Chapter 10: Help or we may starve in January.

Cooking from the Garden

This afternoon Joe took Noah and Georgia to the park to give me time to create an amazing culinary experience, albeit a trial but I felt so confident, a little too confident. Using shallots, eggs, zucchini, baby tomatoes, basil and chilli from our garden, I embarked on our first all-home grown meal prototype. Our plan is to practice making dishes that we can use during our F.F.F.C. I had envisaged that this dish would be a stuffed zucchini dish (our zucchinis are huge) that would be tasty but also look good on the plate.

Recipe: Stuffed zucchini omletty thingo's.

I started by cutting the zucchini into cross-sections of about 5 cm. Then I scooped out the inside of the zucchini leaving a 1 cm rim and a base. I then put these zucchini 'cups' in hot olive oil that was seasoned with salt, pepper and shallots. Cooking the base and then the top rim for about a minute each. I stuffed two of these with a mixture of diced zucchini, sliced baby tomatoes, basil and chilli and then the other two with the same ingredients as well as a beaten egg. I then put them in the oven and coooked them til egg was set and zucchini seemed well cooked.

Stuffed zucchini omletty thingies...mmmmmmmm.

After tasting both types of stuffed zucchini we agreed that the presentation was more of a winner. The zucchini tasted watery due to the way it was cooked and the flavours were too jumbled and eggy. We did however, enjoy a lovely 'sunset champagne' as I cooked. All you need for this little baby is champagne and a hibiscus flower (this one is from our garden). It doesn't add to the taste whatsoever but it looks fantastic and the bubbles do their job.

'Champagne Sunset',  just like a sunset goes down nicely, every afternoon...

There are alot of flowers that are edible from your garden including some varieties of hibiscus, marigold, gladioli, carnations, pansy, lavender and roses . We are going to use elderflowers to make our own champagne for the FFFC.

Any Suggestions?
As you all know our challenge starts in January and we have vowed to prepare food and drinks using only the produce from our garden (with the addition of milk, coffee, flour and olive oil, we are also sneaking in salt and pepper). After eating our stuffed zucchini thingos, it gave us food for thought. Coming up with interesting recipes from the garden is proving harder than we thought. We need your help and are calling on your culinary creativity to design a recipe for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Check out our last weeks 'walk around our garden' post to get some ideas of what's available in our garden. Or if you are filled with confidence of gastronnomical proportion you may want to try your hand at designing a recipe specifically for our final dinner party in January. We would love to road test any recipes you send us and will post them on the blog.


Home made Mulberry wineToday is actually quite a momentus day in our household. As you may have read in one of our earlier posts we have been trying our hand at brewing our own mulberry wine. After months of it brewing away, tenderly cared for by Joe's regular visits and singing, today we managed to fill 7 rosey red bottles of 'uniquely' tasting mulberry and grape wine. The initial taste-test wasn't poisonous which is promising. Fingers crossed in six months it will taste even better.

Our mulberry wine.

Alright gang, we are looking forward to hearing some of your recipes and trying them out in the weeks to come. Next week we are heading indoors to show some of our recent supercheap revamps to our kitchen and living area as well as some of our council pickup gems.