This is one of the all time most popular recipes on Witches Kitchen, and one of my favourites too.
I’m planting another round of all my root staples – carrots, parsnips, spring onions, beetroots – starting seeds off in the shadehouse, and planting out the seedlings started last month. If I do just a tray like this every month, we have a good steady supply. But my main little task today is to dig up some turmeric to take some rhizomes for planting.
One of the best things about Australian cuisine (besides its base in fresh produce) is its multiculturalism. We are recipe bower birds, picking up anything that is bright and shiny from other places and taking it home!
This week’s Muesli Bar Challenge recipe features oranges. It is coming to the end of the navel orange season, and once they finish there will be a gap of a few months until the beginning of the Valencia season.
It is one of the reasons I use a lunar planting calendar though: in the hurly burly of arbitary fixed deadlines, it reminds me to make time for the more elastic but more real deadlines of the seasons. And then, by doing so I create real wealth – good food, health, beauty, integity, freedom.
There is something very satisfying about using the whole of an animal that is killed for food, and even more so when it leads to this. The bouillabaisse fed another dinner party of eleven people, so those fish made a total of over 20 meals. I felt like a very good predator!
I am on a bit of a roll with the mandarin, ricotta and honey flavours. Plus mandarins are getting towards the end of their season so I’m eager to make the most of them. This one is, like last week’s cake, super easy. The flavours are similar -this one is a bit stronger flavoured – but the texture is quite different, more like a cheesecake.
This is a riff on Mollie Katzen’s Green Green Noodle Soup, with a little bit of “Green Eggs and Ham” inspiration.
Wow. I’m over half way through the school year, and I haven’t lost a Muesli Bar Challenge yet. Even I’m surprised. I expected at some stage to push the low-fat, low-sugar bar just a bit too low!
If I can get the micronutrient level nice and high and balanced early enough, I will give the garden plants enough immunity and the predators enough of a head start to avoid most of the spring and summer bugs.