The Whole Five Acres

Fed up!

Only 85 more days until I get my license back. It's been an interesting time without the means to get out and about. It's also been a frustrating time too, having to ask for lifts, or to be taken down the road to get essentials (I hate it especially when I need tampons). If only we had been able to move sooner, the lack of transport may not have been such a burden. Imagine being able to catch a bus, call a cab, or even walk around the corner to the store! At least I WILL enjoy the remaining two months of these luxuries before I stop being one of the driven.

I'm also fed up with some of the blogs I read around the place. So few people seem to be able to actually write. Perhaps I'm one of these people. Good writing used to be all over the internet, and good writers used to also be frequent writers. Perhaps good writers were the early adopters, and now after a few years the novelty has warn off, field has been laid open for the wannabes. I don't know, it would be lovely to come across more sites that have interesting commentary, without the constant need to check grammar and innovative word choices!

And lastly I'm fed up with my kitchen. My constant mess. Life. Work. Clients. Men. And food. Not necessarily in that order. It seems I spend and enormous amount of time serving all of these, and yet not one of them is clicking into place. 

My kitchen is always a mess. it's not that it is small, it is just old and impractical. At least this will change soon - fingers crossed. 

My constant mess? There never seems enough time to sort through all the crap that arrives in the post, is brought in the door, is generated by work, is given to us, is stored somewhere, is living on the floors, the shelves, the desk, everywhere. The mess just grows and grows. 

Life. Work. Clients. Men. It's all work. Hard work. We're currently doing seven days a week while we try to grow the farm side of things, and it's dragging us down. When I'm not at the markets, I'm then squeezing a huge design load into the other four days of the week. The design work after 9 years is starting to become so repetitive that I almost could do it in my sleep, except, hey, I can't. Clients are often nice, but then some of them just like to stamp their feet and demand more and more, just so they can feel they got value for money. Whatever happened to paying for quality? And Men! Go back to the beginning of this paragraph and you'll realise my man works seven days a week too, so he's crotchety and tired and in need of a big sleep. At least I don't lug a half ton of produce in and out of a van eight times every day we do a market! Then again, I also don't say things and immediately deny I said them at all. Is it tiredness really? or just a moonal phase?

Most of all though, I'm fed up with food. Don't get me wrong, I love food. I love cooking. And I am particularly enjoying researching recipes and selling food at the markets. There isn't enough time in the day to do the thing that I would love. Then add the crappy kitchen scenario into the argument and suddenly all pleasure is drained.

So yeah, I'm a bit overwhelmed tonight, feeling that everything is pulling us in a hundred different directions and wishing life was more simple. All I need, most likely, is a good slap, and a friend that turns up with a pot of heartwarming soup.

And probably a good S-L-A-P!

Do you Yahooooo!

We surely do! We finally managed to get approval for the housing loan and now it's all systems go. Apparently we own the house in just over two weeks if all the paperwork is completed by then. Lucky I didn't unpack last time we moved.

Choosing the right plates

It seems that Tonga is currently experiencing a few troubles with earthquakes. In typical Islander style, there seems to be no mass confusion, no great worries and no need to lock up your daughters. Anywhere else in the world a 7.9 on the richter scale would be a big worry.

On the other side of the pacific, Melbourne too is experiencing earthquake dramas. Nothing to scream about, just enough to keep everyone on their toes.

From what I can deduce, with google as my friend, there is a huge plate in the Pacific which slides under another plate that hits Australian shores. The Tongan Trench lines this, to the west of Tongatapu, and from what I have been told this is the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.

Let's just add to this with the eruption of a sea volcano somewhere near Tongatapu. Tongatapu is the main island, and where we spend all our time when visiting. Not to mention our family over there.

The comings and going of these plates seem to be in accord. Is there a big eruption about to happen?

If you look at this link the yellow plate in the centre is the one in question. I appears to border many areas in the pacific including california, canada, japan and possibly other nations. For my eyes a little to small an image to see clearly.

So we have a few quakes under our belt already, and a volcano erupting. Where else may this plate shifting show itself?

I'm figuring we've either had the worst, or that is yet to come. We have about 5 weeks or so before we leave for our weekly break on Tongatapu. Should I pack my floaties and a hard hat? Should I up the ante on my rolling freezer bag we use to import meat to Tonga, and take a ton load more? And to be honest, that is all rather flippant...I fear that there may be something terrible coming for someone somewhere along the edges of this plate that has decided to move.

If only I was a man...

It seems the lobster was right. While the lobster looked fabulous on the outside, on closer inspection the inside was rotten. My plans for sauce, curdled. Nothing was as it seemed.

Ditto with my mortgage application. We're still no closer to have anything signed sealed and delivered.

It appears that even though I have ticked all the boxes in my application, some 'guy', sitting high in his chair at the financial institution is still not happy enough with me to provide funds for the house. Four weeks into the loan application fiasco he's still requesting more and more information, which even other 'guys' within the same institution consider unreasonable.

I'm sure if I were a man, the application would have been approved yonks ago. Let's face it, there's just something terribly fishy about a self employed woman having the funds to buy a decent three bedroom house and being able to afford the repayments. 

Is it unreasonable of me to think that my squeaky clean record of paying rent (which is almost double the mortgage repayments) should be used as a guide to my ability to service a loan?

There are some who may say that my thoughts are just fanciful notions, but in the nine years of self employment, financing problems have always gone the same way. Normal requirements are doubled, and often tripled, information quadruple-checked. 

Yet, I know of a much younger man, in business for far less time, who tripped into the bank one day and secured a loan. He didn't have to prove where he got his deposit from (he'd saved it at home in a sack and duly turned up at the bank with a wad of notes a mile high), and he certainly didn't have a ten year history of business and finance to prove his worth –they would have had to go back to his school days for that.

So why else could it be that the banks don't like the colour of my money?

Lobster = celebration. Right?

Patiently we have waited for a celebration to bring the lobster our of the deep freeze. We're so close now to getting that blinking unconditional approval for our house loan that I foolishly whipped the lobster from one side of the pidgeon pair into the other for a s-l-o-w defrost.

At 4pm this afternoon the mortgage broker emailed to say the bank was running behind, and we may again need to increase the cooling off period before we sign on the dotted line. In the old days, when purchasing, the whole loan agreement was based on mortgage approval. These days, we risk a reasonable sum of money to take the house off the market, in the meantime the banks faff around like a bunch of green water fairies. While they faff, the legal process continues and we keep extending our cooling off period. This is all good if we were only risking a small amount of money, but until we get approval nothing is guaranteed. And then, the longer the cooling off period extends the shorter the settlement period becomes. Let's talk squeeze folks, freaking heck we're moving tomorrow!

So, with my lobster now cool and defrosted, and the bad news coming in from the mortgage broker i was none too cheery about hoiking out our celebration dinner. 

I'm positive the lobster felt the same way. After it's preboil, in readiment for the thermidor sauce, sonny set to cut it up in preparedness. Oik...yuk...the mess that came out of the lobster was not pretty. Our 3kg lobster was a mess of guts and muck and very little meat. This poor lobster had seen better days and could possibly have been anorexic (and on steroids becuase it's shell was huge and fat and very enticing looking). 

While sonny's over on one side of the kitchen pulling apart our (mucky) crayfish, I was at the other end of the kitchen making a thermidor sauce. The sauce wasn't meant to be curdled but somehow within in more than a few minutes of heat the milk curdled. The milk had been fine yesterday and was earmarked for a rice pudding. Today, no, it wasn't going to play nice. Lucky really. We didn't have a lobster to play with either.

I reckon the damn mortgage witches were against us! Lobster wet and flabby. Sauce curdled and inedible. There was to be no celebration. I'm not one for over speculating (yeah, right!) but I hate it when things get out of order. I'm wondering if those boring busy-bees at the bank are now, after today's housing prices news, sitting in their little grey padded cubicles rethinking every un-approved housing mortgage and working out if they should hold off for another six months or so before they say yes!

Tonga anyone?

This shot was taken one day when we travelled west on Tongatapu for a picnic. Just over the ridge of rocks in the middle of the pictures is perfect coral and snorkelling grounds. The sea gets a bit rough over there, so you won't find my white ass hopping along, but for other more seaworthy people it's meant to be beautiful. On the sandy side of the reef its perfect for the littlies. High tide and it's hip deep if you are short. Low tide and it's full of all manner of walkabout creatures. Enough to keep you interested and not too much to upset. We also nabbed a bucket load of sea urchin here. To me, slimy snot like fishy slips, to some others (Neil Perry and his like, a delicacy). It's all here for the taking.

Notice too the looming storm in the background. Whilst the weather was quite balmy, we sat and watched this weather roll in fast. One minute black clouds, next we could see rain, and then in the distance little willy willys. I don't know what a willy willy is in any other language, but I fair love seeing them dance on the distant water.

Maybe I should have waited until we could have these lobsters again before we had a celebration. 50TOP ($35AUD) for the whole basket of them, freshly speared in the morning!

Has it really been 14 months?

I've been faffing around here all night trying to rid myself of that horrible orange and green colour scheme and make this silly little blog look partway acceptable. Of course this then led to reading back through some of the older entries on the site, which then led to my realising that we've been at this farming game for over 14 months.

In my innocence I hoped that we would become self sufficient in a short time frame, and in some ways we have. Not in ways that I really thought about back then.

When we started we were the newbies on the big five acre block. Little did we realise that growing produce was only half the battle. We also had to sell it. Well actually we did know we had to sell our produce but thought that the process would be so much simpler than it turned out to be.

Now, 14 months down the track, we are doing three community markets a week and sending excess to one shop. We've given up on the main commercial market because while they are interested in good looking produce without taste, we are interested in produce that has taste and may come with a dimple or two.

We've ploughed 50 tonnes of tomatoes back into the ground becuase the commercial market wouldn't touch them. We've sold off chillis at $5 kilo because we can produce, produce and produce, but can't find the market for them. And we've preserved, bottled, jammed and cooked our produce into any number of different concoctions both for our stall and also for our own bellies.

For example, tomorrow we're heading off with some trays of eggplant, zucchini and capsicum all roasted up in the Sicilian way with balsamic, garlic, basil and oil, some baci di ricotta, along with zucchini ricotta fritters, a swag of preserves, caramalised onions, basil pesto along with our usual veg and fruits along and what we can buy from the local growers. We also have orders for pickled eggs, my ginger cough syrup, banana bread and tomato jam which have yet to be completed - a job for next week. Praise the Lord that I managed to get the strawberry jam made this week, it's been on back order for almost a month and I fear the natives are getting restless.

By Sunday morning I'll have had to test a couple of veg dishes out so I'm armed with recipes. One customer, dear Laura troops along early on a Sunday morning to find out what I may have of interest for her this week. Each week I draw out a recipe for her on a small piece of paper and then we go over the details. God love her, she has had some brain surgery which makes it hard for the details to sink in. Last week I wrote down a recipe for potato stuffed peppers which she adored. Not only did she adore it, she made it for the old ducks at the club and they all wanted the recipe too. Even though I worry that the details don't sink in, she never fails me with her adapted recipe on the following Sunday. Laura is a real treat!

And a year on, this is what thrills us the most. Not only do we have our regular customers who love a bit of this, or a bit of that, but we have our families with eight kids all demanding my jams and pretzels, or the old dears looking for another face that will make their days a bit more interesting. Next week our autumn crop of zucchini comes in and already our favourite Lebanese family is champing at the bit waiting for the first harvest. They buy in boxes of 10kilos and then go home to stuff them for a week's worth of feeding. 

As for our self sufficiency, these days we most often only go to Woolworths or Coles to buy the sugar and vinegar required for my preserves, aong with some meat from their condemned counter. (I know it's not the best meat, but it's cheap. Try living with a carnivore and then you'll understand!)   The markets are great for cut price of most everything else, and as the kitchen is a main player in our daily workload, there's always something to test, eat or finish off that most of the time a real meal is hard work.

Who would have thought that now I would be able to say we may almost be somewhere near where we wanted to be, and can definitely say we are much happier and healthier for it!

Not a gay drake in the house!

After almost 12 months of duck ownership, we were beginning to think our drake may have been gay, or at least a bit misguided. He'd be doin' the business around and about the yard, but the girls weren't productive. Eggs, yes, ducklings no! 

Whilst we've had several clutches of chickens and several more of geese, not to mention the two little lambs, our ducks were not earning their keep. Until of course the other day. Enter five fluffy ducklings - and then a sixth a day later.

Mum wasn't too keen on having them photographed which I suppose is normal. Prying eyes and stranger danger, but I did manage to get a shot of some little heads behind our protective mum. Don't those fluffed up feathers look frightening?

It will be a little sad not to have them living with us in our new home. Yes, new home! With just a bit more paperwork to be finalised, it looks like the banking gods may be smiling sweetly on us and in a few more weeks we may be living in our own little hoose. I can't believe how excited I am at the thought of owning the ground that will be under our feet. 

As time stands still it is easy to wonder if anything ever changes.

Until of course, one day you look around and realise the whole world is a new place.

I'd like to say that we have had good news about our house purchase, but that would be lying. The reserve bank has cut interest rates to a ridiculous all time low, which has pushed more purchasers into the arena, which in turn has caused the banks to be busier than ever. We wait to hear on our application, and hope that soon we will get the nod and be able to proceed with our house purchase.

It's all paper churning really. Well, at least I'm hoping that it is. 

I'm also proving lousy at follow through with recipe updates. The salted duck eggs were partially sold off the other day, and the remaining four cooked and shelled. Then before I even could think about a photo, we had eaten them all. Must say though, the guy we buy these current duck eggs from doesn't produce an egg anything like ours. Maybe the photo update should come when I have our own eggs salted so you can see how gorgeous the yolk goes after a month in a salty brine. Mmm-mm!

Missy Boo and I did back a pile of stuff yesterday for today's market. We had a fun day in the kitchen, ably assisted by my little grandson. If you've ever met one of those kids that has a grown up's brain in a wee body, then you have met his twin. He knows everything about everything, makes funny little jokes that kept us laughing, and then out of the blue amazed us with little helpful tactics that were sort of right, but damn cute for not being quite so right. Still though we haven't settled on a name for me. I don't want to be Nana, Grandma is, oh, I don't know, too stuffy, and then there is not a lot left that works. Sonny suggested Mops after he found out we prefered Pops for him - on it's own though Mops sounds weird. Maybe I should just be me.

Anyway...we did some baking. All of which was sold at the markets today. The little section of our stall dedicated to my few pickled preserves has swelled into it's own table full of preserves, jams, cakes pestos, herbs, chillis and you name it. We've also worked on the merchandising of this table and to be honest, we can see people wanting to pick everything up and just take it home. it's like a foodies jewellery box. (Yep, I need to think of photos before too long – again, hopeless photographer!)

As for Mulgoa, I'm feeling it in my bones. We seem to fit into the Penrith area, which is where one of our best markets is. The people are perfect for our wares, not to mention lovely to boot and cashed up as well. They really respond to our friendly way of service, and often remark on our honesty. It's really kinda nice to know that people are proud to say they like you and think they can trust you.