Oh what a lovely tea party.

draw back the curtain.


The teabag is a little well-brewed.

The weeds have been decomposing anaerobically for a good month and a half now (just a few weeks longer than was recommended by Gardening Australia). The basic process of anaerobic decomposition is that the microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen. This releases the energy into the water rather than the air. It's used a lot to treat waste water and reduce the release of gases and such from landfill. On an industrial scale anaerobic digestion can be a renewable energy source. Methane and carbon dioxide rich biogas can be harvested and burnt to drive a turbine. What we did was a little more lo-fi, not in an air tight vessel or set up to siphon off the gas, but none the less the same process. We are more interested in breaking down the nutrients in the biomass (the weeds) into a form that the plants can use easily. Unfortunately this works too well so the final mix needs to be mixed with more water to dilute it or it will burn the plants.

Black with one.

Anaerobic decomposition happens naturally in mangroves; their leaves break down in the oxygen starved mud; however in that instance the mud is high is salts and so they smell like sulphur (rotten eggs). The "beautiful, brown, sludge" that formed in our weed tea smells like death. The water is releasing many of the gases that have dissolved into it over the weeks.
There was also an abundance of invertebrate life gathered in the pot. Many small compost flies and about six spiders had taken up residence. To these bugs the rotting smells means food or food for their young.

We haven't put it onto the garden just yet. We are making some seeds for Autumn planting and I hope they like tea. The tea bag on the other hand had can go on the compost heap.


Lars comes in for a whiff...



... and feels a little overwhelmed.

Australia Day/Survival Day - have a nice one and a catchup with us!

The end of the month of January is approaching rapidly! We've scheduled the rest of the 31 Things in our dairies and we probably will finish all of them by the 31st, but we'll have to do some of the posting in February.


Scheduling in the shed.

Meanwhile here's a photo montage/summary of some of the latest and not so latest "Things" we've been doing.

Take it away #3 Make Gift for Anne's Baby!
John's sister Anne is having a baby next month (gender to be a surprise), and my sister Alison is having a girl in early June. So we're both going to have niblings, or nieflings, as we found out the kids of your siblings are also called!

Anne had a baby shower the other week and John and I made baby pants for our gift on my Granny's old Singer. It was the first time I'd used it and I fell in love with the idea of this link to my grandmother, who used to make a lot of our clothes on this same sewing machine when we were kids. John's paternal grandmother was actually a seamstress, and he knew how to work the machine and do the tricky bits. I love this idea of the two grandchildren of these two wonderful women who never met, sewing clothes for their great-grandchildren (our nieflings!). We made a little pair of summer tartan trousers for Anne's baby, and we'll return to the Singer to make something warm for Alison's baby in winter.

We'll also make some other stuff, I hope. I've been dagging around pretty much exclusively in op-shop clothes for the last five or six years because of the sweat shop issue, so the idea of making pretty things that really fit is wonderful. For some reason I really want to do some homemade knickers as well. I figure if you can sew your own underpants you can sew anything.


And so does Lars.


John tracing the pattern with his Nanna's tailor's chalk.


The Singer in action.


Baby pants! (Minus draw-string).

Next up was John's haircut which Maja offered to do back on the walk up Mt Lofty (the first of our 31 Things). On the same day, we also accidentally went to the Wayville Showground farmer's market, because we thought it was on the list, but we'd scrapped it in favour of the Compost Screw.

We thought we might pick one up there, as the guy we know who sells them lives far from town. Instead we came away with a tray of tomatoes, some garlic, the crazy Omega-3, super-weed, purslane (that we had just learned about from Joel on the Little House blog), and some basil from the Food Forest stall. John spoke to Anne-Marie Brookman of the Food Forest and got the ball rolling on the Book Permaculture Course challenge. Unfortunately we've apparently underestimated the cost of the 10 day course by about 50%, but we've started a little savings fund to try to afford it by April.

Here are some pics from the market.


We made some oven-dried "sun dried" tomatoes with this tray of beauties (ironically you need three days of consecutive heatwave to dry them properly outside, and it was cool). The recipe was from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.


Maja and John looking a bit cool at the Farmer's Market.


Food Forest garlic, on top of sundried tomato pesto.


This is purslane! ($2 at the Wayville Farmer's Market)


And this is purslane ($10 from Banner Hardware) - but can you eat this kind?


We think this is also purslane, growing in our street as a weed. We wouldn't want to eat this one as it's growing beside the road and might be polluted, but it's nice to know it's there.

And here is John's haircut. We couldn't get hairdressing scissors anywhere, but finally found some at a $2 Shop when we had given up and set off for home.


Success!

We went back. If John was nervous you couldn't really tell.


I'm the god'arn Batman!


The "bobbed" stage where Maja admitted she mostly cut girls' hair.


Very suave, Willanski, very suave.

Somewhere among the Rudd calling and visiting, John made pesto. The garden basil has gone from abundant to scarce after the heatwave, so we substituted it for Food Forest basil from the Farmer's Market. John used yeast instead of cheese in the pesto. It was chunky and delicious!


Calling Rudd.


Break for dinner.


Calling Wong.

As a sort of 31 Things spin-off, we helped John's brother Dave and sister-in-law Candice start a potted garden in their courtyard. Dave wrote about it on his blog too. I think the figure of us growing 70-80% of our own food is too generous, but I wonder how much we do grow?


John brought the permaculture book along.(the earth users guide to permaculture)


Parsely, capsicum, lemon grass, chives and cherry tomato for the food plants, and native grasses, native rosemary and something else native with pink flowers for the rest.


Willanski Bros.

Then Dave dropped us in Medindie where we visited Jules and her kids Raphie and Indigo. Jules gave us some worm poo for the garden (and worm wee). We think our fruiting plants might be a bit undernourished, so some of this worm compost might help them fruit if it's not too late in the season.


Worm wee, mmm!


An appropriate doggy-bag gleaned from the supply at our local park for the worm poo.


Our hosts having a story.

We're on a sort of daily schedule at the moment.
Next day we made bread with Anna.


Adding the oil.


Consulting the bread cook book. (The Peter Berley Modern Vegetarian Cookbook).


Kneading.


Several hours later (note sun has set) - bread! We took some to a house party that night.

On the bread-making day we also found some soap made from glycerine, which we've been looking for because it doesn't contain palm oil. We were really pleased as we've been trying to avoid palm oil, because of the issues with deforestation and orangutan populations. This turkish-delight style number came from a shop off the Parade that Rapsodie from our Sustainable Communities group mentioned. I'll note the name next time I go down the street.


Note the shower timer still in use. Have we been using it? John has more than I have, but I tend to start the shower timer and not get out immediately when it runs out. Still, when my showers go overtime, they feel illicit, rather than standard, and they're shorter than before we got it.

Yesterday we got a photo-electric smoke alarm from the post office. Actually we got four, and rejected two of the conventional sort. In a weird coincidence (Emeera, did you tell him you'd had a premonition?!), Harry, our landlord arrived unexpectedly to install some of the regular kind that he had brought with him (thereby fullfilling the Call Harry about rotten wood challenge, as well). He was very understanding about us not wanting the radioactive kind and even gave us some money to buy the sort we wanted, as well as one for Anna and Lily's place.

I took a bus back to the post office I used to go to when I lived in the city, because our local one had run out of smoke alarms, and returned triumphantly with the last two they had. Then John rang up from his parents' place to say his Dad, George, had picked us up a couple from a different post office. So now each house has two photo-electric smoke alarms. George is going to take our old ones, and some batteries that have been sitting on top of the fridge for about five years, to his work's hazardous waste bin.


The new ones. And they only cost ten bucks each!

That's it for now. We're both getting ready for our Fringe shows, I've given away uni for this and last week, due to Rudd and getting my photos ready, and we have been doing various other of the 31 Things that we don't have photos of.

I've predominantly been reading a book called "Choosing Eden" that Dave told us he'd got free with an issue of Gardening Australia. Basically it's a first-person account of a couple in their fifties who have packed up their comfortable Sydney life to start a permaculture farm in the NSW countryside, because of Peak Oil.

We're gearing up to write a big Peak Oil post, and because there's not enough time left in January to do it and some of the other posts justice we're going to extend the blog out into February and beyond. We're not sure if we'll continue blogging about new projects after we've reported on all the 31 Things - maybe!

We're booked in for our massage on Friday, and will have at least started or tee'd up all of the "Things" by Sunday, the 31st day of January. Except possibly "Go to an escapist movie"! We wanted to see "Where the Wild Things Are", but it looks as if we've missed it. "Avatar" was recommended (thanks Trina!), but Anna said the camera motion made her sick. I have a bizarre urge to see "The Road", which could not be classified escapist by any stretch of anyone's imagination. (Unless in that way where you realise that your fears for the future aren't as horrible as someone else's dystopia. )

Lastly, a friend of John's parents told us today that my polemic letter about Rudd avoiding the climate change question made it into the Advertiser yesterday! "Catastrophe awaits"!

27. make Moroccan lentils and send others a recipe

This post is epic, but it's central to the whole 31 Days Challenge, as it features among other things lentil shopping, our monthly Sustainable Communities meeting where the challenge originated, numerous photos and links, a book review and three recipes.

Bon Appetit!

The lentils are still soaking and may by now have reached gigantic proportions (if anyone's seen the Young Ones episode where Vyvyan's hamster gets soaked overnight and blows up like a giant farty balloon, you'll know why I am slightly afraid to check on their progress after all this time submerged.)

No, actually, we're going to eat them for tea tonight to complete the number 27. "make Moroccan lentils and send others a recipe" challenge, but sadly not entirely Moroccan-ised as per Kelly's recipe as we are nearing the end of a pay fortnight and so will be substituting some of the ingredients we don't have for others that we do. Plums or apple instead of fresh ginger?

Here is the original recipe from Kelly, the founding member of our Norwood-Stepney Sustainable Communities Group (I finally found out the name last night at the meeting.)

This is one of my favourite recipes of late - sooo yummy and good for you.
I cook up a batch then freeze some. Happy cooking!

2 cups brown/reddish lentils (soak them overnight first in a large bowl of water)
(2 or) 3 fresh tomatoes grated or finely chopped
1 medium onion chopped
3 - 4 cloves fresh garlic crushed or finely chopped
4 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley or coriander (fresh coriander is best, and put it in near the end so it doesn't go too mushy)
2.5 teaspoons cumin powder
2.5 teaspoons paprika
1.5 teaspoons fresh chopped ginger
1/2 teaspoon black pepper 2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup olive oil (or thereabouts)

In a large soup pot, fry onion, garlic and ginger for 2 mins or so then add spices and continue to fry for another minute.
Add lentils and stir in.
Add 2 litres water and fresh tomatoes and bring to simmer.
Simmer lentils over medium heat about 1.5 hours, or until lentils tender and sauce is not watery. Add extra water if required to prevent lentils burning.
Add coriander or parsley near the end.
Adjust seasoning if desired and serve with rice or bread.

And this is Kelly!


While I'm at it, let me introduce the others in our little group. These pics are from the meeting last night at Rapsodie's place.

Rapsodie.


and Eleanor.


But to backtrack to yesterday's lentil mission. I don't know if the aforementioned Young Ones conditioned me at an impressionable age, but until recently I always associated lentils with the character Neil and his giant vats of bland, brown slop, a props department's dream.

My sister became a vegetarian as early as she was allowed to, which was 15, and I joined in when we moved out of home together when I was 20, due to a combination of the example she set, having to cook all our own food and so chop up a lot of meat, and reading Peter Singer.

I've been vegetarian for years now so I love beans, tempeh, hummous and so on, but I never really got lentils. Hippie friends would wax lyrical about the virtues of their dahl, but I continued to carry this prejudice towards lentils as a desperate last resort, a source of protein for the last few days before pay. This meant that I have actually hardly ever tried them.

Which brings us to challenge 27. make Moroccan lentils and send others a recipe!

I was excited when the N-SSCG (the Norwood-Stepney Sustainable Communities local group) decided to share recipes and Kelly mentioned her Moroccan lentils. Would we finally learn the secret mysteries of dahl? If I can get into lentils, they are such a good cheap food.
Let's do it!

Step one
Plan to eat the lentil meal a day in advance to incorporate the overnight soaking. I'm not sure if the soak is just to soften the lentils for cooking and make them less farty or if it's also to remove toxins in the way that for soaking beans is an absolute health requirement. So we'll soak overnight until further clarification.

Step two
Head to the market, bulk food store, food co-op or other place of dry goods. We're trying to use less cans, to save money, waste and because they have a plastic lining that isn't so great for your health, but this means allowing enough time for the soak. When we first started with beans I found it a real hassle, but now it seems pretty simple (and even fun) to whack them in a bowl and cover with water overnight (and there's always the cans or the falafel house if you forget or don't feel like it).

This is us at the Adelaide Central Market, the repository of all things fresh, preserved and delicious.
About to grab a chai. But not with Bonsoy!


Despite the drought, Adelaide is blessed with an abundance of good, local food - anything that grows in a Mediterranean climate, plus a few adaptable varieties of produce that really thrive in more tropical or temperate places - like our tough little banana tree (half the size of its Queensland cousins), or apples and berries in the cooler pockets of the Adelaide Hills.
Unfortunately I was so busy taking a photo of John and me in the mirror that I forgot to take a shot of the market stalls - another time!
Actually it was Monday, which is not a market day, but a few shops stay open all week, including...Goodies and Grains.
Here we bought red, South Australian lentils for $2.50/kg. We bought 500 grams and I think it's going to make left-overs.

There were about five different varieties of lentils, some local and one organic. We went for the local.


Step 3. Soak lentils overnight, then next day follow Kelly's recipe!
(Later tonight.)

While we were in Goodies and Grains we also checked out the eggs. We've recently stopped being vegan and become ovo-vegetarians - with specific requirements for the eggs to be genuinely free range. We're really looking for eggs from chickens living as pets in suburbia (close to us) so we can buy or trade them regularly (zucchinis anyone?), visit the chickens ourselves to make sure they get to run around the garden permaculture style, and have no rooster to fertilise the eggs.

Our objections to commercial free range set ups are that even free range commercial hens can be the offspring of battery hens, and the male chicks in these operations are killed as unproductive (this is why we're not eating free range dairy, because of the male calves). It was hard to figure out this decision, which was for health-convenience reasons - strict veganism is a lot easier to follow than this nuanced version - but we don't think unfertilised pet hen eggs are dodgy, for us.

Anyway, more of this in a forthcoming egg post (and thanks Leticia for the "egg route" suggestion - we'll make that excursion part of the challenge!)

Meanwhile, here is a weirdly shaped biodynamic freerange jumbo egg at Goodies and Grains!


We bought some as backup before we find the pet hen eggs, but later heard at the meeting (from Kelly, who's doing a vegan challenge for January) that if they don't have an Animal Liberation sticker on them, they're not kosher free range. Does anyone else know more about this?

Soap.


Ghee. What is ghee? Is it vegan?


We also bought some organic wine from the market bottle-o, as planned for the meeting. I had hoped to take photos of the delights of the institution that is Wilson's Organics, where we first discovered these gorgeous wines and much more wonderful organic goodness, but it was closed for the holidays.

Here's the wine.


I might add that yesterday's excursion was undertaken with 10 kilogram weights strapped to our legs, or rather what felt like 10 kilogram weights due to the 48 hour post-exercise rule - that you will feel it the worst two days afterwards. We were crippled after the Mt Lofty bushwalk - the bracing to walk 4k down the hill. But we want to go back (it can only get easier, right?)

We borrowed John's parents' car and drove to the meeting, which was one suburb over. We rarely drive anywhere, yet we've driven to 2 out of 3 meetings, one of which was about 1km down the road. I don't know if it's some sort of balance redressing thing ("We're doing something good so we can "afford" to drive there") or a rebellion ("We're sick of being righteous all the time, let's just drive!").

More likely it's that we're running short of time. I want to write a post about juggling environmentally sustainable behaviour with full-time work (we're studying and creating stuff using savings and government pensions for money, so we have more flexible schedules, but I'm starting to realise not much more time than people with jobs).

Last night, I was fighting a cold (which has now gone), we had to get to the meeting, and we remembered that we needed to water my folk's garden before the next hot weather period, which has started today. (I want to write another post about enviros and feeling the need to make excuses. Whatever - our legs hurt!) So we borrowed the car and made it home after everything at about 11pm. I don't feel bad. Absolutism can kill any enthusiasm for trying to change.

We had a good night. Here are some pics.
Rapsodie's cute little street seemed to have a fashion for painted garbage bins.




The house we assumed was hers due to the shade cloth and lemon tree watering systems.


Check it out. I'd been wondering how to water our own four trees effectively and now we know!


Rapsodie's actual house, or rather, garden, built on top of a former swimming pool!


Rocket gone to seed.


Rainwater tank!


Slightly hijacked by the wine, the one we brought plus a bottle of organic red of Rapsodie's, we nevertheless made plans to attend a screening of the movie "Fresh", which will be put on by another sustainable communities group in western Adelaide, for John and me to have our soil tested for toxins from our railway sleeper garden bed (Rapsodie lent us a soil testing kit to check out the PH, too), and heard about the other's January challenges - Kelly to go vegan, Eleanor to cook a vego meal once a month for 2010 and Rapsodie to try for no waste for a month.

We found out that the soft plastics waste recycling depot is no longer taking household plastic, and planned to contact Zero Waste SA to demand an alternative, that I have been overwatering our tomatoes and tomato-related veggies and need to give them tough love so they'll fruit, what people's eco footprints are in hectares and what's making them that size, various details about government rebates for solar, insulation and water tanks, and more that I'll remember when I see the minutes.

We also invited Kelly, Eleanor and Rapsodie to contribute to this blog about their January challenges, so hopefully we'll feature some of their posts in the next couple of weeks.

Meantime here is Eleanor's recipe, this time a dahl soup option. Don't forget the lemon!

Madhur Jaffrey recipe.

Serves 8 people

275gm green or yellow split peas (washed)
1.5L of vegetarian stock
24 peppercorns and 15 whole cloves (tied in cheesecloth)
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/2-3/4 tsp salt to taste

Garnish
8 lemon wedges
croutons

Combine the split peas and stock in a pot and bring to the boil. Remove scum from the top.
Add the spices in the cheesecloth, the turmeric, and the salt. Cover, lower heat, and simmer gently for 1-1.5 hours or until the peas are tender. Remove cheesecloth from soup, squeeze its juices into soup, and discard.
Press the soup through a strainer (well worth it guys), using the back of a wooden spoon, or put it through a food mill.

Serve with lemon

Freezes well - just make sure you use the lemon!


And here is our recipe. I realised at the meeting that my current infatuation with eggs would leave Kelly hungry throughout January, so pancakes are off the menu and a garden salad (literally, woo!) is on.

You will need:

One salad plot.


You could also use ingredients from the market - super, farmers or whatever, but I have to rave about growing salad because it is so amazingly rewardingly fun I want to share it! So, even if this is the lengthiest recipe you've ever followed, if you some time make it from your own salad plot it'll blow your mind, your tastebuds and make you happy.

This is a revolutionary, invaluable book:
One Magic Square
After reading the introduction you are basically inspired to go outside and make a 1 metre square garden bed on the spot. (The author is a local woman, Lolo Houbein and she is appearing at a session at the Friends of the Earth Reclaim the Food Chain convergence on all things food, From Plains to Plate, this February in Adelaide.)

Magic squares are great, but large pots are good too. You can even pick up ready to eat herb pots already containing chives, basil, lettuce etc etc, or some cheap seedlings from a nursery to transplant into a big pot, or keep in several small ones. Then just pick the ingredients for the salad leaf by leaf. So good!

I made this salad while John was pulling up weeds for the weed tea the other night. You can use anything that's to hand for the greens. Our salad plot is an old bathtub gleaned from down the street (the one that drains onto the lemon tree).

Summer Bathtub Salad



Ingredients

a handful of various greens (in this case cos and other lettuce leaves, basil, baby rainbow chard and beetroot leaves)

4 small zucchini, preferably with flowers attached (we have 4 zucchinis and admittedly the plants are enormous, but you could grow just one in a big pot, or substitute zucchini for tomatoes that are very pot-friendly.)

handful of walnuts

Dressing -
1/8 glass olive oil
1/7 glass balsamic vinegar
teaspoon mustard
teaspoon honey/brown sugar/maple syrup - anything dark and sweet
herbs finely chopped (we had chives, marjoram, sage and basil in the bathtub)
1 clove of garlic, very finely chopped

Steam the zucchs until tender but still crunchy (about 10 minutes) (or slice up 3 tomatoes) and arrange on top of a bed of the various greens.
Sprinkle walnuts on top and toss.
Mix dressing together with a fork til mustard and sweetner dissolve and pour over raw salad.
Toss salad and taste, adding another batch of dressing if needed to coat all the salad with a generous amount of delicious dressing.

Ok John's home and I think it's time for the Moroccan lentils.

Here's some Kelly made earlier.


I'll post a pic of our version later, and email the link to this page to the rest of the group to fullfill the "send others a recipe part", but having got this far I think I can say that we're already converts to the way of dahl.

Neil would be proud.