Tassievore eat local challenge – feast day!

Yesterday was feast day!

I learned last time I held a Tassievore feast not to be too ambitious. I’d thought about including a dessert on the menu like I did last time, but decided in the end it would make things too busy for me. I could have made a cold dessert ahead of time, if I’d really wanted to, but I’m trying to cut back on sugar, so I ditched that idea too.

Last week I learned that proving my bread dough for too long and in too warm a room leads to bread that is edible, but visually unappealing. It basically spread out like a pancake. So this time I left it for a shorter time and kept it in a cooler room, and baked it at about 10.00 am.

Last week’s Loaf of Disaster

If you read my earlier post on the sourdough class I went to in March with Kate from Garden Shed & Pantry, you might remember the drama I had with the 12+ year old oven. We have fixed the problem with a shiny new oven, which is making cooking so much easier, and I’m glad we got it in time for this weekend.

The result was much improved. At least it looked OK.

At the class, Kate explained how the climate affects the properties of the flour, and the end result can be dramatically different in terms of texture if you use flour from a colder climate (like Tasmania) rather than the flour she recommends that’s from a much hotter part of the country. However, the challenge was to use Tasmanian produce, so I stocked up on some Callington stoneground flour that was designed for bread making, and looked at the whole thing as a an experiment.

I let the beef bones simmer away in the slow cooker for a few more hours, before straining it into a pot and letting it reduce. I have no idea how concentrated I’ve made it or what size portions I should freeze it in, but at least I now have beef stock.

My plan was to serve:

• Dips, carrot sticks and vegetables when the guests arrived
• Pumpkin soup and bread as an entree
• Roast beef with side dishes of pumpkin and beetroot salad, and honey-glazed carrots
• Cheese, pinot paste and crackers for afters

I was originally only going to do one dip, the smoked salmon one, but as I had more beetroot than I needed for the salad I decided to do a beetroot dip as well. That involved roasting the beetroot, stick blending it and combining it with yogurt and garlic.

A lot of the afternoon was spent cutting up the pumpkin and the other beetroot for the soup and the salad. Cutting up a whole pumpkin isn’t something I do very often, and every time I do it, I remember why I don’t do it. I didn’t lose any fingers so that’s a bonus.

I let the soup cook all afternoon, while I got the other dishes ready. For the chicken stock, I used what I had in the freezer. Whenever we have roast chicken I save the bones and, when I have a bag full in the freezer, I throw them in the slow cooker for 12 hours or so to make a basic stock.

My aim was to serve the beef at about 7.30. It needed about two hours to cook (I like mine well done), so it needed to come out of the fridge at about 5pm. A minor disaster hit when I couldn’t find the mustard I’d bought the day before for the topping.

Catastrophe averted when I found a jar of Tasmanian Rainforest mustard in the cupboard. This is from Hill Farm in Sisters Creek, and no one can remember where or when we bought it, but I’m very glad we did!

Once the beef was in, it was simply a matter of remembering to put the vegetables in with enough time for them to be ready at the same time as the beef. I always forget that the beetroot takes a lot less time than the pumpkin when I make this salad, so I always end up with overdone pumpkin. One day I’ll learn.

The honey-glazed carrots included honey we got from one of Slabs’ workmates, who has his own hives. That’s definitely the Tassievore spirit!

The night was fun. I saw somewhere that it was World Cider Day, so Slabs had picked us up some from Wille Smiths.  I don’t know who decides these things but I’m not going to complain.

World Cider Day! Yay!

The bread was fine. It was a lot denser in texture than bread made from the flour Kate recommends, but still very good.  And the beef (with the dodgy red wine sauce – the reason I made the beef stock) was great.

We had to serve the soup in mugs because we don’t have enough soup bowls

Mustard roast beef

Main course

We concluded the night with a selection of cheeses from Pyengana and Udderly Tasmanian, a pinot paste from Grandvewe and the crackers I made on Friday, which went soggy overnight, so I had to refresh them by re-baking them.

Demolished cheese platter

In the end I was too focused on getting all the food together rather than having a discussion about some of the questions that the Tassievore people suggested as conversation starters in relation to eating locally. Although we did learn that you can buy Tasmanian feta – as used in the pumpkin and beetroot salad. Westhaven does a goats milk feta, which worked really well in this dish (along with the Tasmanian walnuts, which I substituted for the pine nuts in the recipe).

I’m going to reflect on the questions that Tassievore has posed and put some thoughts together in another post, as I think this is already long enough.

Thanks to Sustainable Living Tasmania and the Tassievore Eat Local Challenge for putting this opportunity out there. It’s definitely something I’m keen to continue being involved with in the future.

The recipes
Salmon dip
Beetroot dip
Pumpkin soup: I have been using the recipe for years. I originally found it in the instruction book for a stick blender that broke years ago.
Roast beef: Adapted from Cape Grim Beef’s recipe
Roast pumpkin and beetroot salad
Honey-glazed roast carrots

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I’m back!

Not that I’ve been anywhere. I’ve been lurking, and feeling a bit like my progress in the #steppingonthecracks project has come to a screaming halt.

If you haven’t been following my project, it’s a series of challenges where I try out a new habit, technique or idea for 30 days to see how it works out. The idea is to put some of the things I’ve been reading about and learning into practise instead of filing them away under “interesting idea, should try this one day”.

I’ve had varying degrees of success with the different challenges, and I was about half way through challenge 9 (30 days of undone things), when the end of the year struck, holidays and various other unsettling events that threw everything out of line and most of my good habits went out the window, along with any capacity to make any progress on these challenges.

I’ve spent much of the past eight weeks feeling like I’d come so far, but that I’ve let myself down by letting everything go to shit. All the other stuff that was going on, well that was just an excuse to not do this.

I know! I’m being harsh on myself, and the perfectionist voice is speaking very loudly. It does that.

Last week (or thereabouts), I found the original hand-written list of the 30 little things I wanted to get done in December – you know, those things that take about five minutes, have been on your to-do list forever, but you can never quite get around to doing them. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, even though the project had collapsed, I’d still finished 20 of them. That’s two-thirds. For December, I think that’s a fairly reasonable achievement.

Hooray!

And many of the 20 things are things I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t started this challenge. The button would still not be sewn on. I probably would have lost it by now. I’d still be using towels with holes in them.

All that’s left on the list is:

1. Book skin check
2. Order yoga shoes
3. Make a list of jobs that I can do in 5/10 minutes for when I have a short gap in my day
4. Make a list of things I can do when I have low energy rather than go on my phone
5. Get my baby slides scanned
6. Finish the Facing Fear worksheets
7. Get new cord for Kramstable’s greenstone pendant
8. Sew buttons onto purple shawl
9. Make a list of the beers in the beer books
10. Wash baby mat

It seems perfectly doable. Other than the purple shawl buttons. That is not doable.

The list of things that I can do in 5-10 minutes has been a work in progress for a while. I haven’t finished it because I’ve never known what to do with it, or where to put it, which is probably a reason why there were 30+ undone things in the first place. And I never felt like it was complete, so it couldn’t be put anywhere.

(I’ve combined it with another list I started ages ago of things Kramstable could do when he’s bored. He wasn’t interested.)

So, in the interests of crossing things off the list, and acknowledging that this type of list is never going to be finished, and there just has to be a point where you say, “This is enough and I’m sticking it on the pinboard and next time I have five minutes spare I’m going to do one of these things”, I present it to you now.

• Put some washing on
• Put washing away
• Wash up or put the dishes away
• Clean out a shelf in the pantry
• Empty the bins
• Pick up stuff off the floor in the lounge room
• Take things that are in the wrong place to the room they belong in (bonus points for putting them away)
• Clean out a drawer or a shelf
• Put 10 things away
• Vacuum a room
• Sweep the floors
• Quick tidy of one room (10 minutes with the timer)
• Clear off and wipe down the bench, coffee table or dining table
• Wipe down the bathroom sink or the bath
• Take out the compost or the recycling
• Go through the fridge and throw out food that’s off
• Dust a shelf and tidy it
• Throw something out that’s broken or we don’t need
• Refill soap dispensers
• Update the freezer list
• Unsubscribe from mailing lists
• Write a thank you note
• Find a new recipe and add it to next week’s meal plan
• Book a doctor appointment or haircut
• Go for a walk
• Go outside and look at the clouds
• Hang out with the chickens
• Do some colouring in or drawing
• Write in journal
• Write down things to be grateful for
• 5-10 minutes of breathing exercises or meditation
• Have a glass of water
• Make a cup of tea
• Read a book
• Doodle or scribble
• Sort a paper pile
• Organise a file
• Make a to-do list
• Process emails
• Download photos from phone
• Sort some photos
• Put photos in albums
• Do something from the 30 undone things list
• Make a new 30 undone things list

Let me know what you think.

Do you have a list like this? What’s on your list that I missed?

Here’s to getting things done, one five minute block at a time!

30 days of undone things – days 2-6

I’m now six days into my challenge of doing 30 annoying little things that have been on my to-do list forever and that are mostly pretty easy to do, which which I just can’t seem to get done.

Day 2 (Friday): I put everything away off the bench top and cleaned it off (Number 2 on the list), and I put the instruction book and receipt for the new whippersnipper into the folder with the other instruction books (Number 11).

Day 3 (Saturday): I labelled the new jar for the marjoram and put it into the jar (Number 34 – it wasn’t on the original list) and I washed the fruit and veggie bags (Number 21).

Day 4 (Sunday):  I cleaned the cutlery drawer (Number 29)

Day 5 (Monday): I confirmed my blood donation appointment (I AM going to do this – Number 15) and I went to get my identity documents verified (half way to Number 13).

I also learned why we shouldn’t put little things off.

One of the things, that wasn’t on the original list but is on a list somewhere, was to get a plastic tub for the Christmas decorations instead of having them in a Huggies box in the car port (let’s call it Number 35). I went to get them out yesterday to put up my “…. days til Christmas” countdown tree, only to find that rodents had got into the box and destroyed several things, including my beautiful wooden Aarikka elves that I was given when I left Finland 27 years ago.

I’ve always loved these as they are so cute and they remind me of the year I almost had a white Christmas. I was devastated to see them like this. I was also shattered to find  some of Kramstable’s hand-made decorations from school had suffered a similar fate.

Don’t procrastinate about the little things or you might lose the chance to do them at all.

Day 6 (today): I mailed my change of identity documents to the credit card bank (the other half of Number 13). I cleaned everything off the couch (Number 22). I bought the new tub for the Christmas decorations. (Number 35. Don’t ask whether I put them in it…)

How are you going with your #30undonethings? Reply here or tweet me and let me know!

Challenge 9 – 30 days of undone things

It’s time to start work on 30 things I’ve been putting off and that are annoying me.

Here’s my complete list of things I am going to finish before 31 December:

1. Sew button onto black top
2. Clear stuff off bench top
3. Book skin check
4. Order pen from Notemaker
5. Order yoga shoes
6. Clean out the freezer
7. Make card for Kramstable’s 4th Grade yearbook
8. Print photo for a project that has been going on way too long
9. Make a list of jobs that I can do in 5/10 minutes for when I have a short gap in my day
10. Make a list of things I can do when I have low energy rather than go on my phone
11. Put the instruction book and receipt for the whipper snipper with all the other instruction books
12. Sort out the pile of receipts on my desk
13. Update my name with my credit card bank
14. Go into phone company and update my name
15. Confirm blood donation
16. Get my baby slides scanned
17. Finish the Facing Fear worksheets (there are 6 so is this 6 things?)
18. Get new cord for Kramstable’s greenstone pendant
19. Get desktop drawers for my study
20. Buy new towels to replace the ones that are falling apart
21. Wash the fruit & veg bags
22. Clear all the stuff off the couch
23. Take my headphones into my study
24. Sew buttons onto purple shawl
25. Make a list of the beers in the beer books
26. Sort magazine rack
27. Sort cookbooks
28. Clear off coffee table
29. Clean and sort cutlery drawer
30. Wash baby mat
31. Take empty folders to school
32. Take coins to bank
33. Get battery for scale

I felt a bit inspired today and crossed four things off the list. Ideally I’d do one a day, but I know this won’t always be possible, so the idea is to have the list finished in 30 days. Some of these things will take longer than a couple of minutes to do. Clear off the coffee table for example. This might take several days of gradually moving stuff to its proper place. Or the bin.

Anyway I’ve committed to doing this, so do it I must. Feel free to join me and we can be each other’s cheer squad! I’m tagging my posts #30undonethings on Twitter if you want to play along.