If you’ve been following The Breakfast Challenge then you’ll know I’m a bit ambivalent about porridge. I’m trying to like it. Oats for breakfast are hugely healthy – low GI, cholesterol busting, lots of B vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals – but regular old porridge is a bit bland for my tastes, unless it’s loaded up with brown sugar and cream, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Azolla is a really valuable plant. It’s a rampant native waterweed, that is symbiotic with a nitrogen fixing bacteria, so, like legumes, it is capable of harvesting nitrogen out of the air and putting it into a form that plants can use as a fertilizer.
Mulberry season is so short and so prolific, of all the things I am tempted to make jam from, mulberries are it. But even mulberries don’t make it these days.
I’m on a mission to lower my “bad” (LDL) cholesterol. I already eat really well, and I can’t bring myself to consider the “proven to lower cholesterol” margarines so there’s not a lot to play with. Oats, lots of oats, and oat bran, linseeds, and macadamia oil are just about the limit of the adjustments I can make.
Everything has lined up beautifully for a planting day today – no bottlenecks for once. I have old compost and creek sand for seed raising and potting mixes, seeds and seedlings for planting, a new bed just vacated by the chooks ready to plant into and mulch to mulch up the spaces in the old beds, a barrel of old seaweed brew, a dam full of water, a lovely cool,…
This recipe is a riff on Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest, or at least it owes some heritage to that inspired combination of broccoli, lemon, eggs and cheese – which you wouldn’t think would work but it so does.
I like mowing. It’s just hard enough work for me to feel entirely justified ignoring the gym. A few kilometres of power walking, a bit of aerobic exercise pushing it uphill, a bit of weight training emptying the bag, a bit of stretching and flexing. The perfect workout.