The last of our Apollo tomatoes, grown indoors!
Over the past three years, we’ve completely changed the way we eat.
We used to be avid restaurant goers, dining at flashy hatted restaurants and exploring the local food scene. These days, we don’t eat out much at all.
It’s not because we can’t afford to, but rather that the food we’re now eating at home is so joyously fresh, so sublime in its simplicity, that a restaurant meal just doesn’t appeal like it used to. Since we’ve started growing our own vegetables, choosing our meat carefully and enjoying eggs from our chooks, every meal feels like a feast.
I often remind our sons how truly blessed we are – where else could we eat organically grown cucumbers ten minutes after they’ve been harvested, or ripe tomatoes grown to perfection without derris dust?
This week we were thrilled to finally bring in our first ever zucchinis, after last year’s failed attempts…
We’ve planted an assortment of dwarf bean seeds (Jade, Beanette, Royal Burgundy, Majestic, Plazza and Windsor Long Pod) and now harvest a bowlful every night for dinner. Each is subtly different in taste and appearance…
We continue to experiment and learn – the big lesson this season has been that sadly, potatoes in hessian sacks don’t work (at least not in our backyard). We were only able to grow a small quantity of tiny new potatoes – the photo below is of the entire crop from one of the sacks. Mind you, they were absolutely delicious, gently boiled and then tossed in a little butter, salt and chopped sorrel from the garden…
The beans and zucchini were stir-fried quickly with garlic, olive oil and butter – it’s always fun to watch the purple beans turn green as they cook…
Here was our meal – a thinly sliced Cape Grim scotch fillet steak, griddled rare, accompanied by our homegrown veg. A simple, everyday, feast.
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Beautiful, so beautiful…. I wanted to eat all of them… Thank you, with my love, nia
Thanks Nia! It’s always so nice to hear from you! :)
Celia, you and Pete are such an inspiration! I have a very hard time with gardening, as you know, it’s not easy for us to keep a garden going, for many reasons that are not worth getting into.
But, like you, our way of eating changed a lot in the past couple of years, to the point that when we eat out, the experience never satisfies us, in fact, more often than not we get a bit sick from it. Too much fat, or too heavy a meal, not sure why. Nowadays we go out for sushi, which we both love and always agrees with our “system” ;-)
There’s no better feasting than a great home cooked meal.
Sally, apart from a couple of restaurants that the boys particularly enjoy, we find that these days we only eat out when we’re with friends, so it’s actually for the company rather than the food. And I’ve found that I’m never blown away by a restaurant meal anymore. I guess we’ve just become very fussy!
Gardening has been a joy, but it’s hardly essential – in this day and age, it’s easy to buy wonderful produce almost everywhere! :)
Delicious, I love the pictures- and would dearly love to share in your feast!
I, too, have a hard time eating out- I sit there eating food I could have prepared much better, or eating a salad that I would have never considered serving at home.
You are an inspiration, Celia- thanks for sharing!
Heidi, you understand so well! I knew that when I saw the photo of Frank eating dinner! :)
Even if you can afford to eat out often, it can be disappointing and cooking at home is so enjoyable. Great post.
Thanks Greg! I know that not everyone has the time to grow their own or cook at home, but it really works for us! :)
Absolutely gorgeous, Celia! I echo the comment about you being an inspiration. I wish I could garden like that….. Thank you for sharing it all (especially for those of us in the depths of winter). :)
Abby, we really are novice gardeners, but we’ve turned over the whole backyard to it, so we’ve got lots of space. That’s the advantage of older kids not wanting to play in the yard anymore! :)
You should have heard us in the garden a couple of days ago, trying to figure out if the zucchinis were ready to harvest. “Do we wait until the flower falls off?” “I dunno, maybe we’re supposed to pick them before?” ;-)
everything looks so beautiful celia and i couldn’t agree more about restaurant eating..although i’ve never really enjoyed it that much..food with heart and soul is happiness..x
Jane, I know I keep saying this, but these days, our food feels real. I watch it grow, read up on it, make informed choices – it’s such a great joy!
Look at all those wonderful vegetables. I agree with eating out, that appeal just isn’t there anymore… and I don’t even have your wonderful garden. Most of the time I know it’s just going to be a lot more enjoyed if it’s simplified and eaten at home, using fresh local goodies that I know where it all came from. (except for maybe Red Lantern, and then I’ll happily go out :-)
We have a couple of restos that we love too, but we’re finding we only eat there once every few months, simply because there’s always something fresh in the garden, demanding to be eaten! :)
We now say the same thing, that we have become spoiled, as we grow so much of our own fruit and veg. The taste difference is incredible. But what I also notice is that cooking times for freshly picked veggies is pretty much half that of shop bought ! well done on growing your own :)
Claire, you’re right of course, we’ve been spoiled by the freshness of our homegrown produce! I think the shorter cooking times is due to the shorter storage times – often the veg for sale in the supermarket is weeks old! We also buy from growers markets, and find the produce there much fresher!
A feast indeed Celia. And a well deserved one too – I found that even my abortive attempts at growing things required a lot of effort and energy that I wasn’t prepared to commit. So full respect to you for making it work for you. Hopefully 2012 will be the year that I start to eat differently too. I’ve found a good co-op fairly locally who source all their veg as locally as possible and all organic, so I’m going to try and shop there more.
C, I don’t think it’s necessarily about growing your own as much as it is about making informed and considered choices. Your co-op sounds wonderful!
With all that fresh, organic produce, why would you eat out! I love the sound of your lifestyle. Picking fresh from your own property then using what you have to cook up a family feast. Very envious!
Charlie, we’re very blessed! :) I’ve been surprised how much room it takes to grow enough for dinner. But we’re slowly figuring out what works in our yard, and how to plant in intervals to try and ensure that we have a continuous supply!
A feast indeed Celia! Last night we ate or own zucchini, beans, silverbeet,potatoes and herbs… So fantastic! Even though the beans were picked days ago, they still snapped and crunched beautifully :)
Our families aren’t spoiled, they are abundantly blessed!
Becca, we really are blessed, aren’t we? Our potatoes have been ordinary this year, although I haven’t completely lost hope, and maybe the self-sown ones will produce a reasonable crop!
You have an amazing blog here and such wonderful photographs. I look forward to reading more.
Thanks Natalie! Nice to hear from you! :)
A beautiful meal! I don’t always succeed in growing as much as I’d like to but I generally manage to put something from the garden into each meal even if it’s only a bit of Parsley! The satisfaction of putting home grown produce on our plates is always worth the effort it takes in the garden!
Linda Maree, you’re so right! I think part of the learning process is figuring out what will and won’t grow in our individual yards!
Simple & fresh – it’s often the best way to eat, isn’t it ,Celia.
I have decided, after a 4th year of trying to grow tomatoes up on the hill, that it’s just not going to work for me. I’ve struggled with this as it was always so easy to get a brilliant crop down on the plain. This year I tried cherry tomatoes, after being advised that they grew well up here. I’m getting maybe 3 tomatoes a day – really not worth it for the effort so, that’s it for me.
I’ll be buying mine in future.
Amanda, we’ve tossed in the idea of growing tomatoes outside as well. Just too many fruitfly for us to grow them without dusting. We now buy ours at the markets for sauce, and we’ll probably always try and keep some in the enclosed verandah for salads. We can’t really change our climates! :)
Celia, I share your philosophy. We rarely, if ever, dine out. Peter does so only because his work sees him travelling around the country. By (largely) growing, sourcing and cooking your own food, you know what is in it, its provenance, its freshness and and so on. I hope to spend more time in our small kitchen garden this year so we can grow more. Thank you for sharing another wonderful post!
Lizzy, we do eat out, just not nearly as often as we used to. But it’s getting harder! :)
Now if I could only get the fairies to do the washing up…
We already have the chicken fairies doing the gardening.. ;-)
I too can relate to those sentiments Celia. A restaurant meal is more often than not terribly disappointing. And there is so much more joy (as well as taste and health benefits) in eating food we have made ourselves. Even better if we have grown it ourselves. The produce from your garden looks fantastic.
SG, you cook so well, I’m surprised that you ever eat out! :)
Yes I know what you mean. We [now] find eating out is usually a very expensive disappointment and, when there are huge servings, it’s also incredibly wasteful. I love this post Celia, it’s the every day meals that count so much.
Rose, it’s like discovering a secret, isn’t it? The food at home really IS better! :)
Your produce is always so wonderful looking. You had trouble w/ zucchini? Zucchini is pretty easy to grow here I think. I can’t wait to have a garden of some kind this year, now that we have our own house. Thank you for sharing your feast. It truly does make one not want to eat out anymore.
Mel, zucchinis are supposed to be easy to grow everywhere! They just didn’t work at all last year in our yard, but this year the plants seem to be doing really well. We’re very pleased! :)
I’m impatiently waiting to harvest my beans; they’re only beanlings at the moment. (honey keygold and brown beauty).
I pruned one of my figs to 1.5 metres this winter and imagine my suprise when a tomato appeared out of the middle it must have been in the compost.
Thank you for inspiring the rest of us to keep growing our own food.
Elaine, it’s wonderful to have fresh figs – our neighbour has two large trees, and they’re laden with fruit! Hope your beans are as successful as ours have been! :)
I so agree with you, eating out is over-rated most of the time. We don’t have a garden but in the summer we enjoy fresh market vegetables, so I can only imagine how wonderful it would be to step out your door and harvest your own.
Smidge, buying our fruit and veg at the markets was how it all began, it’s amazing how addictive the freshness is! :)
My mother is the nicest person you can imagine but her cooking skills are to this day solidly out of the 1950’s. Veg came in cans and the only spices were salt, pepper and catsup. So as soon as I moved out i loved eating in restaurants because everything was so much better than what I was used to. Then two things happened, I ate a little hippy place in Malibu (http://www.innoftheseventhray.com/) that served amazing fresh food, and I learned to cook. That was thirty or more years ago and I haven’t looked back.
I love cooking for my mencats and I can cook way better food at home then anything we can get at most restaurants. So here’s to growing fresh food and eating well.
Maz
Maz, I remember Pete’s mum telling me that in the 70s packaged food was all the rage and incredibly liberating. Seems we’ve come full circle! :)
It all looks delicious.
Thank you! :)
Having been lucky enough to dine at Chez Celia and Pete’s, I can say that your food is just brimming with freshness and flavour! :D
We will have to organise another dinner soon – we loved having you guys over!
Absolutely heavenly and so satisfying Celia. You cannot beat a meal using homegrown veg! Awesome stuff. I have only planted a selection of herbs to date this being home as we are now waiting to find out if and or when we are going to do a contract in Namibia for 3 years…
:-) Mandy
Mandy, what interesting lives you and Pete live! I hope you’re home long enough to enjoy the fruits of the fig tree!
I have my eye on the tree every day Celia, they are not quite there yet! My mom did notice one lonesome little fig that is nearly ready… if we do go to Namibia, we should still be home for a couple of months. :-)
What a lovely meal! One of the big let downs in restaurants is often the vegetables. Maybe restaurants of the future will have their own ktichen gardens attached and you can go out and select your own veggies (bit like those ones where you choose your own lobster etc) and then the chef prepares them for you. I have just got some exciting new seeds to try this summer in my little veg bed, don’t know where we will fit them all in if they germinate. I have to say we went out for the first time in ages to a local restaurant and really enjoyed it. It was a real treat for us not to cook and enjoy someone else’s cooking for a change. When I was growing up, restaurants were for birthdays only and always special :)
Jo, I don’t remember eating out much either when we were growing up, but my sons have been eating out all their lives! Sign of the times, I guess. I’m glad you found a local restaurant that you and B liked!
We don’t eat out often, and I must say that I love eating a good meal out. No poking my brain for an inspired dinner idea – I mean, how depressing is it when P can guess what’s for dinner just by a quick sniff of the air … so I wish we’d go out more often. Not expensive meals or restaurants where I might feel underdressed in something nice from my closet, but just a good pub meal. Or a curry. I mean I’ve only had 2 curry meals in a restaurant, and both were in Leicester years ago.
So before I waffle along too long, I’ll just summarise by saying, I WANT TO GO OUT FOR DINNER!!
Okay, I’ll go back to the kitchen now … :D
Misk, maybe you could give us your hubby’s contact details, and we can start dropping subtle hints? ;-)
I have to say, I do love a good curry.. :)
Eat in.
But lock the doors, there are a few people in this list who may gate-crash…
Thank you, dear Cosmo, you’re very kind! :)
Oh yes you are very lucky. Chickens and vegies, very special. I try to cook everything but I do LOVE restaurants ( although I am often disappointed !). Feast onwards
Thanks Tania! You too! :)
We have an abundant crop of butternuts at the moment, they are literally growing like weeds! Our little Rosa tomatoes are also doing nicely. You can’t beat eating something you have grown yourself……that said Himself gets quite carried away and we all have to ooh and ah over his produce even before we eat it! :)
Hahaha…Sue, we do a bit of that too! Ooooh, aaaah, look boys at what we’ve grown! :)
We’ve planted our first ever pumpkins, little golden nuggets, and they’re just starting to bear fruit!
I love gardening and at one time I did have one…now as you know I live in an apartment in Manhattan and the only thing I grew was basil and mint. Hey I still have little mint leaves growing.
I still wish we were neighbors….
Norma, I wonder if you could grow tomatoes indoors like we have?
I think I must have started my veggies too late, or probably it is the poor summer we are having, but my tomatoes have not yet ripened – hopefully they will before winter gets here. It is wonderful to be able to pick your own veggies.
About the chia mentioned in Choclette’s blog, Renaissance Herb sell the plant – Salvia hispanica. I have one growing at the moment and will be interested in gathering the seed. I can’t remember where I bought it but it could have been Bunnings or maybe Plant r Us at Kingsford.
Carmen, it HAS been a really mild summer, hasn’t it? We didn’t really get any hot days until January! As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve given up on growing tomatoes outside in our neighbourhood – we can’t seem to grow them without dusting. Thanks for the tip on the chia seed!
What a lovely, lovely post! I feel refreshed just reading it!
The family and I ate out recently to a local pub. I was tired and I simply could not cook. I was horrified to see that I ordered a chicken wrap that contained reconstituted chicken. I didn’t eat it. Though sometimes my meals don’t quite work out as well as it did in my head, I’ve never been that disappointed.
Thanks Sonia! You’re right of course, it’s hard to be really disappointed when you’re cooking at home (our exception is the dreaded Apricot Lamb which I attempted some twenty years ago. It’s still spoken about in hushed tones.. :)).
Oh I love how they all turned out… and fresh from the garden :)
Thanks Tes! :)
Celia, it’s very hard to find a restaurant that can beat a good home cooked meal and you excel at good home cooked meals – I’d rather eat with you any day.
Choc, you know we’d love that! We’d try out new vegetarian dishes, and then we’d attack the chocolate stash!! :)
this sure looks like a good feast, and love the fact that everything is fresh from the garden :)
btw celia, i tried your fruit sourdough recently and I’ve a few questions – mine didn’t rise enough and was a tad “kuih-like”, if you know what i mean. Just wondering if the 200g of sourdough in the recipe refers to a freshly fed sourdough? I used about 60g of my 60% sourdough and added flour and water to make it 166% (can’t rmber the exact amounts now) and then used that sourdough and followed the rest of your recipe. The sourdough rose when I was feeding it, but failed to rise well after I added the rest of the ingredients – any idea why? Or should I have added the fruits and nuts later?
Thanks for any advice :) Ps – I sure love the flavor of the bread though! Mine turned slightly lilac too!
Janine, thanks for trying out the recipe! :)
In almost every sourdough recipe, the quantity of sourdough will refer to a ripe and ready to go starter. What you’ve actually done is make the bread dough using just 60g of active starter instead of 200g. As a result the dough didn’t rise well during the first prove.
Because of all the added fruit, the finished loaf will be moister than most sourdough loaves, but it shouldn’t really be like kuih! :)
thanks for the clarification Celia!
So this means that I should just grab the sourdough from the fridge (even though say I fed it a few days ago) and use it in a recipe?
Janine, no, you can never use sourdough straight from the fridge, at least not in my experience. It always needs at least one or two feeds first to get it ready, otherwise you’ll end up with a flat loaf! I always take my starter out of the fridge at least 12 hours before I start baking and give it a couple of feeds. Depending on how it responds, it might need more time and feeding before it’s ready to go. My own personal rule is that the starter has to be very bubbly and frothy before I start baking, or I wait. :)
PS. If you’re in the tropics or have a very warm kitchen, the starter might not need quite as long to be ready.
thanks for the pearls of wisdom celia! Once I finish up this loaf of fruit sourdough, I’ll try it again to see if I get better results :)
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of eating home-grown food. Even if it’s just a few beans fresh from the garden it’s so unbelievably satisfying not to mention all the other benefits. Thanks for all your inspiration Celia!
Claire, it’s such great fun! I’m about to head into the garden now to see what we have for dinner tonight! :)
Feasting sums it up perfectly! You know I understand every word you’re saying and completely agree! Eating fresh from the garden fills our souls and completes us. Eating out, no matter how good can never compete with this feeling. Keep doing what you’re doing, Celia, you’re an inspiration to all home food gardeners. :)
PS I love standing over the pot waiting for the ‘exact’ moment the purple beans turn green too!
Chris, yep, I know YOU understand! And I think you put it very well – it really does complete us. Your garden is looking amazing at the moment! :)