Leisure Time

In between gardening, foraging in the tip shop and herding escapee cattle back into the paddocks, we like to spend some of our leisure time checking out the local attractions.  And we've managed to land ourselves right on the edge of a beautiful wine region.  Just like our previous home in the Perth Hills, we've lots of lovely wineries to explore.  Just as well we like wine huh!!

This weekend we had our very good friends M and N stay with us for a night. So we decided to take them for lunch at Green Door Wines.  Apart from doing some stonking good wines (their Chardonnay is a standout along with their Tempranillo) they also do amazing platters for lunch.  We ordered the Mile High which comes with our favourite, local soft cheese, Halls Suzette.  If you love soft rind cheeses, it's worth your while hunting out some Halls Suzette.  Lovely, delightfuly creamy and packed full of flavour.  Green Door use very local, high quality produce on their platters. They're worth going out of your way for.  Oh....and we tried the pastizzi this time. Small crispy pastry parcels of goodness.  Yum, yum, yum!!

Green Door Wines

Halls Family Dairy – Proudly Dairy Farming Since 1980

We were lucky to be blessed with a glorious, sunny day so we sat at one of their outside tables.  Check out the views.

Before we knew it, a good three or four hours of the day had completely disappeared.  But what a way to while away a few hours.

Another winery we've been keen to check out is Talisman Wines which has only recently opened it's cellar door.  Our very good friend G visited Talisman with us when he stayed a few weekends ago. Talisman makes many award-winning wines.  We like all of them but have a soft spot for their Shiraz and Chardonnay.  Oh, and if you think we're slightly barking going for Chardonnays, modern Chardonnays are nothing like the wines of the 80s.  If you've not tried one for a while, get out there and get tasting.  I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Home - Talisman Wines

This is the view from the Talisman tasting room.  What's not to love.

The only problem with wine tasting, aside from getting tipsy, is that....it can be a wee bit expensive on the old hip pocket!!  Just saying. 

Out Bush

 We are lucky to be surrounded by beautiful bush in our little patch of paradise. In fact, there is a sizeable portion of state forest directly across the road from our house.  We love driving through it every day on the way to and from work.  The other thing we love doing is either walking in the forest or gathering wood for our fire. Of course, we stick to the rules and only take wood that is on the ground in designated collecting areas.  And that kind of decides which bits of forest we'll visit.

Most recently we visited a bit of the Wellington Forest called the Arcadia block. It is a truly beautiful bit of bush.  Although, the road in has not seen a grader for years it's seems. There is more corrugation than road.  But it's worth the bone rattling journey to while away an hour or so and spend some time sitting on a log just enjoying the peace and quiet.

Here are some pics.

Once again proving that I am not a photographer.  But hopefully you'll get some idea of how beautiful it is.  If you visit we'd love to take you out for a day in the bush. 

Tip Shop Find

Our local tip operates a tip shop.  Well, it is more tip than shop but every now and then we find a bargain.  Including two rusty old inner tubs from washing machines.  These were full of rust, full of possibility and cost us the grand total of $2.50 each.  They looked just the right size for some spuds we were planning to plant.  Given the cost of pots has risen astronomically of late, a pot of this size will set you back about $300, these seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

They were covered with a lot of rust which R scrubbed off with a wire brush.

And they weren't the most attractive looking.

But after a quick spray with some rust converter and a couple of cans of enamel, wullah, they magically transformed into two, lovely, orange and marone garden beds for spuds.  For the grand total of about $30 each.

Orange and marone are two of my favourite colours.  They remin me of the lovely autumn leaves.  And the fading in of the red on the orange was inspired by the amazing work that T and S did on the letterbox for L and F.  S convinced me it was easier than it looks to do. So I gave it a go.  And I'm very happy with the end result.

The potatoes are growing away quite happily.  Let's hope they're productive.  I guess there'll be a post about that somem time anon.

Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes

One of my favourite things about Summer is a slice of buttered toast loaded up with thinly sliced, lightly salted, fresh tomato.  With this in mind we sowed a range of different tomato seeds in early September so that we could have well developed seedlings in the ground by Summer.  Our seed raising was really successful, so we had a bunch of plants to put in the ground.  We planted six in total (far too close together as mentioned in an earlier blog) and left the rest in the seed raising trays to do something with another time.   And then there were the volunteer tomatoes.  We whittled those down to a handful of the strongest plants.  The end result is that we had a veritable glut of tomatoes.  And there are only so many slices of tomato on toast a girl can eat!!

So we got busy in the kitchen.  Firstly, we turned about 5 kilos of tomatoes into tomato sauce.  I used Matt Preston's recipe which you can find on Delicious.com if you're interested in giving it a go.  It's very tasty but heavy on the sugar. I guess that's why it keeps though.  I did reduce the sugar and it seems to be keeping just fine.

Six kilos of tomatoes cooking in the pan.

Next, we preserved about the same number of tomatoes for use during winter. I used the Vacola method.  Chop the tomatoes, or leave them whole if they're small, and pack as many as you can into a sterilized jar.  Top with two teaspoons of lemon juice and a teaspoon of salt, or a tablespoon of lemon juice if you prefer, and water. After you've put the rings, lids and clips on in the normal way, load the bottles into your preserver. Then fill with water until it reaches about three quarters of the way up the jars, and slowly bring it up to 92 degrees Celsius.  Maintain that temperature for between 30 and 60 minutes (depending which instructions you follow). 

Five kilos of tomatoes waiting to be processed.

Chopping some heirloom tomatoes.

Tomatoes in the jar

There is sure a huge amount of work involved in making sauce and preserving tomatoes.  It seemed like we'd never get to the end of chopping and R developed some new muscles pushing the tomatoes through the sieve to remove the seeds and skins for the sauce.  But it was all worth it. Look at the end result!!

Oh, and we dried several kilos in the dehydrator as well.  Or, semi-dried them at least.  They've been portioned into usable amounts and are sitting in the freezer, waiting to be added to something delicious. 

We are a little over tomatoes now.  And there are still plenty on the vines to deal with.  But we did enjoy making the most of our harvest, including giving loads away.  I'm sure by next Summer we'll be ready to do it all over again.  Assuming we have an equally successful crop.