I love a long weekend where I don't have any commitments besides feeding my cabin guests each morning. It leaves my days free to get some of those jobs done in the garden! So I was delighted with the weather forecast earlier in the week. I was planning to plant seedlings, cut back some shrubs and re-pot my flower pots outside the kitchen door on Friday.
As the saying goes... the best laid plans of mice and men..... my garden play was soon put to a halt as a...
Our little granddaughter Rafaella turned two last Sunday. So her Mum had a tutu tea party for her little friends and family. My job was making the scones, rainbow and chicken point sandwiches. And of course you need cream and jam for the scones! If you’ve never had a scone with marmalade, I urge you to give it a try.
My ‘go to’ scone recipe is one that has been made famous by the talented Prue Campbell from Birregurra. Watching Prue knock out hundreds of sc...
Welcome to the weekend! The pots have been put away and the stove wiped down. I’m stepping away from the burners!
This is my office. It’s where I stir things up! My cooking days are spent right here. I’ve usually got an audio book playing as I stir, cook, test then bottle whatever happens to be on the production schedule for the day. I think I’ve exhausted the playlist on RB Digital and I’m working my way through Scribd! My preferred genre is crime, mystery...
It’s the Monday before Easter and I’m madly making a list of things to do before the long weekend. We have house guests for Easter and menu planning is top of mind. I’m not sure how you celebrate Easter, but in our home it always centers around the kids. So of course there will be an Easter egg hunt. Hopefully the bunnies have left some eggs! There are jobs to be around the farm too. Preparing a few veg beds by harvesting the very last few zucchinis, cucumb...
I finally said ‘enough is enough’ and ripped out the tomatoes on the weekend. There were still plenty of lovely green ones on the vines.
One of the best tips I’ve used when it’s the end of the tomato season and still have plenty of unripe fruit, is to hang the vines in a cool dark place. If you have a cellar, brilliant. We don’t, so I hang them in the old shed beside the last of the garlic that is waiting for me to clean it and plant soon.
We love to give every guest who stays in our groovy African inspired cabin a taste of the Otways. To us it’s important to share the bounty of our region with visitors from near and far. You won’t find any small cereal packets or sliced white bread in this basket!
Frans bakes a fresh loaf of bread for each morning. The eggs are fresh from the girls in the chook house and the bacon is locally cured at MidWest Meats in Colac. The conserves are of course our own...
Our quince tree is small, and as yet we are to pick any fruit from it. So we are very fortunate to have been gifted a generous number of these bumpy yellow fruits again this season from Sandra Scott at DK Potatoes. I can almost see the tree from our back door! Local produce rocks!
Of course the obligatory upside down quince cake must be made. It got the two thumbs up from the man in the house, so here's the recipe:
Welcome to a new week! And what a blustery, cold start it’s been here in our corner of the Otways. We had an amazing storm last night, giving us a spectacular light show. Of course the gutters blocked in a few minutes and Frans went out in the rain to do what handy blokes do. Climbing a ladder with lightning lighting up the sky is not advisable! He managed to clear the problem in a few minutes and hastily made it back indoors. We’ve had rain on and off all...
