Giant Puffball Mushroom prepared and fried – YUM

We had the marvelous mushroom as an antipasto on Saturday. The weather was perfect and we had a barbecue on our deck overlooking the mountain. We peeled the mushroom and sliced it in to ‘steaks’ about 2 cm thick. It was pure white all the way through. We fried some of it in butter and garlic and dipped the rest in egg and breadcrumbs. I added a bit of olive oil to the butter and garlic in the pan and fried the mushroom slices. The batches of mushroom disappeared as soon as it hit the table and got rave reviews from every one. Thanks to our neighbour for one of the most exiting foodie gifts of the year!

Sunday Lunch from my garden

Just out of the oven: beetroot, turnip, whole garlic and rosemary, drizzled with a bit of olive oil, covered with foil and baked at 200 degrees for about 40 minutes.

Sunday lunch from the veg patch. I harvested several beetroots and (accidentally) one turnip. I cut the leaves from the bulbs but left about 1cm to stop the bulb from bleeding, washed the leaves well and put them in the fridge . The leaves will make another dish some time during the week. It took a bit of scrubbing to get the grit out of the beetroot without damaging the skin too much but that is one of the joys of backyard farming – the supermarkets stock things that have been cleaned/preserved/chemically bombed and one does not have to spend so much time on washing! I put everything in the pan and in to the oven. The taste was wonderful and the thick, rich beetroot juice mixed with the garlic and rosemary flavours on the bottom of the pan was sopped up with a bit of bread. The garlic is soft and spreadable and can be eaten with bread or squeezed out of the skins to eat on its own. What have I missed? The glass of red, of course!

Gaint Puffball

Roses are not my favorite plants (rose petals are not that nice), but my nabour’s rose bush has scored some major browny points today. As he went out to pick a rose for his dear wife, he found TWO Gaint Pufballs (Calvatia gigantea) growing under the rose bush. One of which he was kind enough to bring to me for dinner. Cutting it into strips then dipped in egg and fried with a few strips of pancetta mixed with tagliatelle makes wonderful “Tagliatelle ai Funghi” His wife unfortunately is still waiting on her roses.

Greed

“The resident Kereru has gulped down every cherry on the cherry tree. Now I want to see him handle last night’s plum windfall”

Inside the mind of a Quail

QUAIL WATER DRINKERS

I am a minimalist and like to use whatever is on hand, but won’t compromise on efficiency and quality of the end product. Plastic is definitely not my favorite material, but in today’s life you cannot avoid it, so why not use it and save it from landing in the garbage bin and become part of the world wastage problem. I use an old plastic milk and peanut butter bottle to make a very effective quail water drinker FOR FREE and in the process drastically reduced my carbon footprint.

Knowing quail babies love to climb on and into everything and during the first few days are very clumsy and petite, I used this knowledge to make a quail water drinker that encourages the little quails in the beginning to climb into the drinker to make water consumption easy, without being able to drown, get wet or get stuck in a corner. When they are a few weeks old and know their way around the brooder and eat and drink freely, I switch to a drinker that they cannot get into and spoil or soil the water.

Use a milk bottle and cut a large enough hole into both sides so the baby quails can freely enter and exit. Place a piece of wire netting (leftover from the last cage you built) inside to fit well with the sides turned slightly down so the netting is about 5 mm off the bottom of the bottle. Fill with water until the water touches the netting and you are ready. Cut the top off the milk bottle to make cleaning easy.

This will encourage the little quails to enter without any risk of drowning or getting wet.

Drinking made easy

When the quails are about two weeks old, I switch to adult Drinkers

Take used Milk and Peanut Butter Bottles. Any other bottle will work as long as it fits tightly inside the milk bottle. Cut off the top of the milk bottle. Cut a oval hole in the side small enough so a quail cannot enter it’s body, but large enough it can poke it’s head through – about a 30 mm opening and about 50 mm off the bottom.