Food In The Belly, Food For The Soul

I write about food a lot. Food is something I devote much of my time to, as well as a significant part of our income. Food excites me, challenges me and inspires me (and sometimes defeats me). Much of our weekends are taken up with the growth, preparation, cooking and celebration of food (and by that I mean eating).

Every society has a food culture of some sort. Countries are known for their cuisine; the particular ingredients and cooking methods they employ, the rhythms and routines around meal preparation, the colour and bustle of marketplaces around the world. Early trade was centred around foods, and what was commonplace for some cultures was exotic and sought after to others. Nomadic communities based their movement around the availability of particular seasonal foods.

I believe that, by and large, Western society has lost its food culture. And we miss it, by god, do we miss it. We spend millions annually on the business of food; fine dining restaurants, specialty food stores, cooking schools, food festivals. I believe that, as we have evolved, this disconnection from food and its production that we have created has left our society feeling somewhat... hollow. We make up for it by spending more millions traveling to other cultures to experience their food culture... and when we try to recreate it with our Western tastes, we adulterate and compromise the essence of the food. Food culture is, and should be, entrenched in the soils it was raised up from.

Anyway, I was determined to write a lighter post than the last two, so I wanted to share with you some of ways we try to recreate a connection with the earth and its edible gifts in our space. These are photos from this weekend, a lovely, productive two days of pottering around the house and garden, feeding our bellies and feeding our souls.

Breakfast: fruit and honey damper with the last of my apricot sauce

Our harvest on Saturday

More bottled tomatoes - a pantry staple

Our little garden gnome, Eden

The bed we planted this weekend - tomatoes and rhubarb

Orange and date chutney simmering away - a sweet, spicy smell

Finished product - three more jars for the pantry

The beginnings of beer bottling

A clean, mucked out chook pen - and our reward!

Taming the Wild: Our Garden

For some time now, we have had a ramshackle vegetable garden on the go. It is not quaint and neat, there are no beautiful raised garden beds and timber retaining walls, and things aren't planted in lovely, marked rows.

We are not green thumbs from way back; growing our own food has been one of the biggest changes we have made to our lifestyle. If lawn was food, our yard may look a lot nicer, but as it is not, we pay little heed to maintaining it.

We had let the garden go to seed after last season, as we thought we would be moving on. However, we will after all have enough time to see another harvest from our little garden. Last weekend, Nath and the girls planted (from organic seed) radish, turnip, pumpkin, rockmelon, tomatoes, rainbow chard, cucumber, bush bean, cabbage, habanero chilli, roma tomato, cayenne chilli, rocket, silverbeet and zucchini. We already had some capsicum and cucumbers growing, as well as a variety of herbs. I am looking forward to harvesting it all, and hopefully we will have enough to preserve some for when these foods are not in season.

 Our capsicum plants are going well - I wish we had planted more!

The cucumbers that were already growing are going mad - so we will have enough to eat fresh, and, with the ones we have just planted, enough to pickle for the rest of the year as well.

One of our bean plants sprouting.

 One of our pumpkin plants sprouting.

Some lemon basil drying in the kitchen.

Weekend Life

Some random pics from weekends in our part of the world.

Some of our MCNs drying on the line.. so much prettier than disposables!

Eden playing with the 'new' toy from our local Toy Library... a new Saturday morning ritual.

Our latest harvest

Miya, who won't eat carrots served up hot on a dinner plate, loves them straight out of the ground.

Our 'lolly bags' from a birthday party we went to today. I thought this was a FANTASTIC idea!

Responsible Renting.....

One of the things that has been rolling around my head over the last couple of days is.... if I don't have my own house to make changes to in order to live more responsibly, then how can I make the most out of this lifestyle? How can I reduce my impact on the environment when I am restricted by my surroundings?

This was a really big factor in my disappointment about losing the house. I had so many plans and dreams, and it seems so difficult to implement some of them when we are living in a rental. We can't install solar panels, for example, or ceiling fans, and a water tank seemed out of reach too.

We are limited in the type of chicken run we can build, which limits the amount of chickens we can keep, which in turn limits the amount of eggs we can use to barter with. We already trade one dozen eggs every two weeks in exchange for another household's food scraps to upkeep them, as half our food scraps go to the chickens and ducks, and half go to the Bokashi composting system.

Yesterday, I had a hypnotherapy session. I came out of it with much more clarity and peace than I have felt in such a long time, and with an awareness that I was only limited by my own imagination. A significant proportion of Australian families rent, and sustainable living should not only be for the 'rich' or for homeowners. There has to be changes that every Australian family can make, regardless of their living situation.

So I got to thinking. I can still have a water tank... I can have an unplumbed one that services the garden, the chickens and provides drinking water.
I can still have fruit trees. I can buy dwarf versions and plant them in large pots.
I can still build a chicken coop... the materials for it can be shifted when we move house. (At the moment, our chickens and ducks are free range during the day and are closed into a smallish moveable coop at night to protect them from foxes... the coop is too small to keep them in all day.)
I can still live frugally, reduce my usage of energy and water, reduce my landfill garbage (this week, our half size wheelie bin was only one quarter full!!). I can still make sure I am living each day more responsibly than the last.

Some of our range of water collection containers and our Bokashi bucket

Our rudimentary vegie patch; carrots, lettuce, onions, peas, garlics, spinach, capsicum and cucumbers currently growing.

Our homemade chicken coop

Our duck family.... hours of entertainment and fantastic pest control

 Homemade tortillas... best I have ever tasted!

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups wholemeal self raising flour

1 tsp salt

2 tbs vegetable oil

1 cup lukewarm milk

Sift flour into bowl. Combine milk with salt and oil, whisking briefly to combine.

Slowly mix the milk mixture into the flour to form a sticky dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead briefly for a couple of minutes. Leave to rest for 10 minutes covered by a damp teatowel.

Divide the dough into 8 equal sized balls. Cover and rest for another 20 minutes.

Roll the balls out very thinly on floured surface. Fry one at a time in a very hot pan sprayed lightly with oil. Turn after 20 seconds and cook other side. Keep warm and covered until finished; serve immediately.

May also be wrapped and frozen after cooking for up to a month. Thaw and reheat in foil in oven. (Nath and also fridge the dough once it has been rested both times to cook the next day... this works just as well.)

These are really yummy cooked on the BBQ :)