how to be a master preserver - lesson one with the mint jelly

i love preserving. i love buying the books especially. i love the pictures of colourful delicious jars lined up. i love opening the cupboard and grabbing a jar of tomato pasta sauce from last summer. so far, it's been a bit slapdash. in a very scientific way though of course. no e-coli for us. but now the number of books i have seems to exceeded the number of preserves i have made, and this my friends is no good. (wonderfully no good).

So watch out beasties because the mint jelly is now lurking about!

but it unfortunately wasn't the most awesome mint jelly. but maybe because i don't love mint jelly? shut up. it was in the easy-get-started-type recipes, and anyway, we had a date for roast lamb the next day.

so here are some pretty picks of my strange coloured jelly, where i refused to use food colouring, and despite issues with pectin (powdered vs liquid) it set to a very reasonable state. instead of using the liquid pectin 'pouch' they had in the recipe (?!) i used about 6gm of powered jamsetta stuff. -side note: keen to also try the homemade pectin from lemon skins. wooooooo

look! this is my pretty new 'water bath canner' with a wacky name and not easy to say quickly. some people even like to call it a 'hot water bath canner'. c'mon you can't even make an acronym out of it.

i am sterilizing the jars. yes indeed.

now i am chopping the mint.
(the mint comes curtesy of the south melbourne markets. not just dim sims i tell you.)

straining the mint! funky pants jelly bag. i am so specialised and awesome.

this how the hwbc looks on my stove. (i.e. excellent)

and this! well this is the end result. it looks more like green tea, eh?

but at least it set right.
thus ends the lesson. if you want it to taste more minty than the bugger turns out, then just chop some extra from the garden and mix it though before the lamb gets involved.

ta-ra!

lemony delicious

i made slice. i never make slice.

and if i did it would probably be something chocolatey or cheesecakey.

then i saw this. what a beautiful website! what a stunning, luring snack.

so it came to be that i was eating warm, not quite set slice at 9.30pm last night and loving it.

PS. it's true, the edge does go chewy and caramelly.

update on the pickled garlic

it's yum! i wasn't sure it would be you know. because one of the jars mayn't have sealed properly and the cloves seemed to glow green internally. weirdos.

but we opened a non-green affected jar and included some on an antipasto platter with friends the other night to great acclaim. then next day worked some chopped into a nachos salsa. winner.

FAIL - his royal highness, the princely quince

well a colleague was lovely enough to give away quinces at work recently, and once i managed to get my head out of the bag and stop smelling it, i made quince paste. or tried to.

it is princely, but it is also punishing. it sticks like concrete to the dishes and burns you if you touch it.

a labour of love produced four jars.

four jars of rock hard quince. woe betide the servant of quince! fool to temperature and timings. swoon and utter abject misery.

banished from the kingdom of sublime scent. unrequited cheeses, all doomed...

the sad thing is, i shy from failures, i likely won't try it again. there are too many other preserves to try. if i had a quince tree of my own, yes i would toe the princely line, but nope.

hark, i hear there are some pomegranites on the horizon...

Hugh F-W our hero, and garlic in a jar

i bought this awesome book. it's loveliness is endless. it's country as, progressive in a way of c'mon get with the times and eat local, slow food etc. i love it.

i immediately pickled some garlic and fennel in jars, which we have been fortuitously been putting aside.

the best thing is that the guy behind it all is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Whom we love. Doesn't he have a dreamy name? Dreamy dream, River Cottage is our dream.

Pink peppercorns have a certain style. See.

and those are the olives that the fiend bought and has been processing slowly with water and salt and we will have delicious olives forever more.

jam to day ratio = high

These are just some of the jams of Tasmania.

We've come back from a lovely break away to my island home.

Foodies paradise. Classy cool climate grapes into pinot noir, beautiful plentiful diary farms yielding cheeses like you wouldn't believe, oysters farms and wild apple trees.

the fiend and i had to buy another suitcase to fit our accumulated winey and preservey delights. oh dear, but it was worth it. we actually bought a wheel of cheese. almost three kilos of sheepy milky goodness.

go to tasmania now. drive amongst the pristine small town wonder of it all. stop and sample. chat and chomp.

my bread won't sing, or i am a virus

but it looks lovely.

when you take your artisan bread out of the oven it may sing or crackle, but mine is stoically silent.

maybe because it is whipped out by the croc glove. see him? evil.

we love baking bread, but mixing it everyday gets less fun. so now we premix the dough and it's been yummy and via this magic book, have learnt about oven timers and baking stones and steam.

steam? yes. at least the water on 'broiler tray' action gives me some noise.

unrelated matter, anyone else get sick from their flu vaccine? meh!

scrap happy!

Look at this lovely most lovely bundle I got in the mail!



a sweetiepie accordian notebook, crafty cards that the handmade paper is soo tactile and look at those matching scraps. yes, she is a clever clogs.

along with a groovy mix cd of 20 tracks including some new fun ones for me and some favourites, wine song - yeah!

THANK YOU KATE!

The swapapalooza (you can sing that to the tune of bee bop a lula if you change the accents a little.) was a resounding success. well done georgielove you are particularly rad.

power ranga

it's fun. google luckily/unfortunately and your name.

Luckily, Bridie isn't allergic to peanuts.
Luckily, Bridie managed to stop that transaction.
Luckily, Bridie has done the potatoes...


Unfortunately Bridie is the only one that is still alive. (ooh!)
Unfortunately bridie away so dossin in da office.

and my most favourite:

Unfortunately, Bridie (more commonly known as retarded magpie, Swansea or power ranga) didn't go.

fizzy bubbly

look at its loveliness! it worked out a total treat. there is just a light fizz and plenty of sweet gingery taste.

i used pip's nostalgic recipe and fed the little thing for two weeks while flatmates watched on in amusement.

I don't recommend reusing listerine bottles, turns out you can never really get rid of the taste of that stuff. luckily that was only one. the rest are scrummy. little bit of lime, little bit of gin. mmmm. next time, earlier in summer. or actually in summer.

we have a milkman!

we do! old school values or the convenience of modern life? awesome nonetheless. nevertheless. notwithstanding.

[s]he comes early every wednesday and drops us off 2 litres of skinny milk for me and the fiend and 2 litres of fat milk for my flatmate.

not as lovely as the milk bottles with silver foil tops that my nanna used to get and then keep the tops and make them into pretend coins for us. but still quite lovely.

homage to the simple things in life

 

thank you angry chicken! i really like your style. you are a machine. and now because of your groovy blog i have made butter. you can see in the middle the separation between butter and buttermilk. and then the lovely bread i made to go with it. soft and delicious it rose to the occasion. ha.

it was very simple as promised. didn't take long at all in the fiend's lovely kitchen aid. the getting the water out bit was a touch tedious. but only because i'm the most impatient person in the world. but it went down a treat with the flatmates.

success.

butter.

equality for books

 

have read the book grocer blog before, it's funny. esp the shark bit.

and then i found it on sydney road. lovely sydney road.

and all the books are priced nice and low and reasonable, so you know any paperback you like is only going to be $6 and any hardcover is only $10. and i liked two paper and one hard. picklehead is already very funny and moving and foody. the bookbinders with the surname damage is the king of thing i like. there's a word for that, when your name suits your ocupation. the fiend knows it. i can't remember.

delicious things that have happened around our house

 

a quick round up of some tasty treats to remember

backyard antipasto and crumbed treats from piedimontes iga
when the fiend made croissants from scratch
a baked egg pastry delight and homemade panini loaf
birthday cake for the shark (bought from dexter's lovely cake lady)

we heart fowlers

the fiend boyfriend managed to get a hold of a whole bunch of fowlers jars. do you know about these? they are (were?) a wondrous home preserving system, with a very cute and domestic lady in the manual.

and you get to preserve all the wondrous foods of the rainbow, from everyday fruit and veg, to soup and meat and cooked spaghetti (!)

we're starting small. 5 litres of tomato sauce.



stay tuned.

a lovely musical lunch break

Wandered over to City Library yesterday to grab the latest in a certain trashy vampire series that i am admittedly hooked on (despite not really liking the main character OR her love interest hmm, but it does have an element of suspense that keeps me on). When I got there, so lovely because someone was upstairs playing the piano. I remember this happening once before and snapping the lovely old lady doing it with her gorgeous long white hair and nimble memory fingers and no sheet music. magic. and i've even tracked down my pic from then, see? and lucky because i didn't venture up this time, just listened from the queue. que-ue.

degraves always lures me but i rarely ever eat there, partly because i can't decide, partly because of the outdoors smokie people. then what i thought was still degraves, but is actually 'centre place' or 'centre plaza' or something, i happened along a crazy busy fast moving mass of people paying for food, so i joined it and worth it because, yum. flaky pastry cheese and spinach for primo price of $2.50. I think i'll have to go back. just for the photo mind you. BUT there was also a girl playing a sweet violin right nearby, so i got to listen to her while playing crumb face. happy lunch!

kitchen superhero: australian garlic

Found some! It's not common, as you may know. I've been on the look out since reading this article and then randomly at my friend's local grocer, there it was.



Pretty huh? I wanted to marry it, but my lamb got to it first. So I gave them a congratulatory gift of rosemary sprig and left them to it.

Plus some loverly tomats from the garden:



and delicious slow cooked lamb casserole. which i didn't get a snap because it was too yummy i guess and we got distracted. but that's the way it should be with delicious dinners.