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My sourdough journey… 

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really know why, but one day I just woke up with a burning urge to make sourdough. Now this is not something that one can just make with a little bit piff paff poof and a click of the heels and have ready by lunchtime.

There is some magic involved yes, but also some considerable time and a truck load patience, which is not shall we say, a great virtue of mine.

So I plan to detail my sourdough journey, the ups and the downs and hopefully we will finish up with a delightful loaf, as good as the one we ate on the pier in San Francisco.

To start…

You need a ‘starter’. Sourdough utilises the natural yeasts in your own environment, so you will have different flavours and qualities to the bread depending on where and even when it is made.

Google is fantastic, I honestly don’t know how we would live without it these days, but it can also be a minefield. Talk about a kid in a sweet shop! If you type in how to make sourdough, there are literally thousands of pages on there, all with very slightly different pieces of advice.

In the end, I decided to go with Mr Paul Hollywood (I bow to you Sir) and his starter recipe which included 250g of strong white flour, 250ml of water and six organic grapes! As weird as it sounded, I actually had just a few grapes left in my fruit bowl from a trip to the farm shop earlier that week.

An American friend bought me cup measures last year, and I must confess they have been very useful when following recipes from outside of the UK.

So on Monday, I used one cup of water and one cup of strong white flour for equal measures and mixed well in a kilner jar with the six grapes cut into pieces.

I will confess, I sat and watched it for a while, very much like watching Yorkshire pudding is when you first put them in the oven and expecting them to do something incredible like somersaults all backflips or the like. Nowt.

Tuesday: The next morning, the starter had grown slightly and was a little bubbly so I was over the moon and triumphantly added again another cup of water and another cup of flour before heading off to work.

When I returned, the picture was different! The whole thing had separated and when opening the lid, smelt absolutely rancid.

Now I know that sometimes things can smell a little ripe when they are going through a natural fermentation process, if you have ever smelt rotting cocoa beans you will know what I mean. But my goodness. Sweaty feet, paint stripper and hangover breath all rolled into one.

Bleurgh.

Anyway, I duly fed the starter again with this time half a cup of flour and half cup of water and mixed it all together in the hope that it would sort itself out overnight.

Wrong.

Wednesday: The next morning, it had separated again and the grapes looked decidedly disgusting. I poured the separated grapes yuk off and added more flour and water and decided to check out some sourdough forums and hopefully find some advice from an expert.

My prayers were answered and I found a lovely American gentleman who had clearly been making sourdough for years and took one look at my photos and told me the mix was far too runny and would never be able to hold up the bubbles in the day. He said to remove three quarters of it and feed with an equal weight measure, NOT volume measure of water and flour which I duly did. It immediately looked 1 million times better!

12 hours later, and I am pleased to report that I had something that resembles the pictures that I know I am aiming for!


‘Artem’ as he has become known, grew again and again over the next 24 hours. I separated half out into another Kilner jar and fed one with white strong flower and the other with brown. I don’t know why really but I am a devil for not wanting to waste things and I thought it would be fun to try a slightly different slant.

Last night I fed him just before bed and came down this morning to a fantastic looking jar of bubbly stretchy holey perfection, all ready to create my very first sourdough loaf.

The starter now smelt almost like a very rich young beer. The funny thing is, when I think back to when I fed the starter last, darling husband was making beer in the kitchen so I do wonder if it has sucked up some of the yeast from the air? That would be a very happy accident indeed.

Here is the recipe and method I used for my first loaf, which is an amalgamation of perhaps a dozen that I have read on tinterweb. Apparently there is no wrong or right and one must use their intuition to create great sourdough.

Ingredients:

ALL BY WEIGHT NOT VOLUME

150g starter

500g strong white flour

250g water

25g olive oil

10g good quality fine sea salt

Method:

Combine all of the above except for the salt using a kitchen aid with dough hook. It should only take a minute or two.

Allow this to rest for half an hour.

Remove the dough and knead in the salt on a non floured surface using the slap and fold method for five minutes.

Grease a glass bowl with the lightest brushing of good quality olive oil and place your dough into this. Cover with clingfilm and a clean tea towel and place in the airing cupboard in the winter or leave at room temperature in the summer.

Leave for 6 to 8 hours, returning to it on three occasions to stretch and fold the dough four times by pulling it towards you and folding in half, doing a quarter turn and the same thing again, and repeating so that you have four folds. This part of the process is known as bulk fermentation.

When it has doubled in size, turn out onto a non-floured surface and stretch and fold for another five minutes or so.

Fold over onto its self and then flip 180° so that you have a perfectly round ball and all your folds are underneath.

Place into a Dutch oven, I am using a terracotta roaster. On the bottom of the pot, I put a very light dusting of cornmeal to stop it from sticking.

Allow to rise again for a second time in the pan, in the same place as it was previously. This time I left it for around 2 1/2 hours until he had doubled in size.

In the meantime, turn your oven on in advance as high as it will go, my maximum is 220. When the time is right, slit the bread across the top with a sharp knife or blade
and place the the pan with the lid on on the lower shelf of the oven for half an hour. After this time, carefully remove the lid and cook for a further half an hour so that you get a great colour and a really good crunchy crust. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly before turning out onto a wire rack.

It will need to cool for at least an hour before you can cut it. But when you do… All I will say is, there is a high chance you will re-enact that scene from when Harry met Sally. Enjoy!

Oh, and it makes the very best toast in the world! Kind of a cross between the best Farmhouse loaf you have ever had and a crumpet if you can imagine that… it’s great fresh for a couple of days but toasted was good for 4 or 5.

I’m absolutely itching to make my next loaf, but I will have to limit myself I think to 1 a week in this house for fear of turning into the stay puff marshmallow man if I baked it any more than that.

Good luck, do have a go, and please share your journey and results! TTFN x

My Christmas best bits…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

Well that is another year done and dusted and we see ourselves starting this new one afresh in our little home. My one main aim for last year was to grow enough vegetables to keep the pair of us going through the summer and to feed the whole family for Christmas. My other aim was to have our living room all decorated and homely and ready to welcome everyone here. Happily, I managed both.

December was a busy month, making up and delivering all my little hampers of the goodies I’ve been busy stockpiling over the summer and autumn months. This year’s bumper selection included courgette chutney (which I must say everyone turns their nose up at until they try it and realise it is in fact absolutely and completely delicious!), apple chutney, summer BBQ relish, blackberry jam, jumbleberry jam, plum jam, apricot jam, pickled onions, sweet chilli sauce, blackberry spiced Christmas vodka, mince pie vodka, and my raspberry and jumbleberry gins. I have already had repeat orders for the sweet chilli sauce which seems to be everyone’s favourite and already the first photos text to me of empty jars of this and my pickled onions.

empty

I made a fabulous Christmas wreath for my front door with holly from my hedges and oranges that I’d dehydrated from my mulled vodka. It not only looks, but smells amazing when you walk past! I had a little help from a lovely lady at the Cambridge flower school as I wasn’t sure quite where to start and there seem several ways to make a base, but I must say I do like the old school moss method and it has lasted a good four weeks. I will admit to having an urge to make another dozen of them and flounce off to the local farmer’s market but honestly there are just not enough hours in the day. I loved doing it and next year I am already planning to get a few friends around and turn my kitchen into wreath heaven so we can all have a girlie afternoon making them together.

My mince pies were as plentiful as ever, all the better for the homemade mincemeat. They were washed down with a little tot of mince pie vodka, which folk were not quite sure how to take to start with, so they seemed to keep trying it, over and over again 😉

Christmas here was a busy affair, with family travelling from the other side of the country to spend the festive period with us. I achieved that goal with  my Christmas veg, and as an added bonus, because of the mildness of the climate, I was actually able to dig it all up on Christmas eve. There was much oooh-ing and aaaah-ing when it was scrubbed up and brought into the kitchen. The parsnips and carrots weren’t pretty I’ll admit, as well as being an absolute bugger to peel, but they were the best I have ever tasted and I felt a real warm fuzzy feeling of pride inside as I carried the dishes through to the table to feed everyone. So I guess that this will be my annual thing now, and maybe I can add to it next year? Better get the old thinking cap on.

veg

The gammon from the farmshop proved a total hit, having been cooking in my leftover mulled wine for a full twelve hours on Christmas Day. The flavour perfuses the gammon so well and it is moist and tender and literally falls apart. This could not be any more simpler of a recipe, and I emplore you to try it – the ‘recipe’ (for it can only loosely be termed a ‘recipe’, I feel the word ‘instruction’ more appropriate on account of it’s overwhelming simplicity) can be found right here.

And then there were the dogs… my four, one visiting, plus the two next door. They couldn’t be left out so I boiled up the turkey giblets and made them some Christmas doggy biscuits of their own. To be honest, these have been such a huge hit and they go so nuts for them that I’ve already made three batches, and handed out the recipe to countless people. In fact, I’m about to bake a loaf of bread for us and another batch of biccies for the bears right now…

I’ve already started planning my vegetable garden for next year – a day was spent over New Year digging and adding soil improver… I shall plant seeds on my windowsill from next month and am most excited about trying a variety of coloured sweetcorn that I picked up in Italy in the autumn. On the list we have courgettes (but of course!), leeks, tomatoes (trying again as last year was such a disaster with them all stubbornly remaining green), broad beans, mange tout, spring onions, parsnips, carrots and of course some super spuds. I think I’ve decided to leave the broccoli and cabbages as they were a bit of a flop, coming up blind and taking up a lot of valuable space. And I can buy them for 60p from the little cart at the end of my road from someone who knows far better than me how to do these things.

So goodbye Christmas, and goodbye 2015. Thankyou for the sunshine and the harvest, and the happiness we have enjoyed in our new home. Here’s to 2016 being another fruitful one filled with laughter and fun for everyone.

TTFN, I’m off to bake a loaf in my new bread tin (thankyou Santa Claus!) x

xmas

Keep it in the family…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

In September last year, my beloved grandfather passed away. I felt like my world had broken into a million tiny pieces.

One of the things that I had to do which I found desperately difficult was to clear out his home. Both of my grandparents were huge advocates of recycling and repurposing things, I actually spent much of my childhood trawling jumble and car boot sales with them. Clearly this is a habit that stays with you. My mother is an addict too.

So when it came to working out what to do with their old furniture, I knew that I just had to keep some of the classic pieces in the family. Nothing expensive or flashy, just things that always remind me of sitting in their front room.

What I really didn’t want to do was rush into anything and get it wrong so my mum kindly looked after their old dresser, some shelves and my grandad’s old armchair in her garage until I moved into my new home in March of this year.

Having lived in the house for a few months and decided how it ‘felt’ and therefore how we were going to decorate, I found the most wonderful little family firm of upholsterers in Huntington who were so kind to me when I took grandads chair up to them. They spent ages talking through things with me so that we got it absolutely right. I chose a very classic fabric, kind of like Rupert the Bear trousers. They sanded and waxed the legs of the chair too and when I collected it, I was brought to tears by just how beautiful it was. 

 

A very strange thing happened the night that we bought the chair home, my three-year-old collie came running into the room where the chair was and stood there wagging and barking at it as if someone was sat there. She then disappeared off to collect her tennis ball and brought it back and put it in the seat of the chair, just as she used to do when my grandad came to visit. I definitely think animals have a sixth sense and I don’t know why but I have had an enormous sense of calm and peace arrive with me now that seems to have come with my lovely old armchair. One or other of us sits in it every day and we will treasure it for ever and ever.

  

The next thing to deal with was the dresser. I knew that I wanted to sand and paint it – I went on a course earlier this year to learn how to do just that. It’s become rather an addiction and I have several pieces around the house bought for pennies and given a coat or three of paint that I just love. 

So I started the dresser about six weeks ago, first removing the top from the base. Then I sanded the top of the base and waxed it with three coats of old antique pine Briwax. 

   
 
   
 
I had to take all of the doors off and the handles off of the doors and drawers. Then everything had four coats of vintage chalk paint. The key here is to allow every coat to dry and with each one taking approximately three hours due to their being so many nooks and crannies, it was one coat a week for a month. Then it was two coats of wax over the entire thing and some handsome new handles for the doors and drawers. The shelves had the same treatment. Both were done in the colour ‘linen’.

The dresser is absolutely transformed and I think looks incredible in my living room. But it’s not just that for me, I could’ve bought this from any shop and it wouldn’t mean what it means to me ❤️

  
Everytime I look at it, it reminds me of my grandparents home and the warmth and happiness I felt there. I’m so pleased to have been able to give all of these things a completely new lease of life and keep them in the family where they will stay for my lifetime.

  

It’s so nice to have a room finally finished, the dresser was completed the day hubby finished painting the living room. The whole thing was a labour of love but I’m sooooo happy with how it’s all turned out.

Now to cover it all in Christmas decorations! 

TTFN x

The enormous parsnip…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

Once upon a time in a land far far away, there was a woman who lived in a little white farmhouse with her four hairy dogs and her husband. She dreamed of a simpler life where she grew her own organic food in the fields where farmers had grown things for centuries gone by.

The first year that she tried, she grew vegetables with lots of sunshine and lots of rain and there were some that were too small… (there were some very tiny carrots) but there were some that grew too big… and herein lies the story of the enormous parsnip!

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, you’ll know that amongst other things, I’m aiming to grow most of the things for my family for Christmas dinner. This weekend saw our (quite late) first frost and so I decided that I would have a little trial run and cook a big roast on Sunday. I dug up some carrots and some potatoes and some leeks, and cut some sage to make the stuffing. But then I tried to pull up the parsnip with the largest leaves and my goodness, I’ve never seen such a creature!

Do you remember reading the Enormous Turnip at school? About a farmer and his wife who had a bad year but then they grew unfeasibly large turnip big enough to feed the whole family and their animals? And how they had to all bend down and hold onto one another’s waists to try and pull harder. Well that was us. We were in fits and yes I did fall over at one point. It took us a good fifteen minutes and we literally had to dig it out from around the sides leaving a crater the size of a small sink hole.

He measured almost a foot tall, and fed us for two meals, with leftovers! He also looks a bit like a ballroom dancer in the photo above having a jig on the worktop with his little legs and tuft of hair. And oh my goodness the flavour – literally out of this world. The taste I am sure is magnified a hundred times over when something is in your oven within twenty minutes of leaving the ground. I so love this way of living and these were just from a 50p seed packet all those months ago. Definitely one of my most successful plantings.

Between all the veg and my yorkshire pudding (necessary with every roast in this house, not just beef) made with fresh eggs from the girls next door, I’m truly not doing badly in my quest for organic freshness here. My organic free range turkey and sausagemeat for December 25th will come from the butcher at the little farmshop in the village and then I think that is pretty much me done. It does baffle me when you see photos of people going mad with two over sized trollies laden with ridiculous amounts of food wrapped in shiny paper panic buying in the supermarket – honestly – it’s not the apocolypse – it’s a big roast dinner with family where the shops just shut for 24 hours!

Roll on Christmas Day! In the meantime, it’s time to get up some decorations and I’m off on a Christmas wreath making course next week – we are surrounded by holly hedges and I thought it would be nice to make wreaths for the doors here with everything from our own land!

TTFN x

Olden but golden…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

While visiting my best friend who now lives in a little farmhouse in Puglia in Italy, we wandered around her vineyard one afternoon in the muted sunshine where she squealed and said to me “tell me what this tree is, hubby says it’s some kind of an Italian apple but they taste awful!” – I very confidently wrinkled my brow and said “my dear I am excited to tell you, I think you have your very own quince!” So we picked some apples and some quince and trundled back to the house, gossiping about life, the universe and Everything.

Then we drank mulled wine and made chutney from things she had lying around in the cupboard so we added some onions, ginger, garlic, chillies, salt, sugar, vinegar and bubbled it all away for an hour or two. I have never actually chutney-ed quince before and it did take rather a long time to cook down but the smell was fantastic and in a month or three, I am sure she and her family are going to enjoy a fantastic reward as they pop open a jar of home-made chutney, cobbled together with fresh produce from their very own land.

For years at home, I have scoured farmshops and country roads looking for these beautiful fruits. Some years back, on a long weekend in Edinburgh, we visited a fantastic Italian deli where we bought fresh cheeses and Artisan bread and membrillo, the Spanish version of ye olde quince ‘cheese’. We sat in a park and played frisbee on a sunny day and it will remain to me as one of those happy days you always remember. I’ve never found it to buy anywhere ‘darn sarf’ since, so vowed to make it myself if and when I could locate the main ingredient.

Then magically, an enormous Waitrose carrier bag of the largest quince I have ever seen appeared on my doorstep two days after I returned from Italy. I honestly couldn’t believe my luck. My next door neighbour had ‘procured’ them for me from another villager with a huge tree bursting at the seams. So I started to scour the Internet for an appropriate recipe.

quince

It turns out, there is not much involved in the old recipe at all. There are many newer incarnations of the original but I decided to go with the most basic. Many recipes describe pouring the mixture into a greased baking sheet then drying out in the oven, turning out, covering with a dusting of sugar and slicing into squares before storing. This is how I had the membrillo in Edinburgh, however I decided to pop mine into jars so that it would make storage and Christmas gifting all the easier.

I decided because of the original instructions to keep the skin on the fruit as well as all of the cores present during the initial cooking phase. As with apples, there is a large amount of pectin contained within these bits which we often discard at the off, and they will actually help the jelly to set without having to add any further pectin. And quite frankly I learned in Italy that these lovely fragrant souls are indeed the devil’s own work to peel so I am grateful not to have to. They are also incredibly hard even when ripe so use a sharp knife and keep your fingers well out of the way.

Basically there are only the following three ingredients: quince, sugar and water.

I scrubbed the fruit clean with a nail brush then roughly chopped, skin and cores and all. Quickly everything was submerged in a large stockpot with enough water to just cover. I do not need to give you a weight of quince as this is something you make with whatever you have and the recipe is totally adapted depending on your haul.

The next thing is to bring to the boil and leave on a medium heat to simmer gently for around 40 to 50 minutes until the fruit is completely soft and tender. Let it cool slightly before attacking gently with a potato masher to help the process along. Then place a fine metal sieve over a large jug and using a ladle, transfer several spoonfuls into the sieve and gently push through. You will end up with just liquid and a very small amount of quite fine pulp running through. The rest of the fruit will need to be discarded. Repeat until all of your cooked fruit has been sieved.

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Measure the amount of fruit pulp you have ended up with in your jug and transfer to a large preserving pan. Then for every 150ml of this, add 100g of white granulated sugar. In this instance I had 2 litres of fruit pulp therefore I divided by 3 and multiplied by 2 to get the correct proportion which in this case is 1.66kg of sugar. Bring gently to the boil and simmer for around 45 minutes. The smell that engulfs your house is something quite spectacular and the colour changes to that of a blood orange. Complete magic and I found myself wondering if this was the first time this had been made in my almost 400-year-old farmhouse kitchen…

Allow to cool very slightly for around 10 minutes before using your clean ladle and a jam funnel to transfer into clean sterilised jars. After a few hours the jelly will be cooled and completely set. I have read that you need to leave this a month or two before you eat it but I will confess we tried it the next day with some bitter Parmesan and it was out of this world spectacular and every bit as good as the one we had in Edinburgh all those years ago. Traditionally in Spain, you would enjoy it with manchego.

It goes to show that sometimes nothing fancy is needed, just let good ingredients do the talking. Another fantastic example of preserving the season’s harvest and another dozen jars for me to store lol. My Christmas hampers are going to be bursting at the seams. Christmas… Eek! So excited already! 😉

Juggling and the final fanfare…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

Well I’m going to be honest, for me the last courgette of the season deserves as much of a fanfare as the first. 

Having been away to warmer climes for the last few weeks, I was honestly aghast to come home and find some small but perfectly formed courgettes still on the last couple of plants that I hadn’t yet uprooted before I went away. Bless them for making sure we had dinner for when we got back. 

  

I’ve come home with a few few ideas for recipes including the amazing Calabash salad, made for me by the kindest French chef I’ve ever met, the lovely Thierry. In the past, I’ve never been a favourite guest of similar culinary genii, you see on the whole I’ve found the vegetarian thing doesn’t go down terribly well. I was once served an empty plate at a swanky restaurant in Lille as the chef was so affronted that I’d dared to ask for a vegetarian option. Oops, I must not digress but please do check out my salad ideas on the recipe pages. Some folk baulk at the ‘S’ word but I promise these are all fabulous for veggies and meaties any time of year. 

Back to my little courgette friends. I still have a few onions here from the farm shop so I will pair them together tonight and roast in the oven with a mixture of herbs. Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that the onions you buy from supermarket don’t seem to make you cry like they used to? Yet the ones from my farm shop or out of my little allotment patch make me sob like I’m watching Bambii. 

One more digression, just a quick one… RASPBERRIES! I found some growing in the lawn months back so we cordoned the area off and my gosh they are unbelievable! Great big fat flavourful raspberries like I’ve never known. Trouble is they’re so good they never make it back to the house as I’ve always snaffled them before I’m back through the kitchen door. Sooooo good. 

  
So courgettes, onions, some of my own dried mint (halo) with some pearl barley and grilled halloumi. I know your mouth is watering already and you’re contemplating adding pearl barley to your Ocado list before you’ve finished reading… I’ll write it up properly when I’ve taken photos tonight and I think I’ll call it my courgette final fanfare warm salad… Too much of a mouthful? Oh dear. Pun-Dom.  

I have some homemade farmhouse bread proving from a new recipe and it should all be ready just in time for hubby when he arrives back. 

Oh how I love a cold dark evening curled up in front of the fire with the dogs and a blanket but I do miss the long summer nights where I could juggle barbecuing and digging in my veggie patch. I’m concentrating on teaching myself some rather fiddling knitting things now the evenings have drawn in… I’ll post my current journey once I’m complete but let’s just say the air has been rather blue and it’s all been almost thrown onto the aforementioned roaring log fire more than once. I never see Kirsty flap but she must do, she’s human too, even if she is the goddess of all things craft. 

  
Right, I’m off to juggle cooking my final fanfare courgettes, baking my bread, knitting, the fire, feeding the doglets (how do they know exactly what time it is to the minute?) and what feels like a gazillion other things. What is it they say? If you want something doing, ask a busy person? 

And breathe… TTFN X

Summer’s gone…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ 2 Comments

I really do have my sad face on today. Summer’s gone. Today is the start of autumn.

Yesterday I was sitting in my grandad’s armchair, under a knitted blanket, next to the roaring fire, drinking my first glass of mulled wine of the year. Picture it.

And all of my lovely vegetable plants are coming to the end of their life… So I’m going to pull them up today. It feels a bit like the last day of holiday, or the day before you go back to school so I’m going to have a little moment of reflection…

My courgettes were brilliant I have to say, although I am sure one of the plants was a marrow. They all need to come out now although I have two of the ten plants still holding on and squeezing out the last of their gifts. Will have to choose how I use those carefully. I always think the first and last courgettes of the year need some kind of ceremony. I have so much courgette chutney in the cupboard and soup in the freezer I don’t think we’ll go hungry this winter. And I shall plant my seeds (again) in March and be so excited (again) when the first one appears in July. Then hubby will get sick of them (again) by August and I’ll make chutney (again) in September.

Tomatoes were plentiful but mostly green so have had to ripen indoors on the windowsill. The taste is absolutely fantastic. There are still a few left on the plants so I might have a go at fried green tomatoes (at the Whistlestop Cafe) before the first frost comes to bite us on the bum. Onions are long gone, I wish I’d done more to be honest. Leeks are still doing their thing and so is the garlic. Butternut squash are taking over the whole place like triffids and have also invaded my next door neighbour’s plot. She has claimed squatter’s rights to any squash on her side.

Potatoes were fantastic, I’ve got some maris piper’s in now – I was hoping to make them last until Christmas but they are starting to yellow so I think they may get blanched and frozen for the big day. The carrots were a big surprise – I’d heard how hard they are to grow but they’ve been plentiful, although next year I will not use a whole packet in two rows as they’ve been far too close packed. We’ve been eating the thinnings each week but there are still loads. The parsnips also look fantastic still, I will confess to digging up a cheeky one with our last roast a few weeks ago and it was glorious. So hopefully we will have snippers, carrots and spuds for crimble.

On the not so positive front, my beetroots are still very small, the perpetual spinach leaves never got any bigger than the size of my little finger and the cucumbers flatly refused to do anything. Even the plants from the garden centre shrivelled up and died and I have no idea why, I’ve grown them perfectly well before in grow bags. I think perhaps my plot is too exposed for them. There is a lady at the end of my road with a huge polytunnel that grows ‘cukes’ (I’ve learnt from the allotmenteers that this is the term I should use) and then sells them from a little wooden cart outside her house for 25p so I am not going to get too upset, I shall just cheat and buy hers with the money from my piggybank.

I think now I need to dig in some muck and get some onions in to ‘over winter’ – am learning all these new words and terms lol.

But overall, great success I think especially for our first year properly at it. What with all my veg, top ups from the wooden cart down the road, and regular generous donations of eggs from the chooks next door, I’ve barely needed to buy anything except meat and staples like flour and butter from the local farmshop. I’ve not had to set foot in a supermarket for months now aside from sneaking in to buy bottles of cheap booze to make my sloe gin and my Christmas vodka.

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Happy days indeed. Just call us Tom & Barbara. x

The Village Show…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ 3 Comments

This morning I literally feel like I’m living on the set of the Vicar of Dibley.

I’ve been awake since 3.30am with the jitters, nervous because last night I took a brown paper envelope containing £2.10 to the local post office with my entry form and at 8am this morning, I dropped off my entries for the Village show into the marquee.

Once in my life, some years ago, I was convinced to enter my apple chutney in a village show which I proudly did. I make twenty jars each year and the whole family tell me how good it is so surely I would do well? Well no. Epic fail. Disqualified for having the wrong lid. Seriously. And that kind of put me off. Until now.

Moving to our lovely new home six months ago meant a total life change to one exchanging my LK Bennett’s for wellies and a life where a manicure now is scrubbing my hands in the bath with a nailbrush. I am the country mouse.

When I met some neighbours a few months ago (who are all absolutely delightful and the epitome of country living) they told me about the village show. We talked chutney and jam and knitting for hours and that was it, I decided I had to try again. They gave me the schedule and I must confess to getting very over excited at the great list of classes. I could have busied myself for months but in the end managed to restrain myself to just the seven entries. I am not promising anything for next year though, I might go all out and do twenty.

But it’s a minefield, seriously. I’ve heard of a chap being disqualified for having a label on his jam with a gingham border as it was specified that it should be plain.

I’ve been given a whole host of advice from local WI stallwarts which I am going to share with you here should you be brave enough to enter your own local show!

Victoria sponge

Must be 6oz each ingredient, maximum 8 inch tin. Must contain raspberry jam (preferrably home made) and must be dusted with caster sugar. Must NOT dust with icing sugar, must NOT contain strawberry or any other flavour jam. Must not contain cream or fruit. Must be served on a paper plate.

Jams

Must be sealed correctly with a wax disc (shiny side down), must be covered with sellophane NOT a jam jar lid. Must be correctly labelled with contents and full date that it was made. Use a plain label just incase your judges are super picky. Polish the jar before putting on the table as it must also be free of finger prints!!!

Chutney

This is where I went wrong before, not using the correct lid. Unfortunately I was so mortified at the time that I didn’t hang around to be hung, drawn and quartered by the local WI so fled at great speed. A little research with my close friend Mr Google tells me one must use a vinegar proof lid. So then I google what one of those is to be told that it is plastic coated, not metal. But I checked in Waitrose and the lid on the Branston pickle is metal. I remain totally confused and so have gone for a small kilner jar which has a glass lid and I think and hope (and pray) that I have made a safe choice there.

So I have entered a Victoria sponge. I realise I am absolutely mad as we all know this is the ultimate competition at these events. But in for a penny, in for a pound. I have made three other practice ones in the last seven days. Luckily my next door neighbour’s chickens have been keeping me in eggs. There was also a class for fruit scones, so I’ve done half a dozen to the same recipe I did for the wedding a few weeks ago as they were such a hit. I glazed them with eggs from next door which are so bright and golden it’s not true. I baked until 10pm last night. Ooooh and there was a class for muffins… So I had to enter my chocolate courgette ones didn’t I? That’s my little nod to the queen of baking that is Letitia Cropley on this fine day in Dibley.

LetitiaCropley

I made the raspberry jam a couple of weeks back for my victoria sponge, so I took literally hours to get the wax seal and sellophane on that right… It looks pretty good I think. I then have a jumbleberry jam, and the apricot jam that I made when I went to visit my mum last month and her friend gave me a huge box of windfalls from his garden. And then my chutney. The one that got disqualified before. If I’ve got the lid etiquette right, I hope I’m in with a bit of a shot with that at the very least. The cake in the glass dome was a reject although at 11pm last night my dear husband did tell me he thought it was the best he ever tasted.

jam

So there we go. I’ve done it. All eggs in the basket. All cards on the table.  I’m now sat here wishing I hadn’t snuck a non regulation doily onto the regulation white paper plate for fear that my hard work will be once again disqualified. I just can’t help myself but be a rule breaker. I did have a good nosey at the other entries at 8am this morning and there weren’t many in my classes but there were hoards arriving as we left. There was a penguin made from an aubergine, not sure what class he was in but he was definitely my favourite thing. I also saw some quite disturbing parsnips that were the size of a small child and a potato that looked like a submarine.

Cross everything. Let’s hope the judges are kind and I don’t get run out of town as I do kind of like it here.

TTFN x

Thinking of Winter in August? 

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

It might be crazy but I’m planning for winter already. As mad and crazy as the veg seems at the moment and as much as everyone seems to be moaning about their courgette glut, I love it because it means I can get making and get storing. I’ve already got a dozen jars of courgette chutney done and I shall do another batch at the weekend. 

I feel a bit like a size 14 5ft4 squirrel, fluffing around making my nest and hoarding my nuts away for the chilly winter weather. 

I absolutely love soups so today I’ve made one with a big bad boy of a courgette who got a little bit bigger than he should when we were away at the weekend. I know people who throw them away when they get like that but really there is no need. Just get soup-ing! 

All my soups work off the same basic formula. Main ingredient plus potato to thicken, onion to sharpen, stock and salt and pepper to season. Then a spoon of something creamy to lift it up a notch. This can be applied to any vegetable soup. 

If you want to see this one written out as a proper recipe, it’s all here for you. I’m good like that 😉 

This is literally a five minute job. I’m always amazed when people ask me how to make soups. So here goes:

Veg into pot with stock. Boil until you can get a knife through the spud and it’s all cooked. I had half an elephant garlic left over from last night’s meal so that went in too.

  
Then I always blend my soups, I’ve never been one for lumps. 

Ladle into your blender and whizz for thirty seconds ish until smooth.

  
Pop back into your saucepan and add the cream/yoghurt and season well. 

For a courgette soup I add a handful of strong grated cheddar and a pinch of nutmeg too. Taste and add more salt and pepper if needed. 

  
Serve straight away, allow to cool and keep for a few days in the fridge or pour into containers to freeze. I’m freezing several batches and find these elongated aluminium foil containers are just the right size for two portions. 

  
It’s so delicious and full of summer fresh flavours, I think I might just go and make another batch you know… 

Can’t think of anything more lovely to remind me of the summer sunshine and pottering in my veggie patch than to enjoy a bowl of this in the depths of winter. 

It’s September next week you know. Eek. X

Dry as a bone?

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

Following on from the apparent triumph and success of my ‘sun’ dried tomato effort last week, I decided that I would have a little experiment with the dehydrator and see what other magic could be made in the kitchen with a little hot air piff paff poof.

I’m a great one for fresh herbs, I have a herb garden just outside my kitchen and I grow mint, parsley, thyme, chives, sage & rosemary. I have coriander and basil indoors. And I use one or other of these cheeky little flavour enhancers on a daily basis in everything I cook. At the moment, they are in abundance (not quite the abundance of the courgettes thank goodness) and so fresh and flavourful, I wondered if I could capture it somehow for the winter. But there’s nothing much on tinterweb about herbs in a dehydrator so it was a little game of trial and error. Mostly, I won.

Here is my journey!

I decided to try all of the herbs in turn, my idea is to have them all in little pots to replace the ones from Mr Ocado for my own, and then make a one size fits all ‘dried mixed herbs’ blend of them all – because sometimes (and I’m thinking pasta sauces when I say this) a little bit of everything really does work. Well I say all, I fibbed a bit there as I am not bothering with the rosemary on account of it being so hardy it’s available from the garden all year round, come hell or high water.

I’ve already listed the herbs I have, so I picked handfuls of each, washed them well, and patted dry with kitchen paper. They all had a shelf each in the dehydrator, and I put them in at 70 degrees and had the machine whirring in the background of a busy kitchen afternoon.


  

The sage was the first to dry, which really surprised me. It only took around two hours. I tried numerous methods of crushing and getting it into a little pot but the best one was to crush by hand in the fingers into a bowl and then use a teaspoon to spoon into the little jar. They kept blocking up my mini funnel so that was a bit of a fail.

Next was the basil, at around 3 hours, I used the same method for this to crush and jar. It went down to almost nothing.
The parsley and mint came in at around the same time. Same methods employed as above.

The chives were around 4 hours and for these, I lined them up and snipped into a bowl then used the teaspoon into the jar method.

The thyme I felt was a bit woody and ended up a bit like a birds nest of twigs and wotnot so I’d probably avoid that one next time and stick to the others noted.

So that was it, literally nothing to it. No sorcery whatsoever. What is magic though is the way that the flavours are so strong and intense, and the colours so vivid.

I’ve already tried the chives in a potato salad (super good) and the rest in a spaghetti bolognese.

I’ve bought some gorgeous little jars so everyone will be getting a dried mixed herbs pot in the Christmas hampers this year.

Right, I’m off to have a go at drying bananas. Follow our blog to see how that turns out! 

Yum-tiddly-umptious. x