Isn’t he beautiful? Now Im not sure whether to call my Aubergine project a success or not. Whilst I am over the moon that I actually have grown a whole 2 aubergines all by myself, the fact still remains that I have around 15 plants. So from 15 plants I managed to grow 2 Aubergines. Not really the greatest achievement. But he was very yum.

He and his friends…

….ended up in our pasta last night.

Today we are waiting for a very exciting call. Fingers crossed.

]]> http://sandbackens.com/?feed=rss2&p=1211 http://sandbackens.com/?p=1199 http://sandbackens.com/?p=1199#comments Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:12:52 +0000 Ella http://sandbackens.com/?p=1199

It’s been a while since I posted a recipe, so I thought I would share my easy sweet and sour with you. We ate this dish this evening with organic chicken from a local farm, and paprika, onion, squash and tomato from the garden.

Most people only eat sweet and sour from their local chinese take away, but it’s actually very easy to make, well this recipe is anyway.

Here’s what you’ll need:

A couple of chicken breasts (or the equivalent of whatever meat you want)

1 large onion

1 paprika

handful of tomatoes

small tin of pineapple

(you can pretty much use whatever veggies you have available, we had squash in ours too. Though i think its a must to have pineapple, onion and paprika.)

For the sauce:

The sauce is very easy. Its basically based on tomato puree, with equal amounts of sweet and sour added to it. Use approx 100g tomato puree, then add your sour, easiest is just  3 - 4 tablespoons vinegar (I usually use red wine vinegar). Then add the same amount of sweet. This could be sugar, honey, sirap, whatever you have in your cupboard. I prefer using honey as it is a natural product. Add 1 - 2 teaspoons of chinese 5 spice to give it some extra taste. As I said this is a very basic version, you can make this more advanced if you wish. Then add water to the sauce to get it to the consistency you want it, but not too thick and not too thin either.

Chop all your ingredients. Fry the onion and meat first until golden, then add the rest of your veggies.

After a couple of minutes add your sauce and then let it simmer for up to 15 minutes. Serve with rice.

Yum.

….. are now in our freezer.

Our tomatoes are coming on great. I was a little worried for a while that we would hundreds of green tomatoes at the end of the season, but every day we get a handful more.

The question is now, what to do with them all? I want to conserve as much as I can for the winter, so I’ve been doing some reading. So far I have tried drying and freezing. The dried one’s taste great, but as we haven’t got a proper drying machine, it was a lengthy process. The easiest option by far is freezing them, if you want to use them for sauces, soups, stews etc. A great tip I came by was freezing them whole, then you can take them out one by one, or as many as you need. You can then run them under hot water and their skins come away very easily.I will of course be making some great sauces and ketchup a little later.

Today for lunch we dug up some potatoes and jerusalem artichoke and made a lovely soup. Quick, easy and delicious, just the way we like it.

From todays crop of squash, peas, onion paprika, peas, lettuce, parsley and basil I made a great lasagne. It was lovely, why do things taste so much nicer when you have grown them yourself?

My tip of the day: Throw your salad leaves that have started to bolt and/or become bitter in pastas, soups and stews etc. It tastes great.

Come and visit us at Klockargården tomorrow. It will be our last time there for this season. We will then be focusing on Leksands Farmers Market which starts mid August.

Have a great weekend.

We took a day trip to Dala Floda last week. A lovely village. It is in fact the village which my maternal Grandmothers family come from. I even have the traditional dress from there which people wore back in the golden oldie days. People only wear these, at most, on special occasions these days.

I highly recommend a trip to this village. We arrived in time for breakfast at Wålstedts organic farm, yum. You can take a stroll round their gardens and their wool boutique, which has all the colours you could possibly imagine.

They even have a circus school/camp for kids which looks like loads of fun. We topped this off with a  stroll around the village and then settled down to lunch at Dala Floda Värdshus.

The whole day was very inspiring and gave us loads of ideas for the future.

All things bee like are plodding along. In our last class we spent the evening looking for a small parasite called Varroa, which can severely damage a bee colony. One way of checking if your colony has been infected is by freezing in a section of the bee comb which has larvae in, then whilst it is still frozen you break it apart and look for the little terrors on the larvae. Unfortunately we found Varroa on one of the specimens from someone in the class. Though this is treatable, it is a worrying sign as these parasites are fairly new to this area and seem to be on the increase.

At the moment we have a steady supply of peas, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes and of course lettuce. I just love going down to the veggie patch to pick our greens for dinner. Healthier, tastier and easier on the pocket.

It suddenly feels like Autumn has arrived in the past couple of days. I sincerely hope the sun and warmth comes back, otherwise we are going to have a lot of green tomatoes. I guess we’ll be making a lot of green tomato chutney!

Hope you are all still having a nice summer.