Lara's theme

Most of you will know by now that I am enjoying the prospect of passing on my enthusiasm for gardening to my grandaughter Lara.  This is of course not to say that we are skipping a generation, because both of our daughters, Emma and  Fiona, are in their own way already gardening enthusiasts. It's just that I consider that in their case the job is already done, whereas with Lara maybe the opportunity is mostly still to come. When Lara visits us, she is always keen to go out in the garden and see what is new. I think she already associates our garden with nice edible treats, such as tomatoes, raspberries and blueberries. Earlier this year she discovered the delights of home-grown new potatoes. This coming year it will probably be carrots and peas; maybe runner beans.

Lara is always keen to participate in whatever is going on -- especially in the garden. Have a look at the following sequence of photos and see if you can spot the theme...

Yes, it's the presence of the watering-can. Lara loves watering, even when it's totally unnecessary! And she now insists on using the biggest watering-can available, which she can barely lift; not the little baby one - that would be far too easy. I think I already know who will come round and do the digging for me when I am in my dotage...

Lara is also learning from her parents about cooking and food preparation. At their request, we will be buying her some small but "real" cooking equipment as part of her Christmas present, so that she can join in with the grown-ups.  We have ordered some of the things from a great online shopping source we have recently discovered -- http://www.barnitts.co.uk/. All you grandparents out there, I think you need to check this out!

Spiced vodka

We're not great fans of vodka in its normal form, but last Christmas we had a "spare" bottle of vodka hanging around and we used it to make some spiced vodka from a recipe we saw in Jamie Oliver's magazine "Jamie". It turned out to be absolutely delicious, and very potent. This week we found the bottle containing the last little bit of it lurking in the depths of our freezer, and finished it up. This of course re-invigorated our interest in such things and yesterday Jane started the process of making a new bottle of it, which will be ready just in time for Christmas.

The basic concept is that you put a lot of aromatic things in a container along with the vodka, let them infuse for a couple of weeks, discard the solids, strain off the liquid and consume it -- Simples!

 

One bottle of vodka, lots of spices, aromatics, sugar etc



Put the whole lot in a plastic container



Swoosh it about a bit - you then have a rather unappetising-looking brown liquid



Seal the container and put it in your fridge for a couple of weeks

It doesn't look particularly nice at this stage, but believe you me, the taste of the finished thing will redeem it. We enjoyed last year's one as a "digestif" at the end of our Christmas meal, and it was very popular!

The covers are off (temporarily)

Today most of our snow has melted, so I took a quick look at how the crops underneath the fleece covers have been faring. Actually I was quite pleasantly surprised.

The Celeriac still looks fine, although some of the leaves are very bent with having been weighed-down by snow-laden fleece for several days, and the bulbs are still very small (I don't think they will get any bigger now).

The "Tundra" cabbages are also doing all right, though a few leaves had been broken. Again, they are growing very slowly, which is hardly surprising. I'm not sure that they will ever get round to hearting-up. I may have to use then as "Spring Greens"

The various Endives seem to be unharmed.

It's only the "Webbs Wonderful" lettuces that have been badly affected. Many of the outer leaves were brown and slimy. I decided to harvest immediately whatever was usable, which was only a few inner leaves from each one. I think there were 8 lettuces and this is all I managed to salvage:

Not much of a crop, but still enough for a helping for two people I reckon.

Fortunately the "Fristina" lettuces seem to be a bit hardier, and are still surviving all right.

After the "inspection" I replaced the fleece covers, taking the opportunity to straighten-up the supporting hoops and to re-arrange the fleece to provide maximum protection. Some of the pieces of fleece are looking very ragged now, having been ravaged not only by wildlife, but also the weather!

While I was in the garden I took a couple of other photos, this time not of the edible plants...



This Clematis is looking pretty "browned off"



I loved the contrasting textures, patterns and light effects of this view

They are forecasting very low temperatures in our area over the next few days, so we are not out of trouble just yet.

Comfort Food

Readers in the UK will be all too well aware of the fact that we have been experiencing a spell of abnormally low temperatures and heavy snowfalls. We are not used to this -- certainly not this early in the year. We usually get a few days of really cold weather once or twice each year, but normally in January or February, not November or December. When adverse weather is unusual it is hard to justify spending a lot of money on being prepared to cope with it, and this is our problem in the UK: cold conditions always give us a lot more problems than seems reasonable. After all, they cope with much worse conditions every year in Russia and Scandinavia and places like that.

Who's been exploring my garden?


This week I have had to travel to and from London three days in a row, and it has not been easy. I have to drive two miles to the railway station, get on a mainline train to London Waterloo, travel on two separate lines of the Tube (underground railway), and then walk the last half mile or so to the Training Centre where I have been working. In normal conditions, the journey takes me about 1 hour 45 minutes. This week it has been longer! Most of the trains have been running late, many have been cancelled, and the railway timetable has been in complete disarray. Every train that has run has been grossly overcrowded. The result for me is that I arrive home in the evening physically and mentally exhausted -- "frazzled", you might say.  In such circumstances it is a great relief to come home to a lovely hot meal cooked by for me by by wonderful wife Jane. This week's meals have been very much in the category "Comfort food". Not sophisticated, but hearty and sustaining.

This BBC Good Food Magazine book may have had an influence!

Here is the week's menu...

Sunday (appropriately, after returning from our trip to Golborne - originally in Lancashire, now in Greater Manchester) - Lancashire Hotpot, with beetroot and Savoy cabbage.

Lancashire hotpot (old picture!)

Monday - trip to our local Chinese restaurant "Wala Wala", for their so-called buffet, which simply means eat as much as you like, from a menu of about 60 dishes, for £15. We had 14 different dishes! One of our favourites is roast duck in steamed pancakes, with hoisin sauce, cucumber and spring onions.
Tuesday - roast chicken, roast potatoes, mashed Swede turnip, steamed leeks, and most importantly real gravy made from the juices in the roasting pan!
Wednesday - "Spag Bol" - pasta with meat sauce, and salad. The meat sauce was livened up with some of our home-made pesto from the freezer.
Thursday - Chilli con Carne (minced beef with red kidney beans and loads of tinned tomatoes) with brown rice and green beans (home-grown ones, from the freezer).



Chilli con Carne




Chilli con Carne, brown rice, green beans

Friday - Cornish pasties, with brussels sprouts, and fresh (shop-bought) tomatoes, the whole garnished with onion marmalade. Jane makes her Cornish pasties from a recipe in the Cordon Bleu cookery series. The filling includes diced beef, onions, potatoes, swede and carrots, with plenty of salt and pepper. Here's a picture of the raw ingredients:

And here's a picture of the finished items:

Saturday - roast pork, (with crackling, I hope!), apple sauce, roast potatoes, and a vegetable medley to use up the remainder of the veg we had earlier in the week, like cabbage, leeks and turnip.

Isn't it ironic that Jane (who comes from Lancashire) made the Cornish pasties, but I (who come from Cornwall) made the Lancashire hotpot? In our household Jane does most of the cooking (probably 6 days out of 7), though I do try to get involved with most meals, even if it is just prepping the veg. At weekends when I have more time I do like to cook something on my own, but my repertoire is fairly limited in comparison with Jane's. I claim the bragging rights on the casseroles though -- this is what I'm best at making. My "signature dish" is a pork casserole with tomatoes and cannellini beans, with lots of garlic and parsley. I serve it with taglietelli. That reminds me: I must make it -- we haven't had it for a while, and it would be perfect in current weather conditions...

Euphorbia

At the bottom of my garden, near the shed (in one of the least promising growing areas therefore...) I have a patch of Euphorbia. It all originates from one little plant I bought a few years ago for £1 at a Farmer's Market.

Euphorbia is a tough, resilient plant that will tolerate some fairly challenging conditions, which is why it is where it is in my garden. It spreads quite rapidly by means of underground rhizomes a bit like Mint, so you have to keep it in check.

It flowers in the early Summer, and at this time of the year it is normally not something that catches my eye, but as most of you will have realised, now that I have taken up photography I have begun to see things in a lot more detail - always on the lookout for a decent photo. My eye lit upon the Euphorbia, which is beginning to form its buds for next year's flowers (strictly speaking, they're bracts, aren't they?), and I was struck by the multi-layer, almost symmetrical structure of its leaves, and the glossy - almost waxy - texture of those leaves. This is the result:

In Mint condition...

The other day I spotted this tiny "volunteer" Mint plant amongst the gravel near my back door.

"Small, but perfectly-formed," I thought, so I decided to adopt it. I have potted-up the plant, and plan to grow it indoors to see if I can get fresh mint in the middle of Winter -- which would be a rare treat.

This is a 3-inch (7.5cm) pot, so the plant is very small

I don't expect this plant to be a huge success, because indoor plants seldom get as much light as they would really like, (especially during the Winter months) but I'll enjoy the challenge of producing "something from nothing", as it were.  I'll let you know how it turns out...

The BBC Good Food show

On Friday we indulged our hobby by visiting the BBC Good Food show at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham. Jane had won the tickets in a competition run by Loseley, a well-known producer of premium dairy products http://www.loseley.com/  [One of the by-products of Jane's own business http://www.compersgrapevine.co.uk/ ]

This show is a twice-a-year opportunity for food and drink-related businesses to showcase their products and services to a huge audience. The Winter show this year ran from Wednesday 25 to Sunday 28 November. The NEC itself is a massive complex of halls capable of hosting even the biggest exhibitions. I don't know how many businesses were represented at this week's show, but it must have been many hundreds. As for visitor numbers, who can say? Certainly numbered in the tens of thousands over the 5 days of the show.

Regular readers will know that we planned ahead for attending this show, and we stayed overnight just a few miles away from the NEC so that we could arrive at the venue before it got too busy. Jane particularly wanted to have a few words with Kate Jenkins of Gower Cottage Brownies http://www.gowercottagebrownies.co.uk/ with whom she is friendly via email correspondence, though until Friday they had not met. Kate very kindly gave us some samples of her delicious brownies. Heavenly!

We stayed at the show about three hours (this was about as much as we could take, because it is actually quite physically demanding being on your feet most of that time and jostling your way through vast crowds of people). During this time we inspected hundreds of stalls selling all manner of goodies, and we sampled the wares of dozens of them. I lost count of the number of cheese samples we consumed! Actually the show had earlier hosted the 2010 World Cheese Awards, and the entries were on display in a separate part of the exhibition. I have never before seen so much cheese in one place. There must have been literally tons of it.

Being a veg gardener I was on the lookout for vegetable products. There was not much in the way of fresh veg on display, mainly because of the time of year, but there were still a few to be seen, such as this Veg-box delivery business.

After cheese, I think the next most popular food item was the chilli

This stall selling Mediterranean foodstuffs caught my eye. They had fabulously-fragrant dried oregano still on the plant, rather than crushed into tubs. I love it like this, and it goes so well with a good olive oil.

Naturally there were lots of chocolate products on offer...

Since this show was taking place in the heart of England, you would expect there to be pies aplenty...

As a Cornishman, I was happy to see a few stalls selling pasties. This one was serving them hot. The smell was out of this world! [For those of you who do not know the Cornish pasty, it is a savoury pastry filled with beef, potato and Swede turnip - an unsophisticated product but, if done nicely, a real gastronomic treat.]

We bought a few things, most of which I cannot mention here because they are going to be surprises for certain people at Christmas, but I will admit that we did splash out on two new kitchen knives for ourselves. They are from Zwillings Henkel - pricey items, but worth every penny. One is a 15cm Cook's knife, and the other is a filleting knife. I'm sure they will get plenty of use very soon.

One other feature of this show that Jane appreciated more than most was the opportunity to enter loads of competitions. Many of the manufacuturers were running competitions to promote their products, so you never know, we might be lucky and win something. Our daughter Emma once won a fitted kitchen at this event!

All in all, a very interesting and rewarding day out!