Friday Night

Laura and I cooked dinner tonight - Calamari, stir fry vegies and rice. A guy from Cairns (?) comes to Baralaba once a month and his calamari is some of the best I've had for years. For a long time the only calamari I've been able to get, is "squid hoods". This calamari is the real deal, it's frozen, and it's whole squid. Cleaning the squid is so worth it, to get nice calamari. I use a Vietnamese recipe that is just so good. Calamari needs to be marinated before cooking, and then cooking very fast. Tonight we marinated it in ginger, garlic, chilli, sugar (1 tspn) salt (1 tspn) and pepper. Then before cooking, you toss it in flour and then deep fry. I like to use lard (however, my lard is finished and I used macadamia oil tonight). And, sorry, no photo of the food.....I am not a food blogger!

The exciting part about the calamari we got from this fella, is that he's keen to swap meat (pork, beef or goat) for seafood! I love that kind of trading!!! 

So, the take home message from the above discussion, is that cooking with someone else means food that is twice as yummy, and trading home grown food for seafood, is part of the sustainable goal for me!

It's Friday night now and it's been quite a while since I've posted - almost two weeks and wow have they been busy! I've had a weekend at the markets in between and this is my weekend at home.

Last weekend (while in town for the markets) I did a sourdough workshop - an advanced one, learning how to make crumpets, croissants, scrolls and pancakes. It was so good - any time spent with fellow food enthusiasts is always good. And I think we'll have crumpets one day this weekend, they were my favourite I think, although...the scrolls were yummy the next day...and the croissants!!

Yesterday we killed some roosters, which is something we need to do more often. There are ducks still to do and more roosters that we need to catch yet. Our three backpackers were pretty keen to be involved in the process - their keenness may have had something to do with the crowing at 3am!

This chook plucker (below) is an incredible invention - Our kids bought us this - I wonder if you can buy an automatic invisterator! This thing makes plucking a dream, but we are a bit slow doing the rest. 

I like to break up the chickens into the parts (breasts, thighs etc) so that we can do different things with the chicken.I do keep a few whole, because roast chicken is so nice. 

Right now, Kim's watching footy and I'm sitting by the fire. Winter has come back again, so it's nice to have the fire going. I've got a pot of bone broth on it (we have a pot belly stove).  Soup for lunch tomorrow! We have soup about every second day these days. Although we need to eat salad every other day, because I have so much lettuce and rocket in the garden. My garden it delightful lately, but that will be another post, and I'll take some photos as well....so stay tuned.