Ginger and Marmalade Cake

The thing about having a good supply of home made marmalade, or indeed any other preserve, is what to do with it once you've made it. I do give quite a bit of it away, and it's quite handy for guests in our holiday cottage, but that still leaves a good supply to use ourselves. So this is an easy mix cake that keeps moist in the cake tin, and has a good flavour without the need for icings, fillings and all the attendant sugar calories and effort. It's a versatile recipe, you don't have to be too exact with it, and it's useful for using up odds and ends of things in the cupboard, the last of the golden syrup,

 remains of a jar of crystallized honey, and so on. You can use all syrup if you like, and grated citrus makes a good addition if you have the inclination.

 

Marmalade and Ginger Cake

Stand a saucepan on your digital scales and weigh in
350grams/12 ounces of golden syrup, honey and marmalade in whatever proportions you like
150 grams/6ounces of butter
and warm over gentle heat until just  melted





Put the pan back on the scales and add
9ounces/250grams  of plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons ground ginger
good pinch salt
2 medium eggs
about a quarter pint/150 ml milk

and beat briefly with a hand mixer till smooth. Or a wooden spoon if you are from Yorkshire (ie strong in  th' arm and weak in th' 'ead, Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred)

Pour into a lined tin, mine was 11" x8"/ 27cm x 20cm

Bake in a moderate oven for about 30 mins till risen and firm.  Try to avoid getting the top too dark.

 

Best Ever Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

Now you may think that this tray of charcoal boulders is less than the post title suggests. But you would be wrong.  They are in fact  Perfect Yorkshire puddings. It's just that they've been in the oven about an hour too long! Yesterday was the only normal day of weather we have had around here for weeks, and when I say normal I mean normal mildly wintry sort of day, but not raining,  I repeat in case you live in Somerset and can't believe it, not raining so we were outside plodding about in the mud, talking to people we hadn't seen for ages, enjoying the relatively dry air,  discussing the floods again.
Then I suddenly remembered  the oven. Aarghh!!

Luckily I made the full amount of the recipe, which does two twelve hole muffin size tins, so I was able to quickly despatch this lot to the chicken run, and bung a second lot in the oven,. And this time I stayed in the kitchen till they were done!

Anyway to get to the point, the recipe is James Martin's recipe as demonstrated recently on BBC1 Saturday Kitchen. I've tried many recipes over the years but this is my favourite. I really tried it because I have a million eggs to use up at the moment, all the chickens have decided to come into lay, and this recipe uses 8 eggs or even 10 if you have some tiny pullet eggs like I have. You get a good flavour, and a spectacular rise, which is really the whole point.  I stuck pretty much to the recipe except the first bit, I just measured everything straight into a pyrex jug and mixed with an electric hand mixer until smooth, then put it into the fridge overnight. Make sure the tins are hot, the combination of smoking hot tin and fridge cold batter really makes the difference I think. All in all a great recipe for impressing the in-laws, or anyone else really. And if you must go off down the garden, take a timer with you.

Classic Yorkshire Pudding

Ingredients

• 225g/8oz plain flour
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8 free-range eggs
• 600ml/1 pint milk
• 55g/2oz dripping

Preparation method

1. Place the flour and a little salt and freshly ground black pepper into a bowl. Add the eggs, mixing in with a whisk, then gradually pour in the milk, mixing slowly to prevent lumps forming.
2. Cover the bowl with cling film and chill in the fridge overnight.
3. Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas 7.
4. Put a little of the dripping in four non-stick Yorkshire pudding tins. Place the tins in the oven until smoking hot.
5. Remove from the oven and quickly fill the moulds with the batter. Return to the oven and cook for 20-25 minutes.
6. Turn the oven down to 190C/375F/Gas 5 and cook for a further 10 minutes to set the bottom of the puddings.
7. Remove from the oven and serve.

Pink Gin and Other Antiques

I love old stuff, (no untoward joke will be inserted here at the expense of Mr Wilkinson, it's Valentines Day after all), but so apparently does everyone else. Again, I'm not referring to Mr Wilkinson here, but antiques programmes - you can't turn on the telly without being regaled by some tweedy suited expert in a bow tie going on about the value of some bit of old tat. Of course I do realise that one person's bit of tat is another's priceless antique, or at least "Vintage Collectable". And as I say I do love old stuff.
I have no idea of the values of things, and I only buy what I like, but Mr Wilkinson and I have a bit of an ongoing issue with what is called de-cluttering these days, so I try to limit myself to buying things that will be of actual use. Trying to go with William Morris "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" would be my ideal, but you can't help thinking that Anti-Clutterists only read the first phrase,- Have nothing in your houses - and leave it at that! I could never be a minimalist!

So anyway that summarises my excuses for buying these lovely little glasses in a charity shop the other day. I say little, and they are small in comparison to the vast modern wine glasses we all use now, but they are so pretty I couldn't resist them. As I was standing at the counter to pay for them, all of £4.50 in total, the lady behind me pointed out that they were really too small to be of much use, what was I thinking of putting in them, clearly thinking no more than a small sherry when the vicar calls round.
  "Gin" said I,
"No room for the  ice lemon and tonic water though" she said doubtfully,
"Indeed," I said "but if you get your husband (other cocktail wizards are available) to shake it up in a cocktail shaker with ice and a dash of angosturas, then strain it into the glass, it should be just about the right size".
And indeed it is.
Cheers!

How to store wild mushrooms

It was a couple of weeks ago now, but I thought I would just make a note for the record, that I had a massive harvest of wild field mushrooms. this is the first time I've come across such a generous crop of field  mushrooms Agaricus Campestris ever.

They were in the permanent pasture fields above our smallholding. Once they start to come out, they really do get going so you have to pick and use them whilst they at their delicious best. and therein lies the difficulty. For whilst everyone loves a stuffed mushroom to two, one does begin to run a bit short of enthusiasm after a week or so. They don't keep more than a day at most so to enjoy the benefits of the crop a way of storing has to be found. Well, I after some experimentation, I found that a duxelles mix is the best way of storing this lovely autumnal bounty. You can then store it in the freezer ready for use as a lovely pasta sauce or maybe as part odd that special beef Wellington you're planning for a dinner party. Or you can use it for the basis of a mushroom flan or spread on puff pastry as a canapé. Should you come across a good deal for mushrooms at the supermarket this would be a good way of preserving them. Use the food processor for chopping if you're in a rush.

Mushroom Duxelles
large basket of freshly picked field mushrooms, or a punnet from the supermarket
large clove of garlic
 2 shallots
2 oz butter
splash of dry vermouth

Finely chop the shallots and gently fry in butter till soft.
Finely chop the mushrooms and add to the pan with the grated garlic, salt and pepper and vermouth
Allow to cook gently until most of the moisture has evaporated, leaving a dry ish paste-like mix.
Leave to cool check seasoning and store in small quantities (ice  cube trays make it easy to use as much as you need).

To use as pasta sauce melt a few cubes in a saucepan with some cream or crime fraiche and a handful of parsley and stir into freshly boiled pasta.

 

I have to re state, as always, that I only pick and eat fungi that I know and can positively identify. Please do your research, or better still  take an expert's advice before eating any wild fungi.

From small acorns......

So, at the beginning of July I brought home three little black piglets. I bought them from a local breeder and they were small enough to fit comfortably in the back of the car. They looked like this

                                                             Cute.

The pigs are Large Blacks, sometimes called Cornish Blacks, and are the most endangered British native breed. The Large Black was the most numerous and popular pig on British farms and in most other countries too until it fell from favour after the second world war when the modern hybrid white pig took over, with its lean long body. Nowadays people think that black pigs produce black crackling, but they do of course emerge from the abbatior with normal pink pig skin, no black crackling, thank goodness!



Raising pigs though can be quite an expensive business. To start with a rare breed weaner ready to leave it's mother at around 8 weeks old, will cost from around £35 to £65, depending on whether it's registered with the breed society or not, and as registering costs, mine aren't, but are still good pigs from pedigree parents. Then at the other end of the procedure there is the abbatior and butchering costs, I'm expecting to pay around £50 to £60 per pig, plus the cost of getting them there which entails hiring a trailer as I don't have my own. But the major cost of raising the pig is the cost of feeding. I can buy pig feed from my local feed mill in 20Kilo bags, and if I fed my pigs on this alone, depending on how long it takes to raise them to a good weight, I could easily spend  a hundred pounds on feeding each pig.

So, this being the case I've been on the lookout for alternative food sources. and it isn't easy these

days because most traditional ways of feeding pigs have become illegal, and those that aren't illegal have fallen into disuse. Pigs are omnivores, and will eat a wide variety of foodstuffs. That's not to say that they should ever be given rubbish, and if you feed your animals rubbish, you will get rubbish as an end product. But vast amounts of perfectly usable food which could be fed to pigs is thrown away and goes into landfill every year. After the last outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease, it is now
illegal to feed pigs anything which has been inside a domestic or commercial kitchen, so called post consumer food, but it's fine to give them waste fruit and veg and bread, and crops from the field.

 So with this information at the front of my mind I went to see my local shopkeepers to see what I could find. Needless to say the big supermarkets were less than helpful. Not the local managers and staff  who were all sympathetic to my ideas, and one assistant even said he had asked if waste flowers could be sent to the local old people's home but even this was refused! They had all been instructed

from head office that waste food could not be sent anywhere other than landfill and the reasoning was  that someone might eat it and be poisoned, and then sue them! First of all, if the food is good enough   for people to eat they should be selling it to people, and it it's not, then why not let pigs make use of it?

My local greengrocer on the other hand keeps a
designated bin at each of his shops where spoiled produce is stored until either I or another pig keeper comes along to take it away. And my local mini supermarket keeps the stale bread for me to collect when it's past it's sell by date. the pigs love it and seem to be thriving on it, but I just wonder if I can get a relatively large amount of waste from just a few local shops, how much must the big supermarkets be throwing away every week or every year? Stuff that must cost them money to dispose of, and could be turned into delicious pork chops! And remember of course that anything that costs supermarkets money will be charged to consumers in the end. And no one has been poisoned from attempting to eat stale bread or black bananas from my local shops so why can't mr Tesco do the same? Could it be because they don't want anyone to know just how much food they waste? could it be that they would rather ship it all off on the quiet to landfill   and hope that it will be out of sight and out of mind for the rest of us. Read more about this on the Pig Idea.

Anyway, I've also found some other generous suppliers of waste products that pigs just love. Today I picked up half a dozen sacks of spent grain from a local brewery.  And I've been collecting apple pomace from Brendon Community Orchard who produce delicious local apple juice and provide  a great community facility. And lastly, we live on the edge of the Nettlecombe Estate, which is famous for it's wonderful oak trees. A local man collects acorns every year from the mighty Nettlecombe oaks, Quercus Petraea, and supplies them to commercial growers. Luckily for me he only needs the biggest and best acorns, and the rest - small, damaged, or wormy ones are available for me, or rather my pigs.  It's a bit backbreaking gathering them all up, but I'm sure the girls appreciate my efforts - here they are tucking into the latest sackfull

You can see from the pictures that the pigs make quite a good job of digging up the field!

Trains and/or Boats..

I went up to London on Wednesday to visit my daughter and granddaughter, and as I'm now quite a long way from London, I thought I would let the train take the strain as they used to say in the train adverts years ago. The view from the window over what should have been green fields was quite amazing, in as much as it was just water, water everywhere. For anyone who doesn't know, there has been extensive flooding in this area resulting from heavy rains falling on already waterlogged ground.  I took this video on my phone, just a few miles from Taunton, and I thought you might like to see it. It did feel quite weird with the water washing right up to the sides of the train.

Fungus Foray

Our new house is on the eastern edge of Exmoor, in the Brendon Hills. It's spectacular walking country, when it's not raining, which today it wasn't so I took the opportunity to stride off up the hillside with the dog. Bit squelchy underfoot, but lovely non the less. Now I've always been a fan of the idea of foraging, I've watched Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall going off to forage for delicious ceps, chanterelles, morels, and other delicacies, coming back to River Cottage and cooking up a wonderful mushroom supper with a scraping of wild garlic and herbs, but when I've searched myself for such things I've seldom found such bounty. Once or twice I've been rewarded with a Shaggy Parasol or two and once a whole field full of Field Mushrooms, but not as often as tv experts would have you believe.

 

So imagine my excitement when I got to the top of the hill and in the woods I came across these

it's not obvious from the photo, which I took with my phone, but there was a veritable sea of fungi all over the forest floor. I picked a few samples and took some photos,

and when we got back I rushed to check on the internet to see whether my hoped for mushroom supper was about to become a reality. Sadly it seems not. There were two main sorts of the fungi, and neither of them seem to be the edible kind, so far as I can see anyway. I've struggled to find them online and as I'm by no means an expert, and would certainly never consider eating anything that I could not positively identify, I will have to leave them be, but it's really such a shame because there are absolutely masses of the  things up there.

We had a house in France a few years ago, and so popular is fungus foraging over there that you can take your collected specimen of fungi into any pharmacist and they would identify it for you, although there were many apocryphal stories of whole families of people being found frozen in rigor mortis at the dinner table forks in hand around a dish of Amanita Phalloides a la Creme....

Welcome back to me

It's well over a year since I made any contribution to this blog, but in my defence I will say that there's been quite a bit going on around the place. I hope you've missed me, but given the ever increasing number of brilliant blogs popping up everywhere, I'd be surprised, unless you're related to me, if you'd noticed.

Anyway, we've mainly been moving house, and as simple as that sounds, it has taken all my time and effort for most of the last year. It's an utterly exhausting experience, but the upshot is that we have left Windy Wiltshire, are now getting established here in Wet and Windy West Somerset. I'm not entirely convinced that weather wise, we have made a beneficial exchange, since we have had barely a dry day since we moved in several weeks ago. People keep telling me that it's the same everywhere, and indeed it has been, even by English weather standards, a dreadful summer. So since my gardening activity has been mostly concerned with keeping the garden tidy until we moved, I don't really feel that I've missed all that much and I'm hoping that we are due for a better summer next year. Law of averages and all that. Surely.

Here's a snap of the new abode - it's about  15th century, and you can see it's thatched, which is lovely, but at the moment, some of the many gallons of water falling from the sky are falling directly through the thatch and onto the fireplace. Which could put a bit of a damper on the blazing Yule log scenario for Christmas, so I'm waiting in for a thatcher who is coming round imminently to advise us. That's not the blue suit and handbag Thatcher of course, (which is always the image that comes to my mind) but an expert on straw roofs with an altogether more approachable hairdo. Let's hope for the best..

Note the blue sky and sunshine on this photo, taken before we moved in, I'm taking this as evidence that it will stop raining, eventually. We are lucky enough to have some seven acres attached to the house here, so I will try to post some of my efforts in the new garden - there's lots to do, and I have plans to try all sorts of new stuff.  

 

However, at the moment, I'm hoping to be throwing another log on the fire, and unpacking a few more boxes.

And anyway, it's raining....

Spontaneous Wildflower Meadow

It's not much but it's ours! The new Community Garden  for our village is set to get the green light any time now, and although not a sod has yet been turned, and the Lottery Award is still sitting in the bank, it's already gone from grass, nettles and docks,

to this

all by itself!

Well almost by itself. Jackie and Jeremy across the road are having a new extension on their house and during the work they helpfully offered to donate a skipful of topsoil to the community garden rather than sending it to landfill. This was earlier in the year, and since we weren't allowed to start work it just sat there doing nothing. But then as the weather warmed up it just burst into life. Obviously there are lots of the usual suspects, Fat Hen, thistles and so on, and I suspect some locals may think it's a big patch of weeds but to my eye it's an impromtu exhibition of what nature can do with so little help from us, and until we can get going with the garden proper, it's just a lovely thing.

Poppy seeds are well known to lie dormant in the ground for very many years, springing into life only when the earth is disturbed and they are brought to the surface for some reason. Hence the famous poppy fields of France after the battlefields of WW1. However on closer examination I found all kinds of other interesting things, presumably seeds from whatever had been growing in Jacky and Jeremy's garden!

calendula and sunflowers

evening primroses

more poppies than you can count

this tasselly grass don't know what it is

 this looks like fennel or dill

and I think this is a tomatillo, though I'm not sure.

lots of brassicas, including some fledgling brocolli

but it won't last long with these visitors chomping away .-  it's a wildlife garden after all!!

Gonna Eat a Lot of Peaches...

Millions of peaches, peaches for me, or so it says in the song, and although I can't lay claim to millions,relatively speaking, I do have more peaches than I could normally dream of producing. I've never seen so many peaches on my peach tree. Normally we're lucky to get half a dozen, and then they rarely ripen properly. Now I know there are lots of lucky people out there who live in places where you can pick peaches by the bucketful every year, and think nothing of it. Not so here in England. We can do that with apples, pears, plums and many other fruits, but the problem we have here is that peaches flower very early in the spring, and unless you are obsessional about watching the weather forecast and hurtle off off down the garden in the dark with a a sheet of horticultural fleece if a cold night threatens, and then remember pollinating insects are also few and far between in early spring so you have to rush back down the garden next morning to uncover them  and possibly also help pollination with a little paint brush if you can, it's certainly not a plant and forget it type of crop.

But this year we had a really lovely warm spell in early spring, which  caused all kinds of odd things to happen in the garden, but the happiest outcome has been my wonderful crop of peaches. I did absolutely nothing to help them this year, no fleece, no paintbrush, but nature has rewarded me with these. I must have had this tree for fifteen years, I even dug it up and brought it with me when I moved here, so I'm extra pleased that it's done so well in the year we're moving away.  They're a bit small, some are a bit pitted and knobbly, and compared with the perfect giant blemish free specimens imported from the meditteranean and the USA they may seem rather unimpressive, but they are juicy and delicious, and all the more treasured for being so long arriving.

Here's the Millions of Peaches song, I never realised how many famous paintings feature peaches either!

Monty Don's Trousers

We were lucky enough to be given tickets for the preview day  of the Hamptons Court Palace Flower Show,and  got to see the BBC filming for their coverage later this week. Here's Monty Don and Joe Swift getting ready for a cosy chat.

Monty Don's trousers are an endless source of fascination for me. He always seems to be wearing the same ones. Doubtless organic fairly traded cotton, the creased blue suit has become a kind of uniform, underpinned when demonstrating work in the garden by elastic braces of the kind my grandad used to wear, I notice the braces come off for interviews. Time was, a man taking off his trouser braces in public would be time to make yourself scarce, but Monty doesn't strike me as a fisticuffs type. But I do wonder if he has a huge gothic wardrobe with a line of sinsisterly identical organic blue suits stretching off into the distance... Or maybe it's always the same one, I'm sure I could detect a hole in the knee of one leg...

Anyway, we had to wait for The Organic Monty to finish his interview in the RHS Grow Your Own garden before we could go in, so we were forced to partake of refreshments while we waited. I know, it's a tough job but someone's got to do it. It was well worth the wait though, this was the best part of the show for me, far more than the usual pretend rustic allotment display that you tend to get at shows, this was a really cutting edge grow to eat collection of displays. Herbs, fruits, nuts, edible flowers, there was even a mini vineyard interplanted with edible wild flowers, and olive groves which were quite lovely. The theme of the garden is that everything displayed is edible, so I learned a lot more about what a huge variety of plants are in fact edible as well as ornamental. Including my bete noir, cow parsley, see below.

The Garlic Farm won the award for best exhibit in this section with their gorgeous Garlic Plaiters Cottage, featuring together with lots of garlic of course, large quantities of cow parsley, It was a lovely day, far hotter than I had expected, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.The best day, weather wise of the week I suspect.  We also had the honour of being amongst the peasants to be swept aside at one point by a flurry of suits and uniforms ushering the Duchess of Cornwall around, I wonder that poor old Camilla got to see anything much from inside the battalion of escorts, she'd need to be eight feet tall.

The show gardens were all interesting, with the quest to be different in the concept gardens veering off into the frankly weird, but I was amazed to see that the brilliant garden by Chris Beardshaw, the Stockman's Retreat, was only awarded a silver gilt when it was to my mind the best garden in the show, not just because it was beautiful but it was about gardening and practical skills, and certainly one of the few show gardens bearing much resemblance to reality. Ideas, and concepts are great, but unless you're a millionaire you need practical skills to bring your ideas to life, and to avoid having a huge disconnect between the idea and the reality which I often feel is where show gardens can fall down.

Although I am prepared to suspend disbelief  when viewing show gardens, I was nevertheless disappointed with the upside down garden that I had seen previewed on TV,  Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky - sounded good  and looked great on tv, but in realityit was just too much scaffolding and didn't work at all for me.  And The World Vision garden for example was lovely to look at but the gardener in me couldn't help wondering how on earth you'd  get a lawn mower into the bowl of grass apparently floating on water!

And lastly I must say I was staggered at the amount of Cow Parsley on show,  or Anthriscus sylvestris as I must now learn to call it. . You can even buy a cultivated form from the RHS Anthriscus sylvestris var Ravenswing, for £7.99 no less. Having spent years strimming it away in the wild areas under the trees (or rather David and James have), I now find that it's fashionable Plant of the Moment! I've always thought that clouds of cow parsley do look lovely in the hegerows in spring, but not in my garden, now I'm thinking maybe I could leave them all and be the height of fashion!

Coverage of the 2011 Hampton Court Palace Flower Show is on BBC2 on Thursday 7th July 8 - 9pm and Friday  8th July 7 - 8pm