Kate Downham

I think because you’re building in small stages, there is less chance of things going terribly wrong. You can take it one step at a time, think carefully about each step as it comes up, and only move on to the next stage once you’re ready.

Buying land: If you do your research, choose carefully, and know what to expect then there’s not a whole lot that can go wrong.

Building: You can build in stages, and there are things that can happen along the way, but because you’ve planned to do this slowly, you’re not going to get overwhelmed by all the possible cost blowouts all at once, and if something ends up too expensive, you can just wait a bit.

With our place, some things have gone wrong or not according to plan along the way, and we’ve just dealt with them as they’ve come, and have never regretted our decision.

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:I suspect there is more "wastage" in a small cabbage, proportionately than in a large one... But that's only my impression, and it may not hold for other fruit/ vegetables.

From my experience making lots of sauerkraut for home use and farmers markets, I got more kraut out of big cabbages than small ones, even if I started with the same weight. Big cabbages lasted longer in storage too.

As long as they still taste good, I prefer to get bigger vegetables rather than smaller, because I am growing, cooking, and preserving for a lot of people, and find that small vegetables take longer to harvest and prepare, and if they are something that gets peeled, then there’s more wastage too (but I usually don’t peel anything).

For tomatoes, I just want something that will reliably grow outdoors here, so I choose small ones, because they ripen more quickly.

For savoury food, I make a lot of really basic meat/carbs/greens combinations - just get a pot of rice or some potatoes cooking, once that’s ready, fry up some steaks or burgers, then cook greens in the leftover meat juices, and it’s a simple and delicious meal. I alternate this kind of meal with one pot stews and curries, egg dishes, and homemade pizza and pasta and we have a really easy 100% homemade meal plan every week.

Here’s a photo of my lunch from today - absolutely delicious, and only took around 5 minutes of hands-on time to make.

My A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen cookbook has a lot of my favourite one pot meals and other favourite foods.

I’ve been making a blueberry dessert a lot lately from home-canned blueberries. I don’t have a name for it yet, but I’ll share the method here in case anyone would like to try it.

I created this dessert trying to make a honey-sweetened crumble, but it turned out completely different to a crumble so I think it’s a new kind of dessert.

To make the canned blueberries, I cook them up on their own, and squash them a bit so that the juices come out, and then I hot pack it into jars and boiling water bath can it for 20 minutes. You could also use frozen blueberries for this.

To make the dessert, for every 600ml (pint and a bit) jar I mix (in a separate bowl) 1 cup flour, 3 to 4 tablespoons melted honey and 4 tablespoons butter. Put the blueberries in a baking dish, crumble the flour mixture over the top, then bake for around half an hour. The flour mixture absorbs some blueberry juice and turns into this beautiful fluffy cake-like thing with lots of hot blueberries around it. Delicious.

Lovely photos. I'm a bit jealous of your bok choy and cabbage, they look so healthy and green. Your freezer meals remind me of the times I've been getting ready to have a baby and have put away a bunch of meals in the freezer for the extra busy/tired days.

One of my favourites was moussaka. I'd cook up ground beef or lamb with onion and fresh herbs. Boil some potatoes or turnips (then slice them once cool), fry some zucchini slices and/or eggplant, make a white sauce, then in ovenproof glass freezer containers I'd layer the meat with the vegetables, top with a generous layer of white sauce, then grated cheese on top.

How long does your lemon curd keep for? All the recipes I've seen have said to only keep it for around a month in the fridge. I'd love to find a shelf-stable recipe.

So lovely to hear of others appreciating Permies too.

Having pie creates a green line, and then when you click on a topic, it takes you to the first post that you haven't read in that topic. I find it extremely helpful.

I have a monthly pie subscription, so that I never run out of this feature and never have to think about renewing.

Pie also helps Permies to keep running, so is a nice way to help out a little.

For white rice, I don't wash. For brown rice, I soak overnight, and then drain and rinse once.

Rico Loma wrote:Good to know your system, Kate.  Which grains are you using since it appears Taz is more temperate than the mainland? Barley perhaps?.

It was whole barley, with the hulls on. Corn is not very common here.

I had a 4 bucket system going last time we had pigs, so we'd put grain in one bucket every day, it would get fermented for four days, and then fed to the pigs.

I think in general pigs do better on wet food than dry food, so it's good for that reason, but I'm not sure if I noticed a huge difference in digestibility and feed economy on the times when we only soaked it overnight vs the times it went for a full four days.

Maybe for other grains it would make more of difference though.

As well as making tahini sauce and hummus, I like to use it in sweet recipes that call for peanut butter and other nut butters.