Wednesday morning and already half way through “The Challenge”. It has been good making adjustments to fit my 100 mile meal-size commitment. One of the main things I have been changing over the last few weeks and continue even more this week is to use wheat from my son’s small farm. Gladius wheat was the crop on 50 acres this year which is a good flour for bread. He also has durum wheat from a neighbouring farmer which is good for pasta. We have bought a flour mill which you can see in the photo so I grind flour for bread, pizza bases, chappatis and tortillas. Now I am experimenting with making pasta by hand. I make sheets for lasagna and then cut this into strips as fettucine! By the way I now sell this wheat at our Sustainable Communities One Planet Market as 100-mile flour as it is only 62 miles to Auburn in the Clare and Gilbert Valley.
Lots of our food comes from our own garden – eggplant, capsicum, seven year beans and bush beans. Then we have all kinds of greens – spinach, rocket, lettuce, amaranth and we add purslane, basil and parsley to our salads for lunch.
So our menu looks like this – for breakfast we have fruit –rhubarb from the garden and grapes from Auburn with rolled oats, oat bran and wheat germ all local and bought from the Health Food Shop. We use soy milk and buy Australia’s Own so unfortunately that comes from over 100 miles. We have an orange from my son’s place in the Barossa and prunes which I dried in our solar dehydrator from prune plums on my son’s place in the Adelaide Hills. Coffee, we do drink and make sure it is acceptable to the Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping.
Our lunch is always much the same – bread which I make using our own flour, soup made from garden produce and at the moment pumpkin, amaranth and tomato with mung beans again Australian from the health Food shop. We have a salad of lettuce, rocket, basil, amaranth, purslane, parsley, capsicum and tomato from the garden. Also half a boiled egg from our chooks and olives that I pickle from olives from our son’s property at Auburn. We use olive oil on our bread which is our own product which we press from the olives we harvest at Auburn. This olive oil is also sold at One Planet Market! The we use local honey from a local beekeeper who sells beautiful honey at One Planet Market, and have some dried apricots which I dried earlier in the year and then fresh fruit from home grown fruit. This week we had some guavas and jujubes brought to our Swap and Share, Essential Edibles on Sunday morning. This is a great event swapping ideas as well as produce in the Joslin Reserve.
Our dinner has been from the garden with eggplant, capsicum, zucchini (from Essential Edibles) and tomatoes as Ratatouille with flat bread made from our flour. Last night we had roast veggies – beetroot and pumpkin was home grown with potatoe and parsnip bought from our local fruiterer who concentrates on local produce. We added a pie made from the beetroot leaves and an egg (no pastry) and our desert was rhubarb with yoghurt from Paris Creek – within 100 miles.
The photos show something of our produce – especially our nibbles – the white and red wine is made from the grapes grown by my son at Auburn and the nuts – walnut, pistachio and macadamia are also grown there.
Now I must admit to some failures – we do like sambal although trying to make our own and change over to home made lime pickle. We do drink tea and coffee but aim to have it Australian and Fair trade.
In Sustainable Communities SA many of our members are aiming for sustainable food use and we are talking of Food Security in our local area. Working with other people is great as we support each other. By the way we have sold hundreds of Ethical Supermarket Shopping Guides too. But I haven’t been to the supermarket this week and try to go as little as possible.
I will try to log on again tomorrow but the rest of the weekend will be spent at Auburn harvesting walnuts and preparing ground to plant jujubes.
Best wishes to all the other Challengers.
