Hard News: Slumpy Cashflow
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What I want to know is, when living off the land in New Zealand, how do I make mochachinos.
Cocoa and coffee beans grown under glass?
(and no Baldrick recipes!)
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Apologies if that damages your brain, Kyle.
I was with you until you said C6H12O6. Which seriously, that's not chemistry, that's a robot off star wars, stop trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
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I'm planing to build myself a death ray robot, to protect my herb garden from computer geeks.
all ur herbs r belong to us.
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I'd rather just gorge on the fresh fruit than spending hours making what I could buy in minutes for the cost of a few minutes work.
yeah, but compare those alexandrian nectarines with the supermarket ones, and translate that through daleaways rather impressive ennerding of cookery.
jams are not created equal.
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Microwaving works by cooking things from the inside out..
Not really. It uses microwave energy to vibrate the water molecules in things, but microwave energy still has to penetrate the food, from the outside in. Anyone who's tried to reheat a big slab of lasagne or something else solid will know that you get cold patches in the middle unless you stir things around a bit.
If you think of microwaving as a type of steaming or boiling, you'll get some idea of the recipes it works for. Basically it suits anything with an interior liquid content. Fat, it doesn't work so well on.
It works pretty well for melting butter. What it's really hard to do is get the Maillard reaction - getting the fat up to a temperature higher than the boiling point of water so that it caramelises the sugar in things. Reliably and evenly. My sister once heated chocolate to beyond the melting point of the plastic container, and I've had little bits of bacon crisp a bit round the edges.
But yes. It's very similar to steaming in that you usually don't get things above 100C.
Apparently, birds flying into the path of microwave transmitters don't do too well, if they're close enough to the source.
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Apparently, birds flying into the path of microwave transmitters don't do too well, if they're close enough to the source.
Maillard ducks?
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Maillard ducks?
not quickly enough, obviously.
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That's OK unless you have several hundred fruit, berry & nut trees - it is such a waste to see the birds get everything you can't eat or palm off on friends & rellies.
Heh, just watch me do a Homer impression...But, rethink the usage of the land? Different crops for a continuous yield? Several hundred trees says 'farm' to me rather than 'garden', though :-)
Good storage sounds like an easy alternative plan.
What I want to know is, when living off the land in New Zealand, how do I make mochachinos.
Cocoa and coffee beans grown under glass?
I grow coffee under glass (well actually it's a plastic greenhouse). My advice is to buy the damned stuff. You just need too many plants for it to be viable beyond a once-a-year cup to satisfy your curiosity. Tea and coffee are reeeaally labor intensive, which probably explain why they mostly come from the third world.
jams are not created equal.
Hmmm, could be true. I've never eaten a commercial feijoa jam to know...but I could chow my way through the yield of one tree easily.
Unless you've got acres of land, you can't really live off it, so that does imply that you can easily eat everything it produces, fresh.
If you do have acres you're a farmer, and selling the excess produce is clearly the best use...
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I's confused. Maillard reaction does not equal caramelisation. They just look and taste very similar. They both need higher temperatures than 100C though.
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Heh, just watch me do a Homer impression...But, rethink the usage of the land? Different crops for a continuous yield? Several hundred trees says 'farm' to me rather than 'garden', though :-)
I have two apple trees at my house, and I can't eat the yield off one of them. Last year I got about 20 buckets of apples off one of them (it's a monster). Made 25 litres of cider, half a dozen litres of juice, and about 10 apple pies.
Sadly the cider turned out to be barely drinkable (but nicely alcoholic). The apple pies though... OMG.
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Re coffee: you can get 1-2kg per tree, per year, in good conditions. Anywhere apart from the very warmest part of the North Island is likely to be marginal, since the trees won't stand frost and seem to go dormant at 10C or below.
The cherries don't ripen all at once, and they need fiddly treatment to get the bean out from the pulp safely, so it's a very labour-intensive crop. I understand this is why some Australian farms are getting out of coffee, even though their product is excellent: they simply can't get it to market it cheap enough.
If you were serious about "living off the land" in NZ then the only consistent way to get coffee is to trade some delicious speciality of your own for it, which will make it the rare treat it was for your great-greatparents.
Tea might be a better bet. I think tea bushes tolerate more temperate conditions, and there have been various ventures to grow it here over the years.
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Several hundred trees says 'farm' to me rather than 'garden', though :-)
Technically it's a small orchard. Predominantly macadamia nuts, but pretty much at least one of everything else too.
I have to admit, the only fruit we've bought since we owned it has been bananas.
On the home cooking front, at least one mother will be making us crab apple jelly. Which is nice, we probably wouldn't bother to ourselves.
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Maillard reaction: Here comes the chemistry. I have a book at home that gets into that kind of detail about baking.
Ben, rather than take the space arguing I'm just going to assert that I find culinary, economic and lifestyle sense in occasional pickling. You don't understaaand!
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Made 25 litres of cider
Ah. Now you may be talking Kyle. Got a foolproof recipe? It has to be foolproof, I've brewed wine before & all but alcohol poisoned all my friends on one occasion at least.
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If you were serious about "living off the land" in NZ then the only consistent way to get coffee is to trade some delicious speciality of your own for it, which will make it the rare treat it was for your great-greatparents.
If you're serious about living off the land, you should be making your 'coffee' out of dandelion root like a real hippy.
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Alison Holst Microwave Cookbook. Apricot jam. Yum.
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Sadly the cider turned out to be barely drinkable (but nicely alcoholic).
OK, looks like we're from the same school of brewing. I'll weigh in with my story of home made saki one day... our front room resembled a scene from 300 at one stage, there were so many bodies littered across it. Comatose fortunately, not dead.
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Comatose fortunately, not dead.
And I'm just appalled at the binge drinking culture of today's youth.
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Well that slowdown ain't here yet:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/3/story.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10500670
Best part of that is that it was driven by business plant investment -
I have two apple trees at my house
As I recall the bad news is you need two trees to get apples.
I only have ginger beer experience - my only guess would be to favour a 'quick' brew; that is, drink pretty much immediately. My thought being any imperfections in your sterility shouldn't have enough time to take hold. I'm guessing that's what made me really really ill that time. So on second thoughts, don't listen to me.
This plan would also make for something of a drunken autumn.
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Ben, rather than take the space arguing I'm just going to assert that I find culinary, economic and lifestyle sense in occasional pickling. You don't understaaand!
Nah, I do understand. Just giving my particular reasons why it isn't for me. The real main one is I don't eat much jam and I love fresh fruit. Everything else is just justifying that....
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Maillard reaction: Here comes the chemistry. I have a book at home that gets into that kind of detail about baking.
Ben, rather than take the space arguing I'm just going to assert that I find culinary, economic and lifestyle sense in occasional pickling. You don't understaaand!
I have a book like that, on the chemistry of cooking, by a guy called Harold McGee. Very useful.
I don't have a microwave - don't like the effect on most foods and they take up a lot of room. Now a toaster oven I would use if I could find a reliable one (they die). They are useful for toasting that small pan of croutons/pumpkin seeds/blue cheese rusks/bulbs of garlic/stringbeans & red peppers with olives, garlic and balsamic/almonds/pinenuts/sunflowerseeds/hazelnuts/brazilnuts and especially for heating up things like croissants and hot cross buns. They're great if you don't want to heat up the whole oven for one garnish, and usually it's a garnish or side dish that absolutely makes a meal. Like ovendried tomatoes - I don't want to put my whole oven on for 1.5 hours to dry some tomatoes for a dish, but it's worth it in an toaster oven, and they are so crucial to so many dishes.
Having said that I don't have/don't want a microwave, I can imagine they could produce a particularly good jam, as cooking time would be reduced and I think you lose a lot of flavour there, certainly the kitchen smells good. But like Kyle said, there's just something wrong about the whole thing, when applied to jam.
Jam making, yes I love jam making. Here I just make boring old whatever-berries-I-can-buy jam, or strawberry-rhubarb, (3/4:1/4 - the rhubarb freshens up the flavour of the berries, which tends to be drowned out by the amount of sugar you have to put in to make it set. Even when you reduce the sugar by 1/2 or 2/3 the jam is still plenty sweet, and much more berry tasting.
In Vancouver just out of the city the woods are full of the best jam making berries - salal berries, salmonberries, blackberries (not the muscular, sour things they sell here, but fat sweet ones) and my favourite, the bright orange-red huckleberries, almost too delicious to make it home with the others, but crucial to the ideal jam.
The salal berries are delicious but they have a kind of furry, slightly fibrous velvet centre which is not ideal to eat but which has the magical property of being a super-source of pectin and will set your jam without any having to add any. The fibres disappear into a gelatinous jam texture. The mixture only needs sugar and lemon juice, which activates the thickening properties of the pectin. It is possibly the best tasting jam in the world, and now I am dissatisfied with my boring strawberry rhubarb or raspberry (__expensive__ to make raspberrry) jams.
Gathering the berries is very pleasant but good to take a dog as you don't want to surprise a bear with a cub while you're gathering fruit to make jam.
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Ah. Now you may be talking Kyle. Got a foolproof recipe? It has to be foolproof, I've brewed wine before & all but alcohol poisoned all my friends on one occasion at least.
No, my foolproof recipe involved asking my friend how he did it. The first time I tried it, we grated the apples (whole) and poured boiling water over them, left for a week, then got out the liquid. That was bad.
Second time (I asked the friend) I juiced the apples, added a small amount of yeast and sugar, left in a homebrew barrel, and then bottled. The ones I put in plastic were... well bad. The ones I put in glass bottles were drinkable, but not nice. Harsh, bitter taste.
But alcoholic, so at least I got one thing right.
As I recall the bad news is you need two trees to get apples.
I only have ginger beer experience - my only guess would be to favour a 'quick' brew; that is, drink pretty much immediately. My thought being any imperfections in your sterility shouldn't have enough time to take hold. I'm guessing that's what made me really really ill that time. So on second thoughts, don't listen to me.
This plan would also make for something of a drunken autumn.
No, surely apples don't require cross-... whatever the term is. I thought they were... do it yourself breeders (see, I'm very scientific with the language).
I do ginger beer as well - alison groftons ginger beer plant recipe that we found online. Good stuff.
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a belated response to the pickle of the unwise property investor:
I note in the Herald article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10500398Investor 'Big Sam of Maketu' lost $532k he had *borrowed on his mortgage* his house had previously been unmortgaged and he doesn't now how he will afford to service his new mortgage.
Sorry, no sympathy, for private people to borrow to invest is just mad. Greed is not good.
well no greed is never good, but to be fair the hard sells around property were coming in thick and fast from every which direction even just a few short months ago...
by way of example someones-I-know of extremely fiscally prudent stripe, were literally hectored by their accountant because they were failing to leverage the on-paper equity gains in their home by taking down a loan and reinvesting -in property of course.
being very very prudent and turtle cautious, as already noted, they didnt do it. but the relentless well meaning advice and the hyperbole about massive capital gain other people were achieving was starting to wear down even that well developed caution and they were actually thinking about it.
if there's a character developing lesson here perhaps its not to give too much weight to the opinions of financial advisors like investment analysts, mortgage brokers, accountants and bankers?
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__If you were serious about "living off the land" in NZ then the only consistent way to get coffee is to trade some delicious speciality of your own for it, which will make it the rare treat it was for your great-greatparents.__
If you're serious about living off the land, you should be making your 'coffee' out of dandelion root like a real hippy.
Good point. Coffee grows up mountains in hot countries.
But the good news: food miles don't apply to coffee. It's a drink, silly.
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