Getting back to home made

It is well past time for me to get back into making more and buying less. I got out of the habit when overwhelmed with work+work+uni, but as the weather gets cooler and I have time before next semester I need to re-establish some good habits.

Step 1: Bread. I have a new sourdough starter fermenting which should be ready to start baking with it next week. In the meantime I will get back to making bread rather than buying it.

Step 2: I will start making yoghurt using the cultures I bought. I made a batch 2 days ago, and converted about 3/4 into labna (yoghurt cheese). My next experiment will be to infuse the milk with vanilla bean before making the yoghurt to see if I can come close to the flavour of 5am's very delicious (but expensive) vanilla bean yoghurt. I'll let you know how that goes.

Step 3: Get back into make some hard cheese. I think I'll start with caerphilly as it has a short maturing time, and we enjoyed it last time.

Step 4: Eat through the food we have in the pantry. We have loads of dried beans and I still have some ham bones and a hock or two so this excellent soup will be getting a few runs in the next couple of weeks. The presence of dozens of jars of fruit suggests that there will be a lot of crumble made and consumed in winter :-)

It's finished!!

Hurrah hurrah! Today the electrician came and installed the powerpoint for the chest freezer, anf the light switches for the cupboards, so the pantry renovation is finally finished ... and just in time for the arrival of my nephews and brother and sister-in-law from the UK tomorrow.

 

 

Oh and while the electrician was here he also installed a new ceiling fan in the living room, and moved the old one form there to my office, and replaced our ceramic and wire fuses with something a LOT more modern - hey we even have safety cut-outs now!  How very 20th century!

Pantry Update

Handles on - check
Anti-mouse door roller things on the bottom of the doors to fill in the gap - check
Shelves stacked - check

Huston we are go for launch  :*)

 

  

  

Next week the electrician is coming back to fit a power point for the chest freezer, and put in the light switch for the pantry lights.

I'll leave you with a picture of one of last weeks "dinner baskets" from the garden

 

Quick laundry/pantry renovation update

Top L is the "canning cupboard", R is he main pantry, and bottom is the space for the chest freezer(s) and space for assorted other storage.

The new pantry is taking shape

This morning there was a lot of measuring, and dragging out all my kitchen gear to work out shelf spacing. I think Dave is actually a bit frightened by all my kitchen bits and pieces. He was certainly looking at me a bit strangely after the first 15 mins. LOL. However it will be great to have proper shelves to store the canner, dehydrator and fowlers unit as well as places to put the flour bins.

The "canning cupboard" (left pic) will store all the canning and preserving bits and pieces, as well as most of the empty jars (and probably some full ones in peak canning season). On the right will be the double-door pantry (with a wall down the middle so I can squeeze in a few more shelves!) which will store everyday food supplies, as well as jams, chutneys and more canned items. There will be a mix of full and half width shelves, to make the most of the space (this will make more sense when you see a pic)

Tomorrow it's insulation, plasterboard, and more shelf batons........

Laundry renovation update

Work resumed today on the great wardrobe-to-pantry conversion. Demo has been completed, and Dave's started framing up. We now have a wall in the bedroom. It's weird to see proper framing and boarding in this house. I'm getting excited about actually having something to paint!!

The bedroom wall will be insulated before the plasterboard goes up.

Dave has also filled in all the air gaps which will help keep critters out as well as too hot or too cold breezes!

Tomorrow - more framing and shelving!!!!!!!!!!!

It's all happening at M & J's this week

Phew!  It's all happening here at the moment! Today I

• made brambleberry cordial - cheated by using the steam juicer to make the juice. MUCH easier than fiddling with muslin bags etc, and the chickens are overjoyed with the leftover berry pulp

• made cherry chutney - it's SO tedious pitting 2kg of cherries - but when it's $8 for 2kg of seconds you need to just do it :)
• finished making the raspberry vinegar
• made rapsberry jam (Jerry picked 900g yesterday! it's a bumper berry year)
• sorted my garlic and hung the good cloves in bunches to dry further. The ones that won't keep we will eat first
• made a jar of pickled garlic

Doesn't look like much, but that took care of 5 hours this morning.

Meanwhile the great pantry renovation started this week. We're extending our laundry/pantry/utility room into where Jerry's wardrobes are to give us more food (and general) storage space, as well as space for a bigger chest freezer, given that we now buy almost all our meat in bulk. The first stage meant moving ALL Jerry's clothes, and all the food and jars from the pantry out of their respective homes. That took us from this:

to this:

Of course, all the bottles and jars of stuff had to go somewhere...so my new pantry is now down the other end of the house. It's going to be a bit chaotic for a few weeks until it all gets done, but it will mean so much more storage. Most of Jerry's clothes are now in either "my" wardrobe, or in a temporary wardrobe.

Luckily our guests between Xmas and New Year spent about 6 months living out of a trailer-tent whilst touring Australia, so I'm hoping this means they won't feel too claustrophobic with all this clutter at "their" end of the house!