Welcome Fall!

My garden is blessing me with oodles of fresh veggies ... what a bliss! That means a lot of colours, fun and a lot of time in the kitchen.See below (clockwise):
Apple sauce and pickled zucchini - vegetable casserole with potatoes, tomatoes and green beans - soup with cauliflower, pumpkin, potatoes and zucchini - very chocolatey cake.
Yum!

Zucchette sott'olio: Pickled Courgettes South Italian Type

Hey, the harvesting season in the garden has already begun and the first courgettes (zucchini) are ready to be picked!
(The pics from the following recipe are from last year and I never managed to post them)
 When I studied in Padova, Italy, my house mate from Bari in Southern Italy used to bring the most delicious pickled vegetables from her trips home. Since then I have been dreaming of the yummy taste of olive oil, herbs, garlic and vinegar. Now that I tried it it turned out to be quite easy and a good alternative to freeze the vegetables when you harvest a lot of them every day. You can even use those that have grown too much and tend to have a rather stiff peel.
Ingredients:
1l vinegar
salt
spices as you please (pepper, chili, bay leaves, and garlic are the base. You can add whatever you like)
olive oil
sealable jars

1. Peel the zucchini and cut them into thin slices. Salt hem abundantly and leave them for 2-3 hrs in a colander. They will loose a lot of water.
2. Mix water and vinegar half and half. You can add bay leaves and some aceto balsamico for taste. When the mixture is boiling, add the zucchini and cook for 2-5 min. They should not be completely cooked.

3. Let the zucchini dry on a towel, then fill layers of zucchini and spices alternately into a sealable jar. Add olive oil until it covers the last layer of zucchini. This is absolutely important, otherwise the vegetables will rot. Leave it for 3 weeks before consumption.

The pickled zucchini last several months without any problem. Just make sure they are always covered with oil.

Sunday of the Frugal Housewife

Partly probably due to my Svabian ancestors (they are the Scotsmen of Germany when it comes to parsimony), partly due to vital necessisty in the years I have perfectionated my habit of never ever throwing away anything that is still good, exspecially regarding food.
So today we have an extraordinary frugal Sunday with homemade marmelade from garden strawberries and a cocktail of very ripe fruits from the kitchen:

 

Yum!

 

Venetian bread cake with apples. A recipe from my mom who taught me never to throw away bread ... "because the child Jesus ("Gesù bambino" is a very common figure in Italy that sees Jesus Christ predominantly as a human being. Its the poor little boy that was born in the hut, a very well known situation in after war Italy) climbed down from his donkey just to pick up a tiny crum of bread." This used to be told to children that (quite naturally) refused to eat bread from the day before.

Additionally the women of the Padan Plain, once a very poor region where my mom comes from, created a lot of delicious ways to use day-old bread. One of our favourite is the bread cake:

You need: 

day old bread cut in cubes (as much you can put in a salad bowl

1 liter of milk

3 spoons of sugar

vanillia essence

3 spoons of butter or vegetal oil

3 eggs

3 peeled and diced apples

raisins (if you like them. My kids are unfortunately rather picky with them)

Heat the milk until it begins to boil. Be careful to stir it while heationg, otherwise it tends to stick on the bottom of the pot. Add sugar, vanilli essence and butter in the end. Then pour it on the bread dices and cover the salad bowl with a large lid. Leave it while you prepare the apples. Mash them with the bread that should have absorbed the milk by now and add the eggs. Butter a casserole and bake for 25 min.

With vanillia sauce it makes a whole meal!

 And finally some pasta al forno, an absolute classic for reusing leftovers from the previous day. Mix them and add eventually tomatoes to make a sauce. Cook some pasta, add the sauce and cover everything with a bechamelle sauce. Done! Super quick and easy.
And how do you celebrate frugality? I'd love to know!
Have a great sunday!

Strawberries

 Summer is in the garden.

Yum.

Garden, plant dye and a surprise

Probably like many of you I was totally excited when I discovered the wonderful work of India Flint - what an inspiring person!  The beauty of her books is amazing and I still soak it in whenever I feel empty or dissatisfied.

So one sunny day I rushed into the garden, harvested all my woad and started, after having searched for long an easy recipe for this medieval technique without fermentation and having to use strange ingredients like human urine. But I failed... probably in the last step. The dye did.not.turn.blue.at.all.

Sigh.
In the meantime I gathered some walnut leaves and rolled it to a bundle, where I had hidden the last woad leaves (in the picture below) put it into al glass filled with water and boiled it for a while.

What a surprise when I opened it - at least some blue stains are visible, together with the brown of the walnut leaves the form a pretty structure.

Flower Kindergarten

Today we had mild weather, this made me dream of spring... I planted seeds of some new flowers and some that I harvested from the garden last year. I'm not a gardening expert and so I kept the pictures of the flowers in order to know more or less how they will look like when big... I had kept egg cartons - these are useful because they are quite sturdy and waterproof to a certain extent. And you can plant them directly into the earth where they will dissolve.
I just realize that my window looks terribly dirty with the first tiny bit of sunshine... ok, this will be the next project ;-)