Tied to the kitchen

The last few days we have had extra people so life has been revolving around the kitchen and preparing meals! We had 4 backpackers and then two more came Sunday (an accidental overlap!) and also on Sunday a Vet Student turned up to do a weeks work experience here, as well as a mate of Maitland's from the Sunny Coast. So.....12 people at present.

I have great help with food prep, but it does take some organising to make sure it all happens. How do you keep 12 working people well fed?

Breakfast is usually a cooked one - eggs and leftovers or eggs and salami, or scrambled eggs, or eggs! Fortunately the chooks are laying very well at the moment.

Morning teas are usually toast or if someone has baked biscuits or cake, we have that.

Lunches - I like to alternate soup and salad lunches. My soup is usually made up of some of my bone broth and whatever vegetables that are in the fridge and need using up. I also throw in whatever cooked vegetables are left over. One soup this week, was three different soup leftovers that were combined to make one soup. Delicious! Nana would be so proud of me! Salad lunch - we have cold meat, either corn beef, pickled pork, salami, ham or left over roast. A salad made up of fresh lettuce from the garden, tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicum - just the usual suspects. We've been picking up some lovely cheap avocados from a roadside stall and of course my feta cheese. I've been making lots of it over the last week and as usual it is proving very popular amongst the backpackers.
Soup of the Day today is ham and vegetable soup.

Dinner......This week we've had BBQ, Slow Roasted pork (was supposed to be pulled pork tortillas, but we got a bit busy and just had it with vegetables), Edmund's spaghetti bolognaise and goat curry. Tonight's dinner is going to be slow roasted shoulder of goat - roasted with lime, rosemary and garlic. Served with roast vegies.

We do eat a lot of bread here, and the bread machine goes every day. I try to stick to my sour dough bread, but the backpackers all love bread and especially the home made stuff. I've made three batches of feta this week and 3 litres of yoghurt. We cooked up a batch of tomato sauce with tomatoes from the markets and also some star fruit jam. I picked up the star fruit from the roadside stall and while I'm not over fussed on the fruit itself, it makes lovely jam. One of my lovely customers from 1770 made some for me and so I've made a few batches now as it's quick and easy to do in the thermomix with a small amount of fruit. I put a vanilla bean and the zest and juice of a lime to give it a little extra oomph!!! Yum! Happy to post the recipe if anyone wants it.