Slow Food - Part 2

We harvested our first cauliflower today.  It was well worth the effort to get the seedlings in the ground by the end of March to be eating them today.  For lunch today, I chopped 4 florets off and steamed them, then chopped them up, mixed with a little dijonnaise, added a grated 1/2 a carrot, then put the whole lot into a sandwich that got toasted.

Keith and the first Cauliflower of 2012

Very nice.

I have now consumed 2 out of my goal of 5 vegetable serves for the day.  A serve, according to the experts, is approximately the amount of veggies you can fit in a 1/2 metric cup.  I don't know about you, but I struggle to consume 5 different vegetables in one day.  Steak and 5 veggies certainly is a challenge to my tired brain at dinnertime.  Knocking over 2 veggies at lunchtime sure is a good start.  We are going to have the rest of the cauli with dinner, covered in a cheese sauce to appease the junior food critics.

The junior food critics didn't have the same level of enthusiasm as I did about a toasted sandwich containing vegetables, but oh well.  Maybe if I offer it to them another 14 times, they'll eat it eventually.

Tilly the chicken munching a leaf

And guess what else - the chickens LOVE eating the outer leaves of the cauliflower.  (Did anyone spot the red chicken comb sneaking up on Keith and the cauli in the above photo?!?)

Speaking of chickens, ours have developed a frustrating habit in the last few weeks since the cold weather started to bite - they are laying their eggs while on their sleeping perch, instead of going into the nesting box.  Splatttttt.  Broken egg on the ground in a pile of chicken poo.  Maybe they are too cold to leave their snuggling perch-buddies to go to the box?  So I've put a box underneath their perch, with some straw in it to try to reduce the egg-loss.  I'll report on the success or otherwise a bit later.
 

Slow Food - Part 1

We are enjoying slow food.  A couple of weeks ago we bought some peas in a pod, just for the joy of extracting the peas from the pod before cooking them, having to work for our food, so to speak.  I love that the peas are not all the same size, and that they have the stalk part where they attached to the pod.  There was something very satisfying about working for this bowl of vegetables.  It will be even more satisfying next summer when we grow our own.  We cooked them for a couple of minutes in the microwave and then added a dob of butter.  Delicious.

A certain member of our house turned 40 this week (hint - it wasn't me).  Since he doesn't like cake, he requested a vanilla slice for his birthday cake.  The kids and I made it together this afternoon.  We used up almost all our remaining custard powder, so I almost put custard powder on the shopping list but then thought - no - why not make it from scratch next time?  So I consulted the trusty Green and Gold Cookery Book, first compiled in 1923 as a fundraiser for King's College, now Pembroke School.  Sure enough, one can make custard from eggs (which we have in abundance), sugar, milk and cornflour or ground up rice.  Why have I not done this before?  It's no more time consuming than using custard powder with milk, surely?  Convenience is thrust upon us in supermarkets.  Packaged this, packaged that - no wonder our recycling bins are full every fortnight.
Even the packet custard took a full half an hour to thicken up on the stove, as I made 2Litres of it to ensure that the vanilla slice was a thick slice.  It was strangely therapeutic and peaceful, stirring the custard constantly (as instructed on the packet).  I had time to process the events of the day, do some pelvic floor exercises, observe how much grime and dust seems to be stuck to the wall above the stove, wonder how many hours of my Grandparents' days were spent cooking.  A lot of it I suspect.  Along with cleaning and washing clothes, that would have consumed their day easily I think.  Is this why our parents' generation grabbed the convenience food with glee, determined not to be chained to the house as their mothers were?
The Green and Gold was a purchase I made in the year 2000, at BigW for $7.48, according to the sticker on the back of the book.   Flicking through it, I thought how resourceful these women were.  Bread and cakes had no preservatives, so once they were stale, there were plenty of ways to use them up, so they need not go to waste.  Most families had backyard chooks for eggs, and roast chicken once the eggs were no longer forthcoming.  A lot of recipes specify "the weight of 2 eggs in flour, sugar and butter".  I was surprised to find that 2 of our eggs weighed 150g.  No wonder they don't fit in the egg cartons that come from the supermarket.  I perused the recipes, noticing that as long as you had eggs, milk (and therefore cream and butter), flour, and sugar, you could make almost anything sweet by adding seasonal fruit or stewed fruit.  I then set out to look for slices (for my friends The Slice Girls) - but SHOCK HORROR - no heading for slices.  Clearly a deficiency in our Grandparents' cooking repertoire.  Oh wait, there it is, right at the end, under "Confectionery" - toffees, caramels, fudges, even homemade turkish delight and homemade marshmallows.  I propose to work my way through the Green and Gold for the rest of this year, partly as a way to keep in touch with my grandparents generation.

Bee-ing with your family

A bee sampling a flower from the Pin-cushion Hakea in our front yard

The catch-cry of the The Early Years Learning Framework is the 3 B's, which stand for Belonging, Being and Becoming.  
click here to find out what this is 
Quite soon after adopting the EYLF at my current workplace, we starting using cute pictures of Bees when producing documents for families regarding the 3 B's, mostly because cartoon pictures of Bees look oh-so-cute :)

One of the things that has become crystal clear to me since Sophie's death is how much emotional energy I wasted everyday.  For example, getting irritated when someone pinched a parking place I'd been waiting for, or criticizing another person's driving if they forgot to indicate or made some other small error.  All that sort of stuff really-does-not-matter.  I have resolved to spend more time being in the moment and being with my family, my children in particular.  I have been being in the moment with them in things that they are interested in.  Like building a cubby house with Nicole from pruned branches today.  Or doing excavation work in the sandpit with Keith and his Tonka trucks.


I am really enjoying how I spend my time these days, and I'm confident that what I'm spending my time on are the things that really matter in life.