Letters from Wetville

Still blogging ... just.  I've compiled a few posts in my head about fundraising and the school gala.  I won't relive the buildup to the gala here after all, but the actual day turned out really well, we made $14 000 which is fantastic for a school of only 170 pupils in a town hard hit by recent economic changes.  I learnt that I still don't mind working hard on the day, and that making candy floss the night before is kind of fun, but that I should not volunteer to make cakes, buy the ingredients and then discover I cannot find the time to bake. The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater is hilarious, even for me the kale afficcionado. In the absence of a local butcher, and given my dissatisfaction with supermarket meat, I decided to try Gourmet Direct , on the recommendation of a foodie friend's stepmother.  Of course.  How else do you find a butcher?  All very Hansel and Gretel so far.  Armed with a free delivery code, I made a selection of meats...

The garden the garden.  Everything in life seems so much more wonderful when I have my fingers in the earth.  I weeded around my daffodils, planted garlic and planted some pansies.  I harvested some jerusalem artichokes.  I had thought the plant would yield a dinner's worth but actually there is a bonza harvest underneath that decaying stalk.  This week is likely to feature more jerusalem artichokes.  Tonight's dinner, of garlic, onions, bacon, kale and j.artichokes, with lashings of butter and some parsley to boot, was most delicious.  Recipe ideas very welcome. I have almost finished the red corduroy skirt.  All it needs is a hem.  But as I sit here wearing it, I have two thoughts: 1. I may splash out on a leg wax.  I don't see why anyone should have to remove any bodily hair just because of social conventions/expectations, but at the same time I find I want to hide my legs when they are hairy.  Which is most of the time. ...

Sometimes, when I have neither time nor patience to sew and the Sallies have good dinner plates but nothing I want to wear, Postie Plus is a good place to go. Every spring I feel the urge to buy something new, really new. Today I bought this: It's called a scapino chiffon overlay dress. If anyone knows what scapino means, then I'd love to learn. There are worse ways to spend $49.90 I also made fish chowder with my home made fish stock. I cooked the first part in the slow cooker throughout the day and then put the mix into a saucepan to boil with the fish pieces and kale when I got home from work. The fish stock is wobbly when straight from the fridge, indicating reasonable amounts of gelatine and probably other brothy goodness. It tasted quite good. Next time I shall attempt a Chinese style fish soup with ginger and garlic and noodles instead of today's sort of British mish mash of turmeric, carrots, onions and potatoes. And kale and fish pieces too of cours...

I made beetroot cake from Pam Blowers' recipe in the July/August 2011 issue of Organic NZ. The original recipe has various sweetener and flour options; I've listed what I used. 300g grated beetroot 1 C brown sugar 1/2 t vanilla essence 3/4 C olive oil 2 eggs 1 C wholemeal flour 2 t baking powder 1/2 C cocoa 1/4 C chia gel (whisk the 1/4 C of water with a heaped teaspoon of chia seeds to form a suspension of the seeds - I did this by putting it all in a small jar and shaking it) 1/3 C ground almonds - I used almond flour 1/3 C ground sunflower seeds 1. Beat sugar, oil, eggs. Add vanilla essence and beetroot. Mix. 2. Sift in the flour, baking powder and cocoa. 3. Add ground almonds and sunflower seeds and chia gel. 4. Mix to just combined - do not overmix. Pour into greased 20cm square pan. Bake at 180 celsius for 35-40 minutes until firm to touch. It tasted good. My pan was 20cm x 28cm so it was more like beetroot brownie than classically shap...

We've had visitors and lots of fun the last couple of days. Much more fun than listening to some of the economic news, and that damn Phil O'Reilly on why workers should not get pay rises which respond to the sharp inflation rate. From the Blackball Museum of working class history: Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. A shot of the kids. Both photos from our talented visiting photographer. Tomorrow we take the children to my parents to stay and then FH and I are going on a mini holiday all of our own, complete with hot pools, and possibly even snow. None of that over the top expensive broccoli for us. Here we are eating swede. And kale of course. I made smoked fish and potato stew the other night, with kale in it, and I cooked grated swede and 8/9 people liked it. Brighid, of course, was the unpleasable. If you are hanging off the edge of your computer, desperate to know my recipe secrets so that you too can serve swede which people have second helpi...

You want kale first or last? Tonight: kale in nachos. My kids don't like nachos made with a tin of refried bean mush. They also don't like the vegetable mixture to arrive touching the chips. We never have a meat version because if I had the time to make a meat version, we probably wouldn't be having nachos. So. Peel one large kumara. Chop into cubes and steam until soft. Wash, chop out the central rib and chop up quite a lot of tuscan kale (also known as cavolo nero). Peel and chop 4-6 cloves of garlic. Roughly chop the contents of one container of anchovies (50g, sometimes less). Sautee it gently in a pan with the lid on top after the first minute or two (sautee may be the wrong word for experts but it seems the best fit to me). Add some cumin, stir and add the kumara. Mash it up a bit with a fork and turn the element off. Make some guacamole. I made mine with the juice of an entire lime. This is too much lime juice. Half is better. Otherwise, a couple of avoca...

Kale grows throughout winter. Kale survives storms. It survives thunder and lightning and hail and more rain than anyone who doesn't live near a rainforest can ever hope to experience. Which is why we are still eating it. Tonight: kale and garlic chopped and sauteed in a small amount of olive oil. Then I poured in quite a lot of frozen peas and a little water and put the lid on for the cooking to continue. Meanwhile I was cooking some fettucine because that is the only pasta I could find in the drawer. I added about a third of a container (the 250g kind) of cream cheese to the green veg mix because that's all we had left and blitzed it with my whizzy stick. Then I added the pasta into the sauce and stirred it all up and put finely grated cheddar cheese on top of each bowl of pasta. We ate it all and didn't have enough seconds to go round, so I'm treating that as a success. The addition of peas does definitely take it into the realm of babyfood consistency. Why ...

The changeover of chooks project has begun. On Sunday Favourite Handyman killed one chook. He didn't enjoy it at all and there was another hitch in that he thought the chooks had worse distance eyesight than they do. They saw alright and they weren't going anywhere near him. In the past, we have been gifted roosters to kill and eat, but this is the first time we've done our own. We haven't given them names and we always planned they would be eaten once they were past their best laying days, but it was harder to do our own all the same. FH had to go into work straight after the killing and I decided it was far too hard to skin and gut a chook safely (sharp knives and nasty bacteria) with two smallish children wnating to be part of the process. So I cut off the feet (excellent for stock apparently), washed them very thoroughly and put them in the freezer. Then I buried the chook in a deep hole with a bucket of bokashi on top and then soil on top of that. Not the o...

It is very very beautiful where we live. Today, the sun shone brightly for the second time in four days . I went to the beach all by myself, where the shape of the creek running out to sea has changed again. Where I could look for miles and see only open space. They have begun work on our leg of the national cycle way. I guess they will build a bridge over the creek here, giving the kids another spot to throw things from. In a town where it rains much of the time, where winter routes to the rest of the world are difficult to traverse, where everything human-made seems tiny and closed on Sundays, the beach reminds me how lucky we are. Today on Spectrum on National Radio, David Steemson interviewed women from the Knitter Natter group which knits for babies and children at the Kidz First Childrens Hospital in South Auckland. I hope this is the link to listen . It was good piece, partly centred around the meetup of the knitters in Wiri womens prison with the knitters 'outside'....

The sun! The sun! Today the sun shone brightly and no one was wheezing or sneezing green stuff. I realised how long it has been since I was outside in the bright sunshine when it was so shadowy even at midday. I took these outside photos at midday. The chooks get no sun in their run at the moment. YTou can see the roof of the poultry palace in the very centre of the photograph. I guess there won't be much vitamin D when we kill them and turn them into stock. Beautiful sky huh? The low angle of the sun stretches out the washing line shadows - they look to me like giant blackbirds. A whole day without rain. Woohoo. I hope Christchurch people get a whole day without an earthquake soon. And then days and then weeks. The wood piles, pitifully low, are soon to be supplemented by coal. This is rata which we've had in storage for over 12 months. It burns hot and is wonderful stuff. This is beech, which we had delivered in April. It is mostly dry rather than completely so. U...

Cor crikey I don't think you could fault my commitment this week. Not to blogging, to nursing/parenting/wifeing. In aid of drastically reducing the dust mites in our home, I have been cleaning for days. On last count (and I count hourly), Fionn is mostly well, but still blowing rather low on the peak flow metre. He is at school but off sports. Favourite Handyman is still home convalescing, but improving. At risk of jinxing it by mentioning it out loud, he is giving up smoking. Seven days so far. Never mind the 'again' bit, I've heard the stories of people who give up nineteen times before they quit for good. I took Brighid to the doctor today, as her recovery is very slow and she seemed to have gone backwards this morning. But nothing scary to report, and my efforts to give her a gram of lypo-spheric vitamin C every hour today (I nearly got there, probably averaged every two hours) seemed to have paid off in terms of her improvement by the end of the day. By ...

More kale. A few days ago I made a kale meal which started out as a pasta sacue and morphed into a soup with pasta in it. I can report that kale goes well with cannelini beans and pasta, but I didn't keep the recipe in my head. Yesterday I made chicken red Thai curry with kale in it and that was nice. I bought one of those packet mixes and just added carrots and kale with the chicken. Next time I will make it more from scratch myself, though probably still with bought red curry paste. Tasted good. Lunch time today was for all four of us, as asthma boy and lung infection Dad are still off school/work. I'd made chicken stock overnight and I used lots of chopped garlic, onion and ginger sauteed in olive oil and butter, then added chopped pumpkin and some red lentils and the chicken stock. Ten or so minutes before the end of cooking, I added chopped kale. Tonight, more kale. I made pumpkin/feta/rosemary/pumpkin seeds bake in the oven and then on the stove top I sauteed c...

Lunch: wash and chop kale. Finely chop five cloves of garlic. Saute in olive oil, then add one tin of chopped tomatoes, put lid on and simmer. Then add chopped smoked chicken to the pan and keep lid on and simmer some more. Then add in the penne pasta you have just cooked. Serve with parmesan and black pepper. Dinner: Finely chop 12 (yes twelve) cloves of garlic and one onion. Wash a pile of jerusalem artichokes (for proportions, think how many spuds you would use for a main course spud salad and that is how many artichokes you will want) and cut into even sized pieces. Wash and finely chop some kale. Chop up some bacon (I use hunks of bacon ends sold cheaper at the butchery). Put quite a lot of butter in a frypan and cook the bacon. Then add the garlic and onion and artichokes. Put the lid on the frypan and turn it down. After a while, add the kale as well. When the artichokes seem nearly done (about 15 minutes, and I had mine in quite small pieces, perhaps 3cm cubes), th...

The rain has scarcely stopped all day. It rained most of the weekend, but the weekend seems like it was full of tropical sunshine by comparison with today. The bokashi buckets are full and the punnets of vegetables, flowers and lavender are still in the porch, hopefully protected there from the winds. Even when it stops raining, which it didn't today, it's too wet to turn the soil. To replace the real gardening I would like to be doing, I grab a pile of books from the library this afternoon. They have A Green Granny's Garden by Fionna Hill. I've just read the first half of the book and it's 'nice'. I'd put it in the same publishing wave as Wendyl Nissen's A Home Companion: My Year of Living like my Grandmother , but it's not as well written as Nissen's book. Flitting through another book, I now speculate that the problem with my sad little celery (in contrast to the gorgeous and huge celery I grew in my first year here) is lack of cal...

More kale: shepherd's pie. Is shepherd's pie the one which uses leftover roast meat? I'm working on that assumption given that's what Mum called it. If you whizz up kale in your whizzy machine into small pieces, it mixes up with the whizzed up meat and the other chopped veges and lashings of tomato sauce perfectly. Chop the central ribs out first. Magazines and newspapers often publish gorgeous photographs and writeups of fabulous farmers' markets throughout the country. Our climate is a bit more difficult, not so much for home gardening as for commercial scale enterprises. So the next best thing is when South Island producers bring their wares to the West Coast. Motueka Valley Organics have been bringing their wares to Greymouth every second Thursday since last month. Their produce is super yummy and very reasonably priced. I love their apples and grapes and this week we have persimmons, feijoas and chestnuts as well. I'll report back from my virgin at...

I've been sewing. Which is to say I've been learning. I sewed this top in the photo below. Well, I sewed it almost to completion, which was enough for me to know that: a) It's not a bad fit but it's not great either and shortcutting on the full bust adjustment yielded short cut results. b) I am too young to wear navy polyester tops. So tonight I undid the first lot of adjustments. First time round, I cut a 16 in the neck, an 18 in the arms and graded from the 16 through to a 20 from the armscye downwards. I also added 5 cm in length to the front and back. It did fit across the bust, but it was quite baggy around the waist and thus not so flattering. Second time round, i.e. tonight, I cut out the paper pattern piece for a 16 in all the pieces and had my first go at a fba on the front, adding 5 cm on the pattern piece for the front, which will double in effect on the actual fabric. There is no dart in this pattern and I'm not entirely sure I have finished with a...