8 August 2011

The garden is beginning to change and we have been moving plants around, the peas are up and the broad beans are beginning to climb through the new intriguing support system I am trying out.  I am using plastic netting which I put over the bed between four stakes when I sowed the broad bean seeds and as they grow they found their way through.  There are three further levels and this is now supporting them as they grow strong and true, amazing.

The chickens are laying really well and now we have the problem of using them and preserving them in a form that will last.  Mayonnaise and now ice cream.  Mashed eggs for the sandwiches during the week. And the usual lemon and manderine honey.

I am trying to make things stretch a little further use more economical ideas.  The use of the chicken carcasses that are now available at the super market can feed us for three days. They are a miracle to the budgeter. I boil them for an hour with a little salt and then pick of the enormous amount of flesh that is left. Chicken and pasta with the few tomatoes that are left in the garden. Chicken mixed with the first of the leeks, finely chopped with parsley, sage, thyme mint and folded through with a little thick white sauce and sandwiched between pancakes that are always in the freezer.  Topped with a little more white sauce and some grated cheese. Finally I puree the last third with the vegetables used in the boiling process and served with spinach and rice dumplings. 

Cauliflowers are white and perfect in the garden at the moment with their big green leaves folded  over their knobbly forms, that is if I can beat the slugs to them.  Cauliflower baked in the oven with capers and olive oil and flaky salt. Cauliflower in a cheesy sauce baked until the cheese speckles with beautiful brown spots, perfect with a salad and some crusty bread. Curried cauliflower soup with green peppers and specked with red chilli.

I have also taken to buying chicken nibbles and keeping them free flow in the freezer.  They are perfect baked slowly in my wonderful barbeque sauce.

As I am writing this it is slowly dawning on me that I am cooking for two.  I have always cooked for a family, the family has slowly become smaller.  It is the reverse of the frog in hot water and slowly the water of family life and being a mother is becoming a distant memory and the coming of the old and lonely time  is becoming more real. 

Working in an environment where most of the staff and the clients are young gives one a false sense of aging.  One thinks one is the same as the others and your just not.  You forget you have wrinkles and you don’t look in the mirror very often, and then suddenly you catch a glimpse of your unrecognisable self in the mirror, shock horror, you’re an old lady and emotionally alone.  You may live with someone, you may have a family but as you age you become more emotionally alone.  Your thoughts become more complex, your routines more ridged, your ability to adapt to change becomes more difficult.  Small things seem more important and moments more monumental. It surprises me just how supersensitive I am becoming to my environment, to my moods and to those around me. Hyper vigilant you might call it.

The other thing that is becoming more difficult for me is understanding why people have to die.  They die and leave underlying need for connection and a more intense fear of rejection.  Why, why, why do things have to change, I hate it.

The one thing that is constant is how my perpetual spinach keeps growing.  I have now discounted silver beet in any form.  With perpetual spinach you don’t get the terrible funny fuzzy taste. I have added finely chopped spinach to the lasted lasagne that I am trying today which I have mixed it through cottage cheese with grainy mustard.

Saturday is the day when Robyn and her husband come to help and they always have their lunch in the fish’n’chip shop in Silverdale but there always has to be morning tea.  This week it was scones and apricot jam.

We moved the asparagus into its permanent bed.  It is hard waiting for the two years to be up and then you can pick the think juice stems.  Last year the ferns were such a nuisance as they fell all over the path until they turned yellow and could be cut back.  I did tie them p but they looked tight and constrained and not as they should be. I am going to try and get purple asparagus to add to the mix. There is something magical about the way that the deep purple spears turn a deep green when they are cooked.

Ice cream

Chicken and pasta

Chicken in pancakes

Chicken soup with spinach dumplings

Curried cauliflower soup

Cauliflower cheese

Baked cauliflower

Barbeque sauce

New Lasagne

Scones

Dried apricot jam