in spring. This is a big one because it requires that we arrange some extra goat housing and a sheltered place to milk goats. It also requires that we find a suitable buck for our dear Daphne and Lulu.

8. Start “bushman’s toilet paper” seedlings. I’d also like to start some other tree seedlings, perhaps including carob, Japanese raisin tree and stone pine.

9. Improve winter vegetable garden over last year’s effort. I have to hurry up and get organised for autumn seed planting if I’m serious about achieving this one! We are a bit pinched for space at the moment due to work on the chook runs, so I’m going to have to employ all my garden cunning to fit in the crops we want to grow.

10. Save onion seed, and plant our first onion crop from home-saved seed. The seedheads are already ripening on the onions, so I’ll be embarking on this project very soon.

11. Get rid of the kikuyu in the areas around the lemon and lime trees in the house paddock, and work on establishing perennial ground cover to keep weeds at bay. The chooks will have an important part to play here.

12. Complete Playcentre Course 2. This might seem a bit off-topic for Farmlet, but our local Playcentre is an important part of our lifestyle here. Playcentre is a parent-run co-op where New Zealand children up to age 6 can go for free. Playcentre funding depends (among other things) on having enough parents present who have completed Playcentre training courses. Peria Playcentre is small and rather struggling to muster enough qualified parents at the moment. Owen and I love going to Playcentre, and I’m keen to do my part to support our Centre.

13. Update the Farmlet website at least once a week. I haven’t got off to a very good start on this goal, but the year of the Ox is still young and there are lots of things I want to write about!

Posted in Energy, Food and Recipes, Garden, Land Management, Owen | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »