Delving Into the Goodie Bag

The Cape Town Food Bloggers Conference on Sunday is nearly a week gone, but the flavours are lingering. Some in the memory, like Jenny Morris’ wonderful pear and blue cheese tart which has outlived all the other wonderful lunch dishes in my taste bud memory bank, and my first ever sushi from Saul's (I’ve lived on a farm with small kids for a long time now!). Other flavours brought home in the

Vinegar for Cleaning – A Mild Obsession

The smell of vinegar wafts in my nostrils. This time it is not balsamic, not destined to adorn crinkly salad leaves or rich marinades. It is plain old spirit vinegar, not going anywhere near my food if I can help it, but my latest discovery on the cleaning front.I’ve never been a neat freak. My Virgo star sign has never yet extended its renowned attention to detail to the housework. I have a high

Late Summer Tomato Fest

Our son is away for the night taking part with his class in the Waldorf schools’ Greek Olympics. They do all sorts of ancient Greek athletic events and sleep out under the stars, for a taste of what is was like for those Spartan youths way back when. Except they have nice warm sleeping bags to tuck up in and a blow up mattress to keep out the damp. By the time we go to watch them compete tomorrow

Further Yoghurt Adventures

I’m getting the hang of this yoghurt making business now. The third batch came out a little on the sharp side, much to Youngest’s displeasure. A fair amount of Googling later, I came to the conclusion that I had left it incubating too long.Once it has set, any further time just allows the yoghurt to get tangier and sharper. So overnight was too long in the case of the culture that I am using.

Adventures in Yoghurt

It took me a long time to get my head around making my own bread. I thought it would be too fiddly to fit into my day, all that rising and knocking down and stuff. Once I tried my first ever white loaf I never looked back and we’ve been eating home-made bread ever since. Now it has become just part of the daily routine, like doing the dishes, or putting on a load of washing.So why has it taken me

Recycling

One of the everyday problems of living on a farm is dealing with rubbish. There are no convenient collections of black plastic bags, magically whisked away to a landfill site a nice distance away from civilization. In the good old days of course there was very little that you couldn’t either compost or re-use on a self-sufficient small farm. But we live in the good old nowadays, which means milk