This meal is the epitome of what we’re striving for – 100% food self sufficiency. Lamb chops from our paddock with home made spicy tomato-chilli relish, our mashed potatoes and a helping of spaghetti squash. Washed down with my home-brew beer, it was a very satisfying meal on many levels.

Karen’s planter pot system is working a treat with these broad beans ready to go in the garden. We thought we’d try planting a few before winter as we’d read a sneaky pre-winter bed can be up and producing much earlier in the Spring than starting from scratch then. We’ll see in a few months [...]

The wood range is well and truly part of the family after six months of continuous use. It has proven itself a winner for any cooking from the most delicate sponge or shortbread to roasts and bread. It probably gets used for bread more than anything come to think of it. My latest favourite bread [...]

Last night was our Friday pizza night (semi-traditional now). The wood-fired bakery I work at part time does an amazing pizza with sour cream, bacon, spring onion and caraway seeds I have tried to replicate. The result was pretty tasty and for a purist like me to stray from margarita or marinara means it might [...]

Our friends Brian and Carol down the road were kind enough to give us a few bags of quinces while their tree was full of fruit. We had made some delicious quince preserve last year so we thought this year we’d scale things up a bit. We ended up calling every pot in the kitchen [...]

We’ve just dug up the last of the potatoes and collected 103kg this weekend. Including the ones we’ve already eaten, our total potato harvest weights are: Agria – 30kg Rua – 11kg Ilam Hardy – 15kg Desiree – 15kg Rocket – 15kg Cliff’s Kidney – 15kg Jersey Benne – 15kg Red Rascall – 9kg Maori [...]

This recipe is from Tim Allen’s Book – The Ballymaloe Bread Book and it will put you off store-bought buns forever. It’s a little bit of work but well worth the effort. Hot Cross Buns Ingredients 25g fresh yeast 1 Tablespoon castor sugar 50ml warm milk 450g bakers flour (assume high grade flour here) pinch [...]

We have a lot of wild apple trees in our road and they were laden with ripe fruit so we harvested some for the larder. The plan was to process and bottle them all for cooking through the winter but some of them turned out to be quite nice to eat. The pigs will get [...]

We had some delicious roasted gem squash with dinner last night. I’m saving the seeds and hopefully we can grow some next summer. These squash came from a market so we don’t know exactly how they were grown. If they came from hybrid seed then plants grown from these saved seeds will revert to one [...]

Our garlic harvest was pretty modest this year. Considering the neglect it had to put up with I’m surprised we got any at all, let alone harvesting more than we planted. Next planting we’ll definitely do better but here are a few lessons we’ve gleaned: Prepare the bed well. Don’t just turn over some sod [...]