October Daughters

Two of my daughters were born in October, a few days short of eighteen years apart.

Up at the top of the garden where Middle Daughter sat caring for the fire, we watched the darkening sky while food for a joint birthday celebration was being prepared in the house, tasty layers of minced lamb with chopped onion, tomato and aubergine, all wrapped in foil to be cooked on the fire.

By the time the food was cooked and we were eating these lamb burgers inside rolls it was quite dark. I enjoyed my roll and shall try the same mixture again but maybe cooked in the house. We don't do enough cooking on open fires to be expert at it. Perhaps we should practise more!

Pear and chocolate pudding cake followed. This was a roaring success. I shall make it again with some tweaks to the topping. The chocolate I used this time was dairy free for the sake of Middle Daughter's partner and, even with  dollop of vegetable fat spread in place of the butter I usually use and a good squirt of golden syrup, the high concentration of cocoa solids still made it set quite hard. The cake itself was perfect in its variety of textures from gooey centre to just crisp edges, with the pears giving an interesting–and delicious–taste and texture contrast.

We tried to light cake candles but a wind had sprung up and blew them out straight away.

When the older generation (Toad and me) took ourselves to bed the October daughters and their friends spent another hour or so first by the bonfire and then in the warm kitchen.

 Pear and apple pudding without its topping (which can be cream, ice-cream or custard rather than (or as well as!) chocolate if you like) and then, below, with eyes!

pear eyes

I found the recipe on the website baldhiker.com. It is by someone called Sally Laker.

Wine from the Boggy Brae cellar part 2

an illustration of my carrot & apricots wine's viscosity

My 2004 Carrot & Apricot wine, bottled in July 2006, turned out good ten years on, and not just for the colours. Its high viscosity confirms its high alcohol content and it tasted good, in a 'robust' kind of way (Toad said "soft peach holding a war club" and, when he'd had a bit more "like maraschino cherries–full metal jacket variety"). We drank some with pasta and a carbonara type sauce made with Serrano ham and some smoked salmon but no Parmesan cheese. That was good too.

colours of carrot & apricot wine

Next for trial is some Marigold wine.

One day to the summer solstice...

...and the woodshed rose is doing its stuff,


foxglove season is fully with us, and honeysuckle is taking off

honeysuckle and young birch growing together

It is perhaps not surprising that this rhododendron Toad planted "up top" a good number of years ago has never flowered. It is still suffering deer depredations. Hey ho. We think it will have red flowers when it has outgrown deer chompings.


Meanwhile, the splendour of ponticum, such as it is in its non-Tennysonian way, falls. Also that of fuchsia.


I love the word music of Tennyson's poem and I always think of that first line, minus the castle walls, when spring and summer flowers begin to 'go over'.

The splendour falls on castle walls

            And snowy summits old in story:

       The long light shakes across the lakes,

            And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

        O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

            And thinner, clearer, farther going!

        O sweet and far from cliff and scar

            The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

        O love, they die in yon rich sky,

            They faint on hill or field or river:

        Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

            And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Boggybrae being a little behind the rest of the world, Mouse-ear, Greater Bird's-foot Trefoil, and Lesser Stitchwort are just beginning. Have an African daisy while you're at it. These, like Ox-eye daisies, are doing less well than they were.




The chives are lovely right now. Bees love them. The leaves are always useful as garnish on food or just chopped and chucked into whatever dish one's making. Recently I thought of floating some of the flowers, which are also edible (quite strong flavoured so go easy!) on some soup I made (recipe at the end). Pale Escallonia, some cuttings of which I gave to a friend earlier in the year, is opening its flowers now.



In other news, Toadlet is at a sleepover with a pal. This pal, who is a singer and wants to get into the Korean Pop Culture scene might be moving to Korea this summer. Toadlet could not let her go that far away never having watched the Harry Potter movies so they arranged a Hogwart's movie marathon.

Here is the recipe for mushroom, tuna and sweetcorn soup. There are loads of recipes for mushroom and tuna pasta sauces so it was bound to work.

Ingredients:
home-made chicken stock (approx 300ml)
chopped onion (approx a third of a big one; I was chopping one for something else and chucked a handful in the soup pan)
crushed clove of garlic (I love splatting garlic with a broad bladed knife and a whack with my hand)
chopped mushrooms (100g or so)
small tin white tuna in brine, drained

Boil these up, cool a little and whizz in a blender. Then add

small tin of sweetcorn kernels in water (drained)

Serve with your garnishings of choice. All or some of these work: dash of cream, chopped parsley, chopped chive leaves, chive flowers.

Vinegar ice-cream

pic from Wikimedia Commons

Long ago, in pre-Toadlet times, Toad and I took two Bangladeshi kids I was tutoring to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Afterwards we went along to "G & D's" (George & Davis' Ice-cream Cafe) on Little Clarendon Street.

I remembered this event today when I began to tuck into my second wedge of apple streusel cake, this time with some added homemade chocolate sauce (melted chocolate and double cream, essentially – the low fat mantra never caught on with me) and vanilla ice-cream.

Because...

...when I was reading out the available ice-cream varieties for Tanni and Robbie, Tanni must have misheard vanilla as vinegar. She asked for vinegar ice-cream and I, mishearing her in turn, accepted that with a perfectly straight face. It was only afterwards that Toad told me she had said vinegar and obviously wondered why it was called that! Brave girl to have chosen it in that case!

Anyway, ever since then vanilla ice-cream has been vinegar ice-cream in my mind. And so, this afternoon I had a slice of apple cake with 'vinegar' ice-cream and chocolate sauce. Very nice it was too.

Pemmican (Part 1) and a tray of Boggy Brae Flapjack

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Apparently proper Native American style pemmican is a total food.

Toad is making pemmican. He may decide to try an experiment of eating nothing but pemmican for a month or some other period of time. Part of the idea, as I understand it, is that he can take some pemmican to work and eat it during the day instead of drinking coffee throughout the day to stave off hunger. This eating, or rather, non-eating plan tends to fall through when work colleagues bring in cake to share and leave it on a table near Toad's desk. He's looking for a way to eat something more nourishing than cake. He doesn't take a packed lunch. I like coffee and cake but I have them as well as breakfast, lunch and dinner because my coffee experiments have not yet discovered this hunger-staving property that caffeine is supposed to have. It is true that I don't drink my coffee or tea very strong.

When I say "nothing but pemmican" there are provisos. In the first place, according to Toad who has presumably gleaned this information from somewhere, the beef of grain-fed cattle is not as nutrient (vitamin) rich as that of pastured cattle, and as he thinks the beef he bought is probably from grain-fed cattle, he says he would need to take a vitamin supplement as well during the pemmican experiment. Proviso the second is that I presume he would still be drinking coffee and tea, not to mention his winter evening tots of rum or whisky. But that is a presumption at the moment. Observation will bear it out or otherwise.

So, to get onto the pemmican-making method. I am an observer of this process so just describing here what I see. A couple of days ago Toad bought a lump of beef. Last night he thinly sliced some of the raw meat and hung the pieces from cocktail sticks suspended from an oven grid overnight in the bottom oven of the Rayburn on a very low heat setting. This morning I needed to turn up the heat of the Rayburn to cook some flapjack and then a slow-cooking chicken casserole so I had to take the partly dried beef out.

<< Here it is on the baking tray that was underneath it to catch any drips. It occurred to me that, since we have a pan rack above the Rayburn, I could hang the meat there to carry on drying during the day using the rising heat from my cooking, so I did that. See below:

<<Boggy Brae Flapjack. My son-out-law says I should set up a production line, it's that good.







250g salted butter
175g sugar
a dollop (heaped dessertspoon) of honey
a larger dollop (as much as will stick to a tablespoon) of golden syrup

Melt all of the above in a large pan.

While it is melting chuck handfuls of almonds, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, walnuts (or pecans), sunflower kernels, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds (whatever! I usually use all of those) into a blender and grind them up.

Weigh out 350g rolled oats
Add to the oats 2 teaspoons ground ginger (more if you like)
a teaspoon of ground cinnamon
a shake of ground nutmeg or allspice
2 teaspoons of ground coriander seeds.

When the butter and sugars have melted, remove the pan from the heat and mix in the oats, spices, nuts and seeds. Tip into a large baking pan lined with baking parchment. Bake at 325ºC/160ºF for about 20 minutes. My Rayburn oven doesn't cook evenly so I turn the tray round after 12 minutes.

Cut the flapjack into rectangles or triangles while it is still hot and leave to cool in the tin.

Fab with coffee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toadlet will not eat any of the above. She has eaten flapjack in the past. She favourite meat is Parma ham. Whether it is more favourite than Greggs' sausage rolls (which, according to her, are the best sausage rolls in the world) I have not yet established with any certainty.

Soup for a cold and wet 2 November

2 Nov Soup

Ingredients and method

You need:
the leftover juices and fats from a (beef) sausage, beetroot and shallot casserole
some chicken bones that you found in the freezer (wings mainly) with a bit of meat and skin on them

Boil the above with a couple of onion ends (the bits you cut off, including the skin) to make stock.
Strain through a colander.
Take any meat off the bones, chop it and chuck it in with the stock.

Then add:
Some sliced mushrooms
a small chopped onion (or half a large one! – not that it matters really)
some leftover pumpkin that was mashed with coconut milk

more water if necessary

Reheat and cook the mushrooms and onion.
Whizz in liquidiser.

 

Lovely dark mushroom soup with a few extra mushrooms to slice and fry for garnish

Berry pancake/soufflé/omelette

I tried a new technique for making Mark Sisson's berry pancake. His method is to cook the berries first in butter in a frying pan and then add the eggs (whites beaten to a froth, cinnamon and vanilla added to the yolks and all mixed together). The trouble with this method, I have found, is that the fruit tends to if not quite burn, then at least get slightly overcooked, and some of it sticks to the pan when you tip it all out onto a plate.

My first attempt to overcome this problem was to change the cooking fat to beef fat because butter burns at a lower temperature, relatively speaking. This didn't make a significant difference. I concluded that the problem was the method of having the fruit in contact with the hot pan for too long while the egg cooked above it.

My next attempt was to slightly cook the fruit and then transfer it to a soufflé dish, add the egg mixture, and bake the whole lot. That solved the sticking problem but the egg texture wasn't as nice.

What I did a couple of days ago when I made this pancake was to cook the fruit in the frying pan in a little beef fat, then tip it out into a bowl where it stayed until the egg froth had started to cook in the pan. Then I tipped the fruit (blueberries seem to work best, though a mixture of blackberries and raspberries are good too) on top of the eggs, as for an omelette. The visual effect was fun to watch, as you see from the photos below and the colours are wonderful.

This is definitely the best treatment for the fruit – it keeps its taste and juiciness and doesn't get overcooked. Toad was less keen on the egg texture this time, which was different again from the other methods. I liked it but perhaps will try getting the eggs almost completely cooked before tipping the fruit on another time.

I suppose one could just cook a plain frothy omelette and eat it with the stewed fruit. Unless someone has a better idea.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them

The cooking blueberries

Fruit tipped onto the egg base

The omelette bubbles up or the berries sink, as if into quicksand

Ready to eat – with whipped cream
(one day I will try it with ice-cream, possibly as well as cream)