First day of sun screen

Amazingly enough I had to use some sun screen today while out rotovating the garden.

I was doing my best Barbara Good impersonation today - or rather Tom because he got to play with all the good toys.  But my garden is now fully rotovated ready for planting.  And picked clean by the chickens, I had a full complement in tow around the garden but hopefully as I ploughed through several ant nests and they got all excited picking them clean that should mean less to worry about later.

 

In the background you can just see my new bit of fencing.  

This is for my Kindle garden.  

Yes that's right, I have devoted a part of my garden to the hedonistic pleasures of my Kindle.

I intend to grow beans and peas along the mesh fencing and create a private space where I can relax in the shade of the apple trees in summer to read my Kindle, hopefully out of sight of the neighbours and therefore unlikely to be disturbed.

Vegetable cakes - Chocolate Beetroot Brownie takes on Green Tomato Cake

Carrot cake is of course a given, but this year with my domestic goddess cap pulled firmly down on my forehead I am experimenting with other exciting sweet veggie cake options.

In the blue corner, the defending title holder, - Chocolate Beetroot Brownie, and the new contender for the title, in the red corner - Green Tomato Cake.

Chocolate Beetroot Brownie

Preheat the oven to 180°C, and in an oven dish place 250g of quality cooking chocolate, I use a mix of milk and dark patissiere chocolate, and 250g of unsalted diced butter.  Put the dish in the oven to melt the chocolate and butter rather than wasting energy using a double boiler on the hob.


Whisk together 3 eggs and 250g of sugar, add a teaspoon of vanilla extract then the melted gooey chocolate and stir together.

Add 300g of cooked beetroots after whizzing them into a puree in a food processor - you could grate them but it depends on how keen you are on pink fingers for days afterwards.

Into the mixture sift 100g of self raising flour, a pinch of salt and 25g of cocoa powder, fold a few times but don't over work as this can make your brownies a bit tough.

Then bake for 20 minutes, checking with a skewer before taking out of the oven (insert a skewer and it should come out clean without chocolatey goo on it when the cake is cooked).

Leave in the tin to cool fully before turning out onto a wire rack.

TOP TIP - leave the chocolatey mess lying around and little fingers come and clean it for you.

Green Tomato Cake

In a large mixing bowl beat together until smooth:

2 1/4 cups of sugar

1 cup veg oil

3 eggs

2 teaspoons of vanilla

Into the mixture sift:

3 cups of plain flour
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg (optional - I detest it so I don't use it but it was part of the original recipe)

Beat the mixture together creating a stiff cake dough.

Add:

1 cup of pecans or walnuts (I actually used almonds because the walnuts are not ready for picking yet)
1 cup raisins
2 1/2 cups of chopped green tomatoes

Pour the mixture into a greased cake tin - springform if you have one.

Sprinkle with a couple of tablespoons of dessicated coconut, and bake at 180°C for 1 hour.

Righto - off to tend to my green tomato and ham soup - recipe to follow......

Harvest time

Today is a deluge, but yesterday was glorious with a capital 'G'.


So we got to digging - first some carrots...






.... then some beetroots....

..then some onions...




....then some potatoes.....

...then some kohl rabit (bored of digging now so hunting for above ground harvests)...

... found some more beans drying out nicely, and the last few patty pan squashes....

...and for the grand finale - the grape harvest!

With a helping hand from Ferguson

Today it is lovely and sunny, and rather warm for an autumnal day, which goes some way to making up for the fact that it has dropped below freezing for the last three nights, in fact last night it got down to -5°c.

Meaning of course that things are dying off in the garden, first to go were all the pumpkin plants, all those thick stalks full of water have no chance when it  keeps freezing, consequently no champion sized pumpkins this year, but a plentiful crop nonetheless, now with their backsides drying in the sun before heading underground for winter storage.

The next thing to go were all the tomato plants outside.  Those in the greenhouse are all doing fine, although I am doubtful that they will all go red in there before the heavy frosts start.

And some things are remarkably resilient, have reseeded themselves and are going rather well already - radishes of course.

Took a third cut of my cut and come again broccoli heads today as well, and here are half of them boiled up ready to make a broccoli quiche slice for lunch.

Line a tin with some flan pastry, then add in the cooked florets of broccoli.

Make a basic quiche mix, a good way of using up surplus eggs, I use 5 or 6 eggs, 250ml of cream, 1/2 teaspoon salt, lots of black pepper, a tablespoon of dried herbs usually parsley and 1/2 teaspoon of paprika.  I know that using cream does not make for a healthy quiche, but it does taste lots better.

Add the broccoli - if I had any spare bits of sandwich ham I would have added this too, but as the fridge is bare, veggie slice only on the menu.

Top with some slices of ripe tomato, then bake in the oven for 35 minutes at 180°C.

Serve hot or cold with salad for a tasty quick lunch.

And just to prove how hard my inner nerd worked - here is my wardrobe all aired, refolded, neatened, straightened and sorted.

Up to my neck in poo

or manure if you prefer.

Having got umpteen little jobs out of the way on Monday, and finally got all my accounts sorted, filed, acknowledged and signed off to keep the tax man happy for another year I can put all the pretty colour coordinated folders away, take off my office work head and get back to being a scatterbrained hippy in the garden.

Hurrah!

So - new strawberry plot to be dug, old plot to be dug over and big piles of stinking poo to move around.

Here is the existing edge of the strawberry plot.

Here is the new bit dug over.

Here is the new bit planted with baby runner plants.

All edged with the local building blocks that our house is also constructed from.

And even better - Ferguson caught his first BIG mouse.

YAY!!!


Much more fun than calculating balance sheets.

Getting plastered and drying beans

No that's not a reference to our intake over the weekend but the fact that Thea's bedroom ceiling is getting insulated and plastered ready for the winter.

Brendan is doing the standing on the ladder with the fiddly trowel part and I am doing the wipe the bits of wet plaster off everything and clean up all the plaster dust, wash everything down and try to tidy it up part.

A fair division of labour.

That just leaves the hall above the stairs to be plastered now.

Inbetween times I managed to get some lovely macro shots done on Saturday so some time to upload and sort those out needs to be found this week.

Today, just before the weather broke for a storm I managed to get half of my borlotti bean harvest in.

I grow french stringless beans every year until they get too numerous to pick and then I leave them on the plants to form haricot beans that I can dry and use over winter, but I also grow a specific crop of borlottis.

I much prefer these to any others, they are a fantastically hardy plant that has a prolific harvest and seems happy in any old soil.

Plus they look really pretty too.

I find that the best way to conserve them for the winter is to store them as dried beans, and the best method as far as I am concerned is to let them dry out on the plant itself.

Just pull the plant up when it has died back and all the pods are dry and you can hear the beans rattling around inside.

Pick them, spread them out in the sun for a couple of hours after picking then store in an air tight kilner jar or similar.

I wash the jars thoroughly then to make sure they are bone dry and bacteria free I stick them in the oven to dry for 20 minutes (alongside a cauliflower cheese dish this time), then put the lids on loosely and leave to cool.  Don't try to put the beans into a hot jar they will sizzle and smoke and burn.

To make sure that your beans will stay nice and healthy all through the winter, first leave them outside on a tray to dry in the sun for a couple of hours as mentioned above - this drys and hardens the skins and lets all the little bugs that may have been in the pod or on the plant get far away.  Then ensure you only try to dry and keep healthy beans, any that have discolouration or feel squishy or damp should not be kept in a jar over winter - they will pollute all the other beans and ruin your harvest.

Here is my little helper - making sure any beans that I reject get a good scoffing and don't go to waste.

Just behind her you can see the first lot of pumpkins almost ready for picking.

Right back to cleaning Thea's florr before she gets home and realises what a huge mess we have made in  her bedroom.

The best laid plans....and sushi rice

Today's plan was to unpack those last few items from my hand luggage and make some sense of the photos that I took whilst in the UK with a view to getting them loaded onto flickr in this month's allowance.

Ha!

That's all I have to say.


So far I have been swamped catching up with all the letters and paperwork outstanding from the last week.

I am still trying to respond to all of my emails, and I still owe my friend a long detailed letter that I started at the airport, ran on for 14 pages and now has dribbled out of content but has not been finished if you follow me.  It currently sounds like the unfinished symphony in D minor - where D stands for depressed - can't send it in that shape she'll be on the next plane out under the impression that I am about to leak claret all over the bath.

But - I have weeded out my flower beds and collected up the last of the poppy and sweet william seeds ready for next year, just waiting for the asters to finish flowering and I'll have a good collection of flower seeds ready.  Can you say "procrastination"?

I also went and 'communed' with my studio, having not dared to be in there for the last couple of days for fear that I would just lock myself in there and not come out.  My  little brain cells are zinging about all over the place putting together all my existing fabrics with the car boot delights winging their way by post to me now.

This is how I feel today .......

One of things that I did do in the UK (mainly thanks to another friend who steered me (literally after I got confused wandering around the shopping centre) in the right direction) was to eat Sushi.

I heart Sushi

And I can't make it to save my life.

I have bought the seaweed sheets, I have found the right sushi recipe, I have the right ingredients, but it just does not taste the same.

Thank you M&S for bringing sushi back into my life.

Sushi ~ cold boiled rice moistened with rice vinegar, usually shaped into bite-size pieces and topped with raw seafood (nigiri-zushi) or formed into a long seaweed-wrapped roll, often around strips of vegetable or raw fish, and sliced into bite-size pieces (maki-zushi).
Dictionary.com

To make sushi rice, use only short grained rice, washed and rinsed well then soaked for 30 minutes before cooking.

Cook in just enough water to cover the rice for 20 minutes in a pan with a lid, first bring the water to a boil then leave on a low heat, finally turn off the heat and leave the rice to steam for a further 15 minutes.

My handy hint :  if you are worried about how much water to use to cook rice so that you don't end up with soggy rice soup, add slightly more water, cook for 15 minutes then drain the rice.

Let the hot rice water drain into the cooking pot, leaving the rice in the colander place it over the pan making sure that the base of the colander and therefore the rice are no longer immersed in the water then cover with the lid - this allows the rice to continue cooking in the steam.  

Leave over the low heat for the final 5 minutes, then leave to continue steaming for the last 15 mintues.

The sushi vinegar is made from 1/3 of a cup of rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons of fine sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt.  Heat these together until the sugar dissolves then leave to cool.  With a wooden spatula stir the sushi vinegar through the hot rice, being careful not to mush the rice up with the flat side of the spatula.

Well all this boring paperwork is giving me an appetite, looks like leftover Thai curry from the freezer tonight, bulked out with yet more green beans from the garden and a few more patty pan squashes - from having none last year I am now overrun with the blasted things.

Garden collage

These are the projects I have tackled today to try to tame the garden: picking green beans, harvesting broccoli and cauli for the freezer, harvesting red cabbage for pickling, picking and cooking patty pan squashes, picking the first pick of the pumpkins for winter storage, taming the wilderness that is the greenhouse, picking some of the first crop of red onions to allow them to dry for winter storage, snapping all the flower heads off the carrots, picking the overgrown savoy cabbages for the rabbits to scoff.

And yes you are right - I am doing my gardening with a machete - it is a wilderness out there.

Feeling a bit at sixes and sevens

Knowing that this afternoon will be spent in lakeside frolics, I decided against going to the car boot this morning, and I feel at a very very loose end.

Firstly I had a wander around the garden snipping random leaves from the tomatoes, then I wandered around with the grapevine cuttings trying to decide where to plant them to start my very mini vineyard, then I picked some more french beans and courgettes, then I packed the picnic hamper for this afternoon, then I took some photos of the globe aritchokes that I have not picked to eat, then I did a bit of weeding through the flower garden, then I picked some thyme to hang out to dry, then I wove the dried grasses through the fencing to create another shady spot for the chickens to lounge around in, and now I can't decide what to do to pass the time, and it is only 9.30 am.

I think I may go and clean out the overflowing bathroom cabinet to create some sort of order in there (and to prevent being brained by tubes of toothpaste everytime you open the doors).

hmmmmm ........

....... it is an exciting life I lead.

Clean plates all round.

Thanks to Celebrity Masterchef (and Christine Hamilton's recipe idea) tonight's dinner was a doddle!

With all those lovely savoy cabbages now ready in the garden, I curbed my first inclination which was to chop them all up and stick them in the freezer, and decided that they would be the basis for dinner this evening, well earned after a very busy day gardening, three wheelbarrows of weeds pulled up and the grass mowed.


First off the chicken legs went into the oven, seasoned then a sprinkle of paprika and garlic on the skins to make a tasty coating.

Then "Chestnut-y Bacon-y Cabbage-y Mess".

In a large pan (that has a lid), start by frying a couple of slices of bacon or pancetta chopped into small pieces in some herby olive oil, I used thyme flavoured oil as I thought this would best marry with the roast chicken.

Then add about 10 cooked chestnuts chopped into small pieces. I am using chestnuts from last year, that were cooked in hot water just long enough to be able to remove their skins then frozen whole.

Finally add a head of savoy cabbage cut into strips, cook everything together for about 10 minutes until the cabbage is soft, at this point I added a little bit of water, seasoned, added some dried parsley then covered the pan for the cooking time.


As you can see - clean plates all round and another very simple recipe to add to my collection.