sometimes soup in summer is ok

OK. So we made the passata and had the left over tomato water. I guess there was about 3-4 litres there. We froze a whole bunch for winter but kept some out and on one of those weird summer days when it is super cold and windy - we made soup. Pretty easy.

Ingredients

feeds about 4

1 onion- sliced
4 garlic cloves-sliced
1 carrot- cubed
1 zucchini - cubed
1 potato-cubed
brown mustard seeds- just a splash
salt
cumin
corriander
1-1.5 L of tomato water
chicken stock- 1tsp
water
Thyme- chopped
basil-chopped

1 Chili- if you like

Method:

First heat some olive oil and brown the onions, garlic and mustard seeds.
The throw everything else in- including the herbs and spices. Use your judgement. if you like cumin, put more in. We usually go with about 1tsp to start and work up. The vegies we included were simply ones that we had in the fridge so work with the seasons and use whatever you got.
Once the vegies have cooked for a minute or two add the tomato water and stock. You want to have your vegies only just covered by liquid so if you need to top it up with water do so.

Let that boil for about 15-20 minutes and then season to taste. We put some basil on top and grated parmesan cheese. YUM.

The tomato water is such a great base for a soup and it's also a really good way to use everything up. Make some bread to go with it and you're set. bread making documentation pending!

Passata: It's not that harda

This summer we found ourselves foraging the road side stalls near where we grew up. One of the best discoveries of home grown tomatoes for a ridiculously low price. We got ourselves about 10Kgs for about $10. It was exciting to say the least. So what does one do with 10kgs of tomatoes? Well, there are a few options, a nice soup would go down well however it was the dead of summer, so soup was out. With our new found desire to buy and eat locally grown produce we realised that a time would come where there would not be tomatoes at road side stalls, damn you winter. SO we decided to make Passata. Passata is a traditional Italian sauce which is usually just crushed and preserved tomatoes. Sometimes people put garlic or basil but we went with just tomato so that in winter we might enjoy the summery goodness of our cheap, fresh tomatoes. Passata does not need to be difficult. In fact, I think the easier the better. So heres what you do.

Get fresh tomatoes. We had about 10kgs and it made about 6 jars of varying sizes- about 4 litres of Passata and 2 litres of juice (Keep this, it is great to use).
Score a cross in the bottom of each tomato and put it in a heat proof bowl (glass is good) then pour boiling water over the tomatoes so that they are all submerged, poke them a bit to make sure they are all in.
Leave the tomatoes in for about 5 minutes or so or until their skin starts to crinkle off.
When the tomatoes are done take them out and let them cool for a minute otherwise your hands will get very hot in the next step!
When tomatoes are a bit cool (not cold) peel the skin. Squeeze each tomato over a bowl (this is your fresh juice bowl) and place the flesh in a separate bowl. Continue this until you have a bowl of tomato juice (or tomato water) and a bowl of flesh.

At this stage give the flesh another good squeeze into the juice bowl to make sure you get as much liquid out as possible.

Strain the tomato juice (or water) into sterilized bottles. This can be frozen or used fresh. We did eventually break and make soup of of it. Was AMAZING.

To finish your passata you can use a mincer to break up the flesh or we just crushed it a bit more with our hands and then used a Bamix to blend it. This can then go into sterilized jars.

Lastly you need to pasturize the bottled passata. Do this by placing the jars into water so that it reaches halfway up the jar. Boil for 2 hours, making sure you watch that it does not boil dry. Once that's done let the jars cool on a bench and seal with brown paper. The passata should keep in the cupboard for up to a year. Done and done.

Cake making is not for the faint hearted, or the heat.

So my sister always makes the cake in our family. And her cake takes the cake. Seriously. she has made me a Women's Weeklycake every year since I was about 16 and she still makes me one every year. In fact she makes the whole family cakes every year and now that we have two nephews she is going to be doing it for a long while. Nonetheless a friend of mine's niece turned on in late November and I (drunkenly) offered to make the cake. How hard could it be? Well. As it turns out, not that hard but it was time consuming, frustrating but also fun and totally worth it. The firs thing I needed was a cake board. My sister always buys the fancy ones, specifically for cakes and such however I got a man friend to cut up some ply wood, then I adhesived some foil to it(two layers) with spray adhesive and it was as good as any expensive one you can buy.

So the next thing to do was borrow the icing kit thing (thanks jo) and by the ingredients for my white chocolate mud cake. I just used a basic recipe and added more chocolate than they said. I used the dolly varden tin(again, thanks jo) and whipped up the cake. Once finished and cooked it made it's way to the cake board. I also made a simple round cake a well as some cupcakes - not sure how many people the cake was for.

At this point this is what I had

Once the doll was in I must admit to wrapping her head and face in glad wrap BUT it was only to protect her flowing hair.

Next came the icing. I used a base of Butter cream - thanks Women's Weekly and then piped meringue frosting on top.

At this point, she got excited and threw up her arms. I went with two icings mainly cause you can never have too much icing but also because that nice pink shines through---pretty.

The icing was going well but so was the heat. At this point the house was up to about 25 degrees or more IN THE HOUSE.

Before I finished her we set up a cardboard ghetto in our 'cooler' spare room. We then crossed our fingers, made alternate arrangements for transport involving air conditioning and hoped to hell.

So we made it. Bless our air conditioned chariot- we made it. As a final touch I decided to blow torch the tips of the meringue, which was awesome however it may have been a poor idea coupled with the horrendous heat. Before making her debut she required a make shift cool room to slow the melting process but all in all we made it and baby Charlie got her cake. To be honest, I think Gaga should take note, new outfit anyone???

The USA in the summertime is a fantastic place to be.

Last winter us girls travelled to the USA mostly to visit family but on our adventures we discovered that on top of American summers being better than Sydney winters, hometown Portland is the micro brewery capital of the USA. Yes, we were excited, yes we visited numerous breweries, yes, we tasted large platters of beer, yes the pictures are completely inappropriate.What you may not know is that Portland, OR also grows muchos amounts of berries. Seriously thestatistics are ridiculous. Growers there harvest:

marionberry, raspberry, blackberry, black raspberry and boysenberry and the best part is there are so many berries that they sell them on the side of the road in flats like this and price wise a

flat of strawberries is $15 which beats the Aussie prices. Yeah those big trays are called flats and there are 6 punnets in a flat.

A person can find themselves pretty happy with a flat of berries.

Anyway getting to the point. As well as microbrew capital Portland OR also prides itself on it's berries. So I prided their berries with some Australian pride. There isn't a scale here and in hindsight I should have included a ruler or a bank note for reference but it was huge. Mumma sure did me a solid giving me that pavlova recipe. Everyone says you have to dissolve the sugar but I think not. Clearly I'm not a chef but I just think this works better, or maybe I just don't worry if the sugar is completely dissolved. All I know is that the American fam loved the pav.

The garden went nuts one day

Meet the eaters.

So....

JaM Eathouse is really just two girls. One is a teacher full time and the other is an antiques restorer but on the weekends and during holidays plus every other waking moment we are growing, tending and cooking in our kitchen to learn and practice what we love doing.

I'm guessing for a time I'll be talking to myself but none the less. Here HQ we are making solid efforts to grow, harvest and prepare our own produce. It is our dream to one day run a small restaurant, growing, raising and serving our home grown niceness. SO we are going to spend the next few years practicing, albeit on ourselves, and learning to grow and cook our own food into more than salads. We grow with the seasons and even make some attempts to beat them. At the moment we have an established herb garden including basil, thyme, sage, bay leaf, kaffir lime, mint, coriander, thai basil, lemongrass, jalapeno and parsley plus potentially the largest rosemary bush in the land. On their way out are our tomatoes and beans as well as some lettuce. On their way (back) in are butter beans, cos lettuce, spring onions, eggplant, capsicum, leeks, squash, cucumbers, zucchini and some late blooming strawberries. We also have the resident flowers- violets mostly- as well as our oak tree- 3 years old and going strong. Newcomers include passionfruit, which we are giving time to settle in before we get too excited....

Did I mention this is all in our inner city courtyard that also holds an outdoor setting and a motorbike?