Hi everybody! My name is Cristina, I’m from Barcelona and I am in Hvozd as an EVS “European Voluntary Service”. I’m here since April until the end of November 2018 taking part on this project. And suddenly it’s coming the end of it and that’s why I am decided to make this #30days#recipes.
I come from a city next to Barcelona, leaving a common life, going from here to there, working for ones or others but I always had this nice feeling and connection with nature so I decided to experiment this life. We are two volunteers here and we are enjoying it so much. We love nature and to take care of the environment and here we are living our life under the Permaculture principles.
Since the first day I’m here I’m learning a lot of different things that I want to share, small actions that you can do to live more in contact. I like to use this word because it englobes many options. For me be in contact means to stop for a while and observe what I am doing, the consequences that have for myself, for the community and for the environment. Observe and change the way how I am interacting with this elements.
That’s the purpose of this blog, share all the knowledge that I am learning here and is helping to the interaction between me and the environment through the food, the habits and the residues that I am producing.
One of the topics that I am exploring here is about the time. When I was living in the city, I had some schedule to follow, some work to do, some social meetings etc. but I was always with this sentence on me: “I have no time”. I have no time to do the meal so I prefer to buy something, I have no time to sew a broken shirt so I buy a new one etc. This though changed on me some years ago but here I am exploding this change, I am learning a lot of tips that helps me to spend time on myself, doing things from and for myself and at the same time having fun and helping me to feel in contact.
Learning about the food and the interaction between us and what we eat I discovered again another relation and it’s about how we cook, how much we care about the vegetables or other food, making attention on the process. For example, it’s not the same mix the bread with a mixer than by hands, or grain sugar with some grinder than with a mortar. It will take more time if we make it by ourselves, but the energy will be different, and definitely that’s what we are projecting to the food, and finally what we are eating.
You will see how easy are the things that I want to share and how they’ll change your way to live your life!
Here in Hvozd our diet is mostly vegan. I am not vegan, I am not vegetarian I am nothing. I am just learning how to fit yourself with a low impact on the environment. That’s why meanly all the recipes that I am sharing are vegan, we cultivate vegetables and we don’t have animals at the farm.
One of the first thing I felt in love here about the food was the bread. That’s why it was one of the first recipes I learned. The flavour, savour and softy characteristics of the homemade bread make it delicious.
This process is divided in two parts. The first step is make the sourdough. This is a natural process which happens in nature. To make the fermentation and have our natural yeast we’ll need:
Organic, ecological and integral rye flour.
Tempered water
Jar (medium)
For this process it’s important to use a flour as much natural as possible, to help the process.
1. Put the flour into the jar and fill it a little bit less than the middle
2. Add tempered water
3. Mix it until have a consistent denser than a yogurt.
4. Leave in a warm and calm place.
It’s important to put the jar in some high place where the vibrations of us doesn’t disturb the process and also in some warm place.
After two or three days, we’ll observe how this mix starts to have some bubbles, then we’ll fit the dough:
1. Add one spoon more of the same flour
2. Mix it again
3. Leave it for two more days
After this two days in the same calmed place we have the sourdough ready to use. We’ll use it every time we make bread until we’ll see how the bubbles are not growing any more, it can be after several months if the fit it every week. We can start a new sourdough whenever but remember, always in days before full moon.
Fit the sourdough
We’ll make this process every time we want to make bread, the second step:
1. Take the jar and put in some bowl
2. Add flour and tempered water
3. Mix
4. The quantity should be the double of what we had in the jar
5. Leave it around six or eight hours (it can be during the night)
After this time, we take a part (less than a half) of this sourdough fitted and we put in again in a jar ready for the next bread we’ll do. We can keep it on the fridge during a week before it starts to lose the bubbles.
With the rest we can start adding the rest of ingredients for 2 kg of bread:
1. 1k of rye flour
2. 1 kg of wheat flour
3. 3 spoons of salt
4. 1 spoon of coriander
5. 1 spoon of cumin
6. 1 spoon of European cumin
7. Tempered water (around 1L)
8. Mix it all, always better by hands or with some wood tool
9. When it have nice consistency (denser than a yogurt) we can add some seeds, for example pumpkin, sunflower, sesame etc.
10. After this we put in some form and we live it to grow up for six or eight hours.
11. Once it grows we can bake it, around 1 hour and a half, depending on the oven. Here we have an old one and we bake one and half hour around 180º.
12.After we reject all from oven, were take out the bread from the forms, and let it cool down.
This time I feel for these super useful recipe. This food is so good combination with bread as usually it’s presented, but it is also so good mixed in soups or warm as a side dish.
There are many kind of Hummus that you can do. The most common is the chickpeas hummus but actually for me hummus means legume spread so I’ll share other two kind d of spreads made from different legumes: lentils and mungo.
To start, there’s a common part in all kinds and it’s put them in water. I also learned here to eat dried legumes. The only legumes I used to eat before were lentils and usually they came in water, so they are manipulated, not natural and they are submerged in this salty and not so much healthy liquid. But also another important think for me is related again with the time. You have to think about them the day before you want to use them. You have to think about your meal, you have to have time to activate them in water and you have to dedicate time (so little, but time). In short, you have to take care about yourself, think what you would like to eat, to cook and what do you need.
So after put them in water, usually we do it at night, we change the water in the morning before start to work and after approximately six hours they are activated and ready to be cooked with the last water.
For the boiling it’s recommendable to add some spices like coriander, cumin or fennel (or both) because the legumes are quite flatulent and it can be a problem if we are not so used to eat them.
After approximately 15 minutes of boiling, we can drain the legumes but we’ll converse the boiling water to add after.
When the legumes are not hot, we can start to add the ingredients, we use to add one spoon or more, depends on the taste of the people, I recommend to put maximum 4 spoons of the hard ingredients.
For the chickpeas hummus:
Salt
Lemon
Olive oil
Water ( the one we conserve from boiling)
Pepper
Garlic ( two/ three cloves)
Curcuma
Sweet paprika
Some leaves that we have in the garden like oregano, basilica, parsley…
For the lentils hummus:
Salt
Lemon
Olive oil
Water ( the one we conserve from boiling)
Pepper
Garlic ( two/ three cloves)
Trikatu
Majoranka
Again some leaves that we have in the garden like oregano, basilica, parsley…
For the mungo hummus:
Salt
Lemon
Olive oil
Water ( the one we conserve from boiling)
Pepper
Garlic ( two/ three cloves)
Curcuma
There are some ingredients that we can add if we like them, for example:
Tahini (or seeds)
Fried little onion
Fried garlic (instead of raw)
Chilli
The hummus is a recipe which never came the same as the last time. We can experiment a lot, try to add different leaves, more or less chilli, seeds, garlic etc. it’s also good to add spices to conserve the hummus long time, if we like curcuma is a really good natural way of preservation.
After adding all the ingredients we can mix it, to find the consistent we like we can play adding water or oil to make it more or less smooth.
For today we have some leftovers from the lunch so… let’s recycle, reinvent and don’t waste food. In this case when I learned this recipe it was spring which means flower time so to start we add some flowers which helped also to make the dough sticky:
Sambuco
Mustard
For the taste and also to change the colour we can add some leaves:
Nettles
Wild spinach
Ruccola
Ground garlic
Swiss chard
Comfree
To conserve more the food is good to add always some spices, in this case it’s even more important because we are using old food, so we will extend the life of the food, so we can add:
Salt
Garlic
Cumin
Coriander
Olive oil
We will mix all the ingredients by hand to have the dough not too sticky, for that we will also add some flour (rye or wheat).
When we have it ready we can make the form and put more flour on the surface.
To cook them we can just fry them or use the oven. Putting a baking paper we will avoid the oil and the form will stay easily.
For this occasion I’ll share this recipe for the most sportive people. It’s easy and you can roll it in the same backing paper to take it with you whenever. For making one full oven tray, approximately 15-0 bars we will use the next ingredients:
150gr
75gr oat
250 gr seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, sesame etc)
150 gr dried fruit
35gr
300 gr malt syrup or honey
Wall nuts or family
First of all we have to put the oat in the oven, just to roast.
During this time, we should wash the seeds and also put them in the oven but not together with the oat.
Also we have to cut all the dried fruits in small pieces.
When all the seeds and oat will be roasted and dry we put them in a big bowl, also with the dried fruits, nuts, and we also have the possibility to add some taste to the bars, for example cacao or jam.
To make the mix sticky we’ll use malt syrup, we can also use honey but is more sugar and it’s not recommended for diabetic people and also vegans.
In a big pot we’ll put first some coconut oil and when it will be liquid we can add the malt syrup until it will be also liquid. Then we can add it to the mix we already made in the big bowl and mix it all together.
To make the bars we use the oven tray pouring the mix on it and roll out thin.
When it will be cooler we can cut it and serve it!
Today is jam day! I’ll explain how to make delicious jam by different ways, depending on your situation. I will write about current because is one of the bushes that we have and one of the earliest one in production. The aim of share this recipe is also to invite people to plant some bushes, they are easy-grow, don’t need many attention during the year, just pick the fruits!
After pick the nice fruits from the bush we can put the current in a big pot and put in on the gas or fire and slowly the current will lose this form and it will get liquid. To give more consistent it’s possible to add apples in small pieces.
When all the fruits lost the form is the sugar time.
For 6kg of fruits, we can add 1 kg of sugar.
The point is leave it there and remove sometimes to get the texture that we desire, more liquid or less.
The process can be from one to three hours.
To speed we can put the fruits on the oven before start all the process, to make them softer so after will be easier to get liquid.
So I said that I’ll write two different ways of the process because of the people who have stove at home. It’s really nice procedure because always is better make slowly process. For them is so easy, just put the big pot there and don’t forget to remove it!
When we’ll have the texture that we like, we can put them in sterilized jars, we’ll put them down and cover with some blanket se we create kind of micro clime, it will go from 100º during the process cooling down slowly, so we favour the process of sterilisation.
Sweet, sweet, sweet! Let’s make some desert, vegan, fast and easy! So for make the dough we’ll need:
Three cups of fine flour
Half a cup of oil (can be less)
Half a cup of warm water
From this amount we’ll have three strudl. The amount of water will depend also on the dough, it should not be sticky in the hands, compact itself. When we have it should rest half an hour.
After this time we can separate the dough in three parts and start with one. We’ll need a flat place like a wooden board and arolling pin. We’ll put something on the surface to make the
process easy and to prevent that the dough remains sticky in the wood board. We can use flour but here we used to put polenta. The grains are big and it also gives some different consistence.
It’s good also to change the direction of the rolling to make nice rectangle of flat dough (3mm).
When we have it we can add all the ingredients that we want, also we can make some salty strudel.
But in this case we’ll add:
Cinnamon
Sugar
Raisin
Apple
The amount is also depending on how we are, if we life so much sugar we can add more or less.
We can start rolling it. First, we have to put something like 5 cm on and after we can roll more, approximately seven- ten centimetres until the end. We can add a little bit of water in the end to stick the dough together.
The straddle just needs half an hour in the oven in a high temperature, approximately 200º, but it can be more or less depending on the oven.
After the first plantation of seeds in pots we suddenly have a lot of pots to water. Here in a cold climate we have them in the greenhouse, because they are small and they need optimal conditions on this first step of life.
So we want to water them wasting as less as possible of water and time, isn’t it? There’s a way how to and the key is just how to position them.
It’s easy when we can put all the pots in different boxes to move them as a group. We can end with different sizes of boxes, we should find the way how to make a big square or rectangle with all of them, we can plan tetris:
So when we have the boxes closer to each other we can water following a spiral. Starting from the corners and going step by step ( or plant by plant) to the center. The reason to start like this is because we usually forget the plants that are in the corners and they suffer more than the rest that are in the middle next to others and having kind of micro climate.
Hey girls! This post of today is dedicated to us. Especially to our intimal zone and the infections. When I changed by habits, the place where I life, the environment I used to have some infection, just to make it easy. Here I discover some natural remedies which helped me to eliminate this incident.
One and the one I like more is coconut oil. It have a lot of properties and one of them is agains the infections. You can use it just putting it on the zone (external way) or using a natural tampon and have it during the night.
If the infection is important you can add one or two drops of Teatree Essencial oil. But not more. This oil is so aggressive, and it have to be well mixed with the oil. So I recommend you to take a small jar, put one or two spoons of coconut oil, one or two drops of teatree and mix it, with it spread the mix in the tampon and use it.
Another natural remedy I want to share to solve this vaginal infections is drinkable. Consists in put one spoon of curcuma with hot water and drink it as a shot (because the taste is not so good). I promise that doing this during five days and combined with the coconut oil the infection will disappear.
HERBS:
-COSMETICS:
Peeling
Mask
Repellent
Tooth paste
Cream
Oils
- TEAS:
Camomile
St John herb
Venus mix
ENVIRONMENT: (talk about plastics, me as a designer and experience with it)
How to safe seeds
How to save water while watering
How to plant-transplant