Autumn Zebra

When Mum goes on holiday, we go and water the plants, and I scavenge stuff out of her garden. She is not away long this time, so I just got things that were suffering from lack of water (rhubarb) or going to seed (salad greens), strawberries because they don't last long, and potatoes and lemon balm because there is tonnes. I love to see what there is to eat growing in other people's gardens. Salad greens, lemon balm, strawberries, potatoes and rhubarb scavenged from Mum's garden

I made toad-in-the-hole the other day, which is sausages in Yorkshire pudding. I made it from this Jamie Oliver recipe . It worked out ok, except it sank a lot, quickly, and then the Yorkshire pudding at the bottom ended up very thick and more like an egg pudding. Well, it is an egg pudding, but like a heavy one with no air in it. Also, all my sausages floated to the top. Maybe if you use fat sausages they don't do that. A lot of people in the comments of the recipe said they had trouble with the oil burning, but I think that is probably because they used the wrong oil - different oils smoke and catch fire at different temperatures. I had a very small amount of smoke but really no trouble and used canola oil at 250 degrees C (or so my over claims, but it is old so who knows if it even gets that hot really?).

Woohoo, you say, more pictures of food from the Farmer's market! Last week I bought a chicken and tarragon pie, an English pork pie, dried grapes from the organic fruit stall, camembert cheese, pickled walnuts, watercress, a really small half red cabbage, green tomatoes, plums (some of which are giant), corn already skinned, giant long capsicums. I haven't tried the pickled walnuts yet, Mum says they are yuck. And the week before I bought quinces, strawberries, yellow peaches, silverbeet, a turnip, tabouli, dried peaches, seconds tomatoes, a mixed bag of fancy capsicums, a zuchinni and two chocolate croissant things that turned out to be much heavier and more cakey than a croissant, but I think yummier. The strawberries were to make jam, but the lady selling them told me there was 500g in the packets when there was only 250g (I thought it looked wrong) and then one third were moldy by the next day, and many of the others were brown inside. And they were really expensive because...

This is not a terribly good food photo, but all the food in this breakfast is from the Farmer's Market! Egg, tomato, ham steaks, bread. And then I had with it jam that I had made, out of fruit from the Farmer's Market.

The Farmer's Market was good as usual, but I didn't take pictures of what I bought, and now we've started eating a lot of it! However, what I got is: Lebanese "pizza" - flat bread with cumin and other spices on it, pretty good, I warmed mine up in the microwave and wrapped it around bits of roast chicken Lebanese olive dip and hummus- two little pots go a surprisingly long way giant plums and apricots from my favourite, primarily organic, fruit place - they were about twice as big as normal plums and apricots! And yummy! also from the above people - a big bag of greengages. I was wondering why supermarkets don't sell these - and then yesterday I saw that they do, at nearly twice the price, and the Farmer's Market ones are organic! also one red pear - they have red skins and are yummy and good for preserving in jars. I'll buy some more for preserving later, because they are the best preserving fruit I've found so far again from the fruit place, I go...

As we all know, we're supposed to eat lots of different coloured vegetables all the time, etc. I don't like making more than one dish per meal, if possible. Today we had really easy nachoes - tinned beans in chilli sauce, wow, we're almost done already! Defrosted some ham and fried that with onion and garlic before adding the tinned beans, so that's most of dinner. Guacamole which I have made probably a couple of hundred times now, so that is easy. So, we get to have extra vegetables! Quartered mini capsicums that were on special at the supermarket ages ago and have somehow survived in the fridge all this time (the "baby" veges are always expensive, but as soon as they're a couple of days old, they put them on special, yay!), and yellow round beans and flat green beans from the farmer's market, fried over a high heat in some olive oil. Mixing them around every couple of seconds until they all have spots of browning, but are essentially only barely cook...

I love going to the farmer's market on Saturday morning, because I love buying all the yummy stuff there, and I'm always amazed at what you can buy. Since it is seasonal, the selection is always gradually changing, which keeps it interesting. This week I got this, plus a coffee, for $50. It's amazing how little you can buy for $50 now-a-days. The "made goods" cost a lot more - if I take out the falafel, broad bean salad and cornish pasties, cheese and coffee, then it goes down to only $20. But I really like buying the made goods here, because they are a lot nicer than supermarket ones, and although more expensive than the cheap mass-produced cheese and so on, they are cheaper I think than equal quality supermarket and deli sold goods. Full list, with prices as far as I can remember now: Falafel with a little pottle of tahini sauce $5 Two cornish pasties $9.40 Chedder cheese off-cuts (the best chedder ever! It actually says on it Tasty cheese, but I don't know ...

In the late afternoon of mince pie day, my sister came over to cook various stuff. I think she made a crazy Polish cake, most of the trifle, and here she is doing her famous salad from the vegetarian cookbook with lots of Polish recipes in it because the author is Polish. Mum is becoming a hippie again, so she is not wearing shoes. I don't wear shoes much myself, but Mum has generally been a shoe-wearer. From the other photos I have, I see we were drinking beer and wine this afternoon. At some point, my sister and I went down to the supermarket to get crazy Polish cake ingredients, mostly. It was great fun, as for some reason when go places together, we often act quite weird. I guess it is a sister thing :) It's always stuff that is really funny at the time, that no one else finds funny, and isn't actually funny at all.

Every Christmas we make a zillion (fruit) mince pies that aren't anything like the shop ones. This year my brother got to help - as in, he was here and available. I also managed to take a photo of him without his hands over his face for a change. He enjoyed helping, which was pretty cool. Mum had to leave for an appointment part way through, and my brother had to leave to go to a nearby town to do a fire performance there with his group, so I had to finish them by myself. These are the mince pies we made. I made the giant ugly monster one last out of the left-overs. Since the buses don't come very often, my brother and I walked to Mum's from town, which took about 45 minutes maybe. The previous bus had come about 10 minutes ago, and they come every 40 minutes, so the 30 minutes wait plus actually taking the bus plus the 10 minute walk at the end made walking seem more sensible. As it does every time to anyone capable of walking the distance when they consider taking a bus...

At work, I decided I wanted fancy tea, so went through the building, briefly outside, and then into the organic food shop. I'm wearing my paint splatter effect tights, nearly-knee-high very expensive brown leather boots, orange dress with the purple striped top underneath, and a red and blue tartan cloak (so I figure I don't fit in anywhere). (They are my favourite clothes.) I ended up doing some very expensive grocery shopping, getting only 5 teabags as I am trying the dandelion and burdock flavour, no-salt NZ peanut butter made from Aussie peanuts, organic yellow yams (oca, from South America), organic cha soba (green tea noodles) and spicy blue-corn chips. I have some crackers at work that I might try some peanut butter on as I work late this evening. The soba luckily have a little recipe on the back for an appropriate soba sauce, which I might make, and somehow I will cook the yams and mix them with salady things I got from the Farmer's market last weekend, and that...

We eat a lot of strange food. I had this realisation a couple of weeks ago, when I suddenly saw our meal from an outside perspective. Along with making a lot of recipes from outside our culture, I also make a lot of stuff up. Here's a random side dish I made a while ago - chop parsnip into chip-sized pieces, and "sweet bread" (eg. this was raisin and malt loaf) into stamp or domino sized pieces and fry in butter, adding sesame seeds and a sprinkling of salt part way through. I pretty much like anything related to bread or fried/roasted food, so this is all good. With oil instead of butter, it would be healthy. If your definition of healthy includes a bit of butter now and then, then it's healthy already. I like taking pictures of the stuff I cook, because it is another interesting creative exercise of planning and putting things together, so I might post some more interesting recipes. Also, if you can afford it, you should get a titanium non-stick frying pan like...

The other day I felt like making bread. I made some bread rolls, that as usual did not rise as much as they should have, even though it was a warm day. How is one supposed to make bread, how is one supposed to find somewhere warm enough to make it rise? Also, I believe they cheated somehow with the ones in the book to make them all golden looking. We ate them with corn and plantain soup, as for some reason the supermarkets have started selling small plantains.

Yes, I had a birthday :) I turned 1000 years old, although only under certain mathematical conditions. Ever since I've had a camera (I was... actually that was about the last time I was 1000, under similar but different conditions) I've taken a photo of my presents (for archival purposes, lol). Probably people will think this weird, but whatever. Other than getting presents, I went to see "Where the Wild Things Are" and made everyone dinner at Mum's house: Moroccan food, which is like my destined cuisine or something - it's the most ideal type of food I've come across so far. If each person were born to a certain type of food, Moroccan is the closest I've found for myself so far. Here's the picture!! Contents: [from Gwri] 3 striped juggling clubs booklet on juggling clubs booklet on juggling balls 90 minute DVD on fire safety (eg. for fire poi, staff, etc) (which you can get free with an order from " home of poi ") "Where the Wild Th...

Yesterday was soup day, because I made soup. Amazing how that works. I made lentil and root vegetable soup. It also had celery in it, ruining the root vegetable theme - but I categorised it as "seasoning" so the theme was saved, whew! The veges were carrots, an old wrinkled parsnip (it is not necessary that the parsnip be in this state, but in my case I am trying to reduce food wastage so I had to use it on the double! It was rehydrated in the soup, good as new, I'm sure...), yams, swede... I wasn't quite sure if that even grew underground initially, but it does... Wikipedia says that it is a cross between a cabbage and a turnip! So you can eat the leaves, although it is never sold with leaves here. Actually, if you want more ideas on how to eat a swede - I can seldom think of any good ideas but buy them anyway - wikipedia has some cooking notes. Hmmm, looks like a New Zealander has been at that article as it specifically mentions that they grow bigger in the South I...

Wygilia is the Christmas Eve Polish feast, which is, as I understand it, very important and more important than the Christmas day (although, this might be changing in modern Poland due to general international influence on customs?). Maybe I'll just do pictures with identifying captions? Basically, we made some food and then ate it... :D Firstly, the table setting. One is supposed to use a white table cloth, so we do. I assume the white table cloth is so that it shows up the stains from any spilt beetroot soup better... We also have Polish bison grass vodka, and red wine in crystal glasses here. Matching table mats and plates too! Very pretty and nice. Barszcz (beetroot soup) with giant mushroom uszki (filled dumpling things) in it. We have these handy pierogi maker things (you put the circle of pastry on, put the filling on, then fold it in half and it folds it and crimps the edges for you) and we use the smallest for the uszki, but this makes them about 3 times bigger than when w...

I made cream puffs, which are the same recipe as eclairs, just a different shape. To make mutant doom puffs you add food colouring to them, have them end up a weird shape, and probably overcook them slightly even though they cooked for slightly less time than the recipe said. Due to them going a bit brown on the outside, the coloured ones don't show their colour as well as I was imagining, but on the inside they are a nice blue and pink. You can see I tried doing two long ones to make eclairs, but I quickly got bored of that. I shall put cream in them later when Mum comes over with the cream beater, but I'm not sure whether I will have time for chocolate icing.

I did cooking in the weekend, cooking new things. I am obviously very clever. Both recipes are very simple, so you should make them. First I made leek and pototo soup. I can give you the recipe because I modified it from what was in the book, reducing the amount of butter, cream and stock, thus making it healthier, and also enabling me to actually eat it without feeling ill from too much fat and salt. Leek and Potato Soup olive oil 1 onion, finely chopped 2 leeks*, stem only, sliced 1 celery stalk, finely chopped 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 200g (7 oz) potatoes, chopped 1 cup chicken stock, 2 cups water ~160ml (2/3 cup) cream some chopped chives black pepper Heat the oil in a saucepan, add the onion, leek, celery and garlic and cook, covered, for 15 minutes. Stir occasionally, and cook till softened, not browned. Add the potato, stock and water and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and cook covered for 20 minutes. Allow the soup to cool a little (this is where I tried to find the...

The online shop "Edible" has rare and unusual food items such as chocolate covered ants and Thai curry crickets or even sugar-free toffee-candy with an edible scorpion inside. You can order them and eat them. There are non-insect products like the "brandy like liquor fermented in a cask with lizards" and a lollipop made of ground pearls and sugar. The stuff is fairly expensive although it's not like you're likely to be buying it frequently. They seem to ship all over the world. I'm not sure if I would want to try any or not. Maybe. http://www.edible.com/shop/

The lolly in question: I got this from Toyworld for $1.40, in the interests of trying something new, how exciting. The deal with this is, I believe, that you get the pink gelatine stick thing (same sort of stuff as sour worms, etc) and dip it in the green apple sour stuff, and then dip it into the sherbet at the end there. As with every product of it's type (ones involving dipping), there was a miss-match in the amounts of dippers vs dip. I suspected this straight away, and my fears were soon confirmed - there was not enough pink sticks! I haven't yet decided if I should just use my fingers or if that would be gross. There are a number of small problems with this product, the first being that after you get it out of the packet, you have to get off the plastic that stops everything from falling out. It's stuck on rather firmly and you don't want to pull too hard and have it suddenly come off, thus jerking it, and getting sherbet and gooey green stuff everywhere. I manage...

I cooked an artichoke today. Unfortunately it was too old, so most of it was inedible. Stupid supermarket. They often sell things that are not really fit for sale. In some cases however, with exotic things, I suspect it is because no one has a clue what they are supposed to be like. Sometimes the staff cannot even identify them when you get to the checkout But otherwise the artichoke was good - the edible bits were nice and I understand it now so if I find more I can get them and try them. I have concluded, from my dissection of it, that it is a giant thistle head. Well, not actually a thistle I guess, but the same type of plant. Pretty cool. I am eager to get more. This is my new obsession. Today we went to the Asian food shop (like a small supermarket/large dairy) near my work. Why did I not go there before?! I love Asian food shops because they smell yummy and are filled with exciting things. I am wondering if there are any cooking classes in Asian food at the high schools that do e...