Well, I’m almost convinced spring is finally here…though I’ve been tricked before. It’s sunny enough outside to take stock of the state of our little garden. It’s only a 4m2 patch plus a couple of scrappy strips out front of our flat, so we have to be very considered in what we plant, though it…
Nothing happens around here until after breakfast. Usually a couple of coffees down, too. With the warming weather, a fresh smoothie often does the trick. Keeping it nice and simple, because we are functioning only with a stick blender. This smoothie had a pint of milk kefir, one banana, a handful of strawberries, and a…
A little bit of warm weather through the week had our little salad patch blooming. We decided to thin some out to have baby salad greens with lunch. The thinning also allows more room for those left to grow. Here is the dense patch before thinning. And after thinning. There wasn’t a great deal of…
Part of our motivation for getting out of the city to a rural setting is the desire to connect more strongly to the community we live in. It appears that in smaller, more isolated places those bonds are stronger probably by necessity. But it’s also important in urban settings. It seems absurd, but in densely…
Dashing out between rain showers to get some of these poor sun-starved tomato seedlings out into the ground, I pulled up one of these carrots. We don’t have the deepest, or the richest soil in this little patch out the front of our flat, but we had scattered a few seeds around just to have…
It’s the end of the week, and supplies are running low. If we can’t make it to a fresh market by Friday we are usually scrapping something together. This is a very different sort of curry to what we are used to, but very tasty nonetheless. The recipe is for cauliflower and spinach, but we…
This is our standard go-to bread, with fairly basic timing and instructions. As we wrote about the starter, there are many factors that affect the final bread, and we can tweak many of these to make the bread how we like it. We’ll probably talk about them in more detail in later posts. For now,…
Spring is still coiled down here in Melbourne. But we might have some warm weather on the way to get us out in the garden.
There are plenty of blogs and websites and books that tell you how to make a sourdough starter. If you’re looking for some new trick or technique, or a foolproof method, you won’t find it here. Fact is, it’s kind of easy…
There’s always a brace of jars fermenting in the kitchen. In addition to the perennial sourdough starter, there are plenty of things to eat and drink in various stages of readiness.
Auberge du Lis 