Seasonal Matters

We have moved!

2010-09-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

We've said goodbye to Seasonal Matters here on blogger and we've upped sticks and moved over to our brand new shiny blog thing at Very Berry Handmade.

Do join us there if you like, for the usual mix of craft, food, gardening and drinking. If you get your skates on, you can enter our thrilling Housewarming Giveaway!

Garden Labours

2010-08-12T04:10:00.000-07:00

We decided not to grow much this year, because we're trying to change the garden round a bit, extending some patio and the vegetable patch, while trying to plant a new bit of lawn. There's a lot to do, especially as all the buildings that were here before our house was built are still mostly lurking beneath the surface. Coming across this kind of thing -

- can certainly slow you down a bit! And here's just one of the piles of bricks and assorted rubble we've dug out of the ground:

As well as trying to get the layout of the garden more how we'd like it to be, July has been a month in which things have started to happen. And finally we've had some wildlife coming back. Stacks of hoverflies this year, which is good and during July, we've seen some bumblebees back again, like this chap:

They love the white & pink oregano & marjoram we've got flowering at the moment. Not as many butterflies as last year, but we've seen a few speckled woods about the place:

There have also been a couple of spectacular peacocks that have resisted the camera's attentions, but hardly any commas or painted ladies that were pretty frequent visitors last summer. We did find this splendid caterpillar though:

Turns out it's the vapourer moth caterpillar - gaudy in its youth, more sober and brown when it grows up.

Plants too have been quite different to last year. Barely any plums at all - just 4 or 5 on the whole tree - when last summer we were worried that the crop was going to break the branches! The loganberry has been ok, but it's the blackberries that we're going to have a glut of:

With the very late cold weather we had, I think it's done for anything early and it's the late crops that will hopefully be ok. We're really hoping for a glut of tomatoes, to which we've dedicated the greenhouse. They started to go orange and red a couple of weeks back:

And there are plenty more potentially:

As I'm writing this, it's absolutely bucketing down outside, but the weather has been better so far for ripening toms - we're hoping for a sunny late summer and autumn so we can turn the tomatoes into sauce for freezing. The variety we went for this year is Amish Paste, a cooker rather than an eater - not much juice at all, mostly flesh and they have the most wonderful flavour when cooked. Very pleased with them.

As we are with our main bean variety this year, the wonderfully-named Cherokee Trail of Tears, which has been putting out lots of beans for the last few weeks:

Both of these come from the excellent Real Seed Catalogue people, who have a wonderful selection of interesting varieties on their website. Highly recommended. The variety of slow-bolting coriander we grew from them (Leaf Selection) has been really good too.

I must do our recipe for Chakchouka here soon, as it's a great way to use up seasonal vegetables. It's a tomato-y, harissa-y vegetable stew which you finish off by cooking eggs in it. We started with the recipe in Annie Bell's excellent Evergreen (abebooks link) and it's very adaptable: so far this summer we've used the beans in it, as well as our first turnips (Purple Top Milan). They are very lovely things:

When you're thinning things like turnips, you can use the leaves for greens, using them like spinach. Great wilted down with some garlic & olive oil. Our onions (Senshyu Yellow) and garlic (Lautrec Wight) too went into the last dish of Chakchouka:

First time we've grown these. The sight of onions sitting on the top of a bed is very satisfying.

Also this year we did our courgettes (Nero di Milano) a bit differently, turning over a whole raised bed to one plant, which is doing really well, far better than last year's, which had to share the space with salad leaves. We got the seeds for these from Wiggly Wigglers.

So, considering this was kind of a non-growing year, we've managed to get a few things on the go. The challenge now is to really push on with all the earth-shifting jobs so we can get planting in Spring next year. Along with everything else, like foraging for sloes for the Christmas sloe gin (great for a fizz or a martini), getting the 'Rumtopf' (using brandy) going with some seasonal fruit and maybe getting back to baking again soon as well!

Gooseberry Fool Recipe

2010-07-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

We've finally got something of a harvest from our collection of gooseberry bushes this year. We have one called Invicta which is a green-skinned variety, and 2 Hinnonmaki Red, which are, unsurprisingly, red-skinned. We also have another bush picked up cheap from our local diy store, but I'm not sure what it is yet - it's only a baby and hasn't fruited this year.

To celebrate the harvest we had gooseberry fool as our Sunday lunch treat today. Here's the lovely simple recipe that we used, which is based on the one in Good Things by Jane Grigson.

Gooseberry Fool

350g gooseberries
50g butter
sugar to taste
300ml double cream

Top and tail the gooseberries (a yawn but it'll be worth it in the end). Place in a lidded pan with the butter over a low heat and cook until the gooseberries are soft. Stir and a squish the gooseberries. DO NOT sieve the gooseberries - the skins are a vital part of the flavour of the fool, and you really don't notice them in the finished dish. Add sugar a tablespoon at a time until the fruit is sweetened to your taste. Set aside to cool.

When the gooseberries are at room temperature, lightly whip the cream until it has very soft peaks, then gently stir in the fruit. Pile the mixture into a dish/dishes and put them in your fridge until you need them - or, if you can't wait, eat straight away. If you have the time and inclination, some crunchy almond or shortbread biscuits are delicious with this.

If you are lucky enough to have a good supply of gooseberries this year, and you really hate topping and tailing, then I recommend this delicious recipe for Gooseberry Curd. Yum..

Our Granola

2010-06-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

I had a busy afternoon stocking up on breakfast bits and pieces. I made a sourdough loaf, some rhubarb and orange compote and a batch of our own-recipe granola. It's so straightforward to make I have no idea why people eat the shop-bought stuff (which can be so sugary with nasty dried fruit); the other great thing is that you can pretty much choose what you put in it. Here's our standard recipe - but we often make changes depending on what we have in. Another great recipe is Andy's Fairfield Granola from Nigella Lawson's Feast - very delicious, but a bit more luxurious than ours.

House Granola
400g rolled oats
50g pumpkin seeds
50g sunflower seeds
30g sesame seeds
150g whole unblanched almonds
75g Freedom Syrup (or any other syrup - rice or maple maybe)
150ml water
150ml cold pressed rape seed oil (or mild oil of your choice)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
freshly grated nutmeg (around 1/2 tsp)
250g raisins

Preheat your oven to 190C/Gas Mark 5. Mix all the ingredients, apart from the raisins, in a large bowl. Spread the mixture thinly into 2 large shallow baking or roasting tins. Bake for around 25-30 mins until golden brown, turning everything over after about 15 minutes to make sure everything gets nicely crunchy. Try not to handle the granola too roughly - otherwise it will become a bit crumby. When it's done, take it out of the oven and leave to cool on the trays. Divide the raisins between the 2 trays and stir them in. Transfer your granola to a airtight container - the quantities given above exactly fill a 2 litre clip top Le Parfait jar.

I can't tell you exactly how long this keeps for - we've never managed to keep a jar for longer than a week, but it still tastes nice and fresh then, so I'd imagine that it would keep for a couple of weeks. It is delicious served with plain old milk, or with yogurt and fruit compote or sliced banana. I don't need to tell you how nutritious the ingredients are - it's also really filling too. I hope you give it a try and enjoy it as much as we do.

Sourdough Rhubarb Kuchen

2010-06-19T03:48:00.000-07:00

I have a passion for those delicious German cakes that consist of a base of rich bread dough, a lovely layer of fruit, and a sweet crunchy buttery topping. I've made some delicious versions over the years - Nigella Lawson has a really good Apple and Blackberry Kuchen in Nigella Bites, for instance - but I'm so into making naturally leavened bread these days that I really wanted to create something with a sourdough base. I was also curious to see if it was possible to make an enriched sourdough, using egg and milk in the dough. I think it works very well - but here's my recipe - have a go and tell me what you think.

Ingredients
(these are the totals - check the recipe to see how much you need to use at each stage)

100g wheat sourdough starter (mine is made according to the instructions in Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley)
100g plain wholemeal flour
200g strong white flour
1egg
80g milk
3g salt
250g rhubarb
100g plain flour
75g butter
100g granulated sugar

Stage 1
First you need to wake up your sourdough starter. Put 100g of starter in a bowl and add 50g of strong white flour and 50g of plain wholemeal flour and 60g of lukewarm water. Cover and leave in a warm place for 3-4 hours.

Stage 2
Mix together 150g strong white flour, 50g wholemeal flour, 3g salt, 1 egg and 80g milk and knead until you have nice soft dough (7-8 minutes, or quicker in a mixer with a dough hook). Then add all the leaven from the first stage and knead together until soft and elastic. If the dough is very sticky after a couple of minutes kneading then add an extra spoonful of flour. Now cover the bowl and leave the dough to rest and relax for an hour.

Stage 3
Whilst your dough is resting prepare your toppings. Wash and slice 250g of rhubarb thinly (0.5cm slices) on the diagonal, then put aside. In a small bowl rub together 100g plain white flour (or wholemeal if you prefer) and 75g butter until you have a lovely lumpy crumble-type mixure. Stir in a generous 100g of sugar - granulated is fine here and gives a nice crunchy texture. You do need quite a bit of sugar to counteract the sourness of the rhubarb - if you are using a sweeter fruit (dessert plums would be delicious for instance) then use less sugar. Line a large baking tin or tray with baking parchment. I use a roasting tin that measures 30x25cm that works really well - I push the dough right up to the edges.

Stage 4
Chuck your dough onto your prepared tray and press it out so you have a rectangular shape that measures around 30x25cm - it really helps to wet your hands first! Cover the surface with rhubarb and then sprinkle your crumbly topping over the top. Put the tray into a large carrier bag (making sure the bag is nowhere near your kuchen or you will have a very sticky incident) and leave for about 2 hours to rise and become puffy. About 90 minutes into the rising time pre-heat your oven to gas mark 5/190C.

Stage 5
Bake for around 40 minutes until the bread base is cooked through and the crumble topping is golden brown.

Leave to cool and then slice into squares & store in an airtight tin. This is delicious for breakfast and keeps well for 2 or 3 days.

Baking again - Lardy Cake

2010-05-31T01:54:00.000-07:00

Goodness me, is that April and May nearly gone already? It's all been a bit quiet on the baking front recently. Not only have we been brought low by a couple of nasty colds, but I've been trying to get back on with brewing - a nice bitter, and a mild to be ready in about 3 weeks - and Ali was working flat out to put together stock for her first craft fair. Read more about that over on the Craft Matters blog.

Then there's our new Facebook shop opening, again more on this over at Craft Matters. Special offers there for a limited time...

In addition to all this activity, having gone through a few of our old cook books to find some interesting recipes, I've had a few un-blogworthy disasters... So finally, it's third time lucky with a great recipe for lardy cake from the Dairy Book of British Food I last dipped into just before Easter.

Lardy cake is not something for those worried about their waistlines, and probably comes under the category of occasional treat rather than everyday staple! It's traditional to the West Country and the version I made did compare quite well to a memory of lardy cake from a holiday in Devon several years back.

So here's the recipe:

450g (1 pound) strong white bread flour
1.5 tsp dried yeast (or fresh yeast: 15g or 1/2 oz)
1 tsp salt
75g (3oz) lard, diced
75g (3oz) butter, diced
180g (6oz) dried fruit: sultanas, currants, raisins, whatever you fancy.
50g (2oz) candied peel, chopped (optional - if not, bung in some more sultanas)
50g (2oz) sugar

Sprinkle dried yeast into 300ml warm water with a pinch of sugar & leave somewhere warm for 10-15 mins until frothy. Or blend fresh yeast with 300ml lukewarm water.

Put flour & salt in a bowl and rub in 15g (1/2 oz) of the lard until all the lumps are incorporated in the flour. Make a well and add the yeast & water mix. Then beat together to make a dough which leaves the bowl clean. You don't want it too sticky: add flour or water to get the right consistency.

Then either turn out onto floured surface & knead for 10 minutes or put in a food processor with a dough hook on the lowest setting for 10 minutes. It needs to be smooth and stretchy.

Put the dough into a bowl, cover with a clean tea towel and leave it somewhere warm for an hour until it has risen to about twice its original size.

Then turn out the risen dough onto a floured surface and roll it out into a rectangle about 1/2 cm thick, a bit like this:

Dot the dough with a third of the butter & lard and then sprinkle it with a third of the dried fruit (and peel if you're using it) and sugar:

Now fold it into thirds: fold the bottom third into the middle and the top third over the bottom third and you end up with something like this:

Turn the dough through 90 degrees and sprinkle it with another third of everything:

And then fold it into thirds again. Rotate once more, repeat the sprinkling and folding and then squish the parcel down gently with the rolling pin until it's the right size for your tin:

Now cover it loosely with a polythene bag and leave it to prove in a warm place for about 30 minutes. Halfway through this period pre-heat your oven to 220C (Gas Mark 7). The cake should puff up like this:

Score the top with a sharp knife in a criss-cross pattern and bake for about 30 minutes until it's golden on top. Check it after 20 minutes and if the top is browning too quickly, cover it with some foil for the rest of the time. Take it out of the oven to cool:

It's especially delicious sliced while still warm, or cool it on a wire rack and wrap it up to last for a couple of days. The book suggests spreading it with butter! That seems a little excessive...

Quick Rye Pancakes

2010-04-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

These are a popular breakfast treat here. I like them particularly because they don't use any raising agents like bicarbonate of soda or baking powder - they rely entirely on egg whites to give them their light fluffy texture.

The recipe is taken from John Seymour's classic work The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency - although he calls them dropscones. I call them pancakes because I am sure that if I called them drop scones my boys wouldn't touch them. They're pancakes in the American sense of the word - small, thick and fluffy.. Seymour's introduction to the recipe always makes me smile, because he sounds like such a nice chap. He says:

These really are mouth watering, and if you, or your lady, can make them when your kids have their friends round, so much the better.

Seymour was a hugely influential figure in the self-sufficiency movement who passed away in 2004. You can read more about his fascinating life on his family's website.

Anyway - to the recipe. Seymour's version specifies using all rye flour, but I use half plain wholemeal because of my fussy fussy children who don't like pancakes 'with bits'... They're equally delicious (to bit eaters!) either way.

Rye Pancakes

100g rye flour (or 50g rye and 50g plain wholemeal flour)

2 eggs

pinch of salt

around 150ml milk

Grease a griddle or large frying pan and put it on to pre-heat.

Separate the eggs with the whites in a small bowl and the yolks in a larger bowl.

Add the other ingredients to the yolks in the bowl and mix together thoroughly.

Beat the egg whites until they form peaks. Then first fold one tablespoon of the egg whites very gently into the main mixture. When this has loosened it a little, very gently fold and stir in the rest of the egg whites.

Add a large tablespoon of this mixture to the griddle pan - you'll probably fit three or four on. Cook for about a minute, then turn and cook the other side for about a minute.

Keep them warm in a little foil parcel & then serve with jam, honey, maple syrup, sliced banana, whatever you like, really.

Hot Buns

2010-03-31T05:59:00.000-07:00

Just time to make March look a little more respectable by slipping this recipe in before we end up in April. I'm not quite sure where this month has gone, really, but this is a nice one to finish it with.

It's a lovely recipe for hot cross buns, as I didn't put the crosses on them I've called them 'hot buns'. I used the recipe from The Dairy Book of British Food, published in 1988 by the now-defunct Milk Marketing Board for 'British Food & Farming Year', apparently.

I'm sure you used to be able to get MMB cookbooks from your milkman - one of the reasons I'm fond of this one is that my mum gave me a copy of The Dairy Book of Home Cookery when I left home for university many years ago (it's still in print, from these people now). My dad gave me the rather more dashing Len Deighton books. But the dairy one was a good, basic book and its yellow cover still reminds me of my first steps in cooking. They make a nice change: a lot of the recipes are a bit of their time, but they're refreshingly free of all the aspirational lifestyle-y guff that pads out so many of today's cookery books.

Anyway, that's enough blather - here's the recipe. It's pretty much as given in the book, except that I included sultanas instead of currants (as our two kids prefer them) & left out the chopped peel (as our two really don't like it). I also cut down the salt - the original recipe calls for a teaspoon.

Here's what you'll need:

1.5 tsp dried yeast (or 15g fresh)
300ml lukewarm milk
450g strong white bread flour
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp ground mixed spice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
50g caster sugar
50g butter
80g sultanas
1 egg, beaten

For crosses:
50g plain flour
25g butter

For the glaze:
2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp water
3 tbsp caster sugar

Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk. If, like me, you're using dried yeast, then sprinkle it & mix into the milk with about 1 tsp of the sugar & leave it for 10-15 minutes somewhere warm.

Put the flour, salt, spices & sugar in a bowl. Cut the butter into chunks, add it to the bowl, and rub it in. An easy way to do this is to give it a gentle whizz in a mixer. Then add the dried fruit & the peel too, if you're using it.

Make a well in the centre, add the beaten egg & milk and yeast mixture and stir it together until you get quite a soft, sticky dough.

Turn this out onto a well floured surface. I tried this one in the mixer with a dough hook, but it didn't work as well as kneading by hand. So knead it for about 10 minutes until it's soft but not sticky (leaves your hands clean) and it's nice and stretchy. I ended up adding quite a bit of flour as I kneaded.

Put your dough into a clean bowl (big enough for it to double in size), cover with a polythene bag or wet tea towel and leave somewhere warm for 1 hour. It should start like this:

And then double in size to this:

Turn it out onto a floured surface and knead again, this time just for about 3 minutes.

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. I am rubbish at this, as you can tell below. I always end up with a noticeable variety of sizes.. Not that it really matters. Then form each piece into a bun shape (try tucking the edges under and then shaping with your hand) and put them on floured baking parchment on a baking sheet with plenty of room for expansion.

Leave for 30 minutes in a warm place, with a polythene bag tented over the top, and they'll roughly double in size:

While they're rising, pre-heat your oven to 190C (gas mark 5).

You can make crosses to turn them into hot cross buns. Rub together the 50g of plain flour & 25g of butter until it resembles fine bread crumbs. Add enough water to bring it together and knead gently. Roll it thinly and cut strips that you can make into a cross shape - wet them slightly on the back to attach them to the top of your buns.

Bake them at 190c (gas mark 5) for 15-20 minutes until they're a nice golden-brown colour.

While they're baking, make the glaze by heating the milk, water and sugar together. So that when they're done you can brush each one as you transfer them to a wire rack for cooling:

I made these last night for breakfast this morning. They were delicious both warm and cold and were very popular indeed.

Baking Day: Rice Bread

2010-03-09T07:52:00.001-08:00

This recipe is taken, with a couple of minor tweaks, from Jane Grigson's classic English Food, Grigson herself adapting the recipe given in Elizabeth David in English Bread & Yeast Cookery. It seems to have been very popular in nineteenth century England, as Jane Grigson says: "Lady Llanover said it was by far the best bread for sandwiches, in particular for chicken sandwiches".

We wanted to make this with brown rice, because it's nice and nutritious and our two really like the flavour. And it got a big thumbs up when we gave it to them this lunchtime with some home-made hummus on it. The grown-ups had cheese & mustard sandwiches and now there's hardly any left at all..

But on to the recipe. Here's what you need:

85g (3oz) long grain brown rice (uncooked weight)
8g (1/4 oz) dried yeast (or twice that quantity fresh yeast)
15g (1/2 oz) sea salt
500g (18oz) strong white bread flour
Some olive oil for brushing

The first thing to do is to cook the rice. 85g is about a half cupful. Put this in a pan and add a cup of water. Bring to the boil then cover and cook very gently on your lowest heat for about 40-45 minutes. It may take longer and you might have problems with it sticking to the bottom of the pan, so check it towards the end, stir and add more hot water if necessary.

Some time while the rice is cooking, combine the dried yeast (or twice as much fresh yeast) with a little lukewarm water until it has dissolved.

Measure out the flour and dissolve the salt in about 150ml (1/4 pint) of very hot water in a measuring jug. Add another 100ml of cold water once the salt has dissolved (ie. get 250ml or 8 fl oz of lukewarm water). If you want to use less salt, I'd probably go for about 8-10g.

Add the hot, cooked rice to the flour and fork it in a bit.

Add the salted water and the yeast mixture and combine together until you've got quite a soft, sticky dough. We used the bread hook on our Kenwood and ended up with this:

Cover it over with a polythene bag and leave it somewhere warm for about an hour and a half, until it's doubled in volume. Like this:

Knock it down and knead it gently for about 5 minutes (again, we used the Kenwood). Add more flour if it's too sticky - you want it leaving the bowl clean and so it doesn't stick too much to your fingers.

Next, oil the bottom of a 1.5 to 2 litre bread tin a little and line it with some baking parchment. Brush the inside of this with a little olive oil and tip in the dough, pressing it gently into the sides. Cover with the polythene bag again and leave it somewhere warm until it rises up to the top of the tin. After about a quarter of an hour, pre-heat the oven to 230C (gas 8); after a further quarter of an hour or so it should look like this:

Gently remove the bag and place it in the oven. Cook for 15 minutes at 230C (gas 8), then lower the heat to 200C (gas 6) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Take it out of the tin at this point and then cook it upside down for another 5 minutes. Put it on a rack to cool.

It's a very tasty bread indeed, with a lovely flavour and texture from the rice and a great crust. And it does make great sandwiches - cheese, egg or cold meat would all be equally yummy. The boys said it was v. tasty with hummus and even with some butter and honey.

** Just a little update on this one - we've also made it replacing half of the white flour with strong stoneground wholemeal flour with delicious results. It's possibly even more delicious.

Splat Buns - or Baps to You and Me..

2010-03-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

Woops - missed last week, naughty! We did actually make some Barm Brack, but I wasn't particularly happy with how it turned out so didn't bother to blog it. That's one for a bit more experimenting I think.

This week's recipe is from the brilliant Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley. I can't recommend this book highly enough - since reading it I've finally got my head round how making bread actually works. I haven't by any means made every recipe in the book, but the fact that I can now make wheat and rye sourdoughs with ease and have a sourdough leaven happily living in my fridge, makes it worth every penny we paid for it. Can't tell you how my manky, evil-smelling sourdough starters I have thrown away in the past...

This recipe for Baps is also an absolute winner. It never fails - everyone who has tried them has been impressed and there have been many requests for the recipe. So I thought it was about time I got round to it.

Some notes on the recipe:
Whitley suggests using all strong wholemeal flour - we do this sometimes, but we usually white flour too, so that's what I've give quantities for here. We've also tried it with half wholemeal spelt and half strong white flour - this makes delicious baps which rise a little more quickly.

Whitley is very specific about his water temperatures - which is extremely comforting when you are beginning with sourdough, but I haven't found it vital with baps, so I'm not bothering with that here. One more thing - he specifically says that the dough should not be kneaded after it's first rise - but we have found that if it is kneaded fairly thoroughly at that stage (err, thrown around the room - why do you think we call them splat buns?) it actually seems to give the baps a much better final texture.

Splat Buns (Baps) based on a recipe by Andrew Whitley

5g dried yeast
390g lukewarm water
300g stoneground strong wholemeal flour
300g strong white flour
5g salt
30g butter, lard or olive oil

Put the lukewarm water in a large bowl (or your food mixer bowl), add the dried yeast and stir it around with your fork to dissolve it. Add the flour, the salt and fat (we always use farmouse butter from Westry Roberts - gorgeous stuff). Knead (or use your mixer) until, as Whitley puts it 'the gluten [is] properly developed' - that is until the mixture is no longer very sticky, and springs back when you poke it.

Then cover your mixing bowl with a damp cloth (another Whitley no-no - but it works for me...) and put it in a warmish place for 1-2 hours. Towards the end of that period get some flour ready in a small bowl, flour your work surface a little bit, and get a baking tray ready (just lined with baking parchment/sprinkle with flour).

Then get the dough and bang it around a bit (it helps to get some help from small children at this stage, but it's not vital) and divide it into 12 equal-ish sized pieces. Mould each piece into a ball, pulling the dough round tightly to form a smooth rounded top and then dip them in a little flour before putting them on the baking tray, about 2cm apart (see picture).

Then put the whole tray in to a large carrier bag (Bag for Life again), making sure that the buns are in no danger of touching the bag, even after they've risen. Put this into a warm place for the buns to rise for about 30-45 minutes.

Sometime during this period pre-heat your oven to 230C/Gas Mark 8 - (it really depends on how long it takes your oven to do this - it'll become second nature). When the buns have risen so that they are just touching each other - see picture - put them in the oven for 5 minutes, then turn the temperature down to 210C/Gas 7 for a further 7-12 minutes.

When you're happy that they're done, remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Hope you enjoy these baps as much as we do. If you want to see Whitley's original recipe then it here on Google Books. There's also a recipe for overnight baps (which have an even better flavour & are more easily digested) included here in his article Let's Have Some Decent Bread in Resurgence Magazine.

Our Breakfast Buns

2010-02-16T05:17:00.000-08:00

This is another recipe using buttermilk so I hope you've found your supply by now! This recipe has an interesting twist - the flour is soaked overnight in buttermilk before being baked. I first encountered this idea in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. Her theories are a bit too complicated for me to go into now (buy or borrow her book - it's well worth a read) but one of her ideas is that soaking grains before use (as practised in many traditional cultures) makes them more easily digested and makes their nutritional content more easily available.

We call these Breakfast Buns at home because that's when we usually have them - they make a great weekend treat. The recipe is very much like that for buttermilk scones - but they are more moist and lighter than ordinary scones. They keep better too - although if your family are anything like mine, there wont be any left to keep. They also, I assume because of the soaking process, need considerably less bicarbonate of soda than ordinary scones require.

Our Breakfast Buns

325g plain wholemeal flour (spelt makes a brilliant alternative)

90g chilled butter, in cubes

200ml buttermilk (maybe a little more)

100g (very approximate!) plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

pinch of salt

Put the flour in a large non-metallic bowl. Add the cubed butter and rub the fat into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs (see picture). Or use a food mixer of course!

Add the buttermilk and stir in with the flat blade of a knife (this bit is definitely better done by hand rather than machine). You are aiming for a mixture like a very wet bread dough - if your mixture isn't sticky, add a little bit more buttermilk. You need something that looks like this:

Cover the bowl with a plate, clingfilm or a plastic bag and leave overnight at room temperature.

The next day, put your oven on to 220C (Gas 7). Line a baking tray with baking parchment and get a round pastry cutter ready - I use a 6cm cutter. Add the salt and bicarbonate of soda to the dough and then add enough plain white flour to make the dough into a rollable state, like this:

I find the amount required can vary wildly - start with a couple of tablespoons and add more as required. Start mixing with a knife and continue with your hands.

Flour your work surface and use your hands to flatten the dough into a round disc about 2.5cm (1 inch) thick. Cut out rounds with your pastry cutter and transfer to your baking tray - they can be pretty close together - like this:

Keep cutting and re-rolling the dough until it's all used up - I can usually get around 14-17 buns from the mixture.

Put them in the oven and bake for 8-10 minutes, until risen and golden brown. Leave to cool a little on the tray then transfer to a cooling rack. Eat quickly with lots of butter, and spread with honey, jam or (especially) marmalade.

It's Shrove Tuesday today and we forgot to have pancakes this morning - so we'll have some after dinner I think. Our boys prefer thick American style pancakes - which is good because I am useless at making the thin kind - I think you need a really good frying pan too. We like to use the banana and buttermilk pancake recipe, as blogged here by Kit in South Africa, from Nigella Lawson's Feast - they're quick and easy to do, and I like to tell myself that the banana is getting a little bit of extra nutrition into their tummies. And, of course, it's another use for buttermilk... It really is a useful thing to have in your fridge!

It's cold outside

2010-02-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

But the forced rhubarb is with us again. A really welcome splash of colour in the doldrums of the year. Those nice people at Northern Harvest brought us some today.

Irish Wholemeal Soda Bread

2010-02-07T11:08:00.000-08:00

A very tasty, non-yeasted, quick to make loaf this week. Soda bread is a traditional bread in Ireland, and is brilliant if you need bread at the last minute, because it only takes an hour to make from start to finish.

Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) is used as the leaven (raising agent) rather than yeast, and buttermilk is the traditional liquid component. Buttermilk can be hard to get hold of, but once you have some, it is very easy to maintain a supply (see below for information about this).

The 1st time I made soda bread the result was pretty unpleasant - it was very heavy and really tasted nothing like the wonderful versions I had had on holiday in south-west Ireland. This, much more successful recipe, is taken from Rick Stein's Food Heroes - Another Helping. It has more white flour than the recipe I used first time round, I've learned an important lesson - it's important not to over-mix the dough, as Rick Stein points out, very little kneading is required.

A final note before you get started - you need ordinary plain flour to make soda bread - bread flours are no good for this because the gluten content is too high.

Wholemeal Irish Soda Bread

275g stoneground wholemeal flour

275g plain white flour (plus a little extra for kneading)

1 rounded tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

1 tsp salt

450ml buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 230C/Gas Mark 8. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk and mix together (note: I use a knife and then my hands) to make a soft but not too sticky dough. Add a little more buttermilk if the dough seems a bit dry.

Turn the mixture out on to a lightly floured surface and knead lightly and very briefly into a round. Flip the dough over and gently flatten in into a disc about 4cm (1 inch) thick. Lightly dust a large baking sheet with flour (note: I use baking parchment), place the dough on it and then, using a large knife, cut a large cross in the top, almost all the way through the dough. Stab each quarter once in the centre with the point of the knife.

Bake the loaf on the middle shelf of the oven for 15 minutes, the lower the oven temperature to 200C/Gas Mark 6 and bake for a further 20-25 minutes, until it sounds hollow when you tap the base. Remove from the oven and leave to cool before serving.

*****

Soda bread is very definitely best eaten on the day it was made - although it isn't bad toasted the next day (although the slices can be an odd shape for a toaster!). We like it with soup or cheese, but it is particularly good with fishy things like gravadlax, smoked salmon and my personal favourite, rollmops.

Buttermilk

I think a bit of confusion surrounds buttermilk. There are 2 products called buttermilk - one is the by-product of butter making - the liquid that remains after cream has been churned into butter. This is pretty much unobtainable, although we've been lucky enough to get it at Farmers' Markets in the past. The second, more widely available version, is a cultured milk product similar to yogurt. It's available in bigger supermarkets - the brand I have seen most frequently is Yoplait.

Once you have bought buttermilk it is easy to keep a supply on hand indefinitely. All you need to do is add a little buttermilk to ordinary milk (in the proportion 1 part buttermilk to 4 parts milk) and leave at room temperature for around 12-18 hours. You can use a bowl covered with a plate or cloth for this, but the easiest container for this is a a clip-top preserving jar (the type with a rubber sealing ring). Once the mixture has thickened you can transfer it to your fridge where it will keep for a week to 10 days.

There are other uses for buttermilk besides this delicious bread. To make creme fraiche just add 3 tbsp of buttermilk to about 200 ml of double cream. Leave at room temp and after 12-18 hours you will have a delicious creamy creme fraiche. Or, leave 1 litre of buttermilk at room temperature in a large clip top preserving jar until it separates into curds (solid white stuff) and whey (liquid). Line a sieve with muslin or folded kitchen paper and pour in the buttermilk. Then tie up the white solids in the cloth and suspend overnight to let more liquid drip out. After the curds have drained you will be left with absolutely delicious creamy curd cheese. Try this mixed with garlic and fresh herbs and spread it on your soda bread. Scrumptious.

Pitta Bread

2010-02-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

Pittas are really versatile and good fun to make yourself. Even better, they freeze well, so you can make a big batch of them every so often and have stacks in. There are lots of recipes for pitta breads easily accessible from Google; Delia Smith has a good one too, but she uses a breadmaker to make the dough. This one is based on the recipe by Madhur Jaffrey in her Eastern Vegetarian Cooking, with a few tweaks here and there.

Ingredients:

250g strong white bread flour

200g plain wholemeal flour

1tsp sea salt

1 tbsp olive oil

250g lukewarm water

2 tsp dried yeast

1 tsp sugar

Method:

Mix together with your hands in a large bowl:

250g strong white bread
200g plain wholemeal
1 tsp sea salt

Then dissolve in 50g hand-warm water in a small bowl or glass:

2 tsp dried yeast
1 tsp sugar

- and leave it for 5-6 minutes.

Make a well in the flour, add the yeast mixture, 1 tbsp olive oil and 200g hand-warm water. Mix it together until it comes together in a ball and the sides of the bowl are clean. You'll probably have to add some more lukewarm water to bring it together - about 2-3 tbsp probably.

Turn it out onto a clean, dry surface and knead for 10 minutes until you've got a smooth and stretchy dough. Brush the large bowl with a little olive oil, put the dough in, cover it with a damp cloth and leave to rise somewhere warm for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Make sure your bowl is big enough for it to double in size! I used a smallish glass bowl for these before and after photos and the risen dough nearly took over the kitchen:

Once it's risen, knock it down and knead it again until it's nice and smooth. On a clean, floured surface roll it out into a sausage shape. Actually I did it into two sausages, about 6-8 inches each, which were easier to manage. You should divide your dough into 12 equal pieces. Squish them down into ovals and then roll out until they're about a quarter of an inch thick.

They need to prove for about 45 mins next. I found the best way of doing this (so they didn't end up sticking together) was to line roasting tins (or baking sheets) with baking parchment, sprinkle this with flour, lay out the pittas and then cover it loosely with a tented polythene bag. Leave out on the surface.

About 20 minutes before the end of this period, heat your oven to its maximum temperature and put either a cast iron griddle or frying pan, or a baking sheet, into the oven to heat up. When the oven's got to the top temperature, add 2-3 pittas at a time to your pan in the oven and cook them for 3 minutes.

When they're done, wrap them in a damp cloth to cool. Before eating, re-heat them under the grill.

*********************

What to have with them?

Hummus is a good thing to make and one of these days I'll work out the measurements for my bung-it-all-in recipe! A really good way to make hummus is to blend together all the ingredients (chick peas, a teaspoon or two of light tahini, a garlic clove, 2 tsp or so of roasted & ground cumin seeds, the juice of half a lemon, 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil**) in a bowl using a hand blender.

**ok, so that's almost a recipe for about a tinful's-worth of chick peas (although we cook from dried). It's vague because I usually start the extras (especially the tahini and the lemon juice) small, taste as I'm going along, and add some more if I think it needs it.

Another really nice thing is some spiced or otherwise flavoured yoghurt. Here you can experiment a lot. We like to just squish a couple of garlic cloves in salt and add that. Another thing we do is roast & crush coriander seeds then stir them through, maybe with a pinch of cayenne pepper too.

Pittas are great for packed lunches and picnics, especially for kids. Our two like them filled with hummus, chunks of sausage or fish. They're really nice with salt beef and English mustard in them too. There's also the old Grub on a Grant student special of pitta bread pizzas, which are pretty much what you'd expect!

Baking Day: Banana and Apple Bread

2010-01-25T05:43:00.000-08:00

This week's bake - Banana and Apple Bread - is a recipe from the original Cranks Recipe Book. Cranks was the first ever vegetarian restaurant in the UK in the 1960s. I got this book in the early days of my vegetarian period (around 1990 I think) and it has served us very well since - even though I'm back to eating meat now. You can see from the picture that it is very well used - half the pages are falling out these days. There are some quite hard going meal ideas in here, but it has some excellent, very wholesome recipes, especially for baked treats. Favourites in this house include carrot cake, ginger and orange cake, sticky prune cake and bara brith.

Whilst I had the oven on for the bread yesterday I also made a loaf of bara brith - twin 1 has now demolished a fair proportion of it (it's his absolute favourite), but this is how it looked before he got his hands on it. Bara brith is a tradional Welsh recipe (bara brith means speckled bread) and appears to have 2 different styles - yeasted and unyeasted. I expect the yeasted style is more authentic, but the recipe in the Cranks book is an unyeasted one. Sultanas, raisins and currants are soaked overnight in tea (this is the traditional method) which plumps them up so they are lovely and juicy in the finished cake. The next day you add flour, an egg and some spice, and a little sugar (I don't usually bother) and bake for 40 minutes or so. The huge advantage of this recipe is that it contains no fat and you can make it with no added sugar - there aren't too many delicious cakes that you can say that for!

This week's bread is another no-added-sugar recipe. We make this very regularly - it's a good way of using up left over apple puree (a favourite pudding with the boys) and over-brown bananas.

Banana and Apple Bread

450g plain wholemeal flour (for a slightly less dense bread you can use half plain white flour)

7g dried yeast

150 ml lukewarm water

3 tbsp of apple puree (1 apple, chopped small and cooked in small pan with 1 tbsp of water until mushy)

25g sugar (optional - you can omit this entirely or use a tbsp of honey)

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

4-5 gratings of whole nutmeg (or 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg)

50g sultanas

1 large (or 2 small) mashed bananas

grated rind of 1/2 lemon

In a large mixing bowl, mix together 100g of the flour, the yeast and the warm water and leave in a warm place until it rises and bubbles (see left). If you are using a food mixer, put the flour and water straight into your food mixer bowl as I've done here. While the ferment is rising, line a 1lb loaf tin (21cm long by 11cm across by 6cm deep) with baking parchment. You can use a bigger tin but your loaf will be flatter when it comes out of the oven.

Now add the rest of the ingredients (including, obviously, the rest of the flour!) and stir thoroughly, either with a wooden spoon, your hands, or the beater attachment on your mixer. You do not have to knead the dough - just ensure that the ingredients are thoroughly combined. If you are using a mixer then leave the sultanas out until near the end of the mixing process, so they don't get mushed up by the beater.

The dough should be quite wet and sticky - if it feels a little dry and is not sticking to your fingers, add more apple if you have some, or a tablespoon or 2 of water.

Transfer the dough to your prepared tin and smooth the top of the dough with wet hands. Put the tin inside a large polythene bag (a supermarket Bag for Life is, as usual, ideal for this) and leave in a warm place until the dough is teetering on the brink of rising over the edge of the tin (see right). Now's the time to put the oven on to pre-heat to 190C/Gas Mark 5. When your bread has risen, transfer the tin carefully to the oven and bake for about 35 minutes until the top of the loaf is golden brown and the bottom sounds hollow when you give it a tap. Remove from the tin straight away and leave to cool on a wire rack. This is delicious, still warm from the oven, with butter and honey. We also like to have it toasted for breakfast, with honey, marmalade or fruit butter. Twin 2 likes it with chocolate spread, but the rest of us are not convinced by that one!

Words of Wisdom

2010-01-18T08:47:00.001-08:00

The way to approach baking is with peace in your heart and a jug of cider by your side.

Keith Floyd

Focaccia

2010-01-17T04:57:00.000-08:00

An Italian flat bread, rich with olive oil and with a nice firm texture. The recipe below is based on the one given in Ursula Ferrigno's brilliant The New Family Bread Book, which goes into really helpful detail and has stacks of great recipes. It's her quantities we followed for the 'biga', which is a yeast starter added to improve the texture of the bread.

It's one to be done over two days:

The evening before

'biga'
100g strong white bread flour
1/4 tsp dried yeast (or 1/2 tsp fresh) dissolved in 130g warm water

Mix thoroughly - it resembles a stiff pancake batter. Cover & leave for 12-24 hours at room temperature.

Main recipe

250g strong white bread flour
2 tsp salt
1 tsp dried yeast (or 2 tsp fresh)
160g warm water
olive oil
4 tbsp biga

sea salt crystals

extra virgin olive oil

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl.

Dissolve the yeast in 2 tbsp of the water.

Add the dissolved yeast, olive oil & biga to the flour & then add the water, a little at a time, bringing it together into a soft, but not too sticky, dough.

Knead for 10 minutes on a floured surface - at the end of this, the dough should stretch nicely when pulled, and not break. Oil a bowl, put the dough in it, brush a little more oil on the top, then cover with a damp tea towel or a polythene bag and leave it somewhere warm to rise for 1.5 hours.

Knock back and knead for 5 minutes, then cover again and leave somewhere warm to rise for 10 mins.

Roll out into a square or circle, about 1cm thick & transfer to a baking sheet. Tuck a polythene bag around the sheet like a tent over it and leave for 30 minutes to prove.

Pre-heat the oven to 200c (gas 6). Make little dimples in the top with wet fingertips, sprinkle with salt crystals and some fresh rosemary. Leave it to rest for another 10 minutes.

Bake for 30 minutes or until it's a nice golden colour.

Leave to cool and then sprinkle and spread the top with good extra virgin olive oil.

*****

What we like to do with focaccia is something we read Nigel Slater recommending once - which is to slice it in half across-ways, fill it with yummy stuff, wrap it in foil and return to the oven until everything's piping hot.

We did two fillings. The first was spread on both sides thinly with tomato puree then layered with sliced mozzarella, chopped black olives and parma ham. The second had tomato puree mixed with a touch of chilli powder spread on each side and was then filled with mozzarella and anchovy fillets.

Bath Buns

2010-01-11T05:43:00.000-08:00

When we lived down in Cambridge we were frequent customers of the brilliant market stall called the Earth's Crust. They had excellent sourdough and rye breads, brilliant pastries (their chocolate and almond brioche made Sunday morning very special for me) and yummy cakes.

Our sons were particularly fond of their Bath Buns, which is understandable because they are completely delicious, and toddler-satisfyingly huge.

So now we can't indulge at Earth's Crust any more, I thought it was about time that we had a go at making our own Bath Buns. This recipe is based on the one in Jane Grigson's English Food, which she got from Cobb & Co Ltd (I presume a bakers) of Bath. I've added sultanas, because my sons believe that all buns have some kind of dried fruit. I've also omitted some of the sugar in the bun in an attempt to cut down on the calories. These buns are incredibly rich, but I am unapologetic about that because everyone needs a treat now and again. They're definitely best eaten on the day they were made, preferably warm from the oven.

Bath Buns (makes 12 buns)

Ferment

10g dried yeast

10g granulated sugar

70g lukewarm water

4 eggs

75g strong white flour

Dough

450g strong white flour

180g softened butter cut into cubes

45g sugar

a pinch of mixed spice

a pinch of salt

150g sultanas

Bun wash and topping

30g sugar

3 tablespoons water

coarsely crushed sugar lumps, sugar crystals or granulated sugar

The buns start with a ferment which gives them a better flavour and results in a lighter dough - which is fairly essential for this very rich recipe. Put the yeast, sugar and water into a medium mixing bowl and whisk together to dissolve the yeast. Leave in a warm place for about 15 minutes until it has bubbled up. It will look something like this:

Beat the eggs in a separate bowl and then stir into your yeast mixture. Sift in the 75g of strong white flour and stir gently until combined. Cover the bowl with a damp tea-towel or cling film and leave in a warm place until the mixture has frothed up (this takes an hour or more depending on the temperature). You will have something that looks like this:

Put all the dough ingredients, except the sultanas, into a large bowl, gently add the ferment and mix it in using your hands or a mixer with a dough hook. It will seem impossibly sticky at first but patience is required. If you are doing this part by hand, as soon as you are able, turn the mixture onto a very lightly floured work surface and knead for about 10 minutes. If it does not show signs of losing it's stickiness at this stage add a little more flour (start with 1 tbsp). but don't rush into adding flour in the early stages. If you are using a mixer then mix for about 5 minutes. The finished dough should be smooth, a little sticky and will spring back when poked.

Flatten the dough to about 3cm thickness and press the sultanas into it, fold the dough over then press down again. Keep folding, pressing and kneading until the sultanas are fairly even distributed. You should end up with something like this:

Put the dough back in the bowl, cover the bowl with a damp tea-towel or clingfilm and leave in a warm place until it has doubled in size. Again, depending on the temperature this will take at least an hour, probably more like 2 hours for such a rich dough. Your risen dough will look like this:

Line a baking tray with baking parchment, or flour the tray thoroughly. Take your dough, and handling it gently, divide it into 12 pieces, each around the size of a small apple. Try and ensure that you don't have too many sultanas poking out through the dough because they will burn in the oven. Put the buns on the tray with a bit of space around them to allow them to rise:

Put the whole tray into a large carrier bag (I find 'Bags for Life' invaluable for this), making sure that the bag is not touching the buns, and put in a warm place until the buns have puffed up and are 'batching' (i.e. pushing up against each other). This will take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Now is the time to preheat the oven to Gas 7/220C.

When the buns are ready to go in the oven, remove very carefully from the bag and bake them for around 15-20 minutes. Keep a close eye on them - the rich dough can burn quite quickly.

Whilst they are baking make the bun wash. Put the 30g of sugar and the water into a small saucepan and heat gently until the sugar is dissolved, then boil until the mixture is syrupy. Again, watch carefully, it is easy to get toffee at this stage! If using, crush the sugar lumps coarsely in a pestle and mortar.

When the buns are baked, remove from the oven and transfer to a cooling tray lined with a fresh sheet of baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Brush the tops of the buns with the syrupy bun wash and sprinkle with the sugar.

Leave to cool a bit and then enjoy - like this!

Twelfth Night Spiced Bun

2010-01-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

Cakes were always a big thing for Epiphany, Twelfth Day, Twelfth Night, or whatever.

It might be the fifth of Jan, the sixth of Jan, or really, whenever you fancy. Confused by when to count the first day of Christmas, by whether to celebrate on the eve or the evening of Epiphany, or even by some diehards celebrating Old Christmas Day on the 6th of Jan after calendar reforms, it's best just to throw up your hands and seek refuge in a cake.

Cakes are really the traditional English Twelfth Night food. In some households the person who got a bean in their portion would become the president or captain of the evening's festivities; earlier in wealthy households this took the form of a carnivalesque inversion of authority, a 'Lord of Misrule' who ensured everyone got drunk. Much later, there are stories of mischievous urchins nailing the clothes of those peering in bakers' windows to the wall, as the queuing public stood in static admiration of the cakes on sale.

Whatever the history, here is our first baking recipe for 2010. It's for a kind of bun loaf for which you'll need a tin of around 16cm diameter - we used a circular one with a removable base which worked just fine. The basis for the recipe is a ferment and dough given by Andrew Whitley in Bread Matters, as we mentioned here. The book's well worth looking out, as we've said numerous times before..

Night Before:

180g mixed dried fruit: raisins, currants, sultanas - the usual suspects
45g brown sugar
spices: cinnamon stick, cloves, allspice berries, grated lemon zest, whatever you fancy

Soak overnight in 250ml of tea. Strong black tea is fine - we used strong red bush tea.

On the day:

The baking takes about three and a half hours from start to finish.

First make the ferment in a small bowl:

5g sugar
5g fresh yeast, or 3g dried yeast
60g milk, warmed slightly
50g wholemeal flour

Mix together well and leave somewhere warm for 1 hour.

The dough:

30g sugar
60g strong white bread flour
50g wholemeal flour
1 egg
120g of the ferment
50g butter

1. Mix sugar and flour together.

2. Add egg and the ferment. Work into a dough and knead for about 1 minute. You can do this in a mixer with a dough hook.

3. Add butter and knead for 10 mins (by hand) or for 5 mins if you're using a mixer. You should end up with a soft and sticky dough. Wet your hands a bit if you're kneading by hand!

4. Cover with a polythene bag and leave somewhere warm for 1 hour.

5. Drain the fruit from the soaking liquid and pick out the whole spices. Fold the soaked fruit into the dough pretty thoroughly.

6. Line your tin with baking parchment so that it comes over the sides a bit. Drop in the dough (don't be too rough with it), cover it with a polythene bag, and leave somewhere warm to prove for 30 mins.

7. Pre-heat the oven to 180c

8. Brush the top with a bit of beaten egg and bake for 35-45 minutes - check with a skewer to make sure there aren't any squidgy uncooked bits in the middle.

9. Remove it from the tin and the paper and leave to cool on a wire rack.

Here's what it looks when it comes out of the oven:

And it tastes very nice indeed.

Baking

2010-01-04T09:16:00.000-08:00

Happy new year! I think you can just about get away with saying that still in the first week of 2010. The plan for this year is to do more baking and blog a few tested recipes here. The aim is for one each week - we'll see how we do with that!

With this in mind, I'm attempting a festive Twelfth Night bread-cum-cake tomorrow, using an excellent dough recipe from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters (which we wrote about earlier a couple of times) as its base. The book's a great buy for anyone looking to get into all kinds of baking, by the way, highly recommended. Here's it's Amazon link.

Our cake-y bread-y thing is going to be a fruity and spicy number, to suit the season, so the first step for baking it tomorrow is going to be soaking the fruit, so that's about:

180g of mixed dried fruit
45g of brown sugar in a bowl
- soak overnight in about 240ml of tea with a cinnamon stick, 5 cloves & 4 allspice berries. Or any whole spices you fancy.

I think I'll use red bush tea, as that's been successful for us when making bara brith in the past.

The full recipe will appear tomorrow, once I've wrestled the thing into something edible for Twelfth Night, which depending on your preference is either the 5th or the 6th of January. Of course, you can always come up with your own excuse for baking and eating a lovely cake...

Winter

2009-12-06T14:59:00.000-08:00

It can be a tough time of year in the garden. Too little time (especially as we keep the Christmas blog going), too much rain (our garden goes decidedly squidgy with its clay soil), and worthy but dull tasks like tidying up, sweeping up leaves, cutting old plants back, and thinking about big tasks like levelling the ground and laying paths. Oh, and fruit trees too - but they can wait until January I reckon.

Then there's keeping all the feeders filled in the garden as the visiting wildlife (I'm looking at you in particular, squirrels) become ever more ravenous. It's good to see such a variety of birds in the garden - and it's worth checking how much seed, suet-y things and other birdfeed you've got, to have enough to keep you (and them) going through the winter.

The weather did something alarming to the purple sprouting broccoli on Tuesday as December began with the first really frosty day:

You expect some wilting, but the poor thing did seem a little surprised by the drop in temperature. It was a relief to see no apparent ill effects the next day:

Nothing to worry about there, then. Looking forward to that being ready early on in the spring.

Right, now to make a list of all those things that need doing, to fit them round everything else.

Just to say..

2009-11-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

.. that this blog is going to be pretty quiet till the end of the year, as we're concentrating on the Christmas Blog. We've the slightly ludicrous aim of a post a day, at least until New Year. We shall try our best not to make it too woefully unseasonal, and we'll console ourselves that being organised isn't the same thing as being a fruitcake with his decorations up all year round....

Pret a Porter

2009-11-05T03:52:00.001-08:00

Or, more accurately I suppose, le Porter est prêt. The latest beer's had just about enough maturing time - in other words, I can't wait any longer for it. It's to a simple recipe I cobbled together myself, which I'll include at the end of this post.

There's a slightly dusty antiquarian glamour to porter. The father of stout (think Guinness), its popularity amongst porters at London markets during the early eighteenth century gave it its name. It's dark, hoppy and dry, not too strong (in its modern form anyway) and after pretty much dying out in the twentieth century (Whitbread destroyed their last porter ageing vat in 1918), it's experienced something of a revival in recent years.

Porter has its origins in a technological quick fix, an inauspicious beginning as a kind of beery fast food. Before, beer tended to be either 'mild' (young) or 'stale' (mature), there would be at least two barrels behind the bar, and drinkers would mix their beer to get the required balance of flavours. In some places, such as London, there would be as many as three beers: brown, pale and old, and all three could be mixed to make up a pint of 'three threads'.

Porter changed all this by achieving something that was like this mix of mild and stale, but which could be served from one barrel. So, an early name for porter was 'entire butt' or entire, a term you can still see on the sign for the Dove Inn on the Thames at Hammersmith in London:

Photograph by Fin Fahey, Wikimedia Commons.

London breweries started to serve this new beer from about 1720, for 1 1/2d per pint. Publicans could now avoid the expensive process of ageing beer in its cask, as well as the fiddle of having two on the go at once. And like an eighteenth century MacDonald's, this new fast drink took the capital by storm first and then spread across the country. It allowed the production of beer on an industrial scale - and made brewers very rich indeed. By 1812 the four biggest London breweries produced more than 120,000 barrels per year; in contrast London's biggest ale brewery produced 20,000 annually.

There's a darker side to porter's history. It was discovered in 1740 that porter matured successfully in large vats, with small surface area and great depth. The beer could mature for a long time while the surface area was small enough to minimise airborne infections. Vats were now constructed that produced 1,500 barrels of beer; Whitbread had by the nineteenth century vessels with 20,000 barrel capacities. There are stories of new vats being inaugurated with a dinner dance inside them - with as many as two hundred people attending. The arms race was brought to an end following a disaster at the Meux Brewery in 1814 where a vessel burst, killing eight people, demolishing buildings and causing chaotic scenes of people trying to collect the spilt beer from the streets.

Anyway, so much for the history. Our kegs are fortunately a little smaller than the deadly porter tuns groaning under the pressure, and aren't likely to demolish our house. And my recipe is a modern-style version rather than a historical porter - for which I'll go to the Durden Park Beer Club's book when I'm feeling brave enough. But still, it's a pretty good first attempt I reckon. It's dark with enough fruit to live with the hopping - and a nice, long coffee and chocolate finish. It's dry and very drinkable and I'm very happy with it.

Here's the recipe, quite a simple one:

Original Gravity: 1044

Mash
Pale Malt: 3,700g (77%)
Crystal Malt: 410g (8%)
Chocolate Malt: 228g (5%)
Black Malt: 184g (4%)

Copper
Invert sugar 278g (6%) - I just used partially inverted golden syrup
Goldings hops 50g (start of boil)
Fuggles hops 35g (start of boil)
Goldings hops 18g (last 15 mins)

Mash
water: 12 litres
temperature: 67c
2 hours

Boil
2 hours

Final Gravity: 1011

Yeast: I used Wyeast 1318 London Ale III

The two books which were invaluable for this post were: HA Monckton, A History of English Ale and Beer (London, 1966) and Ray Daniels, Designing Great Beers (Colorado, 1996 & 2000)

Dark evenings, squash and lovage

2009-10-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

Clocks put back an hour today, the year's turning to winter properly now. I've always liked these early dark evenings: we even had some cocoa late on this afternoon as it got dark. It's soup weather - so I've included our recipe for squash soup below.

Mostly I love winter better than summer, even though having summer crops has been so great this year. We can still pop out for some things to cook - the beans are having a last hurrah now - but it'll be the greenhouse that'll come into its own soon. We've already moved in some more tender herbs, like parsley, tarragon and some little thyme plants. We may end up moving the lovage plant in there too.

It's a pretty unprepossessing plant, just stalks and leaves, tattered and a bit faded, but it has the most wonderful flavour. A sharp, savoury, celery-like tang, it's particularly good when it comes to making soups and stews.

Which is what we've been doing. We had a nice-sized onion squash in our veg delivery last week, which we decided would be best turned into soup, with a little help from our much-reduced lovage plant.

Soup-making's really easy. The key to it is to sweat down the vegetables for long enough before you add the water or stock. Even better if you have some good, home-made chicken stock to go in it, but for the strong flavours of this soup, you're fine with a light vegetable stock, or even just water.

A quick note on ingredients first. You don't really need lovage - a stick of celery chopped into a small dice and added to the onion would also be fine. Similarly, the fresh parsley's good, but not essential. However, the fresh grated nutmeg is, we think. Nutmeg's one of those great traditional ingredients that seems especially good at lifting hearty, warming foods in autumn and winter.

Squash Soup

Ingredients (serves 4)

1 tpsp olive oil

butter

1 medium to large onion, chopped
1 onion squash (you could use other orange-y squashes), diced
1 clove garlic, chopped
a generous pinch of lovage, chopped (or a celery stick)
1 good sized cooking apple, peeled and sliced
1 bayleaf
1 litre water or a light stock
squeeze of Lemon juice
fresh nutmeg, grated
fresh parsley, chopped (optional)

Method

In a large casserole, sweat the chopped onions (and celery, if using) in some olive oil and butter for 5 to 10 minutes, until the onion is soft.

Add the diced squash, the garlic, apple, lovage (if using) and a bayleaf and sweat on a very low heat, with the lid on, for another 10 minutes. Stir occasionally to stop it sticking to the pan.

Add the water or stock, bring to the boil and cook on a low simmer for 15 minutes.

Liquidise or blend until smooth.

Add a squeeze of lemon juice, a grate of nutmeg and salt to taste.

Serve & garnish with the chopped parsley.

Extending the season

2009-10-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a lovely autumn day here today, a chance to rake up some of the masses of leaves to make leaf mould and just to enjoy being outside. The beech tree we can see over the back of our garden looked especially lovely today. While clearing the leaves, we probably had our last little conker hunt of the year - and it was good fun comparing these 'tree seeds' with the exploding seed pods of the garlic chives:

Nothing if not educational, our garden. The borage is nodding its lovely, dreamlike blue flowers in the herb bed: there are plenty of flashes of colour still in the garden:

But everything's winding down there now, with the last of the cucumber, squash and marrow plants now uprooted and chucked on the compost heap. Next it'll be the turn of the beans. We're still getting plenty of runners, although we haven't done brilliantly this year. And the crop of borlotti beans hasn't been as generous as we'd hoped. Still, we'll be able to rustle up enough fresh to enliven some pasta and stews, even if we won't be looking at drying them for the winter.

Which brings us back to the title. One of the things people are most ingenious at is extending the fruits of summer and autumn into the winter. Sometimes this ingenuity is pretty crass and pointless, like the array of tasteless fruit on supermarket shelves all year round. But often it's brilliant, whether that's preserving fruit in alcohol, pickling, jam- and chutney-making, or taking advantage of polytunnels and greenhouses to extend the growing season where most appropriate. We're going for winter leaves this year:

The seedlings above include American Land Cress (a fab watercress alternative that doesn't require a babbling brook), a spicy mix and some Lambs Lettuce. They're doing well so, with a fair wind, we'll have some leaves to make wintry salads or to add to sandwiches. A little bit of summer through winter.

The cucumber pickles, preserving for the next few months one of our best crops this year, are nothing short of profoundly great:

When it comes to the beer, there's something about autumn and winter that demands something darker, I think, and something new, rather than the extension of summer's light, golden ales (although that's not a bad idea). My porter, to a recipe I cobbled together myself, is now two weeks or so in the keg and is doing very well. Another couple of weeks and this should be ready. Can't wait:

Thinking the Unthinkable

2009-10-15T06:09:00.000-07:00

Or maybe posting the unpostable. Or something. It's not really as dramatic as it sounds, but is an acknowledgement that it's time to start seriously thinking about plans for Christmas. If you're the kind of person who enjoys rushing round at top speed through the shops on Xmas Eve, then it probably isn't. But if you want to have a more home-made time of things, you need to be more organised and start thinking about things early.

The most popular thing we've done over the past few years is to make a load of sloe gin, to bottle and give to friends as presents. And you really need to get your skates on with this now, unless you've already done so.

Sloes are easy to identify. Here's the patch we used to visit, by the River Cam in Cambridge:

The berries are blue-black, with a slight whitish bloom on them. They're hard, bitter and incredibly astringent - but they should have a bit of give to them at least when you pick them. Whatever part of the country you're in, they should be at their ripest now. The thorns are a bit evil, so take care. They have a terrible reputation amongst local farmers, apparently.

The recipe we use is pretty simple: 600ml of gin (pick a decent one, 40% or above, but nothing too fancy) to 450g (or a pound) or sloes and 450g of sugar. We prick the sloes with a skewer first, although you can stick them in the freezer to split the skins, or even bash them with a rolling pin apparently. Pricking them means less filtering later on, in our experience. Put the sloes in a big jar or crock, pour the sugar over the top and then the gin. Shake or stir it a few times a day until the sugar's dissolved and then give it the occasional shake or stir. Here's ours on the go:

If you start it off now, it should be drinking from some time in late January or early February. If you're bottling it for other people, put a 'best after' note on the label.

Another thing you can be getting on with is pickling. We've got a few jars of pickled onions on the go now, which are real favourites to go with all those lovely Christmassy cold cuts between Xmas Day and the New Year:

And then there are other things you can be getting on with, especially if you're going to be making crafty gifts. We'll be dusting off the Christmas Blog in the next couple of weeks to post a few hints, tips and ideas through October, November and then a lot more throughout December. Christmas is better if you plan it a bit, we think, so now's a good time of year to sit down with a drink and a list of people you want to give gifts to, and work out just what you need to do.

Ignore any misgivings about 'starting' Christmas early and see now as an opportunity to have a more enjoyable, and less stressful, time later on.

Autumn Transitions

2009-09-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

It's an in-betweeny time at the moment: as much a time to look forward as it is to enjoy what's going on now. As everything starts to give up the ghost, we need to think about what comes next - what we'd like to have going through the winter; any winter green manures for improving the soil; things like fruit; and all the seeds for next year.

There's something particularly lovely about autumn when everything starts to fade, the light is especially beautiful and both of these seem to show the late flowers at their best. The picture at the top of this post is a flower of a bronze coloured sunflower we've grown this year. The radicchio which has seriously bolted we've left alone, not least because the little blue flowers are gorgeous:

And we have no idea what this is - we rather butchered it earlier in the season as it was taking over. And that seems to have prompted it to produce a great display of flowers:

There's also lots to enjoy still from this year's crops. The Indian Summer that we've been enjoying for most of September has meant that we've had lots more tomatoes ripening than we were expecting. Today we made a lovely soup for lunch with garlic, our fresh tomatoes, rosemary, ham stock and some brown Basmati rice. Just whip up a tomato sauce, water it down with stock (or water, I guess), add 1/2 to 2/3 of a cup of rice and cook for 40 mins or so. Lovely.

The blackberries just keep ripening up - we've had to start freezing them now, because we can't use them. The cucumbers are continuing to do well too. We should get another three large ones and another crop of gherkin sized cucumbers for pickling. And our huge squash is still going strong:

And yet another marrow!

We're also hopeful that we can coax our remaining chilli plants to come to fruition in the greenhouse. Particularly the fierce Scotch Bonnets:

Finally, one of our winter crops that's doing really well as long as we manage to keep the slugs off it. It's survived the cabbage whites' onslaught at least! Really, really hope that the cabbages grow ok as I for one cannot have too much cabbage:

It's nearly next month already.. Some good things about October - the new season of apples, especially if you can find any more unusual varieties. It's Apple Day on 21 October. I'm not sure there's anything happening near us, but we'll hopefully get some cider at least. October is CAMRA's cider and perry month, the month of the Stoke-on-Trent Beer Festival and, just next Friday, the Stone Food & Drink Festival just down the road from us.

Great time of year.

Leaf mould & compost

2009-09-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

It's a good time of year to look for free stuff when you're out and about - the blackberries should still be going if you live far enough north, while purpley-black sloes will soon be around, asking to be turned into sloe gin, as are their various wild plum cousins. A good tip for locating sloes is to try to find an area that was enclosed in the 18th or 19th century - the blackthorn was often used as a hedging because of its vicious thorns.

There are elders - I noticed that the most exposed elder trees near to us were full of berries now, which are great turned into a spicy, wintry cordial, as per our instructions here. The tip with elders is to wait until the berries 'drop', and hang down in a shape a bit like an upside down umbrella.

Then, as autumn progresses there are leaves. Not just a nuisance needing to be swept up, if you have the patience they slowly rot down into a great mulch or addition to a compost heap (after a year), or a lovely conditioner to add directly to your soil (after two years).

You could do what we did and build a ramshackle store for them (see the picture at the top of this post), or you can store them in plastic bags. There are straightforward instructions here. The important tip is to keep them moist and give them plenty of time.

When the mould is a year old it can be added to the compost heap and is a great way of getting plenty of worms in to work. Compost might not be as glamorous a freebie as the sultry sloe, or as instantly gratifying as a blackberry, but if you can manage to get a good heap going, you save a fortune in bought compost. We use a bokashi system to compost all of our food waste to add to the heap - we're also lucky to have a chipper that can shred woody garden waste, and both of these really get the compost heap going. The left hand side is now pretty much ready to be used, probably in a new bed we're putting together:

The next batch is in the right hand container:

Finally, a reminder that brambles and blackberries haven't long to go. The brilliantly productive bush in our garden is now nearly done. Soon be time to cut back all the stems which have fruited this year, ready for it to spring back to life next year.

Stupendous bargains

2009-09-03T14:16:00.001-07:00

Those lovely people at BIS have done it again. Not only did they box up Masaaki Suzuki & the Bach Collegium Japan's recordings of JS Bach's 'Sacred Masterworks' (John & Matthew Passions, B Minor Mass, Christmas, Easter & Ascension Oratorios), but now they've put out four incredible boxes of volumes 1 to 40 of their series of Bach's sacred cantatas.

They're basic but well put together, with a sturdy cardboard box enclosing 10 CDs in plain paper slipcases with the original CD booklets. This is particularly kind of BIS, because often you find with these big boxes that corners are cut when it comes to information.

More information is available on the BIS website, with details for each of the individual CDs, by BWV number.

If you feel like snapping one or more of these up, look no further than the equally lovely people at MDT, who are selling each 10 CD boxset for a paltry £28.63 apiece:

Limited quantities are available, and I believe this is a one off pressing. They're all CDs, rather than the SACDs volumes 28-40 were originally released as, but the sound is still wonderful and these are, in my opinion, amongst the best recordings of this great music. Heartfelt interpretations with a real grace and spirit to them.

Autumn fruits

2009-09-03T11:07:00.001-07:00

For one reason or another, there's been a gap between this and my last post. One reason is that it's a busy time in the garden getting things in and working out what to do with them. When the weather has let us, that is. It seems that all we've done this summer is talk about the weather, which has been pretty filthy. And having pretty much saved our main crop of tomatoes from the dread blight, we could really do with it bringing some late summer or autumn sunshine just to bring the last ones along to ripeness.

Despite all the problems earlier on, the tomatoes have been a success again. Elsewhere, the runner beans have been really good. And possibly my favourite this year, the cucumbers. I'm probably alone in this, but it seems somehow vaguely glamorous to be growing cucumbers in our Staffordshire garden. There's something slightly frivolous about them which is quite appealing. I don't know if it's just because they remind me of summer salads - or Sunday night help-yourself tea - when I was growing up, but for whatever reason, it's been good to wander about the garden seeing the little blighters grow. And as you can see from the picture at the start of this post, the latest crop of them is pretty substantial.

Which brings us on to the main, if somewhat rambling, point of this post, which is the real challenge of this time of year. Just what do you do with the glut of food which your garden should hopefully be producing?

Tomatoes are easy - halved and roasted in the oven, turned into passata or used in a good arrabiata pasta sauce, they can be frozen and stashed away in the freezer to use later on. The runner beans can be eaten as and when they come or left to grow big, with the borlottis, to use the beans themselves rather than the pods. The potatoes never last long the number we get through. Same with beetroot.

Cucumbers? We're having a go at pickling them using some of the dill we've grown:

Plums? Good lord, the plum tree has been overloaded with fruit this year. We've given some away, turned some into spiced plum 'butter' and converted some more into several batches of jam and chutney, including this big pot of 'Dower House' chutney:

But it's nice to preserve some of them for just eating, maybe with a big dollop of yoghurt at breakfast. Last year, we stewed and froze a big batch, but this year we're having a go at bottling them. Here's one of the first jars, rather depleted after we felt we just had to check on how they were doing. Lovely:

It's not for the fainthearted, not least because there's a risk of cultivating botulism if the sealing doesn't go quite right. Yikes. The bit in the instructions where it says 'if you feel short of breath...' isn't exactly reassuring. But faint heart never won fair bottled plums and all that. By the way, if you squint at that picture, you should be able to make out some pinkish blobs on the tree in the background - plums that we've still got to pick or the ones we're sharing with the jaspers.

Finally, an old favourite. We stripped the most successful chilli plant of its fruit to make a fiery pickle with mustard seeds, oil and salt, left on the windowsill to ferment slightly and do its stuff as per Madhur Jaffrey's instructions (one adaptation here). Here it is, can't wait for this one to be ready:

In many ways, the best time of the year

2009-08-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Because, despite all that pests (like the cursed blackfly who ransacked our second broad bean crop), and disease (like the dreaded blight that's done for many of our tomatoes), and the weather (that's stopped things from ripening quickly enough) have thrown at us, it's the time of year when you can just step out into the garden and pick things to have with lunch or dinner.

Possibly my favourite success story this year has been the cucumbers. Not only have we got some of the bigger varieties, but the smaller ones have come up trumps too. These ones will be for salads and sandwiches:

And there are still loads of tiny ones on the plants. We're really hoping to get a big number of these ready at once so we can have a go at pickling them. In the meantime, we'll enjoy the fresh ones as they ripen.

Runner beans are something I really remember from childhood, twining their way round towering cane structures. Then cooked lightly and enjoyed throughout the later bits of summer until they went a bit too stringy to eat. They're really coming into their own now and I picked a load today to go into dinner:

And some to spare too.

Then there's the fruit. The old faithful blackberry bush is producing loads of fruit and we picked enough over the last couple of days for Ali to make some soft blackberry conserve to have for breakfast, stirred into some yoghurt. The plum tree is covered in fruit and this evening was the time for the first batch of plum jam. First of a few, I reckon.

The most modest crop of fruit we've had has been from the alpine strawberry plants - mostly these have been ripening in ones or twos for a little treat while gardening. But this afternoon I found quite a few:

So tomorrow we'll have them with our yoghurt, and save the new blackberry conserve for another day.

Jaspers!

2009-08-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

They're busy little blighters, aren't they. We're slightly concerned that they're stripping the bases of our sunflowers to make themselves a nest - hopefully it's far enough away not to be a problem. But it's fascinating to watch them work:

I'm not quite sure why today has produced so many blog posts, it's probably due to being able actually to do a few things after a bout of illness. And it's been a dry day too, apart from one very brief rogue shower, so we've been able to do enough to feel that we're back on top of things in the garden.

And inside too. I'm inordinately proud of my first attempt at making a pain de campagne (my secret's below). Ali at Craft Matters has been turning out brilliant loaves for ages now, but I've finally had a go myself. And it's turned out really well. Here it is fresh out of the oven:

And here it is at dinner time, when we had some to go with a lovely salad of sorrel, grilled courgettes, green beans, eggs and cheese:

It's been really satisfying - all down to following the painstaking step by step instructions of a book that (without being completely over the top) has rather changed our lives, Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley. Thoroughly and unreservedly recommended.

Some more pictures from the garden

2009-08-17T02:22:00.001-07:00

A few pictures from August.

The sunflowers are looking quite spectacular, towering over our runner beans (on the right) and the greenhouse:

The plum tree is bowed down with fruit. It'll soon be time to get plenty of plum jam and plum chutney on the go:

We have another big, curly cucumber! The first one tasted really nice and was also a pleasingly eccentric shape. Here's the new one:

And we have plenty of cute, tiny cucumbers growing too. The hope is that we can get enough together at one time to have a go at pickling them:

There haven't been many birds in the garden in the last few weeks (hopefully they've found plenty of food elsewhere and will return later in the year). But it's been buzzing with insects. More cabbage whites than I can ever remember seeing (which makes us fear for our winter cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli), but also this spectacular peacock:

And for the last week or two a buzzing crowd of honey bees, solitary bees and drone flies, who seem to like the flowering mint plants particularly well, including this one, which I think is a drone fly:

Finally, not really a picture from the garden, or produce related to the garden (other than a place you might drink it), here's a snap of the latest beer. I haven't brewed for a while (next brew day is Friday this week, I think), but I've still got plenty left thankfully. This one is from a Graham Wheeler recipe for Boddington's Bitter and it's a light, feisty, hoppy thing, with a really nice Harvey's-style tang to it:

Despite the blight

2009-08-17T01:54:00.001-07:00

We managed to get a good bowlful of ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse the other day. A really good way of preserving a large quantity like this for the winter is to half the fruits and roast, with olive oil, in a hot oven until there's a hint of blackening on the edges of a few. Whizz them up in the food processor (or keep them as they are) and stick them in the freezer. Makes a good thickener, or the base for a sauce for pasta. You can roast them with other flavourings too - like garlic cloves, rosemary, anything that you like really.

The anti-blight measures (along with a slight turn in the weather) seem to have proved effective. There are still some green tomatoes which will hopefully ripen -

- and which seem to have escaped the dread blight. And we've had a lot more of a crop than we were fearing a month or so back:

Whether it's been the dithane, or assiduously removing foliage with signs of blight, or the combination of the two, we're feeling a little more cheery than we were. Our second bag of spuds produced a nice crop too - thankfully unaffected after we'd cut the foliage back to just above the soil. There's nothing like home grown potatoes.

Blight Part 3

2009-08-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

This is yet another blight post. There's something about blight - it might be that awful, apocalyptic name - that gets under your skin, and has you telling everyone about how it's getting to your garden produce. Maybe it's watching the fruit, that you've seen grow on your plants, wither and drop off that really gets to you. But anyway, hopefully this post is about more than doom and gloom.

Because we managed to get a nice big load of ripe tomatoes from our blighted greenhouse plants, as you can see from this pic:

We've not quite decided what we'll do with them yet. We had some with lunch, along with a delicious home made sourdough loaf and some fabulous Pecorino Dolce from the Chester cheese shop courtesy of Northern Harvest. And they were very good indeed. The rest I think should be turned into a tomato sauce for the freezer. Either some simple arrabiata sauce, or roasted in the oven with garlic, olive oil & rosemary and then blended and frozen. Decisions, decisions.

We've also decided to have a go at saving some of the very green fruit. Today I cut back all the most obviously blighted stems and foliage on the plants with the green plum tomatoes:

It's probably going to end up as more playing for time than anything else, but hopefully given the lovely sunny forecast for the weekend and the effects of the dithane spraying, we should get some ripe tomatoes before the blight spreads. The forecast isn't great for the cricket, obviously, but it should hopefully do the garden some good.

Blight Part Two

2009-08-02T03:25:00.001-07:00

So our outside tomatoes in their grow bags are infected and past hope. This morning we've stripped the best of the green tomatoes for green tomato chutney and bagged up the foliage to go straight into the bin. After a quick check about what to do with the grow bag compost, I noticed some advice here to use it for top dressing beds, away from where we'll have tomatoes and potatoes next year. So that's what we'll do with it.

Sunny today! So hopefully that should do some good to the tomatoes we've got left.

Blight!

2009-08-01T03:09:00.001-07:00

We're feeling a bit glum at the moment, as a couple of our outdoors tomato plants have succumbed to blight. This rather unappealing picture shows what it looks like as this fungus attacks the tomatoes while they're still green:

The main culprits for this endemic problem are climate change and the rotten July weather we've had this year. Progressively milder winters just don't have the oomph to kill the fungus and day after day of rain and warmth make just about an ideal breeding ground. So it's time to take the chemical route and apply the Dithane. If it ever stops raining.

You have to wait for a Smith period to use it on the plant leaves, as recommended here. And so once again we're praying for a warmer, drier period. If blight gets into the plant then, for tomatoes, it'll be time to strip the green fruit and make chutney or, for potatoes, it's advised to cut the foliage down to an inch above the soil and then harvest the crop soon after.

On a brighter note, we did harvest our first bag of potatoes and we got a pretty good crop from them:

They are great par-boiled for 5-7 mins and then roasted in a hot oven (220c) for 20-30 mins in extra virgin rapeseed oil. You can chuck in some whole garlic cloves or a sprig or two of fresh rosemary too if you feel like it.

It's easy to get disheartened when things don't go well in the garden - but the best thing to do is to keep going. We've picked up a packet of quick growing turnip seeds that should come in in the autumn. We also planted out our purple sprouting broccoli seedlings the other day, a crop that should be ready next spring:

We've given them a bit of protection from above as we tend to have fat woodpigeons clomping around the garden, sitting on things and pecking them. In fact it's been mostly big birds (the pigeons, scruffy magpies) and squirrels in the garden over the last month, adding to the general dreariness. Happily over the last couple of days we've seen some of the smaller birds come back. Dunnocks, blue tits, coal tits and goldfinches have been busying themselves about the place.

Finally, some more nice successes to round off this particular post. We've got an amazing cucumber growing on one of our plants:

And the marrows and courgettes are continuing to flourish. We've had to cut back the squash plant quite radically before it took over the entire garden - there are lots of fruits coming on it too:

The Met Office now seems to be forecasting a change in the weather some time over the next week or two. I do hope it's going to be sooner rather than later. This dull persistent rain is no good for our states of mind or for the garden!

Sunshine and showers

2009-07-30T02:05:00.000-07:00

But mostly showers. In a brief sunny gap I nipped out to take some pics of what's going on in the garden at the moment. The herb bed is looking lovely now that the oregano is flowering

The bit of hedge you can see on the left is now (as of yesterday) gone - I've tried to transplant it elsewhere. The bees absolutely love the flowers. We've had so many bumblebees in the garden this year, it's been really nice to see them. If you want to encourage them in your garden you could do a lot worse than plant some oregano and let it flower:

Only do this if you've got plenty of space (or if you really like oregano), because it will rather take over!

Sadly it's not just welcome visitors that we're seeing at the moment. The blackfly are a bit of a problem - they pretty much did for our second crop of broad beans and now they're eyeing up our runners. Squishing them seems to be pretty effective, but the long term solution will be to encourage predators into the garden. We've had more ladybirds than last year but not many hoverflies. Here's one, having a rest on the lovely white scabious:

We're growing some fennel, which is apparently good for helping ladybirds to overwinter (they have a nap in the hollow stems, I think). And over the next few weeks we'll have a think about planning for next year.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are producing plenty of fruit:

This is that nice time of year when you can just go and pick what you need as and when. The ones outside are nearly ready now as well, despite the rubbish weather.

One really good thing to do with ripe fresh tomatoes is to make an arrabiata sauce for pasta. Put the kettle on to boil. Put three reasonably sized tomatoes in a bowl and then cover them with the boiling water. Meanwhile chop 2 cloves of garlic and 2 dried red chillies. Once the tomatoes have been in the water for a while you should be able to peel them easily - score them with a sharp knife and peel off the skin. Chop them roughly. Then heat up some olive oil in a pan add a pinch of salt, the garlic and the chilli. When the garlic gives off a nice aroma (if you overcook the garlic you need to start again) add the tomatoes. Cook until reduced.

Finally a little pic of our most advanced marrow:

A brief beery post

2009-07-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

All kinds of beery, really. The picture to accompany this post is of a bottle we'll soon be enjoying tonight - some De Cam lambic, bottled in 2005. It's one of the last two (eek!) bottles left from our trawl of the delights of Cambridge's brilliant beer shop, Bacchanalia on Mill Road. After tonight, there'll just be one bottle of Drie Fonteinen Hommage.

But there's some other beery stuff - first, it looks like we'll be having to wait longer for the new brew to be ready. While putting up some shelving in the garage, the tap got knocked rather firmly. Cue much spraying of beer at a right angle to the keg. A quick tighten later (and fingers crossed no infections of anything nasty), followed by a sample next day shows everything apparently ok - all re-pressurised and tasting nice. But a bit cloudy, so the poor thing needs some time to settle down again.

I've also got two new brews planned over the next few weeks. As usual, I'll be ploughing through my copy of Wheeler & Protz's Brew your own Real Ale at Home, and the next two planned are Wheeler's recipes for Wiltshire Old Devil (an 8% number I'll attempt to bottle) and Marston's Burton Bitter. Well, I say as usual, it's this collection of recipes I've used for all my brews so far except one - the brown ale I have on the go at the minute, which I cobbled together a recipe for myself. And very nice it is too. And here it is, from a couple of weeks back. It's still this lively, even down near the end of the barrel:

The other beery treat we've got to look forward to is a jaunt down to London for the Great British Beer Festival at Earl's Court on Thursday week. The beer list is now online, which is great, presented in a tear-your-hair-out frustrating search facility, which is emphatically not great. Not that something trivial like that will detract from our enjoyment. We missed last year's festival, because we'd recently moved house and we didn't know if the boys would be up to the train journey, so it'll be great to get back to our usual August treat.

Now for tonight's treat. Time to open that bottle...

Proper Gardening

2009-07-11T04:18:00.000-07:00

That's what runner beans say to me at any rate. Along with spuds, they're what I really remember my dad growing when we were little. Their jaunty red flowers are a mainstay of allotments and vegetable patches - and they need to be eaten up when they start cropping before the dreaded stringiness sets in. It's the first year that we've tried to grow them and they're doing pretty well, snaking their way up the cane supports and producing plenty of flowers.

I'm convinced that the best argument for growing your own vegetables is having a crop of fresh tomatoes. It's always a great time of the year when the first tomato goes red:

It allows us to look forward to a big crop throughout the later days of summer and into autumn, if we get enough decent weather. And there's something really luxurious about a fresh tomato you've grown yourself, still warm from the greenhouse.

Elsewhere in the garden, the squash plants are amazingly vigorous and are showing their first fruits:

And we're well into the loganberry season now. They make a great smoothie, whizzed up with some yoghurt and a banana and they're probably even more delicious with a sprinkle of sugar and some double cream. It might even be time to start thinking about starting off a Rumtopf / officer's jam / Hodgkin, preserving the fruit we can't eat in brandy or rum. Fished out of the liqueur, the fruit makes the best Christmas trifle.

Another treat we've been enjoying is a wonderful gooseberry and elderflower jelly - I must chase up Ali at Craft Matters to post her recipe here.

Len Deighton on Seasonal Food

2009-07-03T08:07:00.001-07:00

I was very pleased the other day to unearth 'my' two Len Deighton cookbooks. Not just because they were pretty much my introduction to cooking (my dad gave them to me when I left home for University), but also because the Action Cook Book has the best cover of any cookery book. I used to call it Cooking For Spies. Front:

and back:

The books were published in 1965 and, recipes aside, they are great examples of past attitudes to food and witness to the fact that we haven't really moved on in our national food debate since the 1960s. As well as this (hopefully outdated) warning about some people's attitude towards garlic -

Controversial as a flavouring element, although I can hardly imagine life without it. [...] Don't put pieces of garlic into a dish unless you either crush them thoroughly or fry the garlic in oil and then remove it. People who don't like garlic will go out of their minds if they get pieces in their mouths

- we have a foreshadowing of our current anxieties around chickens:

Each onslaught of mechanized farming and agriculture brings us a step nearer to being battery hens ourselves. Where is the restaurant that serves a fine free-range chicken full of its own flavour, with just a background of freshly picked herbs?

But most relevant to the blog here is a short passage on seasonality (just before a really helpful list of what's in season when - the list of game birds is super!), which again shows that there's nothing new in the current generation of celebrity cooks calling for us to eat more seasonally:

Every month the seasons disappear, for more and more foods are available permanently. I have therefore listed the seasons for the cook with a certain amount of trepidation. City-dwellers - never over-conscious of the natural cycle of the seasons - will soon lose their last point of reference: the food shop.

I'll be having a proper re-read of Où est le garlic and Action Cook Book soon. And I'll always be thankful to the books which explained to a complete novice how to chop onions and garlic, how to make a roux and loads of other basics.

A short break

2009-06-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

We're just back from a camping trip to the Yorkshire Dales. We stayed at a fantastic site not far from Appletreewick called Howgill Lodge. The midges were a bit fierce, but they were the only downside. A couple of stormy downpours, but otherwise beautiful sunny weather. Close enough to Appletreewick that we could walk there along the lovely River Wharfe and enjoy a pint or two of Black Sheep in the excellent New Inn.

We were lucky to have someone who popped round to do some watering in the garden while we were away, as things are moving on apace. The first ripe loganberries are appearing:

- so it's great to think we'll be having some soft fruit soon. There's a great recipe for a soft-set loganberry jam which we used last year. We've had our first two (!) decent crops of broad beans too. There is nothing like really fresh broad beans. They go really well in salads with cheese (especially goats cheese), bacon, mint, just about anything really. It looks like blackfly is going to be a bit of a problem this summer, which could affect the later broad beans we planted. So next year we must do even more earlies.

The plum tree has needed a bit of work over the last couple of days too. June or early July is the best time to prune as it's less susceptible to silver leaf. Hopefully that went ok. And at the same time more thinning out of the fruitlets, otherwise the entire tree will collapse under the weight!

Oops - forgot one!

2009-06-15T04:11:00.000-07:00

Meant to include these in the last post. I bought this gooseberry plant for Ali at Craft Matters for her birthday this year and really wasn't expecting any fruit from it until 2010. Should turn out to be enough for a crumble at least. :-) Unless the birds nab them all of course.

First fruits

2009-06-15T03:01:00.001-07:00

Well, not really, as we've been making our way through the first salad crops for a good while now (and I've been pulling baby plums off the plum tree like nobody's business), but it's been good to see the first tomatoes appear over the last week or so:

Fingers crossed for a nice, mostly sunny summer to give us a big crop of nice ripe tomatoes.

And there are even some broad beans that will be ready soon. Our previous attempts at growing broad beans have been pretty dismal. In our garden in London we just about managed to grow enough for one meal; and last year the plants just gave up the ghost in our non-improved soil. But this year the abundant flowers have given way now to plenty of nice looking beans:

Fingers crossed that they keep going. Broad beans are one of the great treats of summer. Even closer to being eaten, our two containers of potatoes will be ready for harvesting very soon, and the first crop of beetroot should hopefully be ready as early as next week:

Boiled fresh beetroot, sliced and dressed in a little vinaigrette, is something that gives a lunchtime a real lift. Even better when it's from the garden.

Elderflowers

2009-06-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

It's that elderflower cordial time of year again. Out for a walk in Hartshill Park, a little bit of semi-wilderness between the A52 & the D Road, we found some trees with a decent number of flowers for taking home and turning into cordial. This year we're using the recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Book, which makes a stronger cordial than our other recipes. Delicious with still or fizzy water - and even better with gin, mint leaves and fizzy water (a Devon Lemonade). Here is our first batch (today's pickings are the second) steeping, before being heated up with a load of sugar:

The weather's gone a bit dismal but at least the water butts are full up now - and things are continuing to go well. One job that needs doing from about this time of year is training the loganberry. It's going to be full of fruit this year:

A good way to grow a loganberry up the wall is to train all the fruiting growth in one direction and the new growth in another. This means when it comes to autumn and time to cut back all the fruited branches, you can just cut back one side rather than hunting for what's old and what's new growth. This year's new stuff will fruit next year. So here's the before and after: first the before with all the new stems growing in with the fruit:

And now the after, with the new growth trained to the left:

You can just about make out what I've done I think!

To finish this post, a couple of pics of some of our 'late' seedlings. First, for the person who described Seasonal Matters as my 'cabbage blog' :-), a tiny cabbage seedling:

And to finish, the very vigorous looking broccoli seedlings:

All this and we're going on holiday a week on Sunday. Ali at Craft Matters and I are slightly nervous about leaving the garden to fend for itself, even with friends to keep an eye on it - *and* we're only going away for 5 days or so..

Flaming June

2009-06-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

What a glorious start to summer this has been. Blue skies again yesterday, hot in the sun and lovely in the shade. It hasn't quite got to the point where we're hoping for rain for the sake of the garden, although our water butts are now empty! I reckon we need at least another two. I'll be brewing again on Thursday - so my water cooling will produce plenty more to top up the butts, but we could do with a shower or two fairly soon.

The garden's really starting to get there. More on the veg lower down this post, but in addition to all that produce, it's so nice to see the flowers coming out into bloom. The sweet peas are starting to come out, it looks like the honeysuckle will be spectacular this year and the sweet rocket plant that we planted in the herb bed is looking wonderful:

It's good to see so much wildlife using the garden too. We've had fledgling blue tits and great tits fluttering around the place, taking (hopefully successful) first steps away from the nest. The goldfinches are still enjoying the nyjer seed:

and we've got stacks of bumble bees buzzing about the place, including this one enjoying our broad bean flowers:

These broad beans are looking strong and healthy and have put out loads of flowers. Fingers crossed that we get a good crop - we have never succeeded with broad beans before. We also have a very welcome glut of radishes:

They're just crying out for some bread, cheese and a very large wheat beer. All going well. And then, just as I was starting to worry about it being too hot to brew tomorrow, the weather's conveniently turned a little colder.

On the subject of beer, one cloud on the horizon which won't do anything for our water butts is the news that the nice people at The Beer Emporium are moving from Burslem to Sandbach. They won't be that far away, but it's a real shame for Burslem where they were one of only a very few decent shops in a pretty sad - but potentially lovely - part of town.

Bread Matters - My First Pain de Campagne

2009-05-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

Since we moved away from London we have really missed the pain de campagne and sourdough bread that we used to get most Saturdays at Borough Market (followed by a pint or 2 at the Market Porter - we miss that too..). Recently, we have very happily discovered that the excellent Cheshire Smokehouse do a good sourdough, but we still pined for some tangy, chewy pain de campagne.

So, at the recommendation of fanatical baking friends we have recently invested in a copy of Bread Matters (by Andrew Whitley, formerly of the Village Bakery), and keen to get going on making bread using a natural leaven, it was always going to be the recipe for pain de campagne that I tried first.

The instructions feel quite complicated and not a little daunting when you read them through - but the process was actually pretty straightforward and I was so pleased when everything went totally as described. What astonished me is that the way in which the awful sticky wet mess that you start with, gradually, as you knead it, turns into a beautiful, smooth, springy, silky dough. It has been very difficult to restrain myself from reaching from the flour, but Andrew Whitley is insistent about this, and, of course, he's right.

First you make a wheat leaven. This happens over 4 days - it's purely a matter of mixing flour and water together - it takes about 1 minute to do. The leaven needs to be kept somewhere warm - I used one of my seedling propagators for this. Here's my leaven at the end of its final rise:

The bubbling and rising of the leaven is created entirely by the action of natural yeasts in the environment. I was so pleased at how active the leaven was at this stage.

The next thing you do is add more flour to make a production leaven. Here's mine - you can hopefully see all the nice large bubbles that have formed after I left it for several hours:

After adding further flour and leaving it to rise again, you have a loaf ready to go into the oven - the result you can see at the beginning of this post. I am so pleased with it (have I said that already?). It is delicious and very similar to the loaves we used to buy at Borough.

A final picture - my lunch:

Red and white radishes from the garden, salad leaves from the garden, porchetta from the Cheshire Smokehouse and some delicious slices of freshly baked pain de campagne. Very delicious indeed.

Rain rain go to Spain

2009-05-18T03:22:00.001-07:00

That's what Ant & Bee say and while I've nothing against the Spanish, I do wish the rain would go somewhere else. The weekend's been a washout and the choice for the boys yesterday was cabin fever or horizontal rain. We went for the second option, poor things. So maybe today they can stay in and read their - criminally now out of print - Ant and Bee books.

It's frustrating for grown-ups too, as it's difficult to do anything much in the garden at the moment. Everything is still doing well, but it would be nice to get some proper sunshine to go along with the moisture. We've been enjoying our first crops of salad leaves and radishes - a real sign that the year's progressing away from winter towards summer. Another sign is hopefully what will be another bumper crop of plums for us from our tree. It's hard to believe that these tiny green blighters will be our main fruit crop in late summer and early autum:

And despite the greyness of the day there's a welcome splash of colour from some azaleas that survived their transplant out of our herb bed to a more suitable location:

And I say the plums will be our main crop of fruit, but the tomatoes are going to run them pretty close for that award. We have a thriving colony of seedlings in the greenhouse at the moment, mostly tomatoes along with some squash and cucumbers:

Some of these are hardening off during the day for growing outside. Once the weather clears, we'll set up our mini greenhouse for them to get used to nights outside too (at the moment, we're shifting them back into the greenhouse at the end of the day). We have high hopes for the tomatoes, especially if we have the kind of baking summer the forecasters are predicting. Last year, the Bloody Butchers were probably the pick of the varieties we grew. They're easy to spot with their 'potato' style leaves and they're doing pretty well too:

So everything is still ticking along - here's hoping that better weather is on its way and we're not continually trying to send our rainy days to Spain.

Wildflowers, brandy & manure

2009-05-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

There seem to be a lot of flower photos turning up here at the moment. One of the pleasures of May is seeing all the flowers and blossom transforming the garden and turning it towards summer. The picture at the top of this post is a lovely wildflower, sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis). And the next one is of the first flowers coming out on the loganberry:

After I hacked the thing back over the winter, I wondered what sort of growth we'd get on it this year. It seems to be growing back with some vigour and we should have plenty of loganberries at the end of the summer. One of their most important tasks will be to go into our Rumtopf, preserving the summer's fruits in brandy through autumn and winter to enliven Christmas trifle, or to turn into a wonderful 'Rumtopf sundae', with brandy-soaked fruit, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and a few Belgian chocolate sprinkles on the top. Yum.

For those who don't know, Rumtopf is traditionally made in Germany with all kinds of fruit, sugar and rum in an earthenware crock. But there are versions pretty much everywhere, including a Swiss version called 'Officer's Jam' and one from Suffolk apparently called Hodgkin. Whatever you call it, it's great. The fruit makes the best bottom layer of a trifle and the liquid, strained from the fruit, a delicious liqueur. Anyway, here's our sundae. You can just about see a loganberry peeping out on the bottom right corner:

On a slightly more prosaic note, our thicket of green manure (see this post) is no more. Or rather, I strimmed it down to ground level and then pegged some garden membrane over the top. This is a 'no-dig' method of getting the green manure to work, so we'll see how it goes. You can see our next crop of green manure in the raised bed on the right in the picture below. This is going to be cut down and then dug in to the bed with some more compost and will probably then be used as a bed for veg like cabbages, onions, shallots, garlic...

Flowering

2009-05-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

The mostly fine Spring weather has meant that everything seems to be going well in the garden. In some cases a little too well!

The tomato seedlings are straining at the sides of their pots and demanding to be planted out. We're intending to try to grow half the greenhouse tomatoes by the 'ring culture' method this year: this involves a bed of gravel or similar (in our case some of the rubbish we've dug out of the garden) and a circular bottomless pot. The only problem is that turning to the web for sources of information reveals a bewildering plethora of different methods and various bits of advice.

It'll be a case of testing it out this year - fingers crossed we choose a successful technique. We have plenty of plants which we will grow according to a few different methods (including grow bags), so if the summer's as good as it's predicted to be, we're looking forward to a good crop.

As we are with our various other little projects. There's nothing quite like fresh broad beans, especially in summer salads (they go really well with goats cheese and herbs like dill or mint). Last year was an unmitigated bean disaster; this year we're more hopeful, not least from the bean plants putting out the lovely little flowers in the picture at the top of this post.

These plants are growing in a raised bed, mostly filled with our own compost, so we shouldn't see the problem of poor soil quality that put a curse on our beans last year. The plants are looking good and healthy. We have a secondary crop in one of the other beds, but these are the first ones to be planted out:

The broad beans aren't the only flowering plants in the garden at the moment. The plum blossom may have passed, but next door's apple tree is still looking lovely with its pinkish white bloom. The tomatoes are starting to show their first flowers, still closed, but a reminder that we have to get a move on with the next phase:

We've even been enjoying the first produce from the garden (excepting the rhubarb, which has been going strong for a while). The salad leaves are ready to eat and make a lovely addition to a sandwich, while thinning out the radishes not only gives us a few small radishes as a little treat, but also gives us their tops, which make a great addition to something like our spiced kale. Here's the main salad bed, looking pretty good, with its rather makeshift twine as protection against birds digging around:

The bare bit of ground that we cleared for planting with grass has been modestly transformed now that the seeds are growing. It will no doubt need some more seed to fill in some of the gaps, but I'm really pleased with how well it's doing. It won't be long now before it gets its first cut with the mower:

Here's the 'before' picture:

And last of all (but not least), the latest beer is now ready and drinking really nicely. Here's the post from when it was brewed. It's a version of a recipe for Timothy Taylor's Landlord and has a very pleasing balance of sweetness and hop that isn't a million miles from the original:

Cheers!

A Short Camping Trip

2009-04-27T15:52:00.001-07:00

With the weather set fine for a few days, we packed up the car for our first trip out in the tent this year. We're not far from the edge of the Peak District, so we're hoping to do a few of these trips when we get a clear spell. This one was just a couple of nights at a nice campsite not far from Leek. We picked up a great picnic from the fabby Italian deli in Leek. The site itself was a little too close to the road between Leek and Buxton for us - a bit too much traffic noise, but there was lots of space for the boys and we were within striking distance of beautiful walking country.

Lots of wild flowers out in the woodland particularly, some lovely Cuckoo Flower or Lady-smocks, the picture at the top of this post, and the woods were carpeted with wood anenome:

Lovely to get away and have a bit of space.

Recipe for Spicy Kale

2009-04-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice, really simple way to serve kale. It's a bit of an adaptation of a recipe from Vegetarian Indian Cookery by Shehzad Husain, although she uses green beans. The sweetness of the kale goes really well with the heat of the spices and the bitterness of asafoetida. Asafoetida's a spice that can be difficult to get hold of: your best bet is to try an Asian supermarket. We got our jar from Daily Bread in Cambridge - you use so little that it lasts for ages. If you can't get hold of it, then you get a similar balance of flavours by using a generous squeeze of lemon juice at the end.

And the recipe:

Spicy Kale

4 good handfuls of kale (if anything, over-estimate a bit, as it shrinks)
2 fresh tomatoes, cut into eighths (optional)
1 tbsp oil
1/2 tsp black mustard seeds
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp chili powder or cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp asafoetida (if you can find it, otherwise a squeeze of lemon juice)
2cm piece of ginger, chopped
1 garlic clove, chopped

Start by wilting the kale. Wash it and then chuck a handful into a large heavy-bottomed frying pan set on a high heat. Add a little water if necessary & cook until it goes floppy & changes colour. Repeat for the rest of the kale & set aside on a plate.

Heat up the oil in the frying pan on a medium heat & add the mustard seeds. Meanwhile chop the wilted kale into reasonably thin bits on your chopping board.

When the mustard seeds pop, add the coriander, asafoetida (if you're using it), chili powder & ginger. Stir fry for a minute or so then add the garlic and the kale.

Stir well over the heat & add the tomatoes if you're using them. If you don't have asafoetida, squeeze the lemon. Stir together for 2-3 minutes.

Check seasoning & serve. It's nice with a dal and some breads.

Cook's note

This recipe is good with any dark green veg, like spinach, chard or purple sprouting broccoli.

AQA2U - An Advert

2009-04-20T03:01:00.000-07:00

Both Ali at Craft Matters and I work for the UK's top text answering service AQA (http://www.aqa63336.com). As of today, they are launching a new service, whereby you can sign up to receive regular text updates on a specific topic, called AQA2U.

It costs 98p to sign up for a topic & then a further 25p each time a text update is sent to your mobile. Each topic is limited to 14 updates a month, so that's a maximum potential cost of £3.50 a month (excluding the one-off 98p registration).

So, a quick plug here for the service and for our topics: one on seasonal celebrations, dates from history and so on (SEASONS2U); and one on beers (BEERS2U). Search on 'seasons' or 'beer' from this page here if you're interested.

You can also sign up as a publisher to earn money from the service yourself - details are on the AQA2U page.

Advertisement over - normal service will be resumed without too many more words from our sponsors. ;-)

Fruit and veg

2009-04-16T04:22:00.001-07:00

Mostly fruit: a few snaps of how things are doing in the garden as we get to the middle of April. The ornamental cherry that looked so nice a couple of weeks back has now gone over - but the good news is that there's plenty of blossom on the plum tree. The branches are pretty well covered in white blossom, as you can just about tell from the picture at the top of this post.

On the subject of fruit, the rhubarb is continuing to flourish:

Also looking nice are our little quince bushes that we've been bringing along in pots for the last couple of years. We hardly got any flowers at all on them last year (one or two, as I remember), but they seem to be doing pretty well this year:

As are the bushes that I cut back pretty severely during the late autumn and winter. The loganberry has put on stacks of new growth on the wall in the back garden:

And the bramble that I hacked back to the bare minimum is also doing well for green shoots:

We've also managed to get some of our seedlings into the ground! Always quite exciting when we get to do that. So some of the sadder beetroot seedlings which didn't seem to be doing so well in their pots seem to like the raised bed a little better:

And the broad bean plants, which we think look pretty good, were also transplanted safely into a bed, courtesy of Ali at Craft Matters the other day:

We feel like we're getting there! If slowly - there's lots to do when there's plenty of stuff to clear, move around and bring along from seed. Busy time of year.

Surging and Seething

2009-04-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

Is how I tend to think of the boil when I'm brewing. This is a little experiment, so apologies for how rough & ready it is, a kind of video partner to this post here.

More from the Garden

2009-04-11T11:03:00.000-07:00

A couple of pictures of the ornamental cherry (we think) in the back garden, which is the first thing to get blossom on it this year, starting about a week back. The plum tree will soon be looking similar, I guess, there's lots of good new growth on the blackberry and the loganberry and we must plant our new morello cherry soon: it's got lots of buds on it too. Here's some more of the blossom - along with all the greenery springing up and the sunny weather this weekend, it lifts the spirits.

We've also been trying to organise the areas round the side of the house, including a more organised area for the compost bins and the back of the greenhouse, now home to a new little annexe for hardening off seedlings:

We're trying to re-use as much as possible, using flags and bricks to make areas of hard standing (today I laid a couple of big flags down level for the tumbler composter, about where the wheelbarrow is in the previous pic).

There's plenty to use, not least all the bricks we've dug out of the ground. There used to be a big house here which was demolished in the 1970s or early 80s to make way for new houses - and most of it seems to be still in the ground. The other big task for round the side of the house is to lay a new hard-wearing lawn for the lads to play on - we'll see how that goes because clearing the area has been hard work. Here's what it looked like about a week back. After a bit more raking and stone-removing, we sowed the grass seed today:

Previously all that area was a thicket of overgrown shrubs, many of them wielding vicious thorns at exposed parts, that needed to be moved if possible and cleared if not. And then there was the rubble, bricks, blocks and assorted detritus of what was here before. To round up a series of none-too-inspiring pics, here's a snap of *some* of the stuff that's come up out of the ground in the process of digging down about 6 to 9 inches.

It's enough to make you want a beer or two. Two weeks to wait now for the current one to mature (it tastes great already); and then brewing again on Monday, this time to my own recipe, the first one I've tried to work out myself. Busy times!

Now that parsnips are all but out of season...

2009-04-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

...I should really post this recipe, which I've had knocking about the place for weeks now. I love parsnips. Apparently they're one of those humble, northern root vegetables that the French rather sniffily consign to animal feed (like swede). Their loss, I say. Apart from their well-known role gracing roast dinners and the Christmas Day meal, they make a delicious and economical soup with sharp cooking apples and a touch of spice. So here's our recipe for:

Parsnip and Apple Soup

2 large parsnips
1 cooking apple
1 pint of stock (or water)
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1 tsp ground coriander
1 pinch dried oregano
1 pinch chili powder or cayenne pepper (optional)
2 tbsp double cream (optional)
butter
salt

Chop the onion and sweat in a large saucepan for 10 minutes over a low heat in a generous knob of butter and with a pinch of salt.

Meanwhile, peel the parsnips and cut into a 1 inch dice or so. When you've done this, add them to the pan. Chop the garlic and add to the pan. Peel the apple and slice it into the pan, stirring it in as you go.

Add coriander, oregano and the chili powder (if you're using it), stir & cook for 2-3 minutes.

Add the stock and cook the soup over a low heat for 20-30 minutes, until the parsnip is soft.

Turn off the heat & then liquidise the soup until it's smooth. Adjust the seasoning and add the cream if you're using it before reheating gently.

Cook's note
This soup tastes particularly delicious when you use ham or chicken stock. You can use vegetable stock, but use a light one like the Marigold Swiss Bouillon powder. Or water, of course!

Green Manure and Seedlings

2009-04-05T08:53:00.001-07:00

The picture off to the left may be a little uninspiring, but while green shoots may be claimed or disputed elsewhere in the world, the green manure in our garden is popping itself merrily out of the soil.

The two beds we have by the greenhouse and just in front of our garden wall need a bit of work. The large laurel hedge just over the wall has presumably sucked almost all of the nutrients out of the soil, so the rather sad ground needs a bit of improving. We've decided to give green manure a go this year - plants that can be grown and then dug back into the soil to give it a bit of pep.

We ordered Mustard White Tilney from the nice people at Simpsons Seeds and sowed the seeds directly into the soil about a week back - it's good to see them growing. Apparently they reach the stage when you can dig them in after about a month or month and a half.

Apparently sunflowers also make a great green manure, as well as something fun to grow with kids. They can be dug back into the soil once they're done - and the seed heads provide great food for birds too. So, beside the green manure bed, we've got some sunflower seeds under a long plastic cloche-y thing (see the pic, at the top). Other seeds are also doing pretty well. One of our new raised beds (also see above) is now home to some radishes and salad leaves, as well as some broad beans, under the bell cloches and sewn directly into the soil. The other broad bean strategy - to propagate them before planting out - also seems to be going well at the moment: the seedlings are looking nice and healthy:

I really hope the beetroot grows well. We'll get through a lot of beetroot in the late part of the year. So versatile, in red flannel hash, dressed with a vinaigrette as a salad, roast with other root vegetables, or even turned into a sumptuous chocolate cake:

Similarly, home-grown tomatoes are great for all sorts of things. There's nothing like a fresh tomato from the garden and they can be preserved as frozen tomato sauce, spicy tomato chutney and even when unripe as green tomato chutney to brighten up the winter:

Fruity oatbars - a yummy recipe with no added sugar

2009-04-04T13:12:00.001-07:00

Long hard days in the garden - of which there are many at this time of the year - require something filling and sustaining as a snack. This recipe absolutely fits the bill - it's hearty, tasty, sweet & satisfying and wonderfully wholesome.

Filling
1/2 cup dried figs, chopped small and closely packed into the cup
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup currants
juice and rind of an orange (1/2 cup of orange juice is fine, or just use extra water)
1 cup boiling water
1/4 cup chopped almonds (optional)

Pastry
2 cups of rolled oats
2/3 cup whole wheat flour (doesn't seem to matter whether it's plain or SR)
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg (a few scrapes of freshly ground)
90g butter (from the fridge - cut into lumps)
1/3 cup water
2 tbsp maple syrup (optional)

Preheat your oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line an 8x8cm baking tray. Place all the filling ingredients (except the nuts) in a small pan a bring to a simmer. Simmer until the ingredients are very soft and well amalgamated (20-30 mins). Remove from the heat and stir in the nuts.

Place the dry pastry ingredients and butter in a food processor or mixer and pulse until the mixture looks like lumpy breadcrumbs. This is quite a buttery mixture - don't worry it it looks a bit claggy. You can do this stage in a bowl with your fingertips too. Then mix in the water.

Press a little more than half this mix into your tray then spread the fruit and nut mixture on top. Then sprinkle the rest of the pastry mix over the top and press into the fruit so it's quite firmly compacted (otherwise it's a very crumbly bar!). Drizzle the maple syrup over the top.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until the cake is lightly browned. Leave to cool from the tin, and then cut into 9-12 bars (depending on how greedy you feel). Enjoy!

Cook's Note
This is just as nice with other combinations of dried fruit - apricots and prunes can be substitued for the figs, but I think that the raisins and/or currants are necessary for that contrast of flavour.

Lots of work in the garden

2009-04-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

The lovely settled Spring weather we're enjoying at the moment not only raises the spirits. It also means all those garden jobs that have been rained off - or put off because of the cold - now have to be done. In our case, there's plenty to do.

Not only are we trying to get some grass seed (a hard wearing clover mix for the boys to play on) down as soon as possible, but we've needed to build some raised beds, shift the water butts around, make a really sloping garden into different levels that are all vaguely, er, level, make a path round to the compost bins and put some firm standing down there, clear loads of overgrown (and quite vicious) shrubs that are a bit in the way, and dig several hundredweight of gravel, rubble and huge housebricks out of the earth. In amongst all this, there are the seedlings too that need watching, re-potting and all that.

In amongst all this slightly frantic activity, it's good to enjoy plants that just grow by themselves without any effort on our part. In the wilder part of the garden (it needs taming, but not too much), the fritillaries are looking lovely, especially on a bright day like today.

The best beer in the world?

2009-03-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

No, not my home brew, even though the new one looked very promising as we transferred it into the keg yesterday (see pictures at the bottom).

As it was Ali at Craft Matters' birthday on Friday, we had a slightly belated celebration supper last night with all sorts of goodies ordered from Northern Harvest. Two of the best things they do (in addition to their veg box scheme) are cheeses from the cheese shop in Chester and meat from The Cheshire Smokehouse in Wilmslow. The cheeses we got this week were Bourne's unpasteurised cheshire, some soft pecorino and Berwick Edge, a real find that's like a good mature gouda. We've had the pastrami from the smokehouse before and it was just as good this time. I have a feeling we visited the Doddington dairy, which makes Berwick Edge up in Northumberland, many years ago. As this was 1995, my memory is too dim to be sure.

But the real star of the feast was a bottle of beer we've been keeping for a while. Before leaving Cambridge, I made several bike trips to the wonderful Bacchanalia beer shop on Mill Road, just about managing to cycle back under the weight of several 75cl bottles of Belgian beer. Last night we opened the last of our Drie Fonteinen Vintage Geuze, which was bottled on 15 April 2003. It was a wonderful beer. Lively and zesty with a real citrussy attack, mellowing out to a long, complex, honeyed finish, it's one of the world's greatest beers.

Lambics (gueuze is a blend of young and old lambic beers) represent the survival of an ancient form of brewing in which the fermentation is spontaneous, effected through wild yeasts, rather than limited to one controlled strain. Michael Jackson (I think) ventured the opinion that the beer being poured in Brueghel's Peasant Wedding must have been a kind of lambic (web gallery of art link). There are only a handful of breweries making these beers today, most of them in the Senne valley to the west of Brussels, where the beers are left open to the wild yeasts being carried by the wind. Drie Fonteinen have a good website (especially if you can read a little Dutch!), including some pictures of the brewery. If you scroll down you can see their koelschip, which is where the spontaneous fermentation takes place. One of these days we'll get ourselves over to Payottenland in Belgium to visit the home of these wonderful beers...

Significantly less wonderful, but still proving enjoyable both to make and to drink, my latest brew is all transferred safely into its keg. We're getting very good at siphoning (although it's still a two person job!) and moved the beer from the fermentation bucket (see the thick layer of yeasty sludge left at the bottom in the first pic) in no time at all. Seeing all that yeast (I used Wyeast 1099, Whitbread Ale) at the bottom made me think that I really need to look into recycling yeast in the future. Well, 4-5 weeks to mature in the keg now and it'll be ready. There's the nice full keg in the last pic, next to our slowly chitting potatoes. Sadly, as the current mild is all but finished, we'll have a month without homebrew. Might be an idea to visit the ever excellent Beer Emporium in Burslem again...

Critical mass

2009-03-27T05:28:00.000-07:00

Browsing through forthcoming CD releases, there seems to be something in the air, with no fewer than 3 new recordings of Bach's B minor Mass forthcoming, and another to be re-released. It's already a particularly crowded field. The list given at the Bach Cantatas website is pretty difficult to get to grips with, given its size! And in the last couple of years, we've already had two outstanding recordings from Masaaki Suzuki (available in a fantastic bargain box set) & Jos van Veldhoven. Do we need any more? Well, it's always nice to have more choices... ;-)

Marc Minkowski's recording (released in France last year & due out here on 31 March, according to Amazon) is his first Bach disc. His record label Naive have put together a nice little snippet on Youtube with brief interviews and extracts:

It sounds like it might be something special. Smaller scale (2 singers per part), it sounds like it compares well to Jos van Veldhoven's recording from 2007 along similar lines (see the Classicstoday review here). You can listen to the recording if you sign up for a (free) account with Deezer, although this (album link) is hardly an ideal way to hear it, given that the transitions between tracks are often jumpy and off-putting. You get a good enough idea to hear that there's a clarity and elegance to Minkowski's interpretation which could very well make his recording outstanding.

Sigiswald Kuijken and La Petite Bande are currently working through a project to record a selection of Bach's cantatas using one singer per part (on Accent records, they've got up to Volume 7). Now they seem to have a B Minor Mass due out (on 6 April according to MDT) which is performed on a smaller scale than Minkowski's, using eight singers. It's due to be released on 2 SACDs. There's a brief blurb about this album on the Challenge records website. The cantata recordings that I've heard suggest that this could be yet another one to look out for. In addition, with La Petite Bande under threat of having a subsidy removed (see the Save La Petite Bande website and sign the petition - just passed 20,000 signatures), now is a good time to support them a bit by looking out for this record! On the download front, I expect that the record will turn up sooner or later as MP3s on Emusic, who have recently listed their Monteverdi Vespers.

Finally some repeat offenders. Someone who has recorded this music on three previous occasions, Michel Corboz and his Lausanne Ensembles, have a new version released (30 March, MDT) which is also available on Emusic. His earlier (second) recording for Erato can be heard on the music streaming service Spotify (album link), while the later (third) recording for Virgin is available on the mid price Virgin de Virgin label (for instance, from MDT). Virgin then provide the final instalment in this glut of Bach recordings, re-releasing Philippe Herreweghe's first version of the B minor Mass (his second, for Harmonia Mundi is one of the very best), again at mid-price, on 6 April. If you want to hear this without getting the CD, it too is available via Spotify (album link).

All slightly confusing and it adds up to being, as ever, incredibly spoilt for choice when it comes to Bach's vocal music. Not that I'm complaining... If and when my bank balance allows me to write any coherent comments on any of these discs, I will post them here. I'm also putting together a big list of great classical recordings that you can hear on Spotify. There are lots and I'll share a few here.

New beer

2009-03-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

Haven't brewed for a while, and with current beers (a delicious mild & a slightly freaky but lovely pale ale-y bitter) running decidedly low, it's well past time to set another one off. Still working through Graham Wheeler's recipes from Brew Your Own Real Ale At Home: this one's a version of Timothy Taylor's Landlord.

Here's the point at which it turns into beer...

First, the wort, just about coming up to the boil:

It starts to seethe about as it gets to the boil:

In go the hops (28g Goldings, 50g Fuggles) and the wort is now beer:

The boiling beer surges over the hops, dragging them in:

And we end up with a nice rolling boil. 2 hours of this:

Springtime: everything's getting going

2009-03-16T04:07:00.000-07:00

As we continue to enjoy the forced rhubarb (some in a sponge pudding; the rest chopped up and added to vodka, as we did last year), our own rhubarb patch is putting on loads of growth. The weather seems to have turned a corner over the last couple of days (for now, at least!) and we're getting some nice spring sunshine.

We're just about keeping up with food for the blue tits and goldfinches, who seem to be visiting the garden most at the moment. And it's really time to get things moving in the garden. We've managed to construct one of our raised beds (3 more to go) and the seedlings who'll be moving into them later in the year all seem to be doing nicely. Here are some of them. First the broad beans:

Then the Bloody Butcher tomatoes:

The Greek Oregano's coming up well:

And finally, some beetroot. Really hope that these work well as we ate tons of beetroot last year:

Delicious Pink Rhubarb!

2009-03-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

We are buying gorgeous forced pink rhubarb with our veg order every week at the moment. It's hard to resist. Last week's Sunday lunch treat was Rhubarb Meringue Pie from Nigella Lawson's How to Eat. Here's a pic of the lovely stuff...

You'll have to buy Nigella's book for that recipe but we can share our rhubarb crumble recipe because it's our own invention, loosely based on a recipe for cherry crumble in an old Crank's cook book.

Rhubarb Crumble
Bottom layer:
Fresh pink rhubarb, around 600g, cut into 1cm lengths
50g unrefined sugar - maybe a little more later in the season when rhubarb isn't so sweet
Juice of 1/2 orange

Top layer:
50g wholemeal flour
50g porridge oats
50g butter
30g unrefined sugar
30g sunflower seeds

Preheat your oven to 190C/Gas Mark 5.

Put the prepared rhubarb in the bottom of a baking dish, add the 50g of sugar and the orange juice.

Put the flour and the oats in a bowl and rub the butter in with your fingertips (or use a food mixer) until you have a lumpy, crumbly mix. If the mixture feels sandy & the lumps are very small, add a touch more butter.

Stir in the sugar & the sunflower seeds.

Cover the rhubarb with the topping mix and gently press the mixture down.

Bake for about 25-30 minutes until the top of the crumble is golden brown.

Serve with custard, cream or ice cream.

Seed potatoes and seeds

2009-03-02T03:24:00.000-08:00

Despite the forecast cold snap over the next week or so, this is a busy time of year for the garden. And not just when it comes to cutting back and planting things. If you want to get some birds visiting your garden (a crucial habitat now for our birds), make sure there's plenty of food available. They're really busy at the moment - our robins appear to be singing all through the night, the blue tits are checking out nest boxes and the collared doves are lumbering amorously about the place - so need plenty of high energy food. Try hanging up suet cakes and fat balls, keep some clean water out and top up the feeders if they're low. We've had a glut of goldfinches after the nyjer seed (6 of them yesterday) and a mistle thrush this morning who's hopefully going to decimate our snail population as well as blue tits, great tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, dunnocks, robins, blackbirds, woodpigeons, and even blackcaps and

If you want an early crop of potatoes then it's time to start thinking about getting hold of some seed potatoes. Even better, cadge some from a friend or family member or club together to get hold of some: you always get so many seed pots that you'd struggle to use them all yourself. There's a picture of ours sitting around getting ready to sprout before we plant them. Growing in a container is good - either a big pot or a compost bag is nice and convenient.

After last year's experiments, we've decided to go for the most successful of the tomato varieties we tried back then - so it's San Marzano for the tumblers in containers, and Rudolph and Bloody Butcher to put in the greenhouse. The first tomato seeds are in the propagator now...

Here's a list of the things we're growing from seed at various points during the year, courtesy of Simpson's Seeds:

Broad Bean: Witkiem Manita

Beetroot: Bikores

Cabbage: January King

Climbing Bean: Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco

Cucumber: Gherkin National

Runner Bean: Painted Lady

Strawberry: Alexandria

Tomato: San Marzano, Bloody Butcher & Rudolph

As the garden's still in a transitional stage, we're not going to bite off more than we can chew (literally)... And that transition means that we're still looking at shrubs to move from the back garden (the main growing plot) out to the front (to make hedge-ish barriers and spruce up the front), or to get rid of and chip for the compost heap.

Busy, busy. And the next thing to plan is another brew day. I'm getting behind and now there'll be a hideous beer-free gap between what's on now (a lovely dark mild) and what's to come!

A Tale of Two Rhubarbs

2009-02-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

As you can see from the picture at the top of this post, the inhabitants of our rhubarb patch are just starting to poke their heads through the surface. To coddle them through the cold days of this winter, we mulched them generously with some of the spent compost from last year's tomato grow bags and hanging baskets. Can't wait for them to be ready for picking.

Mind you, the good thing about this time of year is that you get a delicious sneak preview of what's to come - a delicacy which brightens up this rather grey month. It looks like the forced rhubarb is now well in season, courtesy of our veg box (and more) people at Northern Harvest. I blogged a bit about this wonderful treat last year, when we had a ready supply of forced rhubarb courtesy of the much-missed apple stall on Cambridge's Sunday market. It was not too long ago when we finally finished up the shocking bright pink rhubarb vodka that I mentioned a year ago. Now we're working our way gradually through the two large bottles of vodka flavoured with non-forced rhubarb from our patch - one of which had some ginger added, both of which are fabulous with a nice ginger ale or beer. Back to forced rhubarb, it really is a welcome splash of colour in dull old February and it's probably the first real fruit treat of the year (if you don't count all those great English apples that continue through the winter).

It's even easier to get through the cold, dank days and the long evenings when you can enjoy a delicious crumble made with fresh forced rhubarb. We've got a good recipe that we'll add to this blog post when Ali at Craft Matters can get onto it. Crumble is one of our favourite puddings, when you can get that crucial balance of crunch and chew in the topping: in our recipe the texture is helped along with oats and sunflower seeds. It's great with custard, or even some double or clotted cream, if you're feeling in need of a real treat.

Snow stops play

2009-02-06T13:55:00.001-08:00

Well it stops any constructive play in the garden if you don't want to sprain your wrist digging rock hard ground. We've still got plants to move (mostly shrubs in the wrong place) and now we've got a morello cherry tree to plant on our north facing wall where the old compost heaps were. Apparently a morello's a good thing to put there - and I'm already wondering about steeping some cherries in vodka. We did that about, gosh, 6 or 7 years ago in our first garden and it was delicious. And the steeped cherries made very nice ice cream afterwards too.

With little chance to actually do anything outside at the moment (other than hurl snow at each other and lose control of large snowballs, sending them hurtling perilously down the drive), it's time to have a plan about what we're going to plant. We're turning the greenhouse over almost exclusively to tomatoes this year - the Bloody Butcher & Rudolph varieties that were such a success last year. It's nice having a go at growing more unusual things, but it's also a good idea to look at the things you really eat, and which cost more than a pittance to buy, and focus on those. And it's not so fun to have a go at unusual things if we're going to have as dull and rotten a summer as 2008 again!

It's also important during this cold time to keep nipping out with a kettle of hot water to keep the bird bath in water. And to check there's enough food out for the birds. We're hoping that we're getting nesting blue tits in the garden again this year. They seem v. interested in our nestboxes. And we hope that the new visitors that we've spotted over the autumn and winter - great tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, blackcaps, goldfinches and nuthatches - will stick with us. Fortunately the magpie numbers still seem low.

I'm a bit late with this tip - but one to remember for January next year (!) is to look out for post-Christmas food special offers. I remember that the much-missed Green Poultry on Cambridge Market used to discount their unsold Christmas turkeys in January. Lots of bargain meals there. And this year, Northern Harvest were offering half-price frozen free range turkeys which we've been enjoying this week (when it finally thawed!). You've got to like the leftovers of course, but you get so many meals out of it, it makes a nice cheap-ish treat.

The news is particularly annoying at the moment

2009-02-03T14:24:00.000-08:00

Today all sorts of hand-wringing about snow. Lots of sniggering about 'working' from home, implying anyone doing so is skiving. Boris Johnson quoted all over the BBC & Radio 4 yesterday as some kind of lovable phrase-coining duffer and leading the giddy Martha Kearney a merry dance at lunchtime. Similarly annoying yesterday, we had Maths Genius (tm) and ex-TV Personality Carol Vorderman recruited by the Tories and hitching herself to their Decade Of Woe narrative. She's well into this broken Britain theme it seems:

"In the last decade, 3.5 million children have left school without a basic qualification in maths, a shocking statistic.

"If they are to get the best jobs in the future and Britain is to emerge stronger from the recession we have little choice but to sort maths out now."

Shocking indeed. We should definitely sort maths out now. Why oh why couldn't anyone have thought of this 10 years ago? Why? Couldn't anyone have seen back then that the issue was so simple and the solution so elegant? Eh? Oh:

[Sunday 14 March 1999] CAROL VORDERMAN, Britain's highest paid female television presenter, has been personally recruited by the Prime Minister to spearhead a campaign to raise standards in maths.

Independent. Guardian.

Never mind, Carol. I'm sure it'll work this time round! If not there's always 2019.

Getting back to blogging...

2009-02-03T03:07:00.001-08:00

...has been a bit of a job this year, what with illnesses and trying to catch up with doing a bit of work (see www.63336.com), rescuing beers and trying to get everything at home back to some kind of normality after all the Christmas excitements. Not to mention the garden! Great plans afoot there. Compost heaps, leaf mould, shifting plants and redesigning one area to include 6 raised beds, not to mention chipping all the ex-shrubs so they can go on the compost heap.. The composting is all going really well. After we shifted over to the new containers back in October, we've now pretty much got a new batch usable compost. Thanks to the bokashi system, pretty much all our kitchen waste is now composting away.

I'll get things going again with a few brewing updates. The saga of the 'Christmas Beer' has been rumbling on. After shifting it outside (big mistake with it so cold) and then back in to revive it, the revival not taking hold and a bit of head scratching, I dumped in a yeast starter that I'd cultivated from (an otherwise pretty disappointing) Leek Brewery's winter beer and hoped for the best.

It seems to have worked - although I did find another problem which might have been more significant than the effect of the cold upon the beer. Anyway, some pics first. The first is of some cloudy beer after it first revived, having been warmed up after the initial problem:

It came out ok and I had high hopes at this point. However it then went decidedly flat, so having dumped in my yeasty starter to get it going again I took off some beer, cloudy but a bit more lively and let it settle to clear up (the first pic). This is a good indication that the beer in the keg will also clear down. The second pic is of it in a re-clouded state!

And then yesterday I drew off a pint for drinking, pictured below. And what a relief, it tastes really nice. Hoppy, but not as astringent as it was before, I don't know whether the Leek yeast has softened it a bit and taken some of the edges off, but it was good and even had some reasonable sparkle to it:

The *other* problem (sigh) was that I noticed that the blooming tap on the keg appeared to have developed a leak. Now that tap not being airtight could be a more significant factor in the keg losing pressure, the beer going flat and all that than the cold. So I did something ludicrously drastic: unscrewing the screw-plug bit of the tap (cue beer fountain) and replacing it with a new one. It's nice and tight now, but could well have boogered up the whole thing again! We'll see.

On a happier note, the new beer, one of Graham Wheeler's mild recipes (Bateman's Dark Mild) seems to be doing very nicely. A week-old sample came out of the tap at the expected lick and tastes delicious already - chewy, roasty with a coffee-ish tinge. Can't wait for that one to be ready:

Credit Crunch Recipes (4) - Bubble & Squeak

2008-12-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

This is ideal for making using leftover mashed potato and cooked cabbage – or you can make it from scratch. I don't think it really matters. You can also make it with other cooked greens, like kale or cavolo nero or even the Christmassy brussels sprouts.

The recipe below assumes you're making it from scratch – just ignore the bits about cooking the greens and spuds if you're using leftovers.

It's a lovely filling accompaniment or can make the basis of a meal in itself served up with a fried egg or a few rashers of bacon – or both!

I've not given any precise quantities as I really don't think it matters. You can make enough for a meal for 2 or an accompaniment for 4 with half a cabbage and three or four good-sized potatoes.

=================

Ingredients

Potatoes (preferably a floury variety)
Cabbage
A medium onion, chopped
Butter & oil for frying (I use a mix of butter and groundnut oil usually) – or using beef dripping would be a nice touch
Salt and pepper

Method

If you're making it with fresh ingredients, start by peeling and boiling your potatoes – chop them into a few bits so they cook a bit quicker. Then shred the cabbage and cook that in a large saucepan or frying pan with a lid. Cook it until it's done how you like it.

Meanwhile, fry the chopped onion in a tablespoon of oil and a knob of butter, in a large frying pan over a low heat. You don't want to brown it, just cook it gently until it goes nice and sweet. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes to get this done.

Once the potatoes and cabbage are ready, mash the potatoes with another knob of butter and a splash of milk. Season with salt and pepper and then add the cooked, shredded cabbage. Chop it down smaller before you add it if you like. Give it a good old stir with a fork until it's all mixed together well.

Add a touch more oil to the frying pan and then add the bubble and squeak mix, giving it a good stir to get the onions in the mixture a bit.

Fry it over a low to medium heat and every 5 or 10 minutes flip the bubble and squeak mix over.

It's done when you think it is – I like it well browned on the outside and usually I fry a couple of eggs beside it in the frying pan.

Enjoy! It's great with HP Sauce or Worcestershire Sauce.

Christmas Giveaway!

2008-12-04T04:49:00.001-08:00

Another plug (to go with the one on the Christmas blog) for Ali B's super soaraway Christmas giveaway. Just leave a comment on this blog post here, with a couple of thoughts on what's nice about Christmas (even Scrooges must be able to find something... ;-) ) and be in with a chance of winning some goodies.... More details over at Craft Matters blog.

Competition closes on Sunday!

Apples

2008-12-01T03:43:00.000-08:00

Those nice people at Northern Harvest have some lovely apples available at the moment, grown just up the road from us in Cheshire. This week we opted for Ashmead's Kernel (on the left) as the eaters and Belle de Boskoop as cookers.

You can tell how successful the cookers have been by the fact there's only one left! We've been using last year's home made mincemeat - just core the apples, score them all around the middle with the point of a knife, spread a bit of butter on the outside and then fill the empty middle with mincemeat. Splash a bit of water in the bottom and it'll turn into a nice sauce. Cook in a low oven (gas 5, 190c) for 45 mins or so.

The Belle de Boskoops did the trick - beautifully fluffy and nice and sweet, with that cooking appley edge to stop them being icky.

The Ashmead's Kernel apples are totally delicious - slightly russeted on the outside, they're firm, crispy with a beautiful flavour - clean-tasting, slightly spicy. Wonderful. I hope there are some left for us to get this week!

Also, as we're thinking about fruit trees we could add to the garden over the next couple of years, we might try to get hold of one of both varieties - after researching whether or not they're likely to grow and fruit for us here.

Credit Crunch Recipes (3): A Store Cupboard Treat!

2008-11-24T05:10:00.000-08:00

It's such a grim time of year - still a little while to go until the festive treats of Christmas, bonfire night & Halloween are long gone, the weather is cold and everyone's worried about their finances. So we all need a few treats to cheer us up and bring a bit of warmth & sweetness to our mealtimes & this recipe really fits the bill. It's a rich chocolate pudding which doesn't involve buying expensive extra ingredients but tastes as if you've used the best chocolate available. It's one of those puddings which seems incredibly unlikely before you cook it, but separates out into a sponge & yummy sauce layer. This has the additional benefit of meaning you don't have to serve anything with it, although a bit of pouring cream or vanilla ice cream make it even more delicious if you want an even bigger treat.

Store Cupboard Chocolate Pud

Sponge Layer:
100g (4oz) self-raising flour
100g (4oz) softened butter or margarine
100g (4oz) dark brown (muscavado) sugar
2 level tablespoons cocoa powder
2 eggs

Sauce Layer:
3 heaped tablespoons dark brown sugar
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder
400ml/14 fluid oz water

Preheat your oven to Gas 4/180C & butter shallow baking dish with a 1 litre/2 pint capacity (it's important the dish is shallow or your pudding wont cook properly). Put a baking sheet on the top shelf of your oven to preheat.

Put all the sponge ingredients in a bowl and beat together until thoroughly mixed (a food mixer or electric hand whisk are the best tools to use here). Put the mixture in your baking dish and level it with a spoon.

Out the dry ingredients for the sauce layer in a bowl and mix together with your fingertips until thoroughly combined. Sprinkle this over the sponge mixture in the baking dish. Then boil the water and pour it very very gently all over the top of the mixture (don't pour it all in one place - you will create a big hole!).

Put the baking dish onto the preheated baking sheet & bake in the oven or about 35-40 mins.

Enjoy the yumminess.. If there is any left (ha!) this is quite yummy cold the next day - you get a delicious fudgy texture where the sauce has soaked into the sponge.

Lively!

2008-11-18T03:52:00.001-08:00

As one beer runs out, so another one comes in. This Castle Eden Ale copy is certainly lively stuff! And delicious. Now I have to make sure I finish the keg of dark, beguiling Black Bat so that the current beer that's fermenting (our Xmas brew) has somewhere to live!