A busy kitchen week...

I took the gap this week and spent some time every day building up my food bases. These are things that we use all month in a variety of dishes and I need to make them every 2 - 3 weeks.

This month we ordered a whole lamb from our free range organic butcher as it works out much cheaper and we do have the freezer space. I never like cooking with ribs so I made them into lamb stock which I will use with all the yummy lamb stews we can now make.

The other thing I use a lot of is a tomato based source. I use it in all my pastas and some curries. I don't follow a recipes - it's simple about 5kg tomoatoes, washed and quartered, a good handful of chopped celery, about 10 carrots grated and 2 heaped tablespoons of garlic. I leave this to cook until soft then cool and put in bottles in the fridge.

My son helped me squeeze lemons and oranges for lemon curd which is our winter jam.

I fed the sour dough starter and made two delicious sour dough rye loaves which were just superb with the lemon curd.

I also picked the last of our chillies and made 3 jars fo sweet chilli sauce and pickled the remaining ones.



Besides all of these, I made 4 litres of yoghurt, chicken stock, beef stock and two delicious pies. My mom and dad were here for the first two days and I wanted to treat them so I made Jamie Oliver's steak and guiness pie and followed it with a blackberry and apple pie with old fashioned short crust pastry for dinner the one evening. It was just delicious.

On Tuesday night before home church started we shared pudding with the other family we meet with. This is such a simple recipe and is great for all types of juicy fruits. I have given the recipe before which you can find here on my blog.

A week of good food memories.