Local Spring dinner

I've met my biggest deadline at work and with an afternoon free to clean the house, it was pretty clear that I should drive out to Runanga to Jonesy the butcher's and do a spot of local food shopping. I got bacon ends, a stuffed lamb roast and some sliced ham. On the way back I spied some lettuces at the fundraising op shop at the old miners' hall and bought 4. Grown by a local person, hydroponically. I look forward to learning more - I hope he is growing more than just lettuce. Back in the tiny sized smoke, I stopped at the mad man from Hoki's trailer stall. I bought asparagus, broccoli, tomatoes and potatoes, all grown half an hour south of our home.

Back home I found various non-cleaning things to occupy me. On the school run I popped in to see the principal about the $500 donation to the school for gardening which I had organised. Turns out I'm well connected which can never be bad. Outside Fionn's classroom we chatted about the progress of our children's potato plants. Just three more weeks until weigh in time.

Dinner was roast lamb, lettuce salad (with the first of our own radishes), asparagus and new season's potatoes. The sun is shining and my world feels perfect.

Onion weed

I gathered an armful of onion weed this morning and cleaned and prepared it (like spring onions, chop off roots and about half of the green part, rest to be used) and put it in the roasting tray with some huge winter carrots from my Dad's garden and some celery from my garden. I drizzled them with oil and let it cook at 150 celsius for about 60 minutes. The roasting tray was quite full and the veges wet from being cleaned so they half steamed and half roasted. Then I whizzed the mix up in the food processor and wondered what I might do with it next.

Next I played round with broccoli pesto after seeing a recipe online which I didn't actually follow because I have banned myself from the computer for all but 20 minutes in the evening. But mine was similar except I used parsley for the non-broccoli green.

Tonight I cooked pasta and then sauteed some anchovies in a pan and added the onion weed/celery/carrots mixture and a bit of tomato sauce. I mixed that with the cooked pasta and then topped each plate with the broccoli pesto. It tasted nice. Not likely to win any awards and certainly not restaurant fare on aesthetics, but "Thank you Mummy, I like this" from the boy who was very doubtful throughout the cooking part did very nicely for applause.

We got our first egg on Saturday and then two yesterday and two today. The run is too wet for them though - increased vulnerability to disease. So we will stake the run into the ground and add plastic to keep it dry. We are now talking about building the glasshouse this summer and making that their winter home while I plant winter veges into the current run spot. Then swap over in summer so the glasshouse can grow tomatoes.

I gave my Dad two sub arctic oregon tomato seedlings which I had grown on Saturday. Mum and Dad were over to watch Fionn's final in the rugby league. Hoki dared to beat us once this season and they paid for that on Saturday. Those little 5 and 6 year old boys and girls in Fionn's team thrashed Hoki soundly. I never thought I'd be a sporting girl, but Saturday was full on excitement. Well well well.

Back to gardening. I also gave Dad some of my pumpkin and zucchini seeds. The climate in his garden is quite different to here and it will be interesting to compare results. My neighbour was talking about the article on heirloom tomato varieties and health benefits in the weekend but didn't know where she could buy seeds or plants. I lent her my Kings Seeds catalogue. Spreading the word on genuine food diversity one friend at a time.

Yesterday was the local Lions fertiliser fundraiser. I joined the queue for sheep manure, blood and bone and powedered sheep manure. I didn't want superphosphate, but happy to put the other things on my garden.

knitting

I've finished my cardigan. Photos will come. Photos do eventually get posted here on most projects, just often verrry late. It's lovely and warm and I think even styley and I'm wearing it now.

I had been looking forward to a break from knitting so I could read some books, advise some people on cloth nappies, maybe even do some mending. But I missed knitting. Don't know what's going on there. I have started reading The War for Children's Minds by Stephen Law though. Stepehen Law's website is here. Not that I've read that properly either yet (been knitting my brain away) but it's there if you feel like it. I've been thinking about education issues until literally my head has started to hurt and his book gives me a chance to think about things from a different perspective, one not rooted in questions about where my children should spend their days.

My current knitting project is a sleeveless hoodie for Fionn (5). I'm knitting it in black and yellow stripes. They are his favourite colours and he has chosen both the colours and the stripes so that when he lays on the grass wearing it, he will look like a bumblebee. I'm using Perendale wool, 100% wool and New Zealand made. It's lovely and soft. I bought it locally at the lovely wool shop here in smalltown where the ladies are fabulous and these days I even have a discount card as I'm a member of the local knitting group. While I was at the shop buying wool the other day, the owner showed me a sample of the new range about to come out. It's called "Charity" and it is 100% wool, New Zealand made and designed for making charity knitting affordable. It will be $2.99 for a 50g ball (if I have remembered correctly) which is truly fantastic. Wool at functional prices instead of expensive leisure craft prices.

There are some wools on the market made (or at least processed) in China. I've made my disapproval known. I don't spend money on wool and time on knitting (both of which surely could be better spent on red wine) in order to support sweat shop labour and excessive fossil fuel transport costs.

The pig

Last night I went to book group. I hadn't read the book and by the time I got there the short discussion of the book was finished and the real business, yakking about everything else, had begun. Talk turned to food eventually and some of the frustrations of attempting to buy local and I found out that Sarah has a contact for local beef, hogget and pork/bacon. I offered then and there that I would like to share a pig with her.

Back home Favourite Handyman blasted my ideas that it would fit in our 135 litre freezer part of the fridge freezer. That sounds like quite a bit for a fridge freezer and it is but perhaps not quite a bit for fitting half a pig in.

When we moved into our home in late 2006, I was keen on getting a freezer. Later on I changed my mind because we seemed to be managing fine as long as we ate through things within 2-3 months or less. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle and working ourselves through this winter being conscious of what we are eating from the garden and how dependent we are on the supermarkets (i.e. some place out there to furnish our food needs), I still thought I was in the no-more-appliance-spend category and would simply manage, even though I can't really fit much in there to last the year through after Autumn harvest.

But locally grown and butchered pig, with bacon that is apparently divine. ... Let's just say that I've had a wee look on trademe at the freezer section this morning (nothing around my part of the woods at the moment though). As bacon apparently lures many vegetarians back to the meat side, it's doing its work on me regarding freezers. Also I froze home made pasta sauce last year (much easier than attempting to bottle such a marginal fruit on the acidity/botulism front) but could only do about eight meals' worth because of storage constraints. Then there is Kingsolver's comments about freezing surplus zucchini for winter. With a bigger freezer....

I was buying my pig products from a local butcher. But after twice of not being able to get bacon bones from him I bypassed the nice lady at the counter and had a chat with the butcher. Turns out he gets his pork for curing into bacon boneless and the bones from the year before were bought in from Auckland. sigh.

Bought some local fish from the shop on the wharf yesterday and had a chat there about the challenges facing the local fishing industry. Ninety percent of the fish which is caught off our coast is sent elsewhere in the country (Napier and Christchurch) or to Russia for processing. That's a lot of jobs which I'd like to see here on the coast and it is a lot of fuel.

food mindfulness, mindboggledness

Thank you Joanna for alerting me to this discussion on food miles and locavore practices in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. As far as I can work out, raising my own chooks and eggs and growing my own vegetables and fruit is all good. Anything involving the rest of the world is more complicated.

Indeed it is more complicated. I think food is a class issue. Of course not everyone is interested in talking about class in these post-modern times, but I'm a leftie who won't give up. The benefits of my university education, the time I spent travelling, the interests I have in reading about food and politics - all these things have given me a fairly middle class view of food issues.

But we live in a predominantly working class town and I like being part of our small town community. I want to participate in the life of our town. Doing so shows me very clearly the role of food in community endeavours and I can promise you that we don't talk about food mindfulness (as they do in the second link in this post) on the sidelines at Rugby League.

This morning I took the children with me to support our local high school's Kapa Haka group, which is fundraising to go to Australia at the end of this year and participate in a big indigenous peoples' festival. I know some of the young people in the group and I'm proud to watch them shine. They started off with a garage sale and I am in horror of garage sales these days as we have too much stuff already. But they did have a sausage sizzle out the front and Fionn was delighted with his hunk of processed meat wrapped in soft white bread and drizzled with bright red sauce. I bet there is a lot to criticise about such a food choice. But it was a way of supporting the project without cluttering up our house any further.

The Kapa Haka group performed in fine style and I also loved watching the pleasure my own children experienced watching them.

Then it was time to go to League, where today was something called fun day where all the teams get mixed up and play wearing different shirts and I nearly fell over with admiration for the adults who organised this rather complex process. At the end, everyone in Fionn's team was given a lollipop and later received a spot prize of a new mouth guard and a boots bag festooned with logos including the golden arches. Generous sponsorship by Solid Energy, which has several coal mines in our region, was acknowledged on the cones marking out the junior-sized playing fields. Pies, chips and hot dogs were for sale on the sidelines. I expect these are also fundraisers for the host club.

We paid $20 for the season for our son to play Rugby League and every single week I am bowled over by the generosity of the coaches, the sponsors and the managers. I have no wish to suggest that food, a commodity which has always oiled the cogs of community, must meet my personal standards.

Animal vegetable miracle

I've now finished Barbara Kingsolver's book on eating local for a year. I loved it. Completely adored her beautiful writing. I think I'm getting pretty familiar, theoretically at least, with the principles and benefits of locavore living and yet Kingsolver's prose drew me in. It's not being virtuous to read her; it's a pleasure.

Has it changed my own view on eating local? Not at all, but local eating on the South Island's West Coast is a fairly high level challenge. We ate fish last week, caught and sold by a local family we know through Fionn's school. The fish was divine. Not sure how long we'll have it though. The same week the local paper ran a front page article on the problems facing local fisherpeople. Fuel costs have risen 240% for them in the last year and some boats have stopped going out as they can't afford the overheads.

The only way I can get locally grown vegetables outside of my own garden (where I have greens but no starches) is to buy them from the fellow just outside of Hokitika. But there is no way I'm driving down to make a purchase from him given that it now costs me about $13 in petrol for a trip to Hoki. I used to make this trip for fun about once a month. No longer.

Next month is rooster killing month which will push up our local protein eating significantly.

What I could do is give up bananas.

Next Summer will be the summer of pumpkins I hope. In the dark of next winter, with some good fortune on top of the hard work, we may be eating our own pumpkins each week.

Local food

I've just been reading about Joanna's latest local food meal. It does make me think hard about how I could or should define local food for my family. Eating food only grown in the South Island of New Zealand is not difficult. A wide range of vegetables and fruits are grown in the South Island, fishing is common, wine and beer are made as are the grapes and hops grown, sheep, chickens, pigs, dairy and cattle are raised, grains are grown and the only thing I'm not sure about is whether we grow pulses on a commercial scale. I think there are some around Ashburton. Salt is harvested in Marlborough and olives are now as well, although for the premium end of the market rather than the large bottles I use nearly every day. Herbs grow plentifully.



Except, the West Coast of the South Island is quite isolated from everywhere else and snow still stops transport getting through several times every winter. If fuel prices and availability go the way some are predicting, I don't think the South Island will necessarily be local enough. So I've chosen the West Coast only as a possible local challenge. Not impossible but lots harder. I'm assembling an inventory of possibilities now.


As you can see in the map below, the West Coast is a very long and skinny part of New Zealand linked for the most part by only one road. From one end to the other would take 6-7 hours to drive.



Fruit: blueberries are produced commercially. Nothing else, or nothing within coo-ee of our home. I think there are some organic crops near Karamea, maybe feijoas. But it's possible to grow a number of trees for fruit at home, which we are doing.


Vegetables: again, very little grown commercially. There is a commercial tomato producer not far from us and I support them for my sauce making adventures. There is a place near Hokitika which grows mostly things we have at home but also has asparagus which I don't even have in my garden yet. The Hokitika grower is odd and unpredictable and his wife tells me he tells lies, but no one said this locavore thing was going to be sunshine all the way.


Grains: potatoes for carbohydrates. Too wet for grains here really.


Legumes: I'm experimenting and so have others, but no great success yet. No place for locavore vegans I'm afraid.


Meat: I support two excellent local butchers. I understand however that they get their raw unprocessed meat from Canterbury, so local business but not locally grown. There is a place in Karamea which I have spoken to which sometimes has organic lamb, but mostly I need to get in the know with farmers and the home kill butcher if I want local meat. I have a contact south of Ross who sells me organic beef which she has reared herself.


Poultry & eggs: I have the great benefit of being friends with the wonderful Raeleen who passes her unwanted roosters on to us to eat. We occasionally buy eggs from Raeleen and by spring we should have our own chooks.


Fish: Locally caught fish isn't hard to buy here. Our strongest preference is to buy direct from a fishing family who we know from kindy and now school.


Dairy: The coast is teeming with cows, but it isn't possible to buy local milk and cream and cheese. Westland Milk Company specialises in powdered products which go out of the coast on the train. I suspect the market is largely international.

One local season, One Fat Lady

I've been reading with interest about the Northern Hemisphere one local summer challenge on Joanna's blog.

Could I do it here in Winter? Not sure, but I'm thinking about it.

Perhaps us Southern Hemisphere gals could have a go at this in our Summer?

I've finished "Spilling the Beans" by Clarissa Dickson Wright of Two Fat Ladies fame. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend you order it from your library also. If you are only interested in living simply, then she won't be the read for you at the moment, though you'd be missing out. She has serious gumption and survival skills. I loved reading about her endeavours around good food in England and Scotland and now know she is partly responsible for the revival of Borough Market in London, a place I adored. Books for Cooks in Portobello has also benefited from her skills and I remember trekking over there to check that place out a couple of times also. Food heaven. If someone you love has problems with alcohol, then it is a powerful and relevant book also. Her narrative of the process of alcoholism and rehabilitation will stay with me a long time.

She is also an enthusiast of good food growing, as any food enthusiast must be. Her cardoon growing project has made me consider growing it. Kings Seeds have it in their catalogue.

Roman blinds

Roman blinds, ladies and gentlemen. Am I up to the task of creating a more effective cold and draught block on the front door than the current venetian blind which only covers the glass panes on the door, not the whole door?

Myself? Using instructions like these? I'll need to get something out of the library to stare at for a fortnight at least. We do want an insulation improvement and paying for them to be made is absolutely out of the question financially. Something like the picture below would be very gorgeous except obviously we wouldn't put the couch in front of the door. The wolf ain't knocking that hard yet (I'm not the only one who grew up with a Dad making comments about the wolf being at the door when referring to hard economic times am I?).

I'm planning on having a good look through the remnants bin at our local curtain shop (yes we still have one and by crikey I'll be supporting it rather than go online or mail order). I doubt I'd be able to get a remnant large enough and I need to learn lots more before I'd know whether I could sew several remnants together and still get the blind to hang properly. Our home is not beautifully decorated and nothing has to match particularly. If I see something totally gorgeous in a small piece perhaps I could just use that with plain stuff above and below it. A splash of gorgeous is something I like a great deal. Just doesn't have to align with everything else in my world.

I'm not sure I should even be having such adventurous thoughts. But it does sort of look like if I measure things properly, the actual sewing might be straightforward. I'll ask my tutor at the sewing class on Thursday night. Assuming I remember to sign up for it and pay tomorrow. At least everyone appears to have had chickenpox.

seed sowing, local shopping, organic eating

blah blah. I'm feeling quite the earth mother today.

This evening I sowed eight different kinds of seeds:
1. arugula - which is like rocket but apparently is less inclined to bolt. My understanding of the catalogue description is that I can get growth year round with this seed.
2. calendula - I bought a dwarf mixed colour packet to add to my colour splashes as last year's calendula was so kind to me and flowered all through winter despite total neglect on my part.
3. violas - Heartsease Miss Helen Mount which I've been coveting a while..
4. Welsh Bunching Onions
5. Radish - a gourmet blend apparently
6. broccolli
7. kale - hopefully I won't throw a tantrum and destroy the broccoli and kale if I find a caterpillar like last time.
8. marjoram - cos we haven't got any and I want to see how different it tastes to our Greek Oregano.

Zucchinis are growing more strongly again which no doubt has nothing to do with me throwing wet piles of horse manure around the plants last week. Last August I made some horse poo brew and last August is really a long time ago now. I'd used the brew a few times and then forgot about it as the tree growth covered the brew bin. But since Favourite Handyman cut all bar one of the trees down and let in the light, the brew bin looked silly and like it should be used UP. So I sloshed it in lots of places and we'll see what happens next.

Today I collected a bulk order of sausages from the fabulous Blackball Salami Company, took delivery of some avocadoes from Doug at Eco Avo and discussed a first delivery with Dieter of Treedimensions.

Cos I'm on a foodie roll at the moment, chicken stock is bubbling gently as I write.

Exciting news also came in the form of an email about an organic co-op in the next town which is only 30 minutes' drive from me. It's up and running now and I'm itching to check it out.