Baking, Harvesting and Clearing - Busy Times

It seems to have been very busy recently but then i think a lot of that has been my choice to make it so busy. It's no secret to Mum and D that i've been struggling a lot recently and as a result i've thrown myself into what ever i can head first, whilst still managing to avoid seeing a lot of people! A month ago i started working at a farm 6 hours a week, just 2 hours on 3 days, well that was the plan but i have to adapt due to the weather at times as its all outdoor work. And the i've been doing little things for D to help him out, mainly so i'm not in the house alone, as i seem to have developed this major fear that i'm going to lose control, go on a major binge and eat every single item of food in the house, so there for if i'm not in the house i can't do it!

Anyway, i made a couple of batches of muffins for D's work collegues to keep the going during the Flu jab clinic on saturday. Seeing and jabbing about 1000 people in 3 hours can be exhausting not just phycially but mentally too, having to concentrate hard for so long without a break. I'm not sure the muffins were a success to be honest despite using the freshest produce possible - fresh sweetcorn and fresh raspberries picked with my own fair hands. Not in the same muffin i hasten to add!!
The original recipe for this one was Rasperry and cinnamon, however i decided that cinnamon may not be to everyone's taste so changed to to Raspberry and white chocolate, which is a combination i have seen elsewhere previously. As an after thought though i wondered whether i should have reduced the amount of sugar due to the fact that i had added more sweetness in the form of the white chocolate chips.

Plus then i decided to use the rest of the raspberries to make a puree and then mixed with icing sugar to make a very sticky icing. I know i made more of these than the savoury batch but there were more of these left at the end of the morning. Maybe it was just too early on a saturday morning for something sweet?

The second recipe was Cheesy Corn Muffalettas from BBC Good Food but Mum's reaction to these said it all. She sat eating it in a fit of giggles. I must admit the texture was a little strange, as the sponge was kind of chewy and rubbery from the cheddar but then there were hard little lumps in the form of corn kernels. D said it was strange finding hard bits as normally muffins contain things like raisins which are plump and soft after baking. The taste of the cheese wasn't strong either although it clearly wasn't a sweet muffin as there is no sugar in the recipe and that was clear to taste.

Having said all that all of these went, with the last 2 being taken home by one of the receptionists for her and her husband!

And so onto garden news....

More proud harvests in the form of....
Red Cabbage!!! They've finally hearted up and i'm so chuffed.

And even more chuffed when i cut it in half to find the tightly packed leaves and stunning colour. A quarter of it was used for coleslaw and i'm sure more of it will be too but i think its time to cook the warming winter dish of red cabbage almost sweet and sour style i guess, cooked in balsamic vinegar with a touch of something sweet at the end. Might even get a baby beetroot in from the garden and add that in.
With the red cabbage coleslaw again to get the colours different i used white onion rather than red to go with the yellow carrot.

Autumn is also the time to start getting the Squash in. This was the smaller butternut which i cut in half and stuffed with smoked tomatoes, olives, red onion and goats cheese then roasted in the oven.The slightly larger butternut is now stored in the cool and the dark of the garage along with.....

This stunning little thing. Who knows what variety it is, but then so long as it tastes good, who cares!!

Runner beans, carrots, beetroot, kale, chard, cabbages, onions and parsnips continue to be harvest as and when we want them. Although all the tomatoes are now inside, with the green ones on trays in the spare room, which are then transfered down stairs when the start to turn red! Stock rotation i call it.

I got some onions from work as well to string and last us over winter. The large ones make superb onion soup!

I have also been increasing the number of fruit bushes too.
Lidls had various fruit bushes at £1.30 each so i picked up 3 gooseberry bushes, which of course will need somewhere to be planted permanantly (i know thats spelt wrong but i'm running short of time!) So this weekend Mum suggested clearing the front garden to make room and turn in into a fruit patch as the raspberries and blueberries are already there. Remember how it looked before??

I can't find an old shot of the front which shows the whole patch but the photos above and below should give some idea.

And this is how it looks now:

It won't be usable for a bit as the are bush/shrub routes which now have RootOut on them, plus we are hoping to move the rose bushes from the right hand end down to where the chard is. But that where the holly and ornamental quince routes are. I just hope the don't mind the move and survive!

Anyway off to the farm whilst the sun is shining!

Hastings Seafood Festival and Happy 1st Birthday Blog!

Well, amazingly it's a year since i started this blogger blog which means that my little laptop is a year old too. So here's a nice cheerful post to celebrate with.

It was the Hastings Seafood Festival on the 20/21st September and after attending last year i quite fancied going again. Last year the sun was shining, there was no breeze and the place was buzzing. There were restaurant doing sample dishes, mini portions so to speak. I think my favourite last year was a cuttlefish risotto cooked using the ink.

There was nothing else i fancied on offer in the way of hot food so i wandered along to the fish huts where one of the fishmongers was selling cold fish/shellfish. Last year i finished lunch by having some smoked eel and crevettes (oh and a glass of Pimms!)

I sat on a bench round the back of the fish huts soaking up the sea air, being watched by some greedy gulls.

This year mum mentioned she would come with me, and then D decided he'd come as well. So we all set off on the Sunday, travel was fine until we hit the part of the A21 where it narrows down to single carriageway, but the Sun was shining and we still made it there by about 12.30pm. The number of stalls and the size of the festival seemed to have almost doubled since last year, with the crafts stalls and produce stalls in a separate area to where the restaurants and catering stall were. The number of people seemed to have grown in proportion with the size of the festival. As by the time we'd walked from the multi-storey carpark, it was lunch time we decided to find some food for lunch first, so wandered around the catering area. The restaurant that did the risotto last year, had sadly sold out of their only squid dish already, so D and i had a beautiful King Scallop each, complete with the coral i'm pleased to say, while mum had a little boat of battered/breadcrumbed whitebait.

After walking round the rest of the stalls to have a quick look, i couldn't see anything i faniced. Not for lack of choice - there was a fish dish of every type; Indian, Japanese, African, French, BBQ, In a bun, on a Kebab skewer, soups..... But for me the plain cold seafood like i had last year was more appealing, so we walked on to the fish hunts where once again they were selling cold and unadulterated seafood. Mum and D decided they didn't really fancy anything there, so walked back to the main market and got a devilled mackeral each. They then came back to meet me on the bench where i sat last year, however it was in the shaddow of the fishhut so i suggested moving into the sun as there was a bit of a breeze which made the shade a bit too cool to be sitting still in, so we wandered down onto the beach which was busier than i thought it would be.

So we settled on the beach and tucked in. I had chosen a small dressed crab and some crevettes. They were selling the crabs on plates with a slice of lemon and piece of bread for £6 which i though was a little too much, so i decided to look inside the fishmongers at their produce counter. Inside they were selling similar dressed crabs wraped in clear film, the smallest for £4.20 which wasn't too much smaller than the ones they were selling on their catering stall, so it made sense to get one from there as i already had a piece of bread and lemon and a plate from buying the crevettes.

However i was feeling under a little pressure to hurry up and finish my lunch towards the end....not from mum or D......but i had someone else watching over my shoulder, just in case i should decide i couldn't finish my food.....

I don't know why but it didn't seem as exciting as last year, maybe last year it was because it was a spur of the moment thing and a lone adventure that i took on my own. It was still a lovely day though, nothing beats seafood in my books for a meal during lovely day out.

Stuffed!

A few great harvests over the past week! some giant veg and a couple that were perfect size for a single portion stuffed dinner. First came my first little squash.

I cut out a lid, scooped out the seeds, put the lid back on and roasted til tender and cooked in the oven. I started my risotto just before the squash was cooked, adding the chopped cooked flesh to the risotto with some sage. Served steaming (as you can see!) back in the shell.

Ok, so this photo doesn't show the whole story....a large proportion of the risotto had to be served on the side as it didn't quite fit!

Then came a stuffed tomato (not on the same night!!).

I scooped out the seeds and the core, placed some goats cheese in the bottom then some shredded leeks and then more goats cheese. It didn't need long in the oven an was a little tricky to serve as the tomato kind of collapsed. But it meant the skin came off easily - cooked tomato skin is one of my big pet hates.

On Sunday I suggested to mum that we see how the parsnips were doing and whether they were big enough for eating yet.....
As you can see from D's 1 inch size grid, we need not have worried! we shared the big one between the 3 of us that night and then i had the smaller one roasted like chips with some homemade tomato ketchup from all those tomatoes. The Ketchup was great, although as it reduced even more (it wasn't quite thick enough by dinner time, so i had some and left the rest on a low heat to reduce more) it seems to have become a lot sweeter. So maybe if i do it again i won't add any sweetner until later once the flavour is more concentrated. But from tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, sweetner and seasoning, blended and sieved, it was so simple and tasty! I just have to decide how i'm going to use the rest.

Oh i've buggered this up!

appologies for the messy looking blog. i was trying to change the banner and screwed up......am now i'm so p'ed off it might just be best to leave alone, until i have D's HTML skills.

Edit: ok back to the way it was, the banner at least!

Edit2: well the new banner is there as best it will be for now, not sure how to change the width of the frame though!

An (extremely) experimental cake recipe!

Sadly the blight has really got hold of my tomatoes in the back garden and this weekend (if not before) i will be taking down the second lots of plants, having got rid of the growbag by the back door a couple of weeks ago.

When i took the first set of plants down, there were still lots of green tomatoes on the plant that the blight hadn't reached yet. So i decided to look into a recipe to use them. It seem that over in the USA they eat green tomatoes alot, for example fried green tomatoes. but those recipes used large tomatoes and i didn't fancy trying to slice and breadcrumb lots of cherry tomatoes! In the UK the favourite recipes are chutneys and relishes, however having made stuff to jar like jams and chutneys in the past i know from previous experience that they just don't get used in our house. So i decided on another American recipe - Green Tomato Cake

Other recipes i'd seen didn't tell you to salt the tomatoes, and after reading one of the reviews below this recipe which said the salt just didn't rinse off, i chose not to salt them. this could have been a mistake.....

The batter was lovely. Beautifully spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon but the tomatoes......

very very bitter and sadly even combined with the sweet spiced sponge they weren't redeemed. one mouthful could be lovely with the sponge but as soon as you took a bite with a bit of green tomato you were left with a bitter aftertaste. Not a success and it didn't make it to D's work as i had planned. I'll leave you with a picture of where it did end up.......

and 2 weeks on even the birds don't seem to want it!!

A quick bit of baking - Apple and Apricot Muffins

Just a quick piccie of some muffins i made quickly one morning before going to D's work. I've been helping out but was told i could only go in if i brought something baked, as they all really enjoyed the cakes i did for D's birthday (the practise runs for the country show). However i was then also told that most of the office were on a fat-free, carb-free, atkins diet of one kind or another! So i hunted down a calorie counted cookbook and found a healthy wholewheat muffin.




I substituted some of the sugar for sweetner, used marg instead of butter to help the healthy theme even more and they worked out at about 140 calories per cake (small muffin/large cupcake). I doubt his office normally eats cakes that healthy!! Given that they are normally shop bought cakes.

Aswell as the wholewheat flour, marg and sweetner/sugar, the recipe included plain flour, bicarb, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg, dried apricots and dessert apple and egg. I literally finished baking the second batch left them so they were cool enough to pick up, tried one to make sure they were cooked properly (they were lovely and moist!) and then left the house, so as i was driving the car filled with the scent of spiced muffins.

They were very well recieved and i think even more so because they were still warm

I think the recipe was from the book Hamlyn All Colour: Healthy. i know it was Hamlyn and as it was a healthy recipe i think it was that one, the cover looks the same! but i've taken it back to the library. There's a beetroot cake recipe i jotted down from it too that i hope to try soon.

Mission Accomplished! Homemade Coleslaw from the garden (except the mayo)

One of the things i wanted to be able to do this year was to say that i have made my own coleslaw using all 3 ingredients from the garden.

By mid july i could say i had 1 out of 3.

A month later i could say i had 2 out of 3......

And now i can proudly say i have made my coleslaw with the carrot, onion AND cabbage from the garden!

Of course me being me, my colours aren't quite your normal coleslaw colours. I decided to use a red onion to give it a bit of extra colour as my yellow carrot blend in with the white cabbage a bit too much. But the shredded and grated veg, some salt and pepper and a bit of low fat mayo makes one of my favourite cold foods!

I am hoping that i might be able to try it with red cabbage and white onion with the yellow carrots, but i'm not sure if the red cabbages are going to heart up enough before the onions run out!! Only time will tell.

September Garden Update

I know it's almost the end of september now but these were taking earlier on in the month so since these were taken things have changed again. For instance one of the grow bags with cherry tomatoes - the one by the back door has gone, the blight finally got too bad, and i think this weekend the other one in the back garden might be heading the same way sadly. However when we emptied the growbag we found, like last year, it had a lodger, but this year our lodger had some eggs too!
So we put one of the spare wormery trays over her/him and by the end of the day but had vanished, so i hope they are ok.

Saturday 20th September - Mid Essex Model Railway Exhibition

I should have posted this earlier - but better late than never as they say. This weekend i known as exhibition weekend in our hourse, but of course like all major events its never just the day itself where the hard work gets put in. For D in fact the hard work is the rest of the year during the run up to it, it's usually mum and i that get roped in for the hard graft on the day.

Open 10am to 6pm, free car park on site, free bus service from Shenfield railway station. Admission prices: adult £4.50, seniors £3.50, children £2.50.

How To Get There

It's a great day if you have an interest in modelling, not just trains but also things like the scenery and trees etc. Lots of layouts, an outdoor ride that the kids will love, trade stands for things like modeling paints and books etc, not forgetting the tombola and ofcourse refreshments.

I've lost track of how many years i've been going now, but its always well attended and thoroughly enjoyed.

Tomato Tales, Trials and Troubles

The tomatoes have had a mixed year this year. They got off to a good start with all of the seeds i sowed germinating in April, not going too leggy and lanky. For 2008 i planted the few remaining beefsteak seeds i had, some tumbling toms for the hanging baskets and also opened a packet of seeds that simply said "tomato" so i had no clue what variety of tomato i was going to get. They were from a bargin multi packet of seed that Nan had picked up in a £ shop. But they all germinated nevertheless.

So by May i had a lot of healthy looking plants, of course having sown more than i would need just in case i lost a few. That certainly happened with the squash plants but the tomatoes continued to grow....

They survived varying temperatures and weathers......

and the hanging baskets even survived attempts on their by squirrels, who decided they would be a wonderful place to bury some peanuts! You can just see some peanut skins left in the one above.

By August i had 5 growbags, 3 hanging basket and 1 spare one who ended up in the ground. so that was a total of 5 beefsteaks, 11 mystery tomato plants, which as you can see from above turned out to be cherry tomatoes with a very high yield, and 11/12 tumbling toms divided between the 3 baskets.

Sadly due to a little lapse in concentration from me, quite a few of the beefsteaks got blossom end rot (the one at the top of the photo), and after chucking the first one as i thought something had burrowed into it, mum alerted me to the issue of blossom end rot, so from then i simply brought them in for the fruit bowl to ripen. The other 3 beefsteaks in this photo were subject to another preditor - the caterpillar. These were in my mini greenhouse, so i presume a butterfly or moth had got stuck inside and whilst stuck in there had layed its eggs. I originally thought they were just munching the leaves and despite my efforts to pick them all off (both little green ones and larger brown ones) it seems i didn't get the all, as i started to find tomatoes with chunk out of them too! So they came in and joined my others in the fruit bowl.

Before long i had almost 1/2 dozen green beefsteaks ripening and then the cherry tomato enslaught began. My 11 plants started ripening left right and center.

So i thought i'd transfer them into one big bowl rather than having lots of smaller bowls all over the place.

Even the beefsteaks with blossom end rot ripened perfectly and all that i lost when i trimmed the was a slither off the side, the mark didn't go very deep at all.

Then within the last 2 weeks the real trouble started. Blight! Ah, every tomato (and potato) growers worst nightmare. Initially i thought i'd escaped it this year, but then i spotted in on my 3 cherry's by the back door. I bought some Dithane spray (anti fungicidal), took off the leaves, sprayed the stems and took off any dodgy looking fruit. I then started bringing in all fruit that had started to ripen. I'd rather have them ripen indoors than loose them completely.

With so many ripe cherry toms i thought i'd try preserving a few by oven drying them. But 4 hours in an oven isn't very eco friendly really....

I also picked up some smoked tomatoes when i was in London at Marylebone farmers market a couple of weeks ago, and also got to sample them at borough. So i thought i'd give that a go myself. I spotted an inexpensive smoker bag on ebay and bought that. I had plenty of tomatoes to use so if it didn't work it wasn't the end of the world. Putting them in the bag didn't work, it simply seemed to steam them and they weren't drying out, so i cut the lid off the bag. But even tho the smoke wasn't contained in the bag, it was still contained in the oven. They did end up with a light smokey flavour, but whether they will still be that way after being in the jar of oil who knows.

Mum and D were playing around with a more eco friendly smoker last night - not using electricity for 4 hours!! It didn't really work on such a small scale though and we just couldn't keep the fire burning on a low heat. I haven't looked this morning to see if anything happened to the tomatoes at all.

Like i said, there are plenty to play around with!! In fact this was a couple of days ago and since then i took down the ones by the back door as the blight had got out of control. So there are now hundreds of green tomatoes too! But i'm planning to try this green tomato cake probably without the nuts tho, and maybe a few more healthier alterations. should probably try and scale it down a bit too as i just don't have 12 people to serve!!