Chutney x A LOT

A few weeks ago when we went to the market, our mango people told us that was their last week for the season. So we bought double our usual and went home to make chutney. This wasn't something we had really thought through very carefully, the results of which I will reveal as I go through my chutney tale.

In the past we have used a chutney recipe that requires soaking overnight. This was Sunday morning and we had to work on Monday, so that wasn't going to work. I did a quick search, and found a recipe from Not Quite Nigella that looked do-able, so we used that as our guide.

Her recipe called for 1 kilo of mango flesh, or about 2 large mangoes. We obviously wanted to make a larger batch to use up plenty of mangoes, so we started cutting and scooping them into a bowl on the scale. About 15 mangoes later, we were at 3 kilos - so I think the original estimate of 2 mangoes = 1 kilo of flesh is just not right.

We put the firmest mango cheeks through the shredder blade on the food processor, and chopped up the softer, riper cheeks. We popped this all into our big stockpot, and then realised we had almost no space for anything else. Wah-wahhh.

And because we tripled the recipe, we had nowhere near enough brown sugar, or raisins. We had no onions. We scraped in with just enough cider vinegar. But we realised that Andy would need to go to the shops. He had wanted to run to Bunnings for some seeds anyways, so, perfect.

Because I was expecting Andy back in about 30 minutes, I put everything that we had into a bowl and mixed it all up. Then I put it into two pots to start to simmer, to allow the sugar which we did have to dissolve a bit. Then I cleaned up - chopped up the mango skins so they would compost a bit quicker, gave a few of the seeds to Tika, who loves to suck the flesh off them, and wiped so much mango juice off of every surface. I even did all the dishes.



Over an hour later, I was beginning to wonder if Andy got lost or sucked into some sort of space-time vortex. He sort of did - in Townsville on Sundays, shops don't open until 11am, and he left the house a touch before 10. So although he spent plenty of time in Bunnings, he still had to wait outside the grocery store for it to open.

But eventually he did make it home. By that time the chutney had simmered down enough to fit back into the one pot. We added the onions and the last few bits and pieces, plus a whack of chilli sauce because it was so sweet, cooked it properly, and then got ready to can it.



We ended up with 13 and a half jars of this stuff - about 9 litres worth of chutney. The full ones we processed properly and put them away to last us throughout the year. But for dinner that night it seemed appropriate to have the little half jar with some curry.

I made chappatis, sag paneer (spinach and tofu curry), and we had some leftover dhal, with brown rice and, at the front, our chutney.



Sure, it was an epic process, but the memories of scooping 15 mangoes, stirring a simmering pot of chutney, and cleaning up all the sticky mess will fade as we enjoy our spoils for the next few months!

Milking Oats

Much less grope-y than milking goats.

After more than three years of busy service to us, our soy milk maker has pretty much carked it (see my posts on it here and here). We looked at getting new ones, but the idea of choosing was a bit overwhelming and we have put it at the back of our minds. (But if you're in Australia and can recommend a good brand or model, we would be happy to take suggestions.)

Instead, we've been making oat milk. It's no substitute for bought-milk in tea, but it does the trick on a bowl of cereal. Here's what we do:

We get two of these jugs of milk, plus about 2 cups of pulp from each batch.

Combine 1 1/2 cups of rolled oats, 1 tsp of desiccated coconut, and 1 tsp of raw sugar in a jug. Add 1 litre of water, and let it soak for about 30 minutes. Then blend it all up - I use a stick blender - for a few minutes. Pour this through a fine strainer and scoop out the thick oat pulp. Pour it into containers, and then I add enough water to fill the jugs - our typical batch is about 2.5 litres of oat milk. You can add less if you prefer it thicker. The milk lasts in the fridge for about a week.

But what to do with the 2 cups or so of sticky, wet oat pulp that comes along with the milk? You could throw it away, or compost it, or feed it to the dog. But we've been playing around with adding it to things. We've mixed it into lentil loafs and burgers, but it makes them go a bit gluey in texture.

More successful were these nutella brownie bites - 200 grams of hazlenuts whizzed up in the food processor, then a cup of dates, half a cup of oat pulp, and 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. They were a bit wetter than they should have been, but the oat pulp was a good way of cutting through the sweetness of the dates that sometimes overwhelms raw balls.

I pushed some into silicon cupcake liners, and made some into balls.

Oat pulp is also a pretty fab addition to baking. I made some banana-oat muffins and bread, using oat pulp in place of half the mashed bananas. I don't know the nutrition content, but I'm sure it adds a boatload of fibre and cuts down a little on the (natural, and not bad-for-you) sugar in the bananas.

The banana-oat things are in the background of our Sunday lunch of veggie sausages wrapped in bread dough. 

What is your favourite kind of milk to make? What do you do with the leftover pulp?

Plastic-free produce

In Australia, green bags are pretty ubiquitous. They have been since I was a study abroad student here, way back in 2004, and this was something I thought was very cool and progressive. I still do! I especially love getting green bags (which are often not green, but that's just what they're called) for free at events and things. Very handy. We keep some in the car, in case we forget to bring our main stash with us when we go shopping. We still get plastic bags sometimes, and actually have an embarrassingly large stash of them under the kitchen sink. We use them in our rubbish bin (which is actually just a bucket), but that only uses up one per week. What to do with the bulk of them is a bit of a mystery - I suppose we'll keep them under the sink until we get so good at remembering (enough) green bags that we never get plastics and we run out.

There are lots of other roads that plastic takes into our house, though. I was flicking through Facebook a fortnight or so ago when I saw an ad for Plastic-Free July. I made a pledge - avoid the top four single-use plastic items for the whole month. Drinking straws is easy - we never eat takeaways and thus avoid places where straws are provided. Plastic bottles is also fairly straightforward - in a regular month, we don't often go anywhere to purchase drinks. We drink tap water at home and at work, and if we do go out for an adventure we bring a stainless steel bottle of water with us. Coffee cup lids are a little trickier, mainly because getting them is so automatic. But, when I go for coffee (actually, chai) with people, we have in almost 100% of the time. So I can do this one easily if I avoid the two or three coffee places at JCU that serve only in takeaway cups. The final item in the top 4 is plastic bags. My overly-long intro to this post talks about grocery bags. But what about other plastic bags?

Produce bags are more common in our grocery- and market-trips than plastic shopping bags. Until May, we had been using them daily as Andy's sandwich bags. He would even bring them home to re-use if they were clean enough. And we use them every now and then in places where we might otherwise use cling wrap. But for Andy's birthday I got him a most excellent sandwich container - plastic! but re-usable - that is big enough to fit our homemade bread. So we began accumulating produce bags, too.

From http://www.happyjackson.co.uk/shop/

I was inspired by a link from Plastic-Free July to a tutorial on re-usable produce bags. I looked at it, got the gist, and then made them on a Saturday morning. I used a piece of mesh fabric - mosquito-net style - that we had laying around. I didn't really measure the fabric, but cut it into different sizes.  Working slowly, with plenty of interruptions, it took me about 3 hours to make about 8 bags. I think I'd be quicker next time, now that I know what I'm doing.

I used yarn instead of ribbons for drawstrings, and I love the rainbow I've got to shop with.

We tried them out with stuff from the garden, because Andy was skeptical - he thought they would be annoying.

Yellow passion fruits, yum. 

But the next day we brought them to the markets. We couldn't use them for the first half of the markets. I was disappointed - first we bought things that we don't put in bags, like bananas, and there were heaps of stalls selling items pre-bagged. But in the second half of the market we got to use them, which was very exciting for me! (Simple pleasures?)

As I was making them, I thought about how multi-use these bags are. They are basically the same as a delicates bag that you might use in the washing machine. When I posted a picture of the bags on my Facebook page (have you liked it yet?) Cate and Melissa both talked about using them for toys and crayons and other things. Andy came up with a good use for them after our tomatoes were eaten by a mouse or rat.

Protecting ripening tomatoes from a hungry pest.

In the two weeks since making them, we have put them to use several times. They store fairly small, so I can keep some in my bag, and they weigh about 10 grams each so they don't add much to the cost of produce. They were worth making with the free ingredients I had on hand, but I think I would even go out of my way to get more material.

DIY Sponges

Before I get into this very exciting (or maybe that's just me?) post, let me mention that I'm now on Facebook! Personally, I have had a Facebook account since 2004. But The Tropical Vegan now has a Facebook page. If you use Facebook, please like me  - I expect to update it a bit more regularly that I do this blog, at least during busy work-times.

Now, for the post. One of the very exciting things we have growing in our garden is a luffa. I have posted about it previously. In the comments of that post, a lot of you said you'd never heard of luffa before. I suspect that's true when I'm talking about the vegetable, for eating purposes. Most of you would be more familiar with the loofah, the bath sponge. Good for exfoliating, and completely plant-based.

They are closely related to zucchinis, pumpkins, and cucumbers, and grow very similarly, if a bit more vigorously. Our back fence is covered in the lush, green vine, and all summer we've been picking handfuls of the small fruits for eating. They are good stir fried, and added to stews and things like that.

We actually have three plants, one ridiculous and two which have struggled more. But even the struggle-y ones have produced loofahs, like this one here.

Once the fruit get a bit big, the fibres start to form, and they're no longer good for eating. So those ones we have left. They take a while, but eventually get mature enough to pick and turn into sponges. The process is actually ridiculously simple. The hardest part, for me, was knowing when to pick them. I read that you should let them get soft, but I tried a few like that and they weren't mature enough. Then I realised that they are firm when they are very young, they go soft as they grow, but then they firm back up again. I asked my neighbour, who gave me the seeds in the first place - the trick is to wait until they go a little yellow-brown. Size and firmness don't matter as much as this.

Two sponge-sized loofahs, and four little food ones.

Step one is to cut off the ends. This isn't a necessary step, but I find it easier to get the seeds out, and the end result is prettier.

These black seeds are mature and can be saved to plant next year. 

Then peel off the skin. It comes off by hand with very little effort, really. Not as easy to peel as a banana, but more like an orange.

Once they're peeled, rinse out the seeds and gunky bits. I've used the hose for this, but the laundry sink is easier. My method is to stick my finger in and scoop out as much as possible. If some seeds stay in, it's no big deal, but too much gunk will make them go mouldy (as I learned from experience). They are pretty flexible, so you can squeeze them and bend them a bit at this point to wring out as much loofah-gunk as possible.

Then I squeeze most of the water out, and find them a sunny spot. Let them hang out and dry for a few days, until they have no moisture left.

I think these make fancy gifts for people - look, I made you a sponge! But they also work well, cut into smaller bits, for washing dishes. We have plenty more to harvest, so we probably won't need to buy sponges again for a long time.

Sure, most discussions of "locavorisim" refer to the food we actually consume, but I think growing my own dish-washing sponges is pretty damn cool.

Queensland Jam

Rosellas are a type of parrot. They are also a type of hibiscus flower. This post is about making food from one of these. Can you guess which one? 

We get monthly "what to plant" emails from the website Gardenate.com, and throughout the summer they got a bit sad. November: Plant basils, sweet potato, rosellas. December: Plant basils, rosellas. January: Plant rosellas. We're back into more diverse planting season at the moment, but we're also in the midst of the rosella harvest.

We have 6 rosella plants in our garden, and they are a very lovely plant, I think. They are all at different stages of development, and some took a while to become productive.

After the flower opens, the petals fall off and a red bud-like calyx forms, sort of like a rose hip. This calyx is actually what you harvest. The red "petioles" around the calyx are super tart, and can be turned into jam, cordial, syrup, and those kinds of things. They are also dried and turned into tea - most famously, Celestial Seasons Red Zinger tea, but usually they are an ingredient in most commercial lemon-flavoured teas. Or if the seed pod is removed intact, they are poached and sold for an awful lot of money as "blooming" flowers to add to a glass of champagne. 

We've been harvesting, slowly at first, since December. I made a tiny batch of cordial at christmastime, and I think I will do some again because it would make really nice cocktails.

But most of the harvest has gone into the freezer, waiting for a big enough batch to make jam. This is the most popular use, it seems, of rosellas, which are also known as the "Queensland Jam Plant" - which begs the question, if you refer to them as the Queensland Jam Plant, what do you call the jam? Queensland Jam Plant Jam? Queensland Jam? 

Linguistic conundrums aside, two weekends ago we had a full freezer bag, plus a big bowl full of fresh calyxes to work with. Let the jam making begin! I used this blog post as my guide (but ended up using far less sugar).

Step 1: separate the red petioles from the green seed pod. I put my frozen and fresh calyxes in a big pot with water, to wash off the bugs, crusty old petals, etc. 

Then I spent the next three hours (I kid you not) peeling them apart. It was a lot of work. The pre-frozen calyxes were actually much easier to separate - they peeled away in one quick move. For my next batch, I will definitely freeze them all before working with them. I will also do a better job of washing the calyxes before they go in the freezer, so I don't need to have them in a bucket of water to process. Seriously, my hands have never in my whole life been so wrinkly.

By 7pm on Saturday I had a sore back, wrinkly hands, a bowl full of seedpods and a bowl full of calyxes. I put the rosella-bits into the fridge till the next day.

Put the seed pods into a pot. Cover them with water. Bring it up to the boil, and let it go for about 20 minutes. My jam, in the end, wasn't as set as I would like. I have heard that cutting the seed pods in half is a better way to release the pectin. Probably easier would be to sort of smash them in the water as it is coming up to the boil. I'll let you know if it works better the next time around. After the seed pods have cooked, strain them off. Compost the pods, save the liquid.

Rinse the jam pot out with clean water. Add the red petioles, and the seed pod-cooking liquid. Bring them up to a boil and let them cook until the petioles have gone mushy. This didn't take too long, once the boil got rolling - maybe 5 or 10 minutes. 

Turn the heat down to very low. Let the jam mix cool slightly. Add sugar. I used about 1 2/3 cups of raw sugar, in about 5 cups of jam mixture. This seems like much less than most recipes call for, which could account for the lack of proper-set. But it tasted good - still lovely and tart, but not face-squeezy. Dissolve the sugar gently into the jam while you taste to see if it needs any more.

Once the sugar is dissolved, bring it back up to a rolling boil. Let it cook like that for 30 minutes (sorry, raw foodies, you'll have to look elsewhere). Set a timer, get a book, turn on the fan in the kitchen and stir it pretty near constantly for the whole time. When the 30 minutes is up, you test for set. It's probably best that I don't give advice on this aspect, because I failed. I put my jam on a cold plate in the freezer, but found it hard to determine if it was gelly because of the rosella-bits. So I just thought, schmeh, and we bottled it up.

A lot of people talk about alternative methods for sealing jam jars - popping them upside down while they cool, putting them in the oven, etc. But I've read things that make me nervous about breaking the Preserving Rules, so we got a gigantic pot to boil our jam jars to properly seal them.

We got four jars, which all sealed properly. When I opened one and found the jam was runny instead of gel-tastic, I was a little disappointed, but then I tasted it. And it tasted really, really yummy. And, because of all the rosella chunks, it is still fine to have on toast - didn't run off!

But, what better to do with runny jam than put it into baked goods? I used the recipe for Raspberry Swirl Pound Cake from Urban Vegan, using (obviously) rosella jam in place of raspberry. 

It was even more delicious with another spoonful of jam on top! 

Luckily, we still have 3+ jars of jam, a freezer bag and a half of calyxes, and 6 still-productive plants, because I have falled head over heels for this stuff!

(PS - I made jam out of the hibiscus flower, not the parrot.)

Stank-Buster

Internet, I have a confession. Sometimes, I stink. Lately, those stank-times have been more often than not. Coles stopped carrying my usual deodorant. I switched to my back-up supply, a tea tree scented deodorant that worked not that well against the tropical summer. Then even that started to run low. No worries, I though, I'll go to Woolies. But Woolies stopped carrying my usual deodorant, too. I got angry and frustrated. I looked online - $7-$10 for one single container of vegan deodorant, plus shipping?! You've got to be kidding me. I could have looked in pharmacy, health food and cosmetic shops, yes. But the other day I was sitting on the couch and Andy noticed a bad smell, and realised it was coming from me. So I stopped what I was doing on the internet, and looked up how to make deodorant at home.

Well, my friends, it could not be simpler, nor more effective.

1/2 cup of coconut oil - since this isn't for eating, I used the cosmetic grade stuff I bought in PNG rather than expensive edible ones
1/4 cup of corn flour (corn starch)
1/4 cup of bicarb soda (baking soda)
scented oil, if you roll that way

Mix the three together. Rub some on your pits. Stank no more.

Seriously. I made this straight after the stink-incident above, and rubbed some on straight away, and the bad smell was gone. On the first day I wore this, it erased BO, and held off any new stank despite very hot & humid weather featuring outside work in the garden. The second day I wore it, only one application in the morning made it through a very sunny outing at the beach, plenty of digging and landscaping outside in the hot sun, and then 12kms worth of bike riding - all with no stank! So in terms of deodorising, it was a total success.

Where I went wrong: I tried too hard to be clever. In looking for a jar or container for storing my deodorant, I came upon these two, 50mL pump bottles, which I love because they have a cap so you can travel with them and they don't squirt their contents everywhere. I thought it was perfect, because I could bring one to uni and it could crash around in my shower bag in my office, and I could leave one at home.

All was well until the next morning, when I went to my pump bottle and found oil all over the outside of it. And the pumper all clogged with bicarb and cornflour. Not only did the dry ingredients settle out, but somehow the coconut oil expanded and exploded (a tiny explosion, but no less devastating than a big one). I tried to salvage the pump bottles, but in the end I gave in to reason and transferred (most of) the contents to a bigger jar. So friends, learn from my mistakes. If you try to make your own deodorant (and I really think you should!), put it in a big, wide mouthed jar with plenty of room to breathe. And if you live in a warm place, be prepared to stir up your deodorant before you use it in the mornings. Now I just need to find a smaller jar so I can bring some to work...

Resolved.

One of my new year's resolutions for 2012 was to make my own laundry detergent. I spent the year, off and on, looking for all the ingredients, which are not that easy to find.

Andy brought home an old container of borax from work, which was the first ingredient acquired.

Then in Cole's one day I spied washing soda and nearly shouted with joy.

But soap flakes completely eluded me. I looked in Bunnings. I looked at the grocery stores. And then, in November, I was marking essays written by my first-year sociology students. Early in the semester I made them write about the social problem they are most troubled by, and then after those essays were finished I told them to do something, anything, to make a change. One of the students had identified consumerism, and the constant need to be spending money, and her social change project was convincing some of her colleagues to do what she does and make her own laundry detergent (along with other anti-consumerist things, of course, but that's the one that stuck out at me). I excitedly read her final essay, in which she reflected on this, and wrote my burning question in the comments: Where do you get soap flakes?!

I shortly got an email back (it's nice to know that some people read my comments!) saying you can get Lux brand soap flakes at IGA. So I looked there, and there they were. The box was about $10, which made Andy raise his eyebrows, but I was determined.

A few days ago, I finally managed to get all three ingredients together (along with some essential oil) and make the damn laundry detergent. There are so many recipes on the internet, but they all made about 10 or 12 litres of detergent. Andy and I only do laundry once a week, or at most 5 times a month, so we have no need for giant buckets full of washing liquid. Even if you do washing a few times a week, this was easy enough to make that whipping up a batch every three or so months wouldn't really be an inconvenience. So I cut the recipe by 4, and put it together like so. It was super easy, and it will go far, so expensive ingredients really work out to be very cheap indeed.

All you need is:

1 cup of soap flakes - these can be bought pre-flaked, or you can grate a bar of soap yourself
1/4 cup of washing soda - not bicarb soda. We have soft water. If you have hard water, try 1/2 cup
1/4 cup of borax
a few drops of essential oil - we used ylang ylang
3 litres of hot water

In a saucepan, mix the soap flakes with a cup or two of hot water.

Cook it over medium-low heat until the soap flakes dissolve. Mine went kind of clumpy, because I didn't put much water in.

Add the washing soda and borax and mix this up. Somehow, adding dry ingredients made my soap go smoother and more liquidy, so I think magic might be involved.

Slowly add in the rest of the water.

If the soap goes lumpy and doesn't dissolve, like mine did, heat it over low heat until it does.

Put in a few drops of essential oil. My advice is to use something you love. Even this small batch will last us for maybe 8 or 10 months, so we're stuck with our smell for most of 2013 - luckily we both love ylang ylang.

Let it cool a bit, then pour into bottles. This part was very messy for me. My funnel is narrow, and clogged up with the thick gloopy soap. So instead I got a plastic cup and scooped soap into the bottles (because the saucepan was far too full to pour). I kind of got soap everywhere, but it is soap afterall, so it didn't take much effort to clean up.

Use about 1/4 cup per load. We've done a load of washing, and it seems to be just fine - not a revolution for my clothes or anything, but it seems just as good as the bought stuff. And considering that the box of soap flakes will probably last about 4 years, and the washing soda will last me decades, well, I think it is worth the savings!

Long Weekend Pie

A few weekends ago, Andy and I bought this acceptable but scuffy old table & chairs from a garage sale around the corner.

Then, two weekends ago, we had a long weekend. The public holiday on Monday was Townsville Show Day - for American readers, the Show is the equivalent of the County Fair, and I *love* that it gets its own local public holiday. I haven't ever actually been to the Show (though I did once enter the baking competition). But who doesn't love a free day off? We used the long weekend to refresh the table and chairs. Andy had sounded down the top, which was a lovely light coloured wood. But those curvy, turned chair legs were not going to be easy to sand. And I didn't want to restain the nice-looking wood to that bland brown. So, how about bright blue?!

Painting was stupid and not fun. For three days, we primed and painted. My back was sore, my legs were sore, my bum was sore. But, at the end of the three days, we had a beautiful new dining set!

While the paint was drying, I used some of the time to cook. I made some pie filling, so later in the week we just had to put it into pastry and bake and dinner was done.  The filling was mainly eggplant, with a few other veggies and a thick vegemite gravy mixed through. It was thick and wonderful and very tasty.

And when we baked it up, it got all golden and flaky and beautiful.

And, served up with some easy roasted radishes, mushrooms, and corn, it was the perfect meal for two tired people on a cold night.

But we must have been bitten by a painting bug, because this weekend just gone, we used one of our work-free days to turn our bathroom from this...

To this.

It is the first room we've painted in our house, and it feels good! I've got big plans for the rest of the place!