long overdue

well, that resolution i made not to leave it so long between blog posts no matter how busy i was in the garden? it didn't work, did it? i have to say work has played a big part in it, my shifts have doubled in both length and intensity with the good weather, and schlepping up and down the flight of stairs to the beer garden carrying massive plates has ensured i have little to no energy for anything more strenuous than lifting a glass of near-frozen chenin blanc to my face of a night. i can't complain, my buns of steel and t-shirt tan will be remarkable come july if this keeps up. still, between pouring pints and wielding a watering can, i have found time to be in the kitchen, making, admittedly, incredibly minimum effort food that requires very little supervision, in pretty big batches so that i can be outside as long as possible.

now, i got myself back on the breadmaking wagon, caving to ed's continuous suggestion that i should try my hand at focaccia. we've discussed in many a time, but i had, thus far, resisted; my babysteps approach to breadmaking didn't factor in different types of bread until i'd mastered the basic technique (cue master baker joke here for those of us who refuse to get their minds out of the gutter). you don't need me to tell you the recipe, because i used precisely the same one as ed, as it also appears in my copy of the river cottage bread handbook. i chose to do focaccia purely for it's low maintenace qualities; it needs fuck all shaping, and if i'm to make hay while the sun shines i haven't got time to poach bagels, or mollycoddle loose ciabatta dough, so focaccia seemed like a good variant to play with. i got a good result, as you can see:

i used rosemary from my garden. i had to replace my rosemary plant after the last one got decapitated by a flying fence panel some time in january, which was gutting; my rosemary plant is so new that i was tempted to sub in lemon thyme while i let it acclimatise but in the end i stuck with the basics. the olive oil i used was a present from one of my regulars, bought back from the south of france in an old wine bottle, pressed by one of his neighbours there. it's these little touches i like about cooking. knowing where my ingredients come from and letting them tell ther own story is a part of the process for me. i was re-reading appetite by nigel slater the other day; and he rather exasperatingly pours scorn on people who like to make absolutely everything from scratch; insinuating they've something to prove. i have a feeling he's since changed his mind, having written a two volume series on plot-to-plate cooking, but it still makes me angry to read shit like that. i have the time to put in the extra leg work on my food, and i think it makes it more pleasurable to eat. i don't do it to impress; but if it does impress, well, result. anyway, tangent aside, the focaccia was excellent, and very well received both by my boss (who sulked last time i made bread because he didn't get any), and my american septagenarian friend ed (he of the olive oil from france, no less). it was definitely different from working with normal bread dough; and i have to say i wasn't a fan of the lack of resistance in kneading, but as it requires no shaping and no fuss it's a pretty easy bread to make between planting up pots of veg.

the other things i've made are more directly concerned with the garden. i am a big fan of multitasking, so have been zealously reading up on what weeds i can put to good use as i clear my garden of thigh height specimens. one of the most well-known edible intruders is nettles. i hesitate to say intruders because i have developed an interest in a movement called permaculture, which started in australia and is a contraction of 'permanent agriculture'. it's basis premise is to create symbiotic environments that support and sustain themselves, and it encompasses everything from companion planting to creating greywater usage systems and favouring perennial plants over annuals where possible. what has this got to do with nettles, i hear you ask? well, aside from localized weeds allowing you to determine your soil type very easily and pick plants that will thrive more intelligently, nettles are an amazingly multipurpose plant, and i am sorely tempted to leave a patch of my growing space purely for them.

now is apparently the perfect time of year to eat nettles; the spring shoots are really what you should use for cooking, as the older leaves can be somewhat tough. i made two things with my nettles, a pesto, and a soup. this was my first time cooking with them so i went with tried and tested ideas for their use, wanting very much to get a feel for what they were like as an ingredient. i read several recipes and then just sort of winged it as i went along, so here are my results:

nettle pesto

so i basically eyeballed this one. i had about 100g of nettles (a lightly packed food processor's worth), about 25g vegetarian parmesan, two cloves of garlic, a slug of olive oil (probably about fifty ml), a good handful of pine nuts, and a squeeze of lemon juice. i just blended that to a coarse paste, popped into a container, and put a layer of oil over the top; and that'll sit happily in the fridge for a month, if it lasts that long.

it's really good, actually. i tried it on pasta, first, and the heat of the pasta gave the nettles a slightly mushroomy note, which was nice. but where this stuff seems to really shine is paired with mild cheese like wensleydale, especially on homemade spelt rolls. i think if i were making this again i might be tempted to pop in a few sprigs of mint, as the nettles have a really delicate flavour. i might thin some down and use it to dress my first garden salad when my radishes, broad beans and lettuces have come to fruition, as i have a feeling that will be really good, if not necessarily traditional spring salad practice.

okay, so i also made soup. and it seems like there are as many nettle soup recipes as there are cooks, so i'm going to add mine into the mix:

kirsty's nettle soup

okay, so you need about 200g of young nettle leaves, which for the record is about this much: they obviously need to be thoroughly washed. you also need a knob of butter, a medium onion, two medium potatoes, a clove or two of garlic, a litre of veg stock, and a dollop or two of creme fraiche.

so what i did was soften the onions and crushed garlic in the butter on a low heat, and then added the peeled, diced potatoes and let them soften for about ten minutes, not letting anything catch or colour. i popped the nettles in the pan, let them lightly wilt, and added the stock, simmering until the potatoes were tender. i liquidized it with a stick blender (my new favourite toy), and added a dollop or two of creme fraiche and stirred through.

i bunged it in a bowl, finished with another swirl of creme fraiche and some black pepper (and the last of my focaccia), like so:

as you can see, it went a spring-y jade green (incidentally the exact same colour of the nail varnish i was sporting at the time, models own's grace green, which is a nifty little imitation of last year's chanel spring effort, fashion fans). it tasted like a milder version of spinach, and was immensely satisfying to eat. if i made it again, i'd probably add a glass of dry white at the same time as the nettles, because while there's a place for virtuous vegetable cookery, it's nowhere near my kitchen, and i'm madly in love with the marriage of greens, white wine and cream. so, nettle picking is now on my mandatory spring activities list, and the beauty of it is that wherever i live, there will always be nettles.

so next year's nettle projects might be more ambitious; i fancy learning the art of home brewing next year, so nettle beer might be on the cards. the best bit about eating the nettles was the satisfying feeling of both clearing space in my garden, getting something for free, and trying an ingredient i had never worked with before. also, where i only used the shoots, i cut down the rest of the nettle plants and made nettle manure for my plants. because permaculture is about giving back to the environment as much (if not more, in the early stages of establishing a system) as you take out. lovely.

now back to our normal broadcast...

does anyone else find it oddly coincidental that ed posted a rabbit recipe just after i refuted the idea that my vegetarianism stems from a love of 'fluffy bunnies'? i tend to notice the tiny similarities in things, something perhaps heightened by the fact i've been devouring books voraciously over the past week; my lust for narrative seems to have doubled after my brief literary dry spell, and i'm sort of glad, actually, as i did worry that moving away from academia would dull my critical instincts somewhat. um, anyway, if i was possessed of a little less iron will than i am, that pasta (or more properly, pretty much everything ed posts) probably would have made me cave and turn back to eating all things dead and beautiful. i am, however, excellent at being stubborn even in the face of deprivation, a fact that many people who have been given the silent treatment by me will attest to.

i wish i had something a little more exciting to talk to you about today, but i guess the purpose of this post is really just a catch-all for the preserving and breadmaking i have been doing over the last week or so, a 'back to the routine' sort of roundup.
i kind of fell off the wagon in terms of preserving for a while. i think partly it has to do with how very pissed off i am that my preserving pan from amazon failed to show; partly due to my now reaching child-in-the-face-of-broken-promise levels of disappointment at the impossibility of getting any forced rhubarb (seriously, it is full-on 'but mummy i want to make pink jam and vodka!' kind of sulking, it's not pretty). in other words, i have been having a preserving tantrum, and have let my stash of jars and bottles grow without remotely thinking about what to put in them. however, this was brought to an end by the burst of life-laundry energy i get directly after celebrating my birth. i realized i still had a rather large amount of sloes in my freezer from my october picking, and they weren't going to turn themselves into anything. the sloes were what started it all, the preserving, actually. miserable about what at the time felt like my life falling apart (see for reference horrible breakup and masters quitting at the same time) i took to stalking the villages in my fake fur coat, restless for something to do. being also a bit of a nature freak at heart, when i stumbled on what i thought were sloes, i spent my evenings reading up on them online, consulting as many pictures and sources as i could, and set off the next day armed with as many tupperware boxes as i could to pick them.

my sloe picking adventure took me two hours, much of it taken up talking to an 81 year old lady who had stopped and decided to accompany me because it reminded her of being younger. and as she put it, talking to someone on her walk made her 'feel less lonely in the village'. i haven't ever seen that old lady again but i think if i do i will tell her that it worked both ways. that the pale girl in the fake fur with the tears-hoarse voice felt less lonely too, afterward. i ended up with a freezer drawer full of sloes, and after making four gin bottles worth, which aged and were ready just in time to hand out around christmas time, and get drunk on after heavy december shifts, i still had three or four tubs left in the freezer.

i don't know why i put off making more for so long, but i did. until the nagging from my mother reached monumental levels about freeing up freezer space, i put it off. the sloe gin recipe i use is from the cottage smallholder and i can't help but feel since they put up the recipe in it's entirety, it might be a bit remiss of me to print it here. so this is my sloe gin literally just after it was bottled (i ended up having to buy another bottle of gin and make more, as this used only half the sloes):

if you recognize these bottles you drink too much, so hats off to you, cos i definitely belong in that club too. i use plymouth gin in my sloe gin, as i find the fact it has orange peel and cardamom in it's makeup lend it a sweetness that marries very well with the sweet, almondy taste of the sloes. but i am a gin snob, so if you wanna use the overly citric gordon's, or, and here i shudder, cheap supermarket hooch, do it, just don't tell me about it, because i don't want to know. as you can see the gin takes a while to colour, but after several shakings over the course of a few days it purples up rather rapidly:

so yeah, see you in three months guys, when i'll be enjoying one of the best sloe comfortable screws money can't buy (you can decide exactly how intentional that pun was for yourselves). i will also definitely be trying repurposing the sloes with medium sherry as the recipe suggests, and since i've been raising my game work wise, expect more booze infusions to happen over the next couple of months as i bring my work home with me and turn amateur cocktail artist. because what's better than a ground-up approach to what you put in your mouth? it having the capacity to get you drunk, of course.

right, so onto my adventures in breadmaking. despite my birthday flatbreads success i have still been using the river cottage basic method for breadmaking, just in order to see how different flours behave. i decided to try my hand at spelt bread, and here are the results:

okay, so as you can see, i made smaller loaves, and only shaped them into rounds. why? because spelt is low gluten, so shaping and slashing it wouldn't really do anything. stevens recommends smaller loaves for a better rise, and i do everything he says, as we well know, so i obeyed. these little loaves were monumental with a quick homemade tzatziki to use up an excess of yoghurt, that i totally forgot to take pictures of. i would definitely work with spelt again, although not having stretchy glutens to guide me in kneading was a little unusual.

my next adventure in bread was a little more interesting. while out shopping my mother picked me up a bag of dove farm's malthouse blend; malted flour, rye, and oats. i tend to prefer to mess about with grain blends on my own, but i'm not going to complain about a family member uncharacteristically taking an interest in my cooking, so i decided to use it. having seen the softening effect of using half water, half yoghurt, in my flatbread making, i decided to use that as my liquid, but otherwise, the basic recipe and technique was not deviated from slightly. and look what i was rewarded with:

possibly my most aesthetically pleasing loaves yet. and they were perfect in the eating, too, light brown and studded with chewy oats. i gave one to aled at work, since he enthuses about my bread, and he was incredibly pleased with it. i am getting to the point with my baking where i feel i have mastered yeasts to a foolproof level; and am now pondering alternate methods of working with dough. possible ideas involve buns (it is after all nearly time for the hot cross variety to make an appearance), bagels, and moving on to the slightly nerve wracking environment of oil based doughs. in the meantime i am content to enjoy home made bread with home made soup and the best company i know in this village:

the soup pictured is a tomato based affair flavoured with garlic, onions, oregano rosemary, and fennel seeds, containing white cabbage, savoy, and kale, to clear out the fridge, basically. i just kind of improvised it and finished with oil and freshly ground black pepper. the book pictured is the best thing i've read in about a year. anyway, until next time guys.

a different take on marmalade.

i am only too happy to have the breadmaking territory muscled in on if the results are as good as ed's focaccia. he keeps trying to convince me to make it, but i am sticking to my softly, softly approach to breadmaking. anyway, happy valentine's day and all that bollocks guys, i am reporting to you on a distinct and profound hangover, after three bottles of questionable chardonnay and some serious gossip (yes, ed, about you) with lady laura last night, as we had a 'kanye-tines' date. i bought her one of those godawful stuffed bears holding a heart, and she has called him kanye, and we failed at every aspect of the pub quiz other than sexually harassing the quizmaster. i am now sat here in my snowman pants (they say 'for your ice only', haaa) and drinking cup after cup of black coffee out of my i-graduated-from-portsmouth-and-all-they-gave-me-was-this-shitty-mug-that-advertizes-their-careers-service mug. all is therefore, right with the world.

so, my adventures in preserving continue, much to my mother's annoyance (she is freaking out over where to put the jars, and i'm all 'whatever, eat some then they'll disappear'). i am a bit annoyed actually; i ordered a preserving pan from amazon and it still has yet to turn up. it's been WEEKS people. i don't think amazon know who i am. so limited by the fact i have only a three litre pan at my disposal, and the fact i still cannot get my hands on any early rhubarb (which is actually starting to kill me inside a bit), i decided last week's preserving endeavour would have to be an exercise in reduction. i turned to my trusty river cottage preserves handbook, and let pam corbin guide me into making:

onion marmalade

100ml olive oil

2kg onions, peeled and finely sliced

200g demerara sugar,

150g redcurrant jelly

300ml cider vinegar

50ml balsamic vinegar

1 rounded tsp salt

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper



heat the oil in a large pan over a medium heat and add the onions. reduce the heat, cover the pan and cook over a low heat, stirring occasionally, for 30-40 minutes or until the onions have collapsed and begun to colour. like this:

add the sugar and redcurrant jelly. increase the heat and continue to cook, stirring more frequently, for about 30 minutes until the mixture has turned a dark nutty brown and most of the moisture has been driven off.

take off the heat and allow to cool for a couple of minutes before adding the vinegars (if you add vinegar to a red-hot pan it will evaporate in a fury of scorching steam). return to the heat and cook rapidly for another 10 minutes or so, until the mixture becomes gooey and a spoon drawn across the bottom of the pan leaves a clear track across the base for a couple of seconds. like this:

remove from the heat and season with salt and pepper. spoon into warm, sterilized jars and seal with vinegar-proof lids. use within 12 months.

so. that was onion marmalade. not pictured is the massive jar that is already opened and in use. it might seem like an odd thing for a veggie to make, given that it is usually served with pate or cured meat, but it goes really well with cheese, and i can put away a lot of cheese. it is also useful for pepping up gravy, and veggie approximations of gravy need all the help they can get, in my opinion. one of the ways pam corbin recommends using it is swirled through pumpkin soup, and conveniently, my mother got excited at the supermarket and bought me one of the odd 'seasonal squash' specimens they are selling.

here he is. my friend lizzy has a habit of saying 'i love you but i don't know what you are!' a lot and never, in my opinion, has it been more relevant. i have no clue what type of squash this little guy is. it's skin was deep, burnt orange and it was shaped, as you can see, like one of the kremlin domes. lotta seeds, as you can see, but we'll get to that later. if anyone knows what the hell it is, answers on a postcard.

so, to make my soup, i roasted the squash in chunks in the oven, with toasted sesame oil, maple syrup, and a few cloves of garlic (i wonder who gave me the idea of roasting garlic with squash?). it probably took about a half hour. i then popped the squash and the squeezed out garlic into boiling veggie stock, let that be for about ten minutes, and pureed it. the results, were something like this:

i served it with my onion marmalade, and lightly toasted pieces of my homemade bread. i'm glad i went big on flavouring the squash, as it was a slightly watery specimen and wouldn't have done itself any favours as a classic creamed squash soup. here though, it was marvellous. and corbin is right, the tang of the onion marmalade worked amazingly with the sweet smokiness of this little orange bowful. it actually felt really good to know that everything on my plate was made by my fair hand, from start to finish. i love having this kind of working relationship with my food.

also, a note on the seeds: i hate wasting perfectly good food, so i usually roast my squash seeds with some seasoning. i almost always have a tub full of these in the kitchen to pick at as i cook in the winter months. i seasoned this batch with garam masala, coriander, chilli flakes, and rock salt:

it first dawned on me to do this when the ex was having a barbecue for some pompey cup final crap or whatever (back when they still existed, hah) and told me five minutes beforehand that we had a vegetarian coming (this was back in my carefree omnivore days). now, veggie burgers suck for the most part, but that did not stop me wishing we had some in the house. in a flash of inspiration i whipped up both the standard halloumi kebabs, and some foil wrapped squash wedges with chilli and cinnamon butter to roast in the coals. i was making couscous anyway, and was still at the stage of wanting to impress his caveman friends and their airhead girlfriends becauser i hadn't realized what a bunch of posturing tory twats they were, so i toasted the seeds in spices and use them to tart up the couscous. hostess with the mostest? you bet your ass i am.

still i rise.

integral to the structural stability? well, get a load of that, folks, i thought i was the one with the ego round here but apparently i've got competition. and then ed goes and mentions me daring to venture into territories sexual that nigella would cringe at? honestly speaking he has a point. if nigella is an artfully-outfitted bettie page in food/sex terms, i'm probably somewhere along the lines of a gin-sozzled lil' kim. which is appropriate, because guess whose back catalogue i listened to on my latest cooking venture?

i previously mentioned missing the kind of day-in-the-kitchen structure my life had in university, right? well, obviously, december was hectic for me, job-wise, and i think i mostly lived on fried rice, soup, and whatever they fed me at work, given my hectic schedule of being at work more than i was at home. january has significantly calmed down, although this week just got a little bit more busy what with my model employee status being heavily in demand for the current filming of our latest training dvd (currently waiting on a phonecall from them regarding what they'll make me do today, since they enjoyed working with me so much yesterday- it's a hard life being a people person who is this beautiful, it surely is). this means that other than a brief trip to wine school at the end of the month i've got the opportunity to get a routine back in the kitchen. one of the ways i've been doing this is by making bread, with my river cottage bread handbook (i have other cookbooks, honest guv, though i'm starting to question their necessity).

i recently visited portsmouth, where i studied literature at undergraduate, and caught up with an old housemate, lara. we both got exactly the same model of sewing machine for christmas, and were discussing our approaches to learning to use them. i recommended a book to her; and realized i was summing up my entire approach to learning about things as i explained why i found it so useful. i admire the way people lara learn things, a kind of gung ho 'i can do this, and the bits i can't i'll wing and worry about later', but it's completely counter to the way i learn. maybe it's a hangover from academia, and a life spent learning in the theoretical, but when it comes to something practical my learning process involves deferring heavily to someone whose authority i respect, and a repetition that suits my levels of perfectionism. needless to say, lara and i used to make an unlikely, but excellent pairing in the kitchen, even if some of the suggestions she had for recipe alterations horrified me by being so spectacularly counter to my book-learnin's.

i am going somewhere with this, honest. i've been applying this learning process to my adventures in breadmaking. i have made bread sporadically throughout my life, but it has never been something regularly incorporated into my days. now that i have decided to i have taken the 'basics' chapter of the river cottage bread book to heart, and decided that i need to repeat each recipe several times in order to practice the (twelve page long) basic techniques, before i progress to anything more advanced. other than developing a huge food-crush on daniel stevens, the book's author, this has enabled me to begin understanding process as well as product, an approach i value in all my doings. so, this is my second batch of white bread, and i managed to keep all my teeth for long enough to actually eat some of it it. here's the basic recipe from my river cottage book:

basic white bread

makes 2 large or 3 small loaves, or 12 rolls.

1kg flour

10g powdered dried yeast

20g fine salt

600ml liquid (water, milk, half water half yoghurt)

1 tbsp of fat (various oils, melted butter)

first, mix the dough. this is the one stage method for doing so: combine the flour, yeast and salt in a large mixing bowl. add the liquid and with one hand, mix to a rough dough. add the fat, if you are using. adjust the consistency if you need to, with a little more flour or water, to make a soft, easily kneadable, sticky dough. turn the dough out onto a work surface and clean your hands.

knead the dough until it is as smooth and satiny as you can make it - as a rough guide this will take about 10 minutes.

shape the dough into a round once you have finished kneading. then oil or flour the surface and put the dough into the wiped out mixing bowl. put the bowl in a bin liner and leave to ferment until roughly doubled in size. this could be anywhere between 45 minutes and 1 1/2 hours, or longer still if the dough is cold.

deflate the dough by tipping it onto the work surface and pressing all over with your fingertips. then form it into a round.

now prepare for baking. switch the oven as high as it will go. put your baking stone or tray into position and remove any unwanted shelves. put an extra roasting tin in the bottom if you are using it for steam (in which case, put the kettle on).

divide the dough into as many pieces as you wish (two or three for loaves, or a dozen for rolls). leave them to rest, covered, for 10-15 minutes.

shape the loaves as you wish, and coat the outside with flour. transfer the loaves to well-floured wooden boards, linen cloths, tea towels, or proving baskets, and lay a plastic bag over the whole batch, to stop it drying out. leave to prove, checking often by giving gentle squeezes, until the loaves have almost doubled in size.

transfer the loaves for baking to the hot tray (removed from the oven), slash the stops with a serrated knife. bring the boiling kettle to the oven. put the tray in the oven, pour some boiling water into the roasting tin, and close the oven as quickly as you can.

turn the heat down after ten minutes to 200 degrees c/gas mark 6 if the crust is pale, 180 degrees c/ gas mark 4 if the crust is noticeably browning, 170 degrees c/gas mark 3 if the crust is browning quickly. bake until the loaves are well browned and crusty, and feel hollow when you tap them. in total 10-20 minutes for rolls, 30-40 minutes for small loaves, 40-50 minutes for large loaves.

leave to cool on a wire rack. bread for tearing can be served warm. bread for slicing should be cooled completely.

so again, for reference, here is a picture of my slightly imperfect specimens:

i also, in this batch, baked a couple of rolls, which came out looking like i'd not bothered to shape them at all:

as you can see, they went a bit siamese in the oven. i feel about this batch of bread the way my family probably feel about me; 'hmm, not quite where i was going with this, but okay, the basics are right, i can work with this'. i initially felt like a bit of a twat giving a recipe for white bread, but halfway through giving you the basic, pared down version i realized that this approach to baking is not basic or pared down at all, even with my softly, softly approach. this is my second attempt at the recipe, and i learn more each time, honestly. my previous batch had a lacy texture to the crumb where i'd ummed and aaahed too long and let the shaped loaves overprove. this batch too, had it's foibles. i obviously did not shape the rolls tightly enough, as they went mental in the oven. also, regarding the loaves, did you notice the one on the right had a random vertical split in the end? obviously i need to rethink my slashing policy, maybe slashing more, or deeper. i also am not sure i shaped them tightly enough, honestly speaking, since the ends are so much fatter than the middles. the texture of this bread was better though, less huge holes, a lighter crust. i will be making another batch next week but i am happy with the progress i have made with this one.

also, for note, and to show i do eat real food, like a normal person, rather than just indulging in days of cooking for the sake of it; this is how i ate my bread that night:

with soup. this was something i threw together to save a sad lookin' little calabrese broccoli mum had in the fridge, loosely based on a recipe from the new covent garden soup company's book, soup for all seasons, which i have lent to robert at work, and consequently cannot quote. the recipe is basically to soften an onion and potato in butter, before adding a chopped head of broccoli and some veggie stock, boiling for twenty minutes and then blending until smooth, and stirring creme fraiche through. i didn't have creme fraiche, so i chucked a fair amount of sauvignon blanc (which i was getting drunk on at the time, oh wine i love you so) in there before the stock, then used double cream instead. i used to make this soup all the time in university, it's kicks the shit out of leek and potato on flavour, and look at the cute pistachio green it goes. aww. more than makes up for my quasimodo rolls, right? right.