‘Mustard’ and ‘soup’ aren’t two words that usually go together in the same sentence. However, when my sister returned from Holland and offered to cook mustard soup for dinner that evening, I wasn’t going to turn down the offer.

With a jar of Old Dutch Mustard from the Doesburg Mustard Factory (Doesburgsche Mosterdfabriek), she whipped up a surprisingly tasty meal that I’ll definitely cook again!

The original recipe uses smoked bacon and milk, however we adapted the recipe to suit our own taste and vegetarian ingredients on hand.

Here are photos of our neighbourhood at the moment, following the recent snowfalls, which incidentally have caused travel chaos across Europe. It’s been unusual to have so much snow so early in December. Last year it came just before Christmas time.

This is the view from our living room window; behind these trees begin the plots of the garden club where our garden is also located. Behind the gardens lies forest-covered hills.

With snow falling almost daily and piling up 30cms deep, the trees barren of leaves and the sun permanently hiding behind a thick layer of cloud, I can now say the growing season is definitely over for our garden. For 2010 anyway.

I picked the last of our silverbeet only a week before our first snowfall and filled two large buckets with the stubborn vegetable that would keep on multiplying, if only the mercury didn’t drop so low.

Following the arrival home of my baby girl and I after the birth, our first outing together as a family was for a walk with the stroller in the forest behind our home. On our walk up the hillside and through the pine and oak trees, we came across many fallen chestnuts littering our path.

My husband collected these up and we took them home to be roasted and eaten hot out of the pan!

Fennel is a winter vegetable now making its appearance in German supermarkets. Back in my native New Zealand this plant grew wild in our backyard and was viewed as a voracious weed. Imagine then my surprise when my mother-in-law served this up for dinner, and a tasty one too!

Determined to try out this new vegetable I bought a couple for experimenting and cooked up a delicious meal last night.

I had only been a mother for less than an hour after the arrival of Zoë, when a nurse brought in a steaming pot of ‘Stilltee’, the German name for ‘nursing tea’. This herbal tea is used to naturally help breastfeeding mothers increase their milk production. It is a natural follow-up to drinking ‘pregnancy tea’.

The most common ingredients are fennel (Fenchel), aniseed (Anis) and caraway seed (Kümmel) – natural ‘galactagogues’ which promote healthy lactation. Other common ingredients are verbena (Zitronenverbene), lemon balm (Zitronenmelisse), fenugreek (Bockshornklee), nettle (Brennnessel) and red raspberry leaf (Himbeer).

At the end of our tomato harvest in early October, we were left with one kilo of green tomatoes that wouldn’t ripen as the cooler autumn temperatures set in.

Inspired by a tale of ‘green tomato chutney’ told to me by my cousin Pia, I was determined to not let these unripe vegetables go to waste!

 

The Chinese medical practice of acupuncture has been practiced for thousands of years to treat a variety of ailments and illnesses, by stimulating various energy-conducting points across the body with small needles.

The midwives at my local hospital have all been trained in acupuncture and offered it to pregnant women from their 36th pregnancy week onwards i.e. the last four weeks before the due date.

The cited benefits include helping to soften the cervix in preparation for childbirth and preventing premature labour, as well as naturally turning breech babies to the correct head-first position.

I’m a mother now! It’s been five weeks since the birth of my darling girl Zoë and time for my first blog post since then…of course, it’s also taken me this long to find the time to write an update, with all the adjustments, sleepless nights and new experiences that accompany becoming a new parent.

Naturally, my first post is about this major life-changing experience and what others anticipating their first child may be able to expect when the big day comes.

We all know that eating fresh organic fruit and veggies is better for us, however unless we’re full time organic farmers it’s unrealistic to think we can consume 100% organic produce due to our limited budgets, time and accessibility to such food.

But what if we knew which veggies and fruits were the most and least contaminated by pesticides and could therefore make more informed choices on which organics to purchase or which plants to labour over in our home gardens? Now we can do this with the help of a list showing the ‘Dirty Dozen’ and ‘Clean 15’ of our food supply, in regards to pesticide contamination.