The Whole Five Acres

A moving story

For the one person, apart from myself, that visits this poor excuse for a blog, we're moving! After the six weeks of semi-owning a property on the mid north coast but never being able to get finance approved because it involved over 100 acres and hey, that's too big a risk for the banks to take, we have in the heat of 48 hours found another house we love, put in an offer which was accepted straight off, organised finance and now only wait for the paper work to be put through which may take three days or at most a full five. That's right six weeks of nowheresville right next to 48 hours of let me not put a foot wrong and get this all sorted in jig time.

Our new house has no acres - just a quarter - it's on the city fringe yet still rural. We can't take the 50-odd animals there with us, but have a plan on the farm to house them all. And...with the way this mortgage broker is setting up the loan we can still afford to lease the farm land...another bonus. It's within coo-ee of all our markets, and with a bit of planning we should be able to make our lives a little easier and lose a few of the 4am rises. How I hate getting up at 4am!

In a strange and scary way though, apart from not having the land we want, this house has everything else we could wish for. For summer we have the in-ground pool For those nights when we are tired and sore from work we have the huge two person spa. For my work there is a massive two car garage in the backyard that is currently fabulous teen accommodation - this is set to become an outdoor kitchen along with a corner for my studio. It has ducted air for summer and will soon have a fire for winter. Let's not forget the back deck large enough for the BIGGEST dining table (for entertaining family and friends), not to mention a little corner of the garden where we can keep one or two chickens so we can have fresh eggs. (I"m planning on putting a fairy garden in too for the grandson, and as D2 is constantly telling me she is not pregnant I'm figuring we may also have the granddaughter too to cater to soon.) The shops are around the corner, and within a three minute drive we have found the country pub that grills the best steak in Sydney for only $12 on a Tuesday night. 

The best bit...within a week we will know for sure if the house is ours. The only hiccup could be the bank - but the mortgage broker is certain all things will go in our favour. Having been burnt already this year, I'm crossing all my bits and hoping against hope that this time we are finally through to the end.

Where is Mulgoa?

Why I'm not a food photographer - and the pretzel story

Exhibit A! 

A photo of my recent foccacia style bread. Notice the vibrant green pesto that now looks like old tea leaves, and the mozzarella balls that now look like dough lumps. It may not photograph appealing...

Do you recall that I made up some bread concoction a while ago and saved a wad of the dough in the fridge? 

As they say, the proof is in the eating, and this was one mighty fine piece of foccacia. The dough looked horribly deflated when I grabbed it out of the fridge at least five days after my initial bread baking flurry. My hopes were not high as I pressed the slightly dry dough out into a rough square. In the interests of seeing my experiment through to it's conclusion though we dressed the top with a variety of seasonings and tossed it into the hot oven to see what we would come up with.

Oh my...this was good. One half was chopped herbs, mozzarella and rock salt. The other pesto and mozzarella. I don't think there was a favourite side - hard to tell though as most of this was devoured within about 5 minutes of slapping it on the table. Mighty good indeed.

Sadly though, I don't have the commitment to become a decent food photographer. There were mouths to feed, there was much chitter chat around the table, there was too much else to concentrate on without me ripping out the camera and calling a halt to all things social and taking pics to upload here.

So yeah, you get a misshapen shot, taken in about 3 seconds flat, of a loaf that looks as appetizing as my left shoe. You're just going to have to take my word for it that bread making can be simple (especially for dough deaf people like me) and that you can put your dough in the fridge for a few days and whip out a wonderful starter when family comes around.

There are more photos too that should be on here but aren't due to appetites taking over. The shot of empty paper and a few crumbs just didn't scrub up well in photoshop!

Moving right along, the other day I ventured upon a recipe, on a site that makes my cook's heart sing with joy.

Smitten Kitchen's Soft Pretzels

I've never eaten a soft pretzel, so have no idea what they should taste like, but the gorgeous brown knots of dough in her photos instantly turned me into a pretzel fanatic who must-bake-pretzels-NOW!

With only minutes to spare before my girls (and grandson) turned up to help me clean up for my big move, I had the dough mixed and rising in the corner of the kitchen. Remember I'm not a baker so this was a huge step.

Running backwards and forwards between the office computer (where the recipe was) and the kitchen (where the action was unfolding), the recipe was finally put together and the pretzels went into the oven. We had dramas, we had worries, we had to buy eggs purely for the eggwash. 

And then...we had pretzels. A total of 18 pretzels. Brown, glistening, soft and so incredibly good it was not funny. The salt pretzels were incredible. At every bite there was this instant smack of incredible flavour. The sort of flavour that could see anyone polishing off 18 pretzels in one go. 

But...my dear Sonny does not like salt OR sugar crystals on his food so we had to do some with poppy seeds and some with nanna seeds. (nanna seeds aka sesame seeds. My dad was poppy to all his grandkids - so what else would you call the other seed you find on bread?)

Daughter 2 loved the nanna seed pretzels, I loved the salted and I don't know who loved the poppy seeds but two hours later with only 4.5 of us eating they were all gone. We're talking pretzels as big as your hand. 18 pretzels that you would think should last at least until the morn. I think my one year old grandson actually ate 5 of them! We even gave a neighbour a taste tester and he thought we had bought them - yay to the newbie baker.

So if you are wondering where the photos are, wonder no more. Our mouths move faster than any camera's shutter speed, and you'll just have to believe me when I tell you this recipe was a success. In the meantime we are planning to cook more of these soon, and if we manage to get ourselves organised there may just be a photo or two to bring to show and tell. Then again there may not be.

PS: The process of making these pretzels involves many stages when you think you will fail. The rolled soft dough stage is the worst, as the pasty white puffy dough is none too glamorous and looks either phallic or a lot like some sort of animal turd. Don't let this put you off...once in the oven all is forgotten.

Hockey pucks be gone! Bread baking for the hopeless...

I must set the record straight, before I start, I've never been able to cook bread ever. Years ago, a friend and I even went to a bread baking course, and while everyone else went home with lovely crusty loaves, I went home with marbles. Bread has been the bane of my life – until this week.

My recent bread baking spree was inspired a few months ago after reading many many online success stories with No Knead Bread. The magical process of kneading bread was always where my previous attempts fell flat. Try as I might, I just couldn't turn a lump of sticky dough into anything more than a lump of hockey puck filler. I figured my hands were too dang cold to generate any warmth in the loaf.

Being the impetuous person that I am, it only took six months before I finally gave the no knead recipe a whirl. Well, blow me down, it turned out amazing. Crispy on the outside, light and soft on the inside. All from my own cold littl  hands. 

The only downside with the recipe was the timing. While it takes no time at all to mix the dough, and shape the dough, it takes hours upon hours for the dough to rise, and then more hours after it's risen before the loaf finally makes it into the oven for it's next hour of cooking. With our heat here too of late, I found my dough was ready a good 6 hours before I was ready. While the no knead idea is simplicity itself, the time schedule was a nightmare. I made it once again during the week, and again it was so easy to put together any fool could do it (I did) but again all the timing faff drove me batty. 

In the middle of this no knead bread baking frenzy I then hit on the idea of making some lebanese pizzas. Not that I have ever made them, or have a recipe, I just thought with a bit of dough, some mince and flavourings  we couldn't go far wrong. And...I was right...we didn't go far wrong. 

This time I made a simple yeasted dough in the mixer, left it to rise, then pinched and rolled out 24 little hand size pizzas. The beauty of this was still no work on the kneading side of things (the mixer did the work) and, praise be, I made the dough and had it all in the oven within two hours. Now that sort of time schedule works for me.

One step further along the bread making route brings us to tonight, when another batch of bread dough was flung together to accompany our dinner. In between all these batches I did a bit of google research and learnt a thing or two about making a good dough and how it works.

I found a little site about pizza making, written by a man with a passion for the best pizza dough in town. He spent years perfecting his crust, before he decided it was time to work on the toppings - crazy! He explained an awful lot about how flour works and what to look for when making a dough. So with his thoughts in my head, I set to in the kitchen.

Apparently a wet dough works better if you are beating your dough up in your mixer. Being all about ease, my mixer was the star in this process. His second clue was to allow the wet mix to sit for a while before getting into the kneading. This step allows the flour to accept the water which in turn makes the dough come alive. 

How did it turn out? The taste was good. There was a light crust and the inside was soft and yummy. I think the batter may have been a tad too wet when I finally cooked it, which may be fine in a good baker's oven, but not mine which was full of moisture from the roast and veg.

There's not much left out of two loaves though, and we still have some dough left in the fridge for tomorrow night's dinner.

Easy Homestyle Bread

Ingredients

5 tsp dry yeast

3 tsp sugar

375ml warm water

300ml warm milk

5 cups bakers flour

2 tsp salt

1tbsp olive oil

In a measuring jug stir 5 level teaspoons of yeast and 3 teaspoons of sugar into 375ml of lukewarm water. Allow to sit for a while, and it will become foamy.

In the bowl of your mixer place 5 cups of bakers flour and 3 teaspoons of salt. Give a quick whizz aroundwith your dough hook so the two are incorporated.

Once the yeast is all foamy, add it and 300ml of warm milk to the flour and start the mixer on slow. It's good to push the raw flour down on the sides too in the beginning just to ensure that it all mixes in.

After a quick mix, the dough will be lumpy and bumpy but completely incorporated. Turn the mixer off, throw a teatowel over the whole lot and go away to fold washing.

After about 15 minutes, come back to the mixer and start again. The dough will have risen in this time too. The picture above of the mixer shows what the dough looks like at this point - quite wet and batter like.

Start the mixer again and let it go slowly for a bit. Add the oil at this stage because you forgot to add it earlier. As the dough becomes less sticky turn the machine up until it's starting to get a good mixing action going. Don't do what I did and walk away from the process or you too may find the dough climbing up into the machines mechanism.

I reckon I beat the dough for about 5 minutes or so. As it was still a bit wet and sticky I now incorporated a little more flour into the dough until it looked about right. What is right? Still a bit wet, but stretchy yet dough like. Knowing i was going to dump this on my cloth with more flour, I didn't want to get the dough too dry just yet.

When I was happy with the dough, the hook came out, and the cloth went back over the bowl and left to rise once again. This time once it gets to double its size, it's ready for final shaping.

I vaguely remember my mum using a cloth to knead her dough on. Not having a stainless steel bench, or even a granite block to start with, a clean table cloth was flung over the kitchen table and floured up ready for the shaping stage. 

Dump the dough on the cloth and get fresh with the dry flour. At this point you don't want the dough to stick to you, the cloth or anything else within it's vicinity. I give the dough a few good hand folds and pummels. Nothing too strenuous mind – remember I have no idea what I'm doing. Cut a few chunks off and throw them into an oiled cake tin. Check the bottom picture to see what I'm talking about.

For the top tin in the picture above I took one great gob of dough and stretched it out like a long snake, and then stretched that sideways so it was flat like a huge tongue. Onto this I painted some melted butter, sprinkled parmesan cheese and dried herbs, before rolling it back into a snake. This snake was then wound back around the pan.

These both were then let to rise for a bit, perhaps ten minutes or so. Just prior to cooking I brushed the tops with a beaten egg and threw on either poppy seeds or herbs.

Once there was enough room in the oven, the bread baking began. My oven is old - real old so temperature is pretty much unknown. I was also cooking a roast dinner with roast veg, and had a foil container of carrots bubbling along on the top shelf. The purpose of this bread baking session though was to be able to make a loaf of bread as and when it suited me and my oven, not when the dough wanted to be cooked. So the first loaf (the bun style) went in with the roast in quite a low oven, perhaps 370F. At some stage through this cooking, I turned the oven up to 400F as nothing seemed to be happening too fast and I was becoming impatient. I'm not sure how long it took to cook, maybe 25 mins tops. My imprecise method did not disappoint though. The bread came out brown and well cooked with a slightly crispy crust and a soft bread texture. Not perfect, yet not disappointing.

The snake roll went in next. As the pork roast wasn't cooking well (the oven's very old) the oven was ramped up even higher this time. This cooked much faster on the top than the bottom, which didn't really matter in the end. The flavour was amazing. Considering the amount of cheese inside, this loaf was only slightly savoury - yummy all the same.

It must have been good - there was no time to take photos before it was demolished!

The whole process was very satisfying. While I was in the kitchen getting the dinner ready for tonight, I was also able to get some bread together for our dinner. It may not be perfect store bought bread, then again it also doesn't taste like perfect store bought bread. I can see this recipe evolving even further over time, and also see larger quantities baked whenever we have masses of people to feed. It could even work well in our umu, cooked in a camp stove. 

There's still another half of the dough resting in the fridge. Tomorrow night I may let Sonny have his hand at forming his own loaf for dinner. 

If you look carefully at the finished loaf you'll see that there is little definition between the rolls once it is cooked. This may or may not be because the dough was too wet and didn't have enough strength to support the rolls individually. I might try a little more flour in the next batch and see how it turns out. 

Salted Duck Eggs

Our dear ducks have provided us with many duck eggs in the past few months, right up until a few weeks ago. Not ever having kept ducks before, I wasn't prepared for them to go off the lay so suddenly. From a couple of dozen a week to nothing was rather distressing.

If you haven't eaten a duck egg then you are missing out on one of life's great egg eating feasts. The yolks are almost twice the size of a normal hen's egg, and the richness is delightful in even the simplest of recipes. If you are used to eating supermarket eggs, then perhaps you may not understand why an omelet with nothing but a few herbs can be a gastronomic pleasure. 

In the meantime we we have come across another farmer selling fresh duck eggs. As we get requests all the time at the markets for them, we bought a few dozen to satisfy our customer's wants, and a few to satisfy mine. A slight miscalculation on my part (let's just call it a selling frenzy one Sunday) and the only dozen I had was at home and already potted up in a salty brine. 

Salted duck eggs are an interesting way to save and eat the duck's bounty. After a time in the salty brine, the eggs are boiled then sliced into salads, and other dishes. The spices and chilli impart a slight flavour to the egg, the salt gets leached out in the cooking and there is an incredible depth of flavour in every bite. Many Asian cuisines use them as a condiment, just as we would use a salsa to add a little something to a dish.

Originally I had been told that the eggs go in the brine for 31 days and then they are ready to eat. So our first jar was consumed within a matter of days. A bit more research and I now learn that from day 14 onwards until about day 62 you can keep your eggs in their briny jar, and only pull out what you need as you need them. Our dozen in the picture is at day 7, so only another week to go before we can have our first few. Note: they don't look any different on day 14, or day 31 for that matter!

Make your own Salted Duck Eggs

The recipe is simple. Make sure you have a large sealable jar that will hold the number of eggs you have on hand. Also it is a good idea to make sure the egg shells are clean. Ducks can be rather messy around their nests and we don't want any of that muck in our food! Yew....

Measure the amount of water it will take to fill your jar. This will be more than you need, but is an easy starting point. Bring it to the boil in a large pot then turn it off, it's now time to start adding the salt. I use sea salt and start with about a good cup's worth - you can see my jar is quite large though. Stir until it dissolves. If all the salt disolves then add some more. You'll know when there is enough in the water when there are salt crystals still undissolved. For some reason water can only accept a certain amount of salt before it becomes saturated.*

Once your water is fully salted, just allow it to cool to room temperature. Patience is a virtue at this stage. If it is too warm your eggs will start to cook. When cool place your eggs in the jar, top up with the salt and hey presto you are almost home. 

At this point if you fancy nothing more than the tang of salt in your eggs, place a weight** of some sorts in the top of the pot to keep the eggs submerged and then seal. Put in a dark cupboard and leave for at least 14 days.

If like me you can't help being a mad scientist, go crazy with your spices. This month I've shoved a pile of chillis into the jar along with a few star anise. Can't predict how this will turn out, so we'll have to wait and see in a week's time. 

How to eat Salted Duck Eggs.

This is where the research fun starts again. Some people tell me to boil like normal, others to boil for a long time. There seems to be no real answer to this question, and for every person I ask there is another answer to think about. 

On my first go I was very confused, but Madhur Jaffrey came to my rescue. Bless her. Looking through her Vegetarian cookbook she just happened to mention that she boils her eggs for about an hour, changing the water three times. The water changes help to remove the saltiness from the egg. I'm not a lover of salt, and can recommend you do the same.

Once boiled, peel and then slice into salads, curries or rice dishes. The eggs behave exactly the same way as a hard boiled egg - except there aren't any nasty blue rings around the yolk. In fact, the long cooking time doesn't seem to affect the texture in the same way as a traditional normal egg. The additional flavour from the salting and spices is subtle yet wonderful. 

When I started these eggs a week ago we were having crazy phenomonal heatwave temperatures, the place was hotter than hades, so my thoughts were to cook up a cooling gado gado which would be perfect with the eggs. 

This week though, we're experiencing an Alaskan winter (is that the opposite of an Indian Summer?). Perhaps the eggs may hold up well to a hot curry sauce with rice and veg. I'm open to suggestions.

*I think the key to this saturation is sea water. Living too far from the sea I can't grab a pot and see if salt water will absorb any more salt. Thinking it through though, salt is made in places like France by the evaporation of sea water, and as the water evaporates the salt forms. This all makes sense to me, as this is an Asian inspired preserving solution. Perhaps a community living by the sea discovered this as a way of preserving eggs. They would have been able to run out and grab the salt water by the bucketful to save their eggs. In days gone by, it may have been a bit hard to grab a packet of Saxa salt anytime you wanted to brine some eggs.

**I'm not awfully creative with weights and never seem to have a dish or anything that will work to keep all good things submerged. The other day though I discovered a brining cure for some meat, and the suggestion was to fill a ziplock bag with excess brining solution and float that on the top of the bottle. The brine helps to keep the whole lot submerged, and if for some reason the bag leaks, the brining solution isn't compromised by the addition of plain water. Brilliant! You'll see my bag jammed into the top of the picture.

Tit from tat

Yesterday was a bit of a slow day in the office, and as the kitchen had started to look like a poly box recycling department, I thought it was high time to knuckle down and make some bottled goodies. I also needed an excuse to test out my new electric vacola preserving kit. Love impulse buys!

The night before I had roasted up over 2 dozen red capsicum and slung them in a dutch oven to steam overnight. I was quite thrilled I could do the skin peeling after a good night's sleep. Labour intensive recipes are not high on my hitlist. The next morning though the universe decided to throw stones in my path by providing me with one almighty migraine. Really! Just because I couldn't help but wolf down almost 2 whole man-sized empanadas made by my good friend - even though I knew that the pastry was definitely not gluten -free! But oh my, wasn't the sweet potato and caramalised onion empanada incredible. I would almost suffer another migraine just to take another bite of that filling.

So with the migraine banging at my eyeballs I settled down at the old trusty table to peel away skin after blistered skin from the roasted capsicum. Once done, the next task was to work out what to do with them. I seem to start most of recipes with organising ingredients before deciding on a plan. Experience tells me this is due to the fact I can't stand being told what to do. A recipe is too restricting for my tastes if it comes along too soon in the process. Praise the Google Lords for finding 3 likely recipes. With a quick toss of the head the winning recipe was to be found here here!

As it turned out, I ended up with just enough peppers to fill six small bottles with oodles of marinade left over and nothing to taste test. Who knows what these will taste like, the bottles did end up looking awful purdy after their bath. Out of three bottles, sold two today without needing any taste testers (lucky!).

Next up, a glut of lemons.

Salt preserved lemons have always fascinated me, so with a quick chop chop chop, I had my lemons quartered. Most recipes require you to leave them quartered yet joined at one end. Oy...too much fiddle. So quarters for me, layered in bottles with rock salt, fennel seeds, bay leaves and cloves. Not even sure if that is the correct spice list, we'll wait and see.

This fixed up half the glut, with the rest being earmarked for Yulinka's recipe. This little recipe caught my eye and it only takes a day or two for the syrup to be ready. Tea isn't my thing, but ice cold water in this heat with a zip of lemon tang sounds like just the trick.

After these frou frous were done and placed on the window sill, it was time to shake the Turshi Bonjan.

This recipe reads better than it makes up, and I'm eagerly, or perhaps not so eagerly, waiting for my first taste. The jars look dark and muddy - eek! I did substitute some ingredients (chilli powder for chilli flakes, and chopped garlic for a paste) which could have contributed to this muddy jar of oddness. If the flavour is right though I might experiment with fresh mint, fresh chilli and fresh garlic whizzed together with only the cinnamon and salt for it's dustiness. We wait and see.

All my little jars of homespun goodness sell well at the market, boosting what can be a somewhat dreary sales day quite enormously. Which is why I was stuffing my face with the empanada the other day. it's all in the name of research and product development! 

Today's best seller was definitely my strawberry and balsamic syrup. Who knew that when I was throwing ingredients in the pan the other day I was recreating something so heavenly that you could sit and drink it with a straw - sugar hangover be buggered!. It was simple to make. Whole strawbs tossed with a pile of white sugar and let to steep overnight. Onto the stove the next day with a goodly amount of balsamic to make it taste just right. Boil, boil, boil. Pour into hot bottles when done! Mmmmm...mmm....it's mighty good.