Cautiously pokes head out of shell...

Hi everyone,

Here I am blogging here again.  I'm a little surprised how long it's been.  Not that I've been silent: for one thing, in the course of rebooting my career I've been putting a reasonable degree of energy into my other blog, which focuses more on my work.

Things have been going well since last update.  I still love being back in the law.  I'm still stoked to turn up to the office each day, and that's just as well: I don't think I've ever worked so hard in my life.  I've noticed that I've pretty well fallen back into my old habit of working late (till about 2200) each night, but I'm OK with that.  I'm getting things done, I have an A1 assistant, and the boss seems broadly happy with my work.  That's good enough for me.  And any time I even think about complaining, I remember how miserable I was in the sign factory and then life seems unutterably blessed again.

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#seenonmywalk

A post shared by Stephen Tuck (@sdtuc2) on Oct 9, 2018 at 3:43am PDT

Living in Brunswick continues to suit me.  For one thing, it's close enough for me to be able to walk home on evenings when I don't have SES.  It's of course hipster-central, and at present Labour and Greens Party election posters are going up everywhere - rather different to the National Party heartland I've been living in the last five years.

It was a remarkably cold winter which is now giving over to a warm spring (in the north, a drought that doesn't bear thinking about).  I'm loving that it's warm enough to run and keep fit again.  Seems to be working according to the health check with SES the other night, which said I have basically zero risk of heart disease!

Tomorrow is looking fairly packed, so it may be a while before I write again,  Looking forward, however, to updating here more regularly.

Poor man's lemonade

Here at the farm we waste surprisingly little.  In the warmer months, collecting the water from the shower, kitchen sink and washing machine.  Anything edible goes (in the final instance) to the dog.  And anything organic goes into compost.

 

Recently I've been making a lot of fruit salads, while the fruit is cheap.  It struck me that there might be something more we can do with fruit waste before it's composted.  This married up with my other passion, which is healthy living.  From this came fruit infusions.

 

By way of example, the other day I was making up a salad out of bananas, kiwifruit and canteloupe (rockmelon).  As you can imagine, this generates a fair bit of peel.

 

While I was preparing the melon to be cut up, I cut it in half and scraped the pulp from this middle into a plastic bowl.  I also put in the bowl the touch outer rinds and the peeled skins of the kiwifruit. 

The bananas needed different treatment.  The skins taste revolting, but I couldn't see anything much wrong with the whites inside them.  So, I laid the peels out flat and scraped the edged of the knife along them to remove the white.  This went into the bowl too.

Next, I boiled the kettle and poured the hot water over the mass of pulp, pips and skins and left it to sit while I cut up the salad proper.

Once I'd finished the salad and put it away, I sieved the solids out of the brewed mix of skins and so on.  The skins and detritus could then go into the compost bin.

 

The end result was a pitcher of fruit drink that could be used either as a flavouring for water or as a drink in itself.

 

 

For the avoidance of doubt, wash the fruit before making an infusion with it: this ill remove contaminants from the outside.

 

Clearly, the results you get doing this will be a little haphazard.  In this case, I'd probably have excluded the melon rinds (they gave it an unpleasantly woody taste).  More often than not, though, you get to extract even more value from fresh fruit, and give youself something more flavoured than water and healthier than soft drinks.

 

What have you been doing lately to make food go further?