Wild Garlic

Today a friend and I had a trip to Bygone Times in Great Eccleston and stopped off to take a look at an interesting Church nearby. As it turned out the Church was not that interesting and was locked up, but growing by the roadside was an incredible patch of wild garlic. The wonderful tangy aroma hit us as soon as we stepped from the car, so grabbing a bag from the boot we filled it with as many leaves as we could get our greedy little hands on.

So tonight we have been cooking away. We had a stir-fry using some of the leaves to start with but then made a wonderful batch of wild garlic pesto. Such a simple process and having stolen a spoon of it I know just how powerful and tasty this is going to be.

Cheese, walnuts, wild garlic leaves, oil, a clove of garlic and a dash of seasoning and blend it all up.

 And finally one jar of wonderful wild garlic pesto.

Boston Baked Beans on Sourdough Toast.

Okay, that sounds like something only dear Nigella would think up to call beans on toast, but it happens to be the truth. If you remember (those of you who have been reading long enough) that way back last March or April time I started a sourdough starter and began learning how to make my own sourdough loaf? Well I haven't really updated since, but I am thrilled to say that the same sourdough starter is still alive! That is about 7 months and counting, still as healthy as can be and producing great bread. As for me, I think I have improved no end since those first loaves and am knocking one out about every 5 days or so. This was yesterdays offering:

I really do love making it and I really enjoy the 'dark' taste of sourdough loaves and especially the wonderful toast it makes and the starter is almost like a pet. (for those of you unsure, sourdough is a bread made without yeast but using a starter which is kept alive by feeding with flour and water, it then produces it's own natural yeast)

Yesterday I decided to make my own baked beans to go with the bread. Why? I hear you ask. Is there any point in toiling in the kitchen to make something which is perfectly good out of a tin? Well the only (and rather inadequate) answer I can come up with is why not? The ingredients are very cheap, I know what  has gone in them when I make them myself and who know, they may just be nicer than tinned ones.

Okay, so maybe you don't want to undertake them if you are busy, not really because they are complicated and make you spend much time in the kitchen, they really aren't, but they do involve soaking the beans 24 hours before and then cooking them before you even start the recipe. Not hard, but you can't be spontaneous and 'want them now'.

Anyway, what were the results?

Well they certainly look like baked beans but they were incredibly tasty. Now I have nothing at all against tinned baked beans, a great staple and wonderful to have in, but having tasted my own, these ones definitely do have a more 'natural' taste to them and I can taste what went in them, which is always a nice feeling (which was really the beans, water, tomato puree, cloves, dark brown sugar, garlic onion, mustard and smoked bacon, salt and pepper)

So in conclusion, if I can be bothered I will definitely make them again, they taste great, it makes loads (I reckon the equivalent of 5 tins), they freeze well (apparently) and can be done in the slow cooker so are cheap to cook (as it happens I did them in the oven today through pure impatience because I wanted them for lunch. There again, if I can't be bothered, I have tins of them in the cupboard :-)

Very Quick Stew

I go away working for 4 weeks tomorrow  (minus weekends) so really didn't want to be cooking much today but still wanted something delicious.
Time for a quick stew in the slow cooker. This recipe was given to me by a friend in Brighton, so if it's good, all credit goes to you Adrian.

A few changes here and there based on what I had in the house.

Brown off some cheap casserole beef in oil with some shallots (didn't have any so added chopped onion instead) cook for a couple of minutes and add a tablespoon or two of flour.

Add some beer. (I got a cheap bottle of beer from Lidl and shoved that in) and a glass of red wine, didn't have any so added a glug of port. Crumble in a beef stock cube and add some button mushrooms  (again, no button mushrooms in Lidl so some chopped up chestnut mushrooms.)

That's it! Bung it in the slow cooker for a few hours.

I did that at 9 this morning and I am not kidding when I say it took me 5 minutes. It took me twice as long to find the bottle opener, this being a virtually tee-total house.
Here's how it looks after 8 hours, the smell is heavenly.

Will serve it later with mashed potatoes and peas and let you know how it is, seconds for lunch tomorrow and then any left will go into the freezer for a portion or two on one of the weekends I am home. I love quick and tasty cooking like this.

Things are finally happening in the garden

There has been a huge amount of activity suddenly in my garden in the last few day. Good job, it has a lot of catching up to do.

I can almost here the rhubarb grow. I must admit that not having touched it at all last year has clearly made it's root system good and strong. It is well on and has grown every time I look at it.

The 4 inch stem and leaves on this clematis have grown in the last 36 hours.

These Alliums have suddenly taken off. On the right are the gigantic ones and on the left, well another sort, can't remember what now, haha.

Even these delphiniums are coming through. I am most pleased about these, because I found them at the end of last summer hidden under a tree, doing nothing because they were in full shade and were just a tangle of leaves. I transplanted the roots and had no idea whether they would survive. And here they are.

But there is one thing that makes me sad and that is my complete inability to grow rosemary. Yes, this herb which is usually hailed as a herb that 'anyone can grow' seems to hate me. Every rosemary I have ever had has died and yet I don't think that I do anything particularly bad to it. This one is no exception. I hold out a little hope that it may return to life, but it really does look dead.

So to cheer myself up I made a batch of Paul Hollywood's savoury scones. Ironically they are supposed to be cheese and rosemary scones but I replaced the rosemary and made them cheese and chilli scones. Have to say, I love this recipe, it really did take seconds to make and they are the nicest savoury scones I have ever tasted.

Cat protection

It's turned cold again this morning, in fact, I have icy cold little fingers as I type this. Didn't frost last night though. unlike yesterday. Typical, on the day that I plant out some sweet peas. Fortunately I had the foresight to wrap bubble wrap around them and was out there at midnight doing just that. They are all absolutely fine.
My raised vegetable bed was being used by the local cat population as a giant litter tray so I took action yesterday. I was going to make it a 'square foot gardening bed' anyway, (thanks to Sarina's good suggestion) so I knocked a few nail in and added string, this left me with 18 separate 1 foot squares  ready for different veg collections. As there is nothing yet in them I filled every square with anything that I could find to just put the cats off - small plant pots, rocks and stones - you get the idea.

and guess what? This morning, no digging and no cat poo.as I add some veg seedlings to it I will remove the stones or pots accordingly and by then, hopefully the cats will have given up on it and moved to a different place, hopefully, not in my garden.

This weekend I tried sourdough loaf number 2. I thought it was going badly, as rising seemed to barely happen even though all in all it  had about 24 hours! However, as it turned out, it seems to have worked far better than the last one. Although it lost it's lovely round shape by not coming out of the bowl cleanly.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I will be road testing it for taste and texture in the form of a good bacon sandwich in a little while, when it has cooled a bit.

Nom nom

Busy few days.

I've been in and out, dodging the rain most of the time. One second it is beautiful and warm, the next rainy.
I now do two ladies gardens on a regular basis, which is a nice bit of extra money and quite franky, a pleasure to do most of the time. It's only a couple of hours here and there, but maybe it could build up? who knows?
Did I mention that my oven broke down? Can't remember. It just stopped working which didn't really surprise me as it must have been over 20 years old. Fortunately on the day it stopped working my sister was throwing out her oven so I grabbed it (although I think that her builder wanted to nab it, because he tried very hard to not let me have, cheeky bugger).
So, much as I was tempted to try and put it in myself my mum was horrified and told me I had to get an electrician in. Did so and the kind man only charged £20 so I'm not complaining (watched him carefully and I could have done it myself, but never mind)
Anyway, it works perfectly, but my sister wants shooting - it was filthy!!!!! So a packet of Oven Pride later and I have a shiny new oven, hooray, cooking is back on.

Other things I have been up to - my first sourdough loaf. I can't say it was an absolute success, but it wasn't an absolute disaster either and I have learnt from my mistakes. There is nothing wrong with my starter, he is happily sitting there, bubbling and alive. The loaf itself had two problems, first of which is that it definitely needed more rising - I will give it a few more hours next time and somewhere warmer I think. The other problem was with my cooking, my oven was a bit too hot I think (still trying to get used to the new oven) and so it was very much cooked on the outside, but still a bit stodgy on the inside. Having said all of that the taste is beautiful, but it is just a bit dense - makes wonderful toast though. Loaf number two should be a better effort thanks to my trial and error first loaf.

My sourdough starter

Dough

Ready to bake.

First loaf

Made great eggs on toast though.

I haven't been neglecting my own gardening and working in the greenhouse continues to be a joy. Today I planted out some of my sweet peas - I know it is a bit of a risk mid April, but they were getting way too big for their pots and really wanted planting out. Hopefully no more frosts, but I will keep on eye and wrap them up if there is. 2 wigwams at either end of the new bed.

I'm desperate to get some veg in that raised bed in the distance - every morning the local cat population have used it as a giant litter tray!!!!

Hope you have all had a lovely weekend - time for me to have a piece of the Victoria sponge I made and a cuppa.

Coriander and lemon Hummous

Loads of you asked for the recipe I mentioned, which surprised me somewhat - I thought I was the last person to start making homemade hummous and everyone else already did.

So here it is.

I will base this on a normal size can of chickpeas - although I actually made it with a half size can as I discovered they were 3 for a pound and a half can makes more than enough hummous for me to eat by myself. I just halved all the following ingredients.

·         1 x 400g tin chick peas, drained and rinsed

·         bunch coriander, roughly chopped.( I just did this buy eye.)

·         2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

·         ½tsp ground coriander (I couldn't find mine so I missed this out, I'll try it next time)

·         2 lemons, juiced (I actually just used lemon juice from a bottle, about 2 tablespoons - again by eye)

·         1tbsp tahini (I would probably not buy this especially and would just miss it out, but I happened to have some. A friend of mine uses peanut butter in his instead and says that it gives a saltier and nice texture, but I have never tried)

·         3tbsp olive oil - again, by eye.

  

And that's it! Just put it all in the mini chopper or blender, whatever you have, even s stick blender (you can probably even just mash it although it won't be quite so fine perhaps. I then added some salt, to taste.

I prefer this coriander and lemon flavour one as I find ordinary hummous a little bland.

Let me know if you try it.

I'm back

Hello everyone,

The wanderer has returned and somehow, although I have been away for a month, it is still cold! I've had to put the heating on this morning, partly because the house has been empty for a long time, but mostly because there is such a chill in the air. however, it hasn't gone below freezing and isn't forecast to either.

The good news is that all my seedlings and plants have survived, just about. The longest they were left unattended was a fortnight as I popped home for Easter and my home style seedling irrigation system - a washing up bowl full of water in the bath with a large wet towel draped across the bath with all the seed trays on it, one end in the washing up bowl - worked a treat, maybe a little too well as everything was very damp.

All the seedlings, with the exception of the aqualegia and cosmos, have germinated, which seems something of a miracle considering how cold it must have been indoors here and the bigger plants that I left in my mothers care are all ok she says, although desperate for potting on.

The garden, if not a picture, is at least pleasant. The daffodils are going to burst forth imminently everything is budding, but all the clematis look dead! Last time I saw them they were budding forth and then the snow came and all the buds are dried husks now. I hope they may come back, but I am concerned about them. Also one of my azaleas looks decidedly unhappy.

I was staying with lovely friends who made my time away a joy and from them, I have learnt new recipes, 2 of which I have tried already and one of which will be started today. I have never had great success with home made hummous, but the one they made me was so delicious that I tried again last night with much greater success. I think the problem with my old attempts has been that they have lacked flavour so their  coriander and lemon hummous has changed this and it was absolutely delicious. Had that for my tea last night.
This morning I made tzatziki, another simple dish, but one that I have never actually tried to make before. Since I got my yoghurt maker for Christmas from my sister I always have a surplus of yoghurt so this is a perfect solution for using some of it up each time I make some.

The recipe that I am curious to try today is to make a sourdough starter. I was fascinated by how my friends nurtured this pot of slimy beige liquid, but one taste of their delicious home made sourdough bread was enough to convince me to give it a go. If nothing else, it will be fun, so today I will make my sourdough starter, I think it takes about a week, but I will play it by ear.

All good, cheap, easy things to make today then.

Oh, and I had a spot of good financial news while I was away, so I treated myself, finally, to a new freezer, yes, a brand spanking new one, which will be delivered tomorrow. Mine is absolutely about to give up the ghost and I am terrified of losing all my food stores if it suddenly stops working (also I am rather concerned about it blowing up or setting on fire or something, it ices on the outside now as well as the inside and all around the electrics is solid frozen ice, can't be good). It is not often I actually get something completely new, so I am like a kid at Christmas.

Well, I am glad to be home for 3 and a half weeks and will finally catch up with all of your blogs over the next few days.

No pictures today I'm afraid, but I will remedy that next time.

How to stretch a portion into 3

I have read a lot of blog posts recently on how much the price of meat has gone up. I have to admit that I had not noticed, simply because through January and February I have barely shopped, it has been a store cupboard 8 weeks and gradually the stock of my freezer has been reducing. I am, however getting lower and soon I will have to brave the supermarket again. Consequently I have barely spent anything on food recently, which is lovely.

So with all this in mind I went to my trusty freezer list to see what was in there and among other things I found that I had a portion of beef stew that I made a few months ago. I thought that it would be a good idea to make this stretch a bit more, so armed with my new pastry skills I decided to put it into a small pie. What a good idea this was. One portion of stew put with pastry makes 3 portions of stew.

So yesterday's lunch was a third of the pie, some oven chips (I wanted mash really, but I have run out of potatoes), peas and gravy, with some of my home made pickled red cabbage and pickled onions.

In future, when I make a casserole, I will try to make a pie out of one of the portions.

Other news is that my 20 year old oven has given up the ghost. The mini top oven is still working but cooks very very badly, hence the slightly overdone pastry. Not good when you cook a lot. Luckily, my sister is throwing away a perfectly good oven as she is having a new kitchen, so being me, I have swooped in there and nabbed it. It is a slightly different height than mine (integrated) but the same width, so it will fit in the space with room on the top. A bit of carpentry should sort that out. Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that nothing else gives up working. My broken bath, by the way, is working perfectly ok for showers with some heavy duty gaffa tape. This stuff works like a dream and there are no leaks so far and I haven't had to replace any tape yet. Should do me for a few months.

A rather strange meal and some baking.

I cooked a strange curry last night. It was actually rather nice although it could have gone either way.
I started by wondering what I could do with the last portion of the Christmas beef and some yoghurt that was nearing it's end and curry seemed the obvious choice. So I set to, frying an onion because I like the onions to be very soft in a curry.
I suppose my mistake was that I didn't check the ingredients before I started cooking, because first I found that I had a lot less beef than I thought left. what should I do? I added 3 slices of gammon that were also in the freezer. Gammon and beef curry? odd for sure. So I duly defrosted them and added them to the onions and added my curry spices and a can of tomatoes. Now for the yoghurt. Mistake number 2 - the yoghurt had gone off! I was cross, firstly because I hate to waste any food and secondly, because I like a creamy curry best. So a hunt around the fridge and cupboard unearthed a tin of coconut milk. It will do,and so the curry evolved into something else. In it went with some chilli flakes and some green beans from the freezer that I wanted to use up.
Funny how very odd mixes can end up being delicious.

I know this looks like an especially unattractive photo - everything I seem to snap at night comes out weirdly orange. But it was tasty, believe me.

Other stuff I made yesterday included a treacle tart with some pastry I had left over from a pie. Another Mary Berry recipe. And with the tiny amount of pastry left after that I did 4 mini custard tarts.

Finally, as the oven was on, some chilli, cheesy biscuits with the sum total of my home grown chilli peppers in them.

 All delicious.

Pretty nice bread and butter pud

Making my own bread, when there is just me can mean that I get an excess. I usually freezer any that is going stale and then at a later stage, when I have enough, bake it in a really really low oven and then put it through a processor as bread crumbs (considering I just saw a tiny pack of breadcrumbs in the supermarket priced at £1.99 I can't quite believe that anyone would pay that ever!).
However, I was watching the Mary Berry story on tv the other day and I thought that I would have a go at bread and butter pudding. I a, usually fairly disappointed with a bread and butter pudding but I now know that it was because I was given a 'bad' one in the past. This was delicious, frugal and really nice. I used margerine rather than butter - simply because I had some and was short of butter at that moment, and I didn't use cream, again, because i didn't have any and also, using semi skimmed milk instead makes it healthier. Even without these 'luxeries' it was delicious.

Just before it went in the oven, seemed to neglect to take an 'after' pic.

Mary Berry's bread and butter pudding.

Ingredients

• 150g/5oz mixed sultanas and raisins
• 75g/3oz caster sugar
• (1 lemon or orange, finely grated zest) I didn't bother because I didn't have any.
• ½ tsp mixed spice
• 8 thin slices white bread, crusts removed
• 100g/4oz butter, melted Margering was fine.

For the custard

• 2 free-range eggs
• 300ml/½ pint double cream 300ml of extra milk instead.
• 150ml/¼ pint milk
• 2 tbsp demerara sugar

Preparation method

1.     You will need an ovenproof dish about 2½-3 pint/1.4-1.7 litres volume (18 x 23 x 5 cm/7 x 9 x 2 in).

2.     Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4 and use some of the melted butter to grease the dish.

3.     Combine the dried fruit, sugar, lemon zest and spice together in a bowl and toss to mix well.

4.     Cut each bread slice into three strips. Take sufficient slices to cover the base of the dish and dip one side of each one in melted butter. Lay them in the dish, buttered-side down. Sprinkle with half the dried fruit mixture. Repeat the layering, laying the bread strips buttered-side up. Lay the third and final layer of bread strips on top, buttered-side up.

5.     For the custard, beat together the eggs, cream and milk in a bowl and pour it over the pudding. Sprinkle with demerara sugar, and then leave to stand for about one hour if time allows.

6.     Bake for about 30-40 minutes, or until the top is golden-brown and crisp and the pudding slightly puffed up. Serve hot, or there are some who insist that it is delicious cold!

Practice really does make perfect.

Those of you who have read my blog regularly for a while will know the ongoing battle I have had with my pastry skills. No one ever showed me how to do it and as a novice pastry maker my first tries were very poor and often I would have (in the past) resorted to shop bought. But I persevered and improved, listened to advice, read cookery books carefully, storing away little tricks and tidbits of information and got better.

Well it just goes to show that if you keep trying with cooking and experimenting you really do improve.

This morning I made this chicken and ham pie and I am very, very happy with the results, the pastry looks good and golden, tastes great and there are no soggy bottoms! Mary Berry would be proud.

I didn't follow a recipe, just made it up as I went along. I roasted a chicken a few days ago so I had plenty of chicken picked off in the fridge, I had slices of ham from my Christmas gammon in the freezer so I thawed out a couple of slices too, made the pastry and shoved it in the fridge, fried an onion, added the cooked chicken, sliced up gammon and some mixed veg from a bag in the freezer. Made a white sauce to bind it all, some sage that I had hanging about and seasoned, that was the filling done, after that I just rolled out the pastry base to fill the pie dish, added the filling and put on a lid, cutting out a couple of leaves with a knife from the excess pastry. 30 minutes in the oven and it is one delicious pie.

This will probably do me 3 or 4 more meals.

I am so glad that I kept on trying because I really feel that I know what I am doing now and will never have to resort to bought pastry again. It is so easy to give up after a few failures.

Vegetable Growing 2013.

I think a lot of us in Britain can quite safely say that 2012 was not a good year for vegetable growing. It was rather disheartening to nurture seedlings and then plants, watch them grow their first shoots and finally produce little or no edible content at all. It wasn't all bad, I had successful potatoes and my apple tree and rhubarb took nicely so that I will hopefully have something from them soon, fingers crossed. but tomatoes were disastrous giving me only about 20 tomatoes from 8 plants, my cucumbers all died before they grew a single one and even my rosemary looks like it lost the will to live.

So onward and upward, 2013 is another year and we can only hope that the weather is a bit better and the vegetables actually grow.

2012 was always going to be a bit hit and miss for me, to be fair. I had only just moved in to this garden when I should have been starting seedlings off and the garden needed tons doing to it before I could get stuff in the ground.
Now I have a raised bed solely for veg growing and plenty of mixed beds that have been inundated with organic matter, manure, soil improver etc. All this will hopefully give my veg a better chance.

So I have been browsing the catalogues that I get regularly. I like Suttons, Mr Fothergills and Parkers and there is no pleasure like browsing the various sections on a cold winters night. It is easy, however, to get swayed by the lovely pictures of veg and to want to grow everything, so this week I got my act together and made a list of what I actually want to grow and eat this year. The is no point at all in growing stuff that you never actually eat, so that gets rid of a certain amount. Also, when space is a premium, I only really want to grow stuff that is pricey to buy in the shops, so I am going for stuff that I enjoy eating but can be expensive to buy. I am sure home grown carrots are delicious, but I haven't got room to grow many and after all a massive bag is less than a pound.

In the end I have whittled my list down to:

Vegetables

Spring onions
Tomatoes
Cabbage
Leeks
Squash
Lettuce
Garlic
Potatoes
Purple Sprouting Broccoli
Runner beans

Fruit

Apples (eventually, may get one or two this year)
Raspberries
Strawberries
Gooseberries
Red and black currants
Rhubarb

I am going to divide my raised beds into sections - a bit like square foot gardening, but because of the dimensions of the bed the sizes may be slightly different. At the moment in the raised bed are some rather sad looking cabbages, that have been in there for an eternity. By the time other things want planting out I will eat what I can from the cabbages and ditch the rest as a poor job. I will try and get the spring onions, leeks, squash and more broccoli into there, and some cabbage if I can. In pots or growbags I will grow my tomatoes and I have some old windowboxes that will be perfect for the lettuce. I had good success with potatoes in potato bags last year so will try that again and everything else will go where it can.

On top of all of this veg I will plant up all those remnants of seeds I have from last year, I have a whole load that were not quite used up and which I carefully stored. Anything that comes from them will be a bonus, there are things like radish and beetroot among other things.

With the exception of raspberry canes, all the other fruit is already planted from last year so we will see what happens there.

If all of the above grow successfully I will be a happy man, but as half the pleasure is in the eating and the other half is in the growing, I will enjoy myself whatever comes of it all.

Making yoghurt

My sister gave me a wonderful and very thoughtful Christmas present this year, a yoghurt maker. Now I have made yoghurt lots of times before with various results. The method I used most often was to put the milk/yoghurt mixture in a flask for a few hours to maintain the temperature required. The downside of this method was that it was a little bit hit and miss. Sometimes it would come out very well, but other times I would end up with a grainy mixture that looked a little curdled and other times it would separate too much, leaving me a lot of buttermilk and not so much yoghurt. The other downside was that the flask got very smelly. Hard to clean out a flask with a small opening that has contained yoghurt.

Well this yoghurt maker that I was given is very simple. It works on the same principle as a slow cooker, maintaining a very low but constant temperature while the yoghurt is made. It is cheap to run, even cheaper than a slow cooker and the yoghurt it made was absolutely perfect.

The principle is an easy one. 2 teaspoons of live yoghurt and a litre of milk. I always use UHT milk because it saves the hassle of having to boil and sterilise ordinary milk. Put the milk and yoghurt in the maker, turn it on and in 8 hours lovely creamy yoghurt. It is really really good, very perfect.

I am sure it is possible to achieve equally good results without it, but I must admit, I sort of wandered away from making yoghurt because my results before were so hit and miss. This makes life much easier. 

And the best bit? 2 teaspoons of this yoghurt will go to make another litre of the stuff when I am running low. Eternal, cheap yoghurt if I organise myself. This will do breakfast every day and I am going to look up other things I can do with it now that I have such a large, cheap supply (about 80p for a litre of yoghurt)

Christmas Baking and crafting

Today has been a lovely day. You will all be pleased to know that I very slowly got my car back into my driveway. I did wonder about the folly of this halfway up the hill as the wheels began to spin and then along the ridge where there were cars parked on both sides and my car was sliding a bit. But I went about 1 mile an hour and once it was in the driveway I was content to be snowed in for the weekend. Snow is still here, even though a mile down the road there is nothing.
So what did I do while I was snowed in? baked of course.

The star of the show had to be the simplest. My mincemeat ice cream!
To say that this is absolutely gorgeous is an understatement and I kid you not, it took 10 minutes to make (plus three hours in the freezer of course.)
Separate 4 eggs and whisk the whites, add 100g caster sugar. Whip 300ml of double cream and then fold together the cream, eggwhite and egg yolks. Add your flavour, which in this case was just 100ml of my home made mincemeat. It is a no-churn recipe so that really is it. In the freezer and it is beautiful. It will become a staple in my freezer now, I know and way cheaper to make than even a mid priced ice cream. I reckon less than £2 for a large tub in the end. I will experiment with all sorts of flavours.

Next was my mince pie marathon. I think I have got the knack of pastry a bit more thanks to all your helpful hints. It was good, rolled out fine, no tearing and tastes good with a good texture.

I made 35 mince pies, some with proper lids and some with stars. I actually prefer the stars because they are prettier and actually taste better.

3 batches later and they are all done.

I've popped the majority in the freezer for Christmas, tasted 2 (very very nice, great home made mincemeat) and kept 4 out.

My final bit of baking, as the oven was on, was 12 bread rolls.

A feast fit for a king, even if I do say so myself. Eat your heart out Enid Blyton.

I wanted to dry some orange slices to hang as Christmas decorations, but no way was I going to put the oven on for 3 hours to do it! So I spread them out on grease proof paper and tin foil on top of one of the radiators. Days later, they are nearly dry.

Now that they are nearly dry I have just popped them direct onto the radiator to finish them off. These will get some ribbon or rafia threaded through them and will be hung on the tree, or on a present or somewhere.

Happy days.

Silk purse out of a sow's ear and Christmas gifting.

Thank you to all those suggestions about rescuing my rather nasty homity pie. In the end, I scooped out the rather nasty potato mush gloop and mashed it with herbs and butter to make a surprisingly nice mash, shoved it back in the pie which was beginning to resemble Frankenstein's monster, put it in the oven with some chips, and had the whole thing with peas and loads of gravy. A bit of a carb fest, but you know what? It was actually quite nice. I am certainly happy to eat up the rest of the 1 and a half pies now (sigh).

I have been trying very hard to get all of my Christmas shopping sorted before the 1st December and I am thrilled to say that I am almost there. In fact I have got all of them sorted except for one. I even started wrapping some of them this weekend. The home made Christmas pudding vodka is nicely steeping and will be ready to bottle today, I have to stir it once a day and I couldn't resist a little taste when I did that today - it is absolutely gorgeous, so tasty and I am sure everyone who is getting a bottle is really going to enjoy it.

The only person I have not bought for yet is my mum and I am not sure what I will be getting her. Also there may be one or two people who get some Christmas gift extras from the kitchen, in the form of biscuits or cakes or chocolates and I will obviously not be making these until the week of Christmas. But besides that, I am saved from the high street through December and if I play my cards right, I can do one food shop when my friend comes to stay on the 17th (it is more bearable when it is with someone to share the Christmas supermarket horrors) and that will be me done with shops through December.

I know that I am going to feel unbearably smug now when I hear others moaning about having to go to the shops on Christmas eve :-)

It turns out that Nigella has nothing to worry about.

I do enjoy my cooking and trying new things and then sharing the yummy results with you here on my blog, but don't let that make you think that things always run quite so smoothly in my kitchen! Sometimes I have disasters!!!!!!!

Yesterday I thought that I would make a homity pie for the first time, this is a very frugal dish with onions and potatoes and cheese and in principle should be delicious.

NOT SO IN MY CASE.

I really did a very poor job of it, even though I followed the recipe carefully. The pastry is not that nice (as you know, pastry is not my strong suit), the potatoes were overcooked which meant that they are more of a mush (that's mush, not mash, mash would be an improvement) and the whole thing has a rather bland flavour and unpleasant consistency.

And do you know what is the worst thing:

I made two of them!

I actually just want to throw them away, but that really goes against the grain. I have frozen the little one and half of the big one (it will lurk at the bottom of the freezer now in the hope that the pie fairy will go in there and transform it into something delicious) and I will eat the remaining unfrozen part this weekend. What a prospect. I'm thinking that maybe with some chips and SMOTHERED in gravy, it might improve slightly.

Anyone any other suggestions to make this unappetising feast better?

Baking

Today has been a nice day for baking. The sun came out late morning and was flooding into the house which was a little treat.
I wanted to try making some soft bread rolls and as the oven would be on for this, thought I would make a cake too. I've been having a few too many cakes lately, if I am not careful my waist band will be getting even tighter.
I let the bread machine make the dough, it is a good setting that I don't use enough, but it does take a good 2 hours 20. I got out the dough and shaped it into 13 rolls (not sure how it ended up 13, it was supposed to be 12) and then left them in the sun with a damp tea-towel over them to rise some more.
After an hour or so they went into a hot oven for 15 minutes. Nothing like fresh home baked bread rolls.

Then I made a couple of lemon drizzle loaves. These are so delicious, made so mostly by the drizzle. I heat up the juice of 2 lemons with 4 tablespoons of sugar and dissolve and then pour it over the two finished cakes as soon as they come out of the oven. Makes the cake lovely and sticky.

These are two fairly small cakes, one will go in the freezer for another time. I have put 7 of the bread rolls in the freezer too.

I made a frugal lamb tagine too in the slow cooker (which probably, officially means that I can't really call it a tagine).
This was just 2 lamb steaks that I had bought for £2 with a yellow label some time ago and left in the freezer, cut into pieces with a  grated onion and red pepper, an array of good Moroccan spices, can of tomatoes, some stock and some raisins, all shoved in the slow cooker and left to cook all day. It was really good and there are a couple of portions left.

 It's very 'saucy' as there wasn't much lamb in it, but there were plenty enough chunks for me. I filled the couscous with some of the herbs I have growing. It was lovely.

A great day of cooking very frugally. I am rubbish at totting up the individual prices for things, but I do know that, firstly, I didn't go out and buy a single thing for anything that I cooked today, it was all from my store cupboard and secondly that the reduced lamb was by far the most expensive ingredient used today.

I checked on my laundry liquid this morning, it has gone lovely and gloopy, just like laundry liquid should be. I am actually looking forward to my next load of washing now to check it out!

A couple of people asked me for my home made shampoo recipe, I will do a post on it soon.