Kitchen round-up

Diet
We are all vegetarian or vegan and do shared vegan cooking. We have a cooking roster so that someone is on cooking 6 out of 7 days per week. This means that we only have to cook once a week and so can focus on other things the rest of the week. Other benefits are getting to try dishes you may not have had before and that cooking does not become boring. On average we feed 1.5 extra people per night (friends and boyfriends), which is replacing the non-vegan meal that they would likely have had otherwise. So it is good for the environment for us to feed more people!

Dishes

We have a dishwasher but rather wash dishes by hand for several reasons. Firstly, the dishwasher was not washing the dishes properly. Secondly, food would be stuck on the dishes by the time that the dishwasher was full and ready to run. A way around this is rinsing but why not just do a quick wash of the dish immediately after use if you need to rinse it anyway. We don’t use meat, dairy or egg so a quick wash is sufficient. We have such a high turnover of dishes anyway such that they’d be used again within 2 days. Thirdly, a dishwasher uses more water than washing by hand in the kitchen sink.

Packaging and Fairtrade

We choose to buy food at Bin Inn or in bulk to reduce the amount of packaging we create a demand for. We take our own containers to Bin Inn. After 3 years of shopping at Bin Inn I (Gabby – the pantry manager) now have a labelled container for everything we buy so that we know when we are out of an item and to make it easier to refill at Bin Inn. This year we have started buying in giant bags of flour, rice and sugar.

The brown rice was from Sun Thai (on Middleton Rd) for $68 per 20kg bag. White rice we get from the supermarket in a 10kg bag because the brand Sun Rice donates money to ChildFund for every kg of rice we buy. Actually, they did that last year but may not this year. We’ll check it out before we get the next bag. We also get white and wholemeal flour from Sun Thai for about $27 per 20kg bag. We order fair-trade cane sugar through the Trade Aid online shop for $70 per 25kg, which ends up being $2.80 per kg. This price is about the same as what you get ordinary white sugar for in supermarkets. We have opened this up as a little bulk-food co-op for our friends in the neighbourhood come. They mostly get the fair-trade sugar and cocoa from us because it is cheaper than in supermarkets (if they even have it) and more convenient than going to Trade Aid themselves.

Waste

There are 5 parts to our kitchen solid waste system: reuse, recycling, rubbish, worm farm scraps and bokashi scraps.

We reuse where we can. The most likely candidates are plastic bags, plastic containers and glass jars. We recycle cans, paper and plastic containers that are not very easy to reuse. Food scraps either go in our worm farms or are composted by the bokashi method.

We would rather use the food scraps we generate to feed our vegetables rather than send it to somewhere else to be processed and then redistributed because this handling uses lots of petrol.

Preserving

Apple Avalanche

The flat Truman the Quiet Place (also in Eco-My-Flat) down the road ended up with MASSES of apples and so were giving them away. We claimed two good sized bags to do some preserving with. I found an awesome recipe in a preserving book I appropriated from my mother. The book has recipes for fruit jams, jellies, butters and curds, as well as fruit in syrup. It also has sauces, chutneys, relishes and a general guide to preserving vegetables. It is very handy! So the recipe that I used for most of the apples was Cinnamon Apple Butter. I had made it earlier in the year and it was such a success, with my flat nomming (eating it) like there’s no tomorrow. So I made 2 batches from the apples about 2 weeks ago. We have gone through about 5 jars (or more) since then! Here’s the recipe so you can make it too. Enjoy!

Cinnamon Apple Butter recipe

Ingredients:
2kg cooking apples
¼ cup (65g) butter
1 cup sugar
3 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
5 whole cloves
1 ¼ cup (300ml) water

Method:
1. Peel, core and chop the apples.
2. Put into a large saucepan with the rest of the ingredients and cook over a low heat until the apples are very soft.
3. Remove the cloves.
4. Beat the mixture until smooth and creamy.
5. Bring to the boil, then pour into warm sterilised jars and seal immediately.

Gourmet Stalks
After the workshop by Jan on preserving I was enthused to make the gourmet stalks that she raved about. It is quite tasty. Really good on salad sandwiches – it adds so much flavour. It’s quite cool that it uses that “waste product” that is the stalks of silverbeet, as well as celery which we often struggle to use all of when we get it in the vege co-op.
I also LOVED the feijoa chutney from the workshop but woe, alas, when I went to make some feijoa’s were out of season L Fortunately, Tim at Tauawhi donated some feijoas to me that he had in his freezer. So I’ll be able to make some tasty feijoa tastiness soon J