Roasted Rib On The Bone - Nose To Tail Eating

Recently I made another batch of BBQ sauce.  When you make the sauce you strain out all of the herbs and ground spices so that you are left with a lovely silky sauce.  I did not want to waste all those lovely flavours so I used them to marinade a piece of beef.

When I asked for our cow to be cut into all the different cuts I asked for some thick cuts (ours were about 5cm thick) of rib fillet on the bone as I wanted to use them for roasting.
The Rib Fillet on the bone is also know as an OP Rib and consists of a rib fillet steak still attached to the rib bone as the name suggests.
This cut has enough fat to keep it juicy when roasted and the fact that the meat is still on the bone means you get additional flavour from the bone.

So I covered both sides of the meat with a layer of the spice paste covered it an left it in the fridge for 24 hours.

Before cooking I removed most of the spice paste knowing that the flavours would have penetrated the meat.  I was not wrong.
It was juicy and tender and had all the different flavours from the spices in the paste.  It was a great size for the two of us to have dinner that night and left overs for lunch the next day.

I encourage you all to talk to your butcher about different cuts of beef that you might not normally buy and try something new.  You never know you might find a new favourite.

Monthly Nine - February 2015

Here we are already two months into the year and already reflecting on our progress, challenges and celebrations of our slow living lives.

Linking up with Linda who is now our gracious host having taken over from Christine in hosting the Slow Living Nine.  I love joining in each month and reflecting on what I have achieved, it is also great to hear what everyone is up to and share in their achievements.


Nourish -Make and bake as much as possible from scratch. Ditch over packaged, over processed convenience foods and opt for 'real' food instead.
When I look back at the month I noticed that there are a lot of food posts so it is easy to fell confident in the category.  

Home made refried beans

Prepare - Stockpile and preserve. Freeze extra meals or excess garden/market produce. Bottle/can, dehydrate or pickle foods to enjoy when they are not in season.

With our two freezers full of beef there is not really any room to add to the stockpile anything but I still seem to find room for a few things.  This month I have added a whole lot of mango cheeks and now I have to come up with ways to use them.  I have also added a few frozen meals from when I have made extras and this will help us have easy meals on hand for when we are selling and do not want to create extra work for ourselves.

Reduce - Cut down on household waste by re-using, re-purposing and repairing.

We have continued to send things off to the op shop for someone else to enjoy. I have also done some repairs to items from our linen cupboard that have been waiting to be mended for ages.  There was a flannelette sheet that had gotten threadbare and a hole had formed.  A bit of iron on mender (my go to fix for items that need a quick basic fix) and we will get a few more uses out of it.  The whole thing is getting threadbare so we will probably only get this winter out of it but that is ok.

And then there was a cotton blanket that was fraying as the binding had split.

I just used some cotton that I had to make up a binding, it does the job and will mean we get a few more years out of the blanket.

I also made some chicken saddles out of an old pair of jeans.

Green - Start (or continue!) using homemade cleaners, body products and basic herbal remedies. The options are endless, the savings huge and the health benefits enormous.
 This month I used some of our beef fat to make soap.  I have just started using the first block and it seems really good.  It still needs to dry out a bit more which has been difficult with all the wet humid weather we have been having.

Grow - plant/harvest. What's growing this month? What's being eaten from the garden?

The garden is producing lots of herbs,  the latest round of cucumbers are coming on, there are spring onions, capsicum, eggplant beans and I have just started planting out for the cooler weather.  I have got some peas in as well as lettuce and silverbeet.

Create - To fill a need or feed the soul. Create for ourselves or for others.

I created some art for our walls this month.

Discover - Feed the mind by reading texts relevant to current interests.

Last month I read The Name Of The Wind by Partick Rothfus which was lent to me by a friend and it is a beautifully written book.  This month I have been reading the sequel.

Enhance - Community

Nothing happening on this front.

Enjoy - Life! Embrace moments with friends and family. Marking the seasons, celebrations and new arrivals are all cause for enjoyment.

I managed to catch up with an old work colleague for dinner and we had a really great time and have vowed to make more time to do it again soon.

What have you been up to?

A Busy Weekend In The Garden

Over the Weekend we spend a good 12 + hours doing the last of our garden tidy up before we put our house on the market.

After weeding all of the gardens, mowing the lawns, trimming the edges and doing some pruning we moved about 30 wheel barrows of tree mulch (about 6m3) and spread it around the garden.

We did the fire pit...

The garden along the back of the shed...

The worm farm garden...

Around the bore water tank...

Around the raised veggie beds...

The succulent garden...

Around Jessie's kennel...

The orchard...

And a few other gardens as well.  At the end of the day we were both quite stiff and sore but relieved to have it so much done.

I now have just one of the two back veggie gardens to mulch with sugar cane mulch and then it is just a matter of keeping on top of the weeds.  Because we have had so much rain lately and it is still over 30 degrees most days the weeds are almost growing in front of your eyes.  So every day as I wander around the yard I just pull out a few weeds and this seems to keep them at a manageable state.

Did you spend any time in the garden over the weekend?  What jobs did you get done?

Making Chicken Saddles

Our rooster likes to play favourites with our hens and about a year ago he injured one our hens quite badly which I posted about here.
After a bit of TLC and some time in a fancy outfit, aka a chicken saddle, her feathers grew back and she was good as new.

But recently a couple of our other chickens have been the objects of his affection.  So this time I thought I would make my own chicken saddles (I brought the last one and the domes were not holing any more and it was starting to fall apart),

For the fabric I used the bottom of the leg from a pair of Op shop jeans I had brought for Hubby that didn't actually fit.
I cut the shape based on the previous one and instead of using domes I used elastic which means they do not come undone like the domes do as they wear out.

I used the whole thickness of the pant leg so I had a double thickness of denim and only had to sew the edges I cut.
You don't really need to sew up the edges but it stops the dirt getting trapped between the layers.

This is Speckles and as you can see she is not bothererd by her coat. If you look carefully in the first phot you can see a lot of pink skin peeking out the bottom and the last photo shows her tail feathers are all missing.  She was comp-letly bald across her back but she has now regrown half her feathers and I am hoping the others grow back soon.  The other day when it rained a lot her coat got wet so I took it off over night to let it dry (the denim held onto a lot of water and I did not want her getting cold) then put it back on in the morning.

Have you had to make any interesting outfits for the animals at your place?

Rendering Beef Fat and Soap Making

The other day I posted nose to tail eating, and making the most of all the different cuts of meat that come from an animal. 

One of the thinks I asked the butcher to do was to save all of the fat and mince it for me.  He wanted to know what I was going to do with it as no one has ever asked him to do that before.  I told him I planned to use some for soap making and also for cooking.  
Mum said that she didn't think she could be bothered to render the fat for use and to make soap but it really wasn't that much effort at all.  Plus we were paying for it and we already had the other ingredients for making soap so it will save us money by not having to buy soap in the long term.

These days most people buy vegetable oils for cooking but historically animal fats were commonly used for cooking.  And when I say historically I am not talking even 50 years ago.  As a child (I am in my 30's) I grew up on a farm and I remember my mum pouring the fat off the roast each week into an enamel mug which lived in the fridge.  This fat was later used to cook other dishes.  The fat carried forward the flavours of each dish into the next.

All of the fat from our cow was minced and bagged up and it spent a few days in the freezer before we had time to process it.

Bags of frozen minced fat

The process of rendering is really very simple when you have a slow cooker.
You just fill your slow cooker to the top with the solid fat, set it on low and wait. I have seen instructions to add water but I don't bother.

Frozen fat into the slow cooker

As the fat renders the volume will drop so you can keep adding more fat as there is more space.

The fat is beginning to render

As the fat melts all of the meat bits will get cooked as well.  You are going to need to strain all the meat bits out at the end so if you can skim some off the top as you go this will speed up the process.

Meaty bits floating to the top

After straining all of the meat bits out of the fat I was left with a clear yellow oil which I divided into plastic containers. 
And what to do with all those meaty bits?  We didn't want to waste them so fed them to the chickens and they loved them.

The rendered fat ready for chilling

Once the fat cooled and set it changed to a pale cream colour.  Well made tallow can be stored at room temperature without spoiling but in our hot Queensland summer I was not willing to take the risk so I have been storing them in the freezer.  It doesn't freeze but it is easier to have it in there so we can use the fridge for fresh food.

With so much tallow the plan had always been to use most of it for making soap but I wanted to see how tallow one batch of soap would actually use up.

The ratios I used are:

1.5kg Beef Tallow

198g Caustic Soda

450ml Water

Essentail Oil 

Processed at 55 degrees centigrade with the essential oil added once trace was achieved.

I will not give any instructions about the process of making soap here as there are other blogs and websites that explain the process in enough detail to make it safe.  

I like to pour my soap into silicone molds as it is so easy to get them out.  You just peel the molds away, cut the larger block into portions and leave the soap to cure.

I ended up with 24 bars of soap and these are now curing.  They smell divine and I might have over done it with the essential oil but the last batch I made had no fragrance that was noticeable to this time I was a bit more generous.
I used a blended fragrance called Romance blend which I have had sitting around for years and it really need to be used up.  It is a blend of Cinnamon, Clary Sage, Patchouli, Sandalwood and Ylang Ylang.

Once it has cured and I have given it a bit of a test I will be giving some away so stay tuned.

What kind of soap do you make?