Heads up to all the Fair Food Week people out there. Running from the 16th-25th of October, there are all kinds of events happening. Have a peek to see if there is one near you, and if not, how about organising one?
If that doesn’t sound like your kinda thing, maybe read the book?
Either way supporting a fair food culture should be something on everyone’s plate.
A little spanish food forest inspiration for you. I love the idea of these. So good.
It’s Sunday and there is cake on our family plates
a soft lemony one
a cake that you could easily handle another slice (or two.)
Made quickly but with love.
Don’t ever think that something made in haste
isn’t without it’s lemony love merits,
that’s just practicality.
A practical Lemon-And-Olive-Oil-Made-With-Love Father’s Day cake.
Lemon and Olive Oil Cake
4 eggs
400g caster sugar
250mls olive oil
zest of 1 large lemon
juice of 2 large lemons
450g self raising flour
In a mixer, beat eggs and sugar together until pale. Then drizzle in olive oil. Tip out to a large mixing bowl and add lemon zest and juice. Fold through self raising flour.
Pour mixture into two greased and lined cake tins or one cake tin and one muffin tray (this mixture make approximately one large cake and 8 muffins).
Bake at 180C for approximately 45-50 minutes, shorter time for muffins.
Let’s keep this one simple and straight to the point. Need a last minute kids birthday present and have no idea what to give?
A gingerbread biscuit bigger than their head, yes it’s true.
If you have school aged kiddos, other friends and class mates birthday parties come around quite frequently throughout the school year. But what to get little Hayden from down the street? What on earth would Chloe like? And did we already give Theo lego last year??
I tell you, gingerbread.
Guaranteed no one else is going to be giving that. Homemade, easy, kid friendly, and can be made ahead of time, (or in a last minute hasty rush as this one was). Most kids are quite happy on receiving a gingerbread the size of their head, (and if not, well, there’s usually a adult lurking to happily help them out.)
If you have time, decorate it beforehand, if not, decorate the outside. For this one I wrapped it in clear cellophane and glued a mouth on the outside.
Gingerbread recipe here.
‘Fair Food, stories from a movement changing the world’.
I close the book up and sit there, long deep thinking, and a little frown to concentrate harder as needed. There are so many mixed thoughts and emotions to grab hold of, it’s a bit of a lucky dip, grab one and run with it. Conversation starters, that’s for sure.
Over all while reading the book, I feel completely hopeful, and really excited on how wonderfully driven people are and all that they do for our current food system. Then on another page, I’m feeling the complete opposite. Slipping hope and questions of how the hell did we let it get to this??
As I’m reading, I dog ear so many corners and underline so many lines and passages, it ends up looking like a high school text book. Why? Because it’s important this stuff, I want to remember.
Fair Food is a book told through the different experiences of people within the Fair Food movement of Australia. Personal stories from backyard food forests, urban farming, activism, regenerative agriculture and something that I hold firmly to, radical homemaking.
All topics that are relevant, food and the way that we grow it, support it, buy it, eat it…this is something that effects all of us, every single one of us.
If we are lucky enough to have regular food on our tables, well then we should be educating ourselves on the food system that we buy into, understanding even a tiny corner of it makes a difference, and has a wonderful follow on effect.
While I loved all the different stories from people contributing to this book, I think it was Cat Green, the Radical Homemaker that I identified with most.
“Radical homemaking grounds my day to day life…” I loved reading from her point of view because she clarified things for me (well in my head anyway) that were there, I just needed to join the dots.
“It is a framework for social change that seamlessly entwines personal change with broader collective change.” Damn straight it is.
“My ‘work that matters’ comes from being actively involved in life, not sitting on the bleachers paying for someone else to do it.” Yes. A beautiful resounding yes.
So, while I’ve momentarily closed the book to think on it’s content, I know I’ll be opening it again soon. To read aloud, to quote parts that resonate and most importantly to pass it on to others.
Food for thought
The 3 daily meals Australians eat have travelled over 10,000km before they reach our stomach.
We waste nearly 40% of all food we produce.
The world produces enough food already to feed everyone on the planet.
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Important Links
The Peoples Food Plan: food policy document
Australian Food Sovereignity Alliance
That’s a triumphant jar of lemon curd right there I tell you. I’d tried making it a handful of times and, failed the same number of times. Turns out I was following the wrong recipes. I settled on a recipe from Three Blue Ducks cookbook, (they haven’t failed me yet) and a little nervously began whisking away.
Not long later, done and set. It’s creamy, lemony, doesn’t have lumps and is quite troublesome with a lone teaspoon. Now why had it been so hard beforehand?
Never mind, I had it now, but what to do with those golden jars of goodness?
Apart from the convenient jar with a teaspoon situation, I also played around with some black rice pudding. While I wouldn’t say it’s a tried and true recipe, it is evolving and I will definitely be playing with a few variations over the winter months. If they are flavours you like, have a tinker around with your ingredients and make it to your own tastebuds.
A really easy winter breakfast.
Breakfast Black Rice Pudding with Rhubarb and Lemon Curd
1 cup of black rice
2 tbls coconut oil
2 x pureed soft pears
1 bunch of rhubarb
coconut milk/ or natural yogurt
1 tsp of vanilla essence
lemon curd (recipe found here)
Overnight soak your black rice with cups of water. In the morning, cook the rice up, adding 2 pureed pears to sweeten it a little when you start cooking. Cook it as you normally would rice using the absorption method. Once it’s cooked, stir through two tablespoons of coconut oil.
At the same time and in another pot add your rhubarb. Cut into 1 cm pieces and cook until soft. Turn off and add either half a scraping of a vanilla pod or tsp of vanilla essence.
Serve with coconut milk, (or natural yogurt) fresh fruit and lemon curd. The curd gives it a little zesty sweet kick.
Sore throat? Hacking cough? Nose that’s doing its best impression of a tap turned on?
Yep, it’s that time of year. Time to fight bugs with your natural super powers, (most of which you’ll find conveniently already in your kitchen ready to go.)
Now, most of the time I feel it’s fairly inevitable that our family is going to get sick at some stage. Especially with three small kids, two of which are in school. While I can monitor hand washing and keep sick ones slightly separate here at home. At school? Well it can just be a washing machine of germs. I can’t do much about that, but I can prepare my family with the best cold remedies.
7 of the best Natural Cold Remedies
Turmeric Tea– immune enhancer, liver detox, soothing, healing, anti inflammatory, all that good stuff is attached to turmeric.
Green Ginger Wine- I find it’s a good preventative one if you’ve got the beginnings of a scratchy throat, not one for the kiddo’s though obviously.
Citrus and Honey Shazzam- In a mug add, the juice of a lemon, juice of an orange, grated knob of fresh ginger, top it up with water and heat gently. Add 1 tsp of honey just before drinking and stir, (top picture.)
Master Tonic– I wrote about my experiments with this one recently over on Milkwood. Firey hot, but worth it, I’m completely won over with this one.
Tanya from Ecolosophy recently posted her Nanna’s Old Cold Remedy
Honey- immunity booster and cough suppressant. Dry coughs can be soothed a little by a teaspoon of honey (not for bubbas though.)
Garlic- get it into you, oodles of benefits in there.
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What are some of your favourite natural cold remedies?
Food waste is currently costing Australians up to $10 billion each year, while two million people still rely on food relief. [Oz Harvest]
Standing next to the big tented kitchen and my stomach is grumbling. The smell coming out of it is incredible. Both in what it’s doing to my taste buds and also with the thought- that all those meals that are being created in there? Well, if it wasn’t for Oz Harvest, there would be no amazing tantalising lunches being handed out today and instead all that food would have gone simply into landfill. A sobering thought, that’s for sure.
“Think.Eat.Save 2015 is to bring attention to the alarming amount of food wasted in Australia and around the world, where roughly one third of food produced for human consumption (approx. 1.3 billion tonnes) is wasted or lost along the way.” [ozharvest.com]
Monday morning saw me grabbing my camera and spending a part of the day with the wonderful people connected with Oz Harvest. The national Think Eat Save campaign was launched across ten cities around Australia, in conjunction with the United Nations- (UNEP and FAO) Oz Harvest is doing an incredible job in raising awareness for global food loss and waste reduction.
Oz Harvest is a company that collects good quality perishable food (that would otherwise be discarded and end up in land fill) from a variety of different outlets. They then deliver it to a number of charities around the country. 600+ charities to be exact, that’s some amazing work right there.
But back to Monday’s Think Eat Save campaign.
“Thousands of members of the public across capital cities will be served a free hot meal including surplus soup and rescued stews made from produce that would have otherwise ended up as landfill.” [ozharvest]
Getting more people to rethink food sustainability and security on a local level is something that should be on everyone’s thoughts. Why? Because this effects everyone, on everyone level, at every generation. We should be taking ownership of the waste that we produce. And food waste? It’s a big one that really needs a big reshuffle in this country.
So what did I take away from the campaign? Well a renewed sense of, ‘we really need to do better’ that’s for sure. Rethinking what we put into our shopping trolleys, the food we create for our families dinners and what exactly we are putting into our garbages. I was also blown away by the energy of the volunteers and wonderful people wanting to do more and say more about this issue…it’s really important stuff!
I’ve certainly got more to say, but will keep it for another post. To be continued, and in the mean time? Rethink what you are putting in the bin, it could be part of that $10 billion.
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Insta Lovers- Heads Up: Now if you are keen on sharing your delicious Sunday breakfast (or any other meal) with your teams of followers on Instagram, keep on reading. Oz Harvest and Virgin Mobile have teamed up for the #mealforameal hashtag. You take a pic of your meal (any meal), tag it and Virgin Mobile turns that into a real meal for someone in need. That’s a winner right there, so get snapping people.
Helpful links with more info
I had four and a half hours before I had to get the kids to school. Surely plenty of time to get a cake baked and to be sitting cooling on the bench for when I got back, right?
Er, no.
It seems by getting up at 4.30am it gives you an increased sense of time security, that clearly wasn’t there. After jamming 21 ‘to do’ things into those morning hours, I simply ran out of time.
With time tick-tocking, the school bell never late and the cake clearly still not done. I decided I would have to leave it in the oven, turned off, but hoped the stoves residual heat would cook through any last of the gooey crumb. It had been baking for an extra 5-10 minutes already*, so surely that should be enough?
I get home hours later and enthusiastically reach into my oven to retrieve the cake and start icing it.
Not quite what I expected.
Not really what I expected at all. Sunk like I hadn’t sunk a cake since 1994.** Hmmm, what to do? The cake being still far from cooked through on the bottom, I decided to bake it again and see what would happen.
It seems cake miracles do happen, and it did get a little more height (than the mess pictured.) It was still sunken in the middle though, so what to do about that?
I was going to ice that cake, like I’d never iced before, that’s what I was going to do!
Covering the cakey crater with a vanilla mascarpone mixture***, I then carefully smoothed the tiny bit left over to the edges and sprinkled walnuts on for extra hiding of any problems.
Verdict?
Best cake I’d made in ages. Seriously, I wish all mistakes tasted that good.
Carrot and Cardamom Cake recipe can be found here, (coming from the new cook book The New Nordic.) *
The photo actually made it look taller than it was, a total height of 2cms on the sunken gooey bottom. ** I found the 200C too hot for my cake, use your judgement, and remember recipes are a guide, you know your oven best.
It also needed far longer than stated, but…I shouldn’t haven’t been squishing so many things into the morning. ***
The cream cheese and butter icing as stated in the recipe was substituted for a Vanilla Mascarpone number which is more the way our family roll. 
Beards, hats, cold brew coffee, braces, man buns, green smoothies and scarves. If you’ve begun to conjure up images of well-groomed hipster types with intriguing arm tatts, waxed to a curl moustaches and retro print head scarves well I’ve done my job, because I’m talking about hipsters and sausage rolls today.
So would a hipster approve of these particular sausage rolls?
Well they have a secret ingredient within them, and that secret ingredient is hipster certified….it’s kale. And as we all know hipsters eat kale for breakfast, lunch and dinner right? (As luck would have it these sausage rolls can be eaten at any meal time.)
Hipster Certified Sausage Rolls
one bunch of curly kale (stripped from the stalk and roughly chopped)
2 small eggplants, diced
500g of organic beef mince
1 cup of sourdough bread crumbs
1 free range egg
1 knob of butter
a good slurp of olive oil
1 TSP cumin
salt and pepper to taste
puff pastry
In a pot add curly kale and diced eggplant. Add a good slurp of olive oil, cumin and butter, wilting the vegetables down. Once this is done, take them off the heat and with a hand held mixer, blitz them (or blender.) In a bowl add remaining ingredients and add cooled kale and eggplant.
If you are making your own puff pastry, line that goodness down and add your mixture in rows. If you are using the frozen stuff (because life is full and doesn’t involve making puff pastry, then thaw it out and have an extra cup of coffee in the time you’ve just saved -single origin fair trade cold brew coffee of course.
Spoon the mixture on, fold ’em up, cut them and bake on a tray at 200C for approximately 25 minutes. They should look golden, and be tantalising the taste buds.
Eat with enthusiasm, and some delicious farmers market bought chutney.
Although you can buy pumpkin for a fair chunk of the year here in Australia. Now is when you will be seeing rather a lot of it. Autumn and early winter is a great time for the humble pumpkin. It’s a cheap and easy basic, that really does pay to know a few different ways in which to cook it. Team it up with the forever versatile fetta and you are away. Meal times never looked so simple.
Now if you are lucky enough to grow your own pumpkins, they can be stored for several months in a cool dark airy spot, especially so if they have been cured beforehand. This can be done by leaving them out in the sun for a while first, for the skin to harden and the stalk to dry out.
Then there is the eating. I really like using pumpkin as it’s cheap, and can be turned into a whole list of easy dinner time meals… Or snacks… Or desserts. Actually the humble pumpkin is rather impressive with its array of pumpkiny meal options.
KNOW YOUR BASICS: Find a couple of basic ingredients and really get to know them, what they can do, what they taste well with and most importantly, how on earth to cook them.
First up, roasted. This can be done either with skins on or off depending on your time, strength and taste buds. I normally peel them, as they are generally going into a soup, dhal or bread kind of dish.
Now once you’ve peeled, chopped and roasted you are left with the scooped out, fleshy, stringy and seedy bits. Separate all the seeds and leave them in a bowl to soak over night. The next morning dry them off and spread them out in a frying pan gently roast- watch them, they POP!
Whether you are roasting, steaming, eating cold, eating hot, the pumpkin is a great one to be bought locally, seasonally, frugally, and importantly tastely, (surely that can be a word?)
What’s your favourite way to serve pumpkin?
A few more ideas on what to do with your wonderful pumpkin
Make a Pumpkin and Fetta Tart
Pumpkin and Fetta salad with chickpeas was delicious
Pumpkin and Fetta sausage rolls always a winner
Pumpkin and Fetta foccacia
Pumpkin Spiced Cake– everyone loves cake, especially pudding kinda cake
Pumpkin and Jerusalem Artichoke Soup, cool nights, hot dinners
Roasted pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
Indian Spiced Pumpkin Scones– easy for lunch or afternoon tea
Pumpkin pie
Pumpkin Dhal- frugal and seasonal cooking
and my go to Thai Style Pumpkin Soup
I was still a bit unclear of what we were celebrating the next day. Requests had been made though, and when the requests are asked in a small, considered voice, hope dancing in her eyes…well it’s hard to say no.
It seems we were going to celebrate the fact that it was Thursday, and that alone was reason enough to make some celebratory cupcakes. Cupcakes of the marshmallowy, Iced Vovo Cupcake kind. What ever you are up to this Thursday, I hope it has a little something to celebrate in it.
Iced Vovo Cupcake recipe here.
cityhippyfarmgirl 