Zucchini, Chocolate + Olive Oil Cake

We’ve been knee-deep in zucchinis for a while now. The glut began before the tomatoes ripened, and it continues to surprise us with over-sized veggies most days. It’s a nice problem to have. Only about half of us actually like eating zucchini on it’s own, so to stay on top of the glut, we’ve been experimenting with zucchini kasundi recipes - we’ve not found a total favourite yet, but have a couple that will clear your sinuses if you’re brave! And we’ve returned to old favourites like pickled zucchinis, spiced zucchini soup (fabulous with fresh bread on autumn evenings, and a great glut-buster), and our favourite, zucchini chocolate cake. 

This is our go-to zucchini chocolate cake recipe. It’s a quick mix recipe that makes a large amount of cake to share for a group, or to supply hungry kids with snacks for up to a week (it may depend on how hungry!). The cake keeps moist in an air-tight container on the bench for a few days, or can be stored in the fridge for up to a week, or frozen if longer storage is needed.

The olive oil adds depth of flavour that prevents the cake from being overly sweet. If you prefer a milder flavour, another vegetable or seed oil like sunflower oil might be a good replacement. The cake is dairy free and can be made gluten free with the alternative mentioned below. We haven’t tried an egg replacement so it’s not vegan, but let us know if you find a method that works for you! You can also add your favourite nuts or seeds to the cake, and ice it if you like.

Like all our recipes, we recommend you experiment and have fun finding what works best for you! 

2 cups (250g) plain flour

1.5 cups organic raw sugar (coconut sugar or rapadura also work, but can change the texture slightly).
3/4 cup cocoa powder (or raw cacao) 
3 teaspoons baking powder 
1 teaspoon bicarb
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup olive oil

2 cups grated zucchini, firmly packed

1. Preheat oven to 180°C

2. Grease and flour a lamington tin.
3. Place the flour, sugar, cocoa, bicarb, baking powder, salt and cinnamon together in a large bowl, then stir.
4. Add the eggs and oil to the bowl, and mix well.
5. Add the zucchini and mix together evenly.
6. Pour into the prepared lamington tin.
7. Bake in the preheated oven for one hour. 

8. Cool the cake and slice it into squares. 

Gluten free version: Use a gluten-free flour mix and add one extra egg. 

Marvellous Mulberries :: Our favourite cordial recipe

Our very favourite garden tree is our mulberry. It's the biggest in the food forest, planted 9 or so years ago, over Tiny Owlet's placenta. It grows generous amounts of fruit, provides cooling shade, juice for ink-making, leaves for tea and silk worm fodder, and a stunning autumn display as it's leaves turn yellow where the sun lands on them. Actually, all the plants in our perennial food forest are wonderful. They’re super low maintenance, and feed us huge amounts of food each year. We’re so glad we planted them when we did. If you’re strapped for time, but have some space in your garden for perennial food plants, throw some in and feed your family (friends and neighbours), for years to come. It’s well worth the investment. But back to the mulberry.
Last year, we made the mistake of not throwing a net over our mulberry tree. The tree had grown so much in the year prior, it outgrew the nets we had, and we naively thought there would be enough fruit for us and the blackbirds to share. We didn’t pick a single ripe mulberry.

So, this year we were prepared. And the extra rain we’ve had meant mulberries as far as the eye can see. The laden tree’s heavy branches are sweeping the ground, and every leaf has berries waiting underneath to be picked. Unfortunately the combination of wind, rain and heavy fruit mean the tree is almost lying horizontal at this point. It won't be the same beautiful upright tree, and the food forest is somewhat changed, but that's the adventure of gardening and tending to an ever-changing ecosystem. We’ve still been sneaking out to the garden to scoff and slurp on juicy mulberries all month - bright magenta juice staining our fingers and toes... And, of course, we've been putting some aside for winter.

Bottled mulberries for the cupboards for winter guzzling. Fresh berries and mulberry cordial to enjoy right now. We'll make some cordial into jelly and some fruit into jam. We've been playing with mulberry cordial recipes for a few years now, and here's our ultra-simple favourite. We make a habit of simplifying things, because we find we're more likely to find time for an easy recipe we can remember by heart. Mulberry Cordial

1kg mulberries 1L water 750g sugar 2 lemons 1. Place the mulberries in a large saucepan, with the water and sugar. 2. Add the zest and juice of the lemons 3. Place the pot over a medium-high heat and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally. 4. Simmer for 10-15 minutes, continuing to stir when you remember. 5. Line a large bowl or jug with a fine mesh bag, cheesecloth or strainer while you wait for the pot to simmer. 6. Remove from the heat and pour into the mesh bag/strainer/cloth lined bowl.

7. Allow the liquid to drain from the fruit pulp. We like to use a mesh bag and suspend it from a kitchen cupboard handle over the bowl. Set the fruit pulp aside. 8. Use a funnel to pour the cordial into clean bottles. Sterilise the bottles first if you're going to store the cordial for a while. 9. Seal with lids and move to the fridge when cool if you're planning to enjoy the cordial over the next couple of weeks. Pasteurise the full bottles in a large pot of boiling water if you plan to store them for up to 12 months.

Enjoy your cordial mixed 1:4 parts water. Mulberry fizz is lovely if you have a Sodastream, and mulberry mixes well with alcoholic drinks, too. Use the fruit pulp (and lemon zest) in your favourite crumble, pie or muffin recipe. It's delicious added to an apple base filling. Alternatively, freeze it for smoothies or nice-cream, or for baking another day. 

Happiest Mulberry season! 

~ Lauren. xx

Waste-free Sourdough Crackers

I live with a baker now. In January, Oberon set out on a mission to learn to make bread, using our friend Bonnie Ohara's wonderful book, and he did! This has meant lots of yummy warm and fresh bread, and an abundance of sourdough starter in our house again. And the owlets have a renewed interest in baking, and a new activity to enjoy with their Dad.

Also, unrelated to this, but since we started living waste-free, we haven’t bought crackers for almost 4 years. We haven’t really missed them too much, but they’re a nice snack to have on hand. Happily, our abundance of sourdough starter means we have a regular cracker supply once more! And a very quick and delicious savoury treat to snack on. And no waste, while we’re making our food stretch further. Hooray for new skills and new ways to be creative with turning waste into resources.

—————————————
Sourdough Starter Crackers
1 cup sourdough starter
1 cup plain flour
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp sea salt

Mix all the ingredients together into a ball of dough. Dust your table surface with a little flour and knead the dough until it’s fairly smooth. Roll the dough flat until it’s only a few millimetres thick (thinner = crunchier). I do this on the back of a baking tray, lined with parchment or greased and dusted. Cut the dough into squares with a knife or pizza cutter, then prick each square with a fork. Drizzle with olive oil and spread the oil gently with a pastry brush. Sprinkle whatever flavours you’d like on top - things like sea salt, sesame seeds, seaweed salt, herbs like rosemary are all great. Bake at 180 degrees for 25 minutes. Let cool and eat with your favourite cheese or dip, or just as they are!

Women and the mental load of waste-free living (+ a soap recipe)

There's an elephant in the room, when it comes to waste-free living. In the majority of households attempting to reduce their waste, it is still largely the work of women. Women often have the desire to make change in practical ways, and carry the burden of researching and strategising ways to implement waste-free shifts in their households. Women and children worldwide are also most likely to suffer the impacts of environmental issues and poor waste-management. It's been well documented that women are at the forefront of the actual day-to-day work of environmental change. Anecdotally, Oberon and I have seen it in the Facebook group we run (Zero Waste Tasmania), where more than 80% of members are women. And across social media, the majority of accounts devoted to the practical business of zero waste living are women. Women are the ones buying our book, although hopefully the men in their lives are reading it and trying things, too, and we've addressed this in the book. Waste-free living doesn't have to be burdensome. In fact, it can be joyful and enriching as you find a closer connection and care for nature. It's even fun! But in our home, it's fun, and not burdensome, because it's shared.

Women carry the mental and physical load of waste-free living, and we need to see that shifted. It has to shift for more of us to be able to make space to take more waste-free living practices on. It was the manufacturing of plastic packaged products and 'convenience' foods that simultaneously gave women freedom from their homes and created the huge environmental problem we face today. Meanwhile, men have, for the most part, carried on as usual, embracing 'convenience' products and being left somewhat off the hook. This has to change, for all our sakes, but especially for our children who will discover the full effect of choosing 'convenience' over responsibility.

But for today, on International Women's Day, I'm going to leave the mental load of pushing for that shift to the men-folk (thanks, Huz), and recognise and celebrate the women who have done so much practical work to care for their families, their homes and our planet. I'm often drawn to think, on such days, of the people who lived on the patch of land where I live, before me. First the muwinina women who cared for it so very well that only a midden and stone fish traps by the foreshore remain as evidence that they'd impacted this land. And then the farmer's wife, who possibly seldom made it to our patch of the orchard while she tended her home and garden. Or the housewife who lived here before us, who saw fit to install lots of small cupboards for their preserves, which inspired me to think about filling them with preserves of our own.

While we were in the process of compiling recipes for our book, I visited my Mum's place and she pulled out a couple of notebooks she'd had stored away. Simple notebooks featuring beautiful handwriting, on plain, lined paper, yellowed now from age. The pages were filled with recipes and notes, taken by my two grandmothers, who began them as young, newly married housewives. They began writing them towards the end, and immediately after WW2, and both notebooks reflect how they were striving to stretch their resources further when they were required to keep their homes running, and families fed, on very little. It was a time when food was rationed, Victory gardens were encouraged, and wasting food was illegal or very much frowned upon. And women bore the brunt of that work.

As I turned the pages of hints & tips, so often shared by friends or in newspaper articles, government publications and magazines in a time before Google, I found many that looked like the handy hints we've come to know and love, in our waste-free living travels. But one of my favourites as I flicked through, was my maternal grandmother's method of using up all the old soap ends to make new soap. I snapped a photo so I could bring it home to try. I never met Doris, my mum's Mum. So having a little routine of hers in our own family rhythm seemed like a wonderful idea. So we saved up the soap ends, and gave it a try.

I had to do a little tweaking and estimating to quantify things like how many soap ends a family might make in 3 months, or how big a small cup or her pie dish might be. But we got there in the end. I was delighted to share the making of it with Little Owlet, and I'm happy to say it worked well. And so we have olive oil scrap soap in our home, stretching our resources further, and creating a beautiful product from old, as my grandmother did. Here we've shared the recipe, as you can find it in our book. It's one that's dear to our hearts. 

MAKE THIS :: Olive Oil Scrap Soap

What you'll need:

1 cup soap ends

1/2 cup olive oil, plus extra for oiling 

soap mould - a small glass baking dish works nicely
1 cup water

STEP 1

Grate the soap ends and place them in a

saucepan with water. Make sure the water just covers the soap. 

STEP 2

Place over a medium heat and stir well until

the soap fragments have dissolved.

STEP 3

Remove from the stove and add olive oil,

stirring well.

STEP 4

Beat well with a whisk and, while the

mixture is still warm, pour it into an oiled

dish or mould.

STEP 5

When the soap block is completely cold,

turn it out onto a board and cut it into

squares.

STEP 6

Leave your new soap bars to harden for

a few days before using. 

........ 

Our book 'A Family Guide to Waste-Free Living' is available in all good bookshops (including ours!), and libraries now. Published by Plum Books and featuring photographs by Natalie Mendham, who also took the first picture in this blog post. 

~ Lauren. xx

Pigface Jam

A couple of years ago, on the way home from the beach, I tripped over a runner of pigface stretching across the track back to the car. I picked it up and saw some tiny roots poking out, so I carried it home with me and popped it out in the backyard, beside the herb garden. I didn't expect it to grow, but grow it did, and it completely covered a large grassy patch quite quickly. It grew in heavy clay soil, in the shade and continues to cover as much of the garden as we let it. We use it for bee stings and burns, in the same way you'd use aloe vera, so it's spot near the back door is quite practical.

This year, the pig face patch grew dozens of beautiful bright magenta flowers, which the bees adored. These turned into amazing looking red fruit… and so we made jam.

We referred to this recipe, but made a few minor changes, so here's our version…

1. Collect and peel 2 cups of pig face fruit pulp. The red fleshy skin peels away from the inside ball of pulp quite easily.
2. Place it in a saucepan with 1 cup of sugar and 3 cups of water.
3. Cut a lemon in half, squeeze it a bit and throw it in, peel and all.
4. Bring to a boil while sterilising a jar or two.
5.  Simmer and test the jam until it has thickened to a suitable jammy consistency - ours became really stretchy which is quite unlike any jam I've ever seen before!
6. Strain the jam if you like (we didn't).
7. Pour or ladle it into jars.

The jam is an interesting dark colour, but the flavour is amazing! Pigface fruit taste sweet and salty, with hints of strawberry and guava. The jam is all of that but sweeter… Delicious on sourdough with a little butter.

The entire plant is useful and edible. Leaves can be used in salads and wherever you might enjoy juicy and salty hints of flavour. Our chooks seem to enjoy a nibble, too! If you happen to trip over a little pig face on your way home from the beach, I'd highly recommend plonking it in your garden somewhere and enjoying this readily available bush food. Or perhaps, while you're at the beach, indulge in a little foraging? It's well worth the effort.

~ Lauren. xx