Hello Friends,
Finally, the horrible flu started to recede & on 14th January, I made my first trip outside the house since Dec 27th...........to the metropolis of activity that is Sainsbury's, but it could have been the Moon........or Narnia, I was so tragically excited to be up & about again!
Since then, I've been trying to catch up with everything, particularly all my usual seasonal activities before the new sowing & growing season is upon us.
I did manage to get some marmalade oranges to make our annual supply. The trouble with Seville oranges is that the season is so short that people who are down with the flu could sneeze & they've missed them!
Seville oranges are funny-looking things. They're sort of smaller & lumpier than ordinary oranges, but they make THE best orange marmalade. If you've never used them, they look a bit different when you cut them open. They're quite 'pithy' & are absolutely rammed with pips.
They don't actually look very appetising at all, which is fine, because if you try to eat one (which I once did in the interests of self-education),, they are unbelievably sour & horrid. Yet, with the addition of minimal ingredients.......I use just sugar, water, a little lemon juice & a splash of orange liqueur, these bitter little fruit bombs are transformed into the most lovely marmalade, with a clear, bright flavour perfect for sexing up even the most dreary slice of morning toast.
If you haven't made any, but would like to try, there just may be a few Seville oranges around for the next week or so........but then they disappear, not to be seen again until January next year. Make plenty, as it makes a nice gift for non-jammers. It should keep for up to a year unopened, depending on where it's stored.
I made just two New Year's Resolutions for Albert Whiskers:
1) To stop licking the jelly off his dinner & wasting the chunks.
2) To stop unpiggling people's bootlaces for attention.
He hasn't stuck to either of them. However, he's doing really well with one he made himself - To fit even more hours of snoozing into his day to ensure he really does deserve the title of 'Most bone-idle cat EVER'. He has mustered some energy to play with the new purple snake he received for Christmas. This has already received a good thrashing...........
..........which lasts precisely until he hears any kind of chink from the direction of the kitchen......or the ultimate hopeful sound - the fridge door opening - then he's disentangling himself from the game instantly & racing off to the kitchen in the hope of an extra meal or even better, a tit-bit out of somebody else's sandwich. Albert Whiskers - Never knowingly under-hopeful!
Hope everyone's having a much more productive start to the year than me........although I am onto the garden now & promise I will have made at least some inroads by next time.
Until then,
C xx
Hello Friends,
Happy New Year, & apologies to those of you who have pointed out that I haven't been blogging lately. This was due to a technical problem. My phone & my laptop stopped talking to each other & any attempt to upload photos was met with a sulky array of messages popping up, none of them seemingly anything to do with the actual problem! Anyway, have cracked it, so am back in business!
We've had a good Christmas, spent in London with family. Despite a few pesky symptoms appearing from Boxing Day, the flu managed to save itself until we got home, then arrived full on. And I just can't shake it off! I'm better than I was, but I can't seem to progress beyond this point. Albert Whiskers spent Christmas at 'Cat's Corner' & opened his presents when he got home - 1 laser cat toy, 1 furry purple snake, 3 upmarket cat dinners, 1 soup, 1 goody bag & 5 bags of Dreamies. He's also tucked into his body weight of poached turkey giblets & enjoyed catching up with a few movies.
You know how I can't bear wasting stuff.....well, even in my fluey state, I've still gone into full on new year recycling mode. The freezer is groaning with turkey chilli, turkey soup, stock, etc, & we've already eaten turkey & mushroom supreme & turkey madras. I've sorted & stored Christmas gift bags, paper, tags & ribbon for re-use next year & our cards are all ready to go off to my Mum for her festive crafting.
So January 6th today - Epiphany if you follow the Christian calendar. Or Twelfth Night if you are more of a bacchanalian. For me, it was a chance to recycle a final festive item.
If you make your own wreaths, you'll already be recycling the wire ring & decorations to make this year's. If you bought one (as I did this year, to support a local business), it's still worth taking it to bits. It's a bit prickly, but who cares if it produces some free resources & keeps a few more bits out of landfill? I've saved the wire ring & the plastic berries with wire stems. I can usually rely on my garden for a few real red berries at Christmas, but if not, or the birds have scoffed all the good ones, I'm happy to use plastic ones.
These will be off to the shed with a bag of fir cones & recycled ribbon, ready to be re-made next December. It's really easy to make a wreath using this type of ring because you just cut a bunch of evergreens & shape them around the circle using the wire holders to keep it all in place. Once it's covered, you can add all the sparkly festive loveliness you want & wack it up on your front door.
Don't forget to recycle the greenery too. It's fine to add to your compost heap.
In fact, after all those soggy parsnip & sprout peelings, my compost bin was crying out for a helping of something a bit more fibrous.
If you are still just about to chuck your wreath in the wheelie bin because you don't have a garden or any evergreens for making your own......don't give up. You can make a really festive wreath using twigs, instead, just collect a good bundle when you are in the park or forest, along with some fir cones or the little alder cones, make it up exactly the same, then add a few baubles. Promise you it'll look magic!
Well, the coughing is stepping up a notch.......it's certainly the best range of impressions I've ever done of a tubercular sheep.......so it's time to go & put the kettle on for another dose of my friend Hel's germ-busting raspberry vinegar. Lergy be gone!! No flu for 31 years, then flu 3 years running. Rubbish!!
Wishing you all a Happy New Year & all the very best for 2017. I think it's going to be a bit of a rum year, so we all need to stick together, love the planet & inject a bit of sanity.
Love to all,
C xx
Hello Friends,
I always say that gardening New Year starts in October & I'm in good company because Monty Don said exactly the same thing in a recent edition of 'GW'. Although there are still usually last bits to harvest in October, there is absolutely LOADS that can be done to get next year's growing plans underway. Today I thought ahead to next summer's strawberries.
This year's strawberries were very nice, but there weren't enough of them. There never are, & this is because for years, I've been growing them in a designated strawberry tub......which unhelpfully, strawberry plants just don't enjoy living in. Time for a change. I visited a community allotment earlier this year & saw a built up strawberry bed there which gave me an idea. I can't replicate it...... there are no carpentry skills in this house, unless Albert Whiskers has a secret little toolkit we don't know about......but it did give me an idea, so next year, I'll be constructing a new condo for our strawberries. I'll need lots more plants first, though, & as my favourite kind of plants are free ones, I started pegging down strawberry runners this year as soon as they appeared.
I say 'peg', it wasn't even anything that sophisticated. I just pulled the runner over to a neighbouring trough & couple of large pots, made a little dip in the soil & gently pressed the crown of the new plants in.
I snipped the runners & lifted the new plantlets today & found they'd made pretty good root systems.
Definitely worth potting up, as well as this year's plants, which I lifted out of the now defunct strawberry tub. One or two had succumbed to the Evil Weevil. I found a few of the telltale grubs in amongst the old compost, but I just spread it over an empty bed. Our robin will be jumping for joy when he finds those!
I used cut-down recycled yoghurt pots for potting them up, & stood them in shuttle trays so that I can move them around the greenhouse easily. It always surprises me to see these things actually on sale! Who would choose to buy more plastic when most garden centres have a stash of these trays by the tills ready for taking free of charge?
That's 48 new plants potted up to over-winter in the greenhouse, ready for my new strawberry construction thingy when I make it up next spring. It's not all about looking ahead, either. I've enjoyed watching skeins of geese wheeling around overhead as I worked, another sure sign of autumn.
Albert Whiskers joined me in the greenhouse, but his attentions were soon called away to do a spot of border-patrol. Although he has zero interest in my plans for next year's strawberries, that didn't mean any old neighbouring moggy could swan in giving them the eyeball. Hungry Blackie & The Tabster were soon shown the way back through the fence, along with a suggestion that they might like to reverse a bit quicker if they didn't want a bash. Having won that little stand-off (two cats at once, you see), he had to retreat indoors for a bit of a lie-down........
........and he hasn't moved a whisker since!
To all my gardening friends, Happy Gardening New Year! To all those who keep meaning to grow a teensy bit of something or other, plan it now, & then it will be more likely to happen. And if you have a barrel of old crusty-looking strawberry plants which you haven't even watered since you ate the last berry, go & have a look to see if you have any runners to pot up......& treat them better next year!
Back soon,
C x
Hello Campers,
Well, what a humungous crop of apples we've had from our old tree this year, which is good because the pears have been pants, but even the ever-resourceful me is going to struggle to use them all up creatively. The Big Hairy Half of the Relationship went up the ladder brandishing the apple-pole at the weekend, while I stood underneath catching them & loading them into a crate on the wheelbarrow......a very useful crate which had been fly-tipped behind the bottle bank at Waitrose, to be rescued by me (surely I can't be the only person who goes to the recycling banks & then comes home with stuff?)
We stopped when we'd gathered this many. This is only about 1/4 of the crop, & that's without counting all the windfalls I've been picking up over the past month. Back in the kitchen, I went into sort of 'triage' mode. Apples were divvied up into 'ICU' (for using asap....you know, the ones with all the little nibbles out of them, bruises, that kind of thing), then 'Walking wounded'....those which wouldn't keep long-term but are fine to put in the fruit bowl to eat when I fancy one.
They're really nice apples, actually. They cook well, but left to redden, they are also good eaters. It's a big gnarled old tree we inherited when we moved in. I wrapped the best apples for storage. I'd love some of those lovely old wooden apple storage racks but they are such silly money that I always use a budget option for this job. Newspaper!
I just line a crate with newspaper, then making sure each apple is clean & dry, and more importantly, in good condition, I wrap each individual fruit in newspaper. The crate needs to be stored somewhere cool & dry. I've done it this way for a few years & while it's normal for me to find one or two have gone mushy, the majority of them store just fine, meaning that I can eat my way through them or use them for cooking for much longer.
We turned 3lbs of the ICU bucket into brown sauce on Saturday. I've also made blackberry & apple jam, apple chutney, Cranks' apple & ginger chutney (just bubblng on the hob as I type), apple sauce, apple & cinnamon muffins, as well as eating stewed apples with oats for breakfast. Am still aiming to make apple & ginger loaf cake, apple buns, Norwegian apple cake, plenty of apple sauce for the freezer & apple & ginger jam. The Carnivore-in-Chief has also roasted a shoulder of pork on a bed of sliced apples and I've used some in a curry sauce. When I've exhausted all my regular recipes, I shall look for some new ones.
You see, there will be appley endeavours all week.......but our tree still looks like this......
.....there are HEAPS more!
Albert Whiskers hadn't encountered the apple-pole before. He came out to give the proceedings the once-over, but. when he'd established that none of it was going to result in his dinner being plated up any earlier, he soon trotted off for a rest, so as to work up the energy for his Really Big Snooze later on. I have never known such an utterly bone-idle cat!
Nearly bottling time, house smells gorgeous!
Talk to you soon,
C x
Morning Campers!
What a fab sunny day! Definitely no heating going on here anytime soon!
Now onto the heart-racingly exciting topic of courgettes (I know! I might have to have a sit-down in a minute!) If you are a home veggie-grower, you'll know all about the annual courgette glut. The plants go out around late May Bank Holiday & sit there in an impressive sulk for about a month, before deciding to grow......or not. We've had quite a glut of them this year & they haven't quite calmed down yet.
Made this courgette curry yesterday. It's tasty, low calorie & if you grow courgettes, as cheap as chips. If you have a glut of tomatoes too, even better, as you need both.
Here's what you do:
Slice 700g courgettes & 1 large onion. Skin, de-seed & chop 450g tomatoes. Crush 3 cloves garlic. OK, that's all the prep.
Heat 2 tbsp oil in a large pan & sizzle half tsp of cumin seeds & half tsp of black mustard seeds for 30 seconds. Add the onion & garlic & fry until just starting to turn golden. Now add half tsp turmeric, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp ground coriander, quarter tsp chilli powder & half tsp salt. mix well & continue to fry for a couple of minutes. Next tip in the courgette slices, stir well to coat them with the spices & cook for 5 mins or so.
That's my favourite bit, as they start smelling really good. They should start to cook, but not to burn, so stir them gently now & again so they don't catch. Now add the tomatoes which you prepped earlier, 1 good rounded tbsp of tomato puree & 150ml water. Stir well. Bring to the boil, then reduce heat, cover pan & simmer for about 12 mins, stirring occasionally. Add 1 tsp garam masala, replace lid & simmer for a final 4 or 5 mins. If you have any fresh coriander, you can chop some on top of the curry to serve.
This is really easy to make & freezes well, so if you are at that point where you feel you will actually turn into a striped green vegetable if you have to eat another one anytime soon, you can pop the curry away into the freezer for later in the year. It is good as a healthy side dish, or as a meal in its own right with rice, on a jacket potato or with the garlic flatbread recipe I shared a few posts ago. I think this is quite mild spicing. You can always turn the heat up if you prefer something hotter.....I should do that here, really, as the Bigger Hairier Half of the Relationship is blessed with an asbestos mouth!
There follows, I am surprised to say, a picture of a Genuinely Very Helpful Cat. I've got the cauldron bubbling this morning (apple chutney) & he's generally mithering around under my feet in case his dinner might be coming out 6 hours early. Today however, for the price of precisely 5 'Dreamies', he was content to sit on his blanket & contemplate the meaning of life.
Hope there is some of this autumn sunshine wherever you are, today. Until next time.......& honestly, each time I look at my Blogger stats, I can't believe how many people read my ramblings......
Love from,
C x
Hello Campers,
What a fab afternoon it's turned out to be. Blue sky, sunshine & am regretting throwing my sandals in the wheelie bin last week :-(
Some great pickings this morning......runner beans, more courgettes ('Defender' - shall have to grow this variety again, as they've been nicely prolific & generally un-arsey, unlike some I've grown in recent years), another mug of blackberries to add to my tub in the freezer & an unexpected scallop squash. The most exciting 'picking' today was our first two corn-on-the-cobs.
I know, I know, I'd hardly be excited if I'd popped them in my trolley at the supermarket, would I? But this is the first time we've ever tried growing sweetcorn & it seems to have been successful. I'd heard that there is no corn cob better than one which has been picked & thrown straight into a pan of boiling water & it's true! Really sweet & juicy & we're already planning to grow them again next year.
The only downside to today is how tired I feel, thanks to a certain badly-behaved cat. He rocked up at our bedroom door at 5.30 a.m today clawing & chuntering to be let in. You might think that 5.30 a.m isn't all that early, & it's true, I'm often awake by then, but I'd had very little sleep the previous night.........due to the same badly-behaved cat doing 2 prolonged sessions of door-clawing at around 1 a.m & again at 4 a.m. The 4 a.m shift started with standard clawing, then he became more imaginative. He tried shouldering the door - he's a chunky lad, so that produced a loud 'dumf' each time. He scratched at the door itself, then the door frame as he tried to winkle his claws in between & lever it. All methods having failed, he attempted to tunnel underneath........very noisily, adding a range of cross meows into the mix......for about half an hour without stopping. So that's two useless nights' sleep. Fully expecting to be awoken tonight by tapping on the window & he'll be there, having somehow abseiled off the roof on a length of my patio bunting. Naturally he's lying out on the lawn now like butter wouldn't melt, while I'm sitting here like Mrs Eye-bags. Rubbish!
C x
Hi Friends,
Today's pickings........watercress. Could have harvested more stuff to be honest, but it was wazzing down with rain & I feel like a beanbag in my cagoule. I've already bored everyone with my 'old washing-up bowl' method of growing watercress, so suffice it to say that my old washing-up bowl is still producing, though not as much as earlier in the year. As I could feel the rain running in rivulets down the back of my top, I just picked one bunch.......
......but that's all you need for a small batch of soup, so perfect.
One portion for lunch, two for the freezer & no wasted watercress.
Cat Help: Well, actually, he was GENUINELY helpful today. He helped by staying asleep on the sofa all morning instead of lying smack in the middle of the kitchen floor waiting for the fridge door to open. When he did go out, he did his usual wet weather thing of peering through his cat flap in the back door at the pouring rain.........then begging to be let out of the front! Ever the optimist, he always thinks it will only be raining out the back & the front drive will be dry. Wish you could see his face when he trots out & realises he's made the same old mistake again!
Have a good Friday night, all.
C x
