Doing: ...Posting at the Simple Green Frugal Co-Op on growing sprouts. Check it out!


Making: ...Mrs Burt's tomato sauce recipe. I watered the vegie garden yesterday after a really hot day which burst the skins on many of my tomatoes in the front garden, so - waste not, want not - I used them to make a half batch of my grandmother's famous tomato sauce (a recipe she received from her friend, Mrs Burt). It turned this:

Into this:


Lovely :-) Last year was the first time I made sauce from my own organic tomatoes. This year I used my own onions in it as well, which I thought was pretty cool. I don't sieve my sauce to remove the seeds. My grandmother never did and neither did my Mum so it's doesn't look homemade to me without seeds LOL. I just whizz it with the stick blender briefly before bottling to mush the skins.


...Zucchini marmalade. I'm not a big marmalade fan at the best of times, but there's only so many different things you can do with zucchini's at this time of year, so I gave it a bash. It's made with crushed pineapple and crystallized ginger (although I didn't have any so I used a dash of my home grown dried ginger).


It smells nice, although I used a whole packet of Jam Setta and it doesn't look like it's setting properly which is irritating. We'll see. If it's any good I'll post the recipe.

Baking: ...Zucchini slice x 5.


Harvesting: ...Um, zucchinis ;-) Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, a few raspberries and the last of the blueberries for the season.

Dinner: Guess? Bingo! Zucchini slice and salad from the garden.

Reading: ...This post at We Knit, Sew, Bake, and Grow, and being alternately horrified and disgusted! I had no idea that cheap vinegar is made from petrochemicals! I shouldn't be surprised - when "home brand" vinegars are a third of the price of the other vinegars, alarm bells should have rung, but I was quite ignorant of the fact that petrochemcials can be distilled into alcohol, which is then used to make acetic acid, or as we know it, vinegar.

Here I was thinking I was getting rid of the petrochemical products from my home, all the while stocking up on cheap vinegar to use in my homemade bathroom and laundry products and as Rinse Aid in the dishwasher. I also discovered that cheap brown vinegar is not malt vinegar, it's white vinegar with coluring added to it. Just goes to show doesn't it?

Of course any certified organic vinegars cannot be petrochemical-derived, but I can only afford to use them in cooking, so in future I will be looking for vinegar labelled "grain-derived" or similar for my cleaning products - if such a thing exists anywhere I shop - or I may have to start making my own!