Day Two - so far, so good.

I've fielded a lot of questions in the last few days about 'the rules' of the challenge.  For instance, is it acceptable to ask friends to go into the supermarket for me while I wait outside for my delivery of chips and coke?  What defines a 'supermarket'?  Will we be buying everything from the dairy and paying five times the price?

The Rules

1. A supermarket shall be defined as any shop where you can buy pretty much anything you need within four walls, with the exception of organics stores.  Dairies are allowed, but Four Square and anything bigger are not.
2. Getting other people to shop at the supermarket on my behalf is definitely cheating.
3. I guess we could buy everything at the petrol station or dairy if we really wanted to, but that's not really the point of the exercise.  So before we buy anything this month, we will try to think "do we really need this?"  "Can we make/grow it ourselves?"  When we do need to buy, we'll shop as much as possible from the Farmer's Market, then for other things we will buy from local producers/small retailers (eg. neighbourhood fruit and vege shop, butcher) and from Taste Nature, the local organics shop.
4. We've tried not to stock up on supermarket food, but we did buy a few things last week.  We'll be making all of our bread, pasta and baking, so we bought 5kg each of plain, high grade and wholemeal flour so we didn't go totally broke.  Organic flour is expensive!
5. Buying fish and chips for dinner every night for a month is not in the spirit of the challenge, and is therefore not permitted.

Zucchini for trade!

One of our secret weapons this month will be trading.  I made my first ever batch of jam a week ago, and so now have 13 jars of apricot jam, available to discerning traders who have their own homemade goods to trade.  Alternatively, we also have a plentiful supply of zucchinis/marrows available for trading...  

I really enjoyed making jam - it's easy and quite a magical process.  It's a great time of year to make jam, as there's heaps of seasonal stone fruit and berries around at the Farmer's Market.  The recipe I used is from Stephanie Alexander's book The Cook's Companion and is very tasty.

Apricot Jam

1.5kg apricots, firm-ripe rather than soft (there are lots of cheap jam apricots at the Farmer's Market at the moment)

1 cup water

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1.5kg sugar

I doubled this recipe and made 13 average sized jars.  Don't do more than double or apparently it won't work as well.

Sterilize jars and lids - I found jars and lids at an op shop and sterilised them by washing in soapy water, rinsing, then putting in the oven on 160C while I was making the jam. Boil metal lids in a saucepan of water.  Fill the jars while they are fresh out of the oven so that they seal properly.

Preheat oven to 160C.

Wash apricots, then halve or quarter and remove stones.

Put fruit, water and lemon juice into a non-reactive saucepan and bring slowly to a boil.  Simmer until fruit is tender, about 20 minutes, or longer if you prefer your jam not too chunky.  Meanwhile, put sugar into a clean cast-iron casserole or baking dish and warm it to hand-hot in the oven.  Add warmed sugar to pan, stirring until sugar has dissolved, then boil rapidly for about 15 minutes or until setting stage is reached (put a tablespoonful on a cold saucer and chill for a couple of minutes.  Run your finger through the middle of the mixture - if it seperates into two distinct halves, setting stage has been reached).  Ladle into hot, sterilised jars and seal.