Friday, May 3, 2013

Harvest!



As harvest comes I have spent a considerable amount of time setting myself up to accommodate the fruits. Fruits figuratively speaking.
But first up I tried a new cake out for Ross' birthday, with humungous loads of poppy seeds and honey in it! the first pic is from the cook book, the following my results! Very tasty.



Next up we had three goats scheduled to be home killed and I needed to use up the remaining bits and pieces of our Thumbelina. The biggest and final was her head! Which I cooked in my 17l stock pot for half day and then took the meat of it. I have to admit, I only went for the cheeks and neck, I couldn't dig more without feeling queasy. But the left overs didn't go to waste: I rendered most of the fat and will make it into Liverwurst in the coming weeks. For the moment it's sitting in huge jars in the pantry and not taking much space away. For the meal I made dumplings and we had fresh apple sauce with it. VERY juicy and scrumptious meat. A fitting denouement for our adventure with a pig.

And while I was rendering the pig fat, I also rendered the goat fat that had collected from butchering the three boys.

For our first meal of the goats we had decided to use the filets and have a fondue. I went searching on the internet for some different sauces and and this is what we had: boiled potatoes, pickled onions, mini corn and olives and a mustard cream sauce, a tomato ginger sauce and a cucumber garlic sauce. My favourite was the mustard sauce, which went extremely well with the meat and the potatoes. As you can see in the last pic, we need better fuel to run it, but all in all it was a very successful dinner: the kids hoofed down the meat as if it was the last they'd ever get. I found the recipes at a site dedicated of course to the art of fondue cooking here.



Right, next meal was again something completely different: neck roast. I had taken the two necks of the smaller boys and slow roasted them for 1/2 day in a Jamaican inspired casserole. With it we had rice and Beluga lentils cooked in coconut cream which was inspired by this internet find! And just in case it was all too exotic I made some cauliflower with garlic breadcrumbs, a kid's fav!
 

For the last couple of weeks I have been leaching chopped up acorns. The idea was that I would make acorn flour and use the water, full of the harmful tannins, for tanning my goat hides. That didn't quite work, as I was too busy with one thing and another.  But today I decided that I had to give it go and ground up the chopped acorns into a medium coarse flour, rinsed them a couple more times and then put them in a bking tray to dry. Lightly burned them and still didn't give up! Pulverized them in my liquidizer and got about 1 1/2 cups of dark flour. Got a recipe from this fella, who's got a great site btw, and actually baked a cake with it. My daughter and I tested it and it tasted great. We waited for 2 hours before letting my husband have a taste and even had seconds this evening. All fine so far. The tannins can make you quite sick and as I had never done this before I wanted to keep the damage controllable.

 

 And last, but most certainly not the least, today's lunch: the humble, but ever so satisfying leek and potato soup. Nothing but leek, potato, olive oil and a dash of sour cream! Even my daughter, who's not much of a soup fan, had a serve. And the pic is at the start, sweating the leeks.



And that's it for today. I promise, I will try to post more frequent and have smaller posts then too!

TTFN