Tuesday 30 November 2010

A Seasonal Oddity

Here we are in late November with the temperature outside sulking at around freezing. In the garden, the annuals have long since shown that their year is up, the evergreens are quietly living up to their title and the perennials have withdrawn their life force into the ground to hibernate. It would be all to easy to think that we have to wait for the snowdrops to herald in the new and show that the seasons are turning. But in my garden there is an oddity, a plant that comes up in the autumn and dies down in early summer.
 It is alexanders and was amongst a collection of herbs I put in several years ago. I have since learned that in some parts of the country it is considered a roadside weed and I can see why that might be but having never seen it on roadsides around here I was totally unaware of that at the time.I remember when it disappeared early in its first summer I thought it was yet another plant that had declined my invitation to flourish in my patch. I was delighted to see it re-emerge in October and by the next autumn I had learned not to let it set seed, attractive though the shiny black seeds on ochre coloured stalks are. It is clearly very happy to thrive here. I value it for its fresh green when many other leaves are dull and grey and the  early honey scented flowers loved by the lacewings. And now I have realised that it was an early precursor of celery I will be using it much as I use lovage in the summer.

 When I went out to pick some two days ago, I noticed all the stems had bowed  to honour the presence  of Jack Frost.  I noticed that the water in the rain barrel was almost completely frozen. The elemental force and artistry that could sculpt a glassy plaque of swirling abstract patterns and sign it with the delicate etching of a beech leaf all in the course of a few hours is certainly worthy of such homage.

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Making Mincemeat

I guess with Stir up Sunday behind us now it is not too soon to be talking about Christmas preparations. This year mine will be rather different as we will be spending the holiday away from home so the dinner won't be cooked in my kitchen by me.  It is a long time since that happened, time for a new family tradition to take shape. Without the turkey and trimmings to think about, I can turn my attention to some of the little extras like the mince pies.
Looking in the cupboard, I had partly-used packs of dried friut left over from cake baking so I decided to make up some fruit mince rather than use jars of  the shop bought kind. The best recipe for this is in NMAA Cooks which has to be the most used book on my kitchen bookshelf. From the spots on the page it is obvious I have made this several times before and I know it makes much more than I could use in a year. Although I have kept it from one year to the next, now that each ingredient package has a 'best by' date wagging a warning finger, I would not advise or even suggest that anyone else does the same. I am only saying that I stored it in a sealed container and used it the following year and no one suffered any adverse consequences. None-the-less this time I adapted my trusted recipe to reduce it to one fifth of the orignal quantity. That should match more closely both the ingredients I had to hand and my ambitions for mince pie making this year.
Fruit Mincemeat
Ingredient List
100g each of raisins, sultanas and currants
25g mixed peel
50g grated suet
100g cooking apple -  peeled and  coarsely grated or finely chopped
100g muscovado sugar 
1/2 teaspoon of grated lemon and orange rind
 1/2 teaspoon mixed cake spice (or a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice)
50 ml brandy or rum.

Closer scrutiny of my prep picture will reveal that the orange has become a clementine, there are no currants (I substituted extra raisins and sultanas to make up the difference) and that no one supermarket has my undivided loyalty.


Method
Check over the dried fruit and remove any little stalks then chop the fruit coarsely. This is so that they will take up the flavours quickly and also not bloat when the pies are cooked. Then in a large bowl combine the chopped fruit with the rinds, spices and suet.
In a cup mix the sugar and spirit to disslove the sugar, then pour it over the fruit. Stir it all well, cover and leave for a couple of hours. Stir well again and pack into a clean sterilised jar. Cover and store in a cool dry place for at  least 4 weeks. (Made it just in time!)
This made about 1/2 litre of mincemeat.
 I think I will be turning the jar on its side and rotating it a few times every couple of days just to make sure that the mixture at the bottom of the jar isn't the only bit to benefit from all that lovely sugary, spirited syrup.

And I got to thinking that a similar mixture without the suet,  gently heated to cook the apple  then cooled and whirled into softened vanilla icecream and refrozen would make a very good iced version of Christmas Pudding. But would that be one new tradition too many?

Saturday 20 November 2010

Little Boxes - Part 2

I knew I wasn't finished with making those little crochet boxes I saw on Kirstie's Homemade Home. Far from it. I was planning to build on the basic design, adding handles and some kind of embellishment. And so I did. But as they are so good to make being such a portable project, quick, easy and use up left over bits and pieces, their numbers are steadily increasing and they seem to be appearing all over the house.

 The red one - now with handles - is the ideal size for holding a ball of yarn, a crochet hook, scissors and a needle case thereby contributing to the proliferation of its own kind. The blue one with its built in slit handles shows that the basic box is evolving.

Even when I was working in the garden clearing up leaves, an idea for another change to the basic design came to me. As someone who finds fascination in so many of Mother Nature's designs, you might imagine my inspiration may have come from the exquisite structure of an acorn cup or a larch cone. It was something much less decorative and entirely functional.

The green bag provided by the council for the collection of garden waste! Suddenly I noticed that is is basicly constructed in the same way having four rectangular sides stitched onto a square base. It even has the seams on the outside to help it to stand up.  Maybe I could use braid to add handles in the same way.

So this fascination with little crochet boxes looks like being far from over - at least for the time being. Oh Kirstie Allsopp, what have you started?

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Small Green Shoot

No - I haven't noticed any of these in the economy of late, sadly, but if I thought that I could sprout it on my kitchen window sill, I promise I would give it my best shot! The small green shoot that I mean is the lemon grass plant that I have tried growing. I can't say just where I got this idea, it may have been Alys Fowler in her Edible Garden series but apparently if you put  into water the lemon grass stalks that you can buy in some supermarkets for Asian cooking,  they will produce roots and you can then plant them into pots and hey presto! you have your own lemon grass plant. A  useful novelty here in the south of the UK.
Being the sort of windowsill gardener who has in the past produced avocado plants from the stones and pineapple plants from the tops, I just had to give this challenge a go. The stalks I bought for this looked as if they may have been cut a little high - I have had some that looked more promising in the past but I chose the best I could find and popped them into a vase of water. I waited a full 2 weeks I think before I started checking for any signs of progress and when there were no signs after a further 2 weeks I simply forgot about them. I kept them in  the vase of water and simply added in any fresh herbs I brought in from the garden to have to hand for cooking. It was only when I realised that some lime scented mint had put on a lot of growth and seemed to be crying out to have its new roots in soil that I took everything out of the vase and discovered that the lemon grass had roots too. Wonderful!
I potted them up and waited again to see if the roots would take and go on to sprout new growth at the green end of the plant. And after several more weeks one of them did indeed. For something that took so long to grow roots and then produce a tiny green shoot it has rather taken off and the blades of green are growing noticeably almost from day to day.  Now of course I want to see if it will produce a further basal clump from the roots, something I could harvest and use to cook with. I may have to wait but then I am used to that by now.

All kinds of people are gardeners. They have all kinds of reasons for gardening. The one trait they must all have in common is patience, I think.

Tuesday 9 November 2010

Little Boxes

I just love 'How to' programmes so Kirstie's Home-made Home is unmissable viewing for me. Yes, I know we can't all go and have a one-to-one tutorial with a master craftsman or woman and then have them turn up later with the project we started beautifully finished for us but I don't mind that - I just love watching them try crafts I haven't tried before or come up with new ways of working with the ones I have tried. Watching Kirstie learning to crochet with Erica Knight, I found the urge to try making the little gift basket irrestible. I even had yarn and hook to hand so I started right away.
I made the squares for the larger one on the left first. In the programme, they had used twine, which would be stiffer and make a firmer fabric. I used an 8 ply  pure wool knitting yarn with a 3.5 crochet hook but I wasn't all that sure it would stand up by itself when made up. I then made the smaller basket with a slightly thicker yarn I happened to have in my collection of leftover bits and bobs. That made up very well using the overcasting seam shown on the programme. I decided then that perhaps backstitching the side seams would make them more rigid and would help the larger basket stay upright. Having done that I found that they worked even better when the seams were left on the outside. And so there we have it. Where to go from here with this? I think little handles would be good,  and maybe a quilted lining for the larger one to help keep its shape; oh and maybe either embroidered or crochet motifs. Yes they would make great little gift baskets but I would like to think they would suggest themselves as more than a receptacle, that they might indeed be another little gift in themselves.

Two further thoughts came to me while I was making these. Firstly, simply working in double crochet rows (single crochet if you work to US patterns) makes such a lovely firm fabric. Secondly that both the yarns I had chosen would probably felt really well. Now there's a technique I haven't tried yet.
I'll be watching again tonight and, if needs be, reminding myself that for the time being the house can't cope with the paraphernalia and materials needed for yet another craft hobby and that I already have plenty of 'projects pending' and works in progress to keep me busy.

Monday 8 November 2010

True Colours

How quickly the time passes when the trees demand to be noticed, when they get to flaunt the inner leaf colours they might always be if they didn't need the green of chorophyll to photosynthesise the sunlight. Here the countryside specialises in golds, yellows and tans as beech, birch, hawthorn and oak predominate.

Still an uplifting sight even with the absence of  the flame red of garden grown maples and soumac. But time was not standing still. A few days ago the poplars at the across the field were a sentinel row of pheasant-coloured plumes and now they are  scarcely visible smudges through which to view the fields beyond.

With a forecast of wind and rain I set out to capture some of the best I could find with my camera. I found that up on the downs I was already too late. Many of the trees had already stripped down to their ivy green
underwear.
But finally I found the silver birches much closer to home. So much about them exudes elegance just now - the silver bark, the gold, diamond shaped leaves, the regal purple of the sweeping twigs already bare. Truly, as Coleridge called it, The Lady of the Woods.