Food matters

Tomatoes stored on the bench with a green apple to help them ripen. 

On Wednesday last week, it was World Environment day with the theme of   "Think, eat, save"      -encouraging us all to take care with food, not to waste it.
Think Eat save  is an anti-food waste and food loss campaign that encourages you to reduce your foodprint. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. This is equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger.  

At Chez Earthmotherwithin, we are working hard on this one -and have been for some time.
Our strategies:

1. Menu planning. This is where I start by looking in the cupboards and fridges and freezers to see what we have got, and then plan meals for a fortnight around those things. This means that we use up what we have got before it gets too old to use. I used to only plan for the main meal of the day, but increasingly I plan all the meals. This includes ways to tart up leftovers to make them more interesting.  I have a number of meals that I now know will work this way.

I have found it easier to do the menu plan if I pick up one of my many recipe books and use it as inspiration for the meals -this takes me out of the 'boring and humdrum' old favourites.

There are three of us here and we all cook, so a menu plan is posted on the fridge and then anyone can see what is for dinner. DH really likes the menu plan because it solves the problem of deciding what is to eat.

DD likes it because she can see what she is allowed to snack on , and what is an ingredient vital to dinner!

2. Eat less meat. Our aim is to eat vegetarian meals on every second day. Meat is expensive to produce -it needs lots of water and land- and to buy, and so we are supporting our budget and the environment by doing this. Last night for example, we had baked potatoes with coleslaw, sour cream, salsa and cheese, served with cucumber, green beans and tomatoes. It was followed with jam pudding and icecream.

Lettuce pot in the winter sunshine 

3. Grow our own. The idea is simple -become more self sufficient, eat healthy and save on food transportation costs. Over the years we have learned a lot and are still learning. It is fun and healthy work, growing your own food, and you know it is safe to eat too. It is also cheap to do.  We also love giving excess food away to friends. One of them commented on how lovely the freshly picked turnip was that we gave her -smooth thin skin, crisp white flesh. Makes you wonder how old the stuff is that we buy from the supermarket!
We are not self sufficient in food. We try to grow things that are expensive -such as asparagus or avocadoes-or lettuces. This is a little pot of lettuce growing outside my sewing room window. Lettuce is $24.00 a kilo and goes slimy when kept if bought from the supermarket. Lettuce I grow is fresh and picked just before eating.  It costs about $3 for a punnet which will supply us for about 6 weeks -and less if we sew seed rather than buy seedlings.

Eureka lemons in season now. 

We also love the condiments and herbs which make food interesting -lemons and limes, parsley and rosemary, mint and sage. These are very expensive to buy -one lemon for $2 or a bunch of parsley for $3.50! Cheap as chips to grow yourself and your food is so much nicer as a result. Dried herbs are different than fresh ones in taste.

4. Store things carefully.

Apples cooked in the slow cooker and frozen for later enjoyment

Flour for breadmaking is stored in the fridge - I don't have enough room in the freezer or it would go there. Cold conditions make it less likely that weevils will spoil the flour until it is ready to use.  Special containers store carrots, celery, spring onions and the like in the fridge to make them last longer. I use glass containers where possible, because I want to limit our exposure to plastics which might leach into the food we eat, and because glass containers are strong and see through and reusable. I often pick them up from op shops.

5. Preserve what is in excess
This is as simple as freezing leftovers so that they don't spoil until you fish them out for lunch -adding them to a toasted sandwich or popping a pastry top on them to make a pie. It also includes making soup out of tired vegetables and then freezing in portions for later. We make jam out of lemons and limes and tangelos we have grown.  I pickled radishes for garnishes to sandwiches (nicer than I expected) and I have done a little preserving in the hot water bath method.

Pomegranates add a luxury touch to summer salads

6. Have a compost bin and a worm farm for the waste -so it is not wasted! 
My worms are easy to look after and turn the small amount of waste we produce into fertilizer to grow more veggies for free. Food waste in municipal garbage dumps creates harmful methane gas -but compost and worms just do the planet good, naturally.

Here are some suggestions for further reading:

http://foodtank.org/news/2013/06/thirteen-books-on-the-food-system-that-could-save-the-environment

Try your local library for these.

A very personal quilt finish

 The quilt I call "Afternoon Tea with Mum" was finished this weekend. It is a very personal quilt for me. It is about a story my Mum told me, about thinking she was finished with her family before I was born, and that when all the 4 other children were at school she would be able to go to 'afternoon tea dances"!

Well, birth control was not a precise science in the 1950s so I came along and then my brother, and Mum never did make to an afternoon tea dance.

Mum told that story with some wry humour, and as I get older I appreciate it more. We all look back at some of the things we wanted for ourselves and wonder why we wanted them.

Mum's words to me are very precious "every baby brings their own love with them". I wanted to celebrate that story by making a quilt about having afternoon tea with my Mum.

 My Mum and Dad were typical of those who lived in the UK in those days -almost any time of the day was the right time for a cup of tea. We shared a lot of them over the years. Mum loved fruit cake and bakewell tarts, but sometimes there were eccles cakes or 'fairy cakes' too.

 These cup blocks came from a quilt designed by Jan Mullens. I was afraid the applique of the handles would be difficult so I didn't make many of these -but when I actually tried with some some wash-away stabilizer underneath to support the machine stitches, they were easy enough.

 The butterflies make me think of having afternoon tea in a garden. This was some fabric I found in an op shop.

 The border fabric has pictures of all kinds of yummy cakes. Did I tell you how much I love spotty and stripey borders?

Here is the finished quilt, which is actually single bed size.  I spread it on my queen size bed because the room was nice and sunny.

I don't actually have a single bed which needs this quilt, but I am so glad I made it. It makes me happy!

Simple project fun

 I wanted to make a special thank you for my SIL for hosting us last week, so I came  home to try to find some fabric I thought I had been given. Her lovely new lounge room has a brown sofa and a brown and teal rug, so I used those to make this little table topper for her. I had only one fat quarter of the teal fabric, but the stripey border fabric was a good lift to the whole thing.

 I had been wanting to make one of these 'self binding baby receiving blankets' ever since I saw them on YouTube from the Missouri Quilt Company. Today I had an excuse -so I made it in about 30 minutes flat, using two pieces of flannel I had found at different times in op shops. It feels luxuriously thick and cosy so I think I will remember this for any winter babies -in summer in Perth this would be not much use at all.

 We have our first crop of tangelos -these are a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine, I think. I was sent a recipe for turning them into a curd like lemon curd -so here are two jars!

Finally we have been lucky enough to get a pile of mulch for free that is almost hiding the house! It came from mulchnet.com -and if you are in Australia you might be able to get some too! It is the end result of tree prunings and we have used this sort of thing before on our garden. Over the years the mulch has rotted down and made a thick layer of good humus rich soil on top of our gutless Perth sands.

Of course a pile like this gives us lots of exercise as we spread it. Here is a pic of our half-completed back yard. The mulch in the foreground covers a muddy track to the clothes line -we are so glad that we can now get there and back without getting dirty feet. We will gradually spread this mulch over our garden -it will suppress the weeds which are showing through now we have had a bit of winter rain, and put the garden in good stead for next summer.

I imagine there will be plenty of mulch left to offer to family and friends and freecycle too!

Quiet book for the birthday girl

 I made a 'quiet book' for my grand daughter who is almost one, and actually had the pleasure of giving it to her in person -after all she lives a long way away and that is a rare treat.

I put a transfer of a photo on the cover.

 Inside there is a pretty piece of fabric I saved from one of Annabelle's dad's left over Chrysalis ties.  The dress has a collar and buttons for little fingers to play with.

 The eyelets caused a bit of consternation, but the application of a hammer with force soon sorted them out. I guess this zip will be too hard for Annabelle to unzip for a while, but she will grow into it.

 Farm fabric and flowers with velcro attached -will be much easier for little fingers to tackle now.

 The buttons were a big hit and the peek-a-boo bunny behind the flap caused a smile.

 A doyley for texture and flaps to play with, and velcro pulls which will be a challenge for a while. They take quite a bit of effort to pull.

 Crazy cat fabric and a cross which can be pulled out of  the pocket.

 Last page love letter!

I think she likes it!

If you want to make one of these books, set aside quite a bit of time but it is a very enjoyable project.

How did you spend your Easter?

This year we stayed home for Easter, and enjoyed a lovely peaceful time, sharing with local churches over the weekend.

I wanted to get this quilt a long way towards done, and at least it got to the flimsy stage.

I have called it "afternoon tea with mum".

It has some tea cup blocks, along with a border of cake fabric, and some butterflies and other pretty things.

I will need to figure out a pieced backing from the leftovers, and that will have to wait until next weekend.

This is my first quilt flimsy for the year -I am so glad I finally broke the drought! 

Autumn means new life here in Perth

It is spring in the northern hemisphere, but here in Perth autumn has come with a sense of relief and new life. We had 35 mm of rain here in the last week, and after our normal summer drought the rain always brings new life. Many of our native trees are evergreens, but the rain washes the dust off the leaves and soon we see new pink tips emerging.

One of our favourite trees at this time of the year is the Illyarrie or Red Cap Gum. It has the cutest bright red caps which fall off and then you get clusters of showy yellow flowers. My DD, when she was a primary school girl, used to collect the caps and I would find them in the pockets of her school uniform, so the red cap always brings that little girl back in my mind.

There is a 'dry park" behind our place -that is, a park that the Council does not irrigate. After the rain there is a nice little tinge of green as the grasses come back to life

  I have been redecorating with a few 'hints' of the up and coming Easter season.  Here is a cute Hen tureen and a few decorated eggs to start us off.

Thanks for those who offered suggestions to the use of pomegranates.  I have tried several of the recipes and  will intend to get through all of them. Here is the one I am going to try today: http://witcheskitchen.com.au/smoky-eggplant-and-pomegranate-dip/

Finally a picture of our lovely little Dora, who reminds us that autumn is also a time for finding the nearest quilt to snuggle into. Well, it probably is not quite cool enough for the rest of us to do this  but we have hopes of it soon being cool enough to do so!

On the quilting front there is not a lot to show. I have been working on a couple of grant submissions in my volunteering work, and that ate up a bit of time. I promise an update next week~

Free electricity and gangster gardening!

I have a fairly random collection of things to post about today, but they all make me feel pretty passionate.

Firsty, I want to show you a pretty impressive power bill we received this month. It is summer in Perth -and even though we have had more cloudy days than normal, we still managed to create 627 units of electricity to sell back to the grid, whilst only using 486 units which we had to pay for.  Our solar panels are doing a fine job. :-)

As the seasons (hopefully) will change soon to cooler weather, we have been pulling out our summer vegetable beds and getting things ready for the autumn harvest. This is a bed recently planted with lettuce and parsley, which we added to the beetroots which are nearly ready to harvest, and the rhubarb and asparagus which are permanent features of the bed.

 Our pomegranates are on the street side of our front garden.  Recently someone called by our place and asked for some -we were very glad to share them! We have been experimenting with them in fruit platters, couscous salads and such. They look like huge Christmas tree baubles! They are at least twice the size of my fist.

Thirdly, I want to invite you to spend 5 minutes of your life, getting inspired.  I love his turn of phrase: growing your own food is like growing your own money!
Please watch this TED video then become a gangster gardener too!

Finally I am continuing to tweak the design on my 'afternoon tea with mum' quilt. Coming along nicely.