Welcome to the The Château on Chatham blog! We are Adam, Burton, Stacy and Oscar, three Mechanical Engineers and a kitty.
We all moved in a month or two after the February earthquake (which had left Adam and Stacy homeless). The place has a pretty sweet setup with three raised garden beds and one ground-level bed including a wicked Rhubarb plant, heaps of Nasturtiums and a few herbs. There are also a couple of compost bins, an old barrel we found behind the garage (we’re thinking rainwater storage) and a massive greenhouse! We were able to salvage some of the lettuce, rocket, coriander and onion plants from the garden at our old flat, and they’re still producing surprisingly well! Took these pictures a while ago (see – there is sun!), since then the mustard we have planted out as green mulch has really come along, and we have a few spinach seedlings poking through as well.
Our sweet raised beds!
Stacy had been into baking bread for the past few years, and both Adam and Stacy had been brewing beer for the last year, so those are all flat activities now too. We finally got around to bottling the Stout that was inhabiting the fermenter when the quake hit, after about eight weeks in the fermenter all up – as we were out of town or too busy doing other stuff. It had a bit of an edge at first, but it is finally starting to get pretty tasty with age.
Since the competition started we have ramped up our brewing operation, and we now put down a new brew every week (when we bottle the old one). Currently we have a large stockpile of beer malt kits, but when we finish them we are keen to try out brewing from the grain.
We have also been experimenting with our bread baking. We use a breadmaker to do the initial mix and rise (Pizza Dough setting), rip it out and give it a knead by hand, then place it in the oven overnight to rise, with a bowl of boiling water to keep it warm and stop things drying out. It has taken a while to perfect the recipes, initially the plain white, then a wholemeal, and now we are experimenting with linseeds too. We just recently brought a new loaf pan that makes bread that will actually fit inside our toaster!
Stacy has made fresh pasta a few times, but rolling it out and cutting it by hand takes such an incredibly long time that it almost isn’t worth it. So we purchased a second hand paster maker off Trademe, which is supposed to make it easy to do the rolling and has blades to do the cutting. Hopefully it’ll arrive soon!
