Broad Beans, Strawberries and 'Tates

My broad beans are in flower!  Beautiful flowers which look white from a distance but which are actually of the palest violet-grey, with black spots and very delicate black striations running along the undersides of the petals.  Never having grown broad beans before I'm really excited.

The strawberries are also flowering profusely, and yesterday after the rain we spent some time picking the snails off the leaves and flinging them over the fence (organic pest control at its finest!).  We also put some straw down for the berries to rest on when they appear.

Finally, the 'tates in the bag are through, what seems like ages after planting them.  A grand total of one is through in the veg patch, so we're waiting with bated breath for more to join it.

Baking with a Beautiful View

Saturday 26th May

I am very lucky in that, when I bake, I have something beautiful to look at.  Today, actually, I had two beautiful things - one was a bunch of flowers bought very cheaply from the supermarket, which have been delighting me every time I look at them for two weeks now.

The other was the view out of my little kitchen window which is absolutely spectacular at the moment.  There are cherry and hawthorne trees behind Yvonne and Tom's gardens and the hawthornes are absolutely foaming with blossom.  In the bright May sunshine they are stunning.

I broke off my Bakewell tart-making activities this morning to make a little something for lunch - home-made leek and lentil soup (which usually has chorizo in it, but I didn't have any) with Sweet Potato and Rosemary Rolls from my favourite book.  The rolls were very easy to make, and if they taste as good as they look I will be very happy.

I grated my sweet potato...

...measured out my dry goods...

...mixed them all together, made a well and added the buttermilk...

...then mixed everything together to make a dough.

Then I kneaded the dough and rolled it into a ball...

...and cut it into eight roughly equal pieces.

Each piece got rolled into a ball, and had a cross cut into the top of it with a sharp knife.

They all got baked for 25 minutes...

...and came out looking gorgeous.

I am pleased to report that they tasted as good as they looked - moist, light, flavoursome and perfect with soup!

Noticing Things

I think it's really important to notice things.  This morning, I noticed that the buds on the ceanothus in my garden had turned into big fluffy blue pom-poms.

This evening, I noticed how the setting sun was gilding the leaves on the tree on the village green with gold.



Later, I noticed how the late-night sky was the most amazing, luminous peacock-blue, glowing lighter at the horizon, and how the air smelt sweet with the smell of hawthorne. 

It's really important to notice things.  Just notice, be quiet, and be grateful.

Seedling Explosion!

It has been an amazing Summer's day today - blue skies, sunshine and balmy double-digit temperatures.  I spent a very pleasant ten minutes pottering around the garden this morning before I went to work, checking my plants, watering those that needed to be watered and opening the cold-frame for the day.  On my way into work the May-blossom, which has only just opened fully, was filling the morning air with its syrupy-sweet smell.  It was a wonderful start to the day.

This evening I snuck a bit more garden-time - I had seedlings to deal with.  In this tray we have geraniums, basil, nicotiana and verbena - as you can see, I sowed one or two too many, especially the nicotiana.

I hate killing growing plants with a passion, but on the grounds that they'd probably all die if I didn't take action, I sat myself down in a sunny spot on the lawn while waiting for my tea to cook - supervised by Pastry - selected the two biggest and strongest-looking seedlings in each pot and plucked out the rest.

This is how the nicotiana ended up. 

If these seedlings die, I shall not be best pleased! 

The geraniums are looking fantastic - ready to pot on at the weekend I think.

Rather less pleasingly, tonight's inspection of my courgettes revealed that two of them have broken stems and are looking a bit floppy and sorry for themselves.  I suspect slugs - the copper bands were successful in keeping the beasties off when they were in pots but the war continues now!  I shall report from the trenches with more news anon.

The Veg Patch Takes Shape

After an inauspiciously grey beginning, we had sunshine this afternoon.  The cats loved it - as did I!

I forked fertiliser into the other half of the potato patch for my maincrop 'tates - you can see the brilliant new fence Alastair's building in this photo.

I also planted the courgettes and the cauliflowers out - they look so small and defenceless!

The remaining courgettes got put into individual large pots to be taken down to Mum and Dad.  In the front garden I direct-sowed some spinach into my salad bed - pausing to admire the splendidness of my herbs -

and lifted my red tulips, which are finally over, having given me so much pleasure.  I then direct-sowed some Love-in-a-Mist into the pot.  My last tulips are out, and are beautiful.  Some are a creamy white, and one is pure white with a purple inside.

My ceanothus is also in flower for the first time - very excited!

In the Month of May

May is a lovely time of year.  In the field behind our garden the little black-and-white lambs race up and down, and the fledgling birds are out of the nest and being fed by their parents on the lawn and on the shed roof.  The baby blue-tits sit on the shed roof and flutter their little wings wildly like humming-birds as their parents approach with tasty morsels in their beaks  - it's just gorgeous to watch.  The house-martins are back too, with their little forked tails and white bellies flashing in the evening sun as they swoop into their nests in the eaves.  It won't be long until they have their babies and I can lie in bed on sunny weekend mornings listening to the little liquid burbles and chirrups coming from the nest above the bedroom window.

Alas, however, it is not a lovely sunny May day - like practically every day for what seems like years it is a filthy, grey, rainy day, which also means I'm stuck inside writing about lovely sunny May days when I'd like to be out gardening in one.  But, never fear, there's an unfailingly successful recipe for happy pottering when it's grey and rainy outside...baking!  This could be seen as an act of masochism, seeing as I've just started a healthy-eating programme, but I do genuinely love baking.  It's just so cosy...this morning I reprised my Bumper Oat Cookies, with some alterations - I left out the spices and fruit and introduced some dark chocolate into the equation - and made what I'm calling my Experimental Pear Cake. 

I don't know what the cookies taste like, as I incredibly virtuously didn't even sample any cookie-dough, but they look very pretty with their little chocolate edges.  Here they are in their un-edged state...

...with their little edges setting...

...and waiting to be eaten.

Alastair had some people from a gallery at the house this morning to look at his work, so I laid the cookies out with a nice tray.  The cat supervised.

As for the cake, I had two past-their-best pears in the fruit bowl, one egg left in the fridge and a Waitrose recipe for Dorset Apple Cake.  With this motley collection of chance occurrences I made a rather nice-loooking pear upside-down cake.

The recipe was unusual, in that you made a crumble-mix of butter, flour mixed spice and sugar and then mixed it to a paste with a beaten egg, so I'm looking forward to seeing what a little piece tastes like as a weekend treat!

Experimental Pear Cake Update
Delicious - an intriguing mix of scone and cake, with the lovely spicy flavour complimenting the pear perfectly.  Would be good hot with cream!

Two New Recipes (and Waffles)

Those of you who read this blog regularly have probably been wondering what I was up to this weekend.  Well, my best friend Jules came to stay, and we had the most wonderful weekend of "vegging" - pottering about, eating many, many cakes and other treats, spa-ing, shopping and setting the world to rights. 

As well as being one of my favourite people in the whole world, Jules is a terrific cook, so I wanted to really push the boat out for her.  Her train arrived in Durham at 12.25, so I organised Alastair to go and pick her up and embarked on a morning's cooking.  I tried two new recipes, and - fortunately - both were both easy and an absolute pleasure to cook.  At least one looked much more difficult than it was, too, which is always a bonus!

I made the Hairy Bikers' Basque Chicken Pie from their Bakeation series - I love the Hairy Bikers! - and for dessert I used up some of the left-over egg whites from Alastair's ice-cream making - they freeze, who'd have thought it! - to make a Lemon Meringue Roulade from my favourite cookery website. 

I prepared my pie filling and baked my meringue...

...and then rushed around making my pastry and filling my roulade so that I could lay the table before Jules arrived.

The Basque Chicken Pie was an explosion of sunshiny Spanish flavours and was devoured with much enjoyment.

The Lemon Meringue Roulade - though I say it myself as shouldn't - was an absolute triumph.

The following morning, I made waffles using Alastair's waffle maker and a recipe from an old cookery book that Alastair's mam gave him.  They were light, fluffy, tasty and delicious with maple syrpup - I'll add the recipe to this page when I get a moment (I have to go and cringe at watch The Apprentice now).

Things to Do on a Grey, Rainy Bank Holiday Monday

Alastair is working today, and I have been having an unaccountably fun day at home, interspersing bits of housework with blogging, chatting with family and friends on the phone and facebook and playing ZX Spectrum games - such fun and such a happy trip down memory lane! 

As the afternoon progressed and my housework drew to a close (apart from the ironing, which awaits me still), it went dark and started to rain.  It was all cosy inside, and my mind turned - naturally - to afternoon tea.

I fancied biscuits...but not ordinary biscuits.  Oaty, syrupy cookies of much deliciousness and magnificence.  And the BBC Good Food website more than obliged.  I baked a variation on its Bumper Oat Cookies recipe - no bicarb of soda as I didn't have any in, and dates instead of apricots, ginger and dried sour cherries (dried sour cherries?!  Yuk!).  I baked two versions, one in a baking tray which I cut into squares, as the mixture was very loose and I wasn't sure it would actually make cookies...

...and one batch of actual cookies which I gave five minutes extra on a slightly lower heat as per the recipe suggestion.  And I have to say, I think next time I'll just make cookies as they were very good.  You do have to do as the recipe says and allow plenty of room for spreading though, so you would either have to cook them in batches or use many baking trays.

 My cookies were so splendid that the cat and I had afternoon tea in the living room.

Purely in the interests of research, I sampled a cookie...

...and a square.

I thought both were delicious, and preferred the chewier texture of the cookie to the more cake-like square, although further tasting will be required to be absolutely sure. 

The cat declined to comment.