Category Archives: cooking

San-sho Pepper

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I love San-sho pepper. It seems to be quite hard to find in Australia. We can get some that is already ground, from the Japanese supermarket in Sydney, but it is quite old by the time that we get to it and has lost a lot of its flavour. I’ve always been happy with it, but I didn’t know how good it could be fresh.

We are lucky enough to stumble onto a place where they are preparing some fresh san-sho pepper. We get to see, smell and taste the whole seeds, as well as the freshly ground san-sho pepper directly after being ground.

I didn’t know that it has a high citrus note in the aroma when it is fresh. It’s great stuff. It’s hot and spicy and so delicious. Be careful however, because if you get too greedy like me and take too much, then it suddenly overdoses the taste buds in the tip of my tongue and my tongue goes numb. It’s powerful stuff. Restraint is the key.

A little goes a long way.

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We Go To The Markets

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We go to the markets in the grounds of the Kitano shrine and see some amazing thing, but not what we expected.

On our way to the bus station we see men at work.

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At the markets, we see how okonomiyake is really cooked here in Kyoto, or at least one of the versions of it. best of all we get to eat it and it is delicious.

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We meet the amazing cat lady and her fashionista cat.

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We see lots of old pots, a few of which I buy. But only the smallest sake cups, as we still have 5 weeks to go and I don’t want to be carrying too much.

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We end an amazing day with a meal of fish grilled over charcoal. Oishi des!

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The Last Beta Firing? Success at iteration 7

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Janine has just completed the 7th firing and design iteration of the little wood fired kiln. It worked well and there are now no more obvious and glaring changes that need to be made to the design. Of course there are a lot of little issues that will need to be tweaked over the coming months. But I can’t see anything that will require a major rebuild. I think that this design as it stands now is a good one. – Until I think of something better!

The verandah of the pottery now has a collection of these little prototypes all parked there out of the weather. They all work well enough at lower temps, so I will use them for our raku firing weekend workshops. The image shows a very full wheel barrow of wood, enough for two or more firings to stoneware.
The design that I have ended up with is now ready for a limited production run.
This last firing of Janine’s was more or less perfect. Except that we managed to crack a kiln shelf. Janine had a lot of flat ware, so I retrieved a kiln shelf from the rack that hadn’t been fired for over 20 years. I think that the shock of a fast firing and possibly moisture absorbtion that couldn’t escape fast enough was the problem, as this hasn’t happened before. I would usually like to season a new kiln shelf more gentle. Perhaps by rubbing in salt and pepper with a little olive oil might work next time?:) By lunch time we’re famished. Because I managed to catch up with the fresh fish man, we have ultra-fresh sashimi grade tuna. So its sashimi for lunch.
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I also make fresh pippies in white wine, chilli and saffron sauce for dinner. What more could you want to celebrate a successful firing day. Followed by a fresh salad from the garden. We have a local grower of saffron now, so we support them.
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I have been making a new batch of spy holes for my kiln factory. I throw them on the wheel, very slowly, out of a very coarse mix of crushed high alumina grog and a small amount of kaolin to bind it. The mix is so aggressive that my hands are starting to hurt after just one pot-board full. This mix really takes your skin off. But that’s OK. 20 or so will last me for another year. If I wanted to make any more I’d have to wear gloves. I’ve heard some potters claim that they throw till their fingers bleed, but I’m not that stupid. I know when to stop.
I fire the spy holes in the little wood kiln. This little wonder fires cone 8 on the bottom shelf, cone 9 in the middle and cone 10 at the top. A perfectly useable working stoneware temperature range. Certainly OK for a 3 to 3 1/2 hour firing schedule. My bowls turn out well too. Some nice, soft, pastel glazes.
I’m really pleased that everything has come to a clear resolution at this time. As for the next couple of months. I’m fully booked on other projects and I wont have any time to play with this little kiln for a while. In the evening we de-seed chillies for drying in the kitchen window, along with beans and corn, destined for drying and grinding for polenta. I also finish drying some tomatoes in the oven. Once dried in this way they have the potential to keep almost indefinitely, but they never do. They are so yummy that I eat them like lollies. They never last the year. It’s great to add a handful into winter stocks. They add that certain piquant, sharp sweetness to sauces or a ragu.
This is just another day in the mixed household of self-reliance.
Best wishes from Mr. Beta and Ms Better

Pan Fried Figs in Apple Toffee

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Because we are now past the solstice, it is time for the figs to begin to ripen. We enjoy them cooked in a little butter with a squeeze of lemon juice and a dash of our own preserved, concentrated apple juice. It slowly simmers down to a concentrate of apple toffee with soft poached figs.

It is pretty amazing, but last nights figs in preserved rich red preserved plum juice was  even a little better I feel. It’s all so hard to say, as every bit of it is so, fragrant, soft and delicious. Wonderfully soft and engaging while being a little bit sharp and sweet and delicately textural. It’s one of the few times where a little bit of ice-cream goes so well. It improves it and extends the texture, mouth feel and flavour.

So simple, so flavourful, so easy. Plant yourself a fig tree and enjoy the benefits – if you can keep the birds away!

Nina had to spend quite some time bagging the fruit to protect it from the birds.

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Peppers, with Peppers, with Pepperoni

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This months meat meal is pork. Pork in the form of a hot spiced sausage. I know that I shouldn’t be eating preserved meats. There is plenty of evidence out there to indicate that the preservatives like sodium nitrate and not at all healthy, but on a special occasion once a year. I think that the phrase, everything in moderation might apply.

So, last night I made green peppers (capsicum), with chilli peppers and pepperoni sausage. Actually, it wasn’t pepperoni at all, it was chorizo, but I like the sound of the alliteration. I could have called it chorizo with chilli and chapsicum, but that isn’t as good.

It turned out pretty well. I was pleased with it. Everything except the sausage came from our garden. I started by frying very finely sliced leeks in olive oil until they were golden and crispy, then added 1/2 a knob of finest diced garlic along with the roughly chopped capsicums and chills, plus the chunks of chorizo. Stir fried for a few minutes and then simmered with the lid on for a couple more to sweat out all the juices.

It was hot and spicy, but still crisp and crunchy to bite into. lovely!

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I am very grateful to be able to live this wholesome, self-reliant life.

Sugo and Passata

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The summer is over and we are now firmly into the autumn. The leaves on the fruit trees in the orchards are turning yellow and dropping, but there is still plenty of action in the vegetable garden. In this late season, the little yellow tomatoes are doing well and sprawling all over the garden beds, putting down adventitious roots as they go and still flowering and fruiting well. They sprawl about the place like drunken revellers at the end of a very boozy party, making a mess and refusing to leave. I’ve picked a wicker basketful full of these little wonders. They are slowing down now, but I can still fill the basket once a week.

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 I am engaged in the repetitive task of boiling them down into tomato sugo, then sieving the result and heating it again to reduce it further and concentrate the full flavour of summer tomatoes. I will find lots of uses for it in the coming months for the winter stews and casseroles. Then in spring and even early summer I will use it up in all manner sauces. We don’t get our first ripe tomatoes here until around, or even after Xmas, but even then, they start of in a very shy way, only giving us just enough ripe fruit for our salad lunches.
The really productive time for tomatoes is now, right at the end of the season. So it’s sugo and passata making time.
I make my own version of preserved tomato pulp. I add in onion, garlic, capsicum, chilli and basil, as these are all producing well at this time of year, so it makes sense to incorporate all that I have in the garden that is compatible.
If I’m pressed for time, and aren’t we all, always pressed for time? I just make a quick boiled down sugo or sauce. Mostly tomatoes, placed in a big stew pan and brought to the boil. Seeds and skins all left in and the whole lot ladled into heated glass jars straight from the oven. This works OK, but the flavour from the seeds and skins that are left in there is not as good as when they are removed. It seems to make the sauce a bit thin and sharp somehow? So, I’ve found that it is worth the effort to pass the whole lot through the rotary moullii sieve. But time is always in short supply, so time has to be made for a good passata. Passata sauce has to be sieved. I believe that ‘passata’ means passed through a sieve in Italian? Passata = passed? Whereas ’sugo’ just means sauce.
I haven’t made sugo for two years now. I prefer the flavour of passata, so that is what I plan to do again this season and every year. But the best of intensions often get side tracked or even de-railed completely. So when everything goes temporarily pear shaped. I can still make sugo. I have tried to make time to get every batch of this autumns tomatoes twice cooked and moulied. so far I have been successful and have let other things go temporarily to make the time for it. Something has to give and that something is watching the grim offerings on what Peter Rushforth use to call ‘The idiot box’! No loss there.
I like to add some herbs of whatever takes my fancy. I must say that my favourite is always basil, sweet basil, and plenty of it, but I also vary it with sweet marjoram, thyme and or bay leaves. And of course pepper, but very little salt, just a touch. I make my own salt substitute mix, but that’s another story for another blog.
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 I like to brown some brown onions in olive oil to start with. We are getting to the end of our own onions by this time of the year. I’ve never been very successful with growing a years worth of onions. The small seeds soon get swamped out with weeds and it’s a lot of work to get them up and above the competition, so that I can mulch them to suppress the weeds. I do what I can, but it’s never enough. Still, we do get some onions to dry for 3 or 4 months use.
I dice the onions very fine so that they will break down easily and eventually pass through the fine mouli easily. I soften them out slowly in Australian olive oil and when they are translucent, I add in a few knobs of our smallest, under-size garlic. We grow a few hundred knobs of garlic each year and about a quarter of them never reach a suitable size, for one reason or another. They remail small, about 1.5 to 3 cm acress, not worth plaiting and hanging. They all get sun-dried and then stored in a large wooden bowl on the kitchen counter. I top and tail them and cut them in half, crush them with the side of a knife to break down the fibres and release all the flavour and them drop them into the pot with skins and all. It will all get sieved out at the end, so it won’t matter. Peeling small garlic cloves is a really slow and in this case an almost pointless job as I’m going to sieve it anyway. So this is my easy, fast solution to the small garlic clove problem. How to use everything that we grow, the good, the ugly and the undersized!
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I put on two medium sized boilers of tomatoes, capsicum, chilli, basil mix. This time there is even a few zucchini’s in there and a couple of very ripe aubergines. It is easily reduced down to just one medium boiler of passata after it has all been passed through the mouli. I re-heat it all and bring it to the boil for a few minutes and then let is simmer slowly to reduce and concentrate. It also sterilises it. Meanwhile I get the glass jars washed and ready to pre-heat in the oven to 120oC for 10 minutes or so and I simmer the lids equally.
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The easiest part of the whole exercise is to pour the concentrated liquid puree into the jars and screw on the caps. As they cool, I can hear the sharp, loud ‘clack’ noise as the whole lot shrinks and creates a vacuum in each of the jars in turn, sucking down the ‘pop-top’ lid, to indicate that it is now vacuum sealed These jars will now keep for up to 12 months without any further energy being applied to them. It’s a wonderfully fast and efficient way to preserve food. It’s the cooking and sieving that takes the time, but spread over a couple of evenings, it’s not such a big job and I really enjoy it. It’s a seasonal special event. Something to be looked forward to and relished because it’s a real, honest, creative activity. It might also be supremely healthy, tomato juice concentrate, loaded with lycopene, especially the way that we do it, entirely organic and free of any fertilisers, sprays and preservatives. Even if lycopene isn’t as healthy as some people claim, passata is still amazingly delicious.
I don’t think that many people are aware of this kind of activity these days and how important it is to take control of your own life and take as much personal responsibility for your actions and your own health as possible. It doesn’t get exhibited, or advertised, talked about or reviewed. It is not sexy or marketable. It is just one of the small invisible things that we do to make a tiny part of our larger life here.
The really big job as always, is the washing up!
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Best wishes
The saucy Ms Sugo and her concentrated Mr Passata

Vendange

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It’s autumn now and the grapes are fully ripe. We have been dealing with them in batches over the last few weeks. Yesterday we made the last pick. The Vendange is over for another year. All safely picked, juiced, heat-treated, sterilised and bottled. The rich red dark grape juice bottled in this way will keep for 12 months easily. We make it now in the autumn and drink most of it as a refreshing cool drink next summer in 9 months time.

We have preserved dark grape juice from both our shiraz grapes as well as our isabella fragolino varieties. They both make good dark grape juice, but I think that I prefer the slightly foxy, aromatic density of the fragolino juice to the somewhat austere and peppery shiraz. We abandoned making wine from our grapes sometime ago, as it takes a lot of effort for something that is just plain ordinary and we can buy good wine quite cheaply here in Australia. We have learnt to be selective about where we expend our limited energies, so as to get the best return on our efforts.
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After a lot of experiments, we have learnt that dark grape juice is the best that we can do with what we’ve got, although, this year, early in the season, The Resourceful One also tried her hand at making very early season verjuice.
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We macerate the grapes and sieve out the fresh unfermented ‘must’, skins and seeds. The pure juice is heated on the stove to sterilise it and then bottled into heated jars, fresh from the oven. It all takes time, but this is the quickest and most efficient way that we have found to deal with the harvest, that gives and exceptional quality of product. It also has the added benefit of requiring no energy to store it for a year and keep it beautifully preserved for when you really appreciate it.
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We have been out and when we return in the evening, we find Annabelle Sloujetté’s ute spread-eagled across the front of our house. She has her own key and has let herself in. She is on her way somewhere, or back, and slides her ute into a sort of parked position in the front garden. She asks where Janine is and I have to say that I don’t know. She was here with me just a minute ago. “Ah! Slougetté responds. ‘Miss Flit’. That is why I call her Miss Flit. She flits in and she flits out, never stays still long enough to carry on a complete conversation. A complete conversation with ‘Miss Flit’ is like a Dickens serialised novel. It takes time and you have to be patient as it evolves.”
We end the day with a vegetarian BBQ. Nothing special, just quick and simple, place your sliced, freshly picked vegetables on the barbie and turn them when they are softened, Zucchini, aubergines, little golden nugget pumpkin and capsicums. They couldn’t be fresher and cooking outside at this time of year in the evening is a delight. The cooling breeze has arrived and the aromas emanating make my mouth water in anticipation. I make an autumn salsa out of our little, late-season, yellow  tomatoes, some garlic and chillis, while the bbq looks after itself. The girls are tête-à-tête, deep in gossip.
I plate up to table and we eat them with relish. I like a spoonful of my piquant home-made spicy plum sauce on my bbq’d veggies, but quince paste also works well I think.
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When we wake, she is gone. Only her tell-tale signature circle work on the front lawn tells the tale of her visit.
Best wishes
From Mr and Mrs Flit

Vintage Porcelain Clay and Other Simple Pleasures

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Everyone seems to be obsessed with money these days, as if it solves everything. I heard on the news last night that the 3 richest Australians have more money than the bottom 10% of the nation. Pretty shocking! It’s a shame that there isn’t a way of making life a little bit more even and equitable for the disadvantaged. The Lovely and I have done very well for ourselves, being able to have built a simple, largely non-aquisitive, organic lifestyle here, without ever having had a ‘real’ job. We’ve managed to ‘get away with it’ for all this time, living an engaged, creative, self-employed, part-time amalgam of a life. Without credit card debt or interest payments, doing almost everything ourselves. Living within our self-determined means. We’ve never been on the dole and never asked for handouts. Money may be essential in the modern world, but we don’t let it ruin our lives.
 
I think that money is a like a tool. You pick it up when you need it to do a job, and it’s so much easier if the have the right tools at hand. Then you put it down when the job is finished and don’t think about it again, only taking care to make sure that it is well looked after while not in use. Having tools that you don’t use is a useless waste, better that someone else who needs the tool should have it and get good use of it. That is how I believe that it should be for money too.
 
I think that a lot of people have too much ’stuff’ that they don’t appreciate or really need. Probably bought on hire purchase or credit card debt. We’ve made a point of avoiding that as much as possible.
When I’m fasting, I really appreciate a glass of water. It tastes delicious, I’m so happy to be able to drink it. Such a simple pleasure – and so rewarding. When I get to eat that first small simple meal after the fast. It’s really appreciated. I’m so grateful to be able to eat some small simple thing. A salad, a piece of fruit, some steamed vegetables. They are so wonderful, because of my self imposed state of self denial. Everything is relative. In the 5 days between my fasts, when I’m well fed. That same glass of water isn’t very interesting. A glass of wine seems to be so much more appealing with a nice meal from the garden!
 
Fasting isn’t just about food. The controlled, personally-imposed state of self-denial is a state of mind that applies to money and posessions, just as much as it does to food. When  we began to live without a lot of money to pursue our artistic dreams, it was a kind of self-sacrifice. To get the time to make art, we had to forgo paid work. After we had survived like this for long enough, We started to realise that we just didn’t need so much of it. Not buying, renting, or serviceing the loan repayments on ’stuff’ saved us loads of money, to the point that we just didn’t need to go to work every day any more. This is how we have found the time to make pots – but we still needed money. It all changed when we bought our house.
 
It’s pretty clear that you can’t save up enough money to buy a house outright, so we borrowed money for that, just like everyone else, but not since then. We built nearly all of our house and workshop ourselves, over time, paying for parts and materials as we needed them. I did nearly all the trades, except the electricals. Making everything ourselves. It saved us a fortune. We built the house for the cost of the materials, about $25,000 and the workshop for $4,500.
We have managed to live most of our lives without debt. We keep our cars for 10 to 15 years. We save up and buy them when it’s needed. I do all the serviceing and maintenance myself, and by doing all the repairs and maintenance around the house and property, we end up not spending very much money at all. It’s a badge of honor to keep the 40 year old kitchen stove repaired and working, as well as the 25 year old lawn mower, the 22 year old washing machine and the 15 year old truck. I’m not so nieve to think that everybody should life their life this way. I’m not recommending it. It’s suited us and we have been very successful living this rich rewarding life.
 
I think that money is certainly very useful stuff, but the cost of earning it is very high. I have to give up all the things that I really prefer to do to stop and earn money. So, once the basic minimum and a slight little extra for security against the the unexpected is earned and achieved, then it’s time to stop earning money and take time off to do something much more interesting and rewarding. In our case that something is gardening and making pots. Gardening doesn’t earn us any money, but it saves us from spending some. Pots don’t earn very much money, but the returns on investment are exponential, if measured in satisfaction and enjoyment. We don’t have much in the way of superannuation, but I have spent the last 25 years, laying aside special batches of clay whenever I could. This is one peculiar type of super. However, It would be worth a lot more if it were red wine and not clay!
At 64 I realise that I will not be able to lay down clay for anther 25 years, as I have done in the past. I can’t see myself still being here when I’m 90!  I spent the afternoon working up and then throwing some of my oldest porcelain body, made back in 1990. The kneeding of the rather hard paste was a lot of effort. It needed wetting down a little and then re-working, that really mucked up my wrists for the rest of the day.
 
I have other batches of my milled stone pastes that date back 10 years and more. I get them out every now and then and try some of it out all over again. Just to see how they are improving. Slowly whittling away at the original dozen kilos, that I first stored away in these plastic packs. These non-plastic pastes are so much better with a few years of age under their belt. It’s amazing how a little time can cause such a great change in the rheology of these finely ground mineral coctails, and time is cheap anyway. It cost me nothing to leave it there – especially when I was younger!
 
Now that I’m not in a position to take advantage of the cheap option of time any more. I’m making use of some of the banked age that I have been accumulating in my clay store over the 40 years of our time here. This is now the time to make withdrawals from my clay bank. I have been slowly working away on a special project for the past decade and it’s starting to come together now. I’m feeling pretty good about it. Perhaps in another year or two, it will result in a nice show of special work?
 
We decide that it would be nice to have this months red meat meal tonight, so I BBQ a couple of choice eye fillet pieces with the bone on, along with slices of zucchini, aubergine, capsicum and trimmed orange pumpkin slices with the skin on. We have been growing these marvelous little orange gems all summer. They have been so prolific that we have taken the majority of them to our son’s restaurant as we can’t deal with them all by ourselves. There are just so many of them, we are harvesting 3 or 4 of them a week. These things are so tasty and delicious when BBQ’d. 
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It’s a lovely evening, our visitors have left and we rejoice in the tranquillity of the sunset and our time together as the air cools and settles. We move the table out from under the verandah and on to the lawn, where it is cooler. I do the BBQing while The Lovely finely slices one of our cabbages to make a sort of coleslaw salad, except that it develops as she goes along, adding chillis and shiso leaves and an Asian inspired dressing, using vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil. Suddenly its all changed and becomes something else, quite exciting and interesting. No mayonaise in sight!
It’s delicious and so appropriate, crunchy, salty, sharpe and very slightly oily. It matches well with the bbq’d meat and veggies
 
I love being able to eat the dividends of our investment in our garden in this way. In so many ways it’s better than what money can buy. It’s all organic and super-fresh. We couldn’t afford to eat like this if we were buying it or going to restarants and eat out.
Small simple pleasures.
Best wishes
from the simple but industrious, cash restricted, but life-quality rich, Steve and Janine

Stealing Time – Guilty Creative Pleasures

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I quickly steal a bit of time in the workshop. I want to make some pots out of my aged porcelain stone bodies. I’m supposed to be building gas burners and silver soldering copper gas manifolds, but the lure of the potters wheel is just too strong. I manage to get 30 or so pots made from 3 of my specially prepared and aged porcelain stone clay/stone pastes. It’s a good feeling to be back on the wheel again after a week of brick laying and kiln building. I can only take just so many days of wearing the dust mask, goggles, ear muffs, gloves and all the other OH&S paraphernalia. It’s socially isolating and almost disorienting in its exclusion of the tangible world.

A day back in the pottery grounds me and alows me the fuzzy pleasure of thinking creatively again.

Some of these ground stone pastes of mine are so short that even after 25 years of ageing. I still can’t kneed them by the usual spiral kneading technique. One is just so short that it cracks apart under the rolling stress. I return to the tried and true ‘cut and slap’ wedging method. This has be proven to me to work much better than spiral kneading where finely ground porcelain stone bodies are concerned. The cut and slap method compresses and activates all the clay particles that can respond to this kind of wedging. The rest of the fine, non-plastic stone particles are firmly encased in the weak plastic matrix. It develops a tight workable putty that is almost throwable on the wheel, as long as I take a lot of time to coax it along slowly into the final shape, without expecting anything to happen quickly. The essentially non-plastic, porous,  surface sucks up water and dries out very fast, making the whole soft and floppy, so I have developed a technique of re-using all the wet slip from my fingers to lubricate the paste, thick slip doesn’t absorb so quickly, so that it doesn’t become too floppy, and extends the working time. Still, I have to work fast to get the form into a suitable shape and lift it off the wheel before it collapses.
It’s clumsy and slow, but it eventually delivers a workable open bowl form. Very heavy at the base and only just thrown thinly enough at the rim to pass muster. I rely on doing a lot of turning to get the shape to emerge eventually from the clod of stone paste.
Turning can only be done on bodies like this when they are almost dry. Any time before this, the soft, loosely bonded coagulate of mineral granules, just tears itself apart into crumbly chunks, making the whole pot unusable. Australian readers will recognise this particular torn and crumbly texture if I mention the name of Mersey Valley cheddar cheese. It’s impossible to cut this cheese without it tearing and crumbling against the knife. My milled stone paste porcelain bodies act like this if I try to turn them leather hard. I wait until there are significant white drying rings all over the surface before attempting to start turning.
The stoney grit in the matrix takes the edge off the turning tools in minutes. I have to stop and file the edge on my hardened steel turning tools very regularly. This involves getting off the potters wheel and walking some distance away, where it is safe to create iron filings by filing the edge sharp again, that wont end up in the clay.
Since my last trip to Japan to study single stone porcelain making, I returned with a cluster of tungsten tipped turning tools specially made for turning porcelain. These tools stay sharpe for a very long time. But even they eventually go blunt under constant use. I have found that I can recover the cutting edge back to its pristine sharpness by using a diamond dust impregnated file. This is the closest that I get to bling! I do apparently own quite a few diamonds. It’s just that they are invisibly small and encased in some sort of amalgam. Not sexy, almost as expensive but very useful!
I treat us to a dinner of gyoza, Japanese style pork and vegetable dumplings. I use lots of our garlic along with prime minced pork with very little fat. I get our local butcher to mince up some prime lean pork for me specially. I add in sweet corn niblets, finely shredded cabbage and green onion shoots. I fry it all up to make sure that it is all well cooked through and then work it into the tiny wanton wafers that I buy from the Asian supermarket section. These are pan fried in sesame oil, then when well crisped on one side, turned over and a cup of stock added to the pan with the lid on to steam them for a couple of minutes more.
They are beautifully rewarding, both crisp and yet soft and juicy at the same time. Wonderfull!
A real treat.
Best wishes
from the stone aged (aged stone) man and his wanton Wilma

Recycling

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We have been active in the late summer garden, everything is growing it’s head off. The Lovely just picked two and a half kilos of beans. I took most of them straight down to Biota for Geordie to use in the restraunt. We have delivered baskets full of various veggies over the last few weeks, aubegines, zucchinis, mini orange pumpkins, sweet basil and bundles of shiso.

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At this time of year we are getting the full abundance of the late summer heat. We have had regular rain falls all through the summer, so we just can’t eat it all. We bottle, dry and preserve a lot of it, but it is always nice to be able to give away our excess to our neighbours and friends as well.

The chefs at Biota are high-end creative and flexible people, they simply invent a dish for that day that will use what we take in. It’s a one-day special on the menu till it’s all gone.
The summer garden has been feeding us with lots of lovely meals, like pan fried, stuffed zucchini flowers and baked capsicums stuffed with ricotta, our own dried tommatos herbs and spices.
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I’m back to work in the kiln factory again now. Warren and I put in a 5 day straight effort and almost finished the first one of the current pair of frames sitting in the shed.
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I make all my own firebricks for my own kilns, but when it comes to building kilns for other potters, then I buy in commercial light weight insulating refractory firebricks. They come all packaged on a wooden pallet. I end up with lots of these used pallets. Some from ‘loscam’ and ‘chep’ are deposited and can be returned or exchanged to retrieve the deposit, but these days a lot more coming in on one-off, single-use, non-returnable pallets. I’ve been thinking how I can get some value out of these pallets. The last resort is to break them up and fire the kiln with them. This is OK, as long as they are only heat treated and not copper chrome treated ‘green’ timber. The ‘green’ treated timber can only be taken to the tip for burrial, and at some expense. A total waste. Fortunately, we don’t see any of these green treated ones turning up anymore, they are all heat-treated these days, so OK for burning.
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This last week I disembled one after we had used all the bricks off it to build the kiln and them re-cycled the timber into the arch formwork for the kiln. I even recycled all the nails from the pallet to re-assemble the arch form work.

We finish the day with a 3 rice rissoto and summer garden excess.
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lightly browned home grown onion and garlic in olive oil, red ,brown and white rice, deglazed with a cup of white wine, enriched with a chunk of my frozen marrow bone stock and softened with a pan full of stock, simmered down from what was left from yesterdays baked fish lunch.
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I serve it on Clive Bowen slipware plates with steamed sword fish and a dollop of Janine’s freshly made basil pesto.
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This latest kiln will be ready by the end of the week, so that I can start on the next one in the queue. I’d rather be making pots just now, but I know that I will need to pay out a lot of bills starting this week. Rego, insurance, council rates, land tax and the BAS statement, are all coming due. Just like so many creative types, I’m caught in the creative dilemma. Working for money to support my habit. My ceramic habit!
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Did you hear the one about the potter who won the big lottery?
He said that it wouldn’t change his life at all.
He would just keep on making pots till all the money was used up!
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At least we have a great life here working for ourselves, we don’t have to go to work for a boss! We live on a very low income, but have a millionaires quality of life. Last year we got a special tax concession of $500 from the tax dept. because we were living below the poverty line. We don’t think of ourselves as being in poverty. We’ve chosen this frugal austerity.
This Friday we’re having a day ‘off’, This will be our ‘weekend’. The Lovely and I will be firing the little portable wood fired kiln for its second outing. I’ve performed a bit of surgery on it to improve it a little more. At least I hope so. We’ll do a longer firing this time, we want to see if there can be some nice surface flashing if we fire for long enough? We’ll see what happens.
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best wishes from doctor Steve and his very patient Janine