Self sufficiency? Not so much.

Let me present to you the pride and joy of the clutterpunk garden, the cream of the harvest so far this year:

Yes, that's it all right. A stumpy, warty-looking zucchini.

Anyone want a bite?

We have a way to go before we are dining out on homegrown food here. Since moving out of our two-bedroom, no-garden flat six months ago, team clutterpunk have harboured lofty ideals of 'living off the land'. 

Actually, our ideals aren't that lofty. We're not planning to become survivalists, but we do want to gain some gardening skills, spend time outdoors as a family and grow at least some of our own edibles. And given that my previous record with plants reads 'herbicide by neglect', I figure it's going to take some time to get the hang of things.

Our garden has an inner-urban Mediterranean heritage, with an 'Italian Lawn' (otherwise known as cement). So we've gone with a raised no-dig veggie garden. Ours came from the lovely guys at the Little Veggie Patch Co. Sadly, our first plant-out was disastrous (so sorry, Jon and Mat - our fault entirely). We've replanted for winter and have higher hopes for our garlic, leeks, onions, beets and swedes.

I guess, when you tend towards learning by intuition or feel as I do, mistakes are the way you learn. We inherited these lovely old laundry tubs, but have since learned about the necessity of adequate drainage - hence the mildewed zucchini. 

So we punched a heap of holes into the bucket o' rocket, and that seems to be thriving. Drainage... check! And now we need to learn about planting in succession rather than tipping the whole bunch of seeds in at once. 

Well, it's going to be one fine week of rocket when it happens!

But the failures are hardly failures. There is much pleasure to be had just in the process of creating and tending a garden. With the little bits of learning and activity and beauty it provides, the actual productivity is fairly secondary to us. A few months back the boys spent an afternoon with their Grandma exuberantly planting beans willy nilly throughout our containers. Who knows what they will produce, but it's a delight to see them climbing up the fence and spilling out of the herb pots.

And if nothing else ever takes off, we do have this glorious, heavily-laden lemon tree, poking through its hole in the cement. God bless the Italian migrant population.

Even with just the lemons and a handful of productive herb plants, I feel almost giddy with the potential of it all. I can dress salads! I can flavour pasta dishes and garnish pizza! I can make lemon cordial and lemon curd and put zest into everything! Imagine what I might feel like if anything else takes? Positively self-sufficient!

And now I might go and julienne that zucchini. Or grate it directly into the compost. Either way, I think my thumb is definitely looking just that little bit greener.

My creative space... circling.

It has begun. The quilting of the ugly hexes.

I've opted for hand quilting, and decided on a simple design of intersecting circles. 

Simple in theory, anyway. I'm finding it slow going, but not really in that pleasant, lulling, meditative way I had hoped. It's taking a while to get a hang of lots of things: marking out my design; burying knots; holding an unwieldy quilt on my lap; working the needle through those layers.

And then there is the stitching itself. I started out quilting with thin cotton quilting thread and trying to do small, even stitches. After realising that I wasn't catching the backing with stitches smaller than, oh, about a metre, I decided to embrace the large stitch and go for more of a sashiko look. This looks much better to my eye, and doing a better job of actually quilting the layers together. 

But boy, am I finding it hard work. Physically hard. There is a large amount of friction going on. There must be something weird going on with my particular concoction of fabrics, batting (can't remember what sort) and sashiko thread. The three circles I've completed in sashiko-style took around half an hour each! 

Thoughts? Suggestions? Is this just part-and-parcel of doing something new?

Anyway, with all the effort being expended, I've decided I need to keep the energy levels up. This morning I made a rather large batch of cinnamon scrolls, using brioche dough from my no-knead artisan bread book.

Heavenly. What do you think - do I get one for every sashiko circle-of-pain I complete?

More creative spaces to be seen at Kirsty's place.

Decluttering the groceries, 2010: Slow Food

Back in March, I boldly declared my meal planning intentions as a way of helping my family to nurture sustainable, responsible eating habits. With two small children, one extremely fussy and limited in his food choices, I was seeking a way to streamline our meals, our shopping, and our time. My hope was to avoid food waste, minimize time in the kitchen, and eat seasonally. I subsequently trialled the Table Tucker method of meal planning, which advocates bulk shopping, fortnightly menus, and only cooking three nights a week.

Errr... it didn't last.

There were a few practical reasons why. Shopping and storing in bulk makes sense, but for a family living in a small flat without a car, it was a challenge. Cooking in advance and freezing or refrigerating meals sounded great for freeing up time, but space again is an issue and I found it hard to get into a rhythm with it. I appreciated having the decisions made about what to cook, but found myself feeling a bit creatively stifled. I'm not sure we really wasted less food either. I've learnt that food waste is as much about figuring out what to do with left-over bits and pieces as it is about controlling what I buy in the first place.

The big nail in the coffin, however, was this. Trying to streamline and minimize the place of food and food preparation actually goes against my ideals about how food fits into family life. Just as I've embraced slow fashion, slow transport and slow cloth, I am at heart a Slow Foodie. Slow food is about embracing time-honoured processes, cooking from scratch and avoiding commercially-produced foods, respecting seasonal produce, taking an interest in how things are grown and harvested.

Although I find cooking around my boys frustrating, and I find the constant rejection of my meals wearying, minimizing time in the kitchen is not the answer. If I want my children to one day appreciate fresh, local, seasonal, fair produce, have some skills and intuition in the kitchen, and enjoy the nurturing and celebratory aspects of sharing meals, I need to persist in enjoying the process, instead of trying to relegate cooking to yet another annoying chore.

And so, I'm embracing my inner Slow Foodie, and with it, going back to my fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants style of not-really-planning. We're back to making trips every few days to the local shops for a few items at a time - pasta, flour, a bit of bio-dynamic meat. To help take some of the decision making away, we're back to getting seasonal 'mystery box' of fruit and vegetables delivered weekly, and using this as the basis for what goes on the table. Sometimes I figure the week's menus out in advance, sometimes I go day by day, and either is OK. I'm trying to use up every last bit of the box before the next delivery, which has meant caramelizing onions, stewing fruits and making random 'stock' with whatever is lying around. We're getting better at using stuff up and being creative with the odds and ends. Most of the time, my kids hate it... sigh. But   they always have, so what's the difference?!

organic chicken carcass and withered vegetable stock...a house specialty! 


We're also getting into the baking... lots of biscuits and cakes, and going strong so far with the artisan bread.

Letting the boys help does, of course, have its downsides...

*3#!*&%^

I have many grand plans for making lots of stuff from scratch. I'm inspired by so many of the wonderful, resourceful, home-cooks I see in blog land... particular favourites include Apron Strings, Bountifully, Dillpickle, ecoMILF, Frog Goose and Bear, With My Own Two Hands, and new-to-me CityHippyFarmGirl and Slow Living Essentials.

Meanwhile, I gotta run. I have rhubarb to stew, pesto to pound, parsnip to stare at uncomprehendingly, cauliflower curry to simmer and a meal to figure out for our plain-eating visitor tonight. Ahhh, inconvenient food... how I've missed you!