Last day of vegetarian month

Giving up meat for a month has been really easy. I haven't even been tempted. I did have a craving for anchovies but that was all. I accidentally broke my vegetarian diet twice. Once when I took a bread roll out of the freezer and toasted it and after I ate it I had something in my teeth which I discovered was ham and I realised it was one of those rolls with cheese and ham on the top.

I also ate some chocolate which had marshmallows in it and I realized that the marshmallows would have had gelatin in them, still I didn't stop eating it. (It was Cadbury's Rocky Road)!!

Gelatin is in a lot of stuff. Yogurt, lollies, thickened cream, sour cream, although you can buy brands which don't contain it. I'll be doing that from now on. I am also not going to eat any processed meat anymore and I am only going to buy locally farmed meat. One day I hope to be able to farm all our own meat. We currently have two years worth of organic beef in the freezer which I farmed humanely here on our farm, next year we will have lamb, chicken and pork as well.

I cant say I feel any better or worse from giving up meat. I have lost one kilo but I ate a lot of carbs and cheese, a lot more than usual. I ate a bit more junk food like fried chips than I usually would have and I skipped meals because I couldn't be bothered making something different for myself than the rest of the family. Scott would NEVER give up meat!

I am not especially looking forward to eating meat again. I am looking forward to being able to cook easy meals and not have to think of something separate for me to eat.

Next month I am giving up dairy. That is going to be a lot harder.

August is a good month to be a vegetarian

For the month of August I am going to be a vegetarian! Dustin is a "vegetarian except for bacon and sausages" so since he is refusing to eat meat (only because he doesn't like it) I am going on a vegetarian diet for a month to discover some new recipes and ways of cooking without meat or anything from a dead animal.

I am also interested in monitoring how I feel, what I miss, any serious cravings I have or any kind of withdrawals I get from not eating meat. I know a month isn't very long but I think I will get an idea of whether my body does well without meat and whether it is something I can live without permanently.

I don't think I can be a vegetarian for ever because there is so much great food out there in the world I wouldn't want to miss out on, however it may be possible for me to become a 'part time' vegetarian. I'd like to be able to refrain from meat products unless it was farmed in a humane way or unless it was farmed by me. I think that is highly possible.

My new favourite breakfast

Toasted English muffins with cream cheese, smoked salmon, poached eggs and capers. Yummmmm!

Make this for breakfast. It is soooo good!

Bake a chocolate cake

I baked this chocolate cake a couple of weeks ago. It was very rich and full of real chocolate so if you like chocolate you need to try this cake but read the *secret at the end of the recipe!

Rich chocolate cake

Ingredients

185g butter
250g dark chocolate
1 3/4 cups of self raising flour
1/3 cup of cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups of caster sugar
3 eggs lightly beaten

Chocolate top

20g butter
125g dark chocolate

Reheat your oven to 160 degrees and grease a 20cm spring form cake tin and line the bottom with baking paper. (Boring boring)

Melt the butter and chocolate over a a saucepan of hot water.

Sift the flour and cocoa into a large bowl.

In another bowl combine the chocolate mixture, sugar and egg with 1 cup of water and mix well. Then add this to the flour mixture and combine well.

Pour that into your spring form tin and stick in your oven and leave it there for one and a half hours (yep it really takes that long). Check it though with a skewer or cake tester and pull it out as soon as the tester comes out clean. Then leave it in the tin for 15 minutes.

Turn your cake out onto a cooling rack and wait for it to cool down completely.

I cut the top off my cake so it was pretty but you don't have to if you don't care about the prettiness, but it gives you  the kids something to eat while they are waiting for the cake to finish.

When your cake is cool melt the butter and sugar for the topping in a bowl over hot water and then spread it on your cake.

*Now for the secret! This cake was good until I put it in the fridge and then it went really hard and kind of dry and wasn't too good. So I put each slice in the microwave oven for a few seconds and OMG! It was soooooo good warm!! AND in the fridge it lasts for ages... unless you live with Dustin. This would be a great cake for taking somewhere, like when you have to take dessert to a friends place. Because it isn't delicate or anything. It is pretty solid. Just serve it warm with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream and some fresh raspberries or strawberries. Yum.

We played masterchef at home

We watch Masterchef sometimes and I like the mystery box challenges. So I thought it would be fun to have our own cooking challenges at home so last night I put an array of ingredients out for Scott and his job was to cook our dinner with them.


He had fresh broccoli, tomatoes, mushrooms, leek and bananas. Some kangaroo fillets. Poppy seeds, pine nuts, sour cream, short crust pastry sheets, some dried dates and a jar of sweet tomato relish.


I was a bit concerned about how my dinner was going to turn out because he stood there scratching his head for a long time and then he had two little apprentice Masterchefs helping. I sat on the couch with a martini loving not having to cook dinner.

After a while the cooking smells coming from the kitchen were really good so I suspected dinner was going to be a success and it was. He cooked a kind of thick chunky sauce with the leeks, mushrooms, tomatoes, dates and relish and served the kangaroo panfried and very rare. A little bit too rare though. You are supposed to cook kangaroo rare because it is very lean but I'd have preferred he cook it a fraction more because it was pretty much raw in the middle. It was still good.

He also made a very nice cheese sauce to go with the broccoli which was good but kind of clashed a bit with the sauce for the kangaroo. Don't look at this next picture if the thought of very rare meat turns you off!


I think he did a great job. Yeah, it didn't look pretty, the kangaroo was undercooked and the broccoli was as well and it was cold, but still a very nice dinner. He did a great job. It is my turn next Sunday :)


I used some of my new yarn and crocheted a head band which turned out really nice. I love the colours. This colour range is 'Plum party'. I bought the yarn from Ixchel.


While Scott cooked dinner I started making granny squares out of the rest of the yarn. I'm going to make a scarf next!

Roast your tomatoes

I bought a bag of tomatoes that were over ripe the other day so yesterday I made roasted tomato sauce with them. Sooo yummy! You have to roast some tomatoes.

Quarter them and sprinkle them with some good olive oil, salt and pepper and some balsamic vinegar. I ran out of balsamic (OMG!) that NEVER happens. I usually always have a few bottles in the cupboard... so this time I used red wine vinegar which worked really well. And then sprinkle them with sugar. Into a moderate oven and take them out when they look like this:

Your house will smell delicious! You can put them in salads, or with some goats cheese or on some toasted sour dough (yum), but I blended mine up into a pasta sauce with chorizo and cauliflower and it was delicious!

If I was a chef I'd probably skin them and core them but I'm not a chef, just a plain old family cook. Of course if you can grow your own they will be even better but all my tomatoes are finished now :(

Those are not tomatoes of course. They are tamarillos which I think kind of taste like tomatoes. These were growing in the Hobart Botanical Gardens the other week. I didn't know they could grow down here. I always thought they were tropical. Maybe you need a brick wall to grow them near (to keep them warm). Of course now I have to grow tamarillos too.

Here are some of the tomatoes I grew last summer.

Pumpkin season

The last of the pumpkins will be harvested today plus a friend of a friend has offered us some of theirs so there will be pumpkin cooking non stop for a while.

This one is about to become pumpkin soup for tonights dinner.

Italian Restaurant

I went away to Hobart last weekend with my friends Lisa and Dino. We had a lovely weekend of dining out and shopping and being wheeled around in our pram. Well only Dino got the privilege of being wheeled around but then again he did sleep through the most fabulous pasta meal I have had in ages, spaghetti with artichoke pesto, prawns and truffle oil, and a glass of chianti.