Facemask you can EAT!

Do you ever have those moments where you desperately want to put a face mask on because your pores feel in desperate need of a clean out and you search high and low in the bathroom for something and you just can't find anything?

Stop looking in the bathroom! Go to the kitchen, find your cinnamon and nutmeg, and your tub of honey. Organic honey is best, but you can use any honey (except for the kind with wax).

In a small bowl mix 2 tablespoons of honey, 1 teaspoon of nutmeg and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, mix together (I find best with a teaspoon) until it's all mixed in and is a brown sugar colour.

Try not to eat it when you put it on your face, because it's damn delicious! It'd be great on a bit of toast I reckon. But that's probably another recipe!

So smooth it all over your face, it's really sticky so I find it easier to use the back of the spoon rather than my fingers.

 

So it'll look like this when on. Put it on your lips too, it gives them a great smooth finish. I'd recommend also wearing a old crappy top or put a towel around you because it's honey, it's going to drip.

Leave it on for 30 minutes, then whilst you're washing it off in warm water, do some circular motions all over your face, as the nutmeg and cinnamon will exfoliate but not in a harsh way.

Then once it's all cleaned off you will be able to feel and see the difference in your pores and skin. Dab your face with cool water after to close the pores so as not to get any new gunk in your clean new face.

I recommend doing this once every fortnight. It's cheap, it's not mean to the environment or harsh on your skin, there are no yucky chemicals and if you get some in your eye it doesn't come with the "Seek medical help if eye contact is made"warning.

Give it a whirl, and let me know how it ends up!

Toodles :)
Arika

Horse Lasagna?

If you are ever looking longingly at the frozen, pre-made meals in the supermarket, this might slow your roll: British frozen food giant Findus (which also distributes in other parts of Europe) has found it's frozen Lasagnas contain up to 100% horse meat. Now I'm all for casting aside our cultural sense of squeamishness to enjoy the best the culinary world has to offer (offal anyone?) but casting aside the fact that they are flat out lying to the consumers, the real question is WHERE is this stuff coming from??? Are these horses dispatched in an approved, hygienic abattoir? Had it been treated for human consumption or animal consumption? Had it been checked for disease? It's very hard to trust guys dressing up a horse as a cow just by putting a little cheese on top. And that's a sentence that I never thought I'd have to type. This whole thing raises more questions than it answers, and makes the case once again for greater transparency in the food industry.

Climbing Spinach....Ummm WHAAAAA?!

So a few months ago I came across a vegetable called climbing spinach, I decided to add it my garden because it had these stunning colours of purple, greens and some white.

I didn't add it because I enjoy spinach, in fact it's not really related to your typical spinach you find in most Australian gardens and restaurants; it's known in the Philippines as Basella alba, and comes from the Basellaceae family.

Blah blah why do we care you might say, we'll because it's damn tasty and I must have a tween moment *OMG TOTES CUTES!* Due to its stunningly adorable heart shaped leaves.

It's great chucked into a crab meat soup and adds flavour to a freshly caught fish wrapped in its leaves and baked.

I do have some gorgeous pictures I took earlier for you of this amazing plant, however google+ is taking some time to upload them, so I'll come back to you with those later.

Edit: PHOTOS!

They will be in supply at our next kitchen co-op, so take them off my hands and give them a whirl in the kitchen!

I'm not too well at the moment, so I'm going to make some pineapple sage tea (an entry for another time) and rest.

Toodles
Arika

Jams, Jellies and Sauces!

I'm one of those cooks/bakers/not a candlestick maker, that just chucks things together and hopes for the best.

This is the same with my jams, jellies and sauces. I learnt early on, that when I cook I can't follow a recipe because it always turns out wrong, so I just kept throwing things in/out, tasting, throwing more things in/out, and let it turn into goodie goodness of Arika creation!

Along with jams, jellies and sauces I also make a flu remedy (as seen here in this picture)

 

A concoction of turmeric, lemons, ginger, honey and a secret ingredient that you mix in 1 part water with 2 parts milk. Now I'm not going to give you this magnificent recipe because like I said, i just kinda throw things in until they work and it's all up here in my pretty head (you can't see right now, put I'm pointing at my head).

Also, if I give you the recipe you won't buy it off me, or swap it at the kitchen co-op 'coz you'll just make your own, and where's the fun in that?!

The labels are the easy part, check out The Jam Labelizer by Andy Biggs he also does a neat selection for home brew too, but that's another story.

Most of my ingredients come from my garden which looks like this...

 

 

The others from friends gardens, or markets because as you can see, my garden isn't very big. So I limit what I have, and do a turn around every season, but if you stopped by this very moment you'll be able to spot some eggplants, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, pineapple sage, curry plant, mint, chives, oregano, rosemary, blueberries, strawberries, pumpkin, sage, corn, chillies and capsicum. I also have a lime tree in hiding around the back and a passion fruit vine that takes up my entire back pergola.

If you ever want mint jelly, mint sauce, pineapple sage tea, sage chicken stuffing, berry jams, passion fruit/lemon butters, lime cordial, mint cordial, curry powder, tomato sauce/chutney/pasta sauce, or anything that I make to buy or swap, I'm always open.

I do make things by order, for example, my boss LOVES fig jam, but doesn't do sugar, so I made her a sugar free fig jam. Anything is possible if you can think it up, it might just differ in the time it takes to make it.

So until next time, toodles.
Arika.

Quick pic

Dinner made by the boy: stuffed eggplant, pizza style gf garlic bread and caprese-salad stuffed tomato - HFW book in the background

An Ode to HFW and his Magic Bread

I stopped short of actually writing poetry, but only just. And even then mostly just because I’m already wanky enough for starting an ethical food blog and kicking off with a pretty intense post.

When I grow up I want to BE Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall. A cross between Peter Cundell and Jamie Oliver, an hour of his TV show River Cottage is long enough for him to drive his recycled vegetable oil powered jeep into the veggie patch of your heart (seriously, he fuels up at the local fish and chip shop). 

A London food writer, he threw it all in to move out to the country to run a community-style mixed farm, exploring every facet of what it means to eat food. This includes picking seaweed off the beach, nettles from the garden, even making his own elderflower wine with elderflowers from the hedgerow. In one particularly memorable episode, rabbits are getting at his lettuces, and a hundred different ways with rabbit (each of them delicious) ensues. Managed, of course, as a sustainable food source so he can have rabbit pie for years to come. Other than his cheeky sense of humour and the constant parties he throws for the whole village, one of the best things about HFW is the way he makes everything so easy. Making your own yoghurt? A snap. Pastry? He does it every day. He even has a magic bread recipe, which he promises is so named as it can “grant you so many wishes”. From flatbreads to loaves to pizza bases, this is his all-purpose home-baker recipe. And it’s pretty good. Being a Coeliac I don’t eat bread myself, but I do get a very domestic glow from being able to bake it for the people in my house (though, in all fairness, this rarely happens). 

The recipe (as written in his fabulous book River Cottage Veg Everyday) goes like this:

250g plain white flour

250g strong white flour*

1 ½ level teaspoons fine sea salt

1 tsp instant dried yeast

1 tablespoon of olive oil, plus a little extra for oiling

*Strong white flour is also known as continental flour, 00 flour or sometimes bakers flour. It has a higher gluten content which makes the bread more elastic.

I’ve paraphrased the method a little bit:

Put the dry ingredients into a bowl (including the yeast) and mix well. Add the oil and 325mL water, and mix in the bowl until it forms a dough. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 5-10 minutes until smooth (it will get less sticky as you knead it). Turn it into a bowl with a little bit of oil, and let it rise, covered, somewhere warm for an hour or two. Once it is well-risen, tip it out and knock all of the air out of it basically by poking it. For pizza bases and flatbreads, it is ready to use, for loaves and rolls, make into the desired shape and let it rise for another hour until it is doubled in size. Cook flatbreads on a grill, pizzas in a 250 Degree Celcius oven for 10-12 minutes once topped, and rolls at 220 degrees celcius for fifteen minutes.

  

And there you have it. There is nothing particularly hard about making this bread, and you can manipulate it yourself any way you want. Take these two examples I made at home from the same recipe:

   

The bread twist has rosemary, olives and sundried tomatoes kneaded through and is then topped with some more olives and feta. The bread rolls are topped with egg wash and poppy seeds. So give it a go yourself, and offer some up to friends and family with a smug smile and a false modest “Oh, just something I whipped up this afternoon”. It feels great.  

Why Kitchen Co-Op?

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kitchen Co-Op blog. I thought we could get started with the first and last (maybe – I do love a rant) long, dry, and semi-political post that will hopefully answer the question of why we should be actively looking for different ways to eat. After that we can have some fun, I promise, but for the moment, I’m going to climb up on my soapbox, and provide a little bit of background about the whole idea. I know you’re all sophisticated people so forgive me if you’ve heard this before. 

Maybe you’re sitting down looking at your dinner. Have you got any idea where it came from? Is the chicken in your curry free range, organic or broiler? What practices does the processing plant it went through use? Is there a family in Vietnam who has been impoverished by the industrialization of aquaculture for western export from the frozen prawns you’ve turned into pasta marinara? Why is there added sugar in the canned tomatoes you bought? And what is Acidity Regulator 303? It seems insane that we have to ask these sorts of questions about something that we put into our bodies. And if you are one of the growing number of people who are starting to ask them, you can expect to be met with few answers and an increased sense of anxiety about the food you eat and buy.

  

As consumers, there are very few things that we consume more in our whole lives than what goes into our mouths three times a day. Because eating is a basic human necessity, sometimes we forget that every time we eat, our money is making a political, economic, ethical and environmental decision. The rise of supermarket shopping and the era of industrialized food and agriculture have broken down the chain of accountability between the paddock (and it’s being very generous to consider some of the places processed foods start as ‘paddocks’) and our table. There has never been a larger disconnection between the food that we buy and where it came from, and that leaves a lot of room for practices that we might not support. It’s not about being a Luddite or a hippie or even a hipster (though I’m sure Instagramming pictures of our meals will follow); it’s about taking accountability for our food choices, and participating in society in a way that we feel upholds our values. Industrial economics is not the natural partner for agriculture. When the dollar value is the bottom line, so many things in the chain suffer, from the quality of the food, to the nutrients we are eating, to the livelihoods of the farmers that we should be desperately trying not to lose. The modern food industry, supported almost single-handedly by big corporation supermarkets, is fast making it a fiscal impossibility to farm. Those farmers that are surviving have adopted industrialized farming practices and even then that doesn’t stop them being controlled almost solely by their supermarket contracts, ever-eating into their profits (think about that next time you see pumpkin for 60c a kilo). And the produce suffers. Every time we go into a supermarket we are being sold the idea that we have the right to eat anything we want at any time of the year at a price we can afford. Of course when looked at in this light, it seems obvious that this could not possibly be the case, and yet a loaf of home-brand bread at the supermarket now only costs a dollar, and tomatoes are available (on special) all year round. Whole new breeds of chicken are being created because of our belief that we should be able to buy cheap breast and thigh and throw the rest of the bird away. In order to meet these needs, in most cases, it’s fair to say your dinner has become more technologically advanced than you are. And society is paying the price in a million different ways. Consider obesity, type two diabetes, the aforementioned decline of the farmer, the suffering of millions of animals and the god-awful taste of supermarket ready pre-packged meals.

That’s not what I want to eat. I want to eat animals that had names, dammit, and find excellent ways to cook with all of the meat, not just the prime cuts. I want to have to be creative when the only thing I have is zucchini for weeks on end because it’s fresh, in season and delicious. And I think that the only way that this can happen is by decentralization of the modern food industry back to the local, community roots it came from. But this is a pretty big job, and I’m not a protestor or a lobbyist, so I’m going to try and lead by example and start getting as much food as I can from my own community. To me, this means planting a veggie patch, having friends over and making sure they don’t leave without a zucchini (seriously, we have so many zucchinis) and knowing they’ll return the favour with whatever gems they’ve come across, be it Mum and Dad’s eggs, a mate’s fresh-caught fish or some chilli sauce they’ve made from their own chillies. Formalizing this into a barbeque sounded like a pretty good idea to me, and I hope that we can back this up with a small on-line community to share recipes, gardening tips, good places to buy good food, and anything else that you happen to think of.

For me, this is about a return to treating our food with respect. When we are eating we need to remember that we are using a resource, and we need to respect the people who grew it, respect the animals it came from, respect the land it was grown on, and most of all, respect our taste buds, because I can promise you: this food tastes a lot better.

To get a better insight into the sorts of things that go on in the food industry, here are some great resources.

   ‘The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals’ by Michael Pollan (2006          Penguin Books)

   ‘Not on the Label’ by Felicity Lawrence (2005 Penguin Books)

   And, of course, the fabulous documentary ‘Food Inc.’.

All thoughts and inputs are welcome in the comments section, and in the weeks to come hopefully we will be putting up pictures of our kitchen co-op meets, some cheeky recipes and some seriously awesome places to shop for when we can’t grow it ourselves.