My Shopping Trolley.

I love shopping day. I get so swept up in the colour and flavour of fresh fruits and vegetables, which make up the bulk of what I buy these days, and love the challenge of shopping more consciously every fortnight. I get asked a lot about the cost of buying organically, and whether my food bill has sky-rocketed.

Well, here's the deal. My food bill is 75% of what it was before I started on my journey of local/organic/close to the source eating. It is true that often, organic products cost more than non-organic. This is not always the case, though. Also, when you eat natural foods that have not been processed and over-packaged, you are not paying for the processing and packaging. My food bill has gone down largely because my trolley does not contain pre-prepared, convenient foods. You pay for convenience. This includes jams, sauces, snacks, breads, yoghurts - things you can make at home, but that people often don't. As a society, we are time poor, this is true. We are also nutrient poor.

Here is a photo of what I would put into my trolley for a standard-ish fortnight. There are some things here, such as vinegars and bread mix, that would bump up my bill, but that would last me a good month to six weeks. The contents of this photo cost me $300. A more 'standard' fortnight, without these bigger items, would probably cost about $250 for the fortnight. We used to spend $400. Much of the fruit and vegetables is organic. It is ALL Western Australian grown. Most of it comes from within 200-odd kilometres. The flour is local, biodynamically grown. The meat is local, organic and free ranged. (Actually, the meat was bloody expensive. That bumped my bill up somewhat. I can't wait to be up North and shooting my own meat again.)

There are a lot of arguments against buying organic foods. The cost is the most common I come across - I shop for a family of four on a single social worker's income... this argument doesn't wash with me. Another is the science behind organics - this is a whole other post, but to my mind, it comes down to what we are prepared to put into our bodies. I would rather my children eat fruit that has not been sprayed with pesticides, or meat that has not been pumped with preservatives. I would rather know exactly what is going into their bodies - real, wholesome food, not a bundle of numbers on an ingredient list that reads like an algebra exam.

This is why I shop the way I shop.

From My Kitchen.

I made this pavlova for an Australia Day barbecue we went to. The recipe called for six egg whites. Eggs are a bit scarce in our kitchen at the moment - we believe we have a snake or something similar stealing the eggs from our chicken coop. Even the eggs that our clucky silkie bantam was sitting on have disappeared.


With this in mind, I wasn't keen to use the whites of six eggs and dispose of the yolks. So I decided to try my hand at mayonnaise. I haven't made it before, and it was a project I had been intending on attempting for months, but have felt slightly daunted by (possibly because there is a bit of a Masterchef connection to homemade mayonnaise in my mind!)

I used Julie Goodwin's recipe, which I will post below. My mayonnaise is very yellow, but my backyard hens lay eggs with the most beautiful rich yellow yolks, so this was to be expected. The recipe called for extra light olive oil (this efers to the colour of the oil, not its fat content) but I only had regular extra virgin olive oil. I believe the taste of the mayonnaise would be improved with extra light oil, but, having said that, I quite enjoy the batch I have made!

Julie Goodwin's Mayonnaise

 (I doubled this recipe)

3 egg yolks

1 tablespoon vinegar

1 cup extra light olive oil

salt and ground white pepper, to taste

up to 2 tablespoons lemon juice

I added some fresh crushed garlic

Place the egg yolks and vinegar into a food processor and switch it on.

Add the olive oil a few drops at a time. When the mixture begins to thicken, add the oil in a steady flow until it is all incorporated.

Season with salt and pepper, and add lemon juice (and garlic) to your taste. 

Keep in the fridge for up to a week.

Fresh Baked Bread

Nothing beats the taste of fresh, hot, wholemeal grain bread straight out of the oven, smothered in homemade apricot jam. We usually bake our bread in the breadmaker, but this week I received three antique bread tins that I had bought off ebay, and I swear the bread tasted better when cooked in one of these!

Don't forget if you want to win a set of Onya Weigh Reusable Fruit and Veg Bags from Divine Harvest, you need to leave a comment on the previous post before 6pm tonight.

Spitikos Domatopoltos (Homemade Tomato Paste - Greek Style)

I borrowed this recipe from here but will write it out in full anyway.


Ingredients:
2 kilos end-of season, overripe tomatoes (peeled)
1 sweet red pepper (I used a dried chilli instead)
1 - 2 tablespoons of sea salt

Peel tomatoes by cutting the tops off, immersing in boiling water for a few minutes, then plunging in cold water. The skins should then peel off easily.
Place tomatoes and pepper into food processor and blend until well pulped.
Transfer to a pot and bring to the boil. Boil for 2 or 3 minutes.
Place mixture in a muslin lined metal sieve and suspend over a large bowl in the fridge for 12 hours, to drain all excess liquid away.
Transfer mixture to a glass or ceramic bowl and stir in salt. Leave standing until mixture is at room temperature place into oven to dry for 15-20 minutes at 95-100 degrees celsius.
Spoon into warm sterilised glass jars, avoiding air pockets, and cover with 1 cm of extra virgin olive oil. Let cool then store unlidded in fridge. Will keep like this for a year.

As the tomato paste is used, add more oil to the top as needed.
Jars can also be loosely covered with foil (does not replace oil - always use the oil), if desired.

A note on sterilising jars:
My method of sterilising is to wash the jars and lids thoroughly in hot soapy water, and dry well. I then place them into a cold oven and heat the oven to 160 degrees celsius, and leave jars in there for 10 minutes after temperature has been reached. Make sure the jars are not touching each other in the oven, and be sure to keep them hot until your preserved product is spooned in, as hot foods being put into cold jars will cause the jars to crack.
If using screw top lids, I boil these in a saucepan of water until needed, and use tongs to lift them out and place onto jar. Seal immediately, because as the food cools, it will cause the lids to 'pop' inwards, creating a full seal.
To remove labels from jars easily, I soak all jars in a tub of hot water with some eucalyptus oil, then use a soft scourer to scrape labels off. Make sure jars are then thoroughly cleaned, dried and sterilised as eucalyptus oil is toxic.

Well, my large box of tomatoes is nearly gone, just a few stragglers remain in the bottom. I am thinking I might oven dry these and use them in the pasta sauce that will be accompanying Nath's freshly caught squid tonight!

Home Made Tomato Sauce

This sauce is just so delicious... I will never buy tomato sauce from the shop again.
I adapted Sally Wise's recipe from her book "Out Of The Bottle". My adaptations are in green.

Ingredients

6 kg fresh, ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped

1 kg onions, peeled and chopped (I used red onions, as I like their flavour)

750g sugar (I used raw sugar)

2 cups white wine or cider vinegar (I used organic brown rice vinegar, because that is what I had in the cupboard!)

120g cooking salt

1 1/2 tablespoons whole cloves (I ground these in the mortar and pestle, along with a whole star anise)

1 1/2 allspice berries (I just used ground allspice) 

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (I used a very ready dried chilli instead)

1 tablespoon tamarind paste

Combine all ingredients in a large pan and bring to the boil, then simmer, stirring regularly, for four hours. Strain mixture through a sieve (I disregarded this, being the 'whole foods' girl that I am, and just stuck a hand blender into the pan instead) into a clean saucepan. Bring to the boil over medium heat and then simmer for five minutes. Pour into warm sterilised bottles and seal immediately. Invert bottles briefly.

Store in a cool, dry and dark place for up to two years.

Makes approximately 7 litres (more like six in my opinion)

Healthy Earth, Healthy Me: My Twelve Top Tips

• Buy local as much as possible... go to markets, check the label. Try not to buy products that claim "local and imported" or "imported" ingredients. This isn't always possible, for example dates, which are a terrific dried fruit because of no preservatives and a great sugar substitute are a product of Turkey, I buy them anyway and try to look for "packaged in Australia".

• Buy organic where possible, and if not organic, biodynamic. Again, not always possible, and there is a real ethical dilemma about non-organic and local vs organic and imported. Personally, I choose local.

• Buy products with little or no packaging. Hmmm... very very hard to do!!! Markets are great for this, and always better to buy bulk as it immediately reduces packaging.

• Don't buy products you can make yourself. Bread, yoghurt, pasta, jam, snacks, dehydrated fruit, pasta sauces, pita bread, dips are all things I no longer buy, instead choosing to do it myself.

• Become acquainted with food additives. There are some great websites, otherwise a couple of books I highly recommend are "Chemical Maze" (can't remember author) or "Additive Alert" by Julie Eady. Buy products that are as close to nature as possible, with as few additives and preservatives as possible.

• Eat wholegrains. Fantastic health benefits and Earth benefits as white products require so much more processing. Pasta, bread, cereal etc.

• Replace cane sugar where possible. Use honey, agave, dates (chuck them in the food processor after soaking them to make a paste) or rice malt syrup. Cane sugar crops have a massive detrimental effect on the environment and require so much processing, and aren't very good for us anyway.

• Load up on vegies and to a lesser extent fruit. Market shopping can be so much fun and vegies should constitute most of our diet.

• Drink loads of water but not bottled water. http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/

• Watch your portion sizes. If you are eating natural, unprocessed food mostly, and learning to take your cues from your body about when you have had enough, you will learn to eat like our predecessors ate, just enough to fuel our bodies and give us the good stuff :)

• Avoid Genetically Modified products or ingredients. Look for products that state "No GM/GMO ingredients"

• Buy Fair Trade where possible. Communities that Fair Trade supports are traditionally 'raped and pillaged' by "Corporation/Big Business" looking for our money when their products hit the shelves. The Story of Stuff website has another little video on it, which is the original Story of Stuff video, that goes into the "true cost" of the products we buy in really good detail.

Check out these websites too:

http://www.wholefoodcooking.com.au/

http://consciouscommunity.com.au/

http://www.towards-sustainability.com/

http://www.healthyshelf.com.au/