Life of Bint

Urban Foraging and Firelighters.

2011-11-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

*blows dust off blog*

Hello, I am safe and sound but time gets away with me and I forget to post in here. 'Must try harder' was a true appreciation of my talents on my school reports ;)

Well anyway, yesterday we went out for a quick walk around our local area looking for pinecones to turn into useful things.

Here are some pictures from the trip :)

We're lucky to have an open fireplace to help supplement our heating over the winter. This year we have a lot of chopped kindling type wood from pallets and other wood we've collected from freecycle, plus some very large logs from our neighbour's beech trees that were chopped down this year. Last year we used some pinecones as firelighters along with my wax tart* leftovers and I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two this year. Plus anything that keeps my 4yr old interested for an hour is a bonus ;)

Wax tarts are like a cross between candles and oil burners. You can buy them from many supplers, I buy mine from http://candlewick-greens.com/index.html for two reasons, 1)they're superior to any other brand I've tried, 2) the woman who runs it is very lovely.

So take 2 bags of pinecones, a tub of leftover wax from tart burning, a saucepan of hot water, a glass bowl and some greaseproof paper.

Heat the water in the saucepan, place the glass bowl over the water, break up the wax and allow to melt gently.

Take your pinecones and carefully dip them into the wax, hold them over the liquid wax and shake off the drips then leave to dry on a sheet of greaseproof paper.

Store in a bucket or trug next to the fire ready for winter.

Use.

The Cake is a Pie

2011-07-03T03:24:00.000-07:00

Quick Photo Blog for Toby's birthday last week. It was a quiet event due to everyone being ill the whole week before, but he seemed to enjoy himself nonetheless. I can't believe my little man is now 2, time goes so very quickly. Anyhoo...photos!

Kawaii Kukki

2011-06-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

It's my wonderhubby's birthday tomorrow and I've been trapped in the house all week with two poorly sproglets and no cake ingredients. After staring blankly at the cupboards for half an hour I realised I had enough ingredients to make a batch of cookies...so....

Then some plain old sugar icing with some gel colouring

The recipe I used is from a forum I frequent, it is named as 'Phoebe's Fabulous Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies' which I think is a Friend's reference. *shrugs* The cookies are fabulous though. Some cocoa powder and peanut butter stirred in gives a nice variation too. Anyhoo recipe tiem

Phoebe's Fabulous Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies

12 tablespoons (175g) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup (160g) firmly packed light brown sugar
2/3 cup (130g) white sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups (170g) rolled oats
1 1/4 cup (160g) plain flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups (200g) raisins

Preheat oven to 375F/190C/Gas Mark 5.

Cream butter and sugars together until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla extract; beat until well combined.

In a separate bowl combine oats, flour, soda, baking powder and salt. Mix into butter mixture until just combined. Stir in raisins.

Drop the dough by heaped tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets, leaving a 2" gap between each mound.

Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden brown. Cool on sheet for at least a minute before transferring to a rack.

For the giant cookie, I used a pizza baking tray with some greaseproof paper on top and just threw the whole lot on top and swuished it so it left about an inch gap all round. This gave it a bit of room to spread out.

Baked it for 25 minutes at 190 and then left to cool completely before icing :)

Quick catch up

2011-06-02T12:13:00.001-07:00

Spent a quick half hour tidying some bits in the veg patch this evening and thought I'd share some progress pics. The bits in the greenhouse are slow going but everything else is going great guns.

Hops

Olive

Blueberry

Sweetcorn

Beans

Whitecurrants

Redcurrant

Apples

Garlic

Part of tomorrow's dinner :)

- Mobile post

It's just like riding a bike...

2011-05-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is Dawn, I'm 33yrs old and I have never ridden a bicycle.

Not knowing how to ride a bike is something that has partly defined me for the whole of my life. It's just one of those things that crops up repeatedly and I have to explain yet again that no I don't know how to ride, I never learnt as a child, blah, blah, blah. I am very bad at doing things that I'm not very good at, I avoid situations that embarrass me and do my best to ignore things that make me feel silly.

Anyway, I saw this course advertised via twitter this week - http://www.leics.gov.uk/connect2_events and I emailed to be put on the waiting list.

In the meantime I'm going to try and teach myself with the aid of the internet, a husband who promises not to laugh too much and this

It needs a new brake cable and a some TLC but it's in pretty good nick for an old bike.

Wish me luck!

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me

2011-05-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

I'm going out to eat worms!

Blugh! Not really, but I have got a wormery. The wormery bin itself was gifted on freecycle. I had a quick google and saw that one of my favourite companies www.wigglywigglers.co.uk still sold the rescue kits for this type of wormery even though the unit itself was discontinued.

That made my life a whole load easier ;)

So here's the photo by photo breakdown of putting a wormery bin together using a rescue kit.

Soak bedding block in some water for 20 mins.

In the meantime, pop your drainage chips in the bottom of the bin

Place the woven liner on top, just like a binbag

Grab some food waste for their first meal

Make sure your helpers are watching

Make sure your liner is spread out at the bottom of the bin

and add the bedding block which should now look a bit like this

Open up your package of worms

Allow small person to stroke them and say hello

Make a hollow in your bedding layer and tip the worms in

Chuck your food waste on top, about a 3 inch layer

Fold over the top of the liner and tie off

Keep it like this for a week to keep the worms secure while they make a home for themselves. In a week I'll open it up, feed them again and pop a moisture mat on top. The liner can then be kept untied and the worms should live happily in the bin.

I'll take more photos and update in a week :)

Hide and Go Seek

2011-04-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

We've recently started Geocaching after a good friend recommended it as a fun thing to do with the sproglets. The sproglets love 'treasure hunting' and we're going to start working further out from home and planning geocaching trips whilst travelling to other places.

There's a good starter's guide here - http://www.geocaching.com/about/default.aspx . The 'caching community is incredibly friendly and helpful. If you'd like to add me as a friend on geocaching.com I'm Purplebint there too.

I currently use the app on my Iphone but I'm starting to look at dedicated GPS units as battery usage can be an issue.

We spent this morning geocaching in Bradgate Park. We're very lucky to live so close to such a beautiful place and it's been one of my favourite places since childhood.

Here's some photos from our trip out this morning. We planned to find two caches that were relatively close to each other, however there was a herd of deer enjoying the shade in the copse that contained one of the caches so we left them to it and will return another day!

Lazy Photo Update

2011-04-20T01:26:00.000-07:00

It's slow going with garden work at the moment. Two very active sproglets and Steve's new job means it's less of a priority than it should be. We're planning a good lot of work over the easter holidays so look forward to a more intensive update then.

For now, here's some garden photos from yesterday :)

Charidee

2011-03-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

A little bit of link spam here ;)

I'm currently doing the C25k programme and enjoying it immensely! I'm about to start week 3 and although it's causing me a bit of pain I'm feeling fitter and my stamina is improving day by day.

My sister asked me to run the Race for Life with her and we've signed up to run the 5km on July 10th this year at Leicester! Meep!

We're able to wear a dedication on our backs as we run and I'll be running for my friend Claire. Her bravery and honesty throughout her journey with cancer inspires me, breaks my heart and makes me love her.

I'm trying to raise as much as I can for cancer research so other people facing this disease have access to as much viable treatments as possible to help cure or delay the progress of the illness.

Please sponsor me if you can (and gift aid it) each penny really does help and also has the added benefit of keeping me motivated on days when I would rather eat chips* than go out and train.

*disclaimer - I am not giving up chips completely ;)

Click the image below to go to my sponsor page

Also, my wonderful friend Sarah Bell has organised, collated, created and printed a recipe book. It's an amalgamation of recipes made by family and friends for her handfasting last year and all moneys raised from it's sale are going to SANDS.

It has a few of my recipes in including my basic bread recipe and the infamous Mead.

You can read more about it here - http://www.freewebs.com/sarahholdcroft/recipebook.htm

Buy it from here - http://www.folksy.com/items/1201253-Handfasting-Recipe-Book-in-aid-of-SANDS?shop=yes

Thanks everyone x

Off we go again

2011-03-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

Finally today a bit of sunshine and dry weather!

Greenhouse being repaired

Garlic growing nicely in it's bed.

Blueberry and Morello Cherry starting to shoot.

Toby enjoying the outdoors

Inside we have both of the lime trees starting to bloom again, hopefully they'll be a bit more successful this year. This weekend is set aside for seed sowing, leaf raking and generally tidy-up-ness.

Easy Lime Pickle

2011-03-03T06:47:00.000-08:00

Amended from a recipe at hungrymonster.com

Ingredients

12 unwaxed limes
75g coarse salt
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 tsbsp mustard seeds
2 tbsps chilli powder
1 tbsps turmeric
180ml vegetable oil

Method
1. Wash each lime thoroughly and cut lengthwise into 8 slim wedges
2. Place in a large bowl - sprinkle with the salt and set aside.
2. Put fenugreek and mustard into a skillet or heavy bottomed saucepan and dry-roast over medium heat about 1 to 2 minutes until they begin to pop.
3. Put into a mortar and grind to a fine powder with a pestle.
4. Add the chili and turmeric and mix well. Sprinkle the spice mixture over the limes and stir gently.
5. Pour the oil over the limes and cover with a dry cloth.

6. Leave the bowl in a sunny place for approx 2 weeks until the limes have softened. This can take a little longer in a colder climate.

7. Pack in jars, seal them, and store in a cool, dark place.

When life gives you lemons...

2011-02-11T05:29:00.001-08:00

preserve them!

My meyer lemon twig (I might promote it to tree status if it gets a bit more growth on it) supported 4 tiny little fruits while they ripened and I had a good think about the best way to get the most out of them.

It was a tough decision between lemon curd and preserved lemons. The preserved lemons won as I will get more extended use from such a small harvest, plus they'll go really well with some of my slow cooker recipes.

These are my little lemons compared to two that were bought from our local market a while ago. I'm using the large ones up too as they're a bit past their best.

I used this BBC Good Food recipe as a base - http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3555/preserved-lemons

I added some lime juice into the mix as I had some that needed using up and a mixture of table and rock salt to make up to the approximate quantity I needed.

I'm looking forward to being able to eat these!

Doing Up Hand Me Downs

2011-01-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

I realised I hadn't blogged at all this year and didn't want anyone thinking I was slacking off ;)

Here's a quick photo post showing the painting of Abi's hand me down toddler bed. Toby was starting to climb in and out of his cot and it was becoming unsafe to keep him in there. Abi's bed had been stored in the garage for over a year so out it came.

Stirring It Up

2010-11-21T03:12:00.000-08:00

Today we made Yule Puddings. I used a plum pudding recipe from Mrs Beetons Christmas Book and Abi helped.

Rich Boiled Christmas Pudding

200g plain flour
pinch of salt
1 x tsp ground ginger
1 x tsp mixed spice
1 x tsp grated nutmeg
50g chopped blanched almonds
400g soft light or dark brown sugar
250g shredded suet
250g sultanas
250g currants
250g raisins
200g mixed peel
175g 1 day old breadcrumbs
6 eggs
juice of 1 orange
80ml stout
4 x tbsp brandy
100-150ml milk
fat for greasing

Grease 4 x 600ml heatproof basins.

Sift together flour, salt and spices and add all other dry ingredients.

Beat together eggs with the stout, orange juice, brandy and 100ml of the milk.

Stir this into the dry ingredients until you get a soft dropping consistency, add more milk if required.

Fill the basins leaving 1 inch at the top for the puddings to expand. Cover with greased paper and tie securely with string.

To 'half-steam' get a large saucepan, place an old saucer or plate upside down and oplace the basin on top. Add water till halfway up the side of the basin. Cover the pan with a tight fitting lid and simmer gently for 6-7 hours.

Remove puddings and leave to cool completely. Cover with clean dry cloths, wrap in greaseproof paper and store in a cool place.

Basic Chutney Recipe with variations

2010-11-12T05:13:00.000-08:00

This is my base recipe that I tweak depending on what ingredients are in season.

2 tbsp olive oil
1lb roughly chopped onions
2 large red peppers, cored, seeded & roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 tsp ground allspice,
1 tsp ground ginger,
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp salt
2 lb ripe tomatoes, peeled & roughly chopped
1 lb sugar
300 ml vinegar (malt, white or red wine, or plain white – depending on taste, dietary restrictions)

Add all ingredients to heavy bottomed pan, cook on a medium heat at a lively simmer, stirring regularly, until the chutney is ready. You’ll know when it’s ready to go as you can drag a spoon through the mixture creating a channel that takes a while to fill back up.

Ladle into sterile warm jars. Cover and leave to cool. Label and store in a dark place for 6-8 weeks before use. The longer it has to mature, the nicer the chutney.

Once open keep refrigerated and use within a couple of weeks.

For chilli chutney I add a handful of chopped and deseeded chillies.
For very hot chilli chutney, I keep the seeds in ;)
For plum chutney, substitute stoned and peeled plums for the tomatoes.
For onion chutney, double the onions and halve the tomatoes.
For onion relish, triple the onions, leave out the tomatoes and use a blender to get a smoother consistency.
For apple chutney, replace the tomatoes with 3lbs of apples and add a handful of raisins.

Freecycle Hacking

2010-11-10T01:48:00.000-08:00

I am incredibly lucky to be part of a generous recycling community where I live. I'm a member of Freegle, Realcycle and Freecycle and anything we no longer have a use for is offered on the sites. I also put requests out for items such as baby food jars for my preserves, empty beer bottles for our mead etc.

Our house is filled with items from freecycle, our sofas, storage, dining table and chairs, filing cabinets, slide, swing set, garden swing seat, wardrobes, children's toys...the list goes on. If I see an advert for an item I like, I send a polite reply stating my contact information and when I would be able to collect. I also include a link to this blog in my email signature so people can see the items will be put to good use.

Although the majority of freecyclers are friendly individuals, there are also plenty out there who are rude, ignorant and pretty greedy. I have had some strange requests, and every advert posted brings it's own weird and wonderful characters.

One of the reasons we are so lucky on freecycle is that we're willing to take items that need a bit of fixing up, the play kitchen for Abi's christmas present last year for example.

This week, I managed to be gifted a Quinny Zap pushchair. It's perfect for me as it's small for the buses and playgroup corridors, lightweight, sturdy and it's purple ;). The only problem with it is one of the side catches doesn't quite lock but the pushchair is functional and safe.

The other issue is that although Abi walks pretty much everywhere, she gets tired on long walks and we use a buggy board so she can rest awhile. The old generic buggy board we used was rickety and liable to fall off when going over kerbs and our nice buggy board was a brand specific one for our Mutsy offroader buggy.

After a good luck at the underneath of the buggy, we thought that the Mutsy board might just be usable so we thought we'd try and give it a go. After trying it on for size, we realised that the only way to get it connected safely would be to turn one of the connectors upside down in order to keep the board level. So we flipped it over and drilled a hole in one side to enable the poles to lock into position upside down. This worked near perfectly but the board attachment clips were a little loose on the buggy. We needed something to help them grip slightly but still enable me to take them on and off quickly as I suffer with carpal tunnel and have problems with my grip.

We decided to try some sugru on them and it worked brilliantly. Sugru is silicone, but it's like playing with plasticine. You can mold it onto whatever shape you want, stick it to something, leave it to cure and voila. There are lots of great sugru hacks on their blog over at http://sugru.com/blog/ (Hack is the term the sugru makers use for their product, so anybody who wants to argue about the use of the word in my title should shush now ;) )

Here are some photos of the Buggy Sugru Hack

Squishy

The sugru has a little bit of give to it which adds to the grip as it connects to the buggy.

Tada. A buggy that is perfect for our family and one less item going to the tip.

Sloe Gin

2010-10-19T06:52:00.001-07:00

We finally found some sloes yesterday and have been busy today turning them into booze.

Picking sloes with an audience

3.5kg picked from one small area.

Washed, destalked and frozen overnight to split the skins. (I don't have the time to prick each one so I cheat)

Place 500g in the bottom of a clean 2 litre bottle. Add 200g sugar, white is normally used but we're trying soft brown in one) and approx 500ml of gin (some of ours have a little more in. We're also trying a 1/2 tsp of almond essence in some of the bottles.

Same as the blueberry vodka, shake every day for a week, every other day for a fortnight then once a week till December. Then strain off, bottle up and drink :)

Blueberry Vodka

2010-10-19T04:33:00.001-07:00

Quick recipe for blueberry infused vodka.

Send minion to collect blueberries

Wash and place in a kilner (or any other airtight) jar.

Cover with sugar

Add cheap vodka

Close the lid and give it a really good shake up.

This makes me want a snowglobe :) I must try and get one for Abi this year.

Tada

Not quite...I'm making this at the same time as sloe gin so will treat this the same. Shake it every day for a week, every other day for a fortnight, then once a week till beginning of December. Then I'll have a taste and see if it's ready to drain off.

The leftover blueberry mush will be used as the base for a dessert syrup.

- Mobile post

Foraging

2010-10-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

After a lot of walking and wandering and googling to try and find some sloes to make into gin, it became apparent that there really is no substitute for local knowledge.

Whilst picking away at the sloe trees that a friend had told us the location of, I was thinking over ideas to help other would be foragers.

I've started playing with the idea of a google map based system, where we can log areas that have forageable food, along with tips of how to access them.

It's only in the beginning stages of an idea, but this is the bit of harvesting we did this morning.

View Foraging in a larger map

What do we think? Any ideas

Purpley Prettiness

2010-08-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

After an unsuccessful attempt at dying polyester in my washing machine, I was on the lookout for a decent sized dye bath.

I put out a request for old large pans or stock pots on freecycle and crossed my fingers. Three timewasters later (I have no idea what drives people to offer items then ignore all contact) I received an offer from a lovely lady 10 minutes away. She said she had a very large pan that I was welcome to. Steve went off to go collect it and whilst she was sorting it out for me she found another couple of pans she thought I could use.

How fab are these?? I've got a batch cooking session planned tomorrow for the largest pan :)

So, take one crimson pink hooded cloak.

and some bras that never get worn due to their colour.

Some lovely violet iDye

Weigh your fabric to make sure it's not over 3lbs.

Open pack of dye and check the contents.

Add enough water to the pan to allow the fabric to move freely.

Take out your now wet fabric, put the heat on medium-high and chuck your colour packet in.

Stir until it's dissolved thoroughly.

Add the second packet of intensifier.

Due to the fabric mix of the bras, I chucked in a cup of salt.

Add fabric and stir thoroughly.

Heat fabric up till the water is at a steady simmer and maintain that heat for an hour whilst stirring regularly.

Drain water off and leave the fabric to cool.

Pop in the washing machine and run through a wash with some mild detergent.

Ta Da

I really love this dye, very simple to use with very little mess!

a quickr pickr post

Mini Bint's Kitchen

2010-08-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to show the restored play kitchen we created for Abi's 3rd birthday.

We picked up the original kitchen from freecycle. It was advertised as an old handmade wooden kitchen created by a grandfather for his now grown grandson. We spent just over £10 on paints and materials and it took about 4 evenings to get the work completed, mostly to allow for drying times and re-applications of coats.

Here's the flickr slideshow and photostream showing the work we did, and what Abi thought of the end result :)

Sweet and Sour Chutney

2010-07-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

This morning there was an advert from a lady on freecycle trying to get rid of her excess cherry plums. I couldn't resist and Steve nipped down there and came back with 4kg of green and 2kg of red plums :)

I dusted off my stockpot and decided to use up some cooking apples at the same time.

Apple and Green Plum Chutney

2kg Green Plums. Rinsed well with cold water.
200ml cider vinegar
4 medium cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped
3 small red chillies, chopped finely.
300g sugar.

Place (whole, with stones) into stock pot, add vinegar and let simmer for 20 minutes.

Using a slotted spoon, go through the mixture and remove the stones with a teaspoon. This does take 5-10 minutes, but it's infinitley easier than trying to destone fresh tiny little plums.

Lots and lots and lots of lovely stones.

Give the vinegary plum mixture a good stir.

Add the chopped apples, chillies and the sugar. Stir well and turn the heat to medium.

Cook at a quick boil, stirring regularly for at least an hour until the mixture is thick and gloopy. You should be able to pull a spoon through the mixture and leave a trail that takes a few moments to fill.

Jar up into sterile vinegar proof jars, label, cool and store in a dark place for 6-8 weeks to mature.

Nom with cheese.

Chillies and Citrus

2010-07-28T02:51:00.000-07:00

Chillies are my very favourite things to grow (and eat ;) )

My wall of chillies in the front room.

A large red chilli (this is a mutant batch that was cross pollenated with a bell pepper last year)

Funky Chillies, just starting to turn purple.

Aurora chillies (my namesake). I adore these.

Meyer lemons. I've got 7 large fruits, and one little ripening one. I think I'll turn them into curd

There are lots more chillies in the greenhouse, jalapenos, purple tigers and serranos. As well as my Poblanos in the kitchen. I'll add more photos when I get half a second to take some ;)

Om Nom Blogging

2010-07-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

To try and stop spamming all my friends with boring posts about my dinners and have a seperate place to collate my recipes, tips and tricks I've set up a new blog at http://omnom365.com/

It's very new and still need tweaking, so if you spot a typo or something out of place let me know so I can fix it :)

This will still be my main blog for gardening, harvesting, cooking and general bintery though :)

It's Redcurrant Jelly Time ;)

2010-07-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

Harvest Time :)

350g of whitecurrants

A whopping 3kg of redcurrants

Give them a good wash

Cook down for 10 minutes on a medium heat

Add same weight of sugar to berries

Boil for 8 minutes and then pour into muslins and hang over bowls.

Take a break while gravity does it's thing.

Lovely clear jelly liquid

Ladle into clean jars and lid up

Project 365

2010-06-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Taking a single photo every day. I think I can manage that :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/purplebint/sets/72157624270680080/

Wreck This Journal

2010-06-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

I absolutely love the idea behind this book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wreck-This-Journal-Keri-Smith/dp/039953346X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

Looking forward to playing with it more

Pay It Forward

2010-06-15T02:07:00.001-07:00

After reading Becky's blog - http://purplesparklecrafts.blogspot.com/ and Laa Laa's blog http://hookinwithlaalaa.blogspot.com/ this morning. I'm intrigued with the Pay It Forward scheme they're both setting up.

So much so, I'm going to do the same thing :)

The idea is that random acts of kindness are given without expecting anything in return. Just passing on the kindness, hoping that your recipients will do the same and forming a never-ending chain of kindness.

I promise to make and send a gift to the first 3 friends who comment on this post requesting to join in and promising to Pay it Forward to 3 other people etc..... I don't know what my gifts will be but I promise to send them within the next 365 days. What you then have to do in return is to promise to Pay it Forward by making the same announcement and promise on YOUR blog.

Strawbs, Sunflowers and a sneaky pea

2010-06-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

A quick photo catch up on the current state of growing in the garden.

Pots of lime basil and lemon balm on the kitchen windowsill.

Abi playing on the swing set we were gifted on freecycle.

The teeny limes growing on my lime trees

The wild strawberry plant that seems desperate to escape it's pot. So many many runners.

Potted on as many as I had pots for :)

The sunflower race is going strong, Steve currently in the lead. *plots ;)*

Some very sorry hops we've been gifted from freecycle, they should be fine with a bit of TLC.

A big pot of sweetpeas by the side door.

Some tumbling toms

More sweetpeas, cornflowers, a goji berry bush and a sleeping cat :)

My little shelving system of herbs and salad.

The herb bed is exploding with life. I've chopped the parsley right back today.

and now have a large bunch drying in my kitchen.

View of the whole patio

The peas, beans, rhubarb and some extra taters.

Back of the veg patch, with the strawberry bed, loganberries, blackberries and another goji berry bush.

Whitecurrants, cherry tree and taters.

View towards the greenhouse, more taters, elephant garlic and red onions.

Cauliflowers

Work in progress on the fruit cage

Potato flowers

Elephant garlic

Steve putting the fruit cage together.

Abi trying her first homegrown pea

More to come soon :)

Bento Baby

2010-05-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

I'm bento crazy. I love them, I love playing with food, I love eating things that aren't normally lunch food and I love all the cute paraphenalia that surrounds Bento.

I'm on a healthy eating kick at the moment and my daughter loves to copy what I do, so I've been making most of her lunch in bento-style too. Her being obsessed with My Neighbour Totoro also helped fuel the fascination as Mai has a bento lunch in the film.

I don't like fish, or sushi, or seaweed..but I like the format, so I've just been playing with the kinds of food we like. It's also a really useful way to use up leftovers, and to persuade little 3 year old girls to eat food they'd normally ignore ;)

Here are some of my recent lunches.

And one especially for Abi - she really likes fishfingers. This was a treat lunch for being such a good girl that morning.

New obsession alert

2010-05-08T00:47:00.001-07:00

Well, anyone who reads my blog can see it's often a bit of a photo dump. I love taking photos, and have progressed in the last two years from someone who takes them occasionally to taking random images most days.

Becoming a parent has made imortalising moments important to me, and the creation of this blog has made me want to share my gardening, cooking and other randomness with the world.

After some research into DSLR's, a discussion about how much we really can't afford one and my stubborn pouty face appearing it had been decided that it would be on the list for birthday/christmas/coming into some money soonish. I was discussing the merits of DSLR's with a good friend when she offered me an old SLR that she had bought at a boot sale and never got working. So I got hold of this little beauty.

A Zenit TTL - circa 1960-65.

The first roll of film was eaten due to a dodgy sprocket on the film feed when it came to removing it. The second roll of film suffered some exposure with the same dodgy sprocket when it came to putting the film in. Out of the first 48 images taken, 11 are ok. The mechanism is now sorted, and I think the film should be safe on loading/removal.

I think I'm in love with this camera. The heavy clunkiness of the camera itself is comforting and the slightly grainy viewfinder really forces you to look at your subject. I'd become a very lazy photographer, hardly using the viewfinder and just taking lots of images to get one or two usable ones. Due to not being able to get immediate access to the Zenit images I have to try and do the best I can straight away.

Thank you Em, I adore it. Steve thanks you too for saving us some money this year ;)

Baked Red Onion Bhaji

2010-04-22T03:57:00.000-07:00

Pics to follow :)

Makes 8 medium bhajis

Ingredients;

2½ Meds/450g Onions
45g Flour, White Self Raising
1 Tsp Cumin
1 Tsp Turmeric
1 tsp Dried Coriander Leaves
¼ Tsp/1g Chilli Powder
¼ Tsp Ginger
1 Tsp Olive Oil
1 Tbsp Tomato Puree

Slice onions and soften for 5 minutes in the olive oil.

Mix dry ingredients together inn a medium sized bowl, add the puree and stir together to make a stodgy batter.

Stir onions through the batter until mostly covered.

Line a baking tray with non stick greaseproof paper and place dollops of the mixture on. This recipe makes 8 large bhajis.

Bake at 200C/ Gas Mark 6 for 15-20 minutes until golden.

Per serving;

Calories (kcal)	46.6
Carbohydrate (g)	8.2
Protein (g)	1.5
Fat (g)	0.9
Fibre (g)	1.1
Alcohol (g)	0.0
Fruit & Veg	0.7

Nearly No Fat Icecream

2010-04-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

Today I've been mostly craving food, any food but the fattier the better. I decided to have a google and then a play in the kitchen and in under 2 hours I made nearly no fat 'icecream'.

Things you need

5 medium bananas - nice and ripe with no green showing but not too bruised.
100g of low fat yoghurt, mine is homemade.
A plate
An airtight tub
A freezer
A blender.

Slice the bananas and lay on the plate. Place in freezer for 1-2 hours. I have a heavenly quick freeze function that meant mine were ready to go in less than an hour.

Once bananas are frozen, place in blender and add 100g of low fat yoghurt.

Blend it until it's smooth. This can be slow going at the beginning, keep on in there and it will get easier as the banana breaks down.

After a couple of minutes it should be all smooth and delicious like this. At this point it is like soft scoop ice cream and is ready to go.

I placed (most of) mine in an airtight container and back in the freezer until later, it should firm up a bit more in the freezer and keep for a month or so. If it's given that long ;)

According to the calorie site I use, per 100g this pudding is

Calories (kcal)	109.1
Carbohydrate (g)	22.7
Protein (g)	2.2
Fat (g)	0.6
Fibre (g)	4.3
Alcohol (g)	0.0
Fruit & Veg	1.4

Enjoy :)

Tea or Coffee?

2010-04-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Busy days are here, things are finally start to peep through the soil. We've had some fun with mice in the greenhouse stealing all of my seed from runner beans to habanero, we think the cats have finally scared them off but on the lookout and everything is doubly protected now.

After watching 'How to Grow Your Own Drugs' I was again inspired to try my hand at something a bit different and ordered some tea and coffee seeds from the interweb.

The tea seeds needed soaking for 24 hours first, I kept them in a muslin to weigh them down.

Or they float a lot. This apparently means the seeds aren't as viable as they could be, but that's the interweb for you.

Plant each seed with the eye horizontal

Cover with an inch of compost

The coffee seeds were also soaked for 24 hours.

So I could remove the casing from the seed to enable it to grow.

Then planted into smaller pots but at the same depth as the tea.

These were then placed in warmth on my bedroom windowsill as it's a pretty stable temp up there. They can take several months to germinate so these are an infuriating project for an impatient gardener like me ;)

We took a break to make some more mead. This batch is an all honey recipe and is absolutely divine.

The vinometer says this one is around 8.5%. I'll do a proper detailed post on this at some point soon.

Hops are going crazy again. Such quick growth makes up for slowmoes like the tea and coffee ;)

My wisteria has lots of lovely green growth popping up

Blueberries look like they're going to do well this year.

My whitecurrant is really kicking off. I need to make sure we have plenty of netting for this year!

My little morello cherry looks very busy :)

Leaves uncurling on my apple tree

New shoots coming through on the Loganberry

Flowering comfrey

The Camellia in the back garden, the blooms are over so quickly.

Beautiful while they're here though.

Abi taking a break on a new little seat for potting on, it was a telephone table and chair that we were gifted from freecycle.

The Camellia in the front garden seems to have longer lasting blooms

My magnolia in full glory

The top of this needs trimming this year

The olive tree in it's new place this year, surrounded by the Goji bushes.

The herb bed showing lots of signs of life

Planting the leftover potatoes into tubs.

Phew, busy busy busy :)

Om Nom Taters

2010-04-08T06:15:00.000-07:00

Today is a glorious sunny day, hardly a cloud in the sky. It's beautiful.

So despite having had no sleep for about a week due to the teething nightmares from hell going on with Toby, I decided today was potato planting day.

Last year, Steve had to do the majority of the work because I was heavily pregnant. This time round, I don't have that excuse. Boooo.

So, while Toby had his lunchtime nap Abi and I went out and got started.

Some chitted taters from our next door neighbours, they ran out of room

Abi trying to plant her sunhat

The varieties we've used, for my reference as well as anyone elses....hehe

Tada :)

No Cook PlayDough Recipe

2010-04-07T03:49:00.000-07:00

A recipe for no cook playdough.

This recipe does involve boiling water so will need a grown up's help.

You will need:

125g of flour
90g of table salt/cooking salt.
1 tablespoon of cream of tartar
1 tablespoon of oil (vegetable or olive)
1 cup of boiling water
A few drops of food colouring.
A large mixing bowl (the food dye shouldn't stain, but I used a glass one just in case)
A mixing spoon.

Method:

Place dry ingredients in a bowl, add the food colouring and then mix thoroughly with the hot water. Once the dough starts to come together, it's easier (for me) to get my hands in and work the dough until it's the desired consistency.

Can be stored in an airtight container or sealable bags for a month or so.

If the dough starts to feel brittle or is losing it's cohesiveness, just roll together and place in fridge for a few hours and it becomes pliable again.

My little girl loves it

Garden Catch Up

2010-03-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry, been slacking on the blogging again. I've been getting out and about more with the sproglets ,thanks to some different painkillers, so not as much time in front of the PC ;)

Here's what's been happening over the last few weeks...

We've removed the hydrangeas from the front garden and replaced them with blackthorns. We just didn't like the bulky hydrangeas so we swapped them for something we can make sloe gin with ;)

The herb bed is starting look busy again.

The hops are starting up again. This year, there will be beer! Oh yes!

We've done lots of erm essential lawn maintenance ;)

Wonderhubby has made a raised bed from an old pallet. I'll do a seperate post with a how-to for this soon.

We've put together another compost bin that we were gifted from freecycle. We're up to 3 bins and a green cone now.

I've bought two teeny tiny barganous lime trees. They're living on the kitchen windowsill at the moment :)

We've been going out for lots of walks to find puddles to splash in :)

The ladybirds are waking up :)

We've been gifted a lovely swing seat from freecycle. It needs a bit of repair work, but we're enjoying it :)

Lots of nommy purple sprouting broccoli to nom on

Lots and lots of seed sowing.

Good job I've got a little helper.

We hav giant bees! This one was rescued from the greenhouse (it had to be rescued from there because I didn't dare go in till it came out) *shudder*

Three little goji berry plants, these have already doubled in size.

So there you go, all up to speed. I'll be doing some more detailed blog posts soon so watch this space :)

Lavender and Hops Pillows

2010-03-01T07:47:00.000-08:00

The original idea for these pillows came from the TV series and book Grow Your Own Drugs. We decided to have a go at growing and drying our own hops and had lots of fun doing that.

We are going to use the hops to brew our own ale in the future, but for now I'm using them as an insomnia cure. I suffer with night waking, and tend to only get 2-3 hours sleep a night. The hops and lavender are both said to aid restful sleep, and I have to say they do seem to help.

We dried both the lavender and hops using our dehydrator, this really speeds the process up and means we can get them stored and safe quickly.

Making the pillows is really easy to do, as you can see below.

Take a muslin square. I use one muslin cloth cut into quarters.

Add a sprinkling of dried hops. The lupulin in them is still really sticky and smells very strongly.

Add 3 tablespoons of dried lavender.

Tie up with a ribbon. I recycle these from Lush gift boxes and other things.

Tada

Place under your pillow, and sleep deeply :)

Mo' Honey Mo' Mead

2010-03-01T01:22:00.000-08:00

This is the third, and possibly final tweak on our mead recipe. The last two batches have been half honey/half sugar solution in an effort to cut down on costs. However, we thought we'd give a full honey recipe a go and we have to say on first looks alone we're going to dump the sugar and keep going with this tweak.

It tastes divine already, and the brewing will only enhance the flavour :) If this tastes as good as I think it will then I'll be making this regularly and putting away bottles to mature ready for gifting :)

I'll try and work out a cost per litre too at some point, not today though as I need coffee before I can brain.*I has coffee and brainz, costings at the bottom of the post*

N.B. All amounts shown are imperial, not US.

To make 2 gallons-;

Assemble all the ingredients;

14 x 340g jars of honey.- I used 13 x Sainsburys basic, and 1 x Taste the Difference Clover honey.
3 medium oranges
The zest of one lemon
2 cinnamon sticks
10 cardamom pods
10 cloves
2 heaped tsp of yeast - I used champagne yeast for it's higher alcohol, can use any type
10 black peppercorns
4 bay leaves
2 x fermentation buckets or demijohns. They need to be airtight.

Lots and Lots of Honey.

The not very secret spicy things

Wine Yeast

Our kitchen was really really cold, so to persuade the honey to come out of the jars easily we warmed them in a hot water bath for a minute or so first.

Lots and lots of honey being poured into our gallon stock pot.

Gloopy lovely honey

It was really quite pretty to play with

Adding the posh stuff

The colour variation is really quite striking

Add some boiling water to the jars to get the last of the honey out of the bottom

Pour all of this into the gallon stock pot.

Add your sliced oranges

And the lemon zest

Throw the spicy bits in, cardamomomomom

and peppercorns

The bayleaves and cloves seem to have escaped being photgraphed, but you know what they look like ;)

Top up with boiling water to approximately a gallon, leaving a little room so you can stir. Leave the mixture to simmer gently for a few hours, stirring every now and then to make sure the honey is blending in. Leave to cool for 30 minutes.

Place a sieve over your fermentation bucket and pour the mixture through into the bucket.

This leaves you with a bucket full of mead, and a sieve full of spicey bits.

Empty the sieve into a muslin and tie it securely.

Keep your bag'o'spices to the side for a while and fill your bucket up to the 2 gallon mark with cold water. Test the temperature, if it's still quite warm leave it to sit with the lid on for a while. You need it to be at room temperature before adding the yeast.

Stir in 2tsp of yeast (1tsp per gallon) and place the spicy bag in. Close the lid securely.

We then continued with the same process as the last two batches. I'll copy paste it here so you don't have to go trawling :)

Place somewhere warm and out of direct light or drafts. Ours lives under the sewing table in the front room (although from the amount of root beer, ginger beer, mead and brewing paraphernalia on the table it may be due a name change at some point ;) )

After 48 hours, lift the lid and check that the yeast is active. There should be frothing and some fizzing. Don't worry about the smell and cloudiness at this point, it does tend to smell a bit funky.

If there has been no frothing, fizzing, or the lid of the bucket hasn't 'domed' then it may be worth adding 1 more tsp of yeast and giving the whole mixture a good shake. Leave it for another 48 hours and then check again. If it's still not active, then your bucket may be in too cold a spot and will need relocating. Yeast needs to be at room temperature to be at its most active.

Once the yeast has been active, remove the muslin parcel and dispose of it then close the lid and leave for 4 weeks. Completely leave it, no poking, prodding, testing, touching, sniffing....nothing.

After 4 weeks, rack the mead into a different bucket. To 'rack' means to syphon the clear liquid away from the sediment at the bottom. With our first batch, we didn't have a second bucket so racked it into 2 litre pop bottles instead, this worked fine and was useful for checking the sediment at the bottom.

After 2 weeks, gently pour off a little taster snifter and be proud of yourself ;)

(We started drinking our first batch mead at this stage, because it is so very nice)

After another 2 weeks, rack off into another bucket again in order to leave the last of the sediment, leave to settle and then bottle up.

The flavour of the mead develops nicely if the bottle is thoroughly chilled before drinking.

Enjoy :)

ETA: Approximate costings, rounded up where needed. Some ingredients were purchased from other shops or were from our garden. Sainsburys used for comparison pricing only, other supermarkets exist and may or may not be cheaper/better/whatever ;)

13 x Sainsburys basic honey @ 68p = £8.84
1 x Sainsburys posh honey @ 3.99 = £3.99
Wilkinsons / Youngs Wine yeast 60g @ 1.68 -approx 1/4 used = £0.42
Sainsburys Cinnamon Sticks @ £1.47 - approx 1/5 used = £0.30
Sainsburys Cardomom Pods @ £1.19 - approx 1/10 used = £0.12
Sainsburys Cloves @ £0.77 - approx 1/10 used = £0.08
Sainsburys Black Peppercorns @ £1.36 - approx 1/10 used = £0.14
Sainsburys Bay Leaves @ £0.88 - approx 1/5 used = £0.18
Sainsburys Lemons x 4 @ £0.88 - 1/4 used = £0.22
Sainsburys Oranges x6 @£1.00 -1/2 used = £0.50

Total cost of ingredients = £ 14.79

Approximate cost per gallon (14.79/2) = £7.40
Approximate cost per litre ( 7.40/4.5) = £1.65
Approximate cost per pint is (7.40/8) = £0.93

Other equipment costs;

Fermentation Bucket - Wilkinsons £9.99
Wilkinsons Strainer/Sieve - £1.75
Muslin Cloths - Ebay x 12 £8.91

Feeding the Horde

2010-02-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

Because I spend a lot of my time trying to stay sane and entertain sproglets, I try to batch cook once a month to make sure there's always something in the freezer to make a decent meal from.

This is my standard recipe for batch cooking.

Soak approx 500g of beans overnight. I use haricot, black eye, black turtle and pinto.

Chop 5 large onions.

Brown 1500g mince with the onion.

Whilst this is browning, peel and chop some carrots and sweet potato

Steam these together until softened.

Chop roughly 500g of mushrooms.

Peel and press several cloves of garlic.

I only added a small amount of garlic to the childrens saucepan.

Now the mince is nicely browned

Deglaze the bottom of the pan with a little red wine. I didn't add any of this to the children's saucepan as it would be too rich for them.

The lovely soya mince.

Stir this through with the mushrooms so it soaks up all the red wine and browning.

Add lots and lots of chopped tomatoes.

Stir thoroughly.

Add some fresh basil and oregano

I add frozen spinach to my bolognaise, as I suffer with low iron levels and it's a really easy way to boost the iron in my diet.

Looks delightful as it cooks ;)

Leave the bolognaise to simmer and blend the carrot and sweet potato

and then add to the children's bolognaise. Leave to simmer for 20 minutes.

I then cook some baby spaghetti using the water collected in the bottom of the steamer.

Whilst this is cooking I pulse the children's bolognaise to make the lumps a little smaller.

Then pot it all up ready for the freezer

Then empty the large stockpot of bolognaise and bag this up ready for the freezer.

The large saucepan of bolognaise is then divided up into the 3 saucepans to make the base for the chilli.

Add the remaining 5 pots of chopped tomatoes.

Add some sweetcorn.

Add some roughly chopped bell peppers.

Chop up some chillies. This is a mixture of three fresh ones picked from the plant at hubby's work, and some from the freezer that are looking a litle past their best.

I leave the seeds in as we like our food pretty spicy.

Add the soaked beans

Stir throughly and leave to simmer for at least an hour to give the chilli time to develop.

We didn't think this batch was spicy enough so we added a 3/4 teaspoon of green chilli powder (made from the last of the chilli harvest last year) to each pan.

Stir through, divide up and bag it ready for the freezer.

Apart from a small portion each placed on tortilla chips with some jalapenos and grated cheese with a little home made yoghurt by the side for dipping. Nom

Costings added :)

I pay £1 a 1lb for my mince from the butchers, and using Sainsburys as a guideline for the rest of the ingredients

So

1500g mince = approx £3.50
500g beans (500g Haricot = £1.20,Black Eye = £0.84, Pinto = £0.93, Black Beans = £1.29 = £4.26 / 5 ) = £0.86
5 x red onions = £1.00
3 x sweet potato (half 1kg bag @ £1.58) = £0.79
5 x carrots (half 1kg bag @ £0.80) = £0.40
400g Basic mushrooms = £0.89
50cl First Cape Shiraz = £2.50
300g soya mince = £1.98
20x 400g chopped tomatoes @33p each = £6.60
Frozen spinach -1/3 rd of bag @ £1.00 = £0.33
1 bulb of garlic = £0.25
Herbs, mine are fresh. You can buy them as plants for £1.50ish each which will give you many many servings. All they need is a warm sunny kitchen windowsill. Or you can use dry if you really want to. - cost teeny tiny, approx 10p maybe .
Baby Spaghetti - 1/2 bag @75p = £0.37
Frozen sweetcorn 1/3 bag @ £1.27 = £0.43
Bell pepper - Basic pack = £1.27
Chillies (ours are homegrown) Sainsburys sell them fresh in bags too @ £0.57
Chilli powder - again homemade, but can buy from any shop approx £0.77. A teaspoon and a half of this would cost approx 5p maximum.

Grand Total for the whole batch is £21.89

This made 6 double portions of bolognaise, 8 double portions of chilli, 6 toddler portions of bolognaise, 7 large baby pots of bologniase, plus 30 small baby pots of bolognaise.

6 toddler portions = 2 adult portions
37 baby portions = 4 adult portions.
28 adult portions for grown ups

Alltogether = 34 adult servings.

Cost per serving = £0.65 Ish.

Oh look, more blumming snow...

2010-02-21T04:19:00.001-08:00

We woke up to another few inches of snow that had fallen overnight so the idea of putting together a new compost bin and doing some pruning was set aside for some other essential garden work.

Snowman building!

I've also put some extra birdfeed out, with some of the boiled chopped rind from a gammon joint that I made into honey roast ham today. Partly to give them something to eat while it's so very cold out there, and partly to start distracting them from all the seedlings that are soon to go in the ground ;)

All Hail the Spring ;)

2010-02-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

We decided to do some gardening this afternoon, and just as we were about to go outside the clouds opened and we had a lovely 10 minute hailstorm. Not that it stopped us for long, hehe

Getting ready to get some seeds sown. You can see the remnants of this weeks snow still on the lawn but we gotta get growing :)

Planting on the onion seedlings into toilet roll pots

Putting potatoes into seed trays to chit, this was Abi's job. Mostly to stop her trying to plant as much seed in each hole as possible, hehe

Lots and lots of seed potatoes :)

The greenhouse starting to be stocked with seed trays. This is lettuce, onion seedlings, peas, beans and a tray of more red baron onion seeds. We eat a lot of onions, and make a lot of chutney ;) You can kinda see from the photo that we've cleared the chilli bed, we've saved two of the chilli plants that looked like they may want to give this year a go but the rest were as dead as a dodo.

Propagators full of moneymaker tomatos, tumbling tomatoes (to go into hanging baskets) and several types of chillies. I've planted Peri Peri, Jalapeno, Aurora and Funky. I'm holding off planting Habaneros until I see how well the overwintered plants have survived.

Just keep snowing, snowing, snowing.

2010-02-18T06:31:00.000-08:00

Argh.

It needs to stop snowing! I've got so much gardening I need to do, and it's too blumming cold to go outside :(

There's been another fresh set of fox footprints through the snow last night. The prints follow the same track as the ones last year, and we know that the vixen was unfortunately ran over on the dual carriageway so it looks like her cubs have taken over the territory. I know they cause a lot of damage and love digging in my raised beds, but it's still nice to see them back :)

Not sure if it's two foxes, or one fox making two trails going back and forth.

We're chicken sitting for next door, so nipped round this morning just to check they're safe and sound in their Eglu and their fine. Phew.

The only other good thing about the snow is that it should really limit the slug population this year. We'll still be using nematodes, but glad of any help in the slug war! The yeast traps we tried last year were a big messy smelly failure, but I might try a beer trap or two.

Really glad we fixed the greenhouse last weekend, I'll try and get in there over the weekend and start sowing some seeds. I might try my luck on freecycle for a greenhouse heater ;)

For those looking for a bargain, Aldi have some gardening offers this week. Ours has sold out of the citrus trees already, or I'd have picked a couple up :(

Elephants and Yarn

2010-02-15T11:16:00.000-08:00

We had a lovely productive weekend, a fab visit from a good friend and her boys on the Saturday and a day out in the garden getting sorted on the Sunday.

We chopped back our over wintered habanero chilli plants to get rid of some of the aphid damage from last year, there's already new growth on one of them :)

Then we braved the very cold weather to get the elephant garlic planted and replace some of the polythene panels on the greenhouse.

Abi found some garlic cloves in the old bed that had started to grow so we've relocated these.

Hyuge elephant garlic cloves

Abi being shown the ropes by Steve. I think he has some hopes of sending her out to do the emergancy repairs this year ;)

My pretty purple sprouting broccoli, nearly time for picking :)

One finished greenhouse ready for some hard work this year.

The rhubarb just starting to peep through

The morello cherry tree has lots of buds on this year.

The horseradish root is looking nice and healthy too.

One solitary chive making it's way up from what I thought was a dead root ball. This is from the original chive plant which was planted from a shop bought herb in 2007 :)

In other news, my new obsession is yarn. Really, I'm obsessed. I know it, I'm embracing it ;)

I've been purchasing some lovely hand dyed yarns from the interwebs, they come looking like this

To get them into a workeable centre pull ball of yarn I purchased a Nostepinne (although I got mine from Ebay for a smaller sum than that ;) ) I've spent a good portion of today playing with it and have wound 6 skeins of yarn into balls.

It was very therapeutic to do, and although I have now been offered a long term loan of a wool winder I think I might continue with the Nostepinne for small amounts of yarn.

Now I just need to persuade Steve that he needs to make me a swift ;)

Mmmm...Spicy ;)

2010-02-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Pataks curry pastes, easy, relatively cheap and very nommy. I really wanted to have a go at making my own paste though, partly because I have a lot of chillies to use up (still) and partly because well, it's just the kind of thing I like to do ;)

After talking to an old school friend of mine via facebook, she sent me a copy of a recipe given to her by another school friend for a Ghurka curry using paste.

After a bit of tweaking to suit our palate, here is my first attempt at a curry paste.

For the paste

2 large onions
6 chillies - I used peri peri ones as they needed using up
8 cloves of garlic
30 g dried ginger or 75g fresh chopped
20 g turmeric
20g cumin
40 g garam masala
50 ml olive oil

Roughly chop the onions and place into blender, add all other dry ingredients and give it a quick blend. Then add some oil and blend finely into a paste.

Ladle into warm clean jar, add 5mm of olive oil on top to help preserve it. Lid on securely and place in fridge, this should keep for 3-4 weeks.

For the curry. -

This is a double batch, should make about 2.5 - 3 litres of curry. 2 x average family serving 4

1 large onion
500g diced beef
400g mushrooms
1 tin tomatoes
1 tbsp olive oil.

Place oil in large saucepan and put on medium heat. Add 4-6 tbps of curry paste depending on level of heat required. Cook paste through gently until it starts to darken and seperate from the oil.

Chop 1 large onion into half, then slice.

Add onions and stir through until nicely covered in spicey oil.

Add diced beef, stir well and leave to cook through for 5 minutes or so.

Add roughly sliced mushrooms.

Add tomatoes ( I popped mine in the blender first to pick up the spices stuck at the bottom)

Add 1 litre of boiling water, you can pop a stock cube or two in if you like at this point. I don't think it really needs it.

Roughly chop a handful of fresh coriander and stir in.

If you like your sauce quite thick, use a little cornflour paste.

Leave to cook for at least 30 mins, I tend to make things a few hours in advance and let them simmer away on the hob.

Nom with basmati rice.

Credit to Karena and Richard for the original recipe. :)

Mmmmm...Root Beer

2010-02-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

I love the Root Beer we've been making, so much so that doing the elongated bottling process in sterile glass bottles is the most time consuming part of the process now. Also due to Steve not particularly liking the beverage (he much prefers home made mead) it was turning into a lot of work for little gain.

The other consideration was that the drink carried on carbonating in the glass bottles, making it slightly dangerous to transport and a bit tricky to open safely to drink.

So I've tweaked the fermentation process slightly. I add a quarter of the yeast amount, and leave the drink to carbonate in a warm room for 2 weeks, then I place in the fridge and leave till thoroughly chilled. When the liquid is cooled it absorbs the gas easier, making it fizzy but less frothy therefore easier to work with. We then syphon out of the brewing bottles into clean 2 litre bottles to remove some of the brewing sediment. (this sediment can sour the drink after a few weeks if left) Tada.

We spent this evening doing some syphoning ready to gift a 2 litre bottle to a friend. Here's the pics :)

And so it begins

2010-01-28T00:47:00.001-08:00

The first onion seed peeping through. This is from one of the self harvested red baron seeds :)

Whoop

- Mobile post

Starting Over Again

2010-01-23T11:44:00.001-08:00

This weekend was the first time in about 3 months that we were able to spend any decent length of time in the veg patch. The harsh weather for the past month or so has really taken it's toll on the greenhouse, but we're not going to be able to get that fixed up for a fortnight-ish. In the meantime, we've raked up the leaves, cleared the raised beds, planted out garlic, sorted out the herb bed and started off some onion seed/sets.

Here's the photo dump from today;

Toby keeping a close eye on Daddy

My poor tattered little greenhouse.

Abi helping clear leaves.

View of the back bed, and the ton of soggy leaves everywhere.

Side bed - this is where we'll be container growing this year.

A closer view of my tatty greenhouse :(

Inside is not pretty

The remnants of the chilli bed.

Garlic growing from last years cloves :) They must have escaped being harvested...and nommed.

Abi helping clear leaves from the lavender bush. The blackberry runner we planted seems to be still going too :)

Digging up the secret potatoes. They'd died off ages ago so we hadn't held out much hope.

We were pleasantly surprised :)

The old cabbage bed being cleared for garlic.

The garlic cloves being dug up from their old bed and moved.

Slide break.

The new garlic bed.

Soggy leaves going into the leaf bin.

Abi helping :)

Just keep raking raking raking...

Toby wondering why I'm not raking

I explain about the blog

He likes this

Planting random onion bits. A bit of a trial as to what grows first...or at all...

A ladybird house discoverd under the hops. We were going to remove all the dead hopvines, but have left them in situ until we put some ladybird houses up and can relocate them.

Abi playing 'let's poke Mum with a big stick'

This is apparently lots of fun

As is the peppermint.

The hop vines, we chopped them about 6 inches from the base.

The random onion trial on the kitchen windowsill. The first of many things started off on there this year

The oregano plant still surviving...just.

A tiny sprig of rosemary still going.

A bud on my chive plant already?

My sage not looking very healthy, will need some TLC this year

My very healthy olive plant,really glad this did ok with the snow.

Bay Tree still about the same, I think this might need a bigger pot to get it going.

A close up of the secret potatoes

They went very nicely with some butchers faggots, onion gravy and some peas. Nom!

So that's the catch up, busy weeks ahead of us now. New raised beds to go in, the greenhouse to fix up again and a whole lot of growing to do :)

Basic Bread Recipe

2010-01-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

This recipe is lucky enough to be featured in a recipe book produced by a good friend of mine in aid of SANDS. You can read more about the book here and buy it from here

This is my base bread recipe which I amend to suit my needs. I bake fresh every 2 days, and this quantity makes 1 x 2lb loaf and 8 large soft bread rolls. There is a flickr slideshow at the bottom of the page which shows each step :)

1kg strong bread flour,
1 sachet quick start yeast,
15g salt,
up to 600ml lukewarm water,
1tbsp veg oil
1 yeast starter (more info on this later)

Mix all dry ingredients then add water gradually until the dough comes together without being too wet. The dryer the dough whilst being cohesive , the easier it is to knead. Knead for 10 mins until dough is elasticy. The kneading is the most important part as this develops the gluten which gives a good loaf it's texture. If you skimp on the kneading then you'll end up with a brick ;)

I've started using the slap and fold kneading technique which works a treat and amuses the kids at the same time. Ten minutes of this type of kneading gives you lovely elastic satiny dough.

Before you leave the dough to rise, pinch off a little bit (about a tbspsworth) and put in a sealed pot in the fridge to keep for a starter next time

Roll dough into a rough ball and place in a lightly oiled large bowl, cover tightly with clingfilm and put a tea towel over - or cover with a cloth and then a binbag, leave in a warm draught free spot for approx an hour and a half (may take longer)till doubled in size.

**If you have the time, knock the dough back and place back into oiled bowl and leave to prove again. This helps the gluten to develop and gives a nice texture to the end crumb. I sometimes do this 2 or 3 times before shaping into loaves. It' s not necessary though and a single proving will work lovely**

Knock air out and shape into loaf and rolls. Cover loaf with a cloth and leave for 45 mins while heating oven to 200. If making soft rolls cover with clingfilm (I reuse the clingfilm from the bowl) and then a cloth. This helps to keep the dough moist. They should double in size again.

Remove cloth and clingfilm and cook at 200 for 15 mins. I cook rolls on the bottom shelf and the loaf on the middle. Remove rolls now and place on cooling rack, turn heat down to 150 and give loaf another 20 minutes. Loaf should sound hollow when knocked on the bottom.

Leave to cool for 30 minutes at least before slicing.

Grand Designs - From Barbie to Binthouse

2009-12-11T01:43:00.001-08:00

Although we're both atheist, we enjoy the family aspect of this time of year and look forward to the Winter Solstice. We put up a small tree with some twinkly lights, we're collecting baubles over the years - little ornaments that mean a lot, and we eat an awful lot of food. (More on the food in the cooking blog soon ;) )

However, my husband and I don't like spending money on 'stuff'. We're a single income household who like to live as well as possible, so there generally isn't a lot spare or extra. Most of our xmas presents for others this year have been covered by making hampers of our home-made produce. Our children aren't that huge a fan of my chilli chutney yet though ;)

So this year, we've done the ubiquitous 3 for 2 from Boots using up points obtained from baby items over the last year, recycled some of Abigails toys from the last year for Toby, and scoured Ebay for something special for Abi.

This was the result of my bargain hunting.

Lovingly painted by it's previous owner in barbie pink emulsion.

It comes with lots of furniture and some dolls :)

.......

More to come

Salsa Recipe- Spicy and Not so Spicy :)

2009-12-07T02:06:00.000-08:00

Salsa Recipe -

Makes 5 Litres - (I like to cook in bulk ;) )

6 large red onions roughly chopped

6 bell peppers - variable colours good, roughly chopped

A lot of tomatoes - I used about 1.5kg, ish - diced roughly.

5 peri peri chillies

A handful of coriander chopped roughly

A large splash of lime juice

Wine vinegar - I used a mixture to finish some bottles off, was probably about 100ml red, 150ml white.

Fry onion gently till soft in some olive oil, chuck in the peppers and give them a few mins, chuck in the tomatoes and cook down for 10 mins.

Add coriander, lime and vinegar. Give it a good stir, pop the lid on and leave for a while. Mine cooked down for about 4 hours. I think anything with tomatoes in, does well with an elongated cooking time to break the texture down a bit.

Take out about a third of the mixture and puree it using a blender or processer, mix most of it (keep a 100ml or so out) back in with the original mixture to thicken it all up.

At this point, I took a third out from the salsa to keep as non spicy stuff.

Top and tail the peri peris, and pop them in the 100ml of puree - whack them back in the processer or blender and reblend it.

Add this to the remaining salsa, stir well and tub up.

The spicy stuff will mature while it's stored as the peri peri's do their thing.

Any chillies should work just as well, next time I might pop some sliced jalapenos in as well.

Nom with tortillas, cheese and lots of sour cream

Dark Orange Mead Recipe

2009-11-16T01:37:00.000-08:00

After reading through a lot of recipes for basic mead, I found these two intriguing

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~scheydec/mead.html

http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/grapevine/juicy-gossip/ancient-orange-mead_24852.html

So I had a look through the cupboards and made up my own recipe using these as a guide.

Dark Orange Mead - 2 gallons

7 x 340g jars of honey.- I used 6 x Tesco's own, and 1 x eucalyptus honey.
2 large oranges
The zest of one lemon
2 cinnamon sticks
10 cardamom pods
10 cloves
2 heaped tsp of yeast - I used champagne yeast for it's higher alcohol, can use any type
10 black peppercorns
1kg brown sugar
2 x fermentation buckets or demijohns. They need to be airtight.

Using a large gallon stock pot if possible, (I don't currently have a pan this large, hence the use of two pans at some points during this process) empty the jars of honey

Add a little boiling water to make it liquid and then add the sugar

Slice the oranges into quarters and put into the pan with the other spices

Top up with water and then bring to a low boil, simmer for 30 minutes and then leave to cool to room temperature.

Empty liquid into fermentation bucket through a sieve

Empty the spice and orange bits that have been collected in the sieve and place into a muslin, tie the muslin into a parcel with string and keep to one side.

Top up the liquid in the fermentation bucket with room temperature water (any colder and the yeast will take a bit longer to get started) up to 2 gallons and add 2 heaped tsp of yeast. (it's 1tsp per gallon so can be adjusted if making more or less mead)

Give it a good stir, then place the parcel of spicy orange bits back in the liquid and close the air tight lid.

Once the yeast has been active, remove the muslin parcel and dispose of it then close the lid and leave for 4 weeks. Completely leave it, no poking, prodding, testing, touching, sniffing....nothing.

After 2 weeks, gently pour off a little taster snifter and be proud of yourself ;)

(We've actually started drinking our first batch mead at this stage, because it is so very nice)

After another 2 weeks, rack off into another bucket again in order to leave the last of the sediment, leave to settle and then bottle up.

The flavour of the mead develops nicely if the bottle is thoroughly chilled before drinking.

Enjoy :)

Popcorn in Toffee Sauce

2009-11-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

Recipe yoinked from here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A972362

This is incredibly easy to make. The exact quantities are not important. It will turn out as sweet sticky goo whatever you do.

Method

Put a chunk (about 50g) of butter in a pan.
Add about 4 heaped tablespoons of soft brown sugar (demerera or turbinado is best). Do not use white sugar or it will be spoilt.
Add 2-3 tablespoons of golden syrup. To stop the syrup from sticking to the spoon, heat the spoon over a flame for a couple of seconds first. It works wonders. An alternative method of spoon-heating is to pour the water of a freshly boiled kettle onto the spoon, while keeping your hands protected by the likes of an oven mit. If you haven't any golden syrup then don't despair. As a last resort there is treacle, but it doesn't really work. In the unlikely event that you haven't got any treacle or golden syrup, then you could experiment with maple syrup. This is less viscous so less sugar should be used with maple syrup.
Stir together at a medium heat until the butter is completely melted, and all the sugar has dissolved.

Now you have made the popcorn and the toffee sauce, you need to put them together. This must be done while the sauce is still hot and liquid.

Put the popcorn into a large mixing bowl.
Drizzle the toffee sauce over the top.
Stir.
Keep stirring.
Stir some more.
Stop stirring if the sauce has now cooled to a degree where it is no longer runny and is setting, if not go back to stage three.
Leave until is cool enough to eat. (This fortunately is only a few minutes).

Stirring is very important. If the stirring is not done for long enough then the toffee sauce tends to form a sticky layer at the base of the bowl. In some ways, this can be a good thing, providing you with a lovely gooey dip for your popcorn. By changing the quantities of syrup and sugar, the sauce can be made more sticky or more runny. You should perform experiments to find your preferred viscosity.

Unless something went horribly wrong, you should by this stage be the proud owner of homemade toffee popcorn. It is best to eat quickly, or you will find that someone has eaten it for you.

Om Nom Nom

Bint's Brewery

2009-10-04T11:38:00.001-07:00

Well, all the hops and ginger ale seem to have sparked a bit of an obsession with me ;)

We've now got another batch of ginger beer brewing in bottles, plus the ginger beer plant is alive and thriving ready for another batch next weekend. This one is going to have a bit more of a fiery kick ;)

I've also sourced some Root Beer extract from the US, and had a go at making some of this.

Also used this as an excuse to try out the bench capper that was delivered this week.

We've got about 25 real ale bottles that we've emptied ourselves, we currently go through a couple of bottles a week but not enough to cover all of the ongoing brewing. I posted a request on my local freecycle group and now have a couple of people saving them for me and we'll collect them over the next fortnight. :) Gotta love freecycle.

Today has seen the creation of a new drink, Dark Mead. We wanted to make some mead, for our own use and for christmas presents but couldn't find a simple enough recipe that didn't involve us spending a huge amount of money on demijohns and valves and things and stuff.

After reading through some 'basic' recipes I concocted a 'bint' version and off we toddled to make up a gallon of nectar. Midway through making this we decided that a gallon just wasn't enough...so we decided to extend the recipe...but we had no more honey and no intention of buying any more, as it's not the cheapest ingredient.

After a bit of thought, we decided to add a dark sugar syrup that had been steeped in the same spices that were used to flavour the honey water. The results are a very strong dark honey tasting fragrant liquid that will hopefully stay sweet and become quite alcoholic ;)

Hopping Mad

2009-09-14T01:37:00.001-07:00

Our hops were finally mature enough to harvest this weekend, you could smell the dark yellow lupulin on them.

Little helpers to strip the leaves from the bines.

Lots and lots of cones, and a job well done celebrated by a beer...

Drying time

The smell of the drying hops has sparked an interest in home brewing. We're going to have a look at the equipment we'd need to make some nice ales with our own hops next year, and see what we can source secondhand through ebay and freecycle. I'm already collecting our real ale bottles for decanting ginger ale into, and have my eye on a bench capper (just need to find one for the right price ;) )

Lashings and Lashings...

2009-09-12T04:55:00.000-07:00

After buying a copy of The Hairy Plug Monster for Abigail for her 2nd birthday (absolutely wonderful book, go buy it now! ;) ) , I saw on the author's blog the recipe for a Ginger Ale Plant.

I was completely intrigued, so went ahead and gave it a bash. Ginger Beer was a favourite drink of mine although I used to combine it with copious amounts of whisky. Nowdays I tend not to drink at all so haven't purchased any ginger beer in a while. I am really looking forward to drinking this.

You can view the full tweaked recipe here in Word or PDF

Making the Plant

In the jar, place one teaspoon of dried yeast, two teaspoons of dried ginger, four teaspoons of sugar and a pint (600ml) of cold water. This creates a yeast culture.

Stir and keep at room temperature.

Feed the plant every day with two teaspoons of dried ginger and four teaspoons of sugar. Stir after feeding. The plant will be ready after one week.

We had a little fizzing and whistling during the week from gas trying to escape when the lid hadn't been put back on correctly.

Ready to go plant :)

Making the Ginger Ale

Place 1kg (2lb) of sugar and two pints of boiling water in the large pan. The sugar will dissolve.

Add the lemon juice to the pan.

Strain the contents of the jar - the plant - through the cloth into the pan.

Add 14 pints of room temperature water. We'd filled our empty bottles with tap water and left them to stand to make sure they were room temperature. Due to having small saucepans, we had to do a bit of rudimentary maths to try and get an even distribution of 'goo' to water.

Stir the mixture and transfer to the bottles. Fill the bottles about seven-eighths full as you need to allow for expansion

Squeeze the air out of the bottles to stop them exploding under pressure from their contents

Store the bottles in a safe place at room temperature, and leave for three to four weeks to 'brew'. We've got ours in a tall box, with a heavy book on the top 'just in case' (finally finding a use for my Certificate in Management ;) ) This box is hidden underneath my sewing table.

After two weeks, slowly open each bottle to release a little of the pressure and reseal to continue brewing.

Discard half of the solid from the plant or give it to someone so they may start their own.

Place the remaining half in a clean jar with a pint of water and continue to feed as above and start the whole process over again.

Once the ale has brewed, make sure to open the bottles very slowly to ensure the gas releases gently before drinking

I can't wait to blog about the results! :)

The Good Life

2009-09-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I always wanted to be Felicity Kendall ;)

Busy busy busy busy. I am absolutely loving this time of year, all the harvesting and preserving. I've developed an addiction to chutneys and relish that have seen all of our tomato glut used up, and have my recipe for chilli jam ready to go for the red chilli glut..when they decide to ripen.

The red onion that we left to seed had two good seed heads mature. As well as seeds, little cloves/sets seem to have developed. They look pretty funky and hopefully mean we'll get a good harvest next year :D

Catnip and Peppermint crumbled and stored.

Lavender hung up, chives frozen and sage, oregano, rosemary and thyme hung up too.

Abi showing off her funky wellies.

Squash and aubergine update

Toby update ;)

Caterpillars trying to eat my PSB :(

The two potato plants we planted recently seem to be taking off :D I'll cover these up as the weather cools down.

Some repairs made to the polythene panes

Curious cat

Abi helping with the weeding

Mutant red onion :o

Time for tea! Lovely Lovely Teapigs English Breakfast, I think I'm addicted. I have a code for 20% off, if you'd like it just email me, or leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Jalapenos - more on these later ;)

Nosy child ;)

Because the banana trick worked so well on the tomatoes, we're trying to hurry up some red chillies to make jam with using the same method.

Jalapenos ;) Jarred up in white vinegar and the some of the seed harvested for next year.

Home made piri piri ketchup :) Cheap ketchup + sugar +birds eye chillies = Nom

The dehydrator arrived! So dried and stored the lavender ready for the hops to mature.

The hops are doing really well :) The lupulin glands are maturing and should be ready to harvest in a fortnight or so

Homemade apple rings :)

And the first habanero harvest. I picked the smallest ripe ones ready to chop and store in oil. They spent 4 hours in the dehydrator first to break down the flesh a little.

Om nom, the first 1/4 tsp of this is in a large batch of chicken and mushroom massala, will update on the effects next time ;)

Chutneys, Relish and Bread ...Oh My!

2009-08-23T00:35:00.001-07:00

Om Nom Harvest Time

We found a hidden blackberry bramble in some laurel bushes, only a handful of fruit on it so far as it's well hidden away from the light.

We're going to train some of the runners out to get more of a harvest next year or look into possible relocating the whole plant. May be a bit of nightmare due to the nature of the bramble though. However this awakened a craving for blackberry and apple crumble in all of us.

So...

Blackberry and Apple Crumble

The Blackberries were picked by my sister while walking her dog down the canal paths and a bag of cooking apples were given on freecycle.

Cook apples and blackberries with a little sugar into a goo, make crumble topping, combine and cook. Nom

Due to the success of the banana method of ripening tomatoes, we had a sudden glut of them. What to do, what to do....cook them!

*giggles*

Tomato Chilli and Onion Sweet Relish

Very more-ish, we've gone through a jar already...just to test it before we leave it to mature for 2 months ;)

Chilli Chutney

This stuff has a bit of a kick to it...like a kick in the face with some chilli DM's..hehe

And a load of home made (from scratch, no machines here) bread to eat it all with.

In Garden news, the chillies are ripening nicely

Our pet ladybird (she has a damaged wing and can't fly) is doing a wonderful job of eating all the aphids :)

The hops are erm...hopping :)

We've just ordered a cheap dehydrator to help store all the harvest, and we have another batch of tomatoes ripening up with the banana method. We've amalgamated all the remaining tomatoes into one box now.

We've noticed that we have to keep the tomatoes well away from the end of the bananas to prevent mould though

A batch of chutney or relish to store up for christmas presents will be made with this lot

We're having some caterpillar trouble on the Purple Sprouting though, not sure the little plants will make it through :(

You say tomato, I say erm...salsa :D

2009-08-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

Well, the bananas work! We've had our first handful of ripe tomatoes and turned them into a cheese, tomato and ham sarnie (with other ingredients ofc ;) ) and a salsa. More details on them later...

Here's the bag of beetroot we harvested, this goes straight to my sister as she likes it..and we don't ;)

Jalapeno update. The peppers seem to be going black, it's not an unhealthy black though so we're watching and waiting to see if it's a weird colour variation.

We've planted two more potatoes that had self chitted so we have a chance of fresh spuds for christmas dinner.

We've also planted out some mostly dead purple spouting broccoli that has been sorely neglected and left in the greenhouse. But as the quote goes, "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead"

Okay, so first ripe tomato

Om Nom Nom

The harvest whitecurrants were going to be made into a jelly, however I got distracted by a large mug of tea and before I knew it the sugar had caramelised and made a strange kind of whitecurrant toffee. I actually really like it, and there's not a lot left ;)

Salsa :D

Ingredients

5 x banana ripened tomatoes
1 x red onion grown from seed
3 x chillies grown from self harvested seed. (2 red, 1 green, all seeds included)
a dash of red wine vinegar
a glug of olive oil
a pinch of mustard powder

The end result looks quite nauseating but tastes fantastic. It's quite hot, but very tasty. Will work well with some tortilla chips tomorrow for lunch.

Zombie Cucumbers

2009-08-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Well, so far so good with the tomatoes. There are some that are definately healthy and ripening

Others are a bit soggy

But they're easy to spot so we're removing them as they go. Fingers crossed :)

The cucumber plants that we were going to throw away have decided to have three more fruits on so we're leaving them.

Strange to think a plant in this poor condition

Has these growing healthily on it

They've had a good pruning and a feed now :)

My giant squash plant is surprisingly becoming a giant plant, with squashes growing on it ;)

The red chillies are fruiting well now, with a lot of pruning to get rid of the Aphid damaged leaves :(

Gruesome aphid close-up on one of my other habanero plants.

My red onions grown from seed are all ready for lifting but will be left for another week or two.

My lovely green cone, we had this delivered two weeks ago. Cost a grand total of £7.50 including delivery and installation from www.greencone.com, due to a council incentive scheme. Pop in your postcode and see if you get a fab discount too.

Pulled up the beetroot as it was going to seed even though the beets weren't too large. We harvested a tub full of them though. Gratuitous hubby shot

Harvested a handful of blueberries for snacking

And our hops plant is finally flowering! Yay!!

Blight and Bananas

2009-08-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

Our tomatoes have blight :( All of the plants are affected, even those that had gone outside recently. Boooooo.

After a grumpy facebook post from me saying we'd lost the tomatoes, somebody replied with a tip about picking the green toms and using bananas to ripen them. We'd been all set to make a vat of green tomato chutney but the prospect of being able to make passata instead was too good to pass up.

So after doing a bit of googling and finding this method on wikiHow as to how to ripen a large amount of tomatoes.

http://www.wikihow.com/Ripen-Green-Tomatoes

We harvested all the green toms yesterday and stored them in cardboard boxes, layered with newspaper and a partly green banana.

There were some green tomatoes that looked a bit suspect, but not quite blighty. We've seperated these into their own box to see how they ripen.

In better news, my blueberries are ripening :)

I harvested the last of the whitecurrants last night, and reused the netting from those bushes to protect the blueberries.

My Brundell mint is flowering, pretty purple flowers too.

My chives are flowering too.

Steve took these lovely photos of the low moon from our patio last night too. Very pretty, the effect looked a bit like a floodlight.

Introductions and Apologies

2009-07-31T01:13:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates, keeping up with the sproglets has taken up most of our time. Yes, the second sproglet finally decided to come out.

Introducing Toby, born 26th June wieghing 8lbs, 9oz :)

We have been taking photos of the garden as much as we can though, to keep track of our progress.

Here they are ;)

Rooster potato harvest from one of the compost bags

First ripening chilli from the self harvested red chillies

Aubergine!

Tomato Forest!

Outside Toms

Ripening Toms

Garlic Harvest!

Really pleased with this, it's the first thing we ever planted in the garden and what sparked the whole obsession.

What looks like a cross pollenated chilli. Half red chilli half bell pepper :)

Potatoes!

2009-06-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

Well after a few weeks of neglect and only basic garden maintenance due to my going into early labour (no baby yet, he's due on Friday ;) ) we had our first proper crop today.

Our potato plants flowered two weeks ago, so we dug up a plant out of curiosity today. Surprisingly, it had potatoes on the end of it :o

Also our strawberries are ripening nicely. Om Nom Nom

Our whitecurrants are starting to ripen, a lot of them are very red for whitecurrants though hehe

Blueberries have some fruit setting on them, not bad for first year bushes.

The red onion that we left to seed has started to flower, so looking good for seeds from those. According to the interwebs, as soon as the flower head starts to dry out we should cut them off and leave them to hang to get the seed out. Fingers crossed.

Carrots are coming along too, we picked a handful for dinner tomorrow

Also in the last few weeks we've

Deflowered *snigger* the yukka plant, it looked and smelled lovely but it was setting off Steve's allergies so had to go.

Noot the cat is careful watching the pot of catnip to let me know when it's ready to start harvesting.

Devised a water containment system for my potted cucumbers, they just weren't retaining water in the soil so now have mushroom punnets under the pot :)

Got lots of leafy growth on the horseradish pots

Lots of new growth on my olive and bay trees, and the dwarf runner beans are flowering :)

and a whole bed of greenery that needs to be harvested soon.

Gratuitous Abigail shot

More gardening tomorrow if we can, :)

Om Nom Nom

2009-05-26T01:28:00.000-07:00

Things are growing blumming everywhere. The garden is just exploding with life now, it's amazing!

This weekends photos

The red onion bed

A red onion, and two spring onions that we're trying to get to seed. The red onion has flower heads forming so we're hopeful :)

A teeny tiny comfrey plant. It was donated to us and I thought it was going to die off, but it's resurrecting itself :)

A giant squash plant - seed donated by Jo and we're having a little comp on who gets the biggest plant ;)

Another yellow radish ready to be picked

Horseradish plant :) This is the little pot, we have a big pot too but that's only just showing signs of coming through.

Strawberries!

Look Strawberries!!

There they are ;)

The loganberry is flowering

The cherry tree fruiting away, om nom nom

The lavender nearly in bloom

Earthing up the potatoes for the last time. We can't fit any more soil in! hehe

Same for the potato bags, all filled to the brim now :)

Worm of the week! :)

Dwarf beans planted out. They're sharing space with some overflow red onions. We have another 4 dwarf beans in pots on the patio too.

Aubergines! :) and some PSB getting ready to pot on

Blueberries and Wisteria

Exploding greenhouse

My Shirley Tomatoes. We need to pinch off the side shoots this week.

Spinach Beet. I think I'm going to harvest and quick freeze all these. We transplanted some thinnings into this tub and they've exploded, but we have a row in the greenhouse bed and 3 rows in a raised bed as well.

Frogs, Cherries and Potatoes :)

2009-05-20T00:59:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the delays in between blogs, I'm struggling with SPD and can't be as active in the garden as I'd like. Wonderhubby is doing most of the work keeping it going, I just potter out once or twice a week to have a look and cut some salad leaves, hehe

In photo news this week..

My cherry tree looks like it's trying to fruit in it's first year :D

My potato plants are turning into triffids...just how tall do these things get? Abi likes pointing at them ;)

My first radish, I scrubbed it and ate it. It was nommy.

This is a yellow radish from a Marshalls seed trial. They seem to have battled the slugs admirably and I have a whole row that is about ready to harvest as and when I have a radish craving ;) The radish is on the right, the two other rows are beetroot.

Last night while clearing some old wood to put in the council compost bin we disturbed two little frogs. I hope they didn't go too far, they're welcome to stay and carry on eating our slugs.

Our overwintered habanero is fruiting beautifully already. Chilli at the weekend I think :)

These are the three (very slow growing) habanero seedlings. We've popped one in the greenhouse this morning to see if we can get it to get a move on.

The red chillis that we popped in a planter on our bedroom windowsill seem to be growing really well though :)

Potatoes and Blooming Bluebells

2009-05-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Ho Hi Ho, It's off to garden we go

The Rocket from last week has started to come up already.

The bed of Charlotte potatoes is really going for it now, we've earthed up the 4 or 5 plants that were over 15 cm tall. We'll earth up all of them next weekend.

We earthed up the Roosters in their compost bags too :)

The bluebells are blooming, and looking beautiful. We pulled up one that was growing through the middle of the path and gave it to Abi to play with...after I'd modelled it for a photo ;)

The whitecurrants have set berries on, we've netted them up to keep the birds off. The birds had taken some of the berries already, but I think we've saved 95% of them.

The cherry tree is blooming wonderfully, it's a shame we have to net it up.

The blueberry from Wigglys is all set to flower too. The one from Marshalls looks like it won't be bothering this year, but it's looking healthy so hopeful for next year.

The Wisteria is just beginning to bloom too, so the whole of that side of the garden should be covered in beautiful purple flowers within a week or so. Then it will be bee and butterfly mad back there :)

Mini Herbs :(

2009-04-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

After chasing up delivery of a herb collection I ordered in January for delivery in early March I finally received them this morning.

I'm amazed that a company sells such teeny tiny plug plants for the cost. I paid £6.95 for this

http://www.marshalls-seeds.co.uk/herb-plant-collection-pid2852.html

Look at the lovely established plants on the site. I wasn't expecting a huge established plant but I'm still shocked by the parcel that arrived.

The original plan was to chuck them straight into the herb bed, but I've potted them on for now to give them chance to establish first.

After all the hassles of repeatedly chasing customer service for some kind of ETA on my plants, plus the quality of the delivered product compared to other companies, I don't think I'll be using Marshalls again.

Flooding :o

2009-04-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

There was a thunderstorm this evening and the front garden flooded out within about 30 minutes. The veg patch was ok, but we were worried for a while.