Tag: food

First Fruit

First Fruit

We’re finally in to the new house, starting to get settled. Things have been a little more difficult than we expected. The previous owner was a smoker, and also had a great big dog. This has meant that we’ve had an awful lot more cleaning to do than we anticipated. We’ve already cleaned the place once, and had the carpets shampooed, but the entire house is still covered in a layer of nicotine and dog hair. Quite disgusting, and I’m beginning to despair of ever getting rid of the smell that’s still coming from the living room carpet.

But!

One of the reasons I wanted to buy this house in particular is because it has the most lovely garden. (Well, it will be. Once we’ve got rid of all the dog mess and cigarette butts. And pruned all the abandoned shrubs.) It’s much bigger than our old garden, about thirty metres (100 feet) long, and it already has a vegetable patch and some fruit trees. The pear tree is very young, and hasn’t grown any pears at all this year. The apple tree is also young, but has managed to produce about a dozen little Braeburns! Most of them are still hanging on very tightly, but we’ve picked these three which look lovely. Yes, a little nibbled in places, but we’re thrilled to have lots of wildlife in our new garden too.

We also managed to grab a couple of handfuls of sloes from the well-established blackthorn tree at the bottom of the garden. Although the tree didn’t seem to be excessively full of thorns, which makes me wonder whether they might in fact be damsons. More investigation necessary, I think!

It’s going to take a couple of years to get the vegetable patch sorted, I think, though there’s a greenhouse and a shed and a nice big rhubarb plant to get me started. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m really looking forward to it.

Giant Cheese Bread!

Giant Cheese Bread!

A few weeks ago we bought a cheap breadmaking machine.

It’s brilliant.

Chuck in a bunch of ingredients, press a couple of buttons, and you can wake up in the morning to a freshly baked loaf!

As with any new device, there has been a certain amount of trial and error. The first couple of loaves sank rather a lot at the top, so you can imagine my excitement when I opened the machine to discover this beauty! Not only had it risen right to the top of the pan, it had overflowed and stuck itself to the lid of the machine. Oops.

Still, it came away easily enough, and tasted pretty good as well. This is a white loaf made with added cheese. Unfortunately, what you can’t tell from this picture is that almost the top half of the loaf is completely hollow!

We’ve now taken to using the “sandwich” setting on the machine, which produces a lovely dense loaf with hardly any crust. This makes it nice and easy to slice, and makes a lovely neat square sandwich. Next time I might be a bit more adventurous and buy a bag of wholemeal flour. Apparently this necessitates pushing a different button on the machine, but I think I’ll probably manage.

Harvest Festival

Harvest Festival

Over the weekend Skycarrots hosted a harvest festival!

A small group of us got together and brought masses of food and drinks that we’d grown, foraged, brewed and baked. All of the salad and vegetables were from Sarah’s allotment, with the addition of my cherry tomatoes. The big square pie is pumpkin and feta, and the quiche at the bottom right is tomato and ground elder. The only cheat was the bacon quiche which Paul baked. He may have made the quiche himself, but he foraged for all the ingredients at the supermarket. 😉

If you click on the photo it’ll take you through to Flickr, where you can see some notes about each item.

There were also drinks a-plenty. Mark and Kath had made wine, which they’d nicknamed “wynamite” because of its strength! There was also Sarah’s beech leaf noyau, some cherry-ish brandy, and the remains of our elderflower cordial – now rather fizzy, and probably pretty alcoholic by itself.

Half way through the evening we went on an impromptu foraging trip to a nearby tree, and we all ate raw almonds for the first time. Almonds are related to peaches, so you get a fuzzy fruit with a stone inside it that looks like a peach stone. Crack it open, and inside is an almond! Very exciting.

Our next food mission is to go out sloe-picking, so we can start getting some sloe gin ready for bottling at Christmas. We first made sloe gin two years ago, which was so well-received that people gave us back the bottles asking for a refill! Unfortunately there were virtually no sloes growing locally last year, so we had to disappoint everyone. Thankfully this year there looks to be a bumper crop, so we should be able to make enough for everyone.