renovation

Guess what! We signed a contract with the builder last week for renovation work on the back of our house. We are going to extend our tiny kitchen and dining room and add a big deck off the back where we now have a tiny one. Underneath will be a big extra space.

It was going to start yesterday, but luckily we have had a reprieve and get to keep the back of the house for another week! I'm dying for it all to start but also dying for the extra time to get organised. We're living on site during the work and will lose our kitchen for most of the time and though I'm not sure how that's going to go it sounds like a challenge!

We have been working on the plans and council approval for a couple of years now, doing it with a friend of ours who is an architect. He's been busy, we've been busy, and we've dragged it out a bit - putting off the disruption and expense. But now its finally happening!

Last week the plumber moved the sewer pipes to make way for the excavation. To save money and time we dug a lot of the holes ourselves, all five of us had a go. One minute we had lawn and garden and the next minute there were holes and pipes. My lovely planter boxes  were dismantled and three self sown trees which had put themselves in the wrong spot had to go. Luckily all the trees we've planted are okay, so the bones of the garden will still be there. But the beautiful side garden has been cut back hard in preparation for access so diggers and building materials can come along there.

I've been feeling a bit sentimental for our garden as it was. It's going to change a lot, levels will change and the low wall and stairs and pond we built will most probably go. Plants have been pulled out, pavers stacked and gravel dug up and put in bags in preparation. So here are some before shots, some garden pics I came across while looking through my photos for something else. I love this garden, and I will miss its present incarnation, but I'm looking forward to the next.

My gardens have always been works in progress, I think all good gardens are. They grow and change like children and we can't hang on, but just enjoy the ride. When one plant dies I look at it as a chance to plant something new and different, when a tree plants itself in the middle of a sunny bed we've changed to shade loving plants, and when a plant doesn't look right or doesn't thrive it is unceremoniously uprooted and moved or composted. I learnt to do that from my mother in law :-)

We will always have trees and paths and water. There will always be vegetable beds. I'm looking forward to rearranging things when the dust settles.  My only frustration is this beautiful spring weather, it seems criminal to be moving plants and not sowing seed at this time of year!!!

I hope to show some before, during and (especially) after photos. I always love to watch those sort of transformations and have long been a fan of Grand Designs. Ours won't be so grand and we're hoping to bypass some of the drama and delays of some of their shows but it will be a big change in the spaces we have.

spanish omelette

Do you have a meal you cook when the cupboard is bare. This Tortilla or Spanish Omelette has been that pantry meal for me for the longest time.

This is also one of the simplest dinner meals on our regular rota and a great vegetarian staple for our meat free week.

My recipe was originally taken from an old Delia Smith book though I've adapted it quite a lot over the years. I love Delia for good basic recipes and I see she now has an online site with lots of how to videos for cooking techniques. Her current Tortilla recipe, slightly different than the one I have, is here.

All you need is an onion, some potatoes and some eggs, salt and pepper and we like to add a bit of sour cream and milk. 

To make a Spanish Omelette I cut up about four large potatoes into small cubes. I'm cooking for five big eaters, but this makes a great cold dish too so its good to make a big one. Its not a strict recipe with exact quantities either as you can just add more eggs to cover the amount of potatoes you have. Once you'd made it a few times you'll get a feel for the right balance.

You want the mixture to fill the pan to an inch or two height so choose a deep pan.

Delia cuts her potatoes in slices but I find these awkward to turn and they always break into mush on the edges for me.

I cut cubes and find they stay together, so they're easier to cook and they look cute in cross section!

Cut an onion up into small pieces.

Pour some olive oil into a heavy based saucepan which can handle going under the grill. Fry onion off till translucent and then add potatoes. Cook slowly till they are soft.

Try to stir the potatoes regularly, especially at first so they don't stick. Keep cooking on low until they are golden on the outside and soft on the inside. I use a lid over the potatoes to keep the moisture in and make them cook through inside.

In a large bowl break 4 or 5 eggs. Add a couple of tablespoons of sour cream and a sploosh of milk (1/3 cup?). Mix together thoroughly. Most people only use eggs and you can do that, but I like to thin the egginess a bit. Salt and pepper to taste.

Take the potato mix and add it to the egg mix. Mix through well. You want the egg mix to cover and coat the potatoes well.

Put another slurp of olive oil in the pan and bring to sizzling. Add the potato/egg mix. Cook on medium heat until the egg is nearly cooked through, you can see the egg solidify and bubbles start to show on the top.

You want to cook the bottom of the omelette through and then finish the top off under the grill.

Turn the grill on high and brown the top. Don't walk away as that way lies burnt tortilla!

I like to serve it with a homemade Aioli - garlic mayonnaise. Its great eaten with a green salad, and the best leftover lunch the next day.

For the Aioli I use this Taste recipe but I substitute vegetable oil for olive (I find the olive too strongly flavoured) and dijon mustard for grain. If you don't have lemons use vinegar. Make a batch and put it in a jar and keep in the fridge. It goes with everything!

p.s. not our usual egg brand but free range at least.

meat free week

From the ages of 18 to 36 I didn't eat red meat or chicken.

I found the hardest place to be a vegetarian was in Europe. And the easiest place was Asia!

I not only survived but thrived on my vegetarian diet. I produced three large, healthy babies (including twins) with only minimal iron supplement in my late pregnancies.

After I had children I found it harder to avoid meat. I didn't want to restrict the kids' diets, and their Dad occasionally cooked and ate meat. I started to feel like I was missing out, that I couldn't cook and eat all the wonderful dishes of the world and share them with my family.

I missed ham and mustard, bacon and eggs, beef in black bean and roast chicken. The foodie in me railed against my self imposed restrictions. So I gradually allowed meat back into my diet. I'm still not a meatie eater, but I do love the fact that these days I can go anywhere and eat anything.

These days as a family we are committed to eating well sourced, humanely raised meat in moderation. We only buy free range chicken and eggs and pork and pasture raised beef and lamb. We don't eat veal. Luckily those decisions become easier every day with mainstream suppliers catching up with a groundswell of consumer feeling, but we still have ways to go. It makes my heart ache to think of the conditions some animals endure in the name of food production.

Sometimes the amount of meat we eat creeps up, and so the year before last we had a healthy week and gave up meat to try and reset ourselves. Last year about the same time we tried the 5:2 diet and ate mostly vegetarian low calorie dinners twice a week for six weeks. I do think a mainly vegetable based diet is healthiest.

This year our healthy week coincides with an organised meat free week which starts next Monday.

I think this is such a great idea. Not only does this inclusive movement support eating less meat for health and sustainability reasons, it's about animal welfare. Its about ending factory farming and working towards more ethical food production. Something we can all embrace whatever our personal diet. Read their guide to Ethical Meat choices here. And if you haven't got the sustainable seafood app on your phone its a great help at the supermarket or fish shop.

At our house we are going to cut out meat (and alcohol) and also cut down on sugar and electronics for the week. The website has some great recipes to go with our old favourites.

Funnily enough my kids aren't big meat eaters, and they are always keen for healthy week. We try to make it fun and they particularly love the fruit and nut plate for dessert and the different healthy unprocessed options in their lunchboxes.

And the best thing is the effects roll on to see us eating healthier and eating less meaty for weeks after.

I'm going to post some different recipe ideas starting tomorrow to help inspire anyone who wants to join us on our meat free time. I'm going to post some old and new favourites and I'd love to hear yours!

homemade gozleme

I'm pretty sure we're pronouncing Gozleme wrong (goz-lemmy), especially when I hear other people saying goz-le-may! But whatever you call it it is delicious in any language.

I first tried gozleme at market stalls years ago, and it quickly became a firm favourite that I looked out anytime I was buying lunch from a stall. The type I like are made simply with spinach in pastry and a big squeeze of lemon juice on top.

Miss A started making proper gozleme a year or two ago, after we'd tried faking it with some wraps and cheese back here for her birthday lunch. Our fake version was tasty but didn't have the thin pastry wrapping round its filling as in the delicious originals.

The recipe we started using is this one from taste.com.au (a favourite recipe site). Its not traditional, I've read you need a certain flour for the proper version, and this market stall recipe on the sbs site doesn't use yeast, but requires you start ten hours ahead to let it rest and then roll and fold, roll and fold... I think I'll stick with our version for now.

Gozleme is a quick simple lunch which lasts on the table about two minutes. And its vego, which is always a good addition to our eating.

We recently made it while we were camping, on the camp grill plate, which shows you how simple and easy it really is.

This batch was made for our girl's birthday lunch last week (she's sixteen, can you believe it?!!!) according to tradition, and I took some photos along the way for those of you who haven't tried it.We like to add prefried mushrooms and you could also try onions, olives, eggplant, mince, egg, anything! Use baby spinach or just spinach leaves, no stems.

The only thing that would make it even better would be spinach straight from the garden and homemade feta, but I'm working on that (if you've seen my instagram feed you will know I got a cheesemaking kit for Xmas! But more of that soon!)

six years!

Its hard to believe but today is the sixth anniversary of my blog!

In fact my boys were in kindergarten when I started this diary and they are in Year 6 now, and about to leave primary school to start their new adventure at High School. (Cue tears!)

Each year on this anniversary I am surprised anew to find myself a blogger and still hanging out in this little patch of cyberspace!

In some ways I've changed a lot since 2007, but in most ways, well, I just have to read that first month's posts to see how exactly the same I am. Back then I was printing my designs, growing rose seeds, marvelling over the beauty of a nest, making a jack o'lantern, taking photos of flowers and visiting Sculpture by the Sea.

This month I'm printing new designs, trying to grow lettuce seeds, making soap and paneer, taking photos of flowers for Instagram and visiting Sculpture by the Sea! I am still as inspired as ever to celebrate art and nature and make my own - be it soap, or bread, or roses - as I was six years ago.

I love that this place is such a great record of my creative journey. Truth is I come here to look for instructions and recipes, or remember when I planted something, or to read my own instructions for making!

Its funny I look back now and remember feeling like a newbie and outsider when I first started blogging, not sure if I should be here. I sensed there were established friendship groups that might be hard to break into, everyone else seemed to know each other.

I shouldn't have worried, I found that bloggers are exceptional people who are invariably kind and generous with ideas, information and support. As in any part of life you are drawn to friendships with likeminded people, its just these friendships defy geographical boundaries. That said I am always delighted to find online peeps every bit as wonderful in the flesh as they are behind a keyboard when we meet at last in person.

These last years I find blogging changing. Instagram took some of the immediacy and visual impact away from blogs. They suffered in comparison. Instagram posts were up and interacting literally in minutes while those well thought out blog posts with proper camera photos often took hours to format. In our time poor days sometimes the impulse passed once the instagram pic was posted.

I found it didn't stop me reading my favourite blogs though. In many cases after seeing an image on Instagram I wanted to see larger, clearer photos and more of them, I wanted to read the tutorial, or follow the links. But most of all I wanted the story behind them, the voice of a favourite blogger telling me how it felt, what it meant, what they learnt.

We need to support our favourite blogs. We need to leave a comment every so often to tell the person we're there. That might be my new blog year resolution. And we need to keep shopping handmade and support bloggers' businesses this Christmas and beyond. They are a wonderful independent and honest voice we benefit from having in our lives.

Like many I've wavered in my commitment to blogging recently, found myself with less to say and less motivation to say it. But I think the blogging muscle is one that is strengthened by use and I have been trying to get back to a routine. To think in blog posts again.

I think that my outlook on life benefits hugely from this blog and others, in some ways it functions as a gratitude diary and helps me find and see the beauty in my everyday. I'm all for that.

Thank you readers for being here to share it with me.

home salad farm

A year or two ago I realised I really wanted to grow more vegies, I had the romantic idea of drifting around the garden each evening with a basket harvesting. At the time the few vegie plants I grew were squeezed into the rare vacant spots in the garden, but gave me lots of satisfaction. Luckily I love a mix and match garden and find vegies quite beautiful in their own right, to me they fit in between the ornamentals seamlessly, so we pulled some other stuff out and made new spaces.

Each season since then we have added and improved our vegie plots, eking a bit of sunny space here and there, and of course recently added our raised apple box planters. And one of the things our little inner city garden is best at is salad farming. We grow a wide range of salad ingredients now as you can see from the pic at the top.

Quick salad crops fit in well around our long summer holiday when the garden has to fend for itself and don't hog large parts of garden real estate for extended periods. And they fill that hungry gap between winter and summer crops quickly.

 

Also we eat salad five or six times a week, so its cost saving as well, unlike some crops I've grown before only to find a cheap glut of at the greengrocer when I'm harvesting my own.

It goes without saying that salad is a million times better with fresh produce, because its raw you can taste its wonderful freshness in every bite.

Did you know that leafy plants grow well in semi shade, if it fruits or roots it needs sun but many leafy plants will thrive in that shady spot in your garden, that's something I learned. And most of these plants will grow in pots happily too if you don't have available beds.

I'm no expert, I'm still learning vegie growing, but I'm a fan, and here's my thoughts on what I'm growing:

Lettuce
I think Cos lettuce is hard to grow well. It doesn't like leaf harvesting and often bolts to seed in our garden. Mesclun types like oak leaf, mignonette and butter lettuces on the other hand are real cut and come again heroes. And they look so pretty mixed together. I grow these from seed planted direct though I recently read they won't germinate in hotter conditions. This year I've been collecting my own seeds from plants allowed to go to seed, but an easy way to get new types is a mixed punnet from the local garden centre.

Rocket/Aragula
I found out this year that there are actually two types of rocket. The large leafed annual rocket and the smaller leafed perennial wild rocket. If you're not sure which type you have, salad has white flowers and larger leaves, and wild rocket yellow flowers and small serated leaves. This is my first year with wild and I will be interested to see how well the plants last. I usually make repeat sowings of the salad rocket as it bolts to seed quickly, and I do love its pretty flowers.

Peas and beans
I love purple beans for the decorative splash they bring the garden. Scarlet runner beans have great red flowers. Peas are hit and miss for me, but the plants I have in this year, from a few sowings, are looking good. Broad beans were a new crop last year and fresh broad (fava) beans are a revelation. They have none of the bitterness of bought pods and I pop them fresh into the salad as they are or steam them for a couple of minutes to soften. Delicious, I promise. Sow seed at the end of winter for a spring harvest.

Chard, Spinach, Kale
Chard is the ultimate backyard plant. A few plants give continuously for months and I use the small leaves in salads and the larger leaves in canneloni and quiches. Just recently I added kale to my repertoire and I love the ornamental qualities these plants have, and rumour has it they a superfood. They also grow forever. Baby spinach is delicious in salads, full of vitamins and the plants are a lovely splash of green.

Sorrel
A new addition to my salads this year is the beautiful red veined sorrel gifted to me as seedlings. It is such a pretty plant and the slightly lemony salad leaves are a lovely addition to the leaf mix.

Cabbage
Another gifted seedling, I love the colour of my purple cabbage plants, I've been harvesting young leaves and slicing them up before adding their slight crunch to the salad. Fingers crossed they make a head soon and I can have homegrown coleslaw!

 

Herbs
Coriander is another bolter which is remedied by repeat plantings. The seeds are quick to come up and the small plants can just be sown in any available gaps. Basil we cheat and grow from one cheap punnet bought early in the season in its own dedicated pot, so pretty. Its a great addition to onion, tomato, fetta salads when we're out of lettuce. Mint is another great addition and freshens any salad. Nasturtium doesn't quite qualify as a herb but its peppery bite is a great addition.

Beetroot
I'm using the tiniest baby beet leaves in my salads and also grating in fully grown raw beetroot into salad or roasting them with a slick of olive oil.

Tomatoes
After a few disappointing years trying to grow full size tomatoes, I've resigned myself quite happily to the realisation that in Sydney, with our fruit fly problems, small cherry or grape tomato plants are the safest and happiest in our garden. I like the way they keep a ready ongoing crop too, so you always have a couple of tomatoes when you need them. The tiny red tomatoes in my photo are from a plant that survived winter in a very protected spot against a north facing wall and is still producing. My other favourite is the yellow pear variety which is very prolific and has a long season, so long in fact I used it to make green tomato pickles last winter!

 

Radishes and carrots
The quickest crops, and a great splash of colour when sliced through your salad. Plant in repeat batches so you always have some on hand.

Spring Onions
The spring onions in the top picture were actually regrown from cut off rooted ends from purchased spring onions. I'd read about this online and to my great pleasure it works. Just cut an inch off and poke them into the soil then harvest the green ends for cut and come again.

One other piece of advice I came across this year and have taken to heart is to plant something each week. Formerly I would have brief periods of action when I bought and planted everything at once. With this new method I am filling gaps as I go, after harvesting another crop, or if seed haven't come up or have failed to grow.

p.s. Aren't these vegie photos on Kate's blog beautiful.

apple boxes

Last week my bloke and I skived off work for a road trip to Camden, we were picking up a couple of old apple boxes to convert into raised vegie beds. We'd been waiting for a local garden supplies place to get new stock of these, but in the end bought them straight from the grower.

On the way back we drove through Mount Annan Botanic Gardens where I photographed this striking blue tree. Its a lovely big bushland setting with stands of different tree species. Unfortunately we had the dog with us and couldn't get out for a wander, next time.

You may remember we put some vegie beds down the back of the garden last year. While they started off well they have recently struggled with the number of tree roots in the area so we're hoping that raising them up like this will get them more sun and less competition to their roots. Its also nice to have them raised for easy access, and don't they look nice!

I've showed some of the process, we lined them with weedmat and filled the bases with recycled polystyrene to cut down on the weight and the amount of soil used. Then we filled them with a compost mix from the local nursery. I say we but it was mostly done by the boy crew, Miss A and I were out so missed most of the heavy work. The worm towers were reinstalled for easy composting. I'm hoping these work better in the new situatuion too.

The surviving vegies were transferred to their new spot and are so far thriving. These include some stunted rainbow chard, four broad bean seedlings, eight small broccoli plants and four pea plants. None were very happy and it will be interesting to see if they continue to do well in the new beds.

I have a few winter vegies still going, a couple of healthy kales, some broad beans and beetroot grown from seed and some cherry tomatoes which have held on in their sunny side spot through this mild winter. Last weekend it certainly felt like spring and the heralds of the new season, the wattle, the magnolias, the jasmine, the daphne, the jonquils are all out in force.