How to live a money-less life by Mark Boyle

Frekkah

This health food was mentioned in the August edition of the Australia Woman's Weekly along with quinoa in an article on fibre, which I forgot to show my husband last night as it relates to cholesterol amongst other things. I have had quinoa twice. I thought I'd do this post as the actual spelling is Freekeh. I found this Australian video about it.

Miso Paste Recipe

Vegie Patties

425g tin chickpeas
5 carrots, grated, lightly steamed
2 cups brown rice, cooked until soft
3 tablespoon tahini
2 teaspoons miso paste
2 spring onions, chopped
4 sheets nori seaweed, chopped
1/2 cup chopped parsley

Whiz chickpeas in a food processor until broken up. Stir in carrot, rice, tahini and miso. Knead well. Mix in spring onion nori and parsley. Form into balls and flatten slightly. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Heat olive oil in a pan over medium heat and cook patties until golden both sides. Makes 12.

From House & Garden AU Feb 2008. This is a recipe we have used many times.

Miso Pastes

I am totally learning as I go along with miso soups and miso pastes.

I had an opportunity when I went to my hometown to the chiropractor this Thursday to buy some miso. That is where I got my last packet. It is so easy, even opened it keeps, well I think it does. We had shiro miso before, which I remembered as rice. The shop didn't have a lot of misos so I bought a rice one. However, they are different.

The first one I had was shiro, my first packet ever, and it means sweet rice. The one I have now is kome, which is just rice miso. Shiro smells like Vegemite. And I would deny anyone to tell me that Aussies have been tricked lol. We live in South East Asia after all lol.

So hopefully I will use this packet in recipes and maybe try a different miso next time until I get the hang of this lol. The brand I got was spiral miso.

OK, I think it goes something like colour. Rice is white I think, then there are red ones. Help! The trick is that mine doesn't look very white lol.

I found some useful notes on the saltiness of miso here. There are pictures of the coloured misos here. But still I am unsure if my new miso replaces my old one.

I just found that Janella Purcell has a shop so you can find some of these lovely ingredients. It is here.

Red Lentil Recipe

On my menu this week is this recipe. My husband adapted it. It is really lovely.

Fragrant Egg Curry


Ingredients (serves 4)
• 1 Red onion, chopped
• 2 tbs grated fresh ginger
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tbs light oil
• 2 tbs Ayam curry powder
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 10 dried curry leaves*
• 425g can diced tomatoes
• 8 hard-boiled eggs
• 1/2 cup red lentils
• 1 cup peas (frozen are fine)
• 1 tbs chopped fresh coriander
• 2 teas raw sugar
• Cooked rice, to serve

Method
1. Work on curry sauce first, keep going working with the sauce until
the eggs are put in curry, then add rice to boiling water. The eggs
could be started at the beginning of the cooking.

2. Place onion, ginger and garlic in a food processor and process to
form a paste, use a little oil to help with blending process.

3. Heat the oil in a heavy-based saucepan, add the paste and cook over
low heat for 2-3 minutes.

4. Add the spices and cook for 1 minute, stirring to release the flavours.

5. Add the tomatoes and 500ml (2 cups) water and bring to the boil.
Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 15 minutes.

6. Shell and halve the eggs and add to the pan with the lentils and
peas. Cook over low heat for 15 minutes or until lentils are soft.
Near the end of cooking if mixture is too thick add a small amount of
water (not too much), should be slightly thick paste. Stir in the
coriander.

7. Serve with cooked rice.

Furthering Independence Skills

I was interested in this video because it reminded me of an episode of Gillian McKeith's You Are What You Eat where the lady had to get a friend to write the names on the vegetables for her.  I have the video on this blog somewhere.

My favourite You Are What You Eat episode

I like it because I had so much compassion for this lady who didn't know the names of the vegetables, which apparently is common.



part 2 & 3 are on youtube. The lady's friend writes the names on the vegetables for her.

Homemade Breakfast Sausage

This is a follow up to a previous post. This morning I was lucky enough to have someone add their knowledge of biscuits and gravy to my kitchen experiment of a few years back. I think some of my friends have tried to tell me about the ground pork before. I love what Australians call rissoles, not sure I have had them with ground pork, sounds really nice. Since rissoles are dry, gravy sounds like a great idea.

Because my experiment was made with sausage mince, that Aussies use to make sausage rolls, it would not have been the same. I believe my gravy and biscuits were fine though, as I used American recipes and had the ingredients.



If you think this video is not traditional or doesn't have the right special breakfast sausage ingredients please add your comments. I think probably the turkey is the obvious one. I did find this recipe and the pictures look good. Yum. Here is the matching biscuit recipe.

Stewed Apple

Do you make stewed apple?

Today I stewed up the apples that we picked from the tree on the side of the road. I have four lbs of apples cooking away now. My husband only picked the best apples, and the blemishes you see came off very easily with a swipe of the apple peeler.



I find a short bladed knife best for this type of work. I am putting the sugar in last. I think the theory is that sugar make the fruit keep its shape. I want my apples to squish up, so I add it last stir it in and turn off the heat.

On the internet a couple of years ago I learnt that 3lb of fruit needs about 1/2 cup sugar. I learnt that from a homecook. My Mum taught me to cut apples when I was little or a girl sometime. I learnt you only cover the base of the pan with water. I have the lid on to let that water help steam the fruit. You may be able to see the water in the pot. I think maybe I could have had a touch more.

Apple Crumble

1 cup Self Raising Flour
3/4 cup coconut dessicated
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter

Rub butter into dry ingredients. Put onto top of stewed apple and bake.

This recipe is before metric.

It was interesting that we were happily picking apples last weekend. A few hours later there was a very heavy downpour. Dirt got over the road, so much so that the picture someone took of it was printed in the paper.

Bread and Scones

When I was a little girl, I was equally fond of scones, white high tin bread, and scones.

White high tin, the double one sometimes, was wrapped in tissue paper and left in a cream can my Great Uncles' front verandah. Sometimes by the time I got it home from collecting the bread for Mum, there was a little hole in the crust: I can still image how it tastes. It was fun to separate the two halves. If our family didn't finish the loaf I was asked to feed it to the ducks that Mum kept.

And I am fond of the modern bread. When I was a girl the plastic wrappers I only saw when I went to stay at my Mum's best friends house with her six kids, husband at their dairy.

The bought bread had a distintive taste, and was kept in a cupboard. It is possibly like the cupboard I bought a couple of years ago, with two doors with tin lined hutch behind each. With an old-fashioned catch. I was so in awe of my Mum's friend's bread experience that I bought this cupboard.

I have thought often if I ever ran out of bread I'd make scones. But I haven't done it yet. I wasn't sure how it would work out. Plus I haven't ran out of bread. I thought if I was wanting to save money on a very tight week I would do that.

I have been buying more flour lately, but still there are not large enough amounts to make up for the 23 loaves of bread I buy a fortnight, but I still will do that if it will help. We keep our bread stored in the freezer. I try to buy equal amounts of wholemeal and white to be fair to everyone, but usually it is nearly all white with token amounts of wholemeal at the moment.

Scones are a favourite because of the Red Cross flower show held each year. There was a children's cooking section. My cousin entered her biscuits (cookies) and I entered scones. I loved to make scones. My favourite at the time was wholemeal date scones. I loved the flour that my Nana used to bake with. It was probably McAlpins. It still? comes in a cardboard type box. She loved baking so much that she had special flour drawers made in her cupboards and kept a teacup in there with a broken handle.



Her kitchen has been modified but I think the drawers are the two square ones. The house is for sale, this is the photo for it. Nana had a wood stove. She also had a colander with eggs under the sink.

I love to use a small drinking glass to cut my scones.

My Grandma always made square scones with a knife. Her parents were born in Scotland, she was too, but wouldn't remember living there.

At school I learnt to make a ring with dried fruit in it and cuts around the side. I got a lot of joy making that type of scone. I think it had spices in it as well.

Butter came in a square then, a pound, as Aussie know now they are roughly in half and 250g. My Nana used to teach me how to cut up the butter into ounces or whatever was needed for the recipe.

When we lived in our practice seachange house in 2003 once we did have little money for food and got a great bag of bread that was day old because we asked. It was for a nominal amount.

My Nana had a bread run, and the whole back of the ute was mostly stacked with shelves with mostly what was called parnies (sp?). It was Italian bread. My uncle and my aunty, my Dad's sister only ate this type of bread I think. A lot of our neighbours were Italian. At different farms the women came out fast to see Nana to get the perfect loaf in their perfect colour.

This post was inspired by a post at Down-to-Earth.