A vintage year, and it's done in five gallon cans

I try not to be a wine snob, but instead i say life is too short to drink bad wine.

However, a recent venture into a wine shop revealed that the bar had lowered when it came to wine packaging.

Wine in cans.

Well i guess it had to happen, after all we are the country who invented the Goon.

Taph and i had to try it, so we bought one can of the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. It did not have the famous fresh cut grass, aroma that New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs have. In fact it was a little flat,

Overall we figured it was marketed for those occasions where the place you are going does not allow glass, and you do not want to take a goon.

And who knows, with that marketing plan, we may end up buying a slab of it.

My aversion to wine in cans comes from this old "Arthur Daley E's Alright" song, which has the line "it's a vintage year, and it's done in five gallon cans"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Wine

Starting a rumour

Recently the War Memorial had an open day at their Mitchell annex. We had been trying to go for several year and this was the first time we had a free afternoon coincide with an open day there.

Most people go out their and take photos of the big stuff they have there. However Taph and I were drawn towards some of the smaller stuff instead.

We spent a little time next to the Furphy water cart and tried to start some rumours. None stuck and a few old timers thought we were there as part of the show.

The Little Japanese Tank saw us doing a lot of Lt Gruber impersonations.

The Salvos van at the war memorial made us think how badly paid our serving forces are, if they need to use a salvos soup kitchen to keep them fed.

However it took every ounce of self control to prevent Taph form picking the old sewing machine up and making a break for it. But she was able to resist the temptation that this sewing machine caused, and we made our way outside.

Most of these pictures were lifted from the Riotact, as many of my pictures did not work.

http://the-riotact.com/?p=8443

http://the-riotact.com/?p=6611

Today is St Patrick’s Day.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, and as I am descended from Irish political prisoners who were sent to the other side of the world in the eighteen hundreds, I will be celebrating it.

However I am also suffering from Coeliacs disease so a pint of Guinness is out. But I do have this sitting in my bar, and will be cracking it open later tonight.

The mark of a man …

…Is the size of his salad tongs?
I have seen a few different salad tongs while out op-shopping. These I found on my recent trip down the coast.

Solid aluminium, these cost a dollar, and when I saw them I had to have them. They are perfect in the kitchen, or for beaning a burglar with.

I call them my real mans salad tongs, as real men can eat salad, with egg and bacon pie*.

However, I saw these salad tongs at a garage sale, and thought, this guy must be compensating for something

*I have been to many truck stops across the country, and while none have quiche, they all have Egg and Bacon pie on the menu.
**and I can say all of this without any hint of irony.

F.I.G. J.A.M.

Taph and I know the location of a fig tree that hides in plain sight, so recently, over a few days, when the figs were ripe, we collected the fruit from it.


In all we got about six kilos of ripe figs from this tree, so Taph and I spent the weekend turning this into Fig Jam, and a very nice Fig and Goat Cheese Tart that we had for dinner on Sunday.
In all it cost us around $10 for the spices (gee, vanilla beans are expensive from the supermarkets. Does anyone know of a cheaper option), but we have a good supply of Fig Jam. We are also open to swaps, so let us know if you have some homemade condiments to swap.

There are more to tomatoes than dried.

When we found our stash of Tomatoes, we did dry some of them, but we still had too many for my little food dehydrator to handle.

So we went for the old standard preserve of tomatoes. Sauce and Chutney.

And did we have some tomatoes for the sauce and pickles. All up we produced over three litres of Sauce and six litres of Chutney. All this and a dehydrator full of tomatoes that were scrumped to start with.

What more could you ask for?

Scrumped-tious

In living our lives as frugally as possible, I thought I had set a reasonably low bar, but a couple of Saturday’s ago Taph and I got a gold medal in the 100 metre limbo.

You see, we got food, in bulk,

From the TIP.

It may sound bad, but we did not go dumpster diving. Well it is good to know how much further you can go.

But in our case it is not as bad as it sounds. You see, on Saturday we were going to the R shop, at the Mitchell Waste Transfer station, and I saw a couple of Cherry Tomato plants, just growing wild in the middle of the roundabout there.

After I parked the car, and walked back I noticed several more. In all there were about 10 tomato plants growing wild.

We picked what was ripe, and got the hell out of there, as we were scrumping.

Then we faced the problem of what to do with our ill-gotten gains. We have plenty of tomato chutney and relish from last year. The Fowlers jars are too large for cherry tomatoes, so the best option was to dry them as semi-dried tomatoes with garlic in olive oil. Taph says she has plans to use them in pizza bases.

A search of the Fyshwick markets found us some Australian grown garlic at $15.99 a kilo (we could have bought imported garlic cheaper, but this way we support Australian producers and contribute fewer carbon miles to our Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

We will feel very smug as we eat this first part of our scrumped gains.