Mega pasta making session

With a surplus of eggs in the fridge and more coming on a daily basis, there was only one thing to do.....make pasta! Usually I make fresh pasta and then we eat it on the same day, but obviously we weren't intending to eat this much pasta in one sitting so that left only 2 choices - freeze or dry. I have frozen fresh pasta in the past, but it usually seems to get forgotten about in the freezer. Recently I tried drying some pasta and this appears to work well, plus I am constantly reminded of its presence when I open up the pantry!

So this is the pasta in a semi-dried state, I've left it out all day and will probably leave it overnight just to be sure it is thoroughly dry before bagging up in zip-lock bags.
Some recipes for pasta include semolina, and sometimes water too, but I find that just plain eggs and flour (high grade) works fine. My ratio is usually 1 egg to 100g flour, but since my hens produce slightly smaller eggs than the 'norm' I increased this by 1 egg over 400g flour (in other words 5 little eggs/400g). But it's easy to tell if there's not enough egg to flour ratio as the mixture will not form into a dough without enough moisture i.e. egg. Clear as mud? I hope so.

Anyhow, I've used up close to a dozen eggs here and now have all this delicious pasta at hand. It was relatively quick to make and roll, obviously the drying time and having racks of pasta about the place is a tad inconvenient unless you have a huge bench in your kitchen (I do not, so use the tops of my chest freezers as well as the kitchen table). I also started off hand cutting the pasta but quickly resorted to using the fettucine cutter on my machine - SO much quicker and easier than peeling apart your hand-cut pasta. Do you make your own pasta? and if so what's your preference for type - I haven't got past fettucine and lasagne sheets, although would like to give ravioli a go sometime.

Homemade pasta

At last I found the time and inclination to try out my new pasta machine. I made wide ribbons - pappardelle - I tried some dough through the cutting blades but the noodles turned out too narrow for the recipe I had in mind, I guess these are for making fettuccine and spaghetti. Anyway, once I had put the test dough through several times to clean the machine, and practice handling the pasta, I got started on making the noodles. The dough is just 1 egg and 100g flour per person, whizzed in a food processor until it comes together slightly then knead on a floured surface.

I made a simple pasta sauce using chopped red onion, a little chilli, some chopped smoked bacon, white wine, cream, sea salt and pepper. The pasta took a minimal time to cooked in boiling salted water (about 2mins). After draining the pasta I added it to the sauce, and served it with some grated parmesan and a green salad on the side.

The taste of the fresh pasta was amazing, much superior to using 'fresh' pasta from the supermarket. I can see this pasta machine will be getting a lot of use!

Field mushrooms

We were lucky to be given a harvest of fresh field mushrooms today (thanks Bruce).


One of my favourite recipes for mushrooms is Mushroom and Bacon Pasta.

Olive oil
1 small onion chopped
1 clove of garlic
About 150g mushrooms, wiped and chopped
A few rashers of good quality bacon, chopped
Cream, about 300mls
Sea salt and cracked pepper
Pasta, I use dry spirals or penne, but fresh is always best if you can get it.
Parmesan or Romano cheese for serving


Fry onion, garlic and bacon in oil until soft.
Cook pasta until "al dente".
Add mushrooms to bacon and onion mixture, cook through and then add cream, let it bubble and thicken for a while.
Mix pasta with the sauce, serve on hot plates with the cheese grated on top and salt and pepper to taste. Maybe a little green salad on the side. And a glass of nice wine. Delicious.

Mega pasta making session - UPDATE

In the last post I said I was drying the pasta to store. Well I did dry it, but then froze it in zip-lock bags. Reason for doing this is that I discovered a bag of lasagne sheets I made and dried only 1 month ago and they had gone mouldy! Not wishing to lose the whole big batch I'd just made, so into the freezer they went (in a basket at the top so I can SEE them!). They should keep for up to 2 months in there, although I should imagine we will be able to get through it OK before then.
Does anyone dry their pasta with a dehydrator?

Spring pasta dish

I harvested some of the broad beans last night:

 

I cooked them briefly, then added them to our dinner, which was smoked chicken tagliatelle (homemade pasta), with a little chilli, garlic and onion cooked in a creamy white wine sauce, topped off with some grated Romano cheese:

 

Went down pretty well!

Mushrooms and crab apples

Well once again we were given a whole lot more field mushrooms, just delicious. I made mushroom and bacon pasta again, also made cream of mushroom soup which was very nice. Just fry chopped onion and then mushrooms, add some milk, add some torn up white bread, let the bread soak up the milk, then whizz, add some cream and some herbs - I used thyme, the recipe called for parsley but as hubby isn't a great fan of it I left it out, add salt and pepper to taste and serve with fresh bread or bread rolls.

I've also made a whole lot more crab apple jelly recently. This time round it was much more successful, setting just right and no froth as I was vigilant about scooping it out during the cooking process plus I poured the jelly into the jars through a small sieve. I must have about 35 small jars now. Also enough juice to make another 25 or so......... yikes, oh well will keep us going for some time, plus always good to have in the pantry to give away as gifts.

Update for early January 2011

Greetings everyone
Time for a wee update here on Cabbage Tree Farm.
First off, we were given a cute little dish of homemade pate from our lovely neighbours (yes we do have some!!) D and M-F.

This recipe used rabbit and olives, and tasted delicious.

We've been enjoying some of the produce from the garden, zucchini (of course!):

 Some nice sized beetroot, this one is Chioggia:

 It has pink and white stripes when raw, but cooks up pretty pink:

 Cucumbers ('mini white'):

We've also been enjoying lettuces, beans and herbs - especially basil (I made some pesto yesterday to go with fresh pasta). The tomatoes are starting to ripen, and the chillies are fruiting at last, this one is my Jalapeno:

Jalapeno chilli pepper

 

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes........!

Yes it is that time of the year again. We have loads of big juicy tasty tomatoes ripening daily. The varieties I grew this season are beefsteak, the red one is 'Brandywine Pink' and the green is 'Aunt Ruby's German Green'.

And they can grow pretty big, especially the Brandywines. Here we have a few heavy weights, the first weighs in at 444gs:

This one a little heavier 474gs.

But this is the winner (so far), 603gs! A record.

I should also note here that these tomatoes have done well pretty much all by themselves, they were planted with a good amount of compost in the hole, I haven't fed them much other than a slosh of liquid manure and they have pretty much relied upon rain to keep them alive (thankfully we had a fair amount in January while I was away). So these are winners!

So what do with all those tomatoes you might ask? Well we've been eating them almost at every meal, and are not sick of them yet! Last night they were made into sauce to go with meatballs and spaghetti (zoodles for me).

I've cooked up a few batches just simply with onion, salt and pepper, then processed preserving jars full of cooked tomatoes in my Fowlers Vacola. I now have several lovely jars of ready to use tomatoes lined up on the shelf for when needed.

Apart from preserving the tomatoes, I have also frozen quite a lot of them. I just chop them into big chunks, freeze them on trays then when frozen bag them into Ziplock bags. That way I can just take out however much I want for any particular use (i.e. making a pasta sauce or pizza sauce, or adding to mince for bolognese sauce).

Here are the Aunt Ruby's German Green variety:

These are quite big tomatoes also. They are ripe when slightly yellow. They are not quite so disease resistant however, but still a very nice tomato, and the green colour is pretty. This biggy weighs in at 456gs:

 

Tomatoes in the garden, early January 2016

Note to self: always stake tomatoes well! The sheep netting affair I have here is not adequate to keep them staked properly and with the weight of all those heavy tomatoes they are now flopping all over the ground :-(

Aunt Ruby's German Green

The garden late January 2016

This was the first season in the new garden space. It is flat, and fenced from the wind. Next time round however I will do things a little differently, like not having pumpkins and melons trailing everywhere! More photos and blog posts to come soon on these.

What's in my fridge/pantry?

Laura at Our Wee Farm showed everyone what she had in her fridge and pantry, so I'd thought I'd post a few of pics here of mine:

Main fridge - looks a bit sparse doesn't it!! - has milk, jug of filtered water, bread, mayo, chutneys, my preserved lemons and baking stuff (apricots etc), seeds in boxes at top. But wait, there's more:

The door has my jams at top, sauces, verjuice, jars of chilli, ginger, mustard, Asian curry mixes etc. Eggs, greek yoghurt, cream, milk, fruit cordial, Heinz tomato ketchup.

Pull out meat draw has bacon and delicious home-made pork pate from neighbour (thanks D!).

Other draw has cheese and butter stash, no marg in this house thanks! I do lots of baking hence all the butter in case you're wondering...

Pull out veg drawer currently looking good with Rangpur limes (the orange fruit top left), a Rocoto chilli in need of eating, some wild onion also needs eating, Brussell sprouts, carrots, parsnips, a swede, a leek, some corn and some of our own squash.

The pantry has spices in elegant ice-cream containers (keeps them fresh), oats, puffed rice, honey (complete with Pooh Bear to guard it..for my 3 yr old son!), almond butter, cans of beans, corn, tomatoes, tuna, rice, dried pasta, couscous, corn chips, pulses, popping corn etc

These shelves have crackers in boxes, baking stuff, my homemade vanilla essence, yoghurt raisins, orange and rose flower water, flour, sugar, tins of more baking stuff, dried fruit, decorations for cupcakes, cookie cutters etc

PHEW! looks like quite a lot of food eh!

Grape juice

As you know I've been really busy in the kitchen lately, preserving  lots of lovely peaches and tomatoes. I've done several bottles of peaches now, which I know we will enjoy in the coming winter. The tomato sauces, both Italian and spicy Indian versions, are lined up in the pantry at the ready for future pasta dinners and curries, both of which are a big favourite here at CTF.

However, this past week I've been picking bunches and bunches of juicy ripe red table grapes. Now there are only so many grapes we can actually eat 'au natural' - I say 'we' but the truth is I don't actually like them much! So there was only really one other alternative - grape juice!

It's easy to make, just a little time consuming. Here is a quick guide to making:

1. Pick your grapes
2. Wash your grapes and remove stalks, insects, leaves..
3. Put into clean stock pan
4. Mash with potato masher
5. Bring to boil and simmer for about 10 mins.
6. Cool for about 10 mins
7. Pour into 'jelly bag' aka old clean pillow case.
8. Suspend 'jelly bag' over another big pot to catch juice, leave to drip for a while. N.B. Juice will stain so use newspaper on floor
9. Squeeze out any extra juice you can
10. Bottle up and sterilise in water bath as per preserving fruit.
11. Drink - we dilute with water but I'm thinking soda water would be lovely.

Note - no sugar was added and the juice is sweet enough for us. It's delicious!

Update for the beginning of May

We've had a few personal events to challenge us in the last few weeks and have had to take a bit of time out from the farm projects, so I apologise for the lack of posts of late.
The veg garden is in a state of rest. The raised beds are not yet constructed. However I still have a reasonable crop of rainbow chard, chillies (outdoors in May?), herbs such as basil and coriander. My celery is coming away well, and I've planted some beetroot. Also the artichoke has sprouted a few more buds which we'll enjoy any day now.
We've got a few birds for the table (chickens) in the freezer. Three of them are some of the young birds (about 16 weeks old) and 1 is an old hen that must be about 3 years. Will be interesting to see how they compare (toughness etc). We ate a 3 year old hen a few weeks ago, I cooked it on the rotisserie and it came out very well, not tough at all. And a wild duck which will be enjoyed tomorrow night (it's duck season again).
A friend gifted us a large bucket of wild mushrooms recently, so I made the usual soup, creamed mushrooms on toast, and we also had them in pasta and fried in butter on the BBQ with a steak. Yum!


 I've done a lot of repotting of plants and just have one big cactus left to do, and my frangipani once it has shed its leaves. There were no flowers on it this year and I think that's because it needs new soil and a bit of a booster with fertiliser.

We've got loads of Poroporo seedlings coming up in various pot plants, so in the next few days I need to get on and transplant these. I hope they survive. We want to plant them as short-term hedging, and also hopefully harvest the berries to make jam. Poroporo also has interesting medicinal properties as indicated in this article.

Big mama tomato

I roasted up a dish of fresh tomatoes (Brandywine) together with some freshly harvested garlic and basil from the garden, they were delicious in a pasta sauce with homemade meatballs.

 

And I picked the biggest Brandywine I could find, are you ready for it.....?...:

 Possibly not quite ripe but I didn't want to risk losing it, especially after all the heavy rain we've had on the weekend. It's already starting to crack at the top.

This big mama weighed in at 733gs!

Tomato sauce time

We're still harvesting loads of huge beefsteak tomatoes (Brandywines) which is great, and keeping me very busy in the kitchen! I've frozen lots and also made a basic sauce (for pasta and also pizza once reduced down to thicken it up).

I've made several batches which are all now stored away in the pantry for use in the coming year.

My trusty electric Fowler's Vacola preserving kettle (water bath unit) is doing a grand job and makes preserving a lot easier. Once done it can easily be emptied of the water using the tap on the side. It was a great score from a charity shop, a fraction of the price of a new one.

We had some of the sauce tonight in homemade meatballs and spaghetti, if I do say so myself it was delicious! You just can't beat homegrown tomatoes.

January

Hello and a very happy new year to all!

I have been away in England for a month and am slowly getting back into the swing of farm life again!

The main adjustment has been the weather. Coming from a UK winter (albeit a mild winter) to the peak of NZ summer with 100% humidity and temps up in the late 20s has not been easy! The morning I left England it was minus 4 degrees C! We are however enjoying some beautiful sunny days, mostly with a slight breeze and some lovely sunsets at the end of the long summer evenings.

In my absence, the garden has been growing like crazy. Hubby did a great job of watering my plants in the grow tunnels, and harvesting the produce as it ripened. The Brandywine Pink heirloom beefsteak tomatoes are doing really well, I have picked several kgs of these already with many more to come. We've had some nice homemade tomato soup and they are also getting used up at every meal, fried with bacon and egg for breakfast, sliced up with cheese inside a bread roll for lunch, and made into sauce for pasta for dinner.

We're also harvesting cucumbers (Indian variety - Poona), Italian zucchini, peppers, scallopini (patty pan) squash and potatoes.

The plums were very good this year, we had lots (most of these eaten while I was overseas!).

 A handful of blueberries from off our young bushes, not many at a time but they are very tasty!

The pumpkins are growing well, this variety is Musque du Provence a very large French heirloon variety, it will turn yellow/brown when ready. I also let some self-sown pumpkins grow where they sprouted so will be interesting to see what type they are. Can't have too many pumpkins as they also make good stock food for when we are raising pigs.

Scallopini or patty pan squash

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Dinners and garden/orchard stuff

I cooked up one of the ducks, just did it in the slow cooker, with some stuffing (cranberry and apple) and a little dripping, it turned out really well.
Feeling generous, we gave the other duck away to a neighbour.
On an exploration of the freezer I discovered 2 ducks from last year, so these will need eating up soon.
We also butchered (that's the royal 'we', I actually mean G..) another chicken, an old Indian Game hen. I prepared this bird the same way as the young cockarel, by slow cooking first then roasting for a short time. Again this was successful, the meat was firm but not tough and very tasty.
The next day we were given some field mushrooms, so I made chicken and mushroom pasta for dinner with the leftover meat. Then I made some stock from the carcass.

On the farm front, it's great to have the rain, topping up the water tank nicely but it has prevented a lot of jobs from getting done outside. The veg garden is now seriously neglected.
We called in at Koanga gardens the other day and picked up some Maori seed potatoes 'Urenika' and 'Kowiniwini'. I've grown these a long time ago and looking forward to growing them again, in addition to some 'standard' white potatoes, not sure which varieties as yet. Also picked up a copy of their fruit and nut tree catalogue to see about adding to our orchard. Haven't made any decisions yet, although I would like to get one or 2 pears in and maybe a couple of fig trees.

Not so much going on

I've been pre-occupied with getting ready for the arrival of the new baby lately, hence the lack of posts sorry.
Consequently not a lot happening out on the farm at present. We collected a couple more fruit trees, 2 figs "Batley/Brown Turkey" and "Totara House/White Adriatic". They are only tiny trees so it will be some time before we get any fruit however! We put in another apple "Monty's Surprise", the one that is heralded as having superb anti-cancer properties. Also a pear tree "William Bon Cretian" (grafted onto quince to keep it at a manageable size, otherwise they grow enormous). I've heard that pears take ages to mature to fruiting stage - the adage "plant pears for your heirs" springs to mind, but hopefully we'll be able to eat some even if it does take a while!
In the kitchen this week I've made lemonade with 'lemonade' fruit (similar to lemon), so busy with the juicer again. It turned out really well so I'll make it again soon and post some pics/recipe. Also made up some more candied peel with the spent fruit, and put some of that in some buns along with the candied orange peel, this time adding a little splash of orange blossom water and omitting the sultanas/raisins. Came out very well.
We've had homemade pasta again, seems to take no time at all to make now that I know what to do.
We've had another goat curry and I also made a Thai red curry using up some duck out of the freezer. Not had a great deal of success with the ducks, but it came out well in the Thai curry, chopped up small, marinated in the red curry paste and then stir fried prior to adding the coconut cream and veges.
Very shortly will be getting one of our cows slaughtered so we need to get ourselves another chest freezer. Will post some info on that in the next week or so.

First of the spring asparagus

Not out of our garden unfortunately, but still delicious. For dinner tonight we had lightly steamed asparagus, organic broad beans (from a kind neighbour), a handful of peas, all in a creamy white wine sauce with a little lemon zest, and some freshly made pappardelle pasta. Oh, and of course a little grated romano cheese on top.
Am now just having a little shot of Lemon Z limoncello to round off the meal - yum!

The mushroom fest continues...

Yes we are still enjoying those mushrooms!

This is one of our favourite pasta meals, see here for the recipe. Topped off with a sprinkle of fresh parsley, lovely.

Time for tomatoes

Our tomato plants are producing lovely juicy tasty fruit right now. The 'Brandywine Pink' beefsteaks are doing well, although I had to net them this year - we have a resident blackbird that likes to eat them too! As a result I am picking them as soon as I think they're ready, rather than leave them the extra time on the plant. I would rather have them ripen up fully indoors than risk coming out to find big holes pecked in them the following day!

Here is a basket lot I picked yesterday:

Brandywine Pink tomatoes

The big one in the photo weighs in at a mega 592g (20.85oz)!

What to do with all these tomatoes? Well I shall be making pasta/pizza sauce, and some soup too.

I also grew some smaller 'standard' sized tomatoes 'Blood Butcher' which are doing fairly well. We use these mainly for salads, and I will be putting some in the dehydrator to dry them for 'sun-dried' tomatoes.

Bloody Butcher tomatoes