A Week in the Kitchen

We have been very busy working in the new pottery shed building benches and starting to fit it out as a functioning pottery. But we have also been needing to get into the garden and do a bit of maintenance as well. Everything needs to be done NOW, but we have a limit on our time and energy levels. We muddle through, lurching from crisis to crisis. Everything gets done eventually. I console myself about my ineptitude and clumsiness, by keeping my eyes on the very long view.
We have also been continually busy in the kitchen. In this cold weather we are eating less salads and eating more comfort food. This week I made roasted bone marrow stock with loads of garden Mirepoix veggie stock and a bottle of red wine. This can’t be done in one go. I do it one step at a time, evening by evening. Each night when we light the wood fired kitchen stove, this cooks dinner, warms the house and allows plenty of free extra heat for cooking things like stock that need long cooking time and reduction.

The browning the marrow bones on the stove top, sharing the hot plate with Janine’s Minestrone.

Janine’s minestrone made with our summer harvest of dried beans and our vegetable stock base. The only purchased item was the alphabet pasta, left over from a kids meal.

You can see the various tide line levels on the side of the pot, as I simmer it down from three large boilers of 5 litres each, all reduced down to fit in this one pot and then reduced again to just 600 mls of jellylike concentrate. A spoon full of this flavour bomb, is a home made stock cube substitute, only better, being low salt.
I saw some nice bratwurst and also some pork mushroom and garlic sausages at the local butcher. I bought one of each and we shared half each, cooked with parsnip and spud mash, red cabbage and julienne carrots with garlic. Sausages are not very healthy food, they are stuffed full of salt, fat and preservatives, so I rarely buy them. The only time I eat a sausage is over at the Village Hall at the occasional fund raising get together event. So buying a sausage was a quite unusual event. I can’t remember the last time I bought a sausage from the butcher. It must be two or three years.

Our hybrid take on the old favourites, banger (singular) and mash and bubble and squeak.

I also took time out one evening to dry, mill and grind some sea vegetable kelp and added to it some ‘lite’ potassium chloride salt, with Sumac and a small amount of Japanese sansho pepper. This is all mixed together to make a low sodium, salt substitute seasoning. Being mostly vegetable based, it has loads of flavour but little ‘bite’ from the low salt level.

I also bake bread twice a week. We can eat a loaf between us over 3 to 4 days. I vary the flour as I run out of one, I buy something different for the next batch. I alternate between 100% rye, rye and Wheat blend and straight wheat. I think that I prefer the rye/wheat blend the best.