mushroom compost and peak oil hummous

The good bits: 1. shovelled the newly arrived mushroom compost onto the punga raised bed and then sowed lots of seeds in it. 2. made three loaves of bread and a double batch of hummous and made up nine packets of four hummous sandwiches, seven of which are now in the freezer.

The useless bits: 1-a big number. the many things I did not protect from Brighid. Leaving my best sewing scissors in the lounge where she found them and cut up Fionn's precious league team photo for which we paid $15 only two days ago. The dried apricots. The liquid soap. The toothpaste. The state of the bathroom generally. The state of the house generally.

Shall I go back to the good bits then?

At coffee group this morning, I was given some pea and sunflower seedlings. The sunflowers need a bit more mollycoddling I think, but I have planted the peas in the newly filled punga raised bed and covered each one with a 3 litre juice bottle with the bottom cut out of it. This is to protect the peas from the blackbirds. However the juice bottles are Brighid magnets and so I still have some protection issues. I also sowed seeds of two kinds of carrots, chervil, two kinds of beetroot, calendula, argentata beet, borlotti beans, lettuce and maybe something else I have forgotten. I figure I have nothing to lose on the carrot front - the fresh compost will make them fork according to the books but really if I have enough success with these carrots that they fork as opposed to never eventuate like usual, then forked will be treasured.

Yesterday I planted three cabbage trees in our bog patch, the patch most famous in my mind as the overgrown yucky tree areas which I attacked three weeks post birth, days post an extended period of antibiotics and then seized up big time. They asked me not to lop trees so soon post birth in future. The midwife, the doctor, the husband. But as I haven't given birth for years now and certainly haven't touched antibiotics either, I can get stuck in and do a little more gentle pruning of woody mints and re-sprouting ugly trees. This area is beside Brighid's forest, which is the tiny glade of punga trees which Favourite Handyman planted the day Brighid was born. As he finished patting the soil on the last tree, I had the first contraction big enough that I needed to lean on him for help. I birthed her on the lounge floor about five hours later. Later FH added some cabbage trees to the grove, which she now wanders through on her dreamy treasure hunts. The new cabbage trees should extend the curve of trees down to the fence.

Back inside, I baked three loaves of bread this morning. This evening I did experiment number two with replacing the food processor (broken, like the toaster, the coffee plunger, the league photo, the dvd part of the combi television) with my spong mincer for the purposes of hummous making. Hummous making is the real reason I bought the food processor in the first place, though at the time I trotted out some nonsense about needing it for baby food, before I realised I wasn't that kind of mother and mashed with a fork kept the baby going just fine. I experimented with making it in the mortar and pestle but it was an average result and I couldn't make large batches that way. But the spong mincer, which I got from an op shop in London for mincing meat (best way to know what is in your mince), works well. It takes a bit longer than with a functional food processor but when the western world love affair with oil collapses and in some way which I forget at the moment this means we won't have much electricity, then I will still be making hummous in my manual mincer.

There are other reasons why hummous is wonderful. Lemon and garlic and tahini and chickpeas and olive oil and parsley and salt is all that goes into my hummous and this adds up to a lot of vitamin C and other healthful goodies.

Last night I made piroshki for the first time. I understimated how long it would take by hours and had to send FH out for fish and chips in the middle so we had them with beetroot soup tonight instead. Piroshki are veges cooked inside bread, just like calzone and cornish pasties and samosas are. The thing I liked about piroshki is that the suggested fillings (cabbage, for whcih I read kale) are much cheaper than calzone recipes. Useful for the hungry month.

Comments

Nova said…
ooo i think i might have tossed out our spong! oops.. never thought it could be used for hummus, all ours ever did was grate veges...
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