The funky frontyard farmers challenge: Day 1

  FUNKY FRONT YARD FARMERS CHALLENGE

Day 1

As we woke this morning to the (now common) pitter patter of rain drops on the roof, spirits at the funky frontyard farmers headquarters were high. Today was the first day of our 7 day challenge to live off what we produce from the garden. Despite the amazing mess in the kitchen and a few fettuccine disasters, day one has been an all round success.

Our kitchen blackboard

Ahhh, cant beat the smell of freshly baked bread

Smoothie sailing

For breakfast we enjoyed poached eggs served with basil and sunflower seed loaf (cooked by Joe last night) and rocket and cherry tomatoes on the side. We also enjoyed our regular coffees (of course). A very satisfying start to the day.

G enjoying a blackberry smoothie

breakfast is served

For morning tea, the kids munched on as many purple carrots as they wished, followed by a blackberry and honey smoothie.

Lunch
For Lunch we enjoyed oven baked rosemary potato wedges with a garden salad and white garlic and chive dipping sauce. We harvested our potatoes last Wednesday, and were pleasantly surprised at the good size of most potatoes. N and G gave a hand and thoroughly enjoyed digging around in the dirt for Desiree's, Pontiac's and royal blue potatoes. From 2 square metres of garden, we harvested over 7kg of good sized potatoes.
The trick, we think was heaping extra soil around the potato plants as they grew, which increases the yield. We also added seaweed mulch and regular additions of spent coffee grinds.

no dinner until you've peeled those potatoes!

The end result was crispy and delicious. Much better than store bought potatoes, hands down.

By afternoon tea time, Jo had baked up a honey & blackberry cake, which we enjoyed with a lavender and rose petal tea. All was going according to plan. The tea was surprisingly nice, and we intend to make a number of different teas over the coming days.


Dinner drama
It seemed that the day was going so well, surely the possibility of anything blunting our raging culinary momentum was impossible. For dinner, an ambitious green (silverbeet) pasta served with oven roasted tomatoes, basil and chili was on the menu.

Easy enough, we thought. Simply dice and blanch the silverbeet. Drain, freeze, dice again, then add to the pasta mix of eggs and flour. It looked fantastic, right up until the point at which we tried in desperation to run it through the fettuccine cutter. The pieces of silverbeet were too course for the cutter to cut through. N and G were only to happy to help make the situation worse, taking turns to rotate the handle in the wrong direction and making all the pasta back up and clog in mysterious crevices of the pasta maker.

The fettuccine was a fizzer! The dinner menu was scrapped and we opted for a ravioli creation instead. The filling included broad beans, grated carrot, basil, garlic and parsley, topped with a tomato sauce. We oven roasted some tomato halves, garlic and onion, then blended into a sauce. It tasted great, as did everything else today. Best of all, there was a real satisfaction in knowing where all of our ingredients came from.

Our Ravioli

Time to kick back with a home brew, then clean the kitchen.