GreeNZ Peace: O, live! I Love! Or Olive!

On the Health Front

Hey, I just had an epiphany!! All these words can be found within olive: I Love. O, Live! And indeed, for us, every meal is accompanied by 3-4 olives on the side, plus a generous splash of organic olive oil. The Tree of Life, indeed. I explored an option that I am going to experiment with this winter: Olive Leaf Powder.

Have you ever purchased olive leaf extract at a Health Shop or Pharmacy? It's as bitterly expensive as the taste! When Mike and I were pruning our olives the other day, the idea hit me like a freight train at top speed. Why not make our own?

After some thought, I decided I would experiment with actually drying and grinding the whole leaf, rather than steeping and making a tincture. Easy. Take a bowl of olive leaves, place in dehydrator and 4-5 hours later they crumble in your fingers. I then placed handfuls in our coffee grinder and within half an hour, I had a kilogram of olive leaf powder! A half teaspoon mixed into a half cup of water, with a tiny dash of honey to sweeten - goes down easy, no bitter after taste and it just leaves a "green" taste in the mouth. Not unpleasant at all. Now if I can just remember to do this each and every morning, I should sail through this term at kindergarten laughing in the face of all the bugs are passed from one to another! A MAJOR boost to the immune system.

Olive Leaf Powder

The olive leaves

Actually on Sunday, it was pretty exciting, we headed to another location to pick yet more olives. An elderly couple advertised their free-pick olives in the local paper, so we will took our Helpxchange girls who arrived on Saturday, to help us. They are elderly and can't be bothered to pick them anymore. Our own olives and the ones we picked from a local Frenchman's farm are sitting in the kitchen, curing in daily washings of fresh water.

Simmi and Franzi in front of the olive farm door!!

Picking olives

2 full buckets of olives ready for processing

The olive grove

In the Kitchen

In the meantime, how about making sauces and chutneys with produce you picked 2 months ago? That's why we bought our upstanding freezer 2 years ago. We freeze excess produce which can be processed when there is more time to do so. So in the second week of my holiday, I pulled out some bags of frozen tomatoes and peaches to turn into some yummy tomato sauce and peach jam.

Frozen tomatoes live to incarnate into sauce

Voila! Terrific Tomato Sauce - 2x 1L bottles

Frozen bags of yellow Queen peaches

Voila! 10 bottles of Summer Time Peach Jam

Recycling newspaper into labels

Recently, an old Helxchange friend asked for our salad dressing recipe. Having just made up a bottle last week, I thought to include the recipe as it is SUPER easy and makes any salad YUM.

Super Easy Salad Dressing:

Juice of 2-3 lemons

4 TBspn Organic Tamari or Soy Sauce

Half cup Cold pressed Organic Olive Oil

1/4 tspn stevia powder

Salad Dressing

You can add other things to the salad dressing, like half a teaspoon mustard, or basil preserved in oil, or any herbs of your choice. Sometimes, I add a quarter cup of tahini. When I run out of lemons, I replace this amount with Apple Cider Vinegar and a little water, to reduce the acidity.

Garden Harvests:

Rhubarb in the pot

I have harvested a huge bunch of rhubarb stalks - probably the last of, since they die down in winter and come up again in Spring. In Spring, they respond to a generous handful or two of Sheep Poos. Must remember.

Anybody who has feijoa trees, will sympathise with me. Every day we collect at least 3-5kg of feijoas which drop onto the ground, for around 6-7 weeks. It is a constant activity - and you have just finished when you hear gentle thuds and look around to see a whole heap more have fallen! I have 4 small bags of dehydrated feijoas in the pantry to last us over Winter/Spring. There are several bottles of feijoa puree in the fridge and some in bags, frozen for feijoa cake. There are bottles and bottles of feijoa jam and chutney in the larder, so all in all, we are ready for any food shortage that may arise in the next few months! We could live off preserved feijoas for about 2 months!! Thankfully, they seem to be slowing down now and we collect all we can eat, without having to preserve any.

I have been taking bags of feijoas to kindergarten - the children adore them. The local rest-home, neighbours and backpackers have also benefited!

Red and yellow guavas, plus bell chillies

The other glut at the moment is guavas. We have been picking big bowls of them. I have made red guava jelly and jam, frozen some puree in ice cubes to use in juices later on, and have discovered how delicious guava juice is!! A bowl of guavas, a quarter lemon and 3-4 apples makes the most amazing juice ever!! And of course, it is a major immune booster at the same time. I love it when achieving health is so damn delicious!

Our guava juice is a hit, so I have made 4 lots of it over the last week or so. I add one Monty's Surprise apple, which is purported to have the most anti-oxidants in than any other apples, just to give our juice that extra nutritional zing-shalla-boom!

Monty's Surprise Apple

Monty's Zinger Guava Juice
Note the small amount of dry pulp left over

The beautiful juice to start the morning

At the sewing machine:

I have just gone through my second credit card wallet in about 5 years. It is a handy little piece of hardware - I keep all my "plastic cards" in there - library, eftpos, video shop ID card, loyalty cards etc. But I thought about how the plastic wallets keep on tearing at the hinge and having to replace them - more plastic in landfill! So this time, I created a little fabric cover to strengthen it - hopefully it will last longer than the other 2 I have been through. Previously, I had reinforced them with duct tape at the fold, but after time, the sticky stuff from the tape seems to get all over your cards and hands! A very sticky situation indeed.