Crochet: Update 1 on the Dutch blanket

On the weekend of 10 October 2015 I finished crocheting the last few squares of the blanket. Here are the sets from week 15 up to and including 24. 

After this the work of putting them altogether is going to start. I am looking forward to it and also really looking forward to making a very nice rim around the blanket to finish it off very nicely.

So far I am having a great time with making this blanket, despite it being a lot of work. I have seen picture of finished blankets and they are looking really good. So, slowly we move on.

I will update again in some weeks.

Spinning: Jacob fibre

A few years ago I decided to enroll in a Craftsy course as I really wanted to learn how to properly spin with a spindle. With that course there was a kit available as well and I got that as well. There was a Lucet spindle and there was Coopworth, Jacob and Bluefaced Leister fibre.

In the meantime I have spun the Coopworth and Jacob. The Coopworth I blogged about in an earlier post. I still have to ply that.

The Jacob fibre was really easy to spin with, it didn't take me much time at all. Last Sunday I decided to ply it. It turned out really good. I am very pleased with the outcome. Now all I have to do is decide what to make with it. One of my children has requested a pair of socks, but I have no idea whether I have enough of it yet. I will have to do some weighing and measuring first. So that part is to be continued :-)

This is where I had just started spinning the yarn.

Here I have just put the spun single around my wrist in such a way that I could ply it and had just started plying it onto my spindle.

Here you see where it is all finished plying and it is all on the spindle again.

And now it is made into a ball of yarn.

Fu yung hai

Here comes another family favourite. This time the recipe originated in China. I can't tell how close to the original this is though. In the deep dark past we would sometimes get some Chinese food from a Chinese take-away, back in the day when we still lived in The Netherlands. I was never a big fan of Chinese take-away as I never liked the oily flavour of most things. Though there was the odd Chinese restaurant that was really good. Usually those were serving foods from a particular ethnicity, such as Mongolian, which is really great food.

Often we would have Fu yung hai with our take-away. It was one of the dishes that was tasty. But as I learned more and more about healthy foods, I started wanting better versions of it. At first I tried to make it with a supermarket packet. It didn't do it for me, so I started experimenting with making it from scratch. The below is the result. Mind you I don't make it exactly the same every time. I still experiment with food, sometimes I do put grated carrots in there, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I put sweet pointy pepper in there, sometimes I don't. I don't really do quantities very well. I just do something, so you can totally divert from the quantities I have given here, those are what I used today, any other time it will likely be different. This recipe is flexible :-)

 The noodles

The mix of chicken, vegetables and eggs

The sweet and sour sauce

All of it together on a plate.

Origin:China

Difficulty: easy

Time: 45 minutes

Serves: 6

Traditional, Paleo*

Equipment:

• pans
• kitchen utensils.

Ingredients:

• 500 grams of chicken (pasture raised)
• 4 grated organic carrots
• 2 sliced organic sweet pointy pepper
• 2 large organic onions, in half rings
• 500 grams sliced organic mushrooms
• fish sauce
• shoyu
• ginger powder
• 1 organic garlic clove
• coconut oil
• 10 eggs
• 500 grams (home made) egg noodles or 500 grams courgette noodles (grated on the largest setting of the kitchen machine)
• raw honey
• raw apple cider vinegar
• organic tomato paste
• salt and pepper to taste

Things to do ahead:

• 1 day ahead: make the egg noodles
• 1 day ahead (optional): cut meat and vegetables
  
  

Directions:

• Cut the chicken in cubes, cut the vegetables.
• Put coconut oil in the pan, fry the chicken.
• Add the vegetables
• Add the spices, fish sauce and shoyu
• When all is nicely fried, add the eggs and let them cook until firm.
• During the above cook up the noodles until they are soft.
• For the sweet and sour sauce mix honey, apple cider vinegar and tomato paste until you have the taste you like.
• Put it on a plate and yum!

Enjoy!

* To make this a Paleo dish, substitute the egg noodles with courgette noodles.
It is possible to make this recipe GAPS legal. Omit the Shoyu and substitute the egg noodles with courgette noodles.

Beef and pork from the farm

We go weekly to a local farm to get raw milk. The farm is called Meadow Cottage Farm. They are on the Churt Road in Churt.


They have a lovely Jersey herd. Their milk is divine. I have rarely tasted milk so good.
But as they also have males born, they occasionally butcher one. When that happens we get the offer of buying some of that meat. I am so impressed by the meat of these boys. It is the most tasty I have ever had. I have bought organic and grassfed before from farms local to me before we moved here. One had Marchigiana cattle. That meat was very nice as well, but in all honesty the meat of these Jersey boys is the best I have ever had.

They also keep pigs and occasionally butcher one of those as well. So recently we ended with a package of pork on top of our beef. Our freezer can hardly keeps its doors closed.
these pigs are kept very naturally and also with the pigs you taste it. It is such tasty meat. The sausages are the best I have ever tasted.

So in a nutshell, naturally raised animals taste better.

Thai cashew chicken.

This dish is one of the favourites of my kids. It is also super easy and quick to make. We hardly ever have left-overs of this one, which is unfortunate for me as I love taking it to work the next day for lunch.

Finding a way to make this dish started many years ago.
When we lived in The Netherlands there were these boxes, with which you could make certain ethnic dishes. Thai cashew chicken was one of them. So once in a while we used it. After we moved to the UK in 2005 and I learned about traditional cooking, I learned that some of the ingredients in the boxes had not been so wonderful. So, because I couldn't get it that easily anyway anymore and because it didn't have such great ingredients I started searching on how to traditionally make this myself.

I searched the internet and found many recipes which were called Thai cashew chicken. But most didn't really have great ingredients and others didn't taste so well. So I started experimenting. And this is the result of my experiments.

So I will share it here with you in hopes that you will like it just as much as we do. 

Enjoy!

Soaked rice, ready for eating, still in the haybox, nice and warm.

The chicken sauce

Here it is on a plate

Origin: Thailand

Difficulty: easy

Time: 30 minutes

Serves: 6

Traditional/GAPS/SCD legal, Primal, Paleo, Vegetarian, etc.

Equipment:

• hay box (optional)
• 2 pans
• spatula

Ingredients:

• 600 grams (or more) pasture raised or organic chicken, cubed
• coconut oil
• 2 hands full of crispy cashew nuts
• organic whole grain rice
• a bunch of organic spring onions
• 2 tablespoons of rubbish free thai fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons of rubbish free oyster sauce.
• 2 cups of home made chicken broth
• organic corn starch for thickening (optional)

Things to do ahead:

• 3 days ahead, soak organic cashew nuts in salty water for 6 hours and dehydrate
• 1 day ahead, make chicken broth
• the evening before, soak the rice overnight in an acidic medium
• the morning before, cook rice for 20 minutes and put for the rest of the day in the haybox, alternatively cook it a few hours before

Directions:

• Make the crispy nuts, broth and rice ahead of time, as described above
• Cut the chicken in cubes
• Fry the chicken in the coconut oil, add the fish sauce and oyster sauce
• Clean and cut the spring onions
• Once the chicken is fried well, add the spring onions and the cashew nuts
• Add the broth
• Optionally thicken the sauce with the corn starch. Often enough I don't thicken as the rice soaks up the sauce well enough. In the pictures above I haven't thickened the sauce as I had not motivation to do so :-)

Substitutions

It is not easy to get rubbish free oyster sauce. In case you can't find it, use shoyu or tamari, or just omit altogether and add a bit more fish sauce. With shoyu and tamari it will taste slightly different, but it is still equally tasty.