Capital times with 500 humans

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Well, I feel it's official now with itineraries in hand and flight details confirmed.  The bags are packed and we're leaving the Apple Isle tomorrow for a capital adventure as part of The Human Brochure campaign.

A super fun weekend in Canberra kicking off with a cocktail party at the War Memorial, other activities include a concert at the botanical gardens, seeing cheetahs at the National Zoo and dinner at the dinosaur museum. Phew! My part of the deal is to share all this fun stuff on twitter, facebook and instagram.

I grew up in Canberra, and I'm looking forward to taking my peeps to some of my favourite childhood haunts like Cockington Green. I wonder if the dog weeing on the leg of a cricket fielder is still there?   I loved that as a kid, and I'm sure my children will too.

Family fun aside, I'm also excited to finally meet one of my blogging friends in IRL! Lexi was  one of the first people to comment on my blog. Ever. And I'm super excited about meeting Tiny too and maybe picking up a few fashion tips.

It goes without saying I'm stoked to be part of such an innovative marketing campaign.  Finally all that time I've wasted invested in social media has started to pay off.

I'll be tweeting from here and there will be pretty pictures here if you want to follow along. Or search #humanbrochure to see what the other 496 humans are up to.

In which the bees swarmed

Even the messiest of garden's look charming in this spring weather.  The soft golden light washes over the new green growth and looks so beautiful, that any unmown grass, unpulled weeds and untrimmed edges go unnoticed in the wake of pretty spring blossoms.

Lucky for me.  Because there is so much exciting stuff going on this month that those lawns and weeds and edges need to go unnoticed for quite some time more.

Already this month I've styled a photo shoot for Feast Magazine - look out for the January issue  (although you can check out this month's crumpet recipe to see my granny's crockery).

I've worked with my friends at picnic event on their farm.  I wish I wasn't so busy so I could take some photos, the weather was gorgeous, the setting idyllic and the food delicious.

Then there's a school fair to work on, a school camp to cook for, a market to get cracking on, a website to write for and a summer preserving party to start growing for.

In all this busyness, the bee population quietly grew so much that half the hive buzzed off searching for bigger digs.  They swarmed.  Over the house and off to nether.  Half the workforce gone and half the honey harvest taken as rations.  Sigh.  After wishing them well on their journey, I looked up swarms and came to the conclusion that I am an inattentive beekeeper.

Inattentive beekeeper with unmown grass, unpulled weeds and untrimmed edges.  That's me.  And doesn't it look charming in this glorious spring weather?

Eating like kings

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but in our house, it could be that mother has the necessity of invention, or something like that.  

These past few months as I haven’t had a regular income, I’ve had to be really inventive to make those proverbial ends meet.  We’ve had to be more resourceful about how we shop and what we eat. 

Funny enough, despite a restricted food budget, we’ve never eaten better.  I've really enjoyed the challenge of trying to come up with meals using what’s on hand, what’s in the garden and if we don't have an ingredient, substituting or simply doing without. 

Last night we made pizza for dinner but we had none of the traditional toppings in the pantry.  No mozzarella, no tomato, no mushroom or ham.  Normally I would make a dash to the shops to buy the missing ingredients but instead, I used what we had on hand.  Plenty of milk, ingredients for dough and a garden full of herbs and garlic.   

First I made cheese with the milk.   A soft farm house cheese like a bit like this.  We made the pizza bases and topped them with garlic, olive oil, herbs, smeared some with nettle pesto, dolloped the fresh cheese and finished them all with a generous grating of parmesean.  The children loved them. Best ever pizza they said.  Win. 

Today I stirred finely chopped chives, thyme and parsley through the rest of the cheese and served it with a loaf of Irish soda bread - baked using the whey leftover from making the cheese.   Add radishes and lettuce from the garden, some pickled olives from a friend's tree and lunch was complete.

So simple and so delicious.  Peasant food it may be, but I couldn’t help but think that we eat like kings.  

In which five roosters had a bad day

It was a lucky escape for the three roosters who chose to sleep high in the wattle tree.  For the other five, asleep on the roost, it was not so lucky.

It was a job we were dreading, but eight roosters in the coop is just too many. Just ask the hens.  Or ask me for that matter, that pre-dawn chorus was getting too much. It was time for them to go.  So once the boys were asleep on Saturday night, we caught five of them and gently put them in a small pen 'til morning.

Early Sunday morning the preparations began.  We made a little camp fire and set a large pot of water to boil, grabbed a trestle table and sharpened some knives.  Then I made a batch of brownies.  Because I think it is necessary to have something sweet to counter the unpleasant task of the day.

Good friends arrived with more experience in these matters, to lend a hand and share their knowledge. And the job of the day got underway. Chopping, dunking, plucking and cleaning.

Once all five roosters were dispatched, cleaned and dressed, it was time for lunch.  We took the hearts, marinated them for a while in olive oil and garlic before cooking them over the last of the fire's coals.   They made such tasty morsels.  The livers were pan fried to make something like this pasta recipe, washed down with a very fine riesling from France. It made a fitting accompaniment to those five young roosters.

Did you know that supermarket chickens are around six to nine weeks old when they're killed?  Our roosters had a much happier and longer life of five months filled with sunshine, pasture and plenty of worms.   And one bad day.

Today is a good day.   We have a freezer full of meat that we reared and processed ourselves.  The hens look happier and can rest easy without being hassled by too many roosters.

What's left of the soft rooster feathers flutter around the garden in the gentle spring winds.  They collect in the corners of the porch, where they're promptly collected by small birds who take them away to build their nests.