happy soup

Some left over roasted beetroot and butternut squash made the basis of a lovely colourful soup to brighten a grey day.

I just added chicken stock and a couple of chopped potatoes, bubbled it for twenty minutes and whizzed with the hand blender. The addition of a dollop of creme fraiche and some bread and cheese made a cheering lunch for three.

weekend

Well, at the weekend my sister finally made her twice-postponed Christmas/New Year Visit. I was beginning to think it was going to be the subject of perpetual rearrangement until next Christmas. January/February also had other postponed visits because of bad weather and illness, so I was beginning to feel a bit jinxed.


Fortunately we were able to assemble the local family for an evening gathering on Friday when we all ate together early enough to accommodate small children’s bedtimes. We also exchanged some belated Christmas presents, which felt very strange! 

On Saturday we went shopping! Not a particularly favourite activity for either of us, but Sheila needed some office clothes and a second opinion, so off we went. We got that sorted reasonably painlessly and met up with Steve for a snack lunch at the lovely refurbished Bristol Guild Cafe.

Next stop was a bit of culture at the Museum where it was the last weekend of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. Footsore by now, we trudged home for tea, cake and quantities more food.

Sunday with visitors always means some kind of walk. So we headed off to Leigh Woods for a wander and even saw a bit of sunshine and blue sky.

It was a very good weekend, so I woke this morning feeling a little more optimistic about the eventual arrival of Spring and the prospect of more trips and visits.

marmalade (again)

It’s that time of year again; the internet is awash with marmalade posts. So here’s my annual update on the marmalade ritual. In fact I am a little late to the party – largely because the 28 jars I made last year did, in fact, last a full year and we’re only just on the last one!

I didn’t have the energy for another marathon session, so bought a modest bag of Seville oranges from our local greengrocer. We had a similar number in the freezer from 12 months ago and they combined to produce about 1500g. I also had quite a number of lemon “shells” in the freezer, which I save after squeezing as described in this post last year, so they were included in the mix as well.

I noticed that a friend had used Nigella Lawson’s recipe*, which involves boiling the fruit whole.  As I had frozen fruit which would certainly be rather soft and squashy by the time it thawed out, this seemed to be a method that would embrace that characteristic rather than make a problem of it. I found that it worked pretty well. Once the oranges have been cooked and sliced open, it’s very easy to scoop the flesh and pips out leaving softened peel which is easy to chop finely for inclusion in the marmalade.

I used “jam sugar” with added pectin rather than the usual granulated and it reached setting point quite quickly. (The sugar also has added citric acid, so the remainder was delicious on our Shrove Tuesday pancakes!)

Ta dah! Another lovely addition to the store cupboard. Whoever invented marmalade was a genius. I know that my husband will be quietly twitching about the skew-whiffy labels, but  hey – he gets to eat the gorgeous stuff.

*(Having just gone back to that recipe to put the link in, I discover that it's not actually a Nigella recipe, but one posted on her community boards by someone under the alias "chocolate nemesis" so the credit should go to him/her). 

christmas dinner

Yesterday, for the first time in our married lives, there were just the two of us for Christmas Dinner as all the daughters were committed to visiting their other families on The Day and my sister is not arriving until the weekend when there will be more of the extended family around.  In the past I sometimes used to feel the victim of other people's expectations of Christmas, so we've never insisted that our family have to be around to fulfil particular rituals and we were happy with that.

In fact daughter no. 1 invited us over for Christmas breakfast, so we were able spend time with them and exchange some presents early in the day and then we went off for a walk in the woods.

I had bought a venison fillet for our Christmas dinner and was a little bit anxious about cooking it, as it only needed ten minutes in the oven and I didn't want to spoil it.  Step forward one of my trusty spreadsheets, proof (if any were needed) that I am a control freak at heart!

I'm glad to say that it was delicious and we very much enjoyed our day.  I hope you did too.

squeeze them till the pips squeak

I noticed recently that Carluccio's were heavily promoting their own brand lemon oil (made by crushing whole lemons with the oil) and it reminded me that I hadn't made any lemon and rosemary flavoured oil for a while.  The version I make comes from a Good Housekeeping recipe from a few years back and is very simply made.

On Wednesday I assembled the ingredients: 2 litres of extra virgin olive oil, four sturdy sprigs of rosemary from the garden, the finely peeled outer skin of two lemons and a few juniper berries. (Plus a few sterilised bottles). Ideally the lemon peel should be a single long curl that can be wrapped spirally around the sprig of rosemary and inserted into the bottle, but this is easier said than done; the lemon peel sometimes breaks off before you want it to and even when you do get a long strip and wrap it carefully inserting it into the bottle then causes a collapse!  I have, in the past, achieved a couple of specimens with the perfect appearance, but not on this occasion.  They still look pretty though and after a week or two for the flavours to develop this oil will be delicious for dipping and drizzling (at a fraction of the cost of commercially prepared flavoured oil).

Having bottled up my oil I was left with two juicy lemons in the fridge shivering in their underwear.  I know, from sad experience, that they won't last very long in that condition; mould will soon attack.  So yesterday, inspired by my friend G, I decided that lemon curd had to be made.  The recipe I found on the BBC website specified four lemons (juice and zest).  I decided that three and a half lemons, two of which had already been plundered for their zest, would have to do. 

I hadn't made lemon curd for years and it really is remarkably easy.  The whole process probably only took just over half an hour.  Unless you are making it as gifts this really isn't worth making in huge batches as the presence of eggs and butter mean that it won't keep for more than a month or two.

Not content with two uses for my lemons, I bagged up the squeezed shells and popped them in the freezer.  I will thaw out a few next time I'm roasting a chicken.  They still retain enough juiciness to anoint the chicken flesh and I tuck one into the body cavity and leave another to roast in the tin, giving a delicious lemony tang to the finished chicken. (Or maybe try Sara's lovely idea for Gin and Tonic Marmalade.)

when life gives you raspberries...

We went to Stratford again at the weekend. Not to see a play this time, but to look after a little grand-daughter so Hannah could go to a wedding and Felix could work.

We had fun looking after the little lady and Stratford upon Avon had laid on a food festival for us! I stocked up with some spices and we bought lovely fat olives and sinus-busting wasabi peanuts as well as good breads and posh pork pies. In the regular farmers’ market Felix bought fabulous mushrooms for a risotto and I found “jamming raspberries” on special offer.

So this morning, back in Bristol, I got out the maslin pan and bubbled up a load of raspberry jam. Scrumptious!

down to the sticks, up to the smoke

We’ve been having some very nice times in two separate and contrasting trips.

First we had a weekend trip to Devon, starting last Friday on Steve’s birthday when we went down to visit some special friends. We were joined by another set of friends from Oxford and hooked up with others locally the following day to celebrate two birthdays at the newly-opened River Cottage Canteen in Plymouth.

It was a fab weekend of country walks, generous meals, sea views, laughter, conversation and friendship.

After a brief return to Bristol for Monday childcare fun, we were off again on a very different jaunt in the opposite direction. One thing I miss about our previous location in Oxfordshire is the easy access to London –we just don’t get there very often these days.

Our train journey on Tuesday was very badly delayed by signalling problems, but we did eventually manage to get to the Royal Academy to see David Hockney’s wonderful new exhibition, A Bigger Picture

The blast of colour in these paintings of the Yorkshire landscape is a real feast for the senses. Hockney clearly works very quickly and some of the paintings seem almost slapdash and crude, but then you catch a touch of extraordinary subtlety and grace that renders the landscape totally recognisable. It seems to me that David Hockney has spent his career looking, looking and looking and then showing what he sees so that we in turn are forced to look and see.

Wednesday’s visit to Grayson Perry’s Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum was a last minute addition to the schedule, but as is so often the case, it was the thing that made the trip for me.

It’s funny, thoughtful, touching and extremely skilful - combining work from the BM collection with Perry’s own work. I came away with the hardback catalogue as an early birthday present because I want to be reminded of his words and ideas as much as the artefacts.

Somehow I had managed never to visit the British Museum before and we were very impressed by Foster & Partners’ stunning airy treatment of the Great Court.

All in all a lovely week in the life of the newly retired!

Note: While I have been putting this blog post together, Steve has done a David Hockney on me and blasted out a quick, stream-of-consciousness perfectly judged review of the two shows, which captures them perfectly.

Photo credits: Devon photos - Steve; exhibition photos from RA and BM websites.

I love local

I love living in this area. Thursday afternoons are veg box delivery day at the Southville Centre. Leigh Court Farm is just on the outskirts of Bristol. Minimal food miles for this lovely bag of vegetables. I’m afraid I’m such a neglectful blogger that I had already used leeks and potatoes before I remembered to take a photo.

In addition to the veg boxes, someone from Mark’s Bread always pedals up from North Street on the bread delivery tricyle on Thursday afternoon to sell lovely artisan bread.

Yum.

garden gloom

I have resisted writing this blog post for quite a long time because it is so negative. Back in April I blogged enthusiastically about the garden and everything I’d got set up to produce food this year. Sadly, as all real gardeners know, growing things doesn’t always turn out like you hope. This year was particularly disastrous.

The herb garden wasn’t too bad, though none of the stuff that I started from seed this year came to anything. We had a few micro salads from our wall-mounted gutters, but they got very badly slug and snail infested and were very difficult to keep going.

We tried potatoes in bags again and the yield was even less worth the effort than in previous years. In fact I had to empty two bags (eight potato plants) to get enough for one meal!

We had about ten beans in all from the dwarf bean plants (the pots were better than the ones in the ground) and none of the peas made it past germination. The broad beans were pretty, but not prolific.

Most of the tomato plants drowned when we had torrential rain just after I’d put them out. I was then given three plants and this is what they produced!

We knew that the fruit probably wouldn’t really get going this year, but all the putative apples dried out and dropped off at a pretty early stage, there wasn’t enough rhubarb to pick and neither did the gooseberry or blackcurrants produce fruit.

Really the only modest success was the garlic which kept us going for a week or two.

I’ve even managed to make a disaster of the wormery compost which was just vile and I’ve had to start again, but am not convinced that it’s working any better. I thought wormeries were supposed to be easy to run!

This year’s winners were the nasturtiums which self-seeded from last year and simply took over the whole darn lot. I kept yanking them out, but finally gave up when everything else failed and let them run riot.

Finally two weeks ago Steve declared war on them and pulled them all out. The garden now looks bleak and unattractive, but I need to start thinking about next year and what might actually work.
This is a bit of a misery memoir, but I have a little bit of distance now from the really deep disappointment of getting so little reward for the effort (and money) I put in. I’ve got a lot of hopes pinned on the fruit to get going next year and I think I might move some of the herbs into the raised bed. I definitely won’t be growing from seed next year – it’s too heart-breaking when it all goes wrong.

childcare and more domestic goddessry

Today was a childcare day and as Steve was playing golf with friends I was holding the fort alone!

This child is obsessed by scissors. Given the chance she will spend the entire day snipping little pieces of paper from bigger pieces of paper. She hasn't got a great deal of control yet (especially given that she consistently uses her left hand and the scissors are all right-handed), but making a series of diagonal cuts and then trimming them off seems to hit the spot at the moment. Papercut artwork is everywhere at the moment so perhaps she's picking up the cultural trend?

There's quite a lot of picking up to do afterwards.

Luckily for my sanity she still has a lovely long nap in the afternoon, so I busied myself making mincemeat. It's probably obvious that I love all the heavily-fruited, spicy mixtures that feature in so many of the traditional Christmas foods, but I haven't previously felt it was worth the effort to make mincemeat. This is a non-traditional recipe, however, with no suet and heavy on cranberries and apple as well as the vine fruits. Looking forward to some mince pies now!

Now we have that very rare thing, a good telly evening - University Challenge, Only Connect and The Choir - and probably a bit of knitting.

breakfast

I love breakfast. I wake hungry and could never skip breakfast. I really like the fact that these days people go out for breakfast, meet for breakfast, linger over breakfast. Personally I'm not a fan of the Full English which leaves me feeling stodgy and bloated all morning. Most mornings I make myself a modest bowl of porridge with raisins and a banana, or a couple of weetabix with skimmed milk and a banana (heated in the microwave until the milk is hot and the banana takes on a squidgy sweetness). Today I decided to give my breakfast a little more attention. I had been talking with a friend about mindfulness, so today I made and ate my breakfast mindfully. I had a small bowl of lightly spiced apricots with vanilla yogurt and two slices of wholemeal toast with apricot conserve. To draw it all together and make it a minor feast for the senses and the mind I made myself a pot of spicy chai - fragrant with the scents of cinnamon and cardomom. I enjoyed the gentle pace and the flavours and the aroma and the fact that the spices in the tea echoed the spices in the apricots and yogurt and the apricots were repeated in the conserve. A little piece of culinary poetry to start the day!

star chart - final instalment

Here's the update on the rest of my 50 before 60 manifesto:
33. Continue to explore faith and doubt with my spiritual director: still doing this regularly; in fact I saw her today.
34. Do work filing once a month instead of a marathon when life becomes impossible: have definitely got better at this, but there's a bit of a pile at the moment - this is a good reminder.
35. Make a simnel cake: Yes, did this and reported on it here.
36. Go to cinema once a month: started well on this, but have lapsed of late. There hasn’t been much that appealed to me and there’s no point just going for the sake of it.
37. Finish my "cortona" quilt: I’ve been working on this.
39. Make a range of "earth friendly" cotton shopping bags for the Arts Trail: Yes, did this – reported here.
41. Have a pedicure: this didn’t turn out quite as planned, but Ruth suggested that we should have mutual footcare evenings. She’s having difficulty reaching her feet because of advanced pregnancy and I struggle too because of stiff joints and avoirdupois, so it’s worked out well and means that my feet are getting regular treatment rather than just a one-off.
42. Write up detailed job notes for my successor at work: not started this, but have started talking and planning for the changeover.
48. Reawaken my interest in wildflowers and foster my granddaughter’s existing interest in flowers by teaching her the names of wildflowers and collecting some to press: we have done a little bit of this and started a scrap book.

star chart two

OK, here's the second instalment of my 50 before 60 progress:

15. Increase loft insulation: this is definitely on the shopping list.

16. Grow some vegetables and herbs: YES! This has been a great experience and we are eating salad leaves from the garden and strawberries and generally watching everything get green and lovely.
17. Take part in Earth Abbey’s GrowZone: I reported on this in May. It was just brilliant and such a great kick-start for the garden. It also means that I’m not being too discouraged by the things that are failing. Quite a number of things have just been demolished by pests and in the past I would just have gone – oh, I can’t do that then, but the group is providing encouragement to put that down to experience and plan for the next harvest.
18. Start a wormery: not done yet, but I have talked to one son-in-law about creating one and am also hoping to do a permaculture course in the autumn which includes stuff about creating wormeries.
19. Make bread once a week: I’m not up to speed on this one, largely because the bread I was making with the Magimix wasn’t turning out that well. A hand-kneaded loaf last week was great, so I’ll have to do a few more of those.
20. Take grandchildren on the miniature railway at Ashton Court: not yet, but maybe when Alice comes down with Dan in August.
22. Read two books a month: This I have achieved quite easily and have very much enjoyed giving myself permission to read lots. I have been recording titles and authors and already looking back can’t remember some of the books I’ve read. Does this mean they were unmemorable, that my memory is bad, or that I should be writing "book notes" as well?
23. One book in five to be a challenge of some kind – maybe a non-fiction book or a classic I’ve never got round to: I’m just about achieving this, but as I said in no. 9 I struggle with anything that isn’t a "story".
26. Conquer lace knitting: this is on my needles at the moment and I’m loving it.

Decided to start with a straightforward rectangular shape rather than the triangular shawl with complicated stitch markers that I was trying last year.
27. Use the screen printing equipment I bought two years ago: well I’ve got it out of the box and used it, but can’t claim to have done anything very special.

simnel cake

As planned, I made a simnel cake for our Easter celebrations. I haven't made one for years and was pleased with the result from this Good Housekeeping recipe. I cheated with ready-made marzipan which had been in the freezer since Christmas and was probably the inspiration for the whole thing. It was rather a lurid yellow, but after toasting under the grill that didn't really matter. The layer of marzipan in the middle of the cake stayed in the right place during baking and provided a delicious layer of unctuous, almondy stickiness. As I had been off cake, biscuits and puds for lent this was quite special for me! (It has all been eaten.)

25 random things

The 25 random things meme has been tagging its way around facebook for a while now. After I had been tagged twice I thought I'd better give it a go. It turned out to be easier than I thought as one idea led to another. Then I remembered that last summer I had been tagged here on blogger by Just Gai to come up with six things about me and ducked it. So, in the spirit of re-use, recyle, reduce (well maybe not reduce) I am reproducing my list of 25 here. I haven't got a huge blog circle, but I think I may tag a couple of people whose blogs I read, but don't know in person.

1. I had a very bad squint as a small child. As a result I never developed binocular vision. I had four operations to correct the squint when I was 5, 6, 7 & 8. I am very grateful that something could be done for my eyesight as reading and needlework are such an important part of my life.
2. I’ve always been a bookworm. When I was a child my friends used to hide their comics before I went round to play!
3. Being a mother to our three lovely daughters has been my best achievement.
4. I grew up in a nominally christian family and made my own commitment to christian faith at the age of 15. Since then my faith has taken a variety of different forms, but has never completely deserted me. I wrestle continuously with faith and doubt. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think the whole thing is barking mad, but at others it is a source of great comfort.
5. I have a very sweet tooth and can easily eat condensed milk straight from the can with a spoon.
6. I’m very untidy. I think this is because my mind is dashing on to the next activity before I’ve finished what I’m doing.
7. I wish I had carried on with A level maths. I was talked out of it because I was planning to apply to study French at University.
8. I’m frightened of old age. My father had dementia and my mother had a neurological condition that robbed her of language relatively young. Equally, I have no desire to die young – I’m too interested in finding out what my children and grandchildren are getting up to. I aspire to being a healthy and still intelligent old woman like my maternal grandmother who lived until she was 101.
9. I am completely uninterested in sport of all descriptions, especially team games.
10. I did actually once win a race. It was a three-legged race with my best friend at primary school. We disproved the theory that you need to be well matched in size to do well at this event. I was a good deal smaller than her in both height and weight. Neither of us was particularly athletic, but we did practise. I tucked myself in under her armpit and we had practised starting together on the middle leg and staying in stride; so we powered up the track while all the athletic, well-matched pairs who had been winning the individual sprint races tripped over each other’s feet and fell over and shouted at each other.
11. My mother taught me dressmaking when I was fairly young and I made a lot of my own clothes during my teenage years. We used my grandmother’s old hand powered sewing machine which stitched everything so tightly that it couldn’t be undone.
12. I love all textile pursuits. I learned to knit when I was about six and a lovely neighbour, called Mrs Turner, taught me to crochet a couple of years later. I got to know her because she had a lovely mongrel dog called Sally and I wanted to be allowed to take her for walks.
13. Discovering the world of contemporary embroidery and textile art in the early nineties was a real epiphany for me. In a family where I was intimidated by the considerable drawing talents of my husband and daughters it was wonderful to discover my own means of expression.
14. We used to visit my grandmother every Tuesday. When I was little I used to get bored with adult conversation over the lunch table and I disappeared into my own dark mysterious world under the chenille tablecloth. This is where I first smelled real coffee brewing in Gran’s spirit-burner Cona machine. Although I love coffee I have always thought that the smell is better than the taste.
15. I love the sight of allotments on the edges of towns and villages, there’s something very appealing about their tumble-down, messy orderliness and the evidence of so much industry.
16. I was born and grew up in Lichfield, Staffordshire, which is pretty much as far from the sea as you can get in any direction in England.
17. Over the past 37 years I have accumulated almost enough credits for an Open University degree. When I retire I’ll give it one last push and finish it!
18. I love crosswords and sudoku.
19. When I was 11 I wanted to be a vet. Thank GOODNESS I got talked out of it!
20. I need to spend time alone. I’m an introvert and naturally cautious, but nevertheless I love spending time with larger-than-life, try-anything-once friends.
21. People think I’m calm and serene, but they can’t see my feet paddling under the surface.
22. Steve and I will have been together for 40 years in October this year. On the face of it we don’t seem very compatible (if you compare his 25 things with mine!), but we have shared values and the differences in our personalities complement each other. Clearly, love conquers all!
23. I used to collect and press wild flowers with my mother. It’s something I would like to do with my grand-daughter.
24. I am living proof of the theory that "Dieting Makes you Fat". Despite numerous and frequent diet regimes I have managed to gain at least a stone in each decade of my adult life. This is not something I am proud of.
25. Self-deprecation comes to me as naturally as breathing and I have had to make a real effort not to make this list a litany of my faults and failings.

I'm tagging:

Flutter-by

Poshyarns

Roobeedoo

photo-montage of me aged about 3, 16 and 18

marmalade

Just look at this gorgeous amber confection! I've made 18 jars of it. Bet Steve eats his way through it in about four months.

whose grand-daughter would line up her satsuma like this?

Little Miss Low had two satsumas for lunch today. The first one she lined up with the sections all facing the same way. The second one was lined up like this, with the sections arranged around a central point of symmetry. Given that Mr B recently blogged about his obsessive list-making, I think that something genetic could be going on.
She also insisted that all the "ends" be pulled off because "I don't like to eat them".