From the kitchen

We have had a little fun in the kitchen recently.

I love trying out new recipes and our local fresh fruit and veg market has some amazing weekly specials.

 I try to get down there and take advantage. 

Recently I bought a pocket of onions and so it was time to make some onion marmalade!

It turned out really well and my eldest has decided I should produce it in bulk so he can eat jars at a time.

We jazzed up the "normal" cheese and tomato with fresh rocket and basil from the garden and dollops of onion marmalade!

Peppers were surprisingly inexpensive and I made some marinated pickled peppers.

 They will be ready to try in a day or so. 

We picked our first broccoli from the garden today,

 and I hope to make a broccoli salad over the weekend. 

We have been enjoying the abundance of fresh oranges : orange juice, orange cake (courtesy of  my daughter), butternut and orange soup, and oranges for those in between times when the kids are 

constantly hungry.

The kids harvested lemons at their Oma over the weekend and we have been eyeing out a number of lemon recipes to try. Besides pancakes with cinnamon sugar and freshly squeezed lemon juice, my daughter baked an interesting lemon desert . It is a cake with a sticky and delicious lemon sauce underneath.

Perfect to end off a winter meal!

My Winter Garden

I have been enjoying watching the garden over the last couple of weeks. 

Despite the cooler weather we have lots to look forward to...

The cabbage and broccoli are doing well and we have been enjoying the kale. I didn't realise the great health benefits of this amazing plant until I decided to do a little research. 

The sweet leaves add pleasant flavours to soups and stews and I look forward to trying some new recipes with kale.

The Bright Lights Spinach/ Chard is picked almost daily. 

Handfuls are finely chopped and added to salads, stews, soups, curry or anything going! 

Most recently we have been adding it to home baked breads and muffins.

Fresh peas are picked every couple of days...I need to plant way more next year! 

They are picked and given to our youngest who does not fancy peas any other way, 

except fresh from the garden. 

Tomatoes are everywhere, little yellow blossoms and even a few green tomatoes already. 

Mustard greens are finding their way into salads and are specially delicious on burgers!

I have been harvesting a number of green peppers and was delighted to find a red one on the same bush.

There are a few green granadillas on the vine and soon we will be gobbling gooseberries...

they are everywhere. Perhaps we may have enough this year to try some gooseberry jam.

Winter skies

All though the trees are bare and winter skies cloudy, not much rain has come to our part of the world . In fact we have had many glorious days where one may be mistaken into thinking it could be summer. I wonder if the rains will still come or if we are in for a very hot summer.

Aloes are in full bloom everywhere and I love their bright and bold colours. They remind me of my dear Grandpa Hobby.

Who would have thought.....

Who would have thought today was our winter solstice with the sun the furthest away from here, the least day light hours with the shortest day and the longest night of the year

.... and HOT...

about 26 degrees I think! So hot that it was a perfect morning for school in the garden and completing our chapter on leaves in our Botany course. (I had been putting this off due to cold and wet weather.)

The kids did some note booking pages on leaf classification. They took turns choosing leaves to add to their pages and checked in their book for leaf arrangement, venation, shape, and leaf margins. I asked hubby to put the umbrella up too but that was of no use as the sun was at its lowest point in the sky and so the umbrella gave no protection.

Hats were the answer!

Z was determined to find the biggest nasturtium leaf possible to add to his page!

He had fun tasting some of the leaves too.. the look on his face was priceless as he tasted the peppery nasturtium!

Never to old to have fun with bubbles!

After lunch the kids tried out an experiment from the Botany book....

It called for washing soda, we used bicarb instead so it didn't work. All we ended up with was a pot of crystallised leaves, never the less we had fun!

Rain and more rain

Today we headed off to Shirley's for our moms support meeting. On the way there, we enjoyed the drive and especially the water falls cascading down the mountain. We have had heavy winter rains for the past two days and the temperatures have plummeted.

There was so much foam at this waterfall that it was spilling over onto the road.