Snowdrops, Beetroot and Abandoned Parsnips

The snowdrops in my garden are a cheerful reminder that warmer weather is on the way. Actually, we’re currently having freakily warm weather, it’s already 22°C warmer than last week. The plants don’t know whether they’re coming or going. I had planned to sow the first succession of parsnips two days ago but the ground was frozen so hard that the seed bed I’d previously prepared was like concrete. Sowing abandoned! Now that it’s warmed up to 15°C I’ll risk sowing a few tomorrow. I'll keep sowing a few seeds every two weeks so that they're ready at different times. As much as I love parsnips, recipes to use 15 of them at once might be challenging!

My chitted first early potatoes are looking very healthy and just about ready to go. I used the abandoned parsnip sowing time to pre-dig a trench for the potatoes and I covered it with horticultural fleece to warm the soil up a little. I’ll plant the potatoes later this week. I’m certain we’ll have many more frosts, but they should be fine if I earth them up properly. Earthing up is when you draw a ridge of earth up over the emerging shoots of the potatoes. This should protect them until the risk of frost has passed. Last year we did have a freaky late frost that turned some of the potato leaves black, but by then they were pretty sturdy and they all bounced back.

I’m also sowing some biodegradable pots with some beetroot seeds this week. I’ll keep these indoors in a warm light room (my photographic studio starts to resemble a greenhouse about this time of year). When they’re big enough I’ll transfer them to my new cold frame, which is still in the box it was delivered in 2 months ago. I’m hoping that having seedlings that need to go in there will force me to get to grips with assembling the flat packed cold frame. Flat pack assembly is one of my least favourite jobs in the world. The last cold frame I assembled a few years ago was so wobbly on completion that you could only open the door if you pushed the lid at the same time. I’d like to blame the manufacturers but I’m fairly certain it’s me that’s the problem!

Cupcakes and Winter Disasters

The continuing unusually cold winter weather and our creaky old house have conspired together this week to elevate my stress levels. Frozen diesel in the car and a burst water pipe have been expensive, messy and time consuming. At times like these, I comfort bake. Nothing relaxes me more than baking cakes and cookies. Perhaps it’s all the methodical weighing and measuring that helps soothe the worried mind. This has resulted in a flurry of sweet creations in my kitchen this week.


Raspberry and Pomegranite Cupcakes

For the cupcakes:

325g plain flour

1 tbsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. fine salt

300g caster sugar

125ml rapeseed oil

2 eggs

375ml whole milk

2 tbsp. mashed fresh raspberries



For the icing:

120g unsalted butter, softened

300g mascarpone cheese

160g icing sugar

1 vanilla pod

A few fresh raspberries and pomegranate seeds for decoration




Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C/Gas mark 3. Line a cupcake tin with 18 cupcake liners (or 2 and a bit tins if, like me, your tins have 12 holes)

Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Add these sifted dry ingredients to the bowl of a an electric mixer (hooray for my KichenAid Artisan!) Using a paddle attachment mix on low speed for 30 seconds. Slowly add the oil to the mixture until the mixture looks like fine crumbs. Add the eggs, milk, and squashed raspberries and mix on low speed for 1 minute. Scrape the sides of the bowl to ensure everything is getting evenly mixed, then turn up to a medium speed and mix for another 2 minutes.

Fill the cupcake liners three-quarters full with the mixture and bake until cooked through (about 15-20 minutes) Cool on a wire rack before icing. They must be completely cool before you ice them.

Scrape the seeds from the vanilla pod and add to the soft butter. Cream the butter until light and fluffy in an electric mixer using a paddle attachment. Add the mascarpone and mix. Don’t over work the mascarpone mixture otherwise it may separate. Sift the icing sugar over the mascarpone mixture and gently fold it in. Put the mixture in the fridge for 30 minutes to set, then spread on top of each cupcake and add the fresh raspberries and pomegranate seeds on top. These need to be refrigerated and eaten fairly quickly because of the marscapone icing.

Fill the cupcake liners three-quarters full with the mixture and bake until cooked through (about 15-20 minutes) Cool on a wire rack before icing. They must be completely cool before you ice them.

Chitting Potatoes and Lots of Snow

 

This week has been unusually cold here, the temperature hasn’t risen above 0°C and has been down to -6°C. The big dump of snow we had at the weekend is hanging around looking dirty and there are bare patches of grass on the hills where kids (ok, and us) have tobogganed the snow into oblivion. The image above shows the fields near my house, a favourite place for tobogganing.

 

Preparing the seed bed for the parsnips is on hold. But I’m still itching to get started for this year, so I began the process of chitting my first early potatoes. The terminology involved in potato growing put me off growing them for years. First earlies, second earlies, maincrop? The terms seems unnecesarily confusing and daunting. Really, all the terms mean are how fast the potatoes are ready to harvest once you’ve planted the seed potatoes. First earlies (most people’s idea of “new potatoes”) are usually ready in about ten weeks, second earlies in about thirteen weeks and maincrop are ready about twenty weeks after planting.  The variety of potoato you chose will tell you whether it’s first, second or maincrop. 

 These are my first earlies for this year, at the start of the chitting process. I’ve chosen Arran Pilot this year. It is said to have reistaance to common scab, which was a problem with some of the varieties I grew last year.

 I save egg boxes all year to use for this job. One end of the seed potato will have little eyes or buds, this is called the rose end. Stand it in the egg box with this rose end upwards.

 

You can see that mine had started chitting on their own in their delivery box and had these little white shoots when they were delivered from the seed company (www.simplyseed.co.uk)  They’re white because the potatoes had been kept in the dark in a box. That’s not the sort of sprouting you want at the end of this process, you want short fat green and pink shoots. You can rub out (pick off) some of the shoots to leave just three fat ones on each potato so the plant can concentrate on producing fewer but bigger potatoes. If you have lots of shoots you get lot of tiny potatoes (and you’ll probably miss the really tiny ones when harvesting which is a real pain as the rotting potatoes encourage slugs)

Then you should leave the potatoes sitting in their egg boxes somewhere cool and light – but not in direct sunlight. Mine are spread out on my studio floor in the attic which is unheated due to our super inefficient heating system!  They are ready to plant when the shoots are about an inch long. I’m hoping this freakily cold snap will be long gone by then!

The Last of the Carrots

I’m lucky enough to still be pulling carrots from our vegetable patch on a daily basis. Despite a few hard frosts they’ve lasted really well. They haven’t grown in size since the cold weather set in, but they seem to be perfectly happy to sit in the soil all winter. However, I’m itching to get a seed bed prepared in that area for the parsnips that need to be sown soon. So, as much as I’ve enjoyed my winter supply of carrots,  I’m pulling what’s left of them today and making a big batch of carrot and coriander soup.  I usually spend a few hours each month making soup and freezing it in single serving sizes. It’s the perfect lunch to eat while I’m working and I have mastered the art of image editing with one hand while slurping soup from a spoon from the other.

Carrot and Coriander Soup

Serves 6

1 tablespoon of olive oil

4 large carrots, scrubbed  and cut into chunks

1/2 large onion, roughly chopped

1 teaspoon of dried chilli flakes

900ml (1 1/2 pints) vegetable or chicken stock

A handful of fresh coriander, roughly chopped

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat.  Add the carrots and onion and cook for five minutes or so until the onion has softened a little. Add the chilli flakes and pour in the stock, bring the soup to the boil and cook for 10-15 minutes until the carrots are tender. Add most of the coriander, save a little for the garnish. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly. Blitz the soup with a hand blender until smooth.  Re-heat to serve, add the reserved coriander and enjoy with crusty bread. 

Bread Making and Sourdough Wild Yeast Starters

When the weather is frosty, as it was this morning, I like to make bread.  Bread is one of my favourite foods, but I have an ulterior motive for baking bread when it’s cold outside.  Our house is old, draughty and the heating system barely takes the ice off the rooms.  So I like to supplement our heating with warmth from the oven as I bake.

As you can see from the photo above, I use a cane banetton to proof my dough. It’s  a great way to support the dough and it also gives your loaf a nice swirled design.   I started a wild yeast starter (or sourdough starter)  last summer. Even if I’m not making sourdough I always include a ladle full of my wild yeast starter in my dough with the “normal” yeast.  I think it’s nice to personalise your bread with your own yeast that you’ve “captured” from the wild.  A wild yeast starter sounds daunting, but it’s really simple to make and simple to keep alive. Here’s how I made mine, and what I do with it to keep it happy.

Sourdough / Wild Yeast Starter

Yeast needs sugar, warmth and moisture to reproduce, so here’s how to grow your own little yeast pot.

To start :

150g of flour and 250ml of warm water.  I use spelt flour, you can use any sort, but spelt or wholemeal is best because white flour is a bit slow to get going. Whichever you use, it doesn’t make a difference to your final loaf. You’ll need a non-metallic container with a lid, I use a Tupperware pot. Make sure there’s enough room for it to grow & bubble up. So go for something four times bigger than your initial batter. Mix the flour and water together and then whisk for as long as you can stand!. If you’ve got an electric whisk use this, the idea is to get as much air into the mixture as possible (because the yeast is in the air). Put the lid on, then leave somewhere fairly warm. Keep checking it, at some point you’ll get bubbles or holes on the surface. How long this takes depends on how much air you whisked in, how much wild yeast was hanging about in the air and the temperature.

First Feeding

When you see nice big bubbles or holes on the surface, feed your starter by adding another 150g of flour and another 250ml of warm water. Put the lid back on and leave it somewhere warm again.  The next day, check to see if you have more bubbles/holes on the surface. When you do, you can start the maintenance feeding.

Maintenance Feedings

Tip out half the starter and replace it with 150g of flour and 250ml of cold water (note it’s cold now). Put the lid back on and leave somewhere coolish. Repeat this step every day for a week, then  you can put the starter in the fridge and do this step once a week. I sometimes leave mine for two weeks. You can tell when it’s getting desperate for another feed because the smell changes from nice yeasty smells to something that has a little tinge of acetone to it. Remember though, to take it out of the fridge the day before you want to use it so it’s active and bubbling again.

Borlotti Beans

Last year we grew borlotti beans for the first time. I’d previously believed all the advice that it wasn’t possible to grow them in England. Perhaps it was beginner’s luck, but they did really well for us (even though they were in quite a shady area of the veg plot).  I loved the huge scarlet-flecked pods that adorned the plants all summer, growing veg is all the nicer when they're pretty.  

 This is how they looked as seedlings in the garden back in May last year.

We dried the beans, still in the pods, indoors for a few weeks and then stored them in airtight jars. I was hoping that they’d see us through the winter but I’m using the last of them today so I need to grow far more this year. This is my usual excuse for going over-board on seed buying and scavenging.  This is my seed tin. It’s organised by planting month but I have so many seed packets crammed in there that I can’t close the lid and some packets occasionally spring out and make a break for it. I gave lots away at our allotment society lunch in December, but I still have far more seeds than I have growing room.

As these are the last of our borlottis I’m making my favourite recipe with them. Slightly adapted from a Delia Smith recipe, I love it. It’s also a compromise, The Husband would eat nothing but sausage, chips and tinned Heinz baked beans if given the chance. So I meet him half way with this recipe, much healthier and I don’t think he misses the chips and tinned beans too much.

 Borlotti and Sausage Cassoulet  (serves 2)

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 good quality sausages

8oz (225g) dried borlotti beans (soaked overnight in cold water, boiled rapidly for 10 minutes and then drained)

4oz (125g) diced smoked pancetta

1 onion, diced

1 stick of celery, diced

1 medium sized carrot, diced

1 clove of garlic, very thinly sliced

10 fl oz (275ml) of dry white wine

10fl oz (275ml) water

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage

Salt & black pepper

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 1, 275°F (140°C).

Heat the oil in a large pan or casserole dish (one that you can use both on the hob and in the oven & one that you have a lid for) over a medium heat and brown the sausages. Turn them every few minutes to make sure they’re brown on all sides. There’s nothing less appetising than anaemic sausages. Take them out the pan and put to one side. Increase the heat and fry the pancetta, until it’s golden brown at the edges. Remove it using a slotted spoon (to leave the delicious bacony oil behind). Turn the heat down again and cook the onion, celery and carrot, stirring occasionally for about 10 minutes (until soft). Add the garlic and remove from the heat (the garlic only needs about a minute in the residual heat if you've sliced it thin enough & you don’t want it to burn or it’ll be bitter) add the beans and then nestle the sausages into the pan. Then add the chopped sage, the wine and the water. Season with salt and black pepper and bring it up to a gentle simmer. Put the lid on and put in the oven for 3 hours. Your kitchen will be warm and smell delicious. I like to make wholemeal bread to serve with this; a couple of crusty chunks are just the job to soak up the lovely unctuous juices.

  

About Me, Let's Get This One Over With

This is my first blog post, so I’m going to use it to get the introductions done and dusted.  This bit feels a bit awkward as it’s not about anything other than me.  I’ll be glad to get it over with so I can start properly.

I’m a free-lance photographer and  I licence my images through iStockphoto.com and GettyImages.com. I mostly photograph my obsession – growing and cooking food . I grow my own fruit and vegetables and spend a ridiculous amount of time cooking or thinking and reading about cooking. And, of course, eating.  I’m always in search of really good restaurants. In our house every Friday is No Cook Friday, so I’ll also be sharing the good the bad and the ugly of our finds.

Let’s also get out the fact that I'm a pagan out of the way, because my beliefs affect how I grow food (organically) and what I eat (organic food, and if it’s meat it needs to have been compassionately farmed – or better still, not farmed at all) and my general outlook on life. I mention this not because I will be blogging particularly about religion, just because if you’re bigoted then I’m not sure we’ll be getting along.  Don’t let my broomstick hit you on the way out.