THE WARM UP

Michael is warming up to spring with cleaning, clearing, and cooking some favourite foods.

Things are bursting around here. It's exciting as the ground starts to warm up and the flowers begin to blossom. On the other hand, it's time to get busy. The good greens are starting to grow. We get stuck into feeding the plants and trees in the orchard with much-needed fertiliser. The weeds pick up their game too. Here’s our basic job list this month:

GIVE everything a snip and prune;

FIND and clean all the garden tools, then spray with silicon (or oil);

READY a supply of snail and slug bait;

SOW seedling trays for planting out over the next few weeks;

FERTILISE and mulch everything.

Spring is also my favourite time to have a big kitchen clean-out. •

DIG everything out of the fridge, check the use-by dates, and clean the interior. •

EMPTY the freezer, run through the food, and ditch anything with freezer burn (or cook it up with some rice for pet food), – defrost the freezer as per its manual; •

GIVE the pots and pans a good clean and reoil; •

IF YOU have a cast iron pan,

I would prove it – see instructions at right;

•

RUN through your dry goods, check use-by dates, and repack broken bags or packets; •

GIVE the oven and extractor a good clean out – pull out the extractor filters and run them through the dishwasher •

AND speaking of the dishwasher, clean out its filter and run a cleaning cycle through it.

It's a bit of a chore, but once done, you'll be a safer cook all summer.

Good from Scratch

The cookery school is in overdrive planting out the gardens for summer. It's a great time of the year to attend one of our gardening classes. We have gift vouchers for those hard to buy for people, and we're booking for our 2021 Xmas event. www.goodfromscratch.co.nz

MIKE’S CAST IRON CARE PLAN

If your cast iron pan becomes sticky or rusty, cover the base with 1cm of salt. Place the pan on a high heat and cook for about 10 minutes or until the salt starts to spit or turn light brown.

Wrap a kitchen towel around the handle, carefully remove the pan from the heat, and throw the salt out. It will be extremely hot, so I tip mine into the fireplace ash bucket.

While the pan is still hot, rub the surface with a wad of paper towels. Once dry, pour a little oil in the pan and use a clean paper towel to rub it in.

Every time you use it, while it's still warm, rinse it with hot water and scrub anything that doesn't wash off with a soft brush.

Dry, then apply a teaspoon of grapeseed oil to the entire surface with a paper towel.