Loaf at first sight!

Well, I'm not sure if it looks more like a football with a puncture or a work of art.

I hadn't made bread by hand for absolutely ages. In fact I never thought I was ever any good at it full stop. However I decided I would have another go yesterday to get me in the mood for Friday's baking session. (Which I will blog about over the weekend.)

From the moment I started making the dough I knew this was going to be a top loaf. After the dough had been left in the airing cupboard for 40 minutes, it had risen like my other doughs had never risen before. It was so big, so smooth. I was so excited and half an hour later..

Drumroll please....

Delicious!

I'm making another loaf tomorrow. I had made this loaf for Amy for when she got back from work, but when my family saw it, they asked me to bake them one too.

Don't you just love that scent that wafts through the house when bread is baking in the oven. If you don't know what I am talking about then you really need to bake some bread!

Heavinly!

Have a good weekend!!!
Martin

The price of currants..

I'm going to tell you a secret. We are making Christmas cakes this year as presents for some of our family.

My Grandma always used to grace us each year with a delicious Christmas fruit cake, delightfully iced and topped with festive decorations. However for several years she stopped making them, but I dug out her old cookbook last year and we made one together which was really enjoyable.

This year we are making the rich fruit cakes as presents. I love the idea of homemade delights at Christmas, and I know people will appreciate them more than a box of Thornton's chocolates or a bottle of lower end red wine.

So again, it was time to dig out Grandma's cook book. It is one of those proper, proper cook books. There are stains on the pages, some pages have come loose from the bind, the edges are cellotaped up, there are handwritten notes on certain pages, and at the back are years worth of shopping lists safely preserved. I can't stand it when people have cookbooks on shelves that have never been opened and the pages are clean and new, and they still have that new book smell. What is the point?

My Grandma got this book when she was 21. So over 50 years later, it is still purposefully being used by the next generation.

So we are to make four cakes. (For whom shall not be mentioned, because we know that some of the potential receivers do read this blog.)

We multiplied the ingredients for one cake by four, and this was the shopping list we set off with.

1.8kg Currants

1kg Raisins

1.8kg Sultanas

680g Mixed Peel

340g Glace Cherries

340g Shelled Almonds

1.2kg Margarine

1.2kg Caster Sugar

24 Eggs

1.4kg Flour

1 Jar of Mixed Spice

4 Unwaxed Lemons

Well, we won't have to buy all of those eggs, but we are a few short so I will have to pop in to a local farm shop to make up the numbers that we (or they the chickens) cannot provide for.

First stop was Tesco. I've recently enjoyed shopping in Tescos, because they have had lots of reduced stationary, and I love buying stationary, however I didn't love their home baking section as much, they had no Raisins, no currants, well in fact all they did have off our list was Sultanas, Flour, Caster Sugar, Lemons and Almonds. Oh well. Onwards to Morrisons.

We piled the trolley with the Morrisons value raisins and then we went to pick the currants up, and we almost died of a heart attack at the cost of them. Where as the raisins and currants cost about £1 per kg, the CHEAPEST currants were priced at £3 per kg. So working on a budget, we bought one pack of currants and and extra 1/2kg bag of both raisins and sultanas, costing us much less in the end.

We have a baking session set asside for Friday afternoon. The cakes need to bake for just shy of 5 hours, so we need to be sure we are going to be in to monitor their progress in the oven.

We will let you know how our afternoon goes, and we might even treat you to some more pictures of the cook book.

Have a great day,

Martin



Green Pepper!

We have successfuly grown our first pepper of the year.

It's been sat dangling off the pepper plant for a while now and it was finally a good size and didn't seem to be getting any bigger. We snipped the pepper off the plant and cut it into small pieces to skewer on to some kebabs we were making for a barbeque. With some chicken pieces, fresh tomatoes and onion, the kebabs were absolutely delicious.

This is the first ever pepper I have grown, so to grow it and enjoy it with Amy was really nice. I've grown lots of chilli peppers before, but never had much luck with actual peppers. There are about 6 more peppers in the pipeline so fingers crossed they will be just as tasty.

Have a great weekend.

Martin

Delicious..

I love watching cooking programmes.

But it occured to me the other day that I never ever get around to making anything that I see on the programmes.

However, something that we saw Jamie Oliver make a few weeks ago really tickled our fancy and this is our attempt at it..

Yes, it is a glorified sandwich, but it was delicious. We bought the foccacia bread from Marks and Spencers, and slipped it in the oven for 8 minutes. I prepared the salad for inside whilst it was in the oven. We simply used a round lettuce, some slicing tomatoes and some mozarella. All of it was cut in to slices ready to go in to the bread. When the bread was out of the oven we sliced it in half, it's trickier to cut foccacia than you think. Then we drizzled some olive oil onto the bread as an authentic Italian substitute for butter and then layered the salami in to place. Then the lettuce, followed by the tomatoes and finally the mozarella. It's a massive sandwich, and looks great on a wooden chopping board which can be used for serving. This could feed 4 people, or two really hungry people. It's definately the tastiest sandwich we've ever made. In fact, we've made it twice since.

I think a lot of inspiration  for my cooking comes from what I have seen on a telly, mixed with what I have seen my grandparents and parents cook. If all celebrity dishes taste this good then it won't be the last thing I cook off a TV programme.

So, who are your favourite celebrity chefs? I find it really interested how people can despise one chef and love another who in turn another person despises. My favourites are Hugh FW, Jamie Oliver, Heston and good old Nigella.

Leave a quick comment if you have time to let us know who your favourite celebrity chefs are!

Enjoy the rest of your day!

Martin

100

Since this blog started out in April we have now made a stagerring 100 posts. Don't ask us how, but we have quickly reached such a great milestone. We have already broke the record number of visitiors to our blog in a month in July and we still have just under a week left.

It is so suitable that the 100th post is a celebration of the harvests we have had from our own garden.

We are having home made lasagne for tea and to accompany it we have some of our delicious home grown potatoes, two lovely courgettes. We also have some broad beans and mange tout waiting for tomorrow's dinner.

How exciting.

We have really enjoyed the journey on our blog so far and we can't wait to write the next 100 posts too.

Enjoy the delightful sun. May this be the start of a great week.

Martin

The Jubilance of July

July. Probably the best month for being a veg gardener. All of your hard work during the previous months have lead up to this point. Over there the tomatoes are doing well, over there the potatoes are almost ready, over there the courgettes continue to come, over there the lettuces get bigger, over there the pak choi has bolted. Everything seems to be doing well (there is always one exception, stupid pak choi!!), and there is little maintenance to carry out.

In fact, it is very nice to pour a glass of homemade lemonade, sit back and look at what we have done. We have turned an old fenced off chicken run into a small producing plot, with plans to make it even better next year! (Hopefully)

We have enjoyed a few completly home grown meals. We used the saveable pak choi leaves in a stir fry last night, with some courgette, spinach, mange tout and some very hot chilli peppers. It was delicious. We've had a nice salad, and a vegetable fritatta, with some courgettes and mange tout in an omelette. It's been great.

We are just waiting on a few other things to mature and then there will be plenty more meals like that to come.

I said there was no maintenance on the plot. Well that is a lie. There are jobs to do, but there is nothing major really. If you afford yourself fifteen minutes a day then it is easy to keep on top of things. Although everything is going well, we need to be vigilant. At any moment, we could see blight overtake the tomatoes and potatoes, cabbage fly wip out the cabbages etc. If we keep a good look out for these things then we will definately be in a good place. Picking the odd weed from between the rows of veg is not particularly stenuous on our small plot.

Yesterday I spent a little while doing some of the simple jobs.

I've given the sunflowers and sweetcorn some support. The sweetcorn are planted in a triangle to aid pollination, but they were all leaning in to the centre and it looked a bit of a mess. So some bamboo canes have been added and I've loosely tied the sweetcorn to them.

 The sunflowers are not in the sunniest spot in the garden, so they have decided to start leaning towards the sun, although they would benefit from a bit more sun, they are not in the world's worst position so these were staked back too. My Grandma and Grandad gave me the seeds for the sunflowers so I gave them three plants in return and these are now planted too..

Since the pak choi plan went bottom side up, there is a bit more space at the end of the plot furthest away from the shed. We have had our cabbage growing in pots in the greenhouse ready for transportation when some more space becomes available. I planted out three of the cabbage plants we planted a few months ago. They are in a good spot by the damson tree.

There is still time to sow some more salad leaves and lettuce so I did that to give us some late summer salad greens. We will definately appreciate them come late August and early September.

We are really looking forward to the sweet peppers we are growing in the mini greenhouse. I placed them more centrally in the greenhouse as they seem to be growing well. The middle of the top shelf in the greenhouse is the highest point.

 I have always had fantastic luck with chilli peppers but not so much with sweet peppers. We have 4 sweet pepper plants and 5 chilli pepper plants this year, so hopefully there will be plenty of peppers of different shapes, colours and sizes over the next couple of months.

The flowers are going wild in those hanging baskets too..

I had to pick out a few dead heads, but nothing major. I am really pleased with these!

We are both really enjoying reading everybody's blogs and seeing what you are picking from your own gardens, allotments, window containers, greenhouses, polytunnels, smallholdings and farms. It is amazing that all of us bloggers have different sized growing area.  From Rachel with her small city balcony to  Mo and Steve and of course Sue with her much larger site. It is superb to see how we all grow things, both similarly and differently.

Have a great day, don't forget to check out some of the other blogs on the right hand side toolbar, and see what everybody else is doing this wonderful summer's day.

Martin

Pak (of rubbish) Choi

I am really dissapointed with our pak choi.

It has bolted...

Some of you may not be surprised to hear this as you are a lot wiser than me, but if I knew that they were so sensitive I wouldn't have consumed our valuable growing space with 2 whole rows of this crop. I wish I had grown more lettuce instead!

I have now read that they are extemly sensitive to a real mix of weather conditions. So with the the days of drought followed by periods of sogging wetness, the pak choi did not approve and decided to run to flower.

I was really looking forward to a good crop of this. The good news is that we can still eat the leaves despite it bolting so a nice homegrown stirfry is on the cards tonight. Courgette, pak choi leaves, spinach, mange tout, maybe one of the fillius blue chillies to liven it up a bit. Delicieux!

We are both really enjoying our really healthy home grown meals.

Have a great day!

Martin

We're having twins!

Oh how I love the mis-shapen vegetables you will see when you grow your own veg. On one of the courgette bushes we have this odd-ball...

It looks like two courgettes which are physically stuck together to form one and each half has it's own flower!

You would never see anything like this ending up in the supermarket, the quality control processes these days are too vigorous, and hybrid vegetables means that all crops are identically perfect. That's why it is always such a novelty when you see a potato shaped like a love heart in Tesco. Never mind a carrot shaped like a dog, or twin courgettes or a raddish shaped like a fork...

I am definately a member of the mis-shapen vegetables appreciation society!

Are you?

Ooooh... and we just enjoyed some more home grown courgettes in a meatball pasta bake! Homegrown salad leaves for sides too!!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Martin

First Pickings...

Courgettes!!!

We baked these courgettes the other day and served them with some sausages, asparagus, mashed potato and carrots. Amy said they were 'the best courgettes' she had ever had!

The tiny one on the end made us laugh. We left it  for a week and it did not grow at all, whereas the other courgettes were growing noticeably each day! So we decided to pick it and eat it. It was very sweet and really lovely!

We've also been eating the salad leaves we sown out at the same time as we planted the courgette plants. We've been enjoying the fresh leaves in our sandwiches on a regular basis. When we've been picking the salad leaves we've been sowing a few raddish seeds directly in to the freshly vacated soil. The first ones have germinated so we will be enjoying fresh raddish in about 24 days! Brilliant! They are Amy's favourite too!

Well, there are plenty more courgettes where those three came from..

I am going to have a productive day today.. I hope!

Martin

Royal Lunch

This Friday sees the highly and eagerly anticipated wedding of the world's most famous Aston Villa fan wed..Kate Middleton.
Although, I have not been too bothered by all of the hype leading up to this Friday's ceremony, I think that if you are going to celebrate it then you should celebrate it properly and patriotically.

Today we have been busy in the Kitchen making some light snacks with of a hearty British origin.

We had some sausagemeat in the fridge... So what better to make than homemade Lincolnshire Sausage Rolls.

I am not ashamed to use pre-made puff pastry. Pastry is so easy to make, but to make it well is another thing. If you can get a long to a good supermarket then it will be ready for you to take home and roll. No cleaning up afterwards either which is a massive advantage.

Amy is today's hand model because she has pretty hands.

Ingredients
1 x egg
Pre made puff Pastry (or make your own, entirely up to you.)
450g Lincolnshire Sausagemeat (available from all good butchers)
1tbsp water

Recipe:
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Take the ready made puff pastry and place on a clean surface. Either use a rolling pin or your clean hands to evenly spread out the pastry. It should be about 3mm thick when fully rolled.

Take a sharp knife and cut the rolled out pastry in half.

Split the sausagemeat in to two roughly equal parts. Put each sausage meat in the centre of the pastry halves. Use your fingers to mould the sausagemeat so that it looks like a long sausage down the centre of the pastry. Don't forget, if you don't have sausagemeat you can use regular sausages and just place them in the middle of the pastry.

They look gross at this point.

 Fold over the pastry and use your fingers to press the edges together.

Place on a baking tray and then quickly make the egg wash by cracking an egg into a glass, adding a tbsp of water and mixing together until all one colour. Then get a baster/brush and dip into the egg wash and then coat the whole sausage roll with the egg wash.

Make sure you give the 'crack' (where the pastry overlaps) several coating to avoid the whole sausage roll falling apart. You can cut the sausage roll before or after cooking, we did it before because cutting Puff Pastry can make lots of mess. Place in the hot oven.

The sausage rolls should take between 30-35 minutes to cook depending on the thickness of the sausage roll. It's probably worth checking every 5 minutes or so from the 20th minute. The last thing you want is for them to burn!

When the pastry is golden brown, remove from the oven.

Leave to cool for 15 minutes if they are for later, or eat straight away if you prefer. The sausage rolls can be frozen too which is a bonus, if refrigerated  the sausage rolls should last for 3 days anyway.

These turned out miraculously and we have eaten half of them already. I suggest serving hot with a dollop of ketchup on the side.

More patriotic recipes to follow tomorrow.

Enjoy your evening, not sure if this is the last blog post of the day though....

Martin

Homemade Burgers

I said I wouldn't. But I have!

I wasn't going to make another post today as I didn't want to bore anybody but.. Amy is at work and I needed to make something for tea. Looking at a pretty bare fridge, I turned to the freezer. A few things looked interesting but then I found some frozen minced meat and that got me thinking...

I looked back in the fridge.. hmmmm.... onions, carrots, bread rolls.... BURGERS!

We have just finished eating them but I will gladly share my step by step process with you.

Ingredients:
3/4 of a large brown onion (1/2 diced) (1/4 for garnish)
500g British Beef Minced meat
1 carrot peel (thinly sliced to match the size of the diced onions)
50g flour
2 tbsp water

1) Add the minced meat to the bowl and 'prod' so that there are no large clumps and the mince is fine.

2) Add the diced onion and the thinly sliced carrot. Mix again.

3) Cover the meat, onion and carrot with the 50g of flour and add the 2tbsp of water. Mix again so the mixture binds together. Please note that the concoction of flower and water replaces the traditional need for egg and breadcrumbs in the burger recipe.

4) The ingredients stated should be enough to make 4 large burger or 6 smaller burgers. In this case I made 4. Use your hand to create 4 equally sized balls with the mixture. Then use the palm of your hand to flatten the burger into a traditional 'patty' shape.

5) Put on the grill or in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Make sure you watch the burgers around the twenty minute mark as they can go from perfect to overcooked very quickly. Slice a nice wholemeal bun and butter if necessary. Then add some salad, relish or ketchup and enjoy.

These were the best burgers I have made to date. Third time lucky I think they call it. Let me know if you use any of my recipes and tell me how they turn out. These are all my own original recipes which are heavily based on spontaneity and improvisastion.

Amy was pleased anyway, so it's always good to score extra brownie points. Talking of brownies... That's just given me an idea!

Martin

Afternoon Delight

Wow, what a marvelously, sunny Tuesday afternoon!

What better to hydrate yourself than some home made lemonade?

Ingredients
6 x Unwaxed lemons
240g Sugar
1 litre cold Water

Method
Add the cold water to the pan and turn on the hob.
Meanwhile, take one lemon and grate the zest. Keep the zest to one side for later. Chop the lemon in chunks and add to the water. Take the remaining lemons and slice them in a variety of ways to get different sized chunks of lemon. Add all the chunks to the water and leave the lemons and water to simmer for 10 minutes. Once the lemonade comes to the boil allow to boil for approximately one minuted before removing from the hob. The lemonade needs to be put in to a jug for serving. Pour the lemonade through a sieve bit by bit. Remember you will have to squeeze the remaining juice out of the lemons. Use a wooden spoon to squeeze those final droplets out. The contents left in the sieve should be pulp like and can then be added to the compost heap. When the lemonade is all in the jug, allow to cool in the fridge for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes remove the lemonade and add the grated zest from earlier. Mix well and then serve cold. To serve fill the glass half way with the lemonade and top up the glass with cold still water.

This is my own improvised recipe and it works a treat every time. You can of course add more or less sugar to your own taste. Also, remember it is important to use unwaxed lemons. Most lemons in large supermarkets these days are in fact waxed and the last thing you want is wax in your mouth when you are trying to enjoy a refreshing beverage on a warm day.

Enjoy the sunshine, we are going to be planting some tomato seeds tomorrow.

Martin