Myrtlebank Roaming Farms

Well almost…

I have been wanting to make Madeleines for years, but being restricted to a gluten free diet, I’ve always put the idea into the ‘too hard basket’.

The other day, after continuously being tripped up by the abundance of rhubarb in the vegetable garden, I decided that it was time to harvest it. I have some preserved/canned in the larder, the roses required for my Rhubarb and Rose Petal Jam are a little while off, so just thought that I’d give it away.

Rhubarb in the Vegetable Garden

I know that it looks like a lot, and I suppose it was. But after I bundled it up, there were only seven bundles – maybe I was a little generous, I don’t know.

Continue reading →

Not long after we returned from our lengthy visit to France, I was asked to consider locating a commercial kitchen in order to cook for a local business. We thought about it, discussed the idea, and the search began. We needed a public hall with a commercial kitchen available for hire on a daily basis. It took a little while, but finally we located one just 20 minutes from our home. The next stage in the process was training. I enrolled in an appropriate course and this was done on line. Then there were council applications to be submitted and meetings/inspections held, along with a plethora of other issues to deal with, and then of course the testing of recipes and menu planning …

This week we finished our fifth cook. It has been a crazy and hectic journey, but we are now becoming far more efficient and time savvy. We are very proudly using locally produced ingredients and it is around these ingredients that our recipes are created. At this point, the beef, eggs, cheese, olive oil, and the majority of our veg are produced very close to home – within a 25 kilometer radius, and our milk is also local, but from a little further away. How lucky are we to be able to source such beautiful ingredients so very close to home.

For me, our packaging needed to be environmentally friendly, and with some advice we ended up with a beautiful product, in fact the bases are fully home compostable and the lids can be placed in your recycle bin. On top of this, I think it looks amazing.

So what are we cooking… We are preparing pre-packaged meals in single and family size, such as