You’ve just got to use the right sort of plums – bright red ones that grow on one of our trees. They are too tart for eating fresh, but make a *brilliant* morning greeting when stewed with a little apple and left with oats soaking in them overnight.

After six months in South East Asia, we got to a ger in the north side of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where Soymbo bakes her bread each night. (she does it late at night in order to make the most of the cheaper electricity rate then)

Asia is famous for many things, but bread is not one of them, so Soymbo’s bread was a real treat. When we made it the other day, after months of European bread and our own bread specialties including a favourite sourdough, it didn’t turn out as special as it had seemed at the time. The crunch of eggshells was less easily overlooked from the comfort of our own home – even if they add calcium!

The recipe is given as she explained it to me as we baked together. Why it is done in the order stated is a mystery; our cross-linguistic skills did not extend to such intricacies.

3 dried eggshells, ground in mortar and pestle
20g instant yeast (that’s about 1T)
Mix together

10g baking soda
20g salt
Dissolve in 1l of warm water

~1.2kg flour
Mix with the yeast/shell mixture, then add most of the water mixture slowly

500ml water
Add to the reamining water solution and mix into the dough, adding flour as necessary until the bowl and your hand are clean.
If you don’t have a big enough bowl (as Soymbo didn’t), mix as much as possible in whatever sized bowl you have, taking a clump out and setting it aside until all the water is mixed in.
Knead well for ten minutes.
Rest for 40 minutes, covered in a warm place. It might have been below zero outside the ger, but inside, with the fire blazing it was closer to 30 degrees centigrade, and so a warm place was not hard to find. In our relatively cooler New Zealand summer, I found it takes over an hour for the dough to double in size, as it needs to.
Form into 4 large loaves and place on an oven tray.
Leave to rise some more and bake at 180*C for about 30-40 minutes.

PS I think if I added seeds to the bread, no-one would notice the eggshell

Over the past four weeks, the four bigest kids (aged eleven to fifteen) have been responsible for all the cooking. They have had turns at preparing the breakfast each day, baking the bread and organising dinner. Before anyone cries *slave labour*, please allow me to point out that they are entitled to ask for help. I have promised to always say YES, and on occasion siblings have pitched in to help as well. It’s just that the responsibility for seeing the job gets done lies with the kids. It’s been an eye-opening month for them!

Things they’ve learnt:

• If you want to roast a chicken tonight, it would have been a good idea to take it out of the freezer yesterday.
• When Mama says to cut the eggplants very thinly (and offers to show you or even do it for you), she means Very Thinly. If you cut them chunkily, you will have to take them out of the moussaka…..yes, even if you have already layered all the pieces between dollops of meat sauce. Then, because they are so thick, you will have to fry them up before putting the reassembled concoction in the oven.
• Use a recipe if you’ve never made white sauce before. Just because everyone else in the family does it by throwing various ingredients into a pot, it doesn’t mean the uninitiated can do the same.
• Pizza is not an easy dinner. You have to make the crust, you have to make the sauce, you have to grate the cheese, and even though by now you don’t feel like it, you might as well pick some herbs from the garden too.
• Soaked oats *is* a favourite breakfast after all <wink>
• Cooking takes so long.

Well that’s meant to be the plan anyway.

You moosh up three garlic bulbs in a blender half filled with water.
You strain the resulting glug through a sieve.
Deciding that it’s still too gluggy, you then strain it through a small square of muslin as well.
You make the resulting liquid up to two litres with water (having done mental gymnastics to render the recipe to a size that will fit in the bottles we have on hand…and adjusted the resulting concentrates….and all that from American quarts and gallons with a measuring jug that had only pints – or the other way round or something equally confusing)

Finally you take two tablespoons of the concentrate and add it to two litres of water with an optional one tablespoon of vegetable oil, all in a garden sprayer and you spray away at the little fluffy bums on the blueberry bushes. You then attack invite to the party their parents, the vine hoppers, currently residing on the rhubarb and lone sunflower.

And you think about taking photos all the way through the process, and know you would have if you’d been travelling, but you don’t bother coz you’re not, even though today you’d like to be, but you’re at home in ever-so-normal land, where the excitement of the day is learning to deal to bugs in the garden in a non-pesticidey way.
And if you’re Jgirl15, you wonder if the blueberries will taste of garlic. And you concede at least they will not have all the life sucked out of them.

At least, if the kids take the lemonade bottle off the garden shelf in the garage and take a swig, they will NOT die. Or ever do it again!

Then you go and take photos!

PS All the garlic sludge, we saved. It’s sitting in the fridge in a little surprisingly big jar, looking just like the expensive jars of mushed garlic you can buy at the supermarket

how did it happen so quickly? we can’t even see the dirt! it’s a veritable forest

Dadda getting a new job last week was deemed a grand excuse for the kids to decorate in celebration and congratulations.

The food was good too. A three course meal even. What’s more, there was homemade punch, instead of water in our glasses.

Vegetable samosas for starters.
CurryKingJboy14’s curry served on rice for mains.
Chocolate-covered custard puffs, cream puffs and teeny slice of cheesecake with a momentous dollop of whipped cream completed the meal (all desserts courtesy of The Mad Butcher )

Yes, there’s a roast chicken. Hint: the flesh will be removed.
There are some zucchini and beetroot. Hint: they will be grated raw.
There’s a big bowl too. In that already is one and a half kilos of couscous cooked in 7 1/2 cups of boiling water with 3T cumin, 2T coriander and 1 1/2T cinnamon. There’s a good handful of sultanas, another of pumpkin seeds, a few poppy seeds that fell off the bread we were making, half a dozen apricots (sliced), a pumpkin (roasted and cut into chunks) and six or seven carrots given the pumpkin treatment.

Everything will be mixed together and served on a bed of lettuce with yoghurt garlic sauce** to pour over if desired.

It’s not just dinner. It’s dinner for a family who cannot eat wheat, tomatoes, onions, milk, preservatives, colourings, MSG (heehee) or cocoa (among other things). And, while this promises to be tasty enough, I am reminded of the blessing of being able to eat anything, of the blessing that the only food allergy we contend with is processed-milk-induced eczema(and this can be easily remedied by fermenting the milk or using raw).

**about a cup or so of yoghurt, a splash of olive oil, a pinch of salt, a grind of pepper and a few cloves of crushed garlic

Thank you!!!
One day we’ll plant a passionfruit vine and not kill it. We’re optimists.

Every time we make it we think of our friends!
And often we are eating it with kiwi friends – who, without exception, have found it to be a bit strange! But then we remember we did at first too.

Mamaliga
For every cup of cornmeal, you need to bring three cups of salted water to the boil. Slowly pour in your cornmeal, stirring both constantly and vigorously. One man we watched had a special technique of twisting his jar from side to side as he poured, other ladies just poured in a slow steady stream. Turn the heat down, pop a lid on and let it cook for a few minutes. Give it another stir and serve when ready. Preferably with spicy sausages, garlic sauce and eggs – although we used mushrooms in this instance.

Mamaliga can also be made thicker by using less water. Then it can be sliced and fried (very good) or rolled into balls, perhaps formed around a piece of cheese, then baked in the oven (also very good), or dropped into soup (not at all bad) or crumbled into milk and served for breakfast (another edible option).
That we ever ended up making mamaliga, is testament to our pigheadedness perseverance. Our initial introduction to the stuff provided amunition for a blogpost entitled *when everything goes wrong in the kitchen*
Glad we kept trying. Now we’ve got corn growing in our little garden!

When Kboy11 was Chef For The Week a couple of weeks back (and oh what an eye-opening experience *that* was for him – he discovered just How Much Work is involved in getting dinner on the table each night – and he didn’t even do the half of it – big wink!!)…..anyway, when he was chef, he decided to make a Polish favourite, zapiekanki. The French sticks were purchased from a bakery, the mushroom sauce was made by mother, and some to think of it, she picked the spring onions and sliced them up too – but he did grate the cheese!!

And they tasted Very Authentic.

Must be the mushroom sauce:

Fry together olive oil, mushrooms (we used mostly “normal” ones and a few wild field mushies), onion, oregano, salt, black pepper, the teeniest splash of chicken stock (you could probably omit if you didn’t have any on hand), and the magic ingredient, a little dill.