I have a flock of very cute Chinese painted quail (or button quail) and they are obviously very happy because they lay lots of eggs! They are just like chickens in that they can lay an egg every day or so and you can tell who laid which egg from the individual markings on them - just like a chook egg! But as cute as they are, they are not as practical as a chook egg. A couple of fried quail eggs on toast is great for the littles but the husband isn't so rapt with his dozen fried fairy eggs on toast! I'm not about to give up the quails and they aren't about to stop laying so over time I have come up with some good ideas for using quail eggs that highlights their uniqueness rather than just adding four or five quail eggs to a recipe to replace one chook egg. Here's what I do... Scotched eggs - bite sized version of the normal version. Hard boil the quails eggs, peel, wrap in sausage meat and bake until cooked. Cut a few in half so your guests realise they'...

I got given a couple of chokos that were sprouting by a friend and so having a garden that grows things these days, I planted it. Its been a while since I had a choko vine... I'm thinking upwards of 15 years or so and I had completely forgotten how many chokos a single vine can produce in so few weeks! And I may have planted more than one! When the first few chokos appeared, I waiting impatiently for them to get big enough to pick. We ate them steamed with butter - de-lish-ious! I got a bit more adventurous with the next handful and had them stuffed (good fun) and make fritters with them (bit boring - needs a good sauce) and then I plumb ran out of ideas. The chokos however, continued to multiply and hung green and accusingly, growing plumper each day. I grated them into nachos, I chopped them into strews and I baked them with the weekly roast but still they grew! I got desperate to do something with my most successful garden crop and after a quick search on the net - a ne...

I like baking bread! I love experimenting with different ideas, techniques, shapes, glazes, and ingredients. I'm not the worlds greatest cake baker - my friend Maureen holds that title, but I seem to have an affinity with bread baking. The other day a friend of mine asked where I was buying my bread and was very surprised to discover that I baked it all. He said he was paying $6 a loaf for stuff that looked like mine. It got me to wondering if it was better to buy or to bake bread - what are your thoughts? Here's what I do... Bread is a food staple. There aren't many people in our culture who don't eat bread at some point of the day - as toast for breakfast, sandwiches or wraps for lunch, as a roll on the side with dinner or even as the base of the pizza! You can buy it as cheaply at about a dollar a loaf for the supermarket branded white mass produced stuff and up to $10 a loaf for the hand made, filled with good stuff, artesian loaf from a specialised bakery...

A friend gave me a bunch (a bushel? a peck? a lot, anyway) of Pomellos that he had growing on his tree. Pomellos are a bit like a really big grapefruit. Its a citrus at any rate! Since I had a ton of lemons and a couple of oranges already, I decided to make a tri-citrus marmalade! I wasn't in the mood to stand at the stove all day since it was so glorious outside, and when I was washing up the dishes (yes, from last night) I looked at the slow cooker and wondered... "can you make marmalade (or jam) in a slow cooker?" It turns out the answer is yes! Here's what I did...

After reading a lot about the benefits of eating real foods, I decided to go a bit more "natural" with my cooking oils. I have come to realise that a lot of vegetable oils are made using all sorts of awful chemical processes that I couldn't hope to replicate in my kitchen - making them so altered from their natural state they couldn't come under the heading of real food anymore. Olive oil has been a standard in our house but its not so good at high temperatures, so I needed something that was able to withstand the heat of a stir fry for example, and then I remembered Ghee. Its just clarified butter. Butter is nice and natural and can be made in my very own kitchen so therefore its not a complicated industrial process. Ghee is even simpler and quicker to make than the actual butter itself. The reason butter smokes and burns is that its full of dairy "solids". Once you melt the butter and start to heat it, those solids start to burn, turning your butter ...

I have been making flavoured black teas for a while and for Christmas I wanted to give some away as gifts. While I like the ritual of boiling the kettle, getting out all the tea paraphernalia and concocting my brew to suit my mood, I realise that not all my friends and family like to go to that much trouble. They prefer the speed and conveyance of the tea bag - so taking the path of least resistance I decided to have a go at making my own tea bags - especially for them - as I very rarely use them! Its a bit complicated, fiddly and hard to explain but read through the whole post so you can see how each step leads to the end product... Once you get it though, you've got it! Here's what I did... I bought these at the local supermarket for about $2.50 Each filter made one bag so if you know how many bags you want to make you'll know how many filter packs to buy! I only had a choice of this packet or nothing so I thought I'd bring it home and experiment. I w...

I love a cup of tea! I've never been a coffee drinker and as I've got older (and have a bit more pay in my pocket) I've moved on from the 500 teabags for $2 type cuppa to more sophisticated brews with added flavourings. I prefer the Earl Grey over the English Breakfast and I'm very, very fond of the Lady Grey. For a while there was a Russian Earl Grey in the local Woolworths that we really loved and it disappeared from the shelves never to be seen again before we could stock up on it. When we go into the city, we stop at the local T2 or Tea Centre and stock up on exotic smelling teas that are just divine (albeit not very frugal). I have bought flavoured teas online, from market stalls and from small shops that come and go around the area. I've dabbled in making your own Chai tea from scratch which works well if you have the time and aren't expecting the type of chai tea you will get in a tea bag. One day, when reading the ingredients list on the back o...