Lacuna Sabbath

Lacuna Sabbath is the word coined by the Cougarnaut (also known as the Mountain Man and Pa Kettle in Sherdie’s blog) to describe my duck herding attempts to wrangle Fridays off work for the specific purpose of pottering in the garden and communing with my fury and fluffy friends.

The Lacuna part likens the princess castle duck pond to that wonderful world of Mr Curly, the Leunig character who lives at Curly Flat on the shores of Lake Lacuna. (I wonder if it is OK to have a cartoon character as a spiritual leader…..) The Sabbath, obviously referring to the weekly day of rest and worship practiced by many religions.

Things that happened today include jogging down to the community garden to let the girls out and undertake a bit of impromptu weeding and keening over the self seeded poppy plants coming up amongst the spinach, weeds, and in the paths. I then kept running down through to the Molonglo River to be amazed at how high the water was.

The wonderful thing about being a grown up is that you can have desert for lunch whenever you like (unless your folks are coming to lunch). I used to work with a beautiful woman who whenever she was having a bad time, used to make herself fairy bread for lunch! Recently my beautiful friend Pickle introduced me to baked custard – and what a wonderful, cheap, old fashioned, healthy way to do justice to fresh chook and duck eggs!

Here is my Recipe for Baked Custard:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups rice milk (no cows milk here!)
• 4 chook or duck eggs
• Sugar or sweetener to taste
• Vanilla to taste
• Ground nutmeg to sprinkle on top

Method:

• Pre-heat over to about 160 (low – moderate)
• Grease an oven proof bowl with butter
• Pop ingredients into bowl and mix with housewife’s magic wand or similar
• Stand bowl in a baking dish of hot water from the kettle – try and get water up sides of bowl as much as possible
• Sprinkle nutmeg on top
• Bake until set
• Eat hot of cold.
• Can also be made in ramekins
• Too easy!

So in celebration of the Lacuna Sabbath, I made baked custard with some freshly stewed quince and pear. For Lunch. DELICIOUS!!

Other things that happened today was a nanna nap in the warm sun streaming through the windows, and a quick canter down to the garden once more to pick dinner and lock up the girls before dark, and then do the same back here.

I picked leeks to make a big batch of pumpkin soup. (home grown too of course!) It is just bubling away now. When it is cooked it will be frozen in containers to take to work each day for lunch. Yup, lunch for two weeks all for the price of 6 chicken stock cubes. We have herbs and parsely growing in the office car park/worm farm/veggie garden and a microwave - perfect!

I LOVE leeks, and have two varieties growing all the time – Cartesian Giants, and a leek variety that has naturalized at the Holder Community Garden. This variety is short, fat, blue and incredibly hardy to cold, hot, wind, wet and dry. Once cooked, it is very tender, sweet to eat and self seeds readily.


These are some cartesians. I love how big the root systems of my leeks are. I must be doing something right! I also love that they cost $2 in the supermarket! Same with broccoli - $7 kg! Home grown produce makes me feel very rich indeed.




And finally, for Sherdie the Rocketeer, here is today's picture of Nefley, and on the right, the working girls in their chook tractor - Charlotte and Gretel, with a tiny piece of Bianca on the right.

All in all, an excellent Lacuna Sabbath!