Rainy and Miserable Weather

The weather here in Melbourne is dismal.  Cold, wet and grey, with icy winds that threaten to freeze your face.  Most mornings, I like to take Tabitha for a walk (in the Ergo, wrap or pram) down to our local shopping strip to get a coffee - a nice fifteen minute walk each way.  But the weather has made this difficult, so we are suffering from a touch of cabin fever.  To make matters worse, Tabitha has had a lingering cold for nearly a week now - she's grumpy, clingy and snotty!

Since we're mostly housebound, I fiddled around and made some sweet potato chips.  They are so delicious.  I just sliced some sweet potatoes really thinly, tossed with oil and plenty of salt, and a little cumin, and baked them on a baking tray for about 15 minutes at 190 degrees, turning half way through.  Tabitha ate a few.  I ate a lot.

Here is Tabitha multi-tasking.  She is eating sweet potato chips and riding around the kitchen on her (toy library) bike:

I met my friend Amy at the Prahran Market - just for a little field trip to get out of the house.  The market is one of my favourite places, so it was a brilliant distraction.

We got a whole lot of outstanding little organic mandarins:

Some organic Australian garlic, and some shallots (which I am obsessed with eating, roasted):

From the fabulous potato stand at the market, a few kilograms of Desiree chats, one of my favourite potatoes.  We eat a lot of potatoes - with the skin on, potatoes are one of the most nutritious foods there are.  If you buy more potatoes than you will use in the next few days, you need to keep them away from light, and with a little ventilation.  I keep my potatoes in a large cotton bag, in a large, low cupboard:

I am completely obsessed with raw Jersey milk - that is, unpasteurised, unhomogenised milk from Jersey cows.  Thankfully, you can now buy it in Melbourne - a couple of places sell it, including an organic stall at the Prahran Market called Paddywheel.  They sell a couple of brands, both full-cream certified organic raw Jersey milk.  It is sold for 'cosmetic purposes', e.g. bathing, because it is illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption in Australia.  Of course, what you do with it when you get home is up to you - I drink it.  Lots of it!  Because it is unhomogenised, the fat rises to the top - Jersey milk is nearly half cream, so when you buy it, you can see all the delicious cream on the top.

It's a little more expensive than the regular organic milk I buy (normally from Elgaar Farm) but it is so, so good.  The difference, in flavour and mouthfeel, between raw Jersey full-cream unhomogenised milk, and your standard supermarket milk, is like the difference between freshly squeezed, in season orange juice compared with stuff in a prima-pack.  Supermarket organic full-cream milks sit somewhere in between, I think - maybe like a high-quality bottled orange juice?  There are plenty of benefits to consuming raw dairy - THIS website is a good place to start, if you are interested in learning more.

When I got home, I made a large pan of chocolate hedgehog.  To eat, mostly on my own.  This cheered me up immensely.  Actually, there was a small mishap - I was wearing Tabitha in a front carry (rookie mistake when cooking!) and she reached out and upended a whole bowl of crushed Marie biscuits.  All over the floor.  I could have cried - instead, I let her sit in the crumbs, happily dragging her hands through them, eating bits of biscuit off the floor.  It wasn't a high point of my parenting career, but it seemed to make her happy, and it allowed me five minutes uninterrupted to crush another bowl of biscuits!

I have mentioned several times my love of Vanilla Caster Sugar.  It's simple to make - you just chop up a couple of vanilla beans and add them to a large container of caster sugar.  I keep around 2kg on the go, and 2 vanilla beans are ample to flavour this quantity of sugar.  Every time the container gets about half-empty, I just fill it up again with new caster sugar and give it a shake.  The same vanilla beans have been flavouring my sugar for a couple of years, and are still giving off a beautiful flavour and aroma.  I use this vanilla sugar in almost every recipe requiring caster sugar (I generally still add the full required amount of vanilla extract too, if the recipe calls for it).  It is also sublime stirred into some hot milk as a before-bed treat - I use a scant teaspoon.

If you don't bake regularly, a small jar will do - I have prepared this jar, below, which contains about 3/4 cup of caster sugar and one chopped vanilla bean.  I am giving this to a woman in my mothers group who likes rice pudding - if she uses 1/4 cup or so of vanilla sugar to make the pudding, then tops it up again with caster sugar, the jar will provide her with several years' worth of vanilla sugar.

Have you noticed that Hass avocados are on special everywhere?  Great big ones, too!  My supermarket has them at 4 for $5.  Tabitha and I are really, really into avocados, so 4 of them will be gone within a few days.

My cats are cold and grouchy.  They, like me, have cabin fever, and spend their days wrestling with each other on the floor, stalking around the house looking for warm places, and sitting at the window, tails swishing angrily, watching the rain.

Clever baby Possum spends most of his days sitting high up on top of the reptile enclosure - not only is the room warm up high (of course, the heat from the heater rises) but he also gets a warm bottom from sitting on top of the massive heat lamp for the lizard.  Here he is, half-asleep and warm, peering down at the room below:

Tabitha has suddenly noticed that everyone else has plates and bowls, whereas she eats her food directly off the table.  She is most unimpressed by this, and will now not even touch her food if it is not on a plate!  But once she has the plate, all she wants to do is sit there putting the food ON the plate, then taking the food OFF the plate, ad infinitum.  And also waving her plate around, with an expression on her face of "HEY check it out!  I have a plate!  I am one of you!  Look at me with my fancy plate!"  So not much eating gets done anyway, at the moment.

Because she sometimes drops her plate, I give her a cute Melamine one instead of a china plate.  I suspect it will only be a few days before she realises that this is an inferior substitute, and starts demanding a proper plate.  We'll see...  

Before we had a baby, our fruit bowl normally consisted of a couple of lemons, a bit of garlic, an avocado and maybe a banana.  I wasn't really a big fruit-eater.  But since becoming pregnant, I have developed more of a taste for fruit and, of course, I need to offer it to Tabitha each day, and eat it myself to set a good example.  So now our fruit bowl generally looks like this - garlic, mandarins, tangelos, lime, lemons, apples, avocados, bananas.  Often also a pear.  And in the fridge, melon and berries.  I feel quite virtuous!

Last night for dinner, we had a friend over, and I made slow roasted lamb shoulder.  Our friend is studying to be a vet, living in the country, and is home at the moment on holidays.  The cats loved him - they wouldn't leave him alone!

We had buttered parsley potatoes (boil chats until tender, drain and then cut in half, shake around in the pot to roughen them up a little, then add a good amount of melted butter, salt and freshly chopped parsley):

Also green beans (buttered of course!) which I always think go well with lamb:

With this meal, I make a mint and caper gravy - just the right amount of piquancy to go with the deliciously fatty lamb!

Here is the lamb - the shoulder is easily my favourite cut!  Slow-cooked, it is texturally more like a shank than a leg.  The meat melts and falls apart - you don't need a knife to carve the roast, you can pull it apart with a couple of forks, leaving you with a completely clean bone.  The shoulder is also an incredibly cheap cut.  This piece of lamb, 2kg of shoulder (bone-in) cost around $20.  It had enough meat for 4 (really big) serves.  With the potatoes, garlic, beans, and herbs from the garden (mint, parsley and rosemary) the entire meal feeds 4 hungry people, at around $8 a serve.

Here is my recipe, adapted from one of Jamie Oliver's:

Slow roasted lamb shoulder with caper gravy, parsley potatoes and green beans

2kg lamb shoulder, with a few deep slashes in the skin side

4 – 5 large sprigs of rosemary

A whole head of garlic, broken up but cloves unpeeled

Salt, pepper, oil

2 large shallots

400ml chicken stock

2 tablespoons of plain flour

1 tablespoon of capers, rinsed, drained and finely chopped

2 tablespoons of mint, finely chopped

1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar

1kg chat potatoes

40ml butter, melted

Salt, a few tablespoons of chopped parsley

A couple of handfuls of green beans, rinsed and ends trimmed

Melted butter and salt.

To make the lamb:

Preheat oven to to 250 degrees, or as high as it will go.

Slash the skin a few times, quite deeply, then rub the lamb with olive oil and plenty of salt and pepper.  Poke a few cloves of peeled garlic into the deep slashes on the skin.

Put in a roasting tray, with a few large sprigs of rosemary, and a few cloves of garlic (skin on) underneath it.  Lay a couple more sprigs of rosemary and a few more cloves of garlic (skin on) on top of the lamb.  In the roasting tin, add a couple of shallots, peeled and cut in half.

Cover the roasting tray tightly with tinfoil, then put in the oven.  Turn the oven down to 170 degrees straight away, and leave for 4 hours.

The lamb is done when the meat easily falls apart when probed with a fork.

Remove the lamb, sit on a warm plate, covered with foil and a tea towel - leave to rest for around 15 minutes.  When ready to serve, shred the lamb with a couple of forks, and pile the meat up on a plate - if you do this at the table, people will say 'oooooh!  Look at that!' because the meat is so tender.

For the gravy:

To make the gravy, discard the rosemary, garlic and shallots from the roasting tray, and pour off most of the fat.  Sit the roasting tray on the stove, sprinkle over a couple of tablespoons of flour, stir in, then add 400ml hot stock, a little at a time, stirring over medium heat, scraping at the bottom of the tray.  Once the gravy is thickened nicely, stir in the chopped capers (rinsed and dried), the finely chopped mint, and a tablespoon of red wine vinegar.

For the parsley potatoes:

Boil 1kg of chat potatoes (such as Desiree chats) until a knife can easily pierce them.  Drain them, and shake them around in the pot to rough them up a little.  Cut them in half, and toss them with 40g melted butter, a teaspoon of nice textured salt, and a few tablespoons of chopped parsley.

Along with the caper gravy and the parsley potatoes, and the green beans, I serve this with some excellent bread and butter - you need it to mop up the gravy! 

For dessert, I made golden syrup dumplings.  I didn't manage to snap a photo - they were gone too quickly!  But here is the recipe.  I thoroughly recommend making it, and promise that a serve of these will make the dismal weather seem a little more bearable...

Golden Syrup Dumplings

Dumplings:

1 1/4 cups self raising flour
30g butter
1/3 cup golden syrup
1/3 cup milk

Sauce:
30g butter
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup golden syrup
1 2/3 cup water

Rub butter into flour, gradually stir in syrup and milk. It doesn't have to be perfect or smooth.

Combine sauce ingredients in a medium saucepan, stir over heat, without boiling, until the sugar is dissolved.

Bring to the boil, without stirring, then reduce to a simmer.

Drop tablespoonsful of the mixture into the sauce (about 8, which should serve 4 people)

Simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes, or until the dumplings are cooked through.

Serve with a little of the sauce,  and some cream or ice cream.