Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

I'm not a terribly good advertisement for the eating seasonally school of thought; more particularly eating what we have in the garden etc.   I always mean to eat what's around in the garden but there's always something that slips past me. When we moved here, the garden was infested with elder trees.  We've drastically cut down their number now.  As is ever the way with these things, we thought the multitude of elder trees we had on the fence line in the field would supply all elder needs, but then they all virtually as one decided to suffer.   Whether they were the same age and all shuffled off the mortal at the same time, or whether they all got some strange disease, or whether (top theory at the moment) the succession of icy winters we've had has not helped, I do not know.   But I digress.  We weakly let an elder seedling have its wicked way next to the barn and it is now a socking great tree despite our periodic attempts to get it under control. ...

Now that the hens are laying again, I am starting to focus on recipes that use up a decent amount of eggs.  Swiss roll only uses 3, but it's a start.  Daughter and I made an excursion into baking (or at least she did - I directed operations). Here is a rather squint photograph of daughter doing the prescribed 10 minutes whisking. When I did domestic science at school (which is what cookery was then called), Swiss roll was one of the things we had to do.  Of course, we had to do it all by hand, and I have bitter memories of my failure to beat the mixture enough, meaning my Swiss roll was a flat and rubbery failure.  I wrote that one down to experience, thinking I'd never have to do it again. At the end of each academic year, we did exams in each and every subject, including DS.  We had to cook something we'd done that year.  Miss Reed, the DS teacher, would write down the names of everything we'd done, put them in a hat, and we would draw one out. ...

In common with the rest of the English speaking world, I got Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals  for Christmas.  I sat down and read my way through it, because I get easily bored cooking, and like new recipes otherwise I find it only too easy to get into a rut of the same few things that I can cook in 15 minutes without engaging my brain.  Producing a whole load of stuff in 30 minutes is a brilliant concept, and Jamie has done the thinking and planning for you.  The recipes read beautifully (though he obviously has a family infinitely easier to feed than mine). After I'd sat there for a couple of hours reading Jamie, I engaged my brain, stopped wallowing in the deliciousness of my imaginings, and thought about, what, practically, these recipes were going to involve.  Jamie does say in the beginning that at first you might take longer than 30 mins, and leave the kitchen looking like a bombsite.  Now I am not slow as a cook:  year after year of short ord...

Writing about sorbets reminded me of one of the less glorious episodes in my culinary career. I am not immune from disaster now. I do, even though I've now had years of experience, still burn things because I am prone to try and do too many things at once. My children are used to coping with this, though now my son's knowledge of chemistry far exceeds mine, he takes issue with my statement that carbon is the building block of protein and that burnt offerings are therefore good for you. The particular disaster I am thinking of was a lemon sorbet; at least that was what it was intended to be. It put me off doing sorbets for decades (in fact until last weekend) as I was convinced they were terribly difficult and it wasn't worth trying again. Having made a rhubarb sorbet, I now know the difference between the two types: easy, which has a lot of actual fruit in it, and trickier, in which case you have fruit juice but not the actual substance of the fruit. Lemon is, obvi...

It was an absolutely baking weekend here, so I didn't try Moggypie's rhubarb crisp, though that is still very much on the list to try. I did, however, make rhubarb sorbet, and that was delicious. Neither child would try it, as I had bought a 2-for-1 cookie dough ice cream at Sainsbury's and they preferred the familiar, but OH and I, culinary pioneers always, loved it. Here's the recipe, which comes from Shona Crawford-Poole's Ice Cream (Conran): 1 1/2 pounds of rhubarb (the recipe says spring, but it's well past the forced stuff now, so I compromised by using the thinnest stalks) 10 oz caster sugar (though I used less - about 9 oz I think, and about an oz crystallised out and stuck to the pan, so I think you could get away with 8oz if you like a more tart flavour, which I do) Chop the rhubarb up, and put it and the sugar into a deep ovenproof dish. Didn't have one of these, though I suppose if I'd thought about it I could have used a casserole, bu...

The garden part of this blog doesn't get much of a look in, which probably reflects the time that is spent on it relative to everything else I write about. One thing with living in a fairly rural environment is the glut: at this time of year, everyone I see I mentally size up: are they likely to have rhubarb? - in which case any offer of some of mine is only going to meet with a hollow laugh (it's a good year for rhubarb, this year), or grow only flowers, in which case there will be enthusiastic agreement to take some of it off my hands. Our rhubarb patch, after a couple of sulky years when it protested that it did not appreciate the wind swept climes of our fruit garden, has now decided that wind is for wimps, and it flourisheth even more than the green bay tree (and I have plenty of that on offer too, if anyone's interested). Last year I made rhubarb chutney - excellent, but I'm not sure I can face the thought of the reek of vinegar taking over the house for d...

My life doesn't tend towards domestic goddessery , though I do love baking on the rare occasions that I actually get the time. Marmalade making, which seems one of those things that is the entire essence of goddessery, is something about which I have very mixed feelings. Firstly, I can't bear the stuff, but my husband loves it, and I do like doing something for him I know he'll like (makes a change to my banging on about any of my particular hobby horses). I also like the ego stroking that goes with people liking the end result. Despite hating marmalade myself, I'm told I do a pretty decent job. The same is true for cooking sausages, which I also don't like. Not entirely certain why this is. I do hate though, the endless faff which making marmalade seems to involve, though this is partially my fault for choosing the more intensive jelly method. My friend Patricia, who makes an incredible 100 jars a year (yes really) chops everything up in one go and then cooks. ...

Today, had a day off - not a book in sight. Well, that's not true, because at lunch I spotted a large bookcase full of books, which of course I had to inspect, and did see some Andrew Lang Fairy books as well as several paperback Pullein-Thompsons. But I digress. I went to a cookery demonstration by Sophie Grigson today, thanks to a kind friend who couldn't go so gave me her ticket. SG is excellent value, and sitting watching someone else cook and then test the results is certainly my idea of a good time, so I thoroughly enjoyed the day. One of the dishes SG cooked was lemon scrambled egg. During the demo, she described how she made this first for a boyfriend when she was about 19. "Now," she said. "If you are going to make scrambled eggs properly, though slowly, you will do it in a double boiler." This she said, she never actually did herself, save for on the first morning at said new boyfriend's flat, when she lovingly made him scrambled e...

This post is not for the squeamish. Scroll on, scroll on - click down to the post on Jill if rot and decay worry you. Yesterday I read something, somewhere (could have sworn it was in The Times, but I can't find it now) about masses of food being thrown out because it is after its sell-by date, even stuff like apples. I guess it might be the way I was brought up, but I've always taken sell-by dates on some things to be purely advisory. Chicken, meat and fish I am very nervous of going over the sell by on and generally don't, and I don't visit our sell by horrors on visitors, but isn't when to eat an apple just common sense? If an apple is still firm and unblemished, it's fine to eat. And even if it's started to go squishy, it will still make apple pie. If it's beyond that, the dog will eat it. My grandmother had a very robust attitude to food safety. "Got to eat a peck of dirt afore you die," she'd say, as my sister and I dropped...

Earlier in the week my daughter bought me some Flying Saucers - which are sweets made of rice paper with sherbert in the middle. I hadn't had these for years and years; not since the days when my sister and I would trot off down the road and spend our sweet money at Tarry's. Tarry's was a tiny shop which sold absolutely everything, but the best thing as far as we were concerned was the wooden compartmentalized tray which held the penny sweets (and I'm talking 1d here, not 1p!) Mrs Tarry was the most remarkably patient woman, and would let you stand there for ages while you mulled over the delights of Fruit Salads, Black Jacks or milk bottles. We always hoped the shop would be empty when we went, as then we might be allowed into the kitchen behind to inspect the terrapins. Now you don't get that in Tesco. A lot of the penny sweets seemed to feature liquorice, which I was never particularly keen on, apart from Sherbert Fountains, which can still be got today, and w...