Harlow Carr open day

Unfortunately it was raining on Saturday, when I went to the "Grow Your Own Veg" open day at the Yorkshire RHS site, and the thick (for a youngster like me ;-p ) snow on the ground rather obscured the point they were making about their raised bed patches, but it was still an interesting half-day out. I gave up in the early afternoon, despite two pairs of trousers, two fleeces, and various other bits of clothing!

I couldn't take too many photos due to the rain, but still, the garden was very pretty, especially the heathers:



More photos of snow tomorrow.

Whoops!

Didn't post yesterday. Ah well, it was quite a roll for me anyway :-)

My OH's flight back from Germany on Thursday was cancelled, so he had to take one to London instead, stop the night with a colleague, then make his way back to Leeds yesterday.

Today I went to Harlow Carr RHS gardens near Harrogate. There was an open day, to do with the TV show "Grow Your Own Veg", and it was quite interesting, though very cold and wet! Unfortunately you couldn't see much of their kitchen garden, due to the thick layer of snow, but there were lots of staff around for me to ask stupid questions at. Also, they were giving away "starter packs", which have a little advice, and packets of carrot, spinach, and tomato seeds.

Will post some photos of snow tomorrow :-D

Pasta (mostly)

It looks like my OH's flight (and therefore the camera) will be rather delayed due to the weather, so there may not be any photos today. Mind you, I now don't have to set off for a little longer, so maybe I will find something older in a bit.

Yesterday I had some friends over for dinner, and I decided to make a Tagliatelli, with Chicken, Bacon, and mushroom (chestnut ones in particular, much nicer than the "normal" button ones, try them!). I've not used my pasta maker since I appropriated it from my dad's house, and before then it had always been with my mum, who was generally in charge. I have to admit she was a little bit flighty, and would get a gadget, use it constantly for a few weeks, then put it away indefinately...

But every time I have made a lasagne, I have complained about how awkward it is to use the dried sheets, given that they are never the right size and shape for the dish you have. I kept saying that I would make fresh pasta when I ran out of dried stuff, and finally I have depleted the tagliatelli stock!

The recipe called for 400g of plain flour to 2 large eggs, and due to my inexperience, and having medium eggs instead of large, it was nearly a disaster. However, I eventually settled on about 500g flour to 4 medium eggs, and after I had put it through the machine a couple of times, it was looking good. You pass it through at least 8 times on the widest setting, folding it in half between passes, at which point you start narrowing the gaps between the rollers a little.

Gradually, your sheet of pasta gets unmanageably long, which generally makes it a good time to chop it in half! Once it is thinned enough, you can attach the bit that slices your pasta into strands. I had to cut the strands once I had sliced about half of each bit, then you take them over your arm, and hang them on something to dry a little. I forgot, but whilst processing one half of the mixture, you should cover the other half with a damp cloth, to stop it drying out. Fortunately, I was quick enough that it still behaved.

Once you have sliced it all comes the difficult bit, unless you have planned things well enough to be able to cook the pasta immediately! If you leave it to dry too long, it will snap instead of bending, so you can't get it in the pan without breaking, so you have to wind it up into little nests (like it is sold in the shops dried), but not so soon that it all sticks together!

Anyway, my pasta made it through the winding process unscathed, and happily waited for the guests to arrive. When they had, I cooked diced chicken and bacon in a wok (rather larger than the frying pan, which helps at the end), then added cream, black & red pepper, and (for authentic Italian flavour!) nutmeg. Simmering this a little makes the cream thicken just a little. After boiling the pasta for 3 minutes, you drain it, and stir into the wok. Serving, however, is an annoying job best left to others.

I also made a rhubarb pie with the rich pastry I had made and frozen the other day: really quick, just remember to add a little sugar to the rhubarb when you simmer it! The sweetened pastry really helps with the tartness too. I finally remembered to brush the top of the pie with a little beaten egg, so it was lovely and golden on top. Best enjoyed with custard. :-)

Tonight I have made a chilli, which we can reheat quickly whenever we get back in. Now there is real convenience food! However, I may have made it mostly out of fire, due to forgetting that Scotch Bonnet chillis are pretty hot. I much prefer the flavour of Bird's Eyes, so I don't use them often. Eating it may be a painful experience, though OH will probably approve.

First flowers of the new year

I love snowdrops, and I was very lucky that the previous owner of this house did too! However, this lovely bunch was in the park at the end of our road.



I was quite surprised to find that some of them are doubles! Extra frilly flowers.



Of course, Crocuses are also lovely things.



But Snowdrops are my favourite. :-)

Trees, upright and horizontal (with fungus)

Trees are impressive things, and this one is no exception.



Ok, my title wasn't quite right, as this is actually a stump, but it did used to be a tree. Impressively frilly fungus, I thought.



And here is a proper horizontal ex-tree, doing its part for the cycle of life, or whatever.



These bracket fungi look almost like pieces of agate, with all those strata.



I wanted to end on a more positive note (for the trees, anyway), so here is a very badly taken photo of a snowdrop, which accidentally turned out as a photo I quite like. I know, it is all at a funny angle, and my OH did try to explain the process of doing this correctly, but I still like it :-)

More photos from Roundhay park

The "Castle" in all it's glory, overlooking part of Waterloo lake.



Waterloo lake (it is actually a reservoir, completed in 1815, and named commemoratively for the battle earlier that year).



A different swan to the one in the above photo, which refused to come close enough for a good shot of it.



Barran's Fountain, very sadly not containing water, probably due to "health and safety"! A little silly due to the large lakes full of water you shouldn't really drink, but then I do see that putting it at waist height in a kind of bowl probably makes it more tempting to some people. Not having ducks in it may also change things!

I built a cold frame!

As it came in a kit, that is not massively impressive, but at any rate, when it was delivered this morning I finished clearing a patch for it to go on, and have just finished building it. It is outside our living room window, at the front of our house, as it is South facing.

Clearing the patch involved digging up a great many Cyclamen! I wanted to keep as many as possible, as they are beautiful plants, but this was pretty time consuming as there were rather a lot of "babies", tiny single-leaf plants that I doubt would survive being stored dry for a while like the larger bulbs.

I'm hesitant to put plants out in the frame tonight (thereby freeing up a little windowsill), as I'm not sure if it would still reach freezing inside, given how incredibly cold the last few nights have been. I'm going to place a bowl of water inside tonight, and so long as I remember to look at it before the sun has been on the frame for long, I can check for ice.

In a little while, I will be sorting out containers to sow Calabrese and Carrots. All my Cauliflower seeds (which I planted one week ago) have germinated, and I have lovely strong looking seedlings. Which is more than can be said for the onions! Never mind, it is all a learning curve. :-)

I'm exhausted!

I've done my first ever bit of motorway driving today, in a round trip of 140 miles! Given that I have driven my OH's company car a handful of times so far, and that it is so totally different from what I learned to drive in, it was quite a big deal for me. However, it was all ok, and the friend that accompanied me on the whole trip (OH was there for half, as I dropped him off at Manchester airport) said I was noticeably more relaxed towards the end of the drive.

My husband is gone until Thursday now, so I am torn between visiting relatives and getting something done on the house to surprise him with.

Anyway, before I rush off to make an apple crumble to take to a friend's house, I shall post a couple of pictures from my walk at Roundhay park. There were three trees providing some wonderful winter colour, which was particularly striking against the gorgeous deep blue sky:



So I had a go at being artistic, and was quite pleased with this, given that it was taken with my arms stretched as far above me as possible!



More pics tomorrow, I am sure :-)

I went for a walk yesterday, and I'd love to post lots of photos, but I don't think I should post all 111! I may have gone a little over the top, but there is nothing more frustrating than thinking you have taken a lovely photo, getting home, and realising it is a little too blurred, when taking a second shot would have possibly solved that. If you can't get it right in 2 tries, it is obviously the camera's fault! ;-)

This is the fountain in the upper lake at Roundhay Park. In the beautiful bright sunlight, quite a good rainbow was appearing in the spray from time to time.



These gulls really amused me, sitting in a row on the posts. Every now and then, one would come over and displace another, silly things! On a less busy day, you could go there with a few people, each pick a group of posts to watch, and play connect four!



Tomorrow I am taking my OH to Manchester airport (which will be pretty scary, given my negligible driving experience), and he is off to Germany until Thursday. He's taking the camera with him, so over the next few days, I'll post some of my other pics from Friday.

Pancakes

Rather than have to ask my OH every single time I make pancakes, I thought I'd note down his recipe for batter. I have to say, we have experimented with this greatly, and this is definately our favourite permutation on the theme of milk, eggs and flour:

5oz plain flour
1 egg
1/2 pint full milk

If you are not using a blender, it is a little easier to use 4oz flour, apparently. Can't say I've tried, I made my first batch this morning, because we now have a blender to do it in ;-)

Its not that I'm lazy, but why would you do all that tedious mixing 'till the lumps are gone, when you can delegate it to someone else?! :-D

I may have been a little overenthusiastic, as I made 4 times the amount described. Quite handily though, you can put quite a bit of the mixture back into the milk bottle, and it keeps for a few days. Very helpful if you fancy having pancakes for breakfast a few days in a row. Still, I may have to get a few people to visit to use up this batch!

Oh no, I'll have to have another one later to take a photo of! How dreadfull... ;-)

Ready-made sandwich

I didn't set out to make this, but I set the breadmaker off on the wrong program, and was worried about it not having a long enough rising time for the fresh yeast I had decided to use (smells lovely, but more expensive and a lot shorter shelf life than the dried stuff). I don't actually appear to own a bread tin, so decided to make something I used to do occasionally with my mum.

The dough recipe doesn't really matter here, though the quantity was based on 400g flour. I took the dough after its first rise, beat it up a bit, and separated it into two halves, spreading one out onto a lightly floured baking tray (7" x 9" ish). I fried 5 rashers of bacon, and spread this and some slices of cheese out onto the dough, and brushed water onto the dough all around the edge. Take the other half of the dough, and spread it over the top, pressing down on the edges to seal it.

Allow it to rise in a nice warm place for another half an hour or so, brush the top with beaten egg (in my case, a spare yolk from previous escapades, mixed with a little milk to loosen it, either will give the desired nice glazed top) then bake at about 200°C for 15 minutes.

When you take nice wide slices of it, you get lovely instant sandwiches. This can be done with all kinds of ingredients inside.

Chocolate Pye

Stolen from the programme "Two Fat Ladies" (Clarissa):

175g ground almonds,
1 egg white,
50g caster sugar,
225g plain chocolate,
300ml double/whipping cream.

Flaked almonds and yellow rose petals to decorate, though I had neither of these.

Mix the ground almonds, egg white, and sugar into a paste, knead into a ball, and roll out on a floured surface.

Line a flan tin with the dough, and place foil or baking paper within this, before baking for 18-20 minutes at 170°C.

Melt the chocolate in a Bain Marie, then stir in the cream (which must be at room temperature, in order to avoid re-solidifying the chocolate). Whisk lightly.

DRINK IT! DRINK IT NOW!!!

Ok, best not do that, but oh my, it was lovely and warm, not so cloying as pure melted chocolate, and just about the right level of runny to just down it... Fortunately, I managed to restrain myself, and moved onto the last steps: Pour into the crust, and chill after decorating.

I am currently enduring the torturous wait with it in the fridge. I am pleased to say that having a slab of granite cuts this painful wait to about half though ;-)

Please excuse the slightly shoddy photograph, I was having difficulty with the flash making the chocolate look red (?), and no flash making everything blurry and black... It is not the camera's fault, I am just incompetent.

Insert interesting title here

Ok, I admit, I am only posting so as not to break my unprecedented string of daily blogging ;-)

I've been into university today, which accounts for me not having had the time or energy to do anything of note, and all cooking and baking has been postponed until tomorrow.

I picked up a mini paper trimmer at Poundland, and now I have the technology, I may cut some squares of card and have a go at ATCs, as demonstrated by Allotment Lady and Mrs Nesbitt (I'll turn them into links some time).

Hooray, found the camera!

Embarrasingly, it was buried under a pile of junk that had accumulated on the computer desk. My OH had to excavate this morning in order to make space for his printer. One day, when our house is spottless and tidy, I will show some "before and after" photos...

Not done anything exciting to photo today though, as I've mostly been cleaning windows! Previously, I could easily have photographed the windows, but now they're actually transparent ;-p

I've broken my first glass since we had the worktops put in. We had a couple of people telling us that stone worktops were a big mistake, as you can't hardly put anything down without breaking it. I can report that that is untrue, and any un-padded surface would have cause that glass to break, given how I dropped it...

Anyway, here is a photo taken today, of one Coriander seedling. I guess it has two separately germinating bits in one seed.

My attempt at growing veg

It has been my plan for quite some time that, once we knew we would live in the same house for some time, I would attempt to grow some vegetables. I did a practice run last year, by randomly sowing some seeds from Pomodorino tomatoes (which grew fantastically), and getting hold of a few strawberries.

I started the tomatoes off a bit late unfortunately, but it was still worth doing for the experience. So this year, I'm reasonably organised, except for not having any space prepared in the garden!

However, if most things can be started off in pots (and indeed some things left in them permanently), then I've a little longer before that becomes a problem.

So far I have sowed seeds for two types of onion (Ailsa Craig and Brunswick), some Coriander, and Delphiniums.

Ok, so the last ones aren't veg, but my intention is not to turn the whole garden into a veg plot. Geoff Hamilton wrote a lovely book about growing decorative and edible plants in mixed patches, stopping some of the problems cause by growing mono-cultures. Plus it can look prettier than straight rows of isolated veg.

My first few seedlings aren't looking overly healthy, so I bought some fine compost especially for the job, and will see what I can do with that. It looks like March is the month when it all gets hectic - lots of the seeds I have state that as their first month for planting.

Still not found the camera, so here is a picture of last year's tomato seedlings:

"Golden Syrup" Sponge

I've made steamed pudding with golden syrup underneath, but they have never been quite so enjoyable (especially according to my OH) as bought Heinz ones, so after making a rather nice Sticky Toffee Pudding (Nigella Lawson's), I adapted this recipe to try to make something more like the Heinz pudding.

The problem with the steamed pudding is that, during cooking, the golden syrup gets absorbed almost entirely by the cake, whereas the sticky toffee pudding and the Heinz one have a nice sauce underneath them. Mine gained the approval of my OH, so it must be good!

Cake:
100g caster sugar,
175g self-raising flour,
125ml full-fat milk,
1 egg,
50g unsalted butter (melted),

Sauce:
145g Demerara sugar,
20g unsalted butter,
360ml boiling water.

Grease a dish large enough to contain 1.5 litres, and preheat oven to 180°C.

Combine the 100g caster sugar with the flour in a large bowl. Mix the milk, egg, and melted butter separately, and then pour this mixture over the sugar and flour, stirring with a wooden spoon. Scrape this into the prepared dish.

Sprinkle over the Demerara sugar and dot with the butter. Pour over the boiling water and place in the oven. Bake for 40-50 minutes, until the top of the pudding is springy and spongy.

Nice with vanilla ice-cream, cream, custard, or nothing!

Lemon Meringue Pie, Caramel Apple and Blackberry "Granny", and Scones

This is what happens when my OH and I are pretty much stuck in the house for a few days...

For Christmas, my OH gave me a Magimix food processor, which has certainly earned it's keep since then! I've never made pastry myself before, so had a go at the recipe in the processor book.

Here's some vague recipe-type things. I didn't do anything special to the scones, so I shan't bore you with details ;-)

Lemon Meringue Pie

I lined a 10" dish with rich shortcrust pastry, blind baked for 20 mins, and filled it with lemon curd (not the best recipe I've ever used, but it was pretty quick and easy):

2 lemons, squeezed,
2oz butter,
2 eggs,
8oz sugar.

Whisk eggs a little, then heat gently in a Bain Marie, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. I found that some little lumps off egg formed, which I had to sieve out, but possibly this wouldn't have happened if I had followed my instincts and melted the butter first! I may try this again some time, as it was by far the least messy method I've used.

This was then topped with a meringue: Whites of 3 eggs whisked until stiff, and 3oz sugar added. I baked this all at 140° for 40 mins. All very successful!

Caramel Apple & Blackberry Granny

This is my attempt at a rip-off of a dessert we found at a local pub-restaurant.

Line a dish with rich shortcrust pastry, and blind bake for 15 mins. Thinly slice cooking apple into this, throw in some blackberries, sprinkle with lemon juice, then top with crumble mix. I've no idea what the best recipe for this is, I'm still experimenting, so I won't bother going into details here...

Bake this at 170° for 30 minutes or so, and in the mean time, gently heat a little condensed milk, butter, milk, and a sprinkle of dark muscovado sugar together in a pan, stirring like crazy! I can't give specific measurements, as I just threw it together... This should make a caramel sauce, which you can pour over the top of the crumble.

Very nice with cream, though I think vanilla ice-cream would probably go pretty well :-)

Must blog more often!

Fortunately, I didn't make a "New Year's Resolution" to blog every day, else I would have failed miserably already. My OH and I did resolve to finish the house this year, and I am attempting to grow various veg. I believe I also said I would get my health sorted out, and get back into my uni work, but that is all pretty long-term stuff, so I can't really report on progress with that easily!

My feeble excuse regarding the irregularity of my posts are that we've misplaced the camera, and I do like to include a picture every time. Still, I have a fair few older things, so could just show them.

Anyway, the house is slowly coming together, though we have done virtually nothing since just before Christmas, as all the pressure of making it good enough for visitors is now gone. My veg growing is coming along ok, I have a few onion and corriander seedlings, and given that that is all I have sown so far, that is not too bad! I have a small issue with prepared space in the garden, which is that there is none! Ah well, my theory is that I can't fail to learn something from this, even if it is only regarding the care of the seedlings...

I was managing to get into uni once a week (as I had planned for the next couple of months), until this week, when I unfortunately have flu. I'd consider that to be a good enough excuse though...

Made a lemon meringue pie yesterday, include the pastry (which I have always cheated with previously), as it was the only thing my OH (also stricken by flu) wanted to eat. Today I may be making something with a bit more of the pastry, most probably involving Rhubarb. Hooray for the Rhubarb Triangle, which is almost on my doorstep :-)

Here is an image mercilessly stolen from the website of a local producer of Rhubarb (it is harvested by candlelight!):

I've been "tagged"

Mrs Nesbitt has sent me instructions to write 6 weird things about me, so here they are:

1. I used to have perfect pitch (note the rather sad case of that being in the past, though if I were to start playing music again, maybe it would return? I will find out once our house is finished, and my piano comes to live with us).

2. I am not really left handed. Or right handed. I have a theory that I am neither, which would probably explain why I can't catch ;-) However, not only am I ambidextrous, I am also apparently "cross-lateral", which means that where usually your right hand side would be controlled by the left side of your brain (and vice-versa), mine is the other way round. That has yet to be confirmed medically, e.g. by brain scan ;-p

3. I am evidently a weird shape, so it is very rare that I find trousers & bras that fit. I hated shopping to start with, this is not something I need! As a result, I mostly wear combats and men's t-shirts. This has the side effect of not many people knowing what shape I am...

4. Despite not actually wearing makeup (except for when others make me, such as my wedding day), I am quite particular about having nice looked-after nails. This is probably the girliest thing about me!

5. I love living in a building site. It is so nice to have areas of your house you are allowed to be destructive to, if you are in such a mood, or areas you can be creative with. This feeling is unfortunately not shared by my OH, so this is now a guilty pleasure :-(

6. I used to work out the square roots of numbers whilst washing my hair. To be fair to me, it did take me about 3/4 hour until I had it chopped off short, figured out how to manage it like that, then learned to cope with it better as it grew back. Oh, I probably should have put that my hair is about 3'6", apparently that is quite weird.

Well, that was surprisingly difficult really.

Hmm, don't really know of any blogs that have not just had this already, so my tags are indefinitely pending...

Incidentally, this is my favourite photo of me from our wedding: (my hair grew quite a bit since then)